The fifth and final series of conspiracy thriller series Tracks is currently running on BBC Radio 4, with the lead character, Dr Helen Ash coming to terms with the fact she has 9 months to live. The series has gone down many different pathways over the past few years, and creator Matthew Broughton chatted with Paul Simpson about its origins and much more…

 

Is it purely that Helen’s lifespan has got to this stage that it’s the final season or are there other reasons as well?

That’s a good question. I think there’s certainly an element of that; that’s where we ended with series 4, Indigo. She was given this twelve month period left – she does has stage 4 glioblastoma brain cancer which is extremely serious and there is no going back from that. Of course the series is also about futurology and about advances in medicine and science so there’s always a possibility that the most impossible situations can be resolved and solved.

So, on the question of Helen and her health, yes absolutely the clock is ticking down and one of the things she says at the end of season 4 is the thing that she understands most of all about time is that it’s running out, which of course it is. That is a big element in the final season.

On the bigger more global view of the series, I almost go back to my original impulse for writing it. I had these big questions about what I wanted to deal with at the time, and half of that was making a series about identity and looking at where a person is in their own body. The first series was about the brain, and investigation, if you like, into the possibility that who we are exists somewhere in our own brain and that’s the answer to the universe. The second was about the geology of the Earth, the third season was about evolution. The fourth series was about time and about how we exist in time and the fifth series is about cosmology and about the beginning and the end of the universe and the death of the sun. You can look at the whole thing as a giant map which is solving the question: who am I?

Within those there are subcategories of everyday existence – faith and politics and all that other stuff – as well of course but in terms of those really big subjects the fifth series comes to a moment where we’re looking at the biggest picture of all in the universe, how that will resolve and our place within it. There aren’t that many places to go beyond there, so there is a natural climatic feeling to this season. I feel like I’ve reached an answer.

I don’t know if you ever did this as a kid but I occasionally find old books of mine and it’s Paul Simpson, street address, county address, the United Kingdom, the Earth, Solar System, the Milky Way, Somewhere over there. It just feels a little bit like that: each time you’ve widened your sphere.

Yes and that’s an interesting point because in widening the circle you also bring yourself closer to the answers to the question you’re looking at, I guess.

There is something quite unique about radio drama in the way that I almost feel like I’m whispering into the ears of the audience sometimes. It feels very intimate, it feels like I’m saying “I’m going to give you half the picture and I’ll give you just enough to be able to come with me, and together we’re going to find out what this is.”

First of all it leads to fantastically intense and interesting individual scenes because you place yourself in an environment or a room in a certain situation which you explore in a visceral way but it also leads to a deeper investigation. You feel like you can spill off from that and talk about the issues surrounding it and look at it.

I came to radio drama fairly late really – I was in my thirties when I first came to it a few years ago. I was offered the chance of a commission and I hadn’t really listened to audio drama. I started listening to it and thought this sounds quite old fashioned. There were some good new ones but some of it sounds quite old fashioned.

I was sitting in my room, and there was a massive argument going on in the house next door which I could hear coming through the wall. I thought, “My god this is really interesting because these guys are really upset.” It was a man and a woman fighting and as the argument got bigger and bigger and bigger at a certain point it went quiet and then one of them said ‘Why isn’t the baby crying?’

And it was like, “What the hell is going on in there?” I had turned everything off and I was just listening to this conversation coming through the wall. It was very loud then half an hour later an ambulance arrived and I’ve no idea what happened really but I heard just enough to imagine what was going on. It was such a strong notion. I thought that as a radio drama listener, I want to be in the room next door listening to something extraordinary going on and wanting to know more. It felt to me so strange and curious and interesting that it was instantly addictive.

So with a series like Tracks I tried to have these moments where these things are happening step by step through an episode, that these things are unfolding and unfurling and becoming deeper and more interesting. What I like to be able to do is to fly off of those situations and look at them in a slightly different context and with Tracks that’s mostly through a scientific lens.

I’ll take something that’s very simple, such as my niece saying to me, ‘Why can’t I look at the sun?’ and me saying ‘Well, it’ll burn your eyes’. She says ‘Why? It’s so far away’ so you look at the science at what happens when you put too much light into an eye and suddenly a story comes out of that. There’s a huge number of little things, like why can’t you drink water from a puddle? All those little tiny questions then finding the real science behind them. And also take each of those ideas to the extreme and see what happens when you really put them under pressure.

I think working in radio dramas gives me a great opportunity to explore the world in a number of different ways but at the same time attempt to tell a story within a genre that enables an audience to go with it.

