Digital Commons Network^™

Bowraville And Phoebe's Fall: Award-Winning Australian Podcasts From The Media Formerly Known As Print, Wendy Carlisle

RadioDoc Review

Digital technology has democratised the audio storytelling space in a quite profound way. This article compares two major podcast investigations produced by established Australian newspaper mastheads: Bowraville by The Australian, and Phoebe’s Fall by The Age. Bowraville examines the unsolved murders of three Aboriginal children in the 1990s – all of whom came from the same small town. Phoebe’s Fall investigates the bizarre death in a garbage chute of a luxury Melbourne apartment building of 24-year-old Phoebe Handsjuk and her troubled relationship with her much older boyfriend.

In depicting what have been described as the three essential ingredients of …

La Revolte Des Prostituées/The Sex Workers Revolt: A Dual Analysis, Sean Prpick, Maud Beaulieu

RadioDoc Review

This documentary chronicles how hundreds of French sex workers went on strike in 1975 and occupied five Catholic churches to protest against police abuse and government closure of their workplace. Forty years on, Australian producer, academic and sex worker rights researcher Eurydice Aroney revisits the Lyon cathedral occupied by the women with the full blessing of its cleric, Père Blanc, now ninety years old. Interviews with Blanc and some of the original sex worker protesters are interwoven with archival material to make a compelling audio story, selected as a finalist for the UK In The Dark award (2015).

This work …

‘Swansong’ And ‘ Losing Yourself’: Meditations On Life, Death And The Liminal, Cristal Duhaime

RadioDoc Review

This article considers two very personal audio documentaries that reflect on love and identity via the liminal space between life and death. Swansong, by award-winning UK radio producer Hana Walker-Brown, is set in a hospital, as Hana and her father bear witness to her grandmother’s dying and celebrate her joyful life. Losing Yourself, by US producer Ibby Caputo, is a revelatory account of dealing with a cancer diagnosis.

Swansong is a picture of a person fondly remembered but Hana elevates it beyond eulogy into a multi-layered meditation. Her grandmother Joan’s voice flutters in and out of ethereal recreations of …

Intrigue: Murder In The Lucky Holiday Hotel – A Greek Tragedy In China, Sonya Song

RadioDoc Review

Following the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, President Xi Jinping has rendered himself the omnipotent ruler of one fifth of the world’s population. Xi has defeated his political rivals with no mercy; among them was a rising political star, Bo Xilai, who was shot down in 2012 and is now in prison. Bo has been nearly forgotten – until early this year when his dramatic life and political battle were revived by Carrie Gracie with her brilliant BBC podcast series, Intrigue: Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel.

Although as a Chinese native I followed …

Intrigue: Murder In The Lucky Holiday Hotel – A Chinese House Of Cards Meets Agatha Christie., Drew Ambrose

RadioDoc Review

Intrigue: Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel is a podcast that is Agatha Christie meets House of Cards with an Oriental twist. It tells the story of the downfall of Bo Xilai, a once powerful and charismatic politician, who could have eclipsed current President Xi Jingping as a future leader of China if the cards fell his way. Despite the challenges of reporting in China, BBC China Editor Carrie Gracie is able to explain with clarity the tale of money, sex and power than unravelled Bo Xilai.

Gracie guides us through her five-part series with clear knowledge of her beat …

Editorial: Podcasting As The New Space For Crafted Audio, Siobhan Mchugh

RadioDoc Review

Editorial Overview

The Arts Of Amnesia: The Case For Audio Drama, Part Two, Neil Verma

RadioDoc Review

This article examines what the relationship between audio drama and radio drama might illuminate about both forms. Drawing on some 40 podcasts and other audio forms that take a serial structure, I explore the rise of audio drama podcasts since 2015 and situate them in both a more recent historical context since the late 1990s and in a broader history stretching back to the first Golden Age of radio. By listening closely to key works on Serendipity, Homecoming and other podcasts, I argue that contemporary audio has profound potential to change both how we listen and how we relate …

The Arts Of Amnesia: The Case For Audio Drama, Part One, Neil Verma

RadioDoc Review

This article examines what the relationship between audio drama and radio drama might illuminate about both forms. Drawing on some 40 podcasts and other audio forms that take a serial structure, I explore the rise of audio drama podcasts since 2015 and situate them in both a more recent historical context since the late 1990s and in a broader history stretching back to the first Golden Age of radio. By listening closely to key works on Serendipity, Homecoming and other podcasts, I argue that contemporary audio has profound potential to change both how we listen and how we relate …

Empathy, Ethics And Aesthetics In Love + Radio, Michelle Macklem

RadioDoc Review

The podcast Love + Radio thrives on cultivating a kind of emotional tightrope, where the listener wavers from curiosity to contempt to empathy. The episodes “Jack and Ellen” and “The Living Room” have stark differences, particularly in terms of sound design, but their aesthetic and production values have a coherency that is exemplary of Love + Radio’s style. Sound is used to distinguish between ‘Ellen’, the subject, and ‘Jack’ her paedo-baiting alter ego. ‘Jack’ is created by pitch-shifting the voice of ‘Ellen’ down, instantly giving the story intrigue and also alluding to the clandestine nature of their work. “Jack and …

Criminal: Journalistic Rigour, Gothic Tales And Philosophical Heft, Jason Loviglio

RadioDoc Review

Like many of the shows in PRX’s Radiotopia catalogue of podcasts, Criminal’s sensibility and sound partake of the US public radio formula made famous by This American Life: journalistic rigour and gothic yarns. The show tells “stories of people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or got caught somewhere in the middle”. But it’s moved beyond mere crime journalism to something that aspires to a bit more philosophical heft. Most of the stories unspool through the elegant co-narration between host Phoebe Judge and each episode’s central protagonist. The effect is almost always seamless, thanks to the expert mixing of …

The Eternal Present: The Untold And Short Cuts Series, Bbc Radio 4., Lyn Gallacher

RadioDoc Review

The present tense is THE powerful first lesson in radio grammar. But so is telling the truth. What happens then, when these two butt up against one another and call each other’s bluff?

‘The Untold’ is a half-hour BBC radio series dedicated to ‘documenting the untold dramas of 21^st century Britain’. The episode, Songs of the Bothy Balladeer, like all the stories in this series, is personal. This whole production can only be made with a high degree of cooperation from all its subjects. Indeed some of them nominate themselves. It means that we, the audience, are …

Mei Mei, A Daughter's Song: Review, Masako Fukui

RadioDoc Review

The most compelling aspect of Mei Mei: A Daughter’s Song is its enduring power as cultural critique. On the surface, the subject matter is the universal conflict between mother and daughter, but this radio docudrama by Taiwanese-American producer Dmae Roberts is in fact an ambitious exploration of the complex meanings of race, hybridity and cultural ‘mixedness’ that outline the contours of identity in multicultural societies such as the US.

As an Asian-American ‘minority’ discourse, this documentary disrupts the dominant ‘white vs other’ understanding of culture by exploring Roberts’ ambivalence about her own biracial identity (her mother is Taiwanese, her father …