Well, it’s been a funny old year, hasn’t it? Everything online, including Charles Parker Day, cancelled festivals, students holed up in residences with the virus rampaging across campuses and all that desperate Zooming, Skyping and Microsoft Teaming!

Amazingly, the annual national award for excellence in student audio feature making, the Charles Parker Prize, went ahead as normal. As a Charles Parker trustee and Chair of the Award jury since its inception, I was – with my fellow trustees – concerned that the entry level might drop like a stone – it didn’t and was only slightly down on previous years…. And that there would only be one subject on students’ minds, ie Lockdown, contagion, isolation and despair. Well, on that score too, we were happily surprised and our fears unfulfilled.

So, what was on everyone’s mind? Well, unsurprisingly, it was the usual roster of people with problems and personal tragedies to overcome. Someone once said that the bar for this sort of subject should be set higher than that for other programmes – inasmuch as someone ‘with a problem’ is too easy a subject for factual enquiry. It should be a particularly dramatic story, or surprising in some way. I tend very much to subscribe to this view, and so was pleased when my fellow jurors and I had several issue-driven programmes to discuss that really were special.

My associates, by the way, this year were Mair Bosworth, BBC producer from Bristol and former Parker winner, Mukti Jain Campion, a featuremaker who sits on the panel of the Audio Content Fund, Charlotte Runcie, radio critic of the Daily Telegraph and Philip Sellars, executive editor of BBC Radio Documentary unit.

One such was Finding My Frequency by Shelley Gates of the University of Salford, which was a skilful piece about autism that showed that this condition, sometimes seen as a handicap, can be a strong advantage for people working in broadcasting. Isobel Howe of the University of the West of England made a powerful programme about living with a cleft palate, Read My Lips. It was vivid, open and also funny. I always think that some humour in a programme essentially about tragedy really adds perspective to the drama while also connecting warmly with the listener. Beyond the Cold, by Kate White from the University of the West of England used the subject, Rowan,’s love of cold water swimming as a way into her issues of body image. Chantal Herbert’s Outsider Sisters for the University of Sunderland, was a brilliant and beautiful collage of strongly held views by women of colour talking about their place in contemporary Britain.

Inevitably and memorably, the questions raised by Black Lives Matter in 2020 featured this year, and none more so than in two documentaries marking the 40th anniversary of the tragedy of the firebombing of a house in New Cross, south east London, in which 13 young black people died. One feature in particular, by Magdalena Moursy for Goldsmiths, University of London, called 40 Years On, wove wonderful actuality of street protest with the agonising testimony of witnesses and the lambent lament written about the crime by poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. The jury was unanimous that in a year when we were again interrogating ourselves about inherent racism in our society this was a worthy recipient of the Gold Award.

On an altogether lighter note, The Bathing Place, by Hunter Charlton, again for Goldsmiths, told the story of the stretch of the river Cherwell in Oxford that for many generations was maintained as a private nude swimming area for men. Parson’s Pleasure no longer formally exists, it seems, yet still, in Covid 19 Britain, lives on in some gay men’s experience. Hunter’s programme, apart from being technically the most accomplished of all our entries, had the great virtue of being both fascinating and funny.

A couple of short shout-outs for A Doctor and a Violin which gave a moving account of a surgeon’s sadly in the end unsuccessful intervention in the life of a seriously ill patient, set to a refrain of solo violin performance, and to Imad Al-Suliman’s Journey of Death that charted the escape of one refugee from Syria told through his unpublished diaries. Both were powerful personal narratives told with passion and heart-twisting emotion.

Oh, yes, and Covid? Of course it did get a look in – and made it to the final run of features selected for BBC Radio 4’s New Storytellers this year. I personally loved – and was very moved by – Cherry Rothwell’s Closure for Goldsmiths, which used voice-messaging recordings by students to chart the growing horrific dawning of the reality of lockdown and the loss of their freedom. But it’s He’s Only a Cleaner - a powerful monologue by industrial decontaminator Steve, talking us emotionally through his own working life dealing with the horrors of keeping the public safe from Covid – that will feature in New Storytellers 2021. Hats off to producer Emma Millen for University of Sunderland.

Finally, also for Sunderland, Stephen Bissett’s Make it Happen told a story of hardship, rough lives and despair amongst three male friends. Unemployment is the spectre that haunts this programme, and its raw power – the real voices of the men caught in a way Charles Parker would have admired – stood out amongst the most moving stories of 2020.

How will the two windowcleaners and their unemployed mate fare as we return to some sort of post-Covid normal and jobs become unsupported by furlough and other schemes? That’s a tale for the makers of next year’s Charles Parker entries, of course.