Charlotte is an award-winning writer and producer, and the founder of two-times NYF Radio Awards Production Company of the Year, Almost Tangible, renowned for its boundary-breaking and cinematic approach to audio storytelling. She joins the 2025  Radio Advisory Board. 

New York Festivals Radio Awards: Over the years, Almost Tangible has earned Grand Awards for Macbeth and Hamlet Noir and Production Company of the Year honors.  Can you share backstories on the making of those ground-breaking productions?

Macbeth was Almost Tangible’s first production. I knew I wanted to create a visceral, immersive listening experience - a Macbeth that people would feel in their guts - and I had a strong conviction that if we fostered a more organic, collaborative recording experience, on location and mirroring the filmmaking process, then we would create the ideal environment for the cast to do their best work.  Having talked about this for some time, Gordon House (Head of BBC World Service Drama 1998-2001) finally said to me “yes, but now you actually have to go and DO it, Charlotte”. He was right. So, I did. 

Macbeth set the bar high, in so many ways. It has become the template for how we work and the benchmark against which we measure ourselves. And rightly so. Recorded on location at Glamis Castle, Scotland, with a phenomenal cast and production team, we spent a week running around in forests, shouting from the roof of the castle and experimenting with binaural technology to create a visceral, engaging experience for the listener by immersing ourselves in the work and the environment.  And it worked.  More than worked, it flew.  It is an extraordinary production, and we earned a ton of awards and accolades, which is so lovely but, most importantly, the team and cast who went to Scotland are still connected today, and we continue to hear from people who have listened to Macbeth and found their way into Shakespeare’s words through it.  It continues to touch and inspire people, listeners and creators alike, which is a phenomenal legacy.

Hamlet Noir was another first for me - this time as a writer. I had this strong sense of a parallel story to Hamlet, borne out of my Scandinavian roots. Because what happens to all the people who die in the play? Why doesn’t someone go ‘hold on a minute, something really IS rotten in the state of Denmark!’ and start investigating? And so, that’s how Hamlet Noir was conceived. It merges a modern Nordic Noir crime drama, investigating the deaths surrounding the palace, with Shakespeare’s classic text. 

Pulling such a well-known, iconic text apart was daunting. Merging and matching it with a new narrative, new characters, and new twists on an old plot was terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure. Finding just the right intercuts between old and new text, discovering ways the two narratives illuminated each other, worrying long into the night about taking too much of Shakespeare’s text away whilst simultaneously falling in love with, and giving room to, the new people in the crime drama, reworking a whole scene, the push and pull of the creative writing process. It was an extraordinary experience.

Switching seamlessly between classic and modern text, the result is an exciting and groundbreaking fusion-drama that challenges audience expectations and breaks the mold of Shakespearian conventions. I am eternally grateful that Matthew Dodd (BBC Radio 3 Commissioning Editor) believed in the concept and vision, supporting me even when the creative process wasn’t entirely linear (there is a different, all-modern version of Hamlet Noir loitering in my digital filing cabinet!) and timelines were down to the wire. 

Taking everything we had learned from Macbeth, this time Almost Tangible went international - we recorded in Denmark with a 20-strong, fantastic Scandinavian cast. Allowing the environment to influence performances, Hamlet Noir was recorded on location, at Kronborg Castle and surrounding areas, once again capturing every nuance with hand-held binaural microphones. The cast, performing with natural accents, lends a Nordic cadence and rhythm that brings together the Shakespearian, the modern English and the Danish speech as one, blurring the lines between each and emphasising the timelessness of Shakespeare's words, they are as familiar/unfamiliar as any of the modern.

It was, putting it mildly, an extraordinary feat of logistics and we were all totally exhausted by the end of it, but we also had the most brilliant time running around Kronborg, on beaches, and in rivers. And, as with Macbeth, it worked. By immersing ourselves, we immerse the listener.

