Sophie Willan
Guide to Normality, on BBC Radio Four now
Sophie Willan’s Guide to Normality is sharp, eccentric, provocative, but most of all, it is perpetually funny. After listening to it, I immediately listened to it again, to see what I had missed and savour what I had heard a second time. Her images are wonderfully evocative. A baby is “a large human blob that looks very much like a sad cabbage”.
Her grandmother looks like Morticia Addams, meaning “you’re not quite sure if she’s a beauty or a crow”.
In the first far-too-brief episode, Sophie explained her upbringing and attitude to parents and parenting. She was predominantly brought up by her grandmother as her mother was a drug addict. She describes this as a relief rather than a curse as her mother was not someone intended to be a parent.
With deft jokes and anecdotes, Sophie bats away the prescribed notions of how to be a family and bring up children. I am in danger of giving too much away as the excitement of listening to this energy and imagination makes me want to tell you everything in that ham-fisted way that happens when you want to share your delight. Her grandmother’s refusal to eat crème brûlée comes from having no desire “to eat the unborn child of a depressed hen”. Sophie is one of an increasing number of sharp and intriguing voices on R4.
Bridget Christie
Utopia, available on BBC iPlayer until April 6
“My son said to me the other day, ‘Your pursuit of happiness is a futile and worthless quest’. We are just meat and hair like Iggy Pop,” says Bridget Christie in her new apoplectic series of Utopia. I should have written about this three weeks ago, time to find this on iPlayer is limited. Bridget both bolsters and strips apart conceptions of the middle-class liberal elite, a group she has become a member of due to her comedic success and North London domestic situation.
Bridget is filled with righteous ire, but also elevates it to such absurdity that she maintains a position of being both correct and preposterous. Her dissection of this ridiculousness means that you can both nod in agreement while also realising that you are absurd, too. It’s the ones that don’t think they are absurd that worry me most.
