Perhaps someone can help here

I have a few questions on writing short stories / plays ~ principally aimed at
1) Radio for a 15 minute duration, &
2) Radio play for 45 - 60 minute hour duration

the questions are ...

In general terms for a Short Story reading how many words would it take to fill the 15 minutes ?
For plays it would be even more fluid in time but a similar question is how many words for the 45 - 60 minute duration?
I cannot find any guidance on this on any of the BBC links

Another question is ... When does a short story start to become a novelette?

I have been looking up various competition rules & they seem to limit or request 5000 words maximum
Another competition for a novel submission requires not less than 50,000 words

Many Thanks

I dont know much to help you, but this site might have some answers. It is Transom.Org, a resource for independent radio producers in the USA. Best of luck.

Transom.Org

I wrote to the bbc shortly after posting the question here, so for any budding writers here is the reply received today

The word count for a short story is 2100 (max) (This to fit with approx 15 min duration)

There is no word count for dramas, because it depends on what is happening in the drama. The only way to find out the duration is to time it read it out aloud, as if acted. It might sound primitive this, but this is still how we time a play we are going to record. ( As a general rule of thumb based on the short story word count I would assume that around 6000 words for 45 minute & max 8000 for 60 minute duration - probably a lot less if you account for space / sound effects / etc )

A half-hour radio-drama would probably be about 15-20 minutes long. Pack in the sawdust of advertisments and station-identification, that makes if half an hour. I have seen some old radio-scripts in my time, but I could not remember how long (pagewise), they ran for. Not sure how much help this is...sorry.

The Complete Book of Scriptwriting by J. Michael Straczynski covers writing for radio.

-Kushana

I am an advertising copywriter. While I only tend to write in 30 and 60-second chunks, I can tell you that nothing beats a using stopwatch and reading your script out loud the way you intend for people to hear it. Word counts don't work because a word can be anything from one syllable to several. And word counts don't take into account things like dramatic pauses.