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I have spent the last few days listening to season 9 of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, which has been.... incredible. John Finnemore is the writer and one of the actors in Cabin Pressure, everyone's favourite Radio 4 sitcom about the staff of a very small very crap airline ("Airdot. You cannot put only one aircraft in a line.") starring Benedict Cumberbatch (before he was famous, and then for a quite a long time after he was famous!), Roger Allam and Stephanie Cole. And Cabin Pressure is very, very funny and clever and ends in a brilliantly satisfying way and I'm sure I've recced it to all of you a million times, hi. (Also I never get tired of telling people this, but I was in the studio audience for the last series, having had my name drawn out of a hat with 17,000 other people in it).

The Souvenir Programme was the follow-up to CP, and it is also very good! It's a straightforward-ish comedy sketch show, with lots of silliness and funny songs and a few brilliant recurring bits (of which the best is "So You Ask Me For A Story", a character played by John Finnemore called John Finnemore who tells... stories). Until this year there had been been eight series of JFSP and it's all good though the show probably had peaked a couple of years ago? Definitely recommend it.

Series 9 of the Souvenir Programme isn't a sketch show though. It is, in a way, in that it's full of short self-contained bits. But it doesn't have a studio audience because pandemic, and Finnemore has taken the opportunity, as he says, to do something different. Which is - I can't quite believe this - a history of a queer Jewish family, in vignettes spanning more than a century. Each episode tells the story of one member of the family, backwards, crossing generations, so there's one bit set at a character's 2021 vaccine appointment and another at Christmas in 1898. And it is just... wonderful. Very very funny (it's still a comedy!) but deeply and profoundly moving. And it is, at its heart, very much a queer story. ( spoilers - really, don't click this if you plan to listen to it, it's so much better experienced as it comes ) It brings in some covid stuff, lightly, just because covid is how we live now, in a way that feels inevitable and right. And it does that with a lot of other themes, love and music and family and loss, just deftly picked up and set down again, precisely on the beat. I couldn't have loved it more. It's all on iPlayer of course, six episodes of 25 minutes each, it may bring you some joy.

So I'm still working on the five things fics and lists, but here are the ones I've got so far:

-for hannah, Five best eyebrow raising scenes from the Vorkosigan saga;

-for soupytwist, Five times Carlos surprised Cecil (wild dreams of a new beginning);

-for thingswithwings, five friends Carlos makes in Night Vale (also at the AO3);

-for hedda62, five weather reports from Vorbarr Sultana (with apologies to Night Vale public radio);

-for silverhare, five favourite flights of Arthur Shappey.

In other news - entire day in court, and achieved precisely zilch. Sigh. Although counsel was very nice, and was the first person to join the dots together and offer fortnight-in-advance congratulations on my qualification! So that was nice. (I mean - I am super-conflicted, and to be honest kind of depressed about the whole thing, but, hell. It was nice of him.)

Life, currently utterly unmitigated awful; then something happened this evening that tipped it over from "awful, awful, godawful" to "awful; also a sitcom about it would be a viable prospect".

So, that's something.

Yesterday some of you gave me some fic prompts and I wrote a few of them:

-The Middleman, accidental-baby-acquisition;

-Deep Space Nine, Garak and Bashir, truth or dare;

-Call The Midwife, also truth or dare;

-Cabin Pressure, pretending to be married.

edited to add: another Cabin Pressure, forced to share a bed.

Anyone else for anything else? Give me a fandom and prompt if you would like a snippet; I don't promise to write every single one, but I will try.

So tau_sigma came to stay last night we mulled wine, got drunk on it and then ate pretty much a whole salmon, a whole apple pie, and brandy cream and cranberry-brie filo parcels, because of my recent realisation that you can eat Christmas food whenever you like - and then we got up this morning so so so very early and got the first fast train to London. Because hi, guess who had tickets to the season 4 recordings of Cabin Pressure! THIS GIRL. I later found out that there were around 200 seats available, and there had been 17,000 applicants for them, and was very grateful I hadn't listened to my initial irrational urge to stay in bed.

