2026 Charles Parker Day: Friday 8 May

The Charles Parker Day – the annual celebration of the audio feature, past, present and future – returned to the University of Salford’s Digital Media Performance Lab in MediaCityUK. Sessions explore the importance of the creative audio feature in today’s busy media landscape. The day will examine the power and importance of listening – both to the voices of ordinary people telling extraordinary stories, and to creative audio features, those which cease to be background sound and actually stop the listener in their tracks.

Manchester – and now Salford – has played a defining role in the history of the creative audio feature, from the pioneering work of Olive Shapley in the 1930s through to landmark strands such as Between the Ears in the present day.   Mel Harris, from Manchester based Sparklab Productions talked to Peter Everett, a key figure behind the innovative BBC North series Actuality and Soundtrack in the 1980s and 1990s – programmes that played an important role in the development of the modern audio feature. We also heard from Matthew Dodd, the BBC commissioning editor responsible for Radio 3’s Between the Ears. 

We met Olivia Swift, senior producer at Manchester-based Reform Radio, whose documentary The Door-to-Door Poet, made for BBC Radio 4, explores the work of the remarkable door-to-door poet Rowan McCabe.  We also heard from Nija Dalal-Small about her feature Testament to Rose on Manchester’s almost forgotten Bard of Colour.  Both features echo the legacy of Charles Parker and the Radio Ballads, exploring how contemporary makers are reimagining that tradition through documentary, poetry and community storytelling.  Other speakers during the day included producers Jo Meek and Geoff Bird from the Manchester-based collective Naked Productions; BBC North feature producers Elizabeth Foster and Catherine Murray; and BBC commissioner Hugh Levinson.

The winning features of the 2026 Charles Parker Prize for the Best Student Audio Feature will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as part of the New Storytellers series during the summer.  These winners were announced during the day, which concluded with a choice of sessions: a listening masterclass designed specifically for students, with advice from producers, commissioners and Charles Parker himself. 

For other attendees a separate session focussed on the use of archive material. This included the discovery of new material in the Charles Parker Archive. We also heard from Philippa Donnellan, the daughter of Parker's colleague from BBC Birmingham Philip Donnellan, who made TV films based on some of the original Radio Ballads. And Sean Cooney talked about his new show Peter's Field based on contemporary accounts of Manchester's Peterloo Massacre.

The Charles Parker Archive Trust is a charity and the streamed version of the conference is available free of charge. If you are able to contribute, a donation towards the running costs of the day would be greatly appreciated