Has it always been Grim Up North? asks TONY HENDERSON
IF you like your atmospherics, then the relentless rain of the last few days provides a perfect backdrop to the latest creation by Tyneside-based writers Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood.
If it’s miserable weather for us with our 21st Century comforts, then it would have been doubly so for the soldiers building Hadrian’s Wall almost 2,000 years ago.
Archaeological and historical sources show that the men on the Wall were a remarkably cosmopolitan bunch, from all over the Roman world.
Quite what they made of the wild country and weather of the northernmost frontier in the Roman Empire is food for thought, and was what sparked Ed and Trevor into action.
It has produced a radio sitcom pilot called It’s Grim Up North, involving a variety of characters from AD126 based around Drizzlewort, a milecastle on the Wall.
What we know of real life on the Wall at that time mirrors Ed and Trevor’s comic creations.
The commander’s house at Housesteads fort, for example, was defiantly in the Mediterranean style despite its exposed location on top of the Whin Sill crags.
The Vindolanda letters speak of “wretched little Brits.”
And an officer in charge of an outpost beyond the Wall writes to his commander at Vindolanda pleading for more beer to be sent as supplies have run out and the lads are getting restless.
Ed and Trevor have put the half-hour pilot on their website and are asking people to listen in and give their opinions.
It’s a new challenge for the pair, who scooped the Best Comedy Screenplay award at last year’s Gotham Screenplay Festival in New York and whose plays include Dirty Dusting, Waiting For Gateaux, Son of Samurai, Maggie’s End, The Revengers and Alf Ramsey Knew My Grandfather.
Ed said: “Both of us like walking and there’s nowhere better than Northumberland, with its coast, Hadrian’s Wall, the national park and the wild moors.
“I had just walked from Bowness to Arbeia Roman Fort in South Shields and Trevor regularly does walks around the Steel Riggs section of the Wall. He’d just visited Housesteads and we discussed what it must have been like building Hadrian’s Wall.
“So, rather than a modern setting, we felt it would be good to be at the beginning, when the troops were constructing the Wall because the Roman auxiliaries came from all over the empire. This gave us a wonderful multi-national aspect.
“The European and African soldiers would also have been used to much warmer weather. Those Northumberland moors may be beautiful, but there’s a lot of rain and mist up there – hence the title It’s Grim Up North.
“We thought about writing a television pilot, but radio allows writers to go anywhere and it’s a much cheaper alternative to see whether the idea actually works.”
The duo are no strangers to writing radio drama. Their dark comedy, Son of Samurai, about a lad Geordie who discovered he was the descendent of a Samurai warrior, was performed as a radio play at the prestigious Latitude Festival in Suffolk in 2008. It later toured the region, playing a month at the Customs House in South Shields.
