Rathband: A Digital Tragedy
- Submitting institution
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Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- 34901566
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- Online/podcast
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first performance
- April
- Year of first performance
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Rathband is an audio podcast that resulted from a multi-layered process of investigation involving elements of academic research, documentary, journalism and verbatim theatre as well as the creation of a complex soundscape. It took more than three years of development and involved extended archival research of newspapers and television, social media analytics and the tracing of all relevant data across formats, from Mumsnet to BBC Radio 4. Research and writing took place between September 2013 and January 2017; Rathband then required a team of five and three months to bring to realisation.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Chris Hogg’s Rathband is a drama podcast in three acts, published in 2017. It dramatises the final 20 months in the life of PC David Rathband who was shot and blinded by Raoul Moat in 2010. During the events reflected in the drama, both Rathband and Moat made substantial use of social media, gathering large audiences whose involvement shaped both the life and death of the policeman.
The production of Rathband was guided by three key research questions:
• how has the rise of social media emerged as a new technology of personality;
• what role does extensive use of social media play in the unfolding and experience of trauma, disability and personal crisis (in this case, in relation to masculinity and mental health);
• what novel forms of digital narrative and dramatisation can capture the characteristics and scale of the technological mediation of trauma, disability and human tragedy?
The drama looks at the role of social media from the perspective of the blinded policeman. Rathband was left with 155 pellets in his face after the shooting. Consequently, the idea of fragments became an organising principle of how the story is structured. The drama is composed of 155 verbatim fragments of news headlines, TV interviews, police statements, psychiatrists’ reports and social media commentary that David ‘left behind’. Layering and looping the cacophonic voices of hundreds of fragments in complex narrative patterns, the play highlights the impact that technology has on storytelling and lays the creative foundation for a hybrid form of narration that has the aesthetic capacity to address our technologically-mediated reality.
Dissemination: Rathband won Best BBC Audio Drama Podcast 2018, was nominated for best drama by the Radio Academy and was Itunes #1 Arts download in April 2017.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
