Howard Jacobson's new book, Howl

You're listening to Front Row with me, Tom Sutliff.

Hello. How long can you sustain a howl of pain? And sometimes laughter too. Two hundred and ninety four pages in the case of Howard Jacobson's new novel, Howl, in which a Jewish primary school head struggles to come to terms with the october seventh massacre in Israel and what followed it. Also tonight are vertical dramas, micro serials created with a smartphone in mind, the junk food of on screen entertainment, or a format with a big future.

This is quite possibly the most embarrassing moment of my life. But it is not quite where our story begins. Remove this dress and There is no place for you at this ball or Lenex! That's my wildly charming stepmother. A scene from Pride and Prejudice, the vertical version. Its director joins us later to talk about getting in on the ground floor of a new way of watching.

Also in the studio with us the singer-songwriter Thea Gilmour. Your private drama could be the source of her next song, but only if you volunteer, if she talks to us later, about her Echo Line project. First, though, Hal, the latest novel from the Booker Prize winning writer Howard Jacobson. Howl is narrated by Ferdinand Draxler, or Ferdinand the Moderate, as he describes himself, headmaster of a South London multi faith primary school.

It is, as he says in the opening lines, the story of how the world lost its mind, and not incidentally, of how I lost mine, and it begins on October the sixth, twenty twenty three, the day before Hamas launched an attack on Israel across the border with Gaza. That stuns Ferdinand, but he has another shock to come, because his daughter Zoe, a university student, is among those celebrating what she and many of her contemporaries see as an act of resistance.

and with us now in the studio to talk about the book is Howard Jacobson. Howard it's obviously a reaction to October the seventh. and everything that's followed that, Ferdinand says of the shock of that moment, there was nothing ahead of me I wanted to reach all the good things were behind me. Um it's a fallacy to think that an author is his character, but was was that some of your reaction immediately afterwards? Ferdinand is me with the

shaved down a bit with the rage got rid of because you can't write a novel out of out of rage. So he is He's a sweeter man than I can be. And as a consequence he's a very sweet man actually. He loves his he loves his his daughter. He feels her being on a march is a an unimaginable betrayal. He loves the kids he teaches at Strawberry Fields primary school.

He changes the school motto from Know Thyself to But Know Others Better. He has he has uh been awarded an MBE for the work he's done with encouraging the kids to understand one another. So the idea that people could feel this He can understand that there might have been a massacre, wars happen, and terrible things happen.

What what he would never have expected is that people would rejoice in it. He addresses that directly. Let's just hear a a a little reading from the book and this is him re reacting immediately to to what has just happened.

The massacre was one thing. The minutes, hours, and days that followed, the speed at which morality went into reverse, shocked me far more. Murder made its own sense. You killed, you outraged, you were caught, you said sorry, and promised never to kill again. The rent in the fabric of civil society was mended, the guilty were punished, the innocent mourned, and everyone went back to believing in the possibility of justice.

What was said and done in the hours and days following the massacre in the Negev, however, did not remotely conform to this pattern. Why, for example, if Jews had been slaughtered, were my neighbours across the road calling for the slaughter of more? Wasn't it a mark of civilization to call for the slaughter of fewer? I didn't recall my mother ever mentioning crowds gathering outside Belson on the day it was liberated, shouting for more Jews to be incinerated.

Whoever heard a witness to a fatal road accident asking the driver to reverse and run over the victim a second time? Uh your narrator, um, Ferdinand, who we heard there, he's married out. Um Shaman his wife is not Jewish, and so Zoe, his daughter, is is not either. Why that choice for those characters? I wanted it to be perfectly clear that this was not somebody who was so deeply embedded in his face. that anything that was done against Jews would immediately strike him as an outrage or unfair.

I wanted to make him as it were a not exactly a blank page, but somebody who would be able to receive uh the information that was coming to him about what was happening in Israel and and things that were said on the marches with a fair and open mind. Seemed to me I was I was Tossing into the argument the fairest, kindest and sweetest person a and therefore the furtherest from me that I could find. Um he is still appalled, uh and he's particularly appalled by by Zoe. Um he says at one point um

This is Vietnam with fewer words, more sinister packaged opinions and TikTok. It's a very it's it's very much about the generation. He sees that younger generation as intolerant in a way. Well that's what you that's what I I hear in my garden, or have heard in my garden every Saturday for two years, the sound of the young em saying things which to my ears had no meaning whatsoever, but were were murderous intent.

um he is a he is this sweeter man, he is the same things and Yn ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud. She doesn't buy everything he says, he doesn't buy everything she says, but he would never have ex he would never have expected that from her. I supp I never thought I'm going to do the generational thing. I thought I'm just going to do what it's like to rece

Describe actually what many people that I knew, what many Jewish people that I knew, in fact just about all the Jewish people I knew were f were feeling. They were totally, totally bamboozled, they could not un and then hurt and then frightened because they could not understand this. reac this reaction to this the barbarism.

