Toby Hadoke’s adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s famous lost TV drama The Road, broadcast on 29 September 1963, comes to Radio 4 this Saturday, October 27, 55 years after its only UK broadcast. In this first part of a major interview (which is spoiler-free for those who aren’t aware of the play’s narrative), Hadoke sets the scene for Paul Simpson and explains the process by which the play travelled from 1963 to 2018…

So fifty-five years later, The Road has returned…

As we speak! I had half a mind wondering if we could put it on the same day as the original. It’s set at Michaelmas [September 29].

There’s a reference in your play specifically to 27 October, and I did wonder if you knew your transmission date early enough…

Yes. I did. It’s apposite that things come through on certain dates. I did a cheeky little bit of fiddling in order to made that happen.

It’s unusual to have a specific transmission date that far in advance.

It was because it was going to be the Fright Night for the weekend before Halloween but Jeremy Howe, the Radio 4 commissioner, liked it so much when he heard it that it was promoted to the afternoon. It was going to be a scary Halloween thing but he wanted it to get more listeners, which is really nice.

When Matthew Graham did The Stone Tape for Radio 4 back in 2015, I wondered if it would translate into more Kneale turning up on the radio.

I didn’t invoke The Stone Tape when I pitched it, but knowing it had been done, I was hoping there’d be some sympathy.

So why did you want to do The Road?

Because it’s amazing, and because it’s one of the Great Lost Works. I just thought because it’s about sound, it would work on the radio.

I actually pitched it about four years ago, but it didn’t come to anything – I’m not sure it was even looked at properly and we went on to do other things. I had a couple of plays on Radio 4 relatively recently that have gone down well, and we were looking for ideas. I pitched a few sci-fi ideas; I wanted to adapt something, a bit long form and was looking at some works of literature to get a series rather than a one-off. We were throwing back and forth adaptations and that got me thinking about The Road again.

I’d done a pitch document with four ideas on it, and there was some space at the bottom, so it looked like an incomplete document. Just to show I’m not short of ideas, I went back to my files and simply cut and pasted the paragraph I’d written about The Road four years ago and stuck it on the bottom – and it fitted. If you throw them five ideas, it’s harder for them to reject them all, and in fact two of the ideas got further forward, and one of them, to my surprise, was The Road.

So now we had to ask the Kneale Estate. I knew they can be difficult to convince, and people have tried to do The Road before and it didn’t work out. I thought it was bound to fall at this hurdle… but it didn’t fall at that hurdle so I then had to give my qualifications as a writer to be sent to the Kneale Estate. I thought they’d kybosh it now – and they didn’t. With that in place we then submitted it, knowing it was practically possible and we’d gone through all the legal hurdles, and it was accepted.

I kept expecting it not to happen and not to happen, because I thought it was too good to be true, and it’s a project that would mean a lot to people in our sphere [as fans], but not necessarily people further beyond that. I knew its illustrious history wasn’t going to help us because to most Radio 4 listeners that doesn’t matter. But it happened, and because it’s got that brilliant ending and because it’s about sound, I thought it would work well on the radio without too much difficulty.

 

In the second part, which will go up shortly after transmission, Toby Hadoke goes into detail about the radio adaptation.