'Do it on the radio'

FRANK  (looking up) What?’

RITA  I’ve done it.

FRANK  You’ve done it?

She hands him the essay. (Reading aloud) ‘In attempting to resolve the staging difficulties in a production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt I would present it on the radio because as Ibsen himself says, he wrote the play as a play for voices, never intending it to go on in a theatre. If they had the radio in his day that’s where he would have done it.’

Willy Russell Educating Rita 1985 (First performed 10.6.1980)

BBC (1946?) and Heart South West 2014

‘I had two years of psychiatry. And I learnt a great deal from old man Freud. One of them was - trust your unconscious. It has a logic all it’s own. The second thing was, all motives are quite simple, there’s one motive to do anything, intellect is the great rationaliser, the great excuser. It gave me the courage to devise a form of doing the talks which was to sit down and write them - whatever came to mind.

They were supposed to be thirteen minutes, thirty seconds; sometimes they were eighteen minutes, seventeen, fifteen - then slash them, then censor the more outrageous thoughts, in the interests of domestic tranquillity. (Laughter) And so on. Don’t censor yourself as you go, don’t pretend, don’t try to be somebody else, and this great line of Freud’s - the intellect is the great rationaliser of simple motives, all motives are child like, anger, greed, the wish to be liked and so on.  …a broadcaster, especially radio, must be somebody talking to two friends, no more, in a room.’

Transcribed extract from Writing for Talking Alistair Cooke speaking at the Royal Television Society 3.12.1997