All this week writer 's comedy Bad Salsa has been airing on 主播大秀 Radio 4. In addition to penning her script, Kay has written this post. We're a little sorry that circumstances beyond our control meant we couldn't post it earlier this week.听
Ten years ago I started going to a salsa club. I was a single parent, loved to dance and wanted to get a bit of carefree fun into my life. I immediately fell in love with the world and realized it would make a great setting for a comedy drama.听
At a salsa club you can mix with anyone; young, old, rich, poor, gay, straight, black, white, they鈥檙e all there; along with everyone in between. The dance classes make you laugh till you cry and when the lights go down and the music starts the sensuality in the atmosphere is electric. Unlikely relationships are formed and thrive, and not always sexual ones. People who go to salsa will tell you over and over it鈥檚 the friends they make, (often with people from different walks of life that they would never have met in any other way) that they come to value most.
I began thinking about a possible series and creating characters. Georgie and Tim sprang fully-formed from the dance floor, when a bossy bride-to-be refused to let her fianc茅 move on to the next woman as is customary in a salsa class. 鈥淲e have to dance together.鈥� He trilled. 鈥淲e鈥檙e engaged!鈥�
Other characters came more slowly, and as I pondered what the series would be 鈥榓bout鈥� I noticed that often people came to salsa after a challenging life event of some kind. There were the inevitable divorcees, but also burnt out city types recovering from breakdowns, bereaved wives or husbands, facing life alone for the first time, and people who鈥檇 had a brush with mortality themselves and were seeking recovery from a serious illness.
The salsa club seemed to be teaching more than how to do a neat enchoufla; it seemed to provide a safe place where people of all kinds could meet as equals; a sort of spiritual service station where they could stop and reassess their life journeys perhaps meet new travelling companions and head off in different directions.
At about this time I was at home sharing a bottle of wine with four friends around the kitchen table. We were laughing and joking about the normal stuff of life; annoying workmates, demanding kids, boring partners and disastrous dates when it suddenly occurred to me I was the only one around the table who hadn鈥檛 had cancer. What struck me about this realization was not only how prevalent cancer now is, or how many more people are now surviving it, and how I鈥檇 never seen a scene like the one I鈥檇 just been part of represented in a TV or radio show.
In dramas dealing with the subject, women (it鈥檚 often women) with cancer, get diagnosed, lose their hair , throw up after chemo, recover long enough to realize how precious life is and forgive everyone, then die. I鈥檓 exaggerating of course but you know what I mean. Stories about women just getting on with their lives after having cancer are rarer than hen鈥檚 teeth at a vegetarian buffet; so I decided to write one, and so there could be no mistake about these women鈥檚 zest for love life and laughter, I made it the one set in a salsa club.
Now I had a setting and some characters, but cancer is a tricky subject, especially for a comedy and for a while I struggled to find a home for it. All TV and radio projects need a good producer on board to help convince those in charge to commission it, and I was exceptionally fortunate to meet Alison Vernon-Smith, herself a cancer survivor and even more incredibly one who met her husband in a salsa club! Alison 鈥榞ot鈥� my idea immediately, she knew and loved the world and felt as I did, that it was high time a different more hopeful and upbeat story was told about people living with cancer.
Once the story was commissioned, by Caroline Raphael, Commissioning Editor for comedy on Radio 4, I was keen to work very hard on the research side. I wanted to meet as many women as I could who had had ovarian and breast cancer, to make sure story material of the show was as accurate as possible and that the 鈥榯one鈥� was right. I knew from the start this would be crucial, too 鈥榟ard鈥� and we risked being offensive, too soft could make us bland or even patronizing.
I read all the information I could online, finding the blogs written by cancer survivors themselves immensely useful, but the most useful part of my research was meeting women who were living the lives I was trying to imagine for my characters.
Ovarian Cancer Action, a charity seeking to raise awareness of ovarian cancer and money for research, put me in touch with some of it鈥檚 鈥榁oices鈥� women who had been through cancer themselves, sometimes more than once. These women were incredibly generous, spending hours sharing their stories with me. It was sometimes an emotional experience, being asked to remember how they felt at various times during and after their treatment, how it affected their relationships with their family and friends brought up painful feelings and emotions, but was also, as one of them said, cathartic. I am immensely grateful to these women and tried as faithfully as I could to weave some of the reality of what they had experienced into my series.
Heartening for me was to find that all the women I spoke to, either in the course of my research or my friends, were very positive about the idea of a series featuring people living with cancer, rather than dying of it. They felt it could only be a good thing for the subject to be talked about more openly, and if the series proved controversial, so much the better.
As writing the series progressed I found it was more than anything else about women, in particular female friendship. Bad Salsa shows a group of women pushing and pulling each other through the challenges life throws at them; broken relationships, clingy parents, wayward children, new partners, and stale marriages, oh and of course cancer. They鈥檙e not poster girls, as the name implies they get it wrong and don鈥檛 always behave as women in our society are still 鈥榮upposed to,鈥� but they are feisty and funny and above all very, very real.
To test this out, myself and Alison organised a reading of the first script in front of a group of ovarian and breast cancer survivors, again with the help of Ovarian Cancer Action. I had lain awake worrying about getting the right tone, so it was with immense relief that I heard the women laughing, the biggest laugh coming when Chippy threw her wig at patronizing Gordon. Afterwards the women were keen to say how much they identified with the characters and loved the tone of the show. One young woman there, whose cancer had been misdiagnosed for many years, confided 鈥淚 am Chippy; and that鈥檚 my mum!鈥� Many of the women felt more general awareness of the disease, especially ovarian cancer, would help prevent the missed and late diagnoses that can adversely affect treatment of the disease. They also felt the more light hearted treatment of the subject in Bad Salsa might help dispel the fear that often prevents people either going to the doctors in the first place or pushing doctors to think twice before writing off persistent bloating, back pain and difficulty eating as 鈥淚BS,鈥� without ruling out ovarian cancer.
After the reading I felt confident that even if not everyone liked the idea of a comedy featuring characters with cancer, I had done my best to put forward a picture of women living with the disease that some of them could recognize and identify with.
Once we came to the recording of the series I just enjoyed it. The actors were all brilliantly cast by Alison and seemed to get on board straight away with the tone of the show and its quirky humour.
In the end is a comedy and if it makes people laugh I鈥檒l be happy. I was asked recently if it was comedy with a 鈥榤essage.鈥� To that I would say all comedy and drama has a message, it鈥檚 only when the message is one that challenges our preconceptions that we notice. This series is intended to do that, and if it gets people talking; about cancer, about women, about relationships, then that鈥檚 got to be a good thing鈥asn鈥檛 it?
A last word to one of the cancer survivors who came to the reading:
'I want to personally thank you for taking such a hard, life changing experience and making it accessible, conversational and finding the lighter side of the matter. Thank you for not discussing ovarian cancer in whispers- you have brought a humour to it that makes it understandable for all, and for that I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your work is just鈥� a breath of fresh air.'
Kay Stonham is the writer of 主播大秀 Radio 4's Bad Salsa
- Bad Salsa was broadcast on 主播大秀 Radio in July 2014. Some episodes are still available via 主播大秀 iPlayer Radio. is still available as a free download.听
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