I was reminded the other day of a programme I was involved in many years ago that was aired on Radio One. The programme, Bits From Last Week's Radio, was a show presented by Greg Proops that showcased insane and bizaar offerings from radio stations round the world.

In reality, all the exerpts were invented, produced by Eardrum (Martin and Ralph) and recorded by myself at the Sound Company in London.

It was quickly realised that the programme would only work if the sketches were made to sound as realistic as possible. To achieve this I decided to err on the side of simplicity and as much as possible record the sketches as they would have been recorded in real life. We made the sketches in two stages:

Cast Recordings

The Sketches (the radio excerpts) were recorded dry in a a radio studio at the Sound Company in London. This studio had a medium sized voice booth, but a huge control room. This was essential since we had two teams of actors working on the sketches plus writers and we needed room to reherse and fine tune as well as record. The recordings were recorded onto the Fostex 2000 Digital Audio Workstation. As far as was possible the sketches were recorded to fake the supposed original conditions. So, for a Studio Radio Programme, the actors were seated and typical radio microphones where used. If there was a phone in scenario, the actor playing the part of the person phoning in would remain in the control room and quite literally phone in. Since the studios were also occasionally used for genuine programmes, they were fully equipped to handle this scenario.

Where the sketch was a lone reporter recording a field report, the entire sketch was recorded on a single microphone being held by the actor and in Mono. Vintage sketches used vintage Microphones. The actors were encouraged to act out the sketch physically as well as vocally to give the best sense of movement. For example, in a sketch set in the Antarctic where a blizzard blows the studio door open, the actor leapt out of his chair and fought with the real studio door.

Many of the sketches were recorded in mono, especially "vintage" scenarios.

Sketch Mixing

The mixing took place in a separate session, though in the same studio. Library effects were used for the atmospheres, but many spot effects were produced Foley style in the studio by Martin Simms (producer from Eardrum) and me. This often entailed the two of us simply throwing ourselves at cardboard boxes or beating up items of clothing. But we went to town to look at the fine detail too. If the sketch required someone to pick up a cup, we ensured it was put down again at some point.Some of the sketches were terribly complicated, especially the Hospital Radio sketches where anything could happen, for instance where the reporter (Neil Mullarky) drops his microphone into a body during an opperation. One particular sketch, Isle of God, set in a Lindesfarn style setting, was over 7 minutes long and included the reporter escaping from the island in a manner similar to Papillon.

The audio quality was restricted to mimic the supposed reality of the sketch. As with the voice recordings, if the sketch was a lone reporter with a microphone, then all foley recordings were recorded on the same single microphone. We did use multiple mic settings, but with caution - it would have been all to easy to produce a film quality sound scape that would have completely undermined what we were trying to achieve.

Most music came from Library, but I composed and arranged a couple of pieces, including a peruvian folk version of the Archers theme.

Once the sketches were finished and mastered, they were then degraded to more closely resemble a radio item recorded off air by a listener. This entailed frequency limiting and copying via analogue reel-to-reel tape to add tape noise and the occasional audio error.

This programme was probably one of the most fun and crazy projects I have been involved with. Apart from being technically challenging, it starred some of the most talented radio actors around who were all highly commited to the job. Probably the only other project like this was many years earlier recording 24 Sherlock Holmes plays starring Roy Marsden and John Moffet. That was produced with a very similar eye to detail as was Bits from Last Weeks Radio, but whereas Bits was all recorded digitally, the Sherlock Holmes plays were recorded on analogue multitrack with many of the effects coming from BBC vinyl effects records.