Chimes At Midnight

In partnership with

Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. The first episode of our audio drama THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT goes live on August 20. Just search for it in whichever app you use to listen to your podcasts. It’s free.

OPERATIONS

PROCESS NOTES ON THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT

So Kevin Kolde and I were talking one day about things we’d like to do. I can’t remember which of us got on to the subject of audio first, but radio drama has been in my bucket list forever. I’m British English, right? The BBC. Hitchhiker’s Guide, Earthsearch, the Quatermass Memoirs, Beckett, Radio 4 plays (that wonderful one where Simon Callow plays Sherlock Holmes and gets to crisply utter the word “Bollocks”), Under Milk Wood, I could go on for quite a long time.

And Kevin says, “what if we did radio dramas as podcasts?”

At which point, I pretty much yelled YES.

We got to talking about it, and I got to thinking: how would I approach an audio drama that needed to kick off a studio, and fit with Kevin’s particular tastes? Which very much run to genre, spooky stuff, character stuff. But also, Kevin’s one note was: what would you

Obviously, I’ve never written audio drama before. I’ve recorded audio before, on CASTLEVANIA, but you can’t just go at it like “it’s animation without the pictures.” So I had to do a bunch of thinking and planning, and decided whatever I did first, the story and material itself should be inside my comfort zone, while I learn how to do the difficult stuff.

So I’m sitting there thinking about old British storytelling, right? Because “radio drama” is at the forefront of my brain. And I found myself going back to British television of a certain era - not least because the budgets were comparable, most British tv was made for two-pound-fifty back then.

I found myself thinking about DOOMWATCH, a 70s show about a government department dealing with the environmental dangers of technological advancement, and the QUATERMASS stories, which I’ve been thinking about for forty years. And, as I noted last week, the crime-show radio series ANNIKA STRANDED, which does this really clever thing - there’s only one actor, the sainted Nicola Walker, and the acting and sound design does all the work of suggesting there are other people around her who she’s talking to and dealing with, in different spaces. But we never hear them. The microphone is only ever on her and the ambient sound of her location and the distance between her and the mic.

But. From my CASTLEVANIA experience, I know that most actors like acting with other actors best.

(I confess here that I love working with actors. I doubt they love working with me, but I adore them and the experience of witnessing them create. And I like to be there so I can change lines of dialogue when they turn out to be unspeakable bullshit. Rule of thumb: if it sounds wrong coming out of an actor’s mouth, most often it’s because the line is written wrong.)

I landed on a format: two actors per episode, the lead and the guest. And short episodes. ANNIKA STRANDED is fifteen-minute episodes. We don’t need to fit into a radio station’s running order, so the episodes can be as long or short as we like, but I was aiming for fifteen. (I got that wrong on all but one episode, I think - the others all run twenty or over.)

Two-hander, one-act plays for your ears.

One-act plays, perhaps counter-intuitively, are among the hardest things to write, at least for me. No space to vamp, to unpack stuff, to zap between a dozen locations, to wander, or to go “to be continued” because you’re not sure where you’re going and need to buy yourself space to find the end. It’s all got to be in that one act, beginning, middle and end. It’s a complete statement. There’s nowhere to hide in a one-act play. Setting, text, relationship, theme, and a button on the end, and that’s all you’ve got.

So, for the stories, I decided to play in my comfort zone. Mad science.

I’d tripped over an article somewhere that suggests that dark matter is the fifth form of matter, and the fifth form of matter is information. It’s everywhere but invisible because it’s cold, inert information storage stuck to the fabric of spacetime and just imperceptibly hanging out. Per quantum physics, information cannot be destroyed. Everything emits information and it has to go somewhere.

There are a limitless number of mad science stories right there. And, per Quatermass and Arthur Clarke, any sufficiently esoteric scientific phenomenon is explicable to its contemporary society only as magic, myth and legend.

(Note how I am desperately trying to avoid run-on sentences. I am the worst at that. I once got called out on them by no less than Tom Baker. I still do them. But I am aware.)

For those really into process: I wrote it the way I would a tv or film script, in Final Draft, with the stage directions instead being sound directions. Sometimes just indicating a door opening and what kind of door it is, sometimes “FX: a very low track of unintelligible, rasping WHISPERING voices. Not completely human. Haunted. From space.”

