Resident engagement


Preston calling: how a radio play took stage


Residents aged between 83 and 99 of L&M Healthcare’s Finney House care home in Preston recently launched their very own radio play that would eventually go on to make BBC local news and aired as a weekly series on local community radio stations. Here, the writer of the play, Louise Harder, tells the story behind it and the learnings gained


Just when you think you had thought of everything you possibly can to keep residents engaged and connected with their families during a global pandemic, a ‘What if’ question pops up into your head and an idea is born. Of course, an idea is always a lot easier in your head, than it is in practice and it is never as easy to execute but filled with enthusiasm and a desire to make it work, the idea was hatched, and a plan put into action. ‘We’ll do a radio play starring our


residents’, I thought. ‘I’ll write the parts, record their voices, edit them together and Bob’s your uncle. It’ll be great fun, they’ll love it, it’ll be a really positive experience for them. ’ I am no playwright, in fact I have


never written a play in my life. My job is external communications. I write other things like brand strategy, press releases, advertising, and feature articles as part of my job. I have written poems for family members and friends and a book for my daughter to commemorate her 21st birthday, but never a play. I am always


telling everybody else that you are never too old try something new, so I did.


Tuning the concept The concept was easy, a radio play. What better than a radio play. Residents could easily relate to radio plays as they grew up with them. So, I decided to spoof the most famous long running radio play in the UK, The Archers. Of course, this could not be in any way


a copy, just along similar lines in the way it was structured, voices, the sound effects, and its own theme tune. Beyond that, it needed a structure. Something to build the writing of each episode around. This was also very easy and came to


me straight away. I remembered some years ago we were filming a video in another L&M Healthcare home that was to go on the website. Watching us work were a couple of


residents. They had no idea what we were doing, but I could hear them putting two and two together and coming up with five – making up their own story as to what


we were doing. It was really funny, and I remember thinking at the time that it would make a good comedy sketch, but never did anything with it. Five years later, this comedy moment


now formed the idea for the structure of the play: all episodes could be centred around residents observing the comings and goings in their home, putting two and two together and coming up with five. I started to write and before I knew


it I had five episodes. They were all fictional characters, mostly created around my own older family members, but exaggerating some of their natural character traits. ‘This is going to be really easy’, I thought to myself.


Warming up The scripts were all sent to the senior management team at L&M Healthcare, which owns Finney House in Preston, as they needed to be approved in principal before we started work. Everyone immediately thought it was a great idea and looked forward to hearing the final production. Again, I thought, ‘This is going to be really easy’. We were all set to start recording. It was


at that point I thought to myself ‘This is not going to be as easy as I thought.’ One of the stumbling blocks for recording a radio play in a care home during a global pandemic is that no external visitors were allowed. This meant I was not going to be able to


record residents reading their parts myself, nor was I going to be able to direct them so that they could read with the correct intonations for their delivery of the script. At this point, I did wonder if I had created something that I possibly was not going to be able to deliver! Yet never one to admit


November 2021 • www.thecarehomeenvironment.com 47


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