The Mary Celeste Is A Mystery At Sea

"I had the realisation that the whole project would’ve been heaps easier had I written a mystery before, or worked on a series before."

Rolfe had the Mary Celeste mystery pocketed as an idea for a project, and was just waiting for the right one to come along; as he was pitching some radio ideas, he thought it would be perfect for an audio series format. The creative process was not exactly smooth sailing (sorry) though. “Yeah, there were a lot of challenges,” laughs Rolfe. “A bit before half way through writing it, I had the realisation that the whole project would’ve been heaps easier had I written a mystery before, or worked on a series before. Serialising a story obviously is different to writing a well rounded story that sits into a one-off broadcast. That’s where my experience is — I’ve had a couple of other radio dramas on Radio National before [including Dying Words and Like A Writing Desk] but they were all just one-off things. I’m really happy with how the series turned out, but it is quite difficult to advance a story — particularly a mystery story that requires a lot of exposition that you have to disguise as action — in every episode sufficiently. But I think we did it, it’s a pretty enjoyable show.”

Listening to A Thoroughly Wet Mess really feels like watching a film — the acting is there (featuring the voice talents of actors you’ve seen on Aussie TV), the sound effects and the music, too — except you just have to conjure up the imagery yourself. Co-producer Jesse Cox provided direction from a sound point of view — “like are we getting the right levels, do we wanna get them a bit further away from the mic so they sound like they’re across the room” — while Rolfe took care of the script — and story-based direction. “Because of the nature of the project we had to record out of sequence, which is fairly common, but within a mystery, with a group of actors who haven’t spent weeks and weeks with the script, it was really useful having me on hand to basically give them a briefing before each scene about what they know, and what they don’t yet know, who knows what and when...”

What is it about mysteries that can cause people to obsess over them? “I do think that the value in a mystery is in its not being solved. But that value certainly expresses itself by the desire to solve it — and that’s kind of what we play with in the series a bit.”