One of the messages from film studies, is the refusal to isolate film as a medium unto itself (Collins et al, 1993, 4). So too, radio drama is popular entertainment (plays which are 'good enough', to use Winnicott's phrase, and more) along with high art/aesthetic culture. Radio drama circulates alongside the rest of the radio output, and also theatre and TV, among other mediated and unmediated fictions. But radio is not 'large' like film production, where, as they say in directing, 'you use the space'.
I have tried to indicate some of the ways in which radio drama comfortably inhabits the drama curriculum: practical work, technology and the digital, performance-centered criticism, textual studies of radio plays, aesthetics and researching the full 'set of histories' (Tulloch), especially those of the B.B.C. I have not told the whole story here, and reception theory/studies and apparatus theory are among other candidates to add to the list.
The fact that radio drama is so dispersed and decentred as a subject is, paradoxically, the cause of its gradual unification. Teachers and researchers, too few at present, are spread out over the necessary territory (social sciences, technology training, creative writing and on to drama), and inform each other of varied paradigms and protocols of working. The value of such shared theory-building is that it increases our difficulties, and the resistances and complexities needed in this work - another paradox. I have tried to explain some of the difficulties I experience. Radio academics have not yet got agreement about that 'certain epistemology and methodology in order to study this object', as Patrice Pavis summarises of theatre studies (Pavis, 2000, 69), and that extends further than this article. As researchers, we just have to spend more hours together in dialogue in the same room! But radio is also a bridge. As we study those who work with sound as their sole material for fictions - poet-performers, actors, directors, playwrights, composers, installation artists, technicians - we benefit all.
When wireless drama was first broadcast in the 1920s, it caused all the performance arts to redefine themselves, not least because they were competing for audiences (Popple, 1996, 106). Redefining gives continuous energy to each art form, and I hope that the study of radio plays within the drama curriculum will be part of that questing dramaturgical process.