Backlash

BBC Radio 4

Backlash (The Pamela Myers Show)

by Spencer Hazel

Broadcast 17 May 1995 BBC link

Produced and directed by Kate Rowland

Backlash was a radio-play written in 1993 and submitted to the BBC as an unsolicited script. It was subsequently commissioned by Kate Rowland. It was agreed that three more episodes could be commissioned from other writers from the North-East of England, in order to make the piece into a 4-part series, keeping the main central characters and premise throughout. It was produced as The Pamela Myers Show by the BBC, and broadcast in 1995.

With Backlash I was initially interested in writing something for radio that could be taken to be a real broadcast of an unfolding crisis. I take my cue from Orson Welles’ radio production of War of the Worlds. I had always been intrigued by the accounts of listeners taking that broadcast to be a real event. Indeed, attempting to write things that an audience could decide was real or made up, truth or fiction, features in much of my theatre writing too.

Backlash is the story of a vigilante father, who has taking hostage his daughter’s assailant, and phone’s a radio talk-show to make demands for justice.

Backlash script

Actors