This radio dystopia will chill you to your bones – because it’s not fiction

Radio 4’s This Week is Family Week turns the plight of the Uyghurs in China into a warning to rival The Handmaid’s Tale or Brave New World

For the past month, Radio 4 has been stuffed with programmes about Orwell and Kafka. Like Big Brother, they’ve become inescapable, so much so that their shadow seems to fall across even unrelated programmes, such as This Week is Family Week (Radio 4). 
Part of Breaking the Rules, a new series of one-off plays, it took place in an Orwellian surveillance state where “pre-crime” (such as speaking with people in another country) was punished as severely as actual crime. High-tech scanners rated citizens: green for the compliant, orange for the suspicious; red meant a one-way ticket to “re-education”. Minorities faced sterilisation. In a classroom, a group of adults guilty of being born into the wrong race were subjected to state-mandated brainwashing. “Ethnic unity is good, religion is bad,” they chanted. One glanced down for a moment, only for a guard’s voice to blare over the tannoy: “Student 526, don’t look at the floor, keep your eyes up!” 
As dystopias go, it was all shamelessly derivative. Characters hiding forbidden books, lest the smiling censors from the One True Party burn them? A cheap mash-up of Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. State-appointed “Aunts” invading a family home, dictating who should sleep in whose bed? A blatant rip-off from The Handmaid’s Tale. Only the laziest hack would make this stuff up – the catch being that the society depicted here wasn’t made up. 
It was, in fact, Britain’s fourth-largest trading partner, China. The characters we met were fictional, but the kind of oppression they faced was based on documented testimony from the 2021 independent Uyghur Tribunal. From that evidence, writer Avin Shah and director Emma Harding created a gripping, satirical drama, making surprisingly effective use of non-region-specific accents (cut-glass RP for Mandarin-speakers, an Eastern-European burr for anyone not fluent in the language). 
In the titular “family week”, Han Chinese officials are foisted upon Uyghur families for at-home indoctrination. “Auntie” Wang Shu – building a name for herself in the Party as a champion of “racial integration” – had pulled strings to join the family of Nur, an Uyghur woman whom she planned to use as a political mascot, by setting Nur up in an arranged marriage with her obnoxious son. The actor playing him was excellent. I’d love to name him, but I can’t – as the nightmare extended to the credits. 
It’s not unusual for a radio play’s billing to be a little vague; half the minor characters are often waved away with a single line (“other parts played by members of the cast”). But here only three actors from the ensemble were named at all, the others having “chosen to remain anonymous”, presumably fearing the Chinese government’s reprisals against them, or their families. 
Looking for light relief, on Sunday afternoon I found myself in a small tent, chatting about music with a muddy, bearded viking (a reenactor at the charming Repton Festival in Derbyshire). Viking instruments are a pain to tune, he said, fretting about unfretted lyres. Strings hate the damp, and even basic percussion can be a nuisance in wet weather, when your drum-skins are actual skins. His words were still ringing in my ears when I tuned into Radio 3’s fascinating Sunday Feature: Music of the Vikings. 
Beautifully produced in surround sound, it began with Norse scholar Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough stomping across a Danish hall declaiming Beowulf – a poem that would once have been sung. But what would Viking songs have sounded like? Various experts were wheeled out to answer that question. Edmund Hunt, of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, has been working on “augmented vocality”, analysing subtle pitch-changes built into the pronunciation of words, in order to turn Norse texts into compositions that are almost, but not quite, completely unlike anything a Viking would have enjoyed. 
Written in a very English modern-classical style, heavy on discordant cello, his music would be more at home in the Wigmore Hall than Beowulf’s mead hall. I was more moved by the efforts of instrument-maker Einar Selvik, formerly the drummer for black-metal band Gorgoroth. Faced with a 10th-century traveller’s unflattering take on Viking music – “there is no uglier song than the groans that come out of their throats” – Selvik pointed out that any tourist in a strange city’s karaoke bar today would hear some pretty awful stuff, too. Only two lines of actual old Norse musical notation survive, from one song, in one single manuscript. They sound like a lullaby. Selvik played them on a goat-horn, very gently, and for a moment everything stood still.