Six of these eight plays for radio were directed by John Tydeman, whom I first met when he was a trainee producer. Now he has just retired from the position of the BBC’s Head of Radio Drama. This collection of all my work to date for ‘Portland Place’ is, therefore, a timely opportunity to pay my respects to a friend who has been a sympathetic and patient collaborator since Radio Three and Four were Third and Home.

The Dissolution of Dominic Boot and ‘M’ is for Moon Among Other Things – reduced to ‘Boot’ and ‘Moon’ in my affections – were written for Just Before Midnight, a series of fifteen-minute plays which went out in 1964. The peg for ‘Boot’ – a man riding around in a taxi trying to raise the money to pay the cabbie – was the first and last self-propelled idea I ever had, and I think I wrote the play in a day. ‘Moon’ started off as a short story which never got into print, and was commissioned, or perhaps only encouraged, on the strength of ‘Boot’.

If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank (‘Glad/Frank’ ever after) came out of a conversation in a corridor at Portland Place with Richard Imison. John and Richard, Script Editor then and afterwards until his sadly early death last year, represented BBC Radio Drama to me for thirty years. Richard pounced on me Tigger-like with news of a series of short plays about people in imaginary jobs. There and then I proposed the Speaking Clock. I named her Gladys and gave her a propensity towards interior monologue in free verse, so she went out on the Third.

The next play – about a man painting the Forth Bridge solo – may have started life as another candidate for that series, but by this time I wanted to spread my wings and go solo myself; to write without regard to series or given lengths. Albert’s Bridge was my first more-or-less full-scale radio play, and Albert’s interior monologues were longer than Glad’s.

Where Are They Now? was written for Schools Radio. For the occasion I went against my principles, or at least my practice, and dropped a leaky bucket into the well of personal experience. Not that I was taught French by a Welsh sadist – au contraire, remembering kindly Miss Stokes who drove a pre-war Morris coupé – but no doubt many who have been at an English boarding school might suppose we were at the same one.

Artist Descending a Staircase, The Dog It Was That Died and In the Native State were separated by, roughly, ten-year intervals, a matter of circumstance rather than a conscious withdrawal from radio. Even so, ten years is an embarrassing gap for a writer who is enthusiastic for BBC Radio Drama and in debt to it. The existence of these three plays owed itself to John’s and Richard’s persistent letters and postcards. In each case the play grew from nothing other than the accumulating discomfort of failing to deliver.

John Tydeman was the director of ‘Moon’, ‘Glad/Frank’, Where Are They Now? (in its second production; the director for Schools was Dickon Reed), Artist Descending a Staircase, The Dog It Was That Died and In the Native State. ‘Boot’ was directed by Michael Bakewell, and Albert’s Bridge by Charles Lefeaux.

TOM STOPPARD

May 1994