I want to alert you all to one of the most charming, life affirming, laugh out loud comedy radio 'sit coms' I have worked on.
Hennikay stars Bill Bailey and a fab cast (listed at the end) and is about the relationship between Guy (Bill) and his imaginary friend from when he was a boy...who has reappeared in Guys life, but only Guy can see and hear him.
One of the joys of this was that it was the first full cast recording any of us did post Covid, so being in a studio with all the cast was such fun,
despite a few Covid scares and remote sessions!
Another highlight was being Bills 'Stunt Guitar man', for a very complex jam where some of it is him in London, some is him in his Melbourne hotel room, some is him on stage in Australia, and some is me joining it up! (BTW I asked Bill if it was OK to claim the stunt guitar credit and he said yes!) all with a different key and time sig! Worked out fine in the end.
Here is the blurb and I hope you enjoy it:
Bill Bailey stars as Guy Starling, a middle aged man who, after 45 years, and for reasons quite unknown to him, is suddenly revisited by his imaginary childhood friend, Hennikay. Time has passed and Hennikay is still inexplicably and maddeningly in Guy’s life. Every morning when he wakes up, his 11-year-old friend from 1976 is there, making a noisy mess, asking endless questions and generally being as annoying, as all 11-year-old boys were back in 1976. And there is nothing Guy can do about it. So, one Saturday morning, after a particularly typical Friday night out in Maidstone, a very hungover Guy tries to lay down some adult ground rules to his unwanted housemate and educate him about life in the modern grown-up world. But Guy’s grown-up modern world gets particularly complicated that morning when he discovers a strange woman in his spare bedroom and has no idea who she is or how she got there. Is she his imaginary girlfriend? Who keeps ordering mysterious boxes from Amazon? And when his boss’s suspicious wife turns up demanding to know where he was last night and what he was doing, why doesn’t he have a clue what to tell her? If this is what modern life as a grown-up is really like, then young Hennikay is very unimpressed with how his old friend has turned out. Cast: Guy – Bill Bailey Tony – Dave Lamb Nikita - Polly Frame Lyrissa - Tracy-Ann Oberman Harry - Paul Panting Hennikay – Max Pattison Written by David Spicer Producer: Liz Anstee A CPL production for BBC Radio 4.
Comments