A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

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Bill Nighy stars in these three plays by multi-award-winning author A. L. Kennedy 
 
A.L. Kennedy is a celebrated novelist, playwright, short story writer and columnist. She has won numerous UK and international book awards, including the Costa Prize, and has twice been featured on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. A prolific writer for stage, screen and TV, she has also created several works for radio, among them this trio of dramas specially written for Bill Nighy. 
 
A Single Act &ndash; Lonely Simon (Bill Nighy) longs to bond with his vulnerable grandson Ben (Sebastian Croft), and rekindle his truncated relationship with his neighbour, Joyce (Amelia Bullmore). But although he cares for them both, he can&rsquo;t seem to connect with either. Could the magic of laughter and the &lsquo;Wilhelm scream&rsquo; bring them together? Celebrating 100 years of audio drama, this witty, poignant play pays homage to the inventiveness of radio and the world of sounds. It opens with a short introduction from Bill Nighy, talking about why this special art form is unique and what it means to him personally. 
 
Confessions of a Medium &ndash; Searching for a higher meaning to life, kindly, naive Mr Parker (Robert Glenister) moves to London, shuns conventional religion and explores the dark arts of séances and spiritualism. He believes he&rsquo;s met a spiritual guru in the guise of Mr Thomson (Bill Nighy) &ndash; but despite being a charming, erudite and mesmerising medium, Thomson is a total fraud... Based on a true story from the 1870s, this gothic, darkly comic drama explores themes of illusion, delusion and desire. 
 
Love Love Love Like the Beatles &ndash; Oliver has never been able to say those three little words &lsquo;I love you&rsquo;. Now, at his wits&rsquo; end after losing his job and wandering the streets all night, he finds a private residents&rsquo; garden and waits for the love of his life to pass by. Knowing he has a tendency to bolt when he&rsquo;s nervous, he climbs a tree &ndash; and refuses to come down until he sees Jo&hellip; This romantic comedy about a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown stars Bill Nighy as Oliver and Amelia Bullmore as Jo. 
 
A Single Act 
Simon Pratt &ndash; Bill Nighy 
Joyce Zani &ndash; Amelia Bullmore 
Ben Vane &ndash; Sebastian Croft 
Directed by Sally Avens 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 26 December 2023 
 
Confessions of a Medium 
Thomson &ndash; Bill Nighy 
Parker &ndash; Robert Glenister 
Morton/Mr Gordon/Gentleman/Wilson/Waiter &ndash; Jonathan Keeble 
Mills/Butler &ndash; Andrew Westfield 
Miss Foster/Mrs Gordon/Lady No.1 &ndash; Fiona Clarke 
Miss Blackstone/Woman &ndash; Daryl Fishwick 
Produced and directed by Pauline Harris 
Pianist: Daniel Browell 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 13 March 2010 
 
Love Love Love Like the Beatles 
Oliver &ndash; Bill Nighy 
Jo &ndash; Amelia Bulmore 
Mrs Henderson &ndash; Brigit Forsyth 
Mrs McDonald &ndash; Maggie Fox 
Leonard &ndash; David Fleeshman 
Directed by Pauline Harris 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 26 June 2012 
 
&copy; 2024 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2024 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

A. L. Kennedy: Three Plays

Three Full-Cast BBC Radio Dramas Starring Bill Nighy

Exposing and exploring the sinuous undercurrents of violence, anguish and love, A.L. Kennedy examines the nature of the individual, both in isolation and society, as characters define and deny their chosen identities. While showing us the unlikeliness of intimacy and the impossibility of communication, Kennedy also reveals the subversive liberation of impotence, the humour of discomfort as human beings chafe together, the crazed claustrophobia of the family adn the wildly funny results of an eccentricity unleashed.

