It was a dark and stormy night when Today Translations first set sight on Roger James Elsgood. Well, actually, it wasn’t. It was a benign autumnal evening at the National Liberal Club where we had sponsored an evening of entertainment put together by our board member Sir Timothy Ackroyd. Tim had commissioned Roger to adapt Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a radio-style, in-the-dark presentation to an assembled audience who had little idea of what they were about to see. Or rather, not see.

Roger’s Dracula was a story told by absent actors (they were in an adjacent room) to an audience who could only dimly see the narrator, the wonderful Andrew Jarvis. The cast, led by “Only Fools and Horses” John Challis as Count Dracula with actors from Hollyoaks and EastEnders gave us a chilling (but nevertheless jolly) entertainment over the course of an evening in the manner of an old-style radio show.

Roger is a writer and a producer with a track record of high-profile drama productions for BBC Radio 3 and 4 and is a creative content provider for several international organisations. You can see details of his work at www.artandadventure.org. We thought that Roger would be a good fit with the ambitions of Today Translations and we have asked him to become part of the team – and he was delighted to accept the challenge. So, we are very happy to welcome Roger to Today Translations. Roger is our creative content specialist and specialist on translating English into English. He will contribute to a blog on the world of language, translation and other things that interest him. You can read Roger’s first blog “Speaking in Tongues” about FIFA and the World Cup on https://www.todaytranslations.com/news/fifa-speaking-tongues