by Alan Boon
Fifteen-year-old Simon Perkins is ill. He has lumps on his legs, he’s always tired, and his ankles swell up if he doesn’t keep them elevated. His mum and dad have packed him off to his gran’s house in Cleveland – not the one in America, the one in the north east – and his only companion is what passes for daytime TV because it’s 1974 and if you don’t want to watch Crown Court or the Open University then you’re shafted.
This is where we start Simon Perkins’ Lurgy, the first audio drama from Mulgrave Audio, a new endeavour led by former BBC Radio Tees presenter Bob Fischer. As a side interest, Fischer began chronicling a loose collection of half-remembered music, TV, books, and film from what he called The Haunted Generation, expanding into the new material created to invoke that era. Mulgrave Audio is a natural step on from that, Fischer and company’s own attempt to generate the same feelings of the mundane and eerily sinister that ran through much of that period’s drama.
Essentially a two-hander, although Teesside teenager Ethan Warren does the lion’s share of the work, Simon Perkins’ Lurgy employs a soundtrack from Ben Hopkinson that underscores Simon’s shift from boredom to panic, and through flights of fantasy as his restless mind leads him astray. This is where Roger Limb comes in, reprising a BBC continuity announcer role he last played in the 1970s, as the man on the telly starts to say some very strange things indeed…
Fischer’s script is full of period references which will delight those who lived through those times and bewilder those who didn’t. That’s not to say that Simon Perkins’ Lurgy won’t be of interest to younger listeners, so thorough is its recreation of the feeling of that time, alongside universal themes of the onrush of adulthood and the very recently familiar sentiment that having to stay inside for your own good is rubbish.
A quiet new power is seeping out of Teesside, infusing the airwaves – or what passes for them in this digital age – with an energy that can only produce magic. In a word, Simon Perkins’ Lurgy is spellbinding and will leave you contemplating your very existence.
Simon Perkins’ Lurgy is released on April 25th, 2023 and is available to pre-order now from mulgraveaudio.co.uk.
