BEHIND THE SCENES with Martin Williams


Where did the idea come from to produce The Tourist

The idea for The Tourist (if it can be said to have an idea) came from a holiday in Portugal. I'm a very bad tourist, I think. Stupidly alert to the, um, inauthenticity of that role. Happy to embrace it but actually constantly hampered by my own hopelessness. While in Portugal I started writing a series of sentences all beginning with "The tourist . . .", some of which came from that experience of being the childlike tourist, some of which were just meant to be funny (I don't really urinate in the sink, honestly, or have a doughy aroma, I don't think)

I suppose I was also vaguely thinking about things like Marc Auge's Non-Places , and things I'd read by Dean MacCannell and James Clifford (from whom The Tourist quotes). These things perhaps combined into some kind of opening onto the more melancholic aspects of the tourist experience: the sense of being a stranger, of being outside the rhythms of life, of being essentially purposeless (these are all, of course, aside from the more important problems that flow from mass tourism today.) At the same time I wrote a few scenarios featuring a character referred to as "the tourist." The resulting programme is really just a happenstance combination of these bits of writing, along with recordings I made while in Portugal: a city park, Porto streets, preparations for take off and the sound of someone eating pistachios on a Lisbon balcony

But, really, I'd prefer to say that I don't think The Tourist has an idea as such. I hope that can be a good thing. My partner is an actress who quite often makes devised theatre performances and I'm a little envious of what I understand that process to be, of the way it seems able to accommodate ambiguity and discussion and imagination. There doesn't seem to be much of an equivalent in radio, which is so often more about definitives and boiling things down. The shadow of journalism I suppose. Then again I probably should say that this programme and in fact all the programmes I've made have had a budget of zero and been broadcast on a radio station whose annual budget is equally skinny. Maybe such ambiguity is a luxury that more affluent institutions find difficult to afford

What were you trying to achieve through the sound design

Hmmm. I don't know. Trying to make a virtue out of necessity is probably the most honest answer. Perhaps trying to match the mood of the spoken interludes, perhaps trying to make it evocative of some kind of archetypal tourist experience. It was made about a year ago -- I'm sure if I was to make it now it would turn out quite different. The recordings haven't been treated at all. I tried to make the most of any resonances between what I'd written and things I'd recorded. The really nice piano refrain is by William Basinski, from his work The Garden of Brokenness . The three female voices -- Ana Bonaldo, Haimo Li, and Maike Zimmermann -- are friends whose non-English accents hopefully combine to add some vague sense of placelessness

There's a great variety of stories, and approaches to storytelling on your site . . . what would you say, if anything, ties all of your work together

An absence of budget would probably be one thing. Some of the programmes I've made are quite formal documentaries which attempt to convey or recreate a specific story or event, while others are more abstract or absurd, possibly nearer to being music. I don't know what might tie those together. They were all made in a quite self-contained way. They were all intended for radio. Maybe that's what ties them together: they were made for radio

Radio doesn't demand great resources, doesn't require a cast of thousands. I suppose it'd be nice to think that those conditions encouraged less strategising, greater plurality. Hoping to tap into this plurality I organised a series of programmes last year called No Place Like Home, basically asking 20 or so people to make a radio programme around the theme of Home. The results -- essays, sound collages, documentaries, musical compositions, interviews, field recordings -- maybe combine into some index of what makes radio interesting.