Nenagh Man On Radio

Just to remind you, on Tuesday the 17th of April 2007, at 3.30pm, the British Broadcasting Corporation will broadcast their cleaned-up version of Julian Gough's "The Orphan And The Mob" on Radio 4. The magnificent Conor Lovett will be reading it. The reading will be available online for the week after the broadcast, from the BBC Radio 4 website.

I should warn you that this is a BBC daytime edit of my story, so you will be shocked and appalled by the lack of bad language or biological detail. Personally I think it's not the same story without lines like "Ardcroney ballocks!", and lots of stuff concerning urethral sphincters under intense pressure. But at least 60% of my story is being broadcast (albeit with its ballocks cut off and urethral sphincter removed), unlike Hanif Kureishi's "Weddings and Beheadings", which the BBC have just pulled. His story is about a guy who's forced to film beheadings. The BBC had a journalist, Alan Johnston, kidnapped in Gaza last month, and a group has just claimed to have beheaded him, so one can understand the BBC's reluctance to broadcast Kureishi's story this week, whether or not you sympathise with that reluctance.

It's great that the BBC are trying to bring attention to the best modern writing by sponsoring this prize, but it does make you wonder how good a fit it is if daytime BBC can't broadcast half of it. I don't know how much they've had to cut from the other stories, but I get the feeling this is proving a more challenging year for them than last year (the first year of the National Short Story Prize) when the stories were by people like William Trevor and Rose Tremain.