In which our Diva has been doing some listening and pondering
Being acquainted with a number of industry people on the other side of "The Pond," as well as a fan of various British TV fare, I've had quite a few conversations in the last few years that touch on the differences in acting education and career shapes between the US and UK. The broadest is that over here, we're much more likely to be specialists, whereas traditional British drama-school training assumes that you'll be doing a bit of everything -- theatre, film, TV, and what is arguably the most specialized in this country, audio.
British friends are often surprised when I explain that straight-up, studio-produced radio drama has been absent from American airwaves for decades, with a few NPR offerings recorded in front of live audiences as the closest thing that remains. Happily, there's been a resurgence of the form in the explosion of podcasting. Nobody could have predicted the runaway popularity of
Welcome to Night Vale (which, after listening to it for nearly a year, I still think is most conveniently described as "
News From Lake Wobegon with Cthulhu mythos," though that doesn't quite cover it), and the likes of
Pendant Productions and
Decoder Ring Theatre are making a pretty respectable showing too.
Meanwhile, though, Auntie Beeb never stopped putting original drama on the radio, and these days you can
stream or download a lot of it online. (Unlike most of their video, BBC iPlayer radio programming can be played outside the UK.) Some programs are also delivered by podcast; I've been subscribed to the one for the
Drama of the Week for a while now.
Which is how I came to find
Porcelain: The Trial for the Killing of Sophie Lancaster (sadly not currently available)
in my digital media library in March. It sat there for weeks on end, un-listened-to, for precisely the reason it turned out to be even more interesting to me than it otherwise would have been: I was in the middle of rehearsals for
The Laramie Project, and wasn't quite up to another dramatization of a hate crime against a young person by other young people.