Now That You're Back

After six novels, five story collections and two books of non-fiction, and countless international prizes, A.L. Kennedy certainly has the authority to talk about the craft of writing books – it’s just a wonder she’s found the time. These are missives from the authorial front line – urgent and vivid, full of the excitement, fury and frustration of trying to make thousands of words into a publishable book. At the core of On Writing is the hugely popular blog that Kennedy writes for the Guardian – and we follow her during a three-year period when she finished one collection of stories and started another, and wrote a novel in between. Readers and aspiring writers will have almost everything they need to know about the complexities of researching, writing and publishing fiction, but they will be receiving this wisdom conversationally, from one of the funniest and most alert of our contemporary authors. 
 
Alongside the blogs are brilliant essays on character, voice, writers’ workshops and writers’ health and the book ends with the transcript of Kennedy’s celebrated one-person show about writing and language that she has performed round the world to huge acclaim. Read together, all these pieces add up to the most intimate master-class imaginable from one of the finest – and most humane – writers in our language.

On Writing

An original novel by A.L. Kennedy featuring the Fourth Doctor, as played by Tom Baker in the BBC TV series. 
 
Something distinctly odd is going on in Arbroath. It could be to do with golfers being dragged down into the bunkers at the Fetch Brothers’ Golf Spa Hotel, never to be seen again. 
 
It might be related to the strange twin grandchildren of the equally strange Mrs Fetch – owner of the hotel and fascinated with octopuses. It could be the fact that people in the surrounding area suddenly know what others are 
thinking, without anyone saying a word. Whatever it is, the Doctor is most at home when faced with the distinctly odd. With the help of Fetch Brothers’ Junior Receptionist Bryony, he’ll get to the bottom of things. Just so long as he does so in time to save Bryony from quite literally losing her mind, and the entire world from destruction. 
 
Because something huge, ancient and alien lies hidden beneath the ground – and it’s starting to wake up...

Doctor Who: The Drosten's Curse

A 4th Doctor novel

Love doesn't get easier when you're older but no wiser. 
 
Maggie and John had a passionate but disastrous affair in their younger days, but it didn't last. Now in their late sixties, a surprise encounter gives them another chance to take up where they left off. 
 
Will they manage to find the best in each other and finally get together? Or will old wounds and an awareness of their ageing bodies deter them? Will the treadmill created by the high-cost, high-pressure 21st century, and their endless other commitments and interruptions large and small, overwhelm them? Or will they take the final risk? 
 
This delightful comic drama stars Bill Nighy as John and Anna Calder-Marshall as Maggie. 
 
A.L. Kennedy is an award-winning writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction, an academic and a stand-up comedian. 
 
Directed by Sally Avens.

Subterranean Homesick Blues: The Complete Series 1-3

A BBC Radio 4 drama

A.L. Kennedy's fifth collection of short stories show us exactly what becomes of the broken-hearted. Her characters are perfectly ordinary people - whose marriages founder; who sit on their own in a cinema watching a film with no soundtrack; who risk sex in a hotel with an anonymous stranger or who order a luxurious meal as their lives fall apart - but the stories she weaves around them are truly remarkable. 
 
She reveals the sadness, violence, hurt and terror, but also the redemption and the love - and she does so with enormous human compassion and leaps of black humour. 
 
From the winner of the Costa Book Award for Day.

What Becomes

'Kennedy is a superb writer and the canniness of her observation keeps you reading' Sunday Times 
 
Humour, fantasy, rage and despair both help and hinder the protagonists of these stories as they navigate changing circumstances, accumulating losses, moments of comprehension and tenderness. Here is the woman, hoping for a quiet day at the zoo, who finally snaps at a white man's racist tirade and vents years of fury; the micro-celebrity who practises lines for a chat show on which he'll never appear; and the woman who walks out of her honeymoon suite at midnight, perhaps for good. Unsparing in her close examination of human relationships, A. L. Kennedy proves once again why she is regarded as one of our great storytellers. 
 
