Series creator Martin Jameson discusses the creation of the final episode…

I’ve always loved a dramatic siege. Two characters trapped in a space battling it out for survival. A few years ago, in the long running Radio 4 detective series Stone, one of my most challenging episodes, White Van, explored the inner turmoil of the thankfully rare phenomenon of British spree killers such as Derek Bird and Raoul Moat (although horribly topical again this week, following events in Plymouth). Could DCI Stone survive his encounter with an angry, emotionally inadequate, disenfranchised, socially alienated white van man, recently deprived of his white van?

When I sit down to think about what frightens me – my Angst! of choice – it has to be the self-made existential crisis thundering down the track towards us, as humankind sets about making our one and only home uninhabitable. How better to conclude a series about fears, imagined or extrapolated, than with the most real and immediate of them all? From the word go, I knew I wanted to end this series by trapping a representative of the human race in a room with an angry, emotionally inadequate, disenfranchised and alienated planet.

Angst! would be a series to drag the listener from the absurdities of conspiracy paranoia to the inescapable reality of global catastrophe – a catastrophe that is popularly blamed on greedy capitalists, despots and industrialists, up to all sorts in the conspiratorial shadows – but which is, in reality, just as rooted in the day-to-day struggle for survival, security and the aspirations of ordinary people. The seemingly irresolvable nature of this reality, for this writer, makes the angst even more terrifying. Oh yes, and that’s before you face the even more stomach-churning reality that we’re all just bugs on a lump of rock and, in the end, we don’t matter to anyone except ourselves.

However, the road to anthropomorphism can be a soggy one. As a young theatre director, I once turned down the opportunity to direct a truly dreadful Theatre-in-Education piece in which a noble and towering pine tree lectured unsuspecting school children as to the evils of wasting paper every time they ate fast food from cardboard containers. In Gaia, it is my goal to avoid any such righteous, reductive and simplistic hectoring, rather to dramatise the hectoring by inverting the emotional dynamic usually associated with eco dramas. There’s an adage in writing that goes: ‘Flip the glass upside down and see what falls out’ – a process the writer can use to bring fresh light to a problem – which is why my Gaia is a petulant bloke (instead of Judi Dench), and the resistant human voice is a brutalised climate refugee (instead of a pompous politician).

I was nervous of writing the character of Nemat. Should a white, middle-aged, middle-class male writer even attempt such a thing? Is it appropriation, exploitative, trivialising? I asked myself all these questions. Had this been an attempt at a social-realist first-person account of a Darfuri woman escaping genocide then, yes, I think it would have been inappropriate, however in the context of talking to a planetary AI formed from junk DNA it struck me that as long as the character was thoroughly researched then it wouldn’t be out of bounds to a writer working in good faith – and I hope listeners will agree Yusra Warsama brings a truthful, intelligent and very human quality to the role that is absolutely in tune with the painful moral ambivalence of the script. Meanwhile, Kerry Shale is an inventive vocal genius, who I’ve been working with for over thirty years, and so the part of Gaia was a little concerto of words written especially for him.

And those Easter Eggs?  Well, inspired by the inventive use of the Number Nine at the beginning of every episode of that series – not to mention the inclusion of a hare in some form in each show, usually tucked away on a shelf in the background, or flying across the screen in an explosion – it seemed fitting to put a little bit of literal Angst into every script. In episode one, Actors, the fake Prime Minister is called Morris Sangster (S-ANGST-er); in The Teachings of Smart Town, Professor Greer supposedly teaches at Langs Tech College (L-ANGS Tech); in Plastic, the dodgy defence contractors are A.N.G.  with their S.T. subsidiary; in Poster Girl, the game is updated to run on operating system AN.GST.45… but in Gaia, Timor Greer names our Angst! in its own right, stripping it bare, as the planet loses its fight for survival – and so it isn’t hiding anywhere.