“I’m not really a guest appearance kind.”
On Sunday night at the BBC Radio Theatre in London, Radio 4 controller Mohit Bakaya presented Rosamund Pike with the Best Actress gong at the BBC Audio Drama Awards, for her starring role in the podcast drama People Who Knew Me adapted by theatre writer Daniella Isaacs from Kim Hooper’s novel.
She played New Yorker Emily, who uses the horror of the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to flee a difficult family situation and set up a new life in California as Connie Pryne, bringing up a daughter, Claire, on her own. Yet 14 years later, when she receives a cancer diagnosis, she realises she must confront the life she ran away from, if only for the sake of Claire.
Talking to Radio Times backstage in Broadcasting House, Pike says of the award: “Audio is a very personal passion for me, I grew up travelling with my parents on long car journeys and the thing that got me through those journeys was a box of 16 tapes that contained a whole book. And it was an illustrious panel of judges for this award; it’s very meaningful when the people on the judging committee are all actors and that this show moved them enough to vote for me.”
Talking further about her early years, when she first became aware of audio drama, Pike reveals that Margot Boyd, who played Mrs Antrobus in The Archers from 1984 to 2004, used to live in the next block of flats over from her childhood home. “She was my first real contact with a real actress, so she was my idea of what an actress looked like.” And like for many of us, The Archers is emblematic for her: “The music and hearing that was I suppose what everyone thought of as audio drama.”
Given her early associations with The Archers, would she follow in the footsteps of the likes of Queen Camilla, Princess Margaret, Sir Terry Wogan, Dame Judi Dench and, er, Rylan, and make a guest appearance in Ambridge? “I’m not really a guest appearance kind. I feel there is sort of leaders and there are followers and I think I prefer to be the leader. I like to set the tone rather than try to catch up to it, and that’s generally in life, in all things, that’s not just about work.”
While she may not be turning up for a pint in The Bull with Eddie Grundy, her love for working in audio is apparent: “I love the free rein the imagination gets. It’s a bit like the performance is the equivalent of the rehearsal room for a play, where you can be completely the person in your head but it doesn’t matter if you don’t yet look like the person. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a spot that day or you’ve got a bruise. It’s that freedom I love. With People Who Knew Me, I can play the character in her 20s and 40 because I can make my voice sound younger, but I can’t make myself look like that.”
She’s quick to squash the idea that not having to be in hair and make-up for hours and worry about facial expressions makes playing a role in an audio drama any easier: “You’ve still got to find the character within yourself, and there’s actually more care of whether your voice sounds ‘clicky’ or whether you have a cold, which I did have during part of People Who Knew Me, because suddenly you’re hyper aware of every little way it changes your voice.”
While many people may be aware of singers and actors drinking warm honey and lemon drinks to protect their voices, Pike shares another trick of the recording booth – always have a supply of green apples. “If your voice is a bit sticky, take a couple of bites of a green apple and the high quantity of pectin cuts through that stickiness.”
Writer Daniella Isaacs also directed the drama and the way she recorded, eschewing the traditional radio drama set-up of actors in front of microphone stands, scripts in hand, in favour of the actors wearing headset mics and using tablets for scripts so they could be mobile and as naturalistic as possible, was something that Pike enjoyed.
“People have critiqued audio drama in the past for being slightly stilted, but the modern technology means we can be very free. Daniella wanted it to sound like eavesdropping and it was the first time I’d done an audio drama where you could embrace somebody or somebody could cry into your shoulder or you could eat a baguette and all that sound would be captured. She wanted to hear mouth noises, sniffs, chewing, snivelling, breathing, catches of emotion, voice cracking. She encouraged us to play and live the scenes. It certainly was [liberating].”
At a time when radio drama budgets are increasingly feeling the squeeze, Pike sees the virtue in what you can do with sound versus a visual medium: “I think what’s brilliant is when a story that is big can be contained within the audio space. So this [People Who Knew Me] with 9/11 and all the huge things that happen in it, it would have been a very, very expensive television production, and we were able to do it and make it real for people.”
On collecting her award, Pike said she was surprised that the drama would be broadcast on Radio 4 in the Book at Bedtime slot, as she thought it a harrowing listen and was worried it would disrupt listeners’ sleep. Speaking backstage she revealed the effect the role had on her: “The way I feel about Connie/Emily, when I got to the end of [listening to] the story, I found myself right back there, feeling her feelings again. [By the end] I sort of got choked up, because it feels like something I’ve lived and inhabited.”
That’s the power of audio drama.
