Interview: Mair Bosworth

Our fair city has always played a significant role in the book-related output of national BBC radio. Joe Melia catches up with Bristol-based BBC producer Mair Bosworth to find out more.

What’s your role at BBC Radio?
I’m an Assistant Producer in the Bristol Arts Unit.  I work across a wide range of programming and lead on our ‘readings’ output: Book at Bedtime (novels abridged and serialised for radio, a kind of bedtime story for grown-ups each night on Radio 4 at 10.45pm); and short stories, commissioned from established and emerging authors. I also make one-off documentaries and poetry features.
A lot of my work involves working closely with writers and talking to people about the books and music that are important to them. In the past 18 months our Bristol team has commissioned or adapted work by Stephen King, Evie Wyld, Mark Haddon, Danielle McLaughlin, Joe Dunthorne, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Nina Stibbe and Colson Whitehead.
Radio producers do all the work behind the scenes, from pitching and developing ideas through to writing scripts, researching the topic, recording interviews or discussions, and editing and choosing sound effects and music for our programmes. For Book at Bedtime my job involves reading lots of books and putting forward ideas to the Commissioning Editor, casting an actor to read the book, recording over a couple of days and then editing and mixing for broadcast.

How tricky is it to find writing that works on radio? What are you looking for?
There are some books that I love as a reader, but that I can’t quite make work for radio. Complex plots, multiple narrators, jumps in time and place, anything too post-modern or experimental can be tricky. I think perhaps the ear gets lost more easily than the eye, especially because you can’t check back a few pages if you’re unclear about something, and because many listeners will be listening to the radio whilst washing up, or cooking, or navigating their commute.
I don’t have any rules for what I look for in terms of genre, theme or voice. I just look for great writing, including a strong plot that will serialise well and keep people listening. I particularly like the intimacy of first-person narration on the radio – the feeling of someone telling their story directly to you, the listener. And I like surprising, twisty plots and books that reveal something to us about our own lives – if that’s not too much to ask!

How do you select books to adapt for Book at Bedtime?
We adapt a mixture of new novels, modern classics and ‘forgotten gems’, but the emphasis is on new books to be broadcast at the same time as physical publication.
To find potential Book at Bedtime novels, I always ask people what they’re reading and what the books are that have really stuck with them over the years. We have really good relationships with publishers and with writers and their agents. They let us know about new novels on the horizon and flag up books to us that they think might work well for Book at Bedtime. They send us manuscripts and proofs to read several months prior to publication. In practice this means that I have a daunting pile of books in the ‘to read’ pile by my desk and always feel slightly guilty if I read anything without my BaB hat on.

How much involvement do the writers have with these adaptations?
It depends, but normally once they have agreed to let us feature their book on Radio 4 they tend to leave us to get on with it. I always try to speak to the writer before beginning work on the book and invite them to be involved in casting a reader so we get the voice right. Where possible, I interview the author before I begin work on the adaptation – partly to help with publicising the broadcast, but also to help me understand the book more and how best to approach the project.

What other book programmes and literary content are produced in Bristol?
A lot of people imagine that all of Radio 4’s output is made in London, but we make many long-running Radio 4 series here in Bristol, including Soul Music (a series about the music that moves us and why), Word of Mouth (a programme about language, presented by Michael Rosen), Great Lives, The Untold, Natural Histories, The Food Programme, Farming Today, Any Questions, and ad-hoc documentaries.
Our book programmes include A Good Read, Poetry Please, The Echo Chamber and With Great Pleasure (a kind of Desert Island Discs for words), dramas and readings.

What’s coming up that listeners and readers can look forward to?
Our next Book at Bedtime will be Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, read by Clarke Peters (The Wire, Treme). The book won the 2016 National Book Award in the United States and was one of President Obama’s recommended summer reads.
Colson’s novel is an alternative history, exploring slavery and race in pre-Civil War America. It re-imagines the underground railroad (the network of abolitionists who helped runaway slaves escape from bondage in the South to the free states further north) as an actual railroad, an underground system of tunnels and rails. The book follows Cora, a 17-year-old girl born into slavery on a Southern cotton plantation as she makes her way north from state to state. 

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad will be BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime from Monday February 20 at 10.45pm weekdays. The programmes were produced in Bristol by Mair Bosworth and abridged by Sara Davies.