As Commissioning Editor for Drama & Fiction on Radio 4, Jeremy Howe is responsible for the content of the Dangerous Visions seasons running annually on the BBC. At the conclusion of this year’s core week of plays, he chatted with Paul Simpson about dystopian futures and the wide effect of Dangerous Visions on radio drama…

I think this year’s season of Dangerous Visions has turned things up a bit from previous years.

Has it given you sleepless nights?

There have been moments when it’s felt like it’s struck very close to home! Certainly with elements of Siege…

It’s interesting because it feels to me like visions of the future have become remarkably close to the present, which is kind of what we’re trying to do with Dangerous Visions. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but we’re about to commission something for next year which makes Siege feel like a picnic in the park – so you’re warned!

Something fresh rather than an adaptation?

Yes, we’ll be doing some adaptations as well, but we haven’t decided exactly what. Dangerous Visions will be back.

Good to hear; after we spoke last time, there was a year without it and I thought it had gone by the wayside.

When the Controller, my boss, and I were deciding, the world was looking quite rosy. Had Dangerous Visions run its course? Then the Arab Spring turned to a nightmare, civil war in Syria, mass exodus from Africa and people fleeing the civil war in Syria, Europe falling to pieces in front of our eyes because of that, the Euro about to crash, the rise of the Far Right, etc…. and that was before Trump, Brexit and whatever. I thought, “No we’ve made a mistake here, the world is going to hell on a handcart, let’s bring back Dangerous Visions.”

There’s been some really strong material in the last couple of seasons, and I’ve particularly enjoyed the material prepared with the Wellcome Trust – both Val McDermid’s’s Resistance and Al Smith’s Culture this time around provoked feelings of “Holy shit, I hope this isn’t accurate…”

I’ll give you the backstory on that. We weren’t thinking about Dangerous  Visions at the time but we held a workshop with the Wellcome, and the keynote speaker was Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer of England. Her opening address so put the fear of God in the audience about the percentage failure of antibiotics that I don’t think we needed the workshop after that. You could see that Val was already sharpening our pen and Al came up with Culture; my feeling with Culture is that I hope none of this comes to pass. There is a credibility about both of them. Val’s I think was just grippingly horrible.

Val’s was Survivors for this decade.

I think you’re right. I haven’t spoken to Val about this, but I can’t imagine there aren’t several movie companies knocking on her door. The one conversation I did have with her was a couple of weeks after the broadcast, “Do you think there’s a follow-up to Resistance?” and she said, “No, I don’t think there can be, because it’s so apocalyptic.”

I think the extraordinary thing about Resistance is it occurred to her very fast, and honestly, the address that Dame Sally Davies gave us was inspiring and frightening – that is the key to Dangerous Visions and what makes great dystopic films and literature: taking the present and putting it forward a few notches; upping the tempo and in Val’s case, turning it into a thriller. That for me is perfect Dangerous Visions.

How involved are you at the story level with the plays, or is it more thematically and who’s being commissioned?

I pitch to producers that we’re going to do Dangerous Visions, bring us your ideas, and I then choose the ideas. I was involved with the drafting of the earliest storylines of Siege and Resistance, but not in any script editing detail, just editorial issues.

The editorial issues around both Siege and Resistance were “How credible is this?” With Resistance, we had medical advisers on board who were very helpful, and with Siege we talked to BBC journalists who had been covering the French political scene, to make sure it was credible. Beyond that, in my view, the less executive intervention there is, the more likely the project is to be good. Too many executives spoil the pot – I’ve worked in movies and television and I know the power of execs.

I think the role of the executive in Dangerous Visions is to be an enabler. Editorial creative decisions at script level, casting level, etc are going to be made by the producer in concert with the writer.

This year there are a couple of plays that are more comic – Perimeter, which was a comedy, and Metamorphosis, which was seen as a comedy. Was that a conscious way of doing something different with the idea of Dangerous Visions, or just the way the stories fell?

Dystopia and creating imaginative accounts of dystopia come in many different flavours; the great dystopic novel in my view is Nineteen Eighty-Four – which is about as funny as a car crash – and the companion piece to that is Animal Farm, which is a satire and a very funny one too. For my money also, the first great dystopic piece of literature in the English language is Gulliver’s Travels, which is scabrously funny, deeply satirical. Comedy and dystopia are a match made in heaven.