Full list of winners at the BBC Audio Drama Awards
Best Original Single Drama
- WINNER Dear Harry Kane by James Fritz, producer Sally Avens, BBC Audio Drama London
- Benny and Hitch by Andrew McCaldon, producers Neil Varley and Tracey Neale, BBC Audio Drama London
- Eat and Run by Paolo Chianta, producer Lorna Newman, BBC Audio Drama North
Best Adaptation
- WINNER Bess Loves Porgy by Edwin DuBose Heyward, adapted by Roy Williams, producer Gill Parry, feral inc
- COMMENDATION If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino, adapted by Tim Crouch and Toby Jones, producer Nadia Molinari, BBC Audio Drama North
- COMMENDATION Beowulf Retold based on the version by Seamus Heaney, producer Pauline Harris, BBC Audio Drama London
Best Original Series or Serial
- WINNER Trust by Jonathan Hall, producer Gary Brown, BBC Audio Drama North
- COMMENDATION There’s Something I Need to Tell You by John Scott Dryden and Misha Kawnel, producer Emma Hearn, Goldhawk Productions
- Flirties, written and produced by Jess Hamilton, Audiocraft
Best Actor
- WINNER Hiran Abeysekera, Dear Harry Kane, director Sally Avens, BBC Audio Drama London
- COMMENDATION Lorn Macdonald, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, director Kirsty Williams, BBC Scotland
- Tim McInerny, Benny & Hitch, director Tracey Neale, BBC Audio Drama London
Best Actress
- WINNER Rosamund Pike, People Who Knew Me, director Daniella Isaacs, Merman
- Gabrielle Brooks, Bess Loves Porgy, director Michael Buffong, feral inc
- Maxine Peake, The Women of Troy, director Nadia Molinari, BBC Audio Drama North
Best Supporting Performance
- WINNER Mark Heap, Kafka’s Dick, directors Polly Thomas and Dermot Daly, Naked Productions
- Sacha Dhawan, Anna Karenina, director Nadia Molinari, BBC Audio Drama North
The Marc Beeby Award for Best Debut Performance
- WINNER Rosalind Eleazar, Hindsight, director Gaynor Macfarlane, BBC Scotland
- COMMENDATION Jadie Rose Hobson, Exposure, director Anne Isger, BBC Audio Drama London
- COMMENDATION Dan Parr, The Test Batter Can’t Breathe, director Tracey Neale, BBC Audio Drama London
Best Sit Com or Comedy Drama
- WINNER Where to, Mate? devised by Jo Enright, Peter Slater, Abdullah Afzal, Nina Gilligan, Andy Salthouse, Keith Carter, Jason Wingard, producer Carl Cooper, BBC Studios Audio
- Call Jonathan Pie by Tom Walker, producer Alison Vernon-Smith, Yada-Yada Audio
- She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith, adapted by Barunka O’Shaughnessy, producer Emma Harding, BBC Cymru Wales
Best Stand Up Comedy
- WINNER Sarah Keyworth: Are You a Boy or a Girl by by Sarah Keyworth, additional material Ruby Clyde, producer Georgia Keating, BBC Studios Audio
- COMMENDATION Janey Godley: the C Bomb by Janey Godley, producers Julia Sutherland and Richard Melvin, Dabster Productions
- Olga Koch: OK Computer by Olga Koch and Charlie Dinkin, producer Benjamin Sutton, BBC Studios Audio
Best Use of Sound
- WINNER Hamlet Noir, sound by David Chilton, Lucinda Mason Brown, Weronika Andersen, producers Charlotte Melén, Carl Prekopp and Saskia Black, Almost Tangible
- The Dark Is Rising, sound by Gareth Fry, producers Catherine Bailey and Tim Bell, Catherine Bailey Productions and Complicité
- The Women of Troy, sound by Sharon Hughes, producer Nadia Molinari, BBC Audio Drama North
Best Podcast Audio Drama
- WINNER Badger and the Blitz by Richard Turley and Darren Francis, producer Richard Turley, ROXO
- The Salvation by Justin Lockey, Jeffrey Aidoo, and AK Benedict, producers John Hamm and Boz Temple-Morris, Holy Mountain and Free Turn
- Tagged by Brett Neichin and John Scott Dryden, producer Emma Hearn, Sony Music Entertainment and Goldhawk Productions
Best European Drama
- WINNER This Word by Marta Rebzda, producer Waldemar Modestowicz, Polish Radio Theatre
- Faust (I Never Read It) by Noam Brusilovsky, producer Andrea Oetzmann, SWR Südwestrundfunk with Deutschlandfunk
- The Supervisor by Nis-Momme Stockmann, producer Michael Becker, NDR Norddeutscher Rundfunk
IMISON AWARD 2024
- WINNER Benny and Hitch by Andrew McCaldon, producers Neil Varley and Tracey Neale, BBC Audio Drama London
- Happy Hour by Liv Fowler, producer Jelena Budimir, Naked Productions
- In Moderation by Katie Bonna, producer Sally Avens, BBC Audio Drama London
TINNISWOOD AWARD 2024
- WINNER Cracking by Shôn Dale-Jones, producer John Norton, BBC Cymru Wales
- About a Dog by Huw Brentnall, producer Fiona McAlpine, Allegra Productions
- Ghosted by Lindsay Sharman, directed by the author for Long Cat Media
- Scooters, Shooters and Shottas by John R Gordon, director Rikki Beadle-Blair, Urban Wolf for Team Angelica/The Art Machine
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