To coin a phrase “Good news everybody!” There’s been a hiatus with the Very British Futures podcast for a few months, although I have been recording several conversations. The reason was that I am presenting a mini-series about 1982 BBC anthology Play for Tomorrow and I wanted it to be hitting your ears on a weekly basis. So I couldn’t release the first one until they were all ready to go.

But today is the day and you can hear what Rod Brown (host of Nostalgia Tours podcast) and myself made of the first entry – Crimes by Caryl Churchill.

Play for Tomorrow was a short-lived experiment by television producer Neil Zeiger, who was already in charge of the well-regarded Play for Today strand of one-off plays which ultimately ran for 15 seasons between 1970 and 1984. Amongst its wide variety of original stories were modern classics like Blue Remembered Hills, Abigail’s Party and Edna the Inebriate Woman. Whilst most of its plays were realist, it occasionally ventured into science fiction, most notably in The Flipside of Dominic Hyde. It was the success of that time travel comedy that encouraged Zeiger to propose a mini-season of plays set in the near future UK, based on realistic scientific and social science predictions.

Crimes is not so much as story as a think piece, a collection of linked monologues. building a picture of a more regimented Britain in the shadow of a continued Cold War. A group of prisoners are attending a mandatory therapy session under the chairmanship of Melvyn, a successful criminal psychologist. But is Melvyn himself really in a good place to be deciding on other’s sanity?

I deliberately wanted to have some fresh voices in this mini-season, as well as some old friends. Rod Brown is a fairly recent podcaster on the seen but his Doctor Who podcast Nostalgia Tours is already building a rep for itself. He’s an excellent guest as you’ll find out in this episode. Hope you enjoy this special set of Very British Futures episodes, available on your favourite podcast app.