STAN BARSTOW RADIO PLAYS

STAN BARSTOW writes:
The first money I earned by writing was for readings of my short stories on air from the BBC Studio in Woodhouse Lane, Leeds in the middle 1950s. Some years later I was led into radio drama at that same studio by the legendary Alfred Bradley who directed almost everything I wrote for the medium over nearly thirty years.

When in London in those years of the middle 1960s, I would sometimes call in for an early evening drink at the BBC Club in the Langham, across Portland Place from Broadcasting House. The Langham had been a hotel and, in the 1980s, was sold for that use again. I had no membership card at that time. If Alfred Bradley was in town, there was no problem; if not, I would think of someone else I knew and have him called over the tannoy to come and sign me in.

Still to be seen there were many veterans for whom radio would always be the centre of broadcast features and drama, their great names, Louis McNiece, DG Bridson, Reggie Smith, Nesta Pain, Giles Cooper, Frederick Bradnum, Henry Reed and others. It was being introduced to Douglas Cleverdon, and hearing (though not from him) how he had pursued Dylan Thomas for UNDER MILK WOOD, that set me musing upon what it must have felt like to be pushed from the top of the heap by the upstarts who populated the Television Centre miles away at Wood Lane and served the great mass of the public who were glad that radio had finally acquired pictures.

Stan Barstow

(taken from my autobiography:
IN MY OWN GOOD TIME,
published by Smith Settle)

RADIO PLAYS
A Kind of Loving
The Desperadoes 1964
Ask Me Tomorrow 1965
The Pity of it All 1967
Bright Day (from JB Priestley) 1968
The Watchers on the Shore 1971
Stringer's Last Stand 1972
We Could always Fit a Sidecar 1974 (Won the Writers' Guild Radio Drama Award)
The Right True End 1978
The Apples of Paradise 1988
Foreign Parts 1990
My Son, My Son (five episodes from Howard Spring) 1993

Stan Barstow's's website, set up and run by Martin Benson, is at:

http://www.stanbarstow.info/

Many thanks to Stan for supplying the biographical notes and details of his plays.

Nigel Deacon / Diversity website.

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