Um what about Ferdy's mother? She is a survivor of Belson, but she comes at this from a slightly different angle to him. There's a sort of tension there as well, isn't it Yes, and she is she's been in Belson, um and she's now a remarkably strong woman l um, living sort of holed up in north west London, uh not going out much. Very disappointed in Ferdinand because he's not the s he's not the strong fighter for his people that she would like him to be.

And I th think it's quite interesting too that sometimes when you brought up as sternly as he's been and abstemiously as he's been brought up by her You you don't turn out the way you know, the person bringing you up like that would would like you to be. None of us turn out the way our parents, his daughter doesn't and he doesn't. So he is he is beset really by people who think he's either a cruel, a cruel father, or altogether too moderate a son.

when you take on a subject as volatile as this, um uh uh and as as as prone to kind of divide people, Um, what do you think your novelistic obligations are? I mean, people often talk about the the duty of a novelist. I don't know what you think of that concept. itself but do you think you have a particular duty to um I do and it's grandiose. When Lawrence was asked why he wrote he he he D H Lawrence he said I write out of a religious sense for the race as it were.

I find it very hard to say that because it sounds too too grand and impossible, but actually I do think that. I wouldn't say for the race as it were. But I write Well that's very interesting. Why would you not say for the race? Because people would assume I meant something else. Lawrence meant the human race and people would fear that I meant the Jewish people and I certainly don't mean that.

Though I did feel to a degree that a lot of the Jewish people I n I uh that I knew needed some help and comfort, and the help and comfort I felt that they needed was to know that other people were feeling this. What I knew, you ask w what specifically the my obligation was, and it was not to write a march. A novel is not a march. When I began this novel, I was writing a march.

full of aggression and I knew that had to go. And the other thing, which for me is always comedy had to had to see and the comedy Um I want to come on to the comedy because it is a ve it is a very funny novel. But I want to press in a little bit on this and how you stop a novel being a march, because you have strong feelings about this. You have to create characters who oppose, as it were, Ferdinand's arguments. How do you stop them from losing all the arguments?

I'm not sure that I'm not sure that I do. I'm not sure that I mind a little bit of I'm not sure that I mind a little a little victory here and there, particularly at a time when you might feel that you're the loser in every other way.

The first thing I do when I'm writing a march is to read it to my wife and she says you've written a march, don't. So then I I scra you scrap things. You scrap you know that phrase the in in in cricket? I think you like cricket. That I think the Australians talk about batsmen playing with soft hands. A writer should write with soft hands. If you're writing as though you're carrying a banner, that book's gonna be no good.

And if you let the thing go, the wonderful mystery of art takes over. You don't you don't make comedy happen. If you if you set out thinking, I'm gonna write a funny book, the one thing it won't be is a funny book. Comedy is out there, particularly if you're a Jewish writer, it's

It's out there as a necessary help. But it's out there waiting to come in and take over. And I played with soft hands and I left the doors open and I scrubbed all the things that my wife said l sounded like a march and were a march. And the novel then became became very different.

It's the specificities that make the difference. It's creating having a Ferdinand who's not me, having a Ferdinand who feels all these things, but when he hears on that night, people outside in the street saying gas the Jews He runs out, What the hell? What are you doing? And then he meets one of the people saying that face to face and he goes, Could you quiet it down a bit? My my wife is trying to sleep and the person saying, Yeah and he calls his friend. Could you quiet it down a bit?

