Roger James Elsgood is a dramatist, an audio dramaturg, and an independent arts producer for the BBC. He is a product of the English art school system and trained in figurative painting at Norwich and Camberwell Schools of Art. He was taught by Lucian Freud, Euan Uglow, and Robert Medley. 

Inevitably, this led to four years of working in the music industry, where he managed the live-performance careers of many well-known musicians. Elton John engaged him to represent the live performance work of the roster artists at Rocket Records, and he went on to work for The Who at Track Records in a similar capacity.

On returning to creative work, his first documentary film, ‘Sea See C’, about the poor state of British art education, was made with director Alan Sekers and included a conversation with British sculptor Henry Moore OM. It focuses on a summer school taught by Roger and the artist Robin Hazlewood. It won the Silver Hugo prize at the Chicago International Film Festival. His second film, ‘Time and Light’ featured the work and ideas of John Berger, with whom he went on to have a 22-year creative friendship, which included productions of  John’s ‘To The Wedding’ a collaboration with Complicite and ‘Will it be a Likeness?’, both made for BBC Radio 3.

His production company, Art and Adventure Ltd, was one of the early independent audio production companies supplying programmes to the BBC. He co-developed the process of location-recorded audio drama and made several large-scale productions in India and Sri Lanka with local casts and crews. 

He was the first British journalist to be given access to the Taj Hotel in Bombay immediately following the 2008 terrorist attack and interviewed eyewitnesses and survivors for BBC Radio 4.

He was the only remaining accredited British broadcaster working in Sri Lanka as the civil war ended in 2009 and reported on the events for BBC World and the BBC World Service.

Film director Mike Hodges heard the broadcast of Roger’s audio drama production of Anne Michaels’s Orange Prize-winning book ‘Fugitive Pieces’ and suggested they work together. This led to productions of Mike’s ‘Shooting Stars and Other Heavenly Pursuits’ with Michael Gambon, Clive Owen, and Michael Sheen, and ‘King Trash’, his take on a modern-day King Lear with George Sewell and Cherie Lunghi, both for BBC Radio 3. His death in 2022 thwarted the much-hoped-for ‘Mike Hodges radio trilogy’.

Roger worked with British artist Tacita Dean on her first mystically autobiographical audio work for BBC Radio 3. ‘Berlin Project’ became part of Tacita’s exhibition, ‘Berlin Works’, at Tate St. Ives and is in the Tate Collection.

Roger enjoyed a rewarding creative relationship with British actor Corin Redgrave, with whom he recorded Trevor Nunn’s National Theatre production of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis in Wilde’s hospital cell in Reading Prison, which was released as an audio CD.

His adaptation of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ was made for the Corin Redgrave Student Bursary Fund. In a cast that included Alex Jennings, Laurie Anderson, and Arthur Brown, Corin played Dante the Poet. Canongate publishes the recording.

For several years, Roger collaborated with Indian writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri on live performance projects, culminating in a six-city tour of major Indian cities of Amit’s musical production of ‘A Moment of Mishearing’. ‘A Moment of Mishearing’ became a film documentary Roger co-produced with director Don Boyd. Roger produced several radio features with Amit, including ‘Tagore and the Bengali Sensibility’, ‘Durga Puja with Amit Chaudhuri’ and ‘The Songs That Shaped Me’ for BBC Radio 3.

Roger has worked for over 20 years with the director and RADA teacher Willi Richards, making long-form audio dramas for BBC Radio 3 and 4, including ‘The Mrichhakatikaa’, ‘The Two Gentlemen of Valasna’, ‘Chowringhee’, ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’, a documentary- drama about the extra-judicial murder of Sri Lankan journalist Richard de Zoysa,  ‘Mogadishu’, Vivienne Franzmann’s Bruntwood Prize-winning play and the classic ‘Beau Geste’ starring Robert Hastie. Roger and Willi worked together on Roger’s adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, recorded in Copenhagen with Sofie Grabol, Lars Mikkelsen and Marie Bach Hansen and on Roger’s dramatisation of the eponymous novel by Haydn Middleton, ‘The Ballad of Syd & Morgan’ with Simon Russell Beale and Tyger Drew-Honey in which E M Forster and Syd Barrett explore the importance of finding and retaining a place in the world through creative work.

Roger produced a television version of Willi’s stage play ‘Rush’, starring Rupert Everett, Omari Douglas and Danial Boyd, for BBC Arts’ COVID-19 initiative, Culture in Quarantine.

Roger produced ‘Think, Breathe, Speak’ for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He is a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he teaches intertextuality and audio dramaturgy on the MA Audio and Scriptwriting course. He has taught location drama production skills for the BBC Academy. He is an accredited Executive Producer for the BBC, trained in broadcast compliance and editorial policy and has undertaken the BBC Hazardous Environments training. He was a five-time judge for the Sony Radio Drama Production Award and is an alumnus mentor working with graduate students at the University of the Arts London.