Natt Tapley is the producer and director of the audio versions of Future Shocks, based on the short strips from 2000AD, which are being offered as a podcast monthly. With a new pair of stories in the second episode now available, Paul Simpson chatted with Tapley about recreating Shocks…

As I said in the review, I thoroughly enjoyed that.

Oh good, I’m glad. I think the quality remains consistently high after the Christmas one. The Christmas one is one of my favourites because I love the stories, but I love all of them. I’m very proud of all of them, I think they’re all great. And I think all the people who worked on them did spectacularly well.

How did this all come about? Future Shocks have been around since 2000AD started, pretty much?

Yes. I think it was shortly after the first couple of issues, they arrived as a way of getting shorter stories into the comic.

I’m a huge fan of anthology shows and especially audio anthology shows, old time radio shows like Lights Out or Quiet Please which was more towards the horror end of things… but again they’ve got a slightly lighter take. They’re not deeply horrifying all the time. They’re a bit like Tales of the Unexpected, Twilight Zone, all of those.

I went to Rebellion in 2019. I thought it would be great if we could take Future Shocks and bring them into a new medium, and perhaps to new audiences for people who might not otherwise have encountered them. There are certainly people who for each medium won’t go near it because it’s a comic or because it’s a radio play. If we can find ways to build appreciation across both of those, I think that would be great and they allowed me to do it. We had great fun doing it and I hope the results please everyone.

I think the key thing with these is that the actors have got to buy in to make it credible. Grawks Bearing Gifts has Margaret Thatcher, and it’s an absolute straight playing of her, albeit a little Spitting Image. I was half expecting the “vegetable line” to turn up for the cabinet meeting.

Well, I thought because the Prime Minister is never mentioned by name in the original comic but it is drawn as Maggie, the only way we could really do justice to that panel was to get the person who was the 1980s voice of Margaret Thatcher. So we got Steve Nallon but again we don’t refer to her by name, so she is still just “Prime Minister” but it’s clear for anyone who knows the original story who it is.

We’ve essentially treated the character the same way and I think we’ve done that the whole way through. We’ve tried to honour and respect the spirit of the panels and find the best way of finding an audio representation of what they were trying to achieve, whilst giving people space to have fun and really commit to the roles and do some interesting things with the performance and the story.

In The Star, there’s a panel we use for the review that Ben Smith put up on Twitter, where the scientists appear to be male.

We were looking at the classic stories and they are quite often of their time, when the trope for the standard human who lived in the future was a white man, not that it had any relevance on the story what their gender identity was or what their sex was or what their race was. That was just the default way of representing a person who lived in the future who was involved in doing sci-fi things. So we tried to make the cast a bit more diverse and more representative. When it wasn’t relevant to the story we felt free to cross cast, to cast who would be best.

Have you scripted all of the adaptations?

No, the two episodes you’ve listened to I scripted all of them and there are others. Jake Yapp scripted some, Karl Minns, Gbemisola Ikumelo. We found a lot of new writers, lots of radio writers and lots of comedy writers. Karl Minns was on Have I Got News For You? when I worked on that and John-Luke Roberts who’s done The Now Show and lots of radio comedy.

So yes, after the two that you heard the writing gets a little more diverse but the first two together it was just me.

How did you divide the stories?

Originally we were going to do it focusing on various creators and then we thought that was probably foolish to concentrate on people who hadn’t thought about these stories in 30 years.

There were two considerations: one was we wanted a broad range of creators represented; the second was they had to be stories that had an audio element to them, something which you could imagine working in sound. So ones where the reveal is, “Oh look, everyone’s much smaller than you thought” or “Everyone’s much bigger than you thought”, those twists don’t really work on radio so it had to be something that was more of a plot twist or a character twist. We also wanted a broader representation of both old and new.

To begin with I was given free rein over the early episodes and then as we went along Ben Smith and I decided that we probably wanted to hear from some newer voices as well so that’s when the stories by Rob Williams and Al Ewing and others started to pop up.

In terms of allocations to writers did you just ask people if they were interested in particular ones or did you assign them?

No, I assigned them. I either knew the writer very well or had enough samples of their work that I knew what their strengths were and then it was a case of trying to find the right voice for the right story for the people who would do it justice.

Where did you find the sound engineers?

I worked with Pete Dennis for about a decade. We did a series called In The Gloaming about ten years ago. That was another anthology series of horror comedies which won a few awards.

