BBC World Service invites audience to help create interactive drama

BBC World Service invites audience to help create interactive drama

MUMBAI: BBC World Service's weekday magazine programme Outlook is doing an interactive drama collaboration that asks listeners to help create a play – Kim's Game – to be broadcast in the World Drama slot on 16 February.

The idea is that Outlook listeners will steer the writer Jonathan Myerson in his scripting of the full 60-minute play.

In Kim's Game, a young woman walks into a London police station with no idea of who she is or how she got there.

She goes on Outlook to explain her predicament on air and to ask if anyone out there knows her. Her plea appears online as a blog, with pictures of the objects that she has with her – which include a key and two photos.

She calls herself Kim – after the game in which listeners have to look at objects on a tray and then remember them when they are removed. Meanwhile, she tries to regain her memory. What does the key open? Who is the young man in the photo, which seems to have been torn in half?

Listeners are invited to post comments identifying the pictures or the key, suggesting who the young woman might be and what might have happened to her. Each day, she will learn more about herself from the listeners.

When other clues turn up, Outlook's listeners are invited to contribute. Perhaps there is a song she can't get out of her head? What does it mean? Perhaps the door which can be opened by the key is found – what lies behind it?

Finally, the young woman discovers something that raises big questions about how she came to be where she is.