“I’M thinking about the heat death of the universe, the Jupiter effect, a Malthusian crisis, all the big hitter ends of the world all at once. Life on Earth as we know it just ending or stopping completely. I think it’s calming me down.”
It’s always a treat when Radio Scotland breaks from its sometimes overly rigid programme formatting to try something different and on Thursday Michael Lee Richardson’s half-hour drama The End of the World was a reminder that there can be more to radio than phone-ins and football chat.
Panic attacks, apocalyptic thinking and the difficulties fathers and sons can have in talking to each other were at the heart of Richardson’s drama, one of two radio plays commissioned in association with BBC Writersroom and inspired by A Million & Me, BBC Children in Need’s programme that aims to support children’s mental health.
The End of the World was a vision of teenage anxiety and parental incomprehension, one that caught the jittery energy and circular thinking of its central character played with a lovely mixture of compassion and incomprehension by Jordan Cramond.
In the same slot on Wednesday morning writer Brian McIver’s Fissures took us caving in a story that, like The End of the World, parcelled out its revelations slowly and teasingly. And as someone who finds the thought of squeezing between rocks hundreds of feet beneath the Earth’s surface utterly horrific, Fissures was also easily the scariest thing I’ve heard all week. And that’s quite something in a week when Donald Trump is still in the White House and threatening chaos.
Look Out For: Al Murray: Totally Out of Character, Radio 4, Tuesday, 6.30pm. The comedian sets aside his Pub Landlord persona, pictured above, and appears as himself in this new Radio 4 comedy series.
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