Summing Almost Tangible up? We take the work incredibly seriously - we want the best of the best results for the listener - but endeavour to not take ourselves too seriously. The recording process should be rigorous and excellent and fun. Artists, of all kinds, thrive on experimentation and collaboration and support and the genuine ability to follow their creative instinct without the fear of failure. Of course we all want to create the next best thing but I fundamentally believe that ‘the next best thing’ is created by a guiding vision combined with a ‘let’s try this’ mentality rather than a prescriptive ‘let’s make this a success’ rulebook, and so we strive, always, to have a genuinely inclusive artistic process that allows us to draw the best from the talented people we have the privilege of working with. If that sounds selfless and altruistic - it really isn’t, it’s just smart creative business practice. It means we get the best, from the best of the best. 

And what next? I’m about to embark on another first - this time as director of an eco-thriller set in Norway. Recorded on location, of course.

NYF: What are the most profound changes you’ve noticed in the art of storytelling in the past 5 years?

Storytelling itself hasn't changed. It’s still about creating connection and keeping your listener engaged, until the climactic end. We still read stories to our children for that exact reason.

What has changed is the medium by which we receive it, or choose to receive it.  Linear listeners are in decline, digital on-demand audiences are on the rise, they vote with their ears. Which means an unprecedented, immediate insight into listener behaviour and the prevailing content zeitgeist (so long as the platforms let us have the stats, of course).

The other shift I think is that an almost insatiable appetite for true crime (in particular) has driven the art of the cliffhanger and the episodic drama to an absolute peak. Which is great, in so many ways - what’s not to love about that - but I also wonder. Does it speak of an attention deficit? Lives that have become too busy to enjoy longform content? Will audio content, in future, only ever become digested in bitesize ‘snacks’ because we feel so pressed (efficiency, productivity, etc.) that the notion of listening for 50mins. or 90mins, just seems too big a commitment?  Possibly. If so, it would be a great shame for listeners and creators alike. As a storyteller, I relish the creative freedom of shaping my vision across a more fluid, longer space/time continuum.  As a listener, I want to be carried along, unaware (un-reminded?) of the passing of time.

NYF: How do you decide what to greenlight into production?

I wish I could say we have hard and fast rules about what we greenlight. But really, it’s a gut-check judgement on what feels like ‘our kind of project’ combined with how/whether we think we might be able to fund it. 

We have done everything from poetry journeys (Robert Burns, Sylvia Plath, Hannah Lavery), to HC Andersen and Beatrix Potter (Little Match Girl, The Fir Tree, Peter Rabbit), renditions of classics (The Yellow Wallpaper, Goblin Market), an autobiography of living with epilepsy (Fits and Starts), and German expressionist drama (From Morning to Midnight). And of course, Shakespeare. So, it’s a real mixture. But they all start from the same place - passion and vision.

NYF: What types of technology do you find yourself using?

Binaural and ambisonic microphones are still our go-to when on location. But really, it is whatever will produce the best end result for that specific project which, in turn, is all about how we best support our creative process and realise our creative vision.

NYF: Share your thoughts about the future of audio storytelling.

That it will continue and stay strong, as always. It is the continuation of the earliest and longest form of entertainment, oral storytelling, and it is still what we crave the most. For one simple reason - it's a human-to-human connection, whether that’s from a journalist, an interviewee, or an actor. As listeners, we want them to tell us a story, take us outside ourselves, connect with something emotionally.

I think (I hope?) that a more egalitarian distribution mechanism will emerge out of the current scrum. Podcasting was it, for a while. Then various monetisation mechanisms evolved (for good reason, creators still have to eat), and the minute there was money and sizable audiences involved, the bigger players got onboard and started throwing cash at hoovering up successful content and sucking in audiences. ‘Twas always thus - and I’m not complaining that somebody out there has budgets to throw around - but still, a more egalitarian profitable-for-all way would be the dream to keep the creative ecosystem going strong.

We all wait to see how AI plays out in this space. Harnessed correctly, it is an asset to creators, in terms of speed and efficiency. Harnessed incorrectly, we will end up with a bunch of un-human content which will satisfy some, but very much not all, listeners. Because still, we want human connection, and our ears are incredibly sophisticated at picking out what is authentic.  Someone should harness that…