Martin Jameson has written widely for television and radio, and contributed the five-part serial First World Affairs to 2018’s Dangerous Visions season. He explained the genesis of the idea to Paul Simpson…

This is completely my own pitch. It’s actually an idea I’ve had knocking around for a while – it predates Brexit votes and all that other stuff. I’ve been really interested in looking at a projection – I don’t call it a dystopia. It’s Steven Barnes’ definition of science fiction:  “if only, what if, and if this goes on.” I’m very interested in counter-factuals, I’ve done several of them in radio in different sorts.

For a long time I’d been watching Syria, Aleppo, Iraq, and there’s that thing where you go, “That’s terrible. I’m a vaguely left of centre liberal minded middle-classed truth and justice sort of guy. Look at all those people starving and trying to cross Europe… What’s on the other channel?” It was that simple idea of going back to Kevin Brownlow making It Happened Here.

I tried to sell the idea a couple of times but it was too depressing. Then the zeitgeist caught up because of Brexit and Trump, and because of Syria and whether we should intervene, and the migrant event – I don’t want to call it a crisis – due to both climate change and wars. We’re constantly seeing those screeds of people.

I’d not tried very hard to sell it, but realising the zeitgeist was there, I went with [producer] Jonquil [Panting] to pitch it [to Radio 4 Drama Commissioner Jeremy Howe]. Very few ideas as a writer ever get wasted: I can count of the fingers of one hand the things that haven’t been used – and things come together. In the intervening ten years, I’ve written a lot of Holby City and Casualty, I’ve written Emmerdale Farm. I love writing those shows and what I was able to do was go to Jeremy Howe and say, “I’ve got these two skillsets. I’ve worked broadly within the realms of counter-factual/hypothetical and science fiction including the stuff I made when I was producing, and I’ve worked in soaps. What I want to do is draw the two together. What’s often missing from science fiction is the ability to write about relationships and about the minutiae of English life and play that out against this bigger backdrop.”

I’ve been pitching for a long time and I did it as a piece of theatre; I started telling Jeremy all about this family preparing for a wedding, and I timed it so just at the point I could see the shutters coming down, I dropped the shell on the wedding [which forms the end of episode 1 in the serial]. He literally jumped and I had him.

If I did this for TV, it wouldn’t be the same family. This family is the core Radio 4 demographic – in their 50s, very well educated. They’re skilled professionals but they have very little in the way of transferable skills and they’re asset rich and cash poor. He went for it. The core idea was so much about the zeitgeist – with everything that happened in 2016 and 2017, you felt so many people were uncertain about their identity of being British and what that meant. At its heart that’s one of the two main things First World Problems is about – identity.

I said I wasn’t going to have lots of people making macro discussions, because as you eloquently call it in your review, it’s an infodump, and when I turn something on and there’s an infodump, a small part of me dies. I had to do some macro stuff but I waited as long as possible because I knew if the audience were going to go with it they had to get to know this family and like them, love them, but not in an unconditional way. They should be interested in them because they’re conflicted people.

Jeremy made it a condition – which I was going to do anyway – that I had to meticulously research the context of it. I couldn’t say there was just a random war. I was really busy but I cleared a month to do a phenomenal amount of research, talking to all these terrific people. All of them were great and very generous with their time.

Two people were interesting for different reasons: Tamara Kovacevic, who works for the Reality Check team, is a Croatian journalist, very sharp woman, wonderful. She almost got in touch with us – she was Croat, and in 1992 her family lived on the border between Serbia and Croatia so she had that direct experience of a modern European civil war. You can get a lot about Afghanistan and Syria but it’s slightly removed from our experience in Western Europe. There’s an awful lot of her in this; I knew what the broad structure was, but her mother and grandmother were Serbian, and her father was Croat. She was brought up as Yugoslav in the Communist era and was then forced to make a choice. A lot of that dynamic in the family, and a lot of the reason I went for the Scottish/English thing is directly from her experience during the 1992 War. I owe so much to her for that.

The other really interesting person I spoke to, for completely different reasons, was Jonathan Marcus, the BBC defence and diplomatic correspondent. I’d written to a bunch of people including [BBC technology correspondent] Rory Cellen Jones, who was marvellous, and Peter Barnes, Senior Political Analyst, fabulous.

I contacted Jonathan Marcus and he said, “I don’t know that I like all these people doing things about civil war, I’m not sure I really believe in it.” He was quite reluctant, and I wrote to him and said, “That’s why I want to talk to you.” A really sharp, super intellectual guy. I said, “If you’ll meet with me, let’s stress test this to the limit.” I had about an hour and a half with him and it was quite brilliant.

There were places where it could have been quite woolly that are sharp and a lot of that is to do with Jonathan saying, “That couldn’t happen, that could happen.” If he said something couldn’t happen, I’d say, “Well, how could it happen?” I owe a lot to him – and there were small things as well. I asked him what would happen to the BBC? He said, “It would collapse: you wouldn’t be able to get smoked salmon in North London!” The thing is what I love about research is that he said that as a joke but I go away, and I think, “You’re quite right you wouldn’t be able to get smoked salmon, would you…” which becomes a plot point in episode 1.

I just wanted to make it a vivid experience for the core Radio 4 demographic. Normally you’d look at that and you’d want much more diversity in the casting if it was TV, there’d be much more ethnic and class diversity but I was really clear: this is a white middle class family, not from London, but South Manchester. It’s where I live – these are my streets.

First World Problems part 1 is available on iPlayer until July 11th