016 Speculative Fiction – New
I had difficulty processing The Receiver of Wreck by Ben Cottam. He is evidently talented, loving to moonlight
in his own dramas and seems firmly situated in the north of England. Jen, the titular Receiver of Wreck as played
by Alice Lowe, was real enough, isolated in her job, which forced her to be
continually on the road. When arriving
in a ghost of a coastal Lancashire town, her grip on reality begins to unpeel
(though it’s unclear, in a very sort of magical realist way, whether her
experiences are shared by others; some of them seem to be). So it’s an odd and challenging mix between
very down-to-earth characters, such as librarian/trainspotter/general geek
Malcolm (Pearce Quigley doing his best James Fleet) and policewoman Kelly (Lucy
Gaskell), and mystical, mysterious characters such as the Mayor, the sinister
and oh-so-(northern)-posh Prudence Peacock and the Polish immigrant who, like
Jen, can never go home. What was the
wreck of the ship that might spell salvation for a northern town with no
industry and no future? What was the
ghost of the railway station doing at night keeping a hyper-active Jen
awake? What was the significance of
Kelly being unable to scream? What were
we to make of Coast Guard Adam buying flowers for Jen? Did Jen ever get out of the town or she is
stuck there, like the Prisoner in Portmeirion?
I don’t know, but it was an interesting drama nonetheless. It was directed by Alison Crawford.
Hello Caller by
Jonathan Holloway was an interesting idea for a drama. The idea is that most of the telephone boxes
across the UK are being dismantled. So
where are all those calls—stored in the ether, or like the magical post-horn or
Rabelais’ sound plums—going? Well, into
our ears, apparently, as we hear a kaleidoscope (kaleidophone?) of
conversations. Some of the more
interesting ones go on for a long time; sometimes we can hear both speakers,
sometimes only one. For example, a
middle-aged woman has just found out she has months to live, so she’s told her
husband, but doesn’t want to tell the children.
She has to make plans for the maintenance of one of her developmentally
disabled children, in case her husband then dies, too. It was quite moving. While we had a time travel drama—in which a
woman calling from the 1950s reaches a man in the 1990s—their connection is
brief. Later, we even have
telecommunications with a ghost—in the 1970s, a boy and a girl connect over the
line, only for him to subsequently realize she has died a few months
previously, and now her sole existence is within the telephone wires. Literally haunting. Quite an unusual format for an Afternoon
Drama; it’s the kind of thing I would have expected to hear as a podcast. It, too, was directed by Alison Crawford and
starred the excellent Annette Badland, Luke MacGregor, Sean Murray, David
Reakes, and Alex Tregear.
Stopping to think about the story in Martians made me really sad.
It’s one thing to move to another country. It’s another thing to sign up for a mission
to Mars knowing you will never be able to return to Earth, let alone see your
family again. That’s what Laura (Tia
Bannon) has done in this story, set in the near future, in which she has joined
a group of young astronauts who are going to start a colony on Mars. Laura is a midwife, enriched by the strains
of her St Lucian grandmother (who is introduced to us via camcorder recordings
from the early Noughties) and her Irish father.
This drama stitches together her last moments with her family, as she
packs her 100g of personal items, helped by her brother Michael; final
conversations between her mother and father; and Laura interviewed with her
fellow Martians on a radio chat show.
Laura’s older sister Margot is the only one who questions Laura’s
choice, but does so only in interior monologue; I wish she had voiced her
concerns out loud, to bring that part of the drama some actual closure. Did Laura ever make it to Mars? I guess that’s the subject for another
drama. Martians was written by Lucy Caldwell and starred Toheeb Jimoh,
Angel Coulby, Michelle Greenridge, Lloyd Hutchinson, Joy Richardson, Tallulah
Bond, Ronny Jhuti, and Beth Goddard. It
was directed by Celia De Wolff.
