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Happy new year, friends. I wrote two yuletide stories this year. Firstly, my assigned story, not a fandom I'd ever have considered writing before the perfect and beautiful tv show came out, but it did and here we are!

life in colour (2559 words) by raven
Fandom: The Baby-Sitters Club (TV 2020)
Characters: Claudia Kishi, Stacey McGill

Claudia Kishi, not yet 23, is exhibiting at her old college, Central Saint Martins at Granary Square.

And this treat, a gift for petra for season 9 of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme! I was proud of this one because it's been such a terrible year generally and particularly writing wise (a usual year for me is ~100k, this year was.... 12k) and I had banged my head against it for most of 23 December. And then on Christmas Eve I trashed what I'd got, rewrote from scratch and it was one of those perfect evenings where it just comes together. I was also entirely delighted that Radio 4 rebroadcast season 9 every day between Christmas and New Year. I turned on the radio at 11.30 last night and it was the scene where Newt and Susannah discuss breaking their ducks! And Finnemore live-tweeted it as well, which was lovely. Anyway, here's the story.

at dusk through narrow streets (1427 words) by raven
Fandom: John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme Season 9
Relationships: Susannah Noone/Gally Nightingale | Gally Midnight
Characters: Gally Nightingale | Gally Midnight, Susannah Noone, Oswald "Newt" Nightingale, Vanessa Noone

Newt, Susannah and Gally, on one winter's day in 1923.

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.