I think that’s become even more so in the last ten years with podcasts and whatever is that people are listening to. You probably remember when they first started using binaural but at times it seemed like producers had forgotten that everybody else wasn’t listening in binaural.

One of the first things I did was a series called Planet B which was for BBC7 originally. I was the lead writer on that and I wrote the story for the first series and then created episodes for the series after that.

We had binaural stuff that we were using and we did a little trailer in which you’re inside somebody’s head. (I just realised that actually it maybe had an influence on me with where I went with Tracks in the end.) You hear a saw travelling around the skull, then taking the top of their head off and then you hear somebody scraping out your brain and throwing it into a bucket beside you. And of course because it’s binaural you’re in the centre of that world.

That wasn’t a drama scene, it was a scene that the sound designer and the producer cooked up as a little trailer, ”this drama is going to do this to your head” kind of idea. It was great fun and really effective, and obviously those people that had good headphones could listen to it and really experience it, and it’s amazing. It’s almost old hat now in a way.

When you’re making radio drama you can put people into these situations which feel all encompassing, you’re right in the centre of the action.

I now challenge the sound designers with my stage directions. OK, in this moment we travel inside her, into her lungs and listen to her breathing from the inside out and just see what they come up with. In terms of the texture of those scenes, you’re aware as a listener that something different is happening, that something new is going on. Depending on how you treat that, obviously we’re hearing the lung or whatever, you can actually change the course of the bigger narrative, through those individual sounds. It’s quite challenging but when it works it really lands.

With something like that, do you get responses back from your sound designers basically saying sod off?

I think they actually quite like it. I was talking to Kath Robinson when we were recording the new series and halfway through there’s a key moment where they’re at sea and they go under the water. There’s a series of stuff that happens under the surface of the sea and she said ‘OK, you’ve done this now’ and I said ‘Yes, what else do you want me to do, what’s really difficult to do?’ and she said, ‘Well riding on horseback is always really difficult because it’s very hard to place that in the scene and know where you are.’ So a horse riding scene – I’ve put that to the back of my mind for next time.

I think designers like Kath and the supervising sound designer Nigel Lewis like it, sometimes you get moments where you give them something so difficult that they have to reinvent it themselves. I’m really giving them a blueprint and at the same time saying, “This is just to spark your imagination for you to do something with this” and 9 times out of 10 they deliver something that’s extraordinary and way beyond what I had expected. Nigel has been incredibly important to the sound of the show, he’s inventive and imaginative and a core part of the team.  He won a Best Sound award for his work on the first series.

I’m also reminded of that famous quote from Douglas Adams quote. He said he’d written in the script something like, Two million robots turn round and say hi and the sound producer said ‘How the hell am I supposed to do that?’ And he said ‘OK, how about one million robots?’.

That leads to an interesting question, for radio drama particularly, who are your influences?

My influences don’t really come from radio drama to be really honest because I came to it quite late. All the stuff that really informed how I am as a writer came much earlier. When I was first offered the opportunity to do radio drama I had very little experience in it and hadn’t listened to very much at all and the stuff I had heard I really didn’t like. I felt really alienated from it, it felt almost Edwardian and it’s not the stuff that really excited me. I asked a couple of producers to send me some links or some CDs of the 50 that had come out in the last couple of years. They sent me about 30 of them and of those 30 I think probably 25 of them were just amazing and I thought. “Well, this is extraordinary and amazing in different ways.

I remember a play called Beast by Nick Warburton which is about a small community who find this creature and they investigate the creature and never at any point does he describe what the creature looks like. So it’s 45 minutes of this creature being at the centre of this story and no one ever tells you what it is but you slowly build up a picture of your own as to what this thing is. I just remember thinking that’s very smart and sophisticated storytelling and it’s a fantastic narrative.

I don’t think that was one of those ones that made me think in terms of the soundscape or anything like that or even in terms of philosophy but just in terms of a story that really gets hold of you. You have this massive question that you’re asking yourself from the very beginning: what the hell is this thing? You want to know what it is on every level, where it’s from, what it looks like, what it’s going to do to people, and of course because Nick’s a very clever writer. He turns it into a story about the humans around this thing, and it’s beautiful.

There were things like that that instantly felt an interest and fascination with but in terms of what I write and how I came to it, my roots go into the more avant-garde theatre and avant-garde film. My specialist subject back at university was contemporary Polish theatre which was, at that point, under the strict hand of censorship, so they had developed extraordinary ways of delivering their stories using different acting techniques that are genuinely edgy and strange.

