Claybourne

1998–present ongoing Co-producer, co-story, sound design with Belinda Todd, Jim McLarty, William Davis

A 96-episode New Zealand radio drama serial from 1998, an award-winning supernatural thriller that later became one of the first radio dramas distributed as a podcast.

Cover art from the Claybourne podcast release.

Claybourne is a New Zealand radio drama serial: ninety-six episodes of five to six minutes each, a supernatural thriller wrapped in a soap opera, set in a fictional coastal town in the far north where an American named Thompson arrives to investigate strange events and finds the town has plans of its own. It was commissioned by Newstalk ZB and broadcast from June 1998, four days a week across twenty-six New Zealand radio stations, made with the assistance of NZ On Air.

Dubber co-produced the serial with Belinda Todd through their company Pronoun Productions, shares the story credit, and built its sound design with Sean James Donnelly. It was written by and starred Jim McLarty and William Davis, with music by Victoria Kelly and Joost Langeveld, and a cast that reads like a roll call of New Zealand acting: Angela Bloomfield, Bruce Allpress, Rachel House, Anthony Ray Parker, Jodie Rimmer and George Henare as the Taniwha. The network cancelled it after about six months, with a full one-year arc written; it won Best Dramatic Production at the 1999 New Zealand Radio Awards anyway.

Then it had a second life. Released free under a Creative Commons licence, Claybourne became the most popular spoken word programme on MP3.com, was distributed by The Podcast Network in 2006, and has a fair claim, its own, echoed since, to being the first serialised radio drama distributed as a podcast. In 2026 it began a third life: a full podcast re-release of all ninety-six episodes, four a week from June through November, free, at claybournepodcast.substack.com. The first episode is playable below; the whole serial is on Bandcamp and the Internet Archive.