Cheltenham Festivals blog archives

8 months
3 weeks ago

Time Will Tell is our major education project in association with BBC Outreach for the 60th The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival.

Philip Ardagh writes…

The great thing about my three days of workshops for the Times Cheltenham Literature Festival’s Time Will Tell project was that I didn’t know what to expect. Time Will Tell has been created to celebrate 60 years of the festival, and each school had already been allocated one of the six decades in which the festival has taken place. This was done live on air on BBC Radio Gloucestershire — the festival’s partner in this project — by presenter John Rockley, way back in April. Since then the schools have been visited by local ‘decade detectives’ to talk to the children about the whys and wherefores of their particular decade then, as we reached the end of June, along I came.

The idea is that we’ll end up with six short stories set from the 1950s to the 2000s, each around ten minutes long when performed on stage on 12th October in Cheltenham Town Hall, a key part of the festival itself.

Sure, I’d written an opening line and a closing line for each of the stories but, beyond that, I had absolutely no idea how things would shape up when I entered the schools. I was there to fire the imagination, to get the ball rolling and to mix my metaphors. It’s the students who’ll be plotting, writing and shaping the stories. It’s their ideas we’re after, not mine. I simply provided the nuts-and-bolts and — yes — the enthusiasm.

Some of the groups of students were large, some were small. Some sessions lasted around an hour, some were nearer an hour and a half. Again, it was down to the schools. Some students were already bursting with ideas, others were inspired by the discussions that followed.

By the end of each workshop, we had a main character or two, a central event from the period and an idea of how the students might link events at the end to those at the beginning … but that great big, challenging blank space in the middle is something they’ll have to fill in themselves all on their own.

It’s been a lot of fun for me. What’s not to like? I’ve had the opportunity to work with children to help them realise their ideas and discover what will and what won’t work; to discover that amusing and silly are two different things — what makes your mates laugh might leave an audience just plain puzzled — along with how to approach crafting a short story as opposed to a short play.

Of course, it doesn’t end here. In a few weeks, I’ll have copies of all the stories to edit. My aim is to edit them as little as possible, primarily tweaking things where we might have repetition between stories, or for clarity. When the schools get their story back, there’ll be notes explaining exactly why each change has been made, so that — as well as the writing and performing aspects — they’ll experience the editorial process that we full-time authors have to go through too!

That done, actor/director Fiona Ross will be going into each of the six schools to help them to turn their stories into performance pieces — and the words will, no doubt, undergo one or two more tweaks here so that they can be shown off to their best…

Then, after the schools have had time to rehearse, along will come that final Time Will Tell performance at the festival.

None of this would have been possible, of course, without the festival’s education department, in the guise of Philippa Claridge and Nicola Tuxworth (who not only set up the whole project but also chauffeured me around, fed and watered me, and did all the writing on the whiteboards). And, of course, there’s the BBC.

BBC Radio Gloucestershire has been recording decade detective sessions, one of my workshops, and interviewing us all left, right and centre. They’ve also come up with great ways of listeners getting involved in other aspects of the Time Will Tell project… but that’s someone else’s story. Stay tuned.

Me? I’m really looking forward to the end of term when copies of the six schools’ short stories land on my desk and I finally get to see what we began in those workshops has turned into. Exciting times!

We’ve tagged this post with education, literature, Philip Ardagh, Time Will Tell on Thursday 2 July 2009.