Gráinne Mhaol had to start somewhere! A new podcast charting an imagined first adventure has landed on the RTÉ Home School Hub Podcast feed.
Below, writer Triona Campbell documents just how challenging it was to make radio drama for kids in the midst of a pandemic...
We need to shut down.' Everyone knows where they were when people started saying those words. I’d spent the day recording for RTÉ 2’s Gamer Mode series. Watching a class in Armagh CBS Primary building World War 2 trenches in Minecraft. 'I want to be in charge of no man’s lands because there you can blow everything up’. The kids were amazing, passionate about recreating history using technology.
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Listen to Episode One of Adventures of a Young Pirate Queen
In the car driving back to Dublin, the texts started to come saying schools in the south were closing. And as we drove, I realised no one gets into kids' TV wanting to make life or death decisions, and that’s what shooting in a pandemic feels like. How safe can you make your team? how well you can evade the virus? We would come back and finish the series (which aired during December 2020) with a full safety plan, but in that car ride, we all started confronting what happens next?
There’s a reason I’m passionate about kids' TV. I genuinely believe that there isn’t enough Irish content made for kids and young adults. Yes, the amination industry is impressive. Yes, RTÉjr and TG4 punch well above their weight, but, without more resources, we are creating a future broadcasting crisis if we don’t start creating more content for the 1 million + young people here. I also believe that this content can be international. That Irish stories can travel the world. That Irish digital content (including video games, animation and live-action) is a big future industry because we have the talent.
We couldn’t shoot in the traditional TV sense for a while - but what about podcast drama? Something we could record over the internet? Something for the parents who had bought smart speakers. For people who wanted options other than screen time for the kids in their care. A serialised bedtime story you could play when exhausted after being 24/7 with the little ones. A podcast to listen to on the school commute or long holiday drive...
I had a script I’d been working on that I had mentioned to Niamh Mc Manus and later Nicky Coghlan in RTÉjr Radio. A vague memory of saying something pretty bombastic like ‘Girls today don't want to sit around playing princesses, waiting for a knight to rescue them. They want their own action and adventure’ and them being nice to me about it.
As A teen I adored Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for BBC Radio and Orson Welles' original War of the Worlds radio play. And so an idea was born to create something new, something we hadn’t tried before and like all ideas, it takes a village.
The script that emerged was a reimagining of the Gráinne Mhaol story. She was spoken of so often as a fearsome pirate and powerful leader in adulthood, but we wanted to delve into the possibilities of what she might have done as a child. What wonderful adventures did she have that moulded her into the heroine we all know? And so Adventures of a Young Pirate Queen was begun, at least on paper.
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Listen to Episode Two of Adventures of a Young Pirate Queen
In lockdown we had time, but no money. I knew we could record and direct the actors remotely, but we had little else. Plus I wanted age-appropriate actors, kids talking to kids. The goal was to take what we knew about sound mixing from film and TV and apply it to audio drama.
Could we do that during a lockdown? Can you do an audio drama using Irish internet? Something that would be uniquely Irish for kids?
The team got together. Roisin Kearney started casting looking for actors who had (as well as everything else) good wi-fi and a decent microphone at their end. People who gamed tended to have the best set up. Roisin auditioned people, coaching younger performers, and was the child safety chaperone on each recording.
The adult actors we found were just incredibly giving of their time. No one we asked said ‘no’. Most were eager once they heard the idea – that we wanted to take a uniquely Irish story and bring it to a younger generation. Performers who would have been on location on film sets around the world or threading the boards on the stage lent their time.
We recorded mainly in the mornings - internet in the afternoon was patchy at best. More than once, we had to stop and reschedule as bandwidths dropped. But we kept working and we edited slowly, remotely with Adrian Santos as our sound designer. Finding software patches to even out the tones from having recorded the content over wi-fi from kitchens and bedrooms across the country. We kept fine-tuning even as we returned back to work.
Audio drama made over the internet is feasible. It’s safe, and podcasts offer that screen-free time for kids and parents/caregivers. The only drawback – it’s impossible on a short podcast to do a full credit listing of all the fantastic people and the team who helped us make this (so I’m listing them below).
We are now in another lockdown, full circle. The project no longer exists just on my laptop. Thanks to RTÉjr Radio, Adventures of a Young Pirate Queen is now a part of the RTÉ Home School Hub podcast, available on RTÉjr Radio and wherever you get your podcasts.
And if you do listen, we’d love to hear what you think - mail us at Junior@rte.ie.
Listen to Adventures of a Young Pirate Queen each Monday on the RTÉ Home School Hub Podcast - catch up here.