My view on Metamorphosis is we’ve done a couple of dramatizations of Kafka before and neither of them have really cut through. They seemed a bit dour, and Kafka is a really difficult read, but [his books] are so absurd, and Metamorphosis is so absurd yet chillingly real. In order to make it connect with an audience I think comedy is the way to do it, but it’s shocking – and part of the shock value of it is if you’re laughing at it: poor Gregor Samsa being wheeled around in a wheelie bin is wonderfully absurd and funny and awful at the same time.

Or the voices: [the contrast between] Gregor Samsa, a sweet nerdy kind of individual and then the voice that the family hear – the monster growls – was perfect comic book stuff and chilling at the same time.

So it was a very conscious decision when James Robinson, the producer, and I talked about Metamorphosis. We agree to really go for the satirical humour and the absurdist humour within it, and I think he’s pulled it off really brilliantly. The pest controller is just a brilliant comic turn.

Jan Švankmajer’s Alice

“Let me kill something!”

He was just wonderful!

I hadn’t realised he wasn’t in the original, he fitted in so well.

I think Kafka is really hard because if you’re not careful, you get sucked into the utter high seriousness of it and there’s a whole brand of Czech absurdist [material]. I think Metamorphosis and the way that James has done it comes straight out of the world of Jan Švankmajer, [whose films] are chilling, horrible and vicious satires basically on Communism which are incredibly funny, but all dressed up in this absurdism. I think James has really tapped into that Czech brand of humour, and I think it’s very easy for us – partly because of the translation – to lose sight of that. I thought Metamorphosis was an absolute triumph.

I agree – all of the plays this season had their strengths. Joseph Millson’s performance in Siege was chilling.

Wasn’t it brilliant! What a charismatic bastard!

And you could see why everyone followed him. The one that surprised me was Darkness at Noon – I couldn’t see a SF/futurist element to it. I know it’s powerful in its effect on Orwell for Nineteen Eighty-Four…

When Dangerous Visions started out, it was a science fiction season, and then we lit upon the title, Dangerous Visions, which comes from a Harlan Ellison collection of science fiction stories published in the 1960s.

I think the title has kind of taken over the series – the really interesting thing about Darkness at Noon is that it’s a fable about totalitarian power. When you read it and you listen to it, you think he’s talking about Russia, Stalinism, but actually where it comes from is Koestler was imprisoned on Death Row in the Spanish Civil War at the hands of the Fascists. What I think he put his finger on brilliantly was the power of the state just to destroy people and I think that is a fable, I think it’s a Dangerous Vision. I don’t think it’s science fiction, I think it is one of the most powerful dystopic novels in the canon.

It’s one of the most chilling books that I have ever read. About five years ago, when I wasn’t doing this job and reading morning, noon and night, I took Darkness at Noon away with me for holiday reading! Oh my God, that was a mistake. I think the really interesting thing that [producer] Sasha Yevtushenko and [adapter] Sam Scardifield  did with Darkness at Noon was getting the story into an hour. I thought it moved brilliantly. It was never fast, but it was relentless, it was stately, and they got through the story and the real chill factor of the story with real elegance in an hour. I thought Matthew Marsh was a superb Rubashov.

It’s not science fiction, but I don’t think Metamorphosis is science fiction either but they’re all in the same kind of area of disturbing views of the present pushed into the future. I think we read Darkness at Noon that he’s writing about Stalinism, but that’s because we’ve got the history of the purges in our heads. When he was writing it they weren’t particularly public knowledge. It’s about totalitarian power, and that is one of the curses of the 20th century.

This version concentrated on Rubashov’s experiences rather than some of the side issues that Koestler got into in the book.

I agree. I think Sam Scardifield streamlined it to real effect. I never had any qualms about it as a Dangerous Vision or not. It was absolutely central to the drive of what we’re trying to do. It wasn’t science fiction at all but Fahrenheit 451 is hardcore, brilliant classic SF.

Was there ever an intention to dramatize that rather than just a read?

It didn’t really arise but my feeling about dramatizations of cult books like that is if it has been made into a cinema film, then you want to do something different. Although I don’t think Fahrenheit 451 is Truffaut’s greatest movie, by any manner or means, it is cult cinema and I think you hold up a dramatization of Fahrenheit 451 on radio to the movie and we wanted to do something different with it.

I think it is a really disturbing book and though there is a lot of prose in the book, by abridging it, you lose 90% of the prose. It’s more streamlined. And I didn’t want to dramatize it because I had the images of the film in my head and fire is such a visual thing – you either want to see it or have it described whereas someone playing a soundtrack of burning doesn’t really do it for me.

