The new five-part Radio 4 series Angst! airs this week, and series creator Martin Jameson gives a peek under the hood…

Remember the 1990s? Cool Britannia? Things Can Only Get Better?  9/11 hadn’t happened, climate change was rarely mentioned anywhere other than Channel 4, people still had phones in their houses with curly wires, apparently the ‘world wide web’ was going to change society, and the worst we could expect of a US president involved the inappropriate use of a blue dress. Oh yeah, and The X-Files was a TV sensation with its fanciful suggestion of alien cover-ups. Happy days. If you don’t remember it, then ask a grown-up.

Meanwhile at the BBC in Manchester a young writer/producer called Martin Jameson came up with a wry and satirical four-part anthology series for BBC Radio 4 called Weird Tales From The Slip Road Of Urban Paranoia. The thinking was, that no matter how these happy and optimistic the times appeared to be, audiences would still enjoy tales of danger and conspiracy lurking in the shadows. A young Marc Warren found himself being unwittingly transformed into a giant chicken by eating too much genetically modified fast food; a similarly young Andrew Lincoln found himself trying to expose the truth when a fictional Myra Hindley accidentally won the National Lottery; Cathy Tyson wrestled with horrors in a haunted baby alarm; James Fleet dealt with management consultants from a Kafkaesque hell – and lurking in the background of all the stories, the mysterious Mr Greer, whoever he was…

The 1990s could be very frightening if you screwed your eyes tight and imagined hard enough, and like a child enjoying a scary ghost story, the pleasure was in knowing that back in the real world, everything was going to be all right.

Spool forward twenty-four years, the world is paralysed by disease; the ignorant and paranoid prowl internet, the ignorant and paranoid pull the strings of global power, and the planet is literally on fire. Fear is no longer on the slip road – it’s screaming in our faces like Edvard Munch in full SensurroundTM.

So I went back to Radio 4 and pitched Angst!. The format is similar – Timor Greer is back, and up to… well you’ll have to listen to find out what he’s up to – but our collective anxiety can no longer be written off as middle-class paranoia. We face existential choices on so many fronts. We have a lot to be frightened of. Things quite probably won’t be all right.

Thus it is, the challenge with Angst!, in the scary reality of 2021, has been to see if our very real fears can also be rendered with wry satire, in a way that allows the listener to explore these living terrors – and some of the difficult questions raised by our fear – and not reach for the off switch in depressed horror after the first five minutes.

Expect the series to get darker as it progresses, but Episode 1, Actors, was always intended to welcome the little listener in with gently smiling jaws… and to introduce Timor Greer (Cyril Nri) as our chameleon-like antagonist.

I’ve always been fascinated by the world of the ‘conspiracy theory’. At the heart of our collective angst is the very real sense that we have no control over our fate. Conspiracy theory – often perversely – is our way of addressing that, because however malign we believe the conspiracy to be, at least it means someone knows what they’re doing. It is often said that it is the rise of social media that has fuelled the current obsession with conspiracies, but I would argue that it is also because never before in our existence have we needed someone – or some ‘thing’ – to blame as much as we do today.

Angst!, as a series, explores this phenomenon from different angles, starting with the most absurd… and who better to be our guide than a vacuous, talentless, egocentric actor who finds himself caught up in the greatest conspiracy of all… or not.

I hope the brilliant Hugh Dennis will take it in the spirit with which it’s intended if I reveal that I wrote the part of Tony Bland especially for him, and so I was absolutely thrilled when Hugh said yes to the role. Credit where it’s due, one or two of his inventive ad libs made the final cut as well.

Kudos, also, to producer/director Nicolas Jackson and his sound design team for creating the first of the many amazing soundscapes to be found in our five short dramas. The House of Commons, huge election rallies, and a few more surprising environments in this season opener, all created with a handful of actors recording separately under Lockdown restrictions. Whatever else you make of it, I hope listeners will appreciate the extraordinary depth and detail of the audio production achieved under testing circumstances.

Lastly… look out for the ‘Angsty’ Easter Egg – one in each episode…

Enjoy, and… do have nightmares.

Martin Jameson

Click here to read our review