World first ‘sitcom podcast’ is set in a fictional Channel Island
“I needed a location for the series. I briefly thought about it being a village on mainland England, but that’s been done a lot, and I wanted a greater sense of a self-sustaining community,” says creator David K Barnes.
Woodern Overcoats is a recently released podcast about competing undertakers operating in a small island village called ‘Piffling’ and it is brilliant.
“Two rival undertakers on an island sounded far more interesting than two rival undertakers in an English village,” David said when asked why it was on an island.
It is surprising just how accurately he manages to capture the odd, but wonderful weirdness that comes with living in the Channel Islands, somewhere that isn’t really England but isn’t France either.
David said he picked the Channel Islands for that very reason, saying it was “an island between two countries, neither entirely one nor the other”.
He went on to say that, like Jersey, Piffling is influenced by both England and France “but definitely its own community, its own culture, its own identity”.
“I have no first hand experience of the Channel Islands, alas, though one of the other writers on the team did, and the producers’ flatmate comes from one of them too, and was able to vet what we were doing in the scripts.”
The eight part series, at the time of writing about half-way through its run, is interesting for the fact that, despite being set in a small community, does the opposite of the usual trope of playing on the insular ‘locals only’ idea.
David said: “I also wanted to explore the fact that, just because a community might be relatively isolated in some ways, that doesn’t mean it becomes hostile to outsiders, or somehow gets “left behind” by the world.”
One of the central characters is Eric Chapman, a talented (with a clearly dark backstory we have yet to hear) and outgoing funeral director who sets up opposite Funn funerals — who were until that point the only undertakers in the village.
“The community on Piffling is very modern, forward-thinking, liberal. They’re all fun, wonderful people, that you’d want to have a pint with,” David said.
Adding: “In most comedies, Eric Chapman would be the fish out of water, mistrusted by the locals, baffled at local customs. But in Wooden Overcoats, he’s embraced immediately, and everybody gets on.”
The only people who don’t get on with him are the two leads, Rudyard and Antigone Funn, who run Funn funerals “who find it hard to deal with people, and everybody else on Piffling finds them very odd indeed”.
The beauty of setting your show on a fictional island is that you can do with it as you please. Even if that does mean defying the laws of time and space.
David said: “There’s a golf course next episode, and episode 7 reveals the island is only 1 mile across. Quite how everything fits geographically, nobody knows. It’s half the fun!”
Wooden Overcoats is available on all good podcasting platforms.
DOWNLOAD: Wooden Overcoats from iTunes
Originally published at Up Your Ego.