I think I learned my lesson: last year was the first year we brought Book at Bedtime into the slot, and we did the Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, which I thought was a brilliant film. I thought, what was the point of us remaking that? How could it  we do it better? Of course the book, I think is Ishiguro’s masterpiece, and my God, it’s so disturbing, so chilling – my only worry with Never Let Me Go was, are we giving our audiences sleepless nights? I slightly worried about that with Fahrenheit 451, because it is so very disturbing.

Particularly in the wake of recent events!

We delayed transmission for a week because we felt we wanted to keep away from that shocking terrible event.

I also wondered if there was any link to the new HBO miniseries that’s currently filming…

I don’t know; we only ever looked into the rights to serialised reading. I didn’t know HBO were doing it. I think we would have struggled to get the rights; we struggled to get the rights anyway. That’s an issue with a lot of science fiction – getting the rights is really hard and the serialised reading rights are really, really hard / impossible.

One play we’ve hardly mentioned is Perimeter, which is very different. Personally, I thought that didn’t quite work – lots of good ideas but felt like hundreds of ideas thrown at the wall and some of them stuck…

Might be fair to say, hundreds of ideas thrown at the Fence? I thought it was good fun, I thought it put its finger on the gated communities, only writ large. I thought the Pippa Heywood character was really appalling so that was fun, and the brother and sister worked. I don’t think I’d call it the greatest play ever written, but I thought it was very enjoyable.

Surrounded by the powerful plays as it was, might it have felt stronger as a standalone outside the season…?

Interestingly, we did wonder about that – I’d forgotten, but when we were scheduling, we were debating do we include Perimeter, do we not? I think it earned its place there. I think it’s always useful to have light and shade. That was light, Darkness at Noon was complete shade. Fahrenheit 451 goes beyond Darkness at Noon, and Siege is just terrifying.

What hints can you drop about the fifth season?

The only hint I can drop is that we like it. I think Dangerous Visions is a really good brand. The interesting thing about it from my point of view is that it attracts some of the strongest programme proposers, so that’s always good; it’s something producers and writers really want to get their teeth into. We have some really good stuff in the pipeline that will shock you, enthral you and terrify you…

The corollary of that is – is Dangerous Visions where fans of the SF genre are going to find the material on Radio 4?

I don’t know. I’m not sure – for example this year we did I, Robot as a standalone. It was part of the Robots season, and we did War of the Worlds as part of the Mars season. We commissioned both of those as standalones and then put them into the umbrella of those two seasons.

I don’t think you’re going to get deluged with lots of science fiction, science fantasy and dystopia, but I think Dangerous Visions for us has opened the gates a bit. I was aware when I arrived in the job about 4,000 years ago that science fiction was an endangered species… it wasn’t even an endangered species, it was very, very rare on Radio 4.

I ran a science fiction season that wasn’t wholly successful for various reasons – partly because we struggled to get the rights for anything we really wanted to dramatize – and I went away and rethought it because I think it’s great. I think science fiction plays incredibly well. It’s almost its natural home is radio. You’re not reliant on CGI, you’re reliant on the audience’s imagination – CGI was a wonderful gift for science fiction filmmakers but now it’s a curse – and I think Dangerous Visions has shifted our thinking.

I think that our recent excursions into horror have come out of the birth of Dangerous Visions, I think that all the stuff we’ve been doing with Neil Gaiman – and there will be more – which is great, wouldn’t have found a natural home on Radio 4 if it hadn’t been for Dangerous Visions.

Its tentacles spread far and wide. I think it’s been an incredibly successful brand for us, and the stuff we’ve put in it has been really interesting, really challenging. I want it to go on, and the way it’s fertilising other things we are doing is great. I love that we’re now putting Dangerous Visions into Book at Bedtime and my view is long may it last. I can’t imagine without Dangerous Visions that we’d have done Fahrenheit 451 as a Book at Bedtime, and I think that’s a really good thing to do.

And we have more Hitch-hikers coming as well, I believe?

You have.

The one thing I can assure you is that I don’t think we will be putting Dangerous Visions into The Archers…

“Not coming to a Dangerous Vision…”

Oh go on – Grace Archer didn’t die in the fire, she was a clone…

(laughs) Another interesting shift for us is I’m not sure without Dangerous Visions we would have run with [historical saga] Tumanbay, which is a really interesting departure for Radio 4, a bold and very successful departure. I’m not sure we would have gone there without Dangerous Visions. It’s going everywhere – but it’s not going into The Archers.

 

Thanks to Isobel Pyrke and Beth Sims for their help in arranging this interview.

Click here to access all the plays in the season (NB they will start leaving iPlayer after July 24th)