I don't know what that that was very early on in the book and it was for me a pivotal scene because I thought I know now the tone of this book. That's the tone of this book. Um the comedy is angry too. You have a another character, um he's called Max Axelberg. He's a Jewish convert.

he teaches uh with Ferdinand in the school. And he refers at one point to the October the seventh Massacre as the Hamas Huha, um which again made me laugh, but it's a very dark joke that, about the erasing of what's actually happened. Yes, and but a lot of people did that. Why did you make him a convert though? Because that uh there were a lot of Jewish people who expressed the arguments he expressed, who felt solidarity with Palestine, who You know?

said many of the things he did. Why why w did you make him a convert rather than a a Jewish person? I like the joke I like the joke of it. Um who is it who d doctor John said of Shakespeare that a pun was his fatal Cleopatra for which he would lose the world I would lose I would lose the world for a for a good joke? I I have come across people who have changed their faith.

And come from not being Jewish to being Jewish. They do it on a Thursday. They go to synagogue on a Friday and at the weekend they're marching against Israel. I have seen it. I could even name you some quite well known people who have m who have made this journey. I for me that was irresistible, irresistibly absurd. Well there is there is a comedy in converting to becoming a self hel hating Jew.

Um which is sort of effectively what he's done. Exactly. Um you just mentioned um uh Cleopatra and Shakespeare. This novel is soaked in Shakespeare. Every well, Ferdinand says, everyone Jewish like Mutti and me was Shakespearean. What do you mean by that? Oh I can't explain that. It's one of those things that you f fling out and if we had all night I think I could get somewhere. The other th I mean it

It's it's Ferdinand Shakespeareaness that I like. He's a very he's quite p pompous and pedantic. He's a grammarian. He loves the English grammar teacher, Ridout, who taught people my age, I was gonna say our age, but my age, grammar in the nineteen fifties. And and and he writes when he leaves university he writes a pamphlet which argues that every Shakespearean fool is in fact Jewish.

His point is uh I didn't say that, he said that, but I wouldn't mind having having said that. His point really is that there is something very dark about Jewish humour. that comes, I always argue, because Jews know nothing is funny, and Shakespearean fools know nothing is funny. They make their best jokes in the face of the blackest, most despairing Um Charmian's father, who who is also not a Jew, says at one point Life as a Jew was either a catastrophe or a witticism. Uh

I agree entirely with him and it's the and the w the the witticisms and it's more than witticism uh come out come out of the catastrophe. What do you do? What tools do you have? What tools of N I don I would now wax spiritual and historical and say that for two thousand years Jews have had to find a means of dealing with this what seems to them inexplicable, irrational hatred. It is explicable actually, and I nearly wrote a book explicating it.

And that was Memoir Wife again said, No, don't do that, you're writing a novel, not a book explicating that novel is um Hal uh thank you very much, Howard Jacobson and that is out on Thursday.

Now, actually published today, a slightly unusual book, it has around 10,000 authors and no content at all. Apart that is, from a list of all those names. It's called Don't Steal This Book. And it's being distributed at the London Book Fair. We have to judge this book by its cover, there's no way other way to do it. And it is in effect a warning message aimed at the government, currently thinking about how copyright law might apply to AI companies.

The back cover has this phrase printed on it. The UK government must not legalize book theft to benefit AI companies. Joining me now to talk about the continuing campaign is best selling historical novelist Philip O'Gregory. Philip uh um tell us why you are happy to join this rather unusual collaboration. Well, I think it's it's uh it's uh it's a trade collaboration, of course. It's people whose livelihood is threatened by a new technology development.

So in that sense we follow the long lines of the Luddites. But we're a bit more interesting than that in that this is not against the publication. This is not against broadening a readership. Everybody wants more readers, they don't want less. It's the belief that if AI is allowed to crawl over, as the word is, or read, or exploit, or draw.

It's not that AI is malign in itself, it's that the people who own the AI are are basically taking everything published, everything digitised without payment.

Um, there are two grounds for anxiety there, aren't there? There's there's uh a ground for anger in that all of the work that you've done has been scraped without your permission and fed into this machine. And then there is also the anxiety about the future. um and whether, as it were, AI might start to generate writing and steal readers. What's your principal concern between those two?

