Sci-fi warning at the Festival of Chichester
and live on Freeview channel 276
But its creator Graham Richards is quick to point out: there's also a hefty dose of the ridiculous about the whole thing and plenty of laughs throughout. The show comes to the Old Dojo, New Park Centre, Chichester on Saturday, July 8 at 6.30pm courtesy of Audible Visions Drama. Far among the stars, a group of freedom fighters battle against a brutal police state which is pushing the universe down a path of controlled identity, as Graham explains. Cyclone blends action, drama and absurdity in equal measures, all against a backdrop of a 1980s check-out girl, out of her depth, Graham promises. Tickets: £10, seniors £7, students £7.
“It is about freedom fighters fighting against a totalitarian police state that are clamping down on identity and who we are. Predominantly they are very much against women in positions of power. It is basically a dystopian story but it can be enjoyed at lots of different levels. One is a very keen sense of total absurdity. We're not afraid to play for laughs because absurdity is all around us in real life and I want to take a little bit of that absurdity into the ridiculousness of what occurs. But it's a bit of a warning. It looks at what our species could become.”
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Hide AdThe stage version of the show comes from a podcast version which Graham launched last year, itself a new version of a sci-fi audio drama he began 40 years ago at the age of eight.
![Graham Richards](https://www.sussexexpress.co.uk/webimg/b25lY21zOjg1YTU2ODUzLWU3ODctNDhkMy1hMGYzLWEwNDAxZTBmMzNjMzpmMWE1OGJhOC04ZDRhLTQyYjAtOTZiMy0zNTBlZjA5NTI4NDY=.jpg?crop=3:2,smart&width=640&quality=65)
![Graham Richards](/img/placeholder.png)
“It began on cassettes recorded over the school holidays of 1982 and then shared later with BRCC classmates. It's a story that's stayed will me all my life.”
He launched it as a podcast series last autumn on all the main streaming platforms including Spotify, Audible, Amazon etc through Graham’s Audible Visions Drama, free to download – just as he offered the stories free to class mates several decades ago.
“It all goes back to when I was eight years old and I was inspired by some of the TV programmes on at the time but not in the usual way. I was inspired by the fact that the sci-fi used to aggravate me. I used to think ‘I wouldn't do it that way. I would do it this way.’ They were getting it all wrong! It mainly stems from Doctor Who. My parents were big fans of Doctor Who and I really loved it but every time there was something like a new companion I would wonder why the companion wasn't someone who was a little bit off the wall and would go along messing everything up. I started drawing out little ideas when I was a nipper and I stole my sister’s tape recorder. I started inventing little dramas and storylines. I kept those storylines to myself for a while and then I started sharing them around at school.
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Hide Ad“It was about two years later that I started to rope other people into making the stories as well. Before that was just me on the tape recorder playing all the characters. When I was 12 or so I started getting others to join me. When I was about 12 I was so embarrassed by my eight-year-old self on the recordings that I wiped my eight-year-old self, but I do still have some of those I made from when I was 12 onwards and I kept on doing them through my teenage years until I was about 16 or 17. I've still got quite a box full of the recordings and I started putting them on CDs some time ago but then I just forgot about it for a while until around 2004 I got the bug for recording again and I started doing what I call Audible Visions Drama whilst I was at work where the boss was very kind and let us do it during the breaks. I roped everyone together and we made some new recordings.”