'Kennedy dissects the small intimacies of inner thoughts... Her prose is typically direct, her sentences clear-cut and yet capable of great tenderness' Observer 
 
'An author with a proven ability to see - truly see - and whose prose can fire like gunshots across the page' New Statesman

We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time

Bullfighting - the ultimate spectator sport. 
 
Acclaimed novelist A. L. Kennedy unpeels the layers and explains the mechanics before dissecting them with surgical precision. Beyond the theatre, the costume and the well-worn plot she focuses on the fact that a man faces his death while a crowd looks on. The result is a startling confrontation with her own, and mankind's, mortality.

On Bullfighting

The final two series of A L Kennedy's wry comic drama about love in later life 
 
In their youth, John and Maggie had a tempestuous on/off affair that ended badly. Now in their sixties, they've decided to give their romance another chance - and discovered that love doesn't get any easier when you're older but no wiser. 
 
Having survived dating and moving in together, the duo face the next big test for their relationship: tying the knot. They soon find that married life is no picnic either - even their honeymoon turns out to be more endurance test than relaxing spa break. 
 
As John worries that Maggie's getting bored with wedded bliss, he's got some work to do to save their marriage. And there are further challenges to come, in the form of lockdown and a mystery 'lurker' who seems to have set his sights on Maggie... Will the couple come through it all unscathed, and finally find their happy-ever-after? 
 
Created by award-winning writer A. L. Kennedy, this witty, engaging series stars Bill Nighy as John and Anna Calder-Marshall as Maggie. 
 
 
Production credits 
Written by A L Kennedy 
Directed by Sally Avens 
 
© 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd 
(P) 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Subterranean Homesick Blues: The Complete Series 4 and 5

Isn’t life terrible? Isn’t it all going to end in tears? Won’t it be good to just give up and let something else run my mind, my life? 
 
 Something distinctly odd is going on in Arbroath. It could be to do with golfers being dragged down into the bunkers at the Fetch Brothers’ Golf Spa Hotel, never to be seen again. It might be related to the strange twin grandchildren of the equally strange Mrs Fetch – owner of the hotel and fascinated with octopuses. It could be the fact that people in the surrounding area suddenly know what others are thinking, without anyone saying a word. 
 
 
Whatever it is, the Doctor is most at home when faced with the distinctly odd. With the help of Fetch Brothers' Junior Receptionist Bryony, he’ll get to the bottom of things. Just so long as he does so in time to save Bryony from quite literally losing her mind, and the entire world from destruction. 
 
 
Because something huge, ancient and alien lies hidden beneath the ground – and it’s starting to wake up…

Doctor Who: The Drosten’s Curse

Almost forty and with nothing to show for it, Hannah Luckraft is starting to realise that her lifestyle is not sustainable. Her soul is unwell, her family is wounded, her friends are odd, her body is unreliable and her drinking is out of control. Robert, a dissolute dentist, appears to offer a love she can understand, but he may only be one more symptom of her problem. From Scotland to Dublin, from London to Montreal, to Budapest and onwards, Hannah travels in search of the ultimate altered state – her paradise.

Paradise

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 
 
Jon is 59 and divorced: a senior civil servant in Westminster who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work, he is a good man in a bad world. 
 
Meg is a bankrupt accountant – two words you don’t want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your CV. Living on Telegraph Hill, she can see London unfurl below her. Somewhere out there is safety. 
 
As Jon and Meg navigate the sweet and serious heart of London – passing through 24 hours that will change them both for ever – they tell a very unusual, unbearably moving love story.

Serious Sweet

The dazzling new collection from the Costa Prize-winning author of Day and The Blue Book. 
 
She doesn’t ever lie to him unless it’s for the best. 
 
A husband and wife wait for a train as their relationship unspools silently around them. A woman contemplates the idea of her lover dying as she queues in a bank. An almost impossibly uncomfortably lunch culminates in a passionate kiss. In this dazzling collection of stories lies the battlefield of the heart, where characters who have suffered somehow emerge – haltingly, awkwardly – into the astonishment of intimacy.