I think actually my principal concern is to s first of all make sure that the government understands that it is in their hands to grant this licence or not. So it's not just that AI is is is has in the past. taken without permission because that is how there are lawsuits trying to uh just you know, respond to that and trying to get justice for that. But that before the government and before all the governments of all the world at the moment is the question of are you going to say yes, this is

permissible and legal and you can go ahead with it? Or are you going to say there has to be a small payment paid? Or are you going to say much more stringently uh that every single thing that is taken has to be has to be taken under licence. The government's current position is that authors can opt out So in a sense, it is our responsibility to say to AI, I don't want you to steal my stuff. And that's really like saying every homeowner should put a sign up against the front door.

saying burglars please not allowed to pass by. Certainly not. With the law of copyright. No, you mentioned there um legal action and you you've been part of a successful class action suit against the AI company Anthropic. Can you tell us about that? Uh yes, this is uh this is uh slightly to the side and it gets so complicated. It's that there were some books, a number, a huge number of books.

uh were pirated by another agency and the Anthropic went and just took them and gave it to their models who then as it were you have to imagine these m these machines read it and therefore they produce it at will. So there is really no point you buying uh an original copy of these fact books in particular because you can just get the facts off AI for free. Uh when it's something like a poem or a literary work, then obviously how it is written and how therefore you read it.

makes a difference. But in terms of, you know, factual uh novel authors who are at the moment not frightfully well rewarded anyway, this is this is making research. financially unviable. Um i i that that case was settled, I think, out of court um by anthropic One point one billion pounds was the settlement. I know, it sounds like points, doesn't it? I'm expecting to get three hundred pounds. Oh right. Okay. So it's a bit book which

Which took me five years to write. So they really have, as it were, scraped an enormous number of writings. They scraped an enormous number. Well, basically they they were they considered themselves free to take everything that had been digitised. So stuff that was literally sitting in the libraries between the covers, they couldn't get hold of because the machines read off digitized things.

But if you think of like a Kindle library or you think of the enormous stocks of, say, public libraries which have been helpfully digitized, uh these big large language models just ate them up. Yeah. Okay. Um well they had to pay to a certain degree, but maybe uh some more as well. Uh thank you very much, Philippo Gregory. It is a question of money and uh it's whether we want these enormous

internet companies to take our little bits of money as well as the enormous profits they have for themselves. Well you've made a start in opposing that. Thank you.

Now, um absolutely guaranteed AI free, the singer songwriter Thea Gilmour, who, after over twenty albums, drawing on her own emotions and thoughts and feelings, has deliberately chosen to look outwards for inspiration. Her project, The Echo Line, invites people to leave a message, in writing or by fo voicemail.

any one of which might become the seed for a new song. She's here in the studio to sing the latest fruit of that project, and to talk to us about it. Um, Thea, first of all, could you just explain how Echo Line works?

Well, uh at its simplest, it is a uh an a phone line and a website um where you can call and uh leave an anonymous message. And it can be anything. It could be um grief or love or joy or or just something tiny that that has been sitting with you for a while that you don't really have anywhere else to put. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud yma. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud.

you know, pick one or a few and and write songs about it. And sometimes you you start with one but some other elements come in and and mix and meld and Absolutely. I mean the project runs in rounds. So we've got um I'm on my second round now and uh and and it's really interesting actually because the rounds sort of seem to kind of almost grow themes of their own, which obviously it's good there's no direction of of any description for me. People ev everything that comes in is is entirely sort of

you know, what comes into people's heads. But but but it sort of seems to have have kind of themes running through it, which is really interesting to me. It's kind of like this weird sort of little universal There is a degree of separation. You say it's anonymous. I can understand why it would be anonymous, but there's no way for you to contact back either. Why was that important to you?

Because I wanted that absolute, you know, safety I suppose. And and also it's an ethical thing as well, you know, th th there has to be a real sort of ethical distance, I think, um, because if I feel like I it's very hard, I would have to say, and a lot of the messages, you know, they do come from particularly this round, have come from a come from a place of grief and they're and all I want to do in many cases is just to reach out and say

I I hear you and it'll be okay. Um, but you can't do that. And I and uh th I I think it's that that I suppose it's sort of almost like a journalistic distance. You have to be able to sort of stand back and and and kind of

from that distance with with that clarity to be able to write something that is meaningful. What what prompted you to do it? I mean it's a it's a really interesting idea, but what made you think, Oh, I'm gonna go in this direction first. I th I think it's a degree of burnout from the way um

time that we're living in which is so full of turmoil and so you know, so so full of sadness at at the moment and so many people are struggling and we have these incredible tools that connect us, but we're using them in in my opinion, all all the wrong ways. You know, w w y w w clickbait and kind of everything focusing on the negative. And I think part of me I was fed up with talking about myself because I've made twenty albums doing that and that's boring.

