Explores the last thirty years of radio docufiction in Italy and the United Kingdom. Located at the crossroads of fact and invention, docudrama constitutes a rich field of investigation for media studies. Despite the hybrid nature of this subject and a recent boom in podcasting, scholars have mainly concentrated on film rather than audio docufiction. Sabina Macchiavelli remedies this with an analysis of Italian and British docudramas that explores the ambiguities of this form, looking at their structure and form, as well as the type of understanding they convey. She investigates the ways that sound effects, music, recorded events, voices, and silence can work to fictionalize audio productions that sit somewhere between journalism and fully dramatized readings or plays. This interplay between fact, fiction, and sound subverts accepted knowledge and produces an alternative view of personal and historical matters, one that may complement or complicate the accepted version of the truth. Macchiavelli builds her case with studies from the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Radio Audizioni Italiane, tracing parallels and divergences within their programming to dig into the docudrama’s paradoxical nature and the ambiguities it yields.
