Lend me your ears

In late March, faced with five cancelled productions due to the imminent lockdown, we decided to try something new. The plan, swiftly hatched in a department meeting an hour before the school site closed, was to produce a radio play in weekly instalments during the summer term.

I had come up with a premise the previous evening, listening to the government's 5pm broadcast with my family. Gathered round the ‘wireless’, with foodstuffs disappearing from shops and freedom of movement curtailed, I was reminded powerfully of the opening months of World War Two, when a similarly indefinite period of waiting commenced in the form of the ‘Phoney War’. The next day Vera Lynn's We'll Meet Again popped up in the charts, so it was clear that I wasn't the only person struck by the parallels. It seemed a good starting point.