Rick Blything, the sound designer, was new. He came to us because the person who had worked with us on In The Gloaming couldn’t do it because he was on a feature film but he had a friend who had a few weeks free so we grabbed and held on to him. He did some superb work, he was a real find.

What about the music score, was that by them?

There are a couple of pieces which we commissioned but we also used some library music in this. There’s library scores underscoring certain things, we have some original compositions; it’s a sort of mixture of whatever happened to work the best.

I’m thinking of The Star where you’ve got the big build, that crescendo up to that…

That’s a piece of library music.

Was that just a question of what fitted or was it budgetary consideration as well on that?

It was budgetary consideration as well. It would have been nice to have a different composer on each story creating complete soundscapes but unfortunately the budget didn’t allow for that, but hopefully you’ll think we’ve done reasonably well with what we could find.

So to the casting. Who’s playing Tharg?

Ah, that’s of course Tharg himself. It would be rude to imply that anyone but Tharg himself could speak in such a Tharg-like way…

And the other actors, are they people you’ve worked with?

Yes, having done this for a while, a lot of people were people that I knew and have worked with in the past or they’re people I’ve wanted to work with.

Not that I would suggest there are huge upsides to the pandemic but people had a lot of time on their hands so I tended to be able to phone people who I thought would be the right person for the part. Usually they had time to do it, so when I thought of getting Steve Nallon in to be Maggie, it was just a case of phoning him up and saying, “Hello, do you have a morning we could sit down and record some things?”

We have to do it differently than the way we were expecting to because of the restrictions of lockdown. Usually we would have gotten everybody together in a studio and had a lovely lunch, which we couldn’t do.

We also had to teach people how to build home studios in the corners of their rooms out of whatever equipment they had to hand or send them microphones in some cases. The setup took a lot longer because we essentially had to teach people how to deaden the sound in their rooms, how to position themselves, make sure they had the right equipment… but once they were going, the process was pretty easy, normal, pretty fun. And we could do just as exciting experimental stuff as we could do had we all been sitting around making each other laugh.

Did you have video running when you were doing the recordings?

No we didn’t; we tended to avoid it just because we were always dependent on people’s internet connections and the bandwidth. We were aware of the bandwidth and we had to make it sound as if they were in a room together. I don’t think we could have gotten away with it if you could tell people weren’t in the same sound environment, so we needed as high a quality on the audio feed as we could get.

What’s been the biggest challenge for you of putting it together?

I think making sure people had a decent way of recording themselves was the biggest practical challenge, making sure that we could get usable audio from people who weren’t trained sound engineers, who didn’t know much beyond how to plug in the microphone.

Look, they’re actors, they’re not sound people, they’ve got a different job to do. Their job is to be brilliant at saying words which most people wouldn’t be able to begin to read without wondering what they were talking about. Their job is to take those things and give life to them, not knowing how to hook up a ISDN line through some sort of audio interface, or know why the microphone isn’t working because it’s not talking to the whatever. Things can very easily go wrong even when you know what you’re doing.

In terms of creatively it’s been a remarkably exciting process and Rebellion has been extremely supportive all the way through. There haven’t been problems that have been insurmountable; when inevitably hitches happen, it’s been a case of making some phone calls so everyone can find the best way through them. We just feel incredibly supported by them all the way through. We couldn’t have had better support.

Presumably you were running scripts past them and final mixes.

Yes. First they were involved at the stage when we were choosing the stories and deciding who or which writers and artists we were going to be using. They’ve got a huge wealth of knowledge about what’s in the catalogues so that was really useful.

Then yes, we had scripts done and they passed their eye over the scripts and usually had very few notes; only a couple of times we had to take the odd joke out because it was a little much. Then yes, we gave them the final mixes for notes and they were hugely supportive all the way through. It really was a dream of a process.

How long did it take to record everything?

Longer than I think we initially thought. We started work in the first week of June and we finished eight episodes, that’s sixteen stories, in the first week of November. So that’s five months.

Is there more material in the podcasts than the dramas?

No, that’s what they are. The shortest one is the Christmas one.  Some are 35 minutes long. Because it’s a podcast it doesn’t have to be exact. We’re aiming for half an hour but they are generally between 25-35 minutes.

And each one is two episodes?

Yes. The Christmas one ends up a little shorter. It could have been longer because we had lots of material, but we found it jogged along much more happily when we cut it. That one’s been cut most voraciously and most enthusiastically.

