At the beginning of the new year, the WDR will cancel four weekly radio play slots in its cultural program WDR 3. The daily appointments from Monday to Thursday at 7 p.m. will then be canceled, as will the culture magazine scheduled before Resonances will be extended accordingly.
So far, the WDR has broadcast fictional radio pieces on these program slots, which last around half an hour; the dates were often used for broadcasting multi-part programs. This means that only the one hour long broadcast slots from Friday to Sunday remain for radio plays on WDR 3, also at 7 p.m.
The daily radio play slot at 7 p.m. was only introduced six years ago by Valerie Weber, who at the time was still quite new as radio director (and recently announced that she would be leaving WDR). It brought the radio play from the late evening hours into prime time. It is one of the things that are “dear to us”, she explained at the time: “If we can continue to afford it, then it makes no sense to broadcast such an expensive program at 11 p.m.” – at a time when most people have already turned off their radios.
The WDR sees the decision that has now been made as a strengthening of the genre
In the course of this, Weber also broke the rather rigid length specification of 53 minutes for radio plays. In the linear program, she created the possibility of broadcasting multi-part films with shorter episodes – and developing formats for them that correspond more to fictional podcast dramaturgies.
This meant a strengthening of the genre, and the WDR also sees the decision that has now been made as such. Because the broadcaster would like to present its radio plays even more strongly where they are in demand. “That is why more productions than before are designed in such a way that they are not just tailored to the requirements of a particular radio wave,” explained a spokesman for the WDR. On the one hand, this means that more content should be aimed primarily at use in the audio library, as there is particularly high demand for radio plays there. On the other hand, the WDR would like to step out of the cultural radio niche more strongly than before in the linear program with its radio plays and develop offers that can be broadcast in the high-reach programs of WDR 2, WDR 4, 1Live and Cosmo.
A first example is the three-part suit The crab migration, of which there is a German version for WDR 3 as well as a Kurdish-German version that Cosmo will broadcast. However, these waves rarely have fixed broadcasting slots for radio plays, where they will have more of an event character.