I worked with theatre company Complicité as a writer for a period, so there were a number of influences coming out of that: theatre of the absurd, Eastern European inventive dramas and the avant-garde. I’d always said to myself that the avant-garde could learn a lot from popular theatre, TV, in terms of its storytelling because sometimes it just goes off and becomes too self indulgent – but at the same time the mainstream and popular stuff could learn a lot from the avant-garde in the way that they distil and find these emotions and explore them, and do them in extraordinary ways.

Your radio stuff’s been quite varied, Gulliver’s Travels, Tracks, the Witchfinder General play… What attracts you to a subject?

Again, you’ve opened the biggest can of all in a way. It’s something that I didn’t think about for a long period, as to what makes me write the stuff I write because I’ve always just done it from a really early age. It’s never been something I’ve had to think about or work at. For as long as I can remember, I just write stuff and it’s there.

Just before I started working on Tracks, I was working on a feature film I’d written. It had a really high profile cast, we’d been filming it in Europe for about six weeks and suddenly there was a massive funding crash and production came to a halt. So I was stuck in Belgium for a few weeks in a hotel with all the crew and the cast, and we had to stop until the funding came back. And eventually the funding didn’t ever come back so the film was thrown out. It’s almost completely unheard of: these things never happen and then it happens.

In that time I had this sudden sense of loss: loss of power, loss of control, loss of everything. This big project I’d been working on for about three or four years that we’d finally gotten over the line and was finally being made – it was a good project. It was fun and interesting, it was a great film – It’s not going to happen. That slowly dawned across these weeks in this hotel and it was at that point that I came back home and thought, “What the hell am I going to do now? First of all I’ve got to make money, I’ve got to live” and that was the first time since I began that I actually questioned what I’m doing. It was that question of who am I?

The conclusion was that that question is a question of identity. I want to know why I’m doing this, who I am, and I want control over that in order to tell it in the way I want to tell it. Because writers are really at the centre of the creative world in radio – along with the producer of course – like no other medium, we get to work with the actors, we get to speak to the producers, we get to talk to the technicians. It’s more intimate. With Tracks it’s really just two blokes in a shed working on a sci-fi drama series. There is a chance for actualisation for the writer in radio, so that’s when I went back to radio and said “What’s going on, can I do this?”

But since I was writing about identity, I suddenly looked at everything else I was doing and they were all about the same thing. They were all about characters – real people like Vincent Price [for the Witchfinder General play]; I did a play about Keith Moon and Oliver Reed when they were filming Tommy in Portsmouth. I made a film about Charles Manson when the murders took place in ’69, and going way back further, on the first night of BBC Four, I made a film about Salvador Dali and about his position with the surrealists in 1930s Paris.

I looked at them all and thought, “I’m just writing about the same thing, every single time. I’m looking at an individual who either doesn’t fit in or fits in in an unusual way to the world around him who’s trying to make a mark and say this is who I am.” He’s trying to take control in one way or another. Whether that’s through absolute chaos of Keith Moon and Oliver Reed smashing up a pub on the Isle of Wight or whether it’s Salvador Dali saying I’m more surreal than all of you put together because I reject what you’re saying, it suddenly became one of those, “oh that’s what I do” moments.

That’s when I started getting into the science and saying, “Maybe it’s just in people’s brains, maybe it’s just a place in the head and we can find it. Also maybe, if we can find who we are in our head, what else can we find in there? Can we find out if God exists? Can we find out where the future lies? Can we find out the answer to the universe? Is it always in there?” And of course as soon as you start asking those questions, you know that the only way to deliver them is by bringing people with you. It came together and suddenly I felt I was on a new path; now I know what I’m writing.

A lot of writers never do know what it is that’s driving them. Does that present its own challenges then in that you know what you’re writing about? Do you not get that moment of discovery as you go through?

A few months ago I adapted a book by John Berger, A Fortunate Man for Radio 4. I met him a few times when I was working on Complicité in the early 2000s; he’s a remarkable man. I wasn’t friends with him but just to be in a room with him was to understand that this is the elder of the village, the wise man as it were.

He did one of the Face to Face interviews on TV that I was looking at, just to get an overview of him and put that into the pattern of the adaptation. He was asked the same question, “What do you write about? What kind of writer are you?” And you see him thinking about it and he said, ‘I write about borders’ and he says ‘Crossing borders and about how borders do or don’t exist and how they exist and what you can smuggle across borders.’ He’s talking both literally and metaphorically. Then the interviewer [Jeremy Isaacs] said, ‘But in knowing that, does it make it difficult to do it?’ and he said, ‘No because every time I start something new, I don’t know it again, it’s gone so I have to rediscover it each time.’