All the Rage

Alfred Day wanted his war. In its turmoil he found his proper purpose as the tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and - most extraordinary of all - he found Joyce, a woman to love. But that's all gone now - the war took it away. Maybe it took him, too. 
Now in 1949, employed as an extra in a war film that echoes his real experience, Day begins to recall what he would rather forget...

The stories collected in Original Bliss are concerned, appropriately, with the complexities of sex and the lack of it. In the long novella that gives the book its title, Helen Brindle thinks she has lost God - but it is simply love that she's missing. She can't find it at home, with the violent, deadly Mr Brindle, but will she find it in Stuttgart when she meets the enigmatic Edward E. Gluck, with his Process and his paraphernalia? And what happens when her father confessor starts to confess? A beautiful and terrifying examination of passion and pornography, of the aching need for completion and healing.

Original Bliss

Mary Margaret Hamilton was educated in Scotland. She was born there too. These may not have been the best possible options, but they were the only ones on offer at the time. Although her father did his best, her knowledge of life is perhaps a little incomplete. Margaret knows the best way to look at the moon, how to wake on time and how to breathe fire. Now she must learn how to live. A. L. Kennedy's absorbing, moving and gently political first novel dissects the intricate difficulties of human relationships, from Margaret's passionate attachment to her father and her more problematic involvement with Colin, her lover, to the wider social relations between pupil and teacher, employer and employee, individual and state.

Looking for the Possible Dance

The heroes and heroines of Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, A. L. Kennedy's first collection of stories, are small people - the kind who inhabit the silence in libraries, who never appear on screen and who never make the headlines. Often alone and sometimes lonely, her characters ponder the mysteries of sex and death... and the ability of public transport to affect our lives.

Night Geometry And The Garscadden Trains

Something odd is going on at the Fetch Brothers Golf Spa Hotel. Receptionist Bryony Mailer has noticed a definite tendency towards disappearance amongst the guests. She&rsquo;s tried talking to the manager, she&rsquo;s even tried talking to the owner who lives in one of the best cottages in the grounds, but to no avail. And then a tall, loping remarkably energetic guest (wearing a fetching scarf and floppy hat) appears. The Fourth Doctor thinks he&rsquo;s in Chicago. He knows he&rsquo;s in 1978. And he also knows that if he doesn&rsquo;t do something very clever very soon, matters will get very, very out of hand.

Doctor Who: The Death Pit (Time Trips)

You are crossing the Atlantic on a liner with your boyfriend who may or may not be planning to propose. 
 
You are fleeing the past - your ex-lover Arthur, the man who helped you dupe the vulnerable into believing loved ones were trying to make contact from beyond the grave. 
 
But there's a secret you've kept from Arthur, a deception about the two of you that threatens to emerge when you discover Arthur's presence on the boat.

The Blue Book

The twelve stories in Indelible Acts are variations on a theme of longing - the unassuagable human need for contact, for completion, for that most fugitive gift of all: reciprocal love. Its characters' lives are thwarted, dashed, impassioned, each in their own way immolated by hope. A queue outside a cheese shop leads to a thrilling infidelity; a crematorium funeral exposes a love gone sour; a foreign hotel room becomes a diorama of despair as physical sickness becomes a metaphor for incurable grief. In the title story, two lovers confront their lusts amid the ruins of Rome; in 'A Bad Son' a young boy from a damaged home searches for some kind of peace in the newly fallen snow.

Indelible Acts

Jennifer M. Wilson has decided to become a voice. A professional enunciator, an announcer, a voice-over artist, she has retreated into a world of words. Behind the sound-proof double doors of the recording studio she must surely be safe from the painful inconveniences of hate and love. Until reality breaks in and Jennifer uncovers the harsh vocabulary of addiction and the addictive extremes of sex. -An alchemical romance, a Swiftian satire for our times, an impossible spiritual journey and a devastating plummet into insanity and perversion, So I Am Glad is oblique, incisive, hilarious and horrific.