Because we need to have fun. And I have a long career of torturing my collaborators with impossible asks.

There are many different ways to write an audio drama - the BBC has a specific format for radio drama, which looks like this:

(you can find the full thing at this link here)

But, by the time I started writing, I had my crew - Meredith Layne as casting and voice director, with Salami Studios doing the recording. And that was my CASTLEVANIA team. So I could have adopted an audio-specific script format - and there can be creative advantages in that, as well as probably getting a more exact timing for each episode - but I figured, why mess with what we’re all already comfortable with? Therefore, we went at it like we were recording CASTLEVANIA. Nice and easy.

We cast James first, which, as I’ve said before, unlocked the whole thing and saved my life because I wrote it with him in mind and would have been screwed if he’d said no. After that, Meredith took over. A casting director reads the scripts, comes up with ideas as to which actors could do which parts, draws up lists and then starts making phone calls. Meredith has pulled off astonishing things in the past. I had had only one casting thought other than James - Gildart Jackson. If you’ve watched CASTLEVANIA, he was the Flyseyes demon who did that astonishing monologue performance about his death and life by the campfire with Isaac. After that, I’ve always looked for opportunities to work with him again.

Meredith takes things to another level. How the hell she secured our actors, I don’t know. I didn’t think it was even possible to hire Alicia Witt, an actual genius, who did something so deliciously insanely creepy as Dr. Bestler in episode one that I laughed out loud and thank god my mic was muted.

The respect they all had for James was palpable. A lot of fun was had.

(An aside: I wanted proper theme music. Proper actual theme music, especially for genre shows, seems to have gone away. We should do a “greatest tv show themes” bit here. I suspect the last truly great one was SUCCESSION, though I bow to the astonishing technical brilliance and general cleverness of the KIMMY SCHMIDT theme. We got Trey Toy in, whom we’d worked with on CASTLEVANIA (you can see a pattern there) and my one ask was, please do me a proper theme, not the fucking musical wallpaper I hear all the time these days. I’ll get into this more when episode 1 drops, but there was a happy accident in there.)

Anyway. That’s how the whole thing happened. And, broadly, how it was made. I’ll get into more details next week, after episode 1, THE COLD SPOT, has gone live.

Like I say, it’s going to be easily found wherever you get your podcasts. Apple, for instance. Or Spotify. This one is Amazon in the US, I believe. Just search for “The Department Of Midnight.”

ORBITAL

THE MISSIONARY

Jason Howard sent me a copy of his new comic THE MISSIIONARY with Ryan Stegman - it’s being published by those DSTLRY people, and final order cut off is this week.

It’s COMPLETELY MAD. It’s the story of:

A nice man who gets possessed by a demon in the first days of what seems to be a war between Hell, Earth and Heaven. Which is why you get Jason Howard to draw it.

There’s a lot happening, it’s dense, and it’s a lot of fun. Ask your comic shop about it this week.

I have no idea if I’ve even spelled DSTLRY right. Jason tells me the pages are larger than standard comics size, which is nice.

This came up in conversation at home the other day, and I thought maybe some of you have not seen the greatest title and cover for a Seventies British crime novel:

As I recall, the story of the cover goes like this: they could not find a hard-looking-enough Seventies English bent-copper face for the cover. Except for one. This is in fact a photograph of the author, GF Newman.

This letter has been zapped to you via Beehiiv and:

Increase Your Amazon Position Before Oct Prime Day

Send free products to Micro-Influencers using the platform Stack Influence which automates influencer collaborations at scale (get thousands of collabs per month). Brands like Magic Spoon, Unilever, and Farmacy have been able to get to #1 page positioning on Amazon and increase their monthly revenue as high as 13X in as little as 2 months.

• Pay influencers only with products

• Increase external traffic Amazon sales

• Get full rights image/video UGC

Increase your listings search positioning before Oct Prime Day is upon us!

Get 10% OFF signing up before Oct Prime Day.

Suddenly I am doing all the things at once - scripts, consults, a couple of big rewrites, notes on art pages. I’m still scribbling in a notebook at ten to midnight every night. The trick is to carve out time for myself. Take five minutes to make a good lunch rather than just devour something out of the fridge on the fly. Spend an extra five minutes hanging out with the cat. Read some of a book in the evening. Slow it down just a little bit, so you can breathe and think. Go easy on yourself. See you next week.

W