Radio
In 2008 Stephen won the Tinniswood Award for his play Memorials to the Missing. The prize is awarded by the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and the Society of Authors for the best original radio drama script broadcast in 2007. Memorials also won Silver in the Best Drama Award in the 2008 Sony Radio Academy Award.
In 2012 at the inaugural BBC Audio Drama Awards Stephen won the Tinniswood Award a second time for his play Gerontius first broadcast in 2010.
Click Play to listen to an interview with Stephen about Memorials
ALCS News also published an interview with Stephen in 2009.
More recently, Stephen talks about his work in a Writers Guild of Great Britain podcast posted in May 2012.
Stephen’s first play for radio was Help Stamp Out Quicksand broadcast in 1977 but it was only in the late 1980s that he began regularly working in radio drama. In 1993 his play Fairest Isle about the creation of Purcell and Dryden’s King Arthur won a Sony Award. In 1994 his adaptation of Gogol’s Dead Souls was shortlisted for a Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award and in 2003 his hard-hitting contemporary drama, Party Animal, was shortlisted for the first Tinniswood Award. Both Memorials to the Missing (2007) and Gerontius (2010) have won the Tinniswood Award. In all, Stephen has created over twenty original scripts for radio.
Stephen is also well known for his dramatisations. Highlights include: Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget (1993), Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise (1997), Sketches by Boz (1998-1999), Gilbert without Sullivan (2003-4), Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (2004), Vanity Fair (2004) and Tom Jones (2007). In 2009 two series of his adaptations were broadcast – Thackeray’s The Yellowplush Papers in the 11.30 am slot and versions of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, The Boy who followed Ripley and Ripley under Water for the Saturday Play - as well as Farewell Symphony, a play for Radio 3 about the last days of the composer Haydn. He has recently completed work on four dramatisations for Radio 4's Classic Chandler. To accompany them he has written two plays about Raymond Chandler's work as a Hollywood screenwriter - Double Jeopardy (February 2011) about working on the screenplay of Double Indemnity with Billy Wilder and Strangers on a Film about working with Alfred Hitchcock on Strangers on a Train (September 2011). Patrick Stewart played Chandler in both productions. His dramatisation of Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity was broadcast in November/December 2011 and his dramatisation of Alice Through the Looking Glass was heard on Radio 4 at Christmas 2012 and his three-part dramatisation of Dante's The Divine Comedy in the spring of 2014.
More recent projects include The Shadow of Dorian Gray about John Gray, the model for Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray and Finlandia a play for Radio 3 to celebrate the 15Oth anniversary of the birth of Sibelius. The Psychic Circus, a Dr Who audio drama, for Big Finish came out last year and his radio monologue, The Seven Ages of Woman, commissioned by Pier Productions, was performed by Sian Phillips in January 2021. At the end of 2022 he completed Me and Him and Who an audio drama about the last days of the Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner issued by AUK audio.
Stephen's most recent radio play is The Song of the Cossacks broadcast in March 2023 on Radio 4. It's a dramatisation for radio of a stage play by Jean Binnie about the shocking story of the British collaboration with the enforced repatriation of the Ukranian Cossacks to the USSR at the end of World War Two,