So I Am Glad

Nathan Staples is consumed by loathing and love in roughly equal measures. Frustrated by his life and the way he lives it, he is sustained only by his passionate devotion for his estranged wife and their teenage daughter, Mary. When Nathan contrives to have Mary invited to the island where he lives in retreat, he sets in motion the possiblity of telling her he is her father, and becoming whole and complete and alive again.

Everything You Need

Cecelia Ahern

Jake Arnott

Trudi Canavan

Jenny T Colgan

Stella Duffy

Nick Harkaway

Joanne Harris

Time Trips is a unique and beautifully illustrated collection of Doctor Who adventures from bestselling and award-winning writers including Joanne Harris, Trudi Canavan, Nick Harkaway, A.L. Kennedy and more. Taking you from ancient Alexandria to nameless planets in the far future, these tales are at turns funny, frightening, moving and thought-provoking – short stories that are bigger on the inside. 
 
Time Trips includes: 
 
The Anti-Hero (featuring the Second Doctor) by Stella Duffy 
 
Salt of the Earth (featuring the Third Doctor) by Trudi Canavan 
 
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller (featuring the Third Doctor) by Joanne Harris 
 
The Death Pit (featuring the Fourth Doctor) by A.L. Kennedy 
 
A Handful of Stardust (featuring the Sixth Doctor) by Jake Arnott 
 
The Bog Warrior (featuring the Tenth Doctor) by Cecelia Ahern 
 
Keeping Up with the Joneses (featuring the Tenth Doctor) by Nick Harkaway 
 
Into the Nowhere (featuring the Eleventh Doctor) by Jenny T. Colgan

Doctor Who: Time Trips (The Collection)

Armando Iannucci

Melvyn Bragg

Sam West

Tess Hadley

Romesh Gunesekera

Claire Tomalin

A BBC radio collection celebrating Charles Dickens' life, work and influence 
 
Charles Dickens was a literary giant, second only to Shakespeare in the ranks of England's greatest writers. This extensive biographical collection looks at the man, his novels and his legacy to provide an all-round portrait of the much-loved author. 
 
Michael Eaton's five-play cycle Dickens in London, starring Samuel Barnett, Alex Jennings and Antony Sher, explores Dickens' changing relationship with the city that fired his imagination. His numerous achievements are discussed in Great Lives: Charles Dickens (featuring Armando Iannucci and Humphrey Carpenter) and In Our Time: Dickens (featuring Melvyn Bragg and guests). Sam West reads from Dickens' letters in Words and Music: Dickens's World; Simon Watts tells how the author's 1842 visit to the US became a turning point in his career in Witness History: Dickens in America; Ian Gillan takes a tour of Dickens' old home in Pride of Place: 48 Doughty Street; and in Night Waves, Philip Dodd talks to Claire Tomalin about her definitive biography, Charles Dickens: A Life. 
 
Literary Pursuits finds Sarah Dillon hunting for the story behind the story of Dickens' classic masterpiece, Great Expectations; and in The Mystery of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Frances Fyfield ponders what happened to the hero of Charles Dickens's final, unfinished novel? In Free Thinking: Dickens, Matthew Sweet and guests examine his oeuvre and the way his work connects with the present day, while Landmarks: Charles Dickens is devoted to the great author's final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend. 
 
Finally, Indian writer Ayeesha Menon finds out about her country's love affair with Charles Dickens in The Documentary: Dickens and India - Mutual Friends; and his enduring significance is explored in the five-part Radio 3 series The Writer's Dickens, in which contemporary novelists Tessa Hadley, Romesh Gunesekera, AL Kennedy, Alexander McCall Smith and Justin Cartwright consider the craft of Dickens' prose and reveal how he is both a role model and a shadow looming over their own writing. 
 
Copyright © 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

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