BBC Radio 4’s Limelight series to whet nation’s appetite for cliffhangers

It may be traditionally known for long-running rural soap The Archers and classic adaptations, but BBC Radio 4 is aiming to capitalise on the nation’s appetite for cliffhanger series such as Line of Duty with the launch of a weekly contemporary drama strand called Limelight.

The station hopes to attract wider, younger audiences through the regular Friday afternoon showcase.

As Jed Mercurio’s BBC One’s hit police show proved, despite the explosion in catchup TV services, audiences sometimes still like “rationed viewing” and the anticipation that waiting for the next instalment of a gripping series brings.

Limelight will be 30 minutes long and begin on 28 May with the first episode of a six-part Fight Club-style thriller called The System, starring Bafta nominee Siena Kelly, Noughts+Crosses actor Jack Rowan and Iain de Caestecker from Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD.

Although the series will also be available on BBC Sounds for audiences who want to binge-listen on different platforms, Radio 4’s commissioning editor for drama and fiction, Alison Hindell, said she hoped the shows on Limelight would be “appointment listening” and “bring new listeners into the wonderful wider world of Radio 4’s rich audio drama, because we know more people are enjoying drama”.

Limelight will feature what the BBC describes as “fresh approaches to serialised storytelling” and cover a range of styles and genres that will “hook in audiences with their driving narratives and cliffhangers”. Future series include an Irish mystery called The House That Vanished and a Halloween special about a town built on the site of a medieval plague village.

The System writer, Ben Lewis, who has written for theatre, film and TV series such as Sky’s Psychobitches, told the Guardian that radio drama is “really exciting at the moment because there’s been such an explosion of interest in [audio] over the past year”.

He said part of the reason is that more people are listening on headphones than in the past, whether at home or on the way to work: “The intimacy of radio and to be inside the character’s head isn’t afforded by any other medium in quite the same way.”

Whereas radio drama has traditionally been seen as the poor relation of media, the rise of podcasting and platforms such as Audible has created a boom in audio storytelling – as seen with the success of Radio 4’s recent podcast, The Battersea Poltergeist.

Radio is also attractive to actors as they can fit recordings in between other gaps in their schedules and play characters they might not usually be cast as.

Lewis said radio was also a “really important part of the whole ecosystem, as it allows you to tell stories that you couldn’t really tell elsewhere”, as it does in The System’s exploration of the dark side of masculinity.

And he thinks Limelight will help writers, as radio “allows younger writers to experiment with longer form and doing series and serials … You wouldn’t get those opportunities necessarily in TV in quite the same way.”

Rhian Roberts, commissioning editor for digital and podcasts at Radio 4, added: “The podcasting world is bringing new forms of creative excellence to audio drama, and we’re excited to be showcasing that in the Limelight strand too. There is an increasing digital audience out there for unique storytelling.”