I suppose and this is gonna sound r really daft, but I kinda wanted to do something that I felt was a bit useful and this is what I do. I write songs, it's the thing that I do well. And I want it to be of some use in a world that I think really needs useful people. You said in a little post that that it was the bravest and most vulnerable thing that you'd done. I I was interested by brave I can see but But why did you feel vulnerable in doing it?

Uh probably because I'm dealing with incredibly delicate emotions and y there i you know, there is a real possibility that I will create something or write something that that somebody takes real issue with. Um And I have to be r you know, again, it's there's this deep ethical responsibility to take people's stories and treat them with absolute care and and consideration and make sure that you try And representing the right.

the story that's coming in wi with with real consideration, but also y uh ultimately you are you're creating something, you're trying to to sort of build a world that encompasses not just their story but a lot of other people's as well. And there's there's quite a th it

it's quite a dexterous thing to do and I'm not a hundred percent sure whether I'm able to do it yet. And and is it a different way of working for you? Presumably when you are writing your own songs, it's all in your head or you're you're receiving kind of inspirations from the outside world, obviously as well. But here you're getting very kind of intimate.

Does that feed into the songwriting? Absolutely. And and you know, I I've had voice messages of of people, you know, really in in bits on the phone. That's incredibly hard to hear'cause again you can't r you can't reach out, you can't get back to them and say, Are you okay? And that's yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw in need of of special assistance. Yeah. To send them in the right direction so that people understand that it's not a kind of a a a sort of service if you like. But um

But but but th there's that human part of you that just wants to kind of wrap your arms around somebody who's in pain and just just help them. And this is writing a song, that's the closest I can get. Um, why are the songs temporary on the site? You said it goes in rounds and they're they're there for a while, but y but not forever.

Because I think we've lost that art of kind of communicating with each other through music. And, you know, the the whole point of music when it you know, is is this sort of like you know, it's a communion, it's i it's in a room together, we all experience it and then it's gone and it's that fleeting moment and and I feel that, you know, the way that we're consuming music at the moment, which which is just i effectively background noise, uh everything is about stopping the scroll

all of the kind of content creation that that's that's happening where music is part of it is just so incredibly transient and and and so in the background. And I I kinda I wanted to put people at the front of the music that they consume and they are in

you know, they are they are the subject matter. Okay. Well you're in the room with us now. Um tell us about the the song you're going to sing for us. So this is it's a song called Sylvie and it uh it comes from the message that that came in, it was this was actually a written message and the first line of it was I don't talk about Sylvie much anymore.

And that line instantly just stopped me because I n you you can tell what that what that line is about. It's about someone who's grieving and I didn't and and then Yn ymwneud ymwneud yw'n ymwneud yw'n ymwneud yw'n ymwneud yw'n ymwneud yw'n ymwneud ymwneud.

And it was thirty years ago and they felt like they s they can't talk about about their partner anymore because it's so long ago. Um but they live in this sort of space that has forever altered through the absence of this person. Okay. Let's hear Sylvie then. Thank you so much, Sea Gilmore. Beautiful. Um and who knows, there might be somebody out there.

For whom that goes even deeper uh than the rest of us. Uh you can hear Sylvie again via the Echo Line project on Thea's website and keep checking for when you can once again leave a message there.

Finally tonight, the jury's still out on whether the internet and social media is actually degrading our attention spans, but whether it is or not, short form art is booming, and particularly short form drama. Disney became the latest big streaming company to announce that it was investing in vertical drama recently, serial stories with episodes that can be as short as a minute.

Originally from China, verticals are already hugely popular across East Asia, and they're filmed in a phone-friendly portrait aspect. Familiar to those who've grown up looking at screens that are taller than they are wide, there is absolutely no time at all in these things for the slow build. Are you sure you want to do this? Can't we wait? This is legally our wedding night.

A steamy scene from The Mafia's Obsession, a homegrown vertical drama from one of the UK's early entrants to this market, Onset Octopus. I'm joined now by its director, Dan Lowenstein, and by Jake Kwon, BBC correspondent in Seoul, who's been following the rise of vertical drama in Asia and South Korea. Um Jake, first of all, can you s give us a very brief potted history? They first took off in China, didn't they? And they are huge there now.

It really is. It became what is estimated a seven billion dollar industry there in twenty twenty four. It's earnings surpassed the traditional movie industry, the the ticket sales at the box office. So I mean, this is an industry in China that makes more movie uh more money than the the movies that we know. Uh and other places like Hollywood and South Korea, the K drama industry, they're taking notice.

