Episode 4’s writer Alex Straker sets the scene for the penultimate part of Angst!

You can tell a lot about a place by the sport that best captures the excitement and ambitions of its people. Not everyone knows or cares anymore about the ups and downs of the Roman Empire, the life and death of Julius Caesar or the politics of the Senate; but the battles of Roman gladiators live on in our collective imaginations – the images of warriors bathed in dirt and blood, fighting to the death before a baying crowd, have been immortalised in poems, novels, and movies, and tell us more than we think about the world they lived in… and the one that we currently inhabit.

It’s a truth that echoes again and again throughout history – the sumo wrestlers of Japan, whose discipline and precision was first depicted on cave drawings in the prehistoric world; the jousts that are so inseparable from the courts of medieval Europe, a sport that sent many a giant of a knight to an early grave; the visceral nature of bullfighting. Whether through violence or strategy, or often some combination of the two, games have captivated humankind since the earliest days. Of course, we tell ourselves that we’ve moved on from those times – now, we get our satisfaction from more polite competitions. Whether it’s tattoo-clad hunks fighting over a love interest by the pool in Magaluf or a ‘shoot ’em up’ console game that’s just a load of pixels on a screen, we comfort ourselves that gladiators are a thing of the past – we’ve moved on from truly violent games now.

Or have we?

Every now and then, a crack appears in the veneer of our everyday lives. The powerful roll the dice, gambling with the fate of millions in the process. The vulnerable make the best of the cards they have been dealt, and yet little seems to change: the house always wins. Could it be that the gladiators aren’t dead after all? Perhaps, if we put our headphones on, and really listen closely we’ll still hear, however faintly, the applause of the crowd, like an army of vampire spectators, baying for blood.

Perhaps we’ve been in the arena all along.

These were the kernels of fear that led to the creation of ‘Poster Girl’, a nightmarish cave painting for the 21st century, only one that is etched in audio. So, go ahead. Take a seat. Put your headphones on. Press ‘Play’. If you dare…

Series Creator Martin Jameson adds:

If you think of the five plays of Angst! as five ‘acts’ of a whole, however loosely connected, then Episode 4 has to be the structural ‘Worst/Crisis Point’. Alex Straker’s script fell naturally into this place as the terror it explores is the one by far the closest to the reality of recent years.

Playing a game for citizenship governed by arcane and seemingly random rules? How is that different from the ‘hostile environment’ and the shameful reality of the Windrush scandal where people who had lived in the UK for decades suddenly found themselves facing deportation, unable to get a job, stripped of their rights and their identity?

Naomi and her mum forced to live in a one-room shoebox? Check out what’s going on in the so-called ‘human warehouse’ at Terminus House in my home town of Harlow in Essex. Seriously, Google it.

UK Families living on food parcels? In 2021? Don’t be ridiculous.

However, when the dystopia you are satirising is only a few sound effects away from reality, that leads to a whole set of new editorial challenges. Did the world Alex was painting need to go further, be darker, suggest greater horrors? Or is that the point? The world of the video game may appear fantastical, from a reality removed from our own, a warning of sorts… but then the listener will realise that all this stuff has already happened, and that will be the truly terrifying thing.

While Alex was writing Poster Girl, the report from The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, chaired by Tony Sewell, was published, essentially denying that institutional racism was a ‘thing’. It inspired possibly the most contentious exchange in the script. Let’s just say there was more than one draft of that piece of dialogue, and some intense discussions as to which version would make the final cut.

I hope we got it right.