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Mary Tinkler

Mary was born in 1963, the third of four children. Her childhood was spent in Somerset, Surrey, Wales and South London. Mary moved to Preston in 1981 to study and work as a special needs teacher. Married with one teenage son, she now lives in Langdale and runs a holiday cottage.

She initially got involved with the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ by joining an Inside Lives group in Cumbria where she wrote two 2 minute stories for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio Cumbria. This involved spending some time with a small group, learning a few story-telling techniques, then recording her story.

After that, there was no holding her back. She was asked to participate in writing and recording a drama for radio as part of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's RaW literacy campaign. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ invited 4 people who had never met, and in just twenty one hours they produced a twenty minute drama and got a taste for writing more.

Mary, Linda and Renate

The four people went along to some workshops and had a go at team-writing a 30 minute radio drama. To complicate matters further, two of the team had English as their second language.

Linda Nkomo and Renate Rejmar who live in Salford, but are originally from Zimbabwe and Poland, were joined by Mary Tinkler from Cumbria and Howard Simon from Chorley for a series of workshops under the direction of Marie Crook.

The workshops were intensive, with the team having to come up with characters and ideas for their play as quickly as possible. Getting-to-know-you exercises revealed that everybody had a strong relationship to water: some couldn't swim; a couple had phobias of it. So they decided early on to set the play in a swimming pool.

The characters had to be based on themselves as they would also be performing, so they developed 3 female characters that are having swimming lessons with a male instructor. The title, ‘Taken by Water’ came out of a short piece of writing that Linda wrote in the very first workshop.

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ GMR’s Richard Fair and Kate Dinsdale handled the production side of the drama, directing the recording session and editing the final programme, adding sound effects and atmosphere.

Katherine Beacon from Northern Exposure - who work with new writers, also helped offering guidance and advice. Katherine agreed to come and speak to the group about writing radio drama and the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ’s commissioning process.

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ sound effects department at work!

The recording itself was an adventure – with only 3 hours available to complete the whole thing. The swimming pool setting proved difficult in terms of sound effects, but we had on hand some help from the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ drama department who sent down an experienced sound technician with a bucket of water!

Mary and Howard are both keen to continue writing for radio, so much so that Mary is already working on a new drama that she hopes will catch the eye (or should that be ear) of the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ in Manchester.

Hear Mary's Audio

You can hear Mary's Inside Lives stories and the Taken by Water radio drama on the top RHS of this page.