Wokingham

Just the way she likes it.

This was a tricky one. One thing I was sure of when I started exploring ideas for a 'Martin's family' episode was that I didn't want any of them to be out and out villains. Carolyn's sister in Helsinki and Arthur's father in St Petersburg both turned out to be pretty nasty pieces of work, and I thought it would be stretching it a bit to have three members of the crew related to monsters. But of course, there has to be some source of tension and conflict, or there's no story. And so, eventually, I came up with Wendy's genuine, non-manipulative, yet still fantastically annoying compulsion not to be a bother to anyone. Similarly with Simon: he's brash and insensitive, but he's also genuinely fond of Martin, pleased to see him, and is even quick to praise him, in his own condescending way. Basically, we all fall back into our old roles when we visit our families, and for Simon, Martin will always be nine. Anyway, as often happens when you set yourself more or less arbitrary extra restrictions in writing, good things came out of it - Arthur as the perfect Wendy-neutralising force, for instance; and the chance to play a little at the end with the possibility that Martin was actually being a bit hard on Simon….

And then we only went and got Prunella Scales to play Wendy! I mean, Good Lord. As if it wasn't comedy-royalty-amazing enough (and it really is) that I get to play scenes every episode with Stephanie Cole, now it turned out I had written a two-hander scene I would play with actually Prunella genuinely Scales! (If you don't know what all the fuss is about, then I'm pretty sure you're not from Britain. That's fine, it's not your fault, poor thing. But do Google her. And Stephanie.)

What else? Oh yes: this episode contains I think quite a good example of what I mean when I say sometimes that it's actually very easy to do visual jokes on the radio. The example I usually give is the unfilmable last scene of Douz, but this is a subtler version. It's when the doctor meets Martin and Caitlyn in the hospital, and says he's sorry they had to come away from their party, to which Martin, after a moment's puzzlement, replies: 'Oh… no, these are actually our jobs.' The radio listener has to think back to make sense of this, and recall that we've been told Martin is a pilot, Caitlyn is a traffic warden, and Wendy's chided them both for coming straight from work, in their uniforms. So the realisation of what the doctor saw when he came in hits the audience in one moment, and also functions as a call back - the audience race back through what they've heard so far to make sense of the line. On television, we'd see the uniforms constantly, so although the line would still make sense, it wouldn't be as funny, because the audience would have to do no work to get the joke - and oddly, having to do a bit of mental work tends to make jokes funnier. 

NOTES AND QUERIES

'Hang on… doesn't Douglas lose the one syllable game in his cabin address?'

No.

'Yes he does! He says 'hour', and that's two syll-

No he doesn't. Of course he doesn't. Why would you make up such a silly lie?

'He does! He definitely says 'hour'! Go back and listen, he-'

I don't need to listen. There's no way he says 'hour'. And even if he did, which he didn't, Carolyn didn't notice, so he didn't lose. And anyway, I did that deliberately, to, er, to demonstrate that… er… …for reasons you wouldn't understand. Next question. 

Why is Caitlyn pronounced 'Kate-lyn' in Limerick and 'Cat-lyn' here? 

She was always 'Kate-lyn' growing up, but then when she was 17, she announced she preferred the 'Cat-lyn' pronunciation. The rest of the family do their best to remember, but sometimes they slip back, especially when she's not there.  

 

I mean… technically, given that it was radio, Justin didn't have to physically pick Benedict up for the 'He's flying!' bit. But, well… he did.
I am helpfully holding the script for them. And I am also standing next to Prunella Scales. Oh yes.