The series that examines books, plays and stories and how they work. John Yorke looks at the 1962 theatre memoir Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff. The text is a comic account of Hanff’s attempts to break into New York theatre in the early 1940s, which found a new audience after the success of Hanff’s later epistolary memoir 84, Charing Cross Road.

Underfoot in Show Business is a dispatch from a golden era in New York theatre, in which Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were actively producing plays.

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that are being dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. As creator of the BBC Writers Academy, he's trained a generation of screenwriters - now with over 70 green lights and thousands of hours of television to their names. He is the author of Into the Woods, the bestselling book on narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of narrative - including many podcasts for R4.

Contributor: Howard Sherman, US writer for The Stage

Readings from Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff (Futura Publications, 1980) Audio from Friday Night, Saturday Morning (BBC Television, 1980) and Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4, 1981)

Reader: Madeleine Paulson Sound: Sean Kerwin Researcher: Henry Tydeman Production Hub Coordinator: Nina Semple Producer: Lucy Hough Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4