And now they're trying to get in and kind of capitalise on the same success. Um, how long did it take South Korea?'Cause you you you mentioned K drama, it's huge in uh well, not just in Korea, in here as well. How long did it take them to catch on and say we better do that?

Well, I think the real success became very visible around twenty twenty four and we started seeing South Korean firms getting into it the same year. I think South Koreans have a very innovative spirit. I think when they see these success happenings elsewhere, uh they tend to capitalize it on it very soon and you know Hollywood is not far behind. And uh we spoke to one of the CEO who has, you know, thrown his lot into it. He's more of a tech CEO rather than a creative industry guy.

And he said that, you know, this really seemed like the next frontier that he wants to get in early so that he could really be the market leader. Um, who is watching them? Um, is it a very sort of narrow demographic or a very id well identified demographic of people? Well, I think they're primarily going for women. Uh especially women in America in their forties and fifties. They said that they do really well with these um who they would refer to as housewives type.

Uh and these are people who are uh pretty much lying down to fall asleep at night and around eleven PM local time the the watch rate it spikes up. Very good. Presumably this is all to do because it's vertical, you're watching it on a smartphone screen, essentially. You can watch it all, you can watch it on bed, you can watch it wherever you are, on a bus, anywh anywhere.

Exactly. And some people even watch it while they're watching television. So they there's the big screen in front of them. That really is double screening. Um can you just very quickly uh what what's the finance of this? How are they making the money? Are they cut how do they monetize it?

So you know, uh Americans have tried this before, just before the pandemic. I don't know if you remember Qui, but you know, they sold a huge amount of money spent on that and lost. Yes, I mean that was there was a one point seven five billion dollar uh failure. Uh but uh what they try to do was sell these um premium shows, uh monthly subscription fees. But what the Chinese have done is that they sold very cheaply made shows uh at one episode each for about twenty, thirty cents per episode.

So what the the other industries are trying to do is the same thing. They're trying to radically cut down on the cost of making these shows. Which would be maybe 10% or less of what a traditional show cost. A traditional show cost maybe two million dollar uh per episode, like in the Game of Thrones.

Uh but these shows they're making for a hundred thousand dollars. They also come in these tiny l little episodes, don't they? So you can give away three or four or five minute episodes and get people hooked. And then they start to pay. Exactly. Each show could be fifty episodes, sixty episodes, maybe a hundred.

Uh but you get the first ten episodes free and then the rest of the episodes about twenty to thirty cents, uh maybe fifty cents. Uh and then you end up paying more than twenty dollars by the time you finish. Um, Dan Lowenson, I want to bring you in. You're you're um I I don't know what your payment model is, but you're one of the kind of early adopters uh in this country. What made it made it sort of appealing to you?

I'm always interested in multi format um and I was really interested in this vertical stuff. Um at the beginning I had no idea what it was. at all. I was thrown into it. It was a job. I was freelancing. Um, and that was two years ago and I did two back to back, one of them being Mafia Obsession, which then went viral and had about a month break and then twenty eight shows later.

Here we are. Um, where did it go viral? Because you're you're making these in English, um, and you're making them here, but was it going viral here or in China?

It was in the US. Yeah. Yeah, mostly that was the audience for sure. Yeah, yeah. A and you're you're making them for Chinese platforms at the moment, are you? How do p how do people see these things? It's for Chinese platforms but based in the West. So a lot of them like Real Short DramaBox, all the big ones I've worked for, but there's also really interesting boutique platforms I call them popping up. Um so Gamma Time for example, run by Bill Block.

Um he I've worked for them once. That was a really interesting, beautiful experience. But they're they all have their same models, the same tropes, the same feelings and same storytelling. But

Done in slightly different ways. Um what do you think of the the fast food metaphor? Because it comes up again and again, doesn't it, in di in different ways. They are sort of chicken McNuggets of drama, aren't they? V bite sized, very spicy.

Yeah, yeah, very spicy sometimes. I I do I mean it's an interesting one'cause it's a debate about the whole clickbait thing about grabbing attention so fast and then all of a sudden attention span and it's a lot of responsibility for the creatives to understand what they're making. I don't wan I don't wanna take it lightly, because especially the younger audiences, which aren't tapped into yet necessarily, but when they do, it's something that they're gonna be watching at such a fast pace.