It actually all went very smoothly - we got the train with plenty of time, were able to walk to RADA from King's Cross, and it was sunny and bright and so warm you could do without gloves. When we got there around tennish (for a half twelve start), a couple of nice stewards stamped our tickets and said, why don't you go away and come back at twelve, now your tickets have been stamped you're definitely getting in. If that's so, I said, what are all these people queueing for? I don't know, he said: they never usually do!

I never did figure out what they were queueing for. tau_sigma and I went to Pret and had coffee and chatted in the warm, and got back just in time to go in and sit in the bar that had been advertised as "absolutely packed" and wasn't at all. Because some people get tickets and then don't turn up, they give away more than they have room so all seats are filled up in the audience, but it means some people with tickets get turned away. I actually like the casual aspect of it all - the tickets are free, you're advised upfront not to travel long distances for them, and we did see some people come up to the door, hear it was full, go "eh, breakfast time then" and wander off.

Of course the studio audience are put on their honour not to write about the episodes on the internet before broadcast! But given that - ah, Cabin Pressure, it is wonderful, and the recordings were wonderful, the actors and the audience were wonderful. It was a back-to-back recording of episodes 3 and 4 of season 4 (V and W), and they ran through them in one go and then did retakes of anything that needed retakes, and from my perspective the most impressive part was that John Finnemore, who does, y'know, act in the series, added a few lines by hand to each episode script and they were done at the end.

And it was delightful! So quiet and casual and hilarious and delightful! I guess if Radio 4 is about anything it's creating total brilliance out of nothing but talent and intelligence and bad puns. The whole audience was in stitches. The two episodes were rather different from the first three series episodes, but that is all I can say about it, I think. They were very good, and will make people other than me very happy!

And the thing is I am not an actor, I've never acted and I don't know much about acting as a craft, but I do know that if you're just wearing street clothes in a small space at a mic, with no scenery or colour and you have your script still in one hand and you're in front of a studio audience who have been primed to laugh by an hour of situation comedy, and you still stand up and bring the audience to a tense pin-drop silence with your few lines of dialogue - yeah. The cast were spectacular. I still have a crush on Benedict Cumberbatch when he's ginger and giggly and couldn't look less like Sherlock if he tried, it turns out - it's the charisma of the man. And Roger Allam and Stephanie Cole and ah, the guest stars, whom I can't talk about either! So good.

Afterwards we filed out into the late afternoon and nearly ran into Stephanie Cole, but were too scared to go and speak to her, and went back to KX very happily. Hurrah for Cabin Pressure! I think I absolutely must go and see things being recorded again - it is such a gentle, joyful day's project.

raven is also at Dreamwidth: there is or are comment(s). Comment there or here.

Soup and writing fanfic really do make everything better. Still can't seem to sleep though. The next batch:

for avendya, Vorkosigan apocalypse fic (mostly Miles and Ekaterin)

for musesfool, Sirius/Remus, amnesia (oh OTP of my heart, etc.)

for avanti_90, Aral and Alys, historical AU

for doomlizard, Cabin Pressure, Martin, Douglas and Carolyn and accidental-baby-acquisition

Again, they vary in length from drabbles to full-length stories.

Vaguely relatedly, at least to the Simon-and-Alys-visit-the-Planet-of-the-Indians story in the last post, forthwritten now thinks I should write a whole novel about INDIANS IN SPAAAAACE.

(Quite my favourite things about week-before-last's Doctor Who was the INDIANS IN SPACE.) Everything is better with extra Indians. I mean, have you met Indians. We're hilarious.

We're pretty cool though.

(spaaaaaaace)

As I am dashing off to Paris tomorrow (not by air!), I think I am just going to post this and run. (Kink meme fill, you guys! Kink memes always do bring out the embarrassing idfic worst in me. But as I have posted this on the AO3 under my own name I think I may as well just put it here and then leave the country.)

fic:: only the margin to write on now
by Raven
1000w, gen, Cabin Pressure, Carolyn & ensemble, for this kinkmeme prompt.

( it was a closed adoption )