Almost every line is doing something in it, which is not always the case in radio drama.

We thought it was better to err on having shorter snappier episodes than ones that were trying to hit an arbitrary time limit.

That’s the thing about Future Shocks, they were basically short sharp shocks. I haven’t seen the more recent ones but are they still two pages?

They can be, yes, there can be two pages. One Christmas During Eternity was a two-pager. They can go up to five. I think in the current Progs there’s a five-pager but there’s never a huge amount in terms of page length.

So pretty much with all of them, the shorter ones, you’re still having to add material in to flesh it out?

Yes. In One Christmas During Eternity there’s a new character who Steve Nallon plays – the father-in-law who comes in half way through Christmas. Partly it was because we thought there was some fun to be had with notions of what Christmas would be like in the future but also there had to be a way of telling parts of the story without putting it all in Tharg’s mouth in voiceover. We wanted someone to be able to explain what was happening in part of the scene which wouldn’t be naturally narrated by either of the two parents who are watching this happen. So we have someone revelling in it who can again give us a slight twist on the drama of the scene but also gives us a way of getting some more information out in some ways.

With the combinations of stories, did you always envisage them in the pairings they’re in?

They weren’t made as pairs necessarily, apart from the Christmas one because those are both Christmas themed stories. The rest was judgements on tone and length. We had more than 16 stories we were considering and then ones that fell nicely into pairs became the ones that became the episodes. If there was something that didn’t pair up with anything else then it probably didn’t make it into the eight episodes.

Some of these stories were written 40-odd years ago and as you’ve already said about the casting it was a less diverse society then. Did you find issues with the tone of some of them? Where you had to go with the intent of the story rather than the letter of the law because it didn’t work?

Yes, not often, but there were moments that struck us as, “Oh you wouldn’t say that that way”. What the writer and artist were trying to do with that panel is being clouded by some of the standards of the time which have just been thrown in there without thinking.

So for example, in Beware Grawks Bearing Gifts there is one panel which, the way I read it, at the time was complaining about cultural imperialism of Americans and Australians who were bringing all their culture over and it was swamping native British culture. But because that sort of language has been used in the immigration debate for the last 30 years it sounded like “coming over here imposing their things, not integrating” and there were lots of unpleasant overtones, which there probably weren’t in the same way in 1983.

We cycled gently around that panel and didn’t do much with it, and tried to make the point which we thought was being made overall without being slavishly stuck to a panel which had crude overtones now it probably didn’t have 30 or 40 years ago. Using that language would have taken people out of the story we were telling and involved it something that it didn’t necessarily have to be in.

This is with Al Murray as an Australian alien – you don’t want to be taken out from that.

No, you want to revel in Al’s delightful accent as much as possible!

I don’t think we were trying to sanitise or be politically correct. What we were trying to do was do the truth of the story justice by avoiding things that stick out wonkily or would take people out of the story. Things that make you say, ‘Oh that sounds a bit BNP-ish when you say it like that’ but in context made sense. We found it easier just to de-emphasize those in the script and the production.

With Beware Grawks, the PM could easily be Boris Johnson or you could have had Priti Patel as the Home Secretary, and it suddenly takes on an edge that ironically the original probably had with Maggie but is instantly smoothed by clearly being that far in the past.

That did occur to us – should we update them?  We wouldn’t have had both of them, you could have done it with the voice of Boris noticeably identifiable as him. But I think for that one, the satirical point it was making about the Thatcher government, that they would sell out the country to anyone they thought had money, doesn’t sit the same way as trying to make that point about the current government – or at least I’m not sure that’s the point Alan Moore would want to make, so it seemed unfair to try and co-opt his argument from 30 years ago and apply it to a new piece of satire that’s doing a slightly different thing.

You’ve maintained the attitude without the attitudes.

Yes, that’s exactly what we were trying to do.

What’s the roll out of these going to be?

I believe they’re releasing an episode every four week through the subscriber app. So they’ve got one in the bank every month until July.

And hopefully by then you will be working on another batch?

Oh I’d love to, that would be great. We have some big stars who’ve said they’ll definitely do a second series if we do one. So there will be some exciting names to come if we get to do that and yes, I hope people love them as much as we love making them, and they enjoy them. That people feel they’re part of what they get a subscription for… and they’re a fitting tribute to the stories.

2000 AD subscribers can now listen to second episode of the exclusive audio drama podcast