Last year the BBC radio drama department received 3,797 scripts from hopeful authors, of which just 33 were recommended to BBC radio drama producers. I came across this sad statistic when I was well into my first attempt to write an hour-long radio drama set in a trench during the first battle of Ypres in 1914. My chances of hearing my poor little play performed on the radio were reduced from slight to negligible when I then read that the BBC will be accepting no more drama scripts until the end of the year; and from negligible to zero when I belatedly looked into The Way to Write Radio Drama, by William Ash, and realised how naive I had been to imagine I could master such a tricky genre straight off the bat.
My play was inspired initially by two pages of first-hand narrative written by a private of the 1st Gloucesters, which General Sir Anthony Heritage Farrar-Hockley GBE, KCB, DSO, MC included in Death of an Army (1967), his gripping history of that amazing battle, in which the British did to the Germans what the Germans did to the British 18 months later on the Somme.
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