Studio & Archive · 2026-09-03
And who pays for radio drama?! Brussels!
A Belgian science-fiction radio drama was first heard on a university community station in the summer of 2026, and by 30 August it was already on the public airwaves in Brussels. The order is not accidental: the rules of the Belgian radio drama fund require it. Hungary's radio drama financing drew on a similar source — until it switched to „manual control” around 2020.
„Nos souvenirs sont votre avenir” („Our memories are your future”), a science-fiction radio drama series by Adrien Pinet and Thomas Licata, ran on Brussels station Radio Campus over the summer. The Belgian public broadcaster RTBF aired it in a re-edited version six days after the series ended (30 August).
That order was not an editorial choice. The work was supported in 2024 by the FACR, the radio creation fund of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, with some 21,000 euros (about 8 million forints), as a 90-minute fiction; the producer is the independent sound studio Deux temps trois mouvements („in a jiffy”). According to the fund's 2024 report, an application must show „the commitment of at least one private sound service (radio) of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles to ensure the first broadcast of the work”. RTBF, as a public broadcaster, was legally unable to fill that role — Radio Campus could.
The FACR, which supports documentary, fiction and music works, was created in 1987 (and is still running today!!) and is now governed by the February 2021 media decree. Its money does not come from the state budget but from the radio advertising market: according to the report, RTBF pays in two per cent of its radio advertising revenue each year — 417,371 euros in 2024 (154 million forints) — while private network radios contributed a further 878,117 euros (325 million forints), almost 1.3 million euros in total (479 million forints). Of that, 26 of 76 applications received support in 2024, sharing 488,600 euros (181 million forints); fiction works received 194,647 euros (72 million forints) and documentaries 277,553 (103 million forints). That works out at an average of 18,792 euros — roughly 6.9 million forints — per supported work.
The Hungarian system draws on strikingly similar money. The ORTT and later the National Media and Infocommunications Authority likewise lived on frequency fees and other charges. In 2025 the media service fee paid by commercial broadcasters amounted to 1,405 million forints, which went to the Media Council's Support Programme.
The difference lies not in where the money comes from but in who may reach it. In Hungary, after the ORTT era, the Cserés Miklós tender was launched in 2014 within the Hungarian Media Patronage programme, supporting the production of radio dramas and radio docudramas. In 2015, 50 million forints went to twenty radio dramas — an average of 2.5 million each. The tender ran for the last time in 2018 and was discontinued on 1 January 2020 along with the Patronage programme's creator competitions; since then media service providers, not independent workshops, are the ones who can apply within the Media Council's support system. In the most recent years only MTVA has commissioned radio plays, from external producers of its own choosing (Kaneta and Thália) — or readings, solo and collective, resembling radio plays. Listeners came to know this commissioning arrangement from the mouthful announced after each play — „produced on the order of Duna Médiaszolgáltató Nonprofit Zrt., on behalf of MTVA” — from which the one thing that did not emerge was which studio had actually made the piece.
The Belgian and the Hungarian model thus start, this latter interlude aside, from the same basic idea: that the radio dramas made in a country should be financed by commercial radio and its advertisers. In Belgium, however, the rule opens the money to independent production houses and steers the premiere explicitly towards private stations, so the small broadcasters are the first to receive what the large ones financed. In Hungary the financing of radio art now needs to be rethought from the ground up — not only at the new Magyar Rádió, but also for the work made in other radio workshops, those operating with a frequency and those without.
🎧 Radio Campus — a sorozat epizódjai
🎧 RTBF Auvio — első rész (54 perc)
Sources
- FACR — 2024 annual report of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles radio creation fund (PDF)
- Radio Campus Bxl 92.1 — the series' first episode in the „Créations radiophoniques” programme (2026-07-20)
- Radio Campus — the „Créations radiophoniques” programme page (with all six broadcast dates)
- RTBF Auvio — Par Ouï-dire, the two-part version and the full credits (2026-08-30)
- Act LXIII of 2024 on the 2025 unified budget of the Hungarian media authority (NMHH)
- NMHH — official note on the revenue sources of its unified budget
- Hungarian Media Patronage — summary of the Cserés Miklós radio drama tender
- NMHH — the Media Council's 2015 decision: 50 million forints for twenty radio dramas (2015-10-30)
- ELTE Radio Drama Database — production credits on the catalogue records („commissioned by …, produced on behalf of MTVA by Kaneta Produkció”, and likewise Thália Színház Nonprofit Kft.)
- MédiaKlikk — MTVA's own description of the Rádiószínház strand
- Népszava — Krisztina Hompola on the relaunch of radio drama on Kossuth Rádió and the state of the archive (2026-07-14)
- Index — MTVA merged into Duna Médiaszolgáltató; the successor is named Magyar Rádió és Televízió Nonprofit Zrt. (2026-07-27)
AI involvement — Research: partly · Writing: partly · Verification: partly. The article is based on machine translation of original texts in French.