Between the Ears

Five radio producers from around the world hijack The Essay for a week to play a game of audio 'Consequences'.

As part of BBC Radio 3's celebration of twenty years of Between The Ears, the BBC's home for adventurous feature-making, five radio producers from different corners of the world play a week-long audio version of the popular childhood game Consequences.

Over the course of the week, the five elements of the narrative game are introduced - the woman, the man, where they met, what they said and the consequence ...

The series explores the many playful ways a story for the ear can be told - from documentary to drama, sound art to fantastical storytelling - with each player unaware of what has preceded them.

The Man

In this monolgue, we hear from a man who wants to regain control over the soundworld he inhabits. Desperate to isolate himself from a world filled with pointless noise he builds a soundproof box in which to contain his ideal environment.

Produced and narrated by Tim Hinman, founder of the Danish radio magazine 'Third Ear'.

Producer: Tim Hinman

A Falling Tree Production for BBC Radio 3.

Five radio producers from around the world hijack The Essay for a week to play a game of audio 'Consequences'.

As part of BBC Radio 3's celebration of twenty years of Between The Ears, the BBC's home for adventurous feature-making, five radio producers from different corners of the world play a week-long audio version of the popular childhood game Consequences.

Over the course of the week, the five elements of the narrative game are introduced - the woman, the man, where they met, what they said and the consequence ...

The series explores the many playful ways a story for the ear can be told - from documentary to drama, sound art to fantastical storytelling - with each player unaware of what has preceded them.

The Woman

A portrait of a woman looking for a lover who may only exist in her imagination ...

Producer: Natalie Kestecher

A Falling Tree Production for BBC Radio 3.

Between the idea

The words of TS Eliot provide a cue for this playful, challenging and touching anniversary series celebrating 20 years of Between the Ears.

Radio 3's showcase for adventurous feature-making was launched in October 1993 with a 'piece for radio', by the composer Ian Gardiner. 'Monument', which was conceived as a kind of London symphony, received the prestigious Prix Italia the following year.

Shadowplay offers a new four-part 'symphony of voices', exploring the shadows that may fall between the appearance of things and their reality. Making use of the full palette available to the radio producer - documentary, fiction, music, pure sound - four feature-makers address our values, our identities, our romantic inclinations and our sense of worth.

In the first movement 'Theme and Variations', ideas about what we value - wealth, health, liberty and happiness - are revealed through the experiences and insights of the economists Ha-Joon Chang and Felix Martin, the life-model Sue Tilley and the poet Jazzman John Clarke, and also with reference to Ian Gardiner's 'Monument', Ritalin and Mary Poppins.

Produced by Alan Hall and Hana Walker-Brown.

Musician David Bramwell delves into the world of Victorian psychic phenomena, modern witchcraft and mind altering states in the search for the story behind an inherited moustache. "In the early summer of 1991 I inherited a moustache from my Great Aunt Sylvia. She made it to the over-ripe age of 96 before sailing out of this world, fag in hand, leaving behind an unfinished jigsaw of the Eiffel Tower and a forlorn cat..."

Obsessed with finding out the identity of the moustache's owner - an unlikely inheritance from his Great Aunt Sylvia - musician David Bramwell sets off on a quest to record séances and psychics, the effects of mind altering Amazonian plants, hippies and phantom orchestras - a soundtrack pulling the audience into the world of a Victorian deceased freak show host - Ambrose Oddfellow.

The Haunted Moustache is a meditation on one man's obsession with freak shows, synchronicity, the occult and the existence or not of a spirit world. Drawing on the tales of Victorian spiritualist fakery from magician Paul Zenon, the gothic charms of The Last Tuesday Society, the magical early electronica of musician Sarah Angliss, not to mention a cup of tea shared with a Wiccan Priest in suburban Shoreham, Bramwell travels from the wilds of Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire, where the moustache's owner is recalled on the stage of the magical 1920's Kinema in the Woods, before ending in a Brighton council flat, with Dali muse Drako Oho Zarhazar, sharing the messages concealed in his tattoo.