I’ve just done a short for Sky Arts on Orson Welles in Norwich, a little comedy twenty five minute film and it’s quite good fun. My friend Richard who directed it said ‘Would you like to do this?’ and I said I’d take a look at the material. I started to investigate Orson Welles and I thought it was is funny and an amazing story and he went there and did that… Putting all these things together and mapping out this story of what I think are the most interesting things about it, what’s funny about it, what’s sad about it, all the simple pillars of the story. I’d written a first draft and I thought, “I’ve written about identity again”.

It’s just how I do it. I don’t know how it happens, it suddenly appears and I suppose that’s the process. You can’t control it at all really but you can occasionally step back and note something that happens.

And also the flip side of that, you’ve got the Harold Pinter quote about meaning being overrated.

Yes. Although it feels like it means something. I’m sure it did for him. At the same time you’re always at that crossroads where you’re thinking, “This all could possibly be completely meaningless.” And even then, it’s out there now, I’ve done it, it’s off my chest, whatever it was.

The whole way through on Tracks I’ve been working with James Robinson the producer. In fact, I wrote the first script he ever directed in radio. He and I have an understanding in the way we work together which is now down to a shorthand – he can half raise an eyebrow and I can picture the page of notes that come with that. The great thing is, we constantly challenge each other, I’ll go into a scene thinking this is exactly what it’s about and he’ll say ‘I don’t think it’s about that’ and I’ll go ‘Maybe you’re right’. (Laughs)

We try to expand that among the production. Particularly in the first series when it was finding its feet, I would write three or four drafts of each episode. Then I would take it into the actors and we would hold them back as much as possible for the first couple of episodes. The actors wouldn’t see the [later] scripts – they were following the story in real time, they were an audience for it really. Then we would sit there and hear what they were saying. “Where do you think this is going? What do you think is happening to your character now?”

I remember at one point Romola Garai in the first series said, after episode three or four, ‘Well, I’m pretty convinced I’m a robot’ (laughs) She knew there was something going on but couldn’t put her finger on it and she knew it was about her character; she’s fantastically instinctive and understands that sort of thing.

Obviously there’s an ownership over certain things, with the character of Helen Ash, I know her so well that I know what she says or doesn’t say in any situation. So that’s a more general character thing more than anything else but in terms of where she goes and what she does, I’m constantly trying to find out what is the correct way for her to behave or where she’s going for the story and that is a massively collaborative process.

That begs an interesting question because of course you’ve had three different actresses playing Helen across the series. Has that made a difference at all to how you’ve written if you are reacting to an extent to what they’re bringing?

It’s one of those grey area fudgy answers but you’re aware but not aware at the same time.

Romola is a big film star really and she has got that star quality. It was a punt for us to even ask her but she just happened to be eight and a half months pregnant, so she couldn’t do anything else. She was enormous, about to give birth. We knew that we got lucky. She was fantastic and she brings so much to it.

She helped create the voice [of Helen] in the first place; there were certain things in there which were interesting. I’d always wanted a character that was slightly difficult and a little cold and that’s where I wanted it to begin. Her actions overcome that characteristic and as soon as Romola opened her mouth on the first read through, it was exactly as I’d heard it. It was remarkable and whether that was just her reading the punctuation properly, I don’t know, but it was, oh my god that’s amazing.

Subsequently, the other actors that come in [Hattie Morahan and Olivia Poulet], who are both really amazing in their own rights, have both brought so much to that part and continued it in significant ways and made subtle changes because of who they are. The whole idea of the character of Helen Ashin Tracks is that she begins the series as one thing, as this cold distant, slightly broken GP, and across all the series, she changes and becomes something slightly different.

There are key moments across the series where those things come into play and the actors that have played them are playing the same character but in a slightly different headspace each time, in terms of the series. They’re moving it with themselves, so they’re growing it because there’s someone new. That’s partly accidental and it’s about availability and frankly, any one of them I’m lucky to have and work with really because they’re just terrific.

But I think there’s a serendipity. It’s just one of those projects where everything falls into place. We’ve been lucky to get these people and we’ve been lucky that they get it and know how to do it.

All the series of Tracks are available on BBC Sounds; series 5 goes out weekly on BBC Radio 4.

Thanks to Sean Harwood for assistance in arranging this interview