But uh there is some amazing ownership about it. Like because it's such a small screen, you're in bed sometimes watching it, you own the story, it's your story. It's about it you feel like you own the characters and it's your little private moment, you know? Um how long is an average episode for you? Are you are you doing these sort of very short Yeah, so the the script is usually ninety pages, hundred and twenty pages long.

And it's like a film. Like a feature. Yeah, yeah. But then split into ninety second chunks. Yeah. So each so sixty episodes or something. Now th there's a sort of huge kind of narrative drive there. You have to hit people in the opening ten seconds, presumably. Mm-hmm.

Uh then you have to deliver a bit of drama and and plot advancement and then you have to end on a cliffhanger too. Yeah, within each each episode, yeah. It's a lot a lot of information to get in there to hook those audiences to make sure they're feeling that they're driving the narrative forward.

And there's not much time to establish the scene. Like like you said before, you're you're thrown into the drama immediately and that's what the sort of hook is. And I wanted to ask a little bit about the the visual aesthetic too, because we're you know, filmmakers stress over academy ratio and and widescreen and they they were you know Go over and over this.

Suddenly you've got it you've got it upended. That's a huge kind of shock, isn't it, to the way in which you think about film, how you frame a scene. Yeah, of course. I mean it was i you go against your gut a lot in vertical drama, in micro drama, I feel like you're going against your in your kind of feeling a lot of the time as a filmmaker as a creative. But then more the more you do that, the more you get used to working against that and you start embracing the new format.

And the fact that vertical screen you stack the actors up as opposed to have them lengthways. And it's quite interesting. You can play with that kind of wide shot, which isn't wide at all. You can't do wide shots because you see ceiling and floor. You have to do tool shots. characters and IP, uh they've released something called Locker Diaries, yeah. Which is viewed through an American high school locker. So you c you know, you actually have the frame around around the the image and they've

They've managed to get everything they need into that tiny space. Yeah, and I th it's quite quite intuitive actually in s doing that'cause you've you're bracing the the frame, the locker. That's quite nice. But not Jake, um South Korea is a little ahead of the curve. I mean it's quite a long way ahead of the curve as as far as um the UK is concerned.

How are micro dynamas appraised critically over there? Is there any sense that as it were, just as with cinema when it first emerged, you start with kind of um very short things, entertainment, and then you build towards a different kind of art and you build towards a different aesthetic. Are they beginning to work towards critically appraised microdramas?

Well, that is the argument that the CEO of the microdrama filmmaker, he was trying to make that the industry simply needs to mature before we start to see more premium, more you know, w what we would refer to as cinematic experience. Because right now their top shows are really ones that has to do with those same tropes you might expect that the werewolves or cheating spouses and you know, very spicy dopamine raging stuff that quickly gets at the a very trope heavy.

Um, but he was saying that, you know, maybe in five years, who knows, uh there will be more talented people writing what they would consider higher art. Um, Dan Lowenstein, you probably don't get a lot of time to shoot this. You're shooting at a huge fast pace, aren't you, as well? Yeah, correct. I mean that's the whole business model that you you shoot for cheap and then you hope it pops.

But yeah, usually um we're shooting about seven to eight days for the whole whole project and then a prep is about two weeks. Right. So that so that it's the equivalent in in running time of a feature film and you're doing it in seven to eight days. Correct. No time not a lot of time for retake. No, I mean it's it's I give the actors three when I can. Never one though, never one. Yeah.

And do you think it's gonna build to to real to uh as it were a an art form? I I really do. I really do,'cause there's these boutique companies popping up and as if one or two of these shows hits and and creates a viral impact Then that will set the standard. Okay. Well, thank you very much, uh, Dan Lowenstein and Jake Quant talking there about vertical drama coming to a phone screen near you soon. Oh possibly not.

That's it for tonight. On tomorrow's front row, the writer of the BBC's new period drama, The Other Bennett Sister, which follows the events from Pride and Prejudice. From another different point of view, Mary Bennetts. And eight hundred years after his death, what's the cultural legacy of St. Francis of Assisi? Join Kirsty for seven fifty.

Thanks for listening to Front Row. I'm Tom Sutcliffe and the producer was Lucy Collingwood. The production coordinator was Fiona Anderson and the studio manager, Never Masyrian. Uh you can subscribe to Front Row on BBC Sounds and then you'll never miss a programme. If you missed um Killian Murphy talking l yesterday to Samira, you can catch up. You can do that on BBC Sounds.