The British Broadcasting, bbc radio 4 – Afternoon Play
Dividing Afternoon Drama Plays
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- 4.1. Dividing by episodes
4. Dividing Afternoon Drama PlaysIn this chapter, the centre of our interest is going to be playwrights of today’s plays whose names appeared throughout the five month period. The afternoon drama which was previously called the afternoon play has a set duration for 45 minutes and is traditionally on air form Monday to Friday at exactly the same time that is from 14.15 to 15.00 of the British time. This fact brings us up to a total of 261 broadcasts last year. Afternoon drama plays and all dramas broadcasted by BBC have been divided several times into groups like crime, historical, musical, classical & period, psychological, political and many others. But there does not seem to be a survey which would look at the ratio of multiple episode plays to single episode plays, the number of broadcasts and the number of plays per a writer. 4.1. Dividing by episodesThere are around 190 new afternoon plays written each year out of which there are 40 afternoon plays that come in several parts, they are a series. The number of episodes a series plays can have is up to five parts. [npnd31] To be able to produce such a large number of plays the BBC has to have a sufficient number of drama writers. In the period of the five month there had been broadcasted to a total number of 115 afternoon plays some of them have more than one episode so I followed them back to their first episode and that brought me to a total of 122 drama plays. Now, let us have a closer look at these plays and divide them into several categories. As mentioned before, the plays can be grouped into categories written above but in a next several paragraphs all the plays will be divided into 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 episode plays. These five possible groups must be broaden out to six groups to include multiple series plays. As seen in the chart below one episode drama have the largest portion of the chart. All together there were 71 single episode dramas (58.1%). Second biggest sector belongs to two episode dramas which mean that there were 9 plays with 2 episodes each, all together 18 plays (14.7%). In the third place are three episode plays. All together there had been three, three episode series and that is the total of 9 plays (7.3%). Fourth place could be divided between five and four episode dramas. Each of them had two plays with desired number of episodes but in case of the five episode plays the total is 10(8.1%) and in case of the four episodes plays the total are 8 afternoon plays (6.5%). The smallest sector belongs to one play in two series each having three episodes and that adds up to 6 plays (4.9%). 
It is obvious that plays with only one episode are on the top of the broadcasters list. It is very likely to be due to survey which is provided by each radio station to recognize listener’s needs. To be sure of what the listeners want the BBC publishes yearly reports, Performance against public commitments. In these reports they have in view the quantity of audience for each radio station. BBC Radio 4 had another very strong year. More than 10 million people tuned in each week and perceptions of quality remained high. Listeners to the station continue to listen on average for longer each week than to any other BBC radio station. In our service review two years ago, we asked the Executive to look at ways to reach more people outside the south of England, including the devolved nations. However, Radio 4 continues to struggle to do so, and therefore, we have asked the Executive to do more to extend reach across the whole of the UK. BBC Radio 4 extra was listened to by around 1.7 million people each week and perceptions of its quality remained high. [np137] Download 241.84 Kb. Share with your friends:
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