"The best radio of 2006" - Gillian Reynolds, Daily Telegraph
"Public service broadcasting at its very finest" - Music Week

The 2006 Radio Ballads series was an ambitious documentary and songwriting project to update the 'radio ballad' techniques of Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker, and apply them to 21st century issues.

The original Radio Ballads were broadcast in the late 1950s/early 1960s and considered a seminal documentary series in radio history. MacColl and Parker conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with people involved in the building of Britain's motorways and the fishing industry, with coalminers, boxers, travellers, teenagers and people living with polio; people whose voices were not ordinarily heard on the BBC.

Well aware of the giant footsteps they were walking in, the Smooth Operations team adopted the original principles and updated the approach for the modern era, developing a seamless transition between speech, song and atmosphere, telling powerful stories without the intrusion of a narrator.

Executive producer John Leonard and musical director John Tams assembled some of the finest names in contemporary folk music to write songs based on interviews gathered on six new subjects: the decline of the steel and shipbuilding industries, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the ban on hunting with hounds, the lives of Britain's fairground communities and people living with HIV/AIDS.

The songwriting team included Julie Matthews, Jez Lowe, Karine Polwart, Tommy Sands and John Tams, with musicians John McCusker, Andy Cutting, Graeme Taylor, Mike McGoldrick and Andy Seward providing superb backing for singers Bob Fox, Barry Coope, Cara Dillon, Kellie While, Chris While and Kate Rusby.

From the deeply personal stories gathered by interviewers Vince Hunt and Sara Parker, the team wrote more than 60 poignant songs for the six-part series. The 2006 Radio Ballads was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 between February and April 2006, and repeated over the Christmas holiday.

A stage version of the Ballads was commissioned in January 2007 by Glasgow's Celtic Connections festival. Highlights of the live show - which featured the full 2006 Ballads company and received a standing ovation - will be broadcast on BBC Radio 2 sometime in 2008.

Smooth Operations produced an in-depth Radio Ballads website accompanying the series for Radio 2. It features historical and educational links, details of the documentary process, galleries, speech clips and video, as well as extracts of the original Ballads of MacColl, Parker and Peggy Seeger.

All of the 2006 Radio Ballads, including a compilation of the series' songs, are available on CD. Please email Smooth Operations for further details.