Felicity Ward has decided that she wants to fix her life, but isn't actually prepared to put in any effort or cut out the nice things that aren't necessarily good for her. However, since we live in the 21st century, there are better ways of dealing with various issues, including insomnia, IBS, anxiety and depression. There's an app for that. So, Ward is hoping they can help her.
The problem of this first episode is insomnia. Apparently Ward has significant difficulties sleeping, and so she's downloaded "Do it in your sleep". Of course, listening to an actual sleep app might be more than a little boring, so here we've got Ward's parody of an app, as voiced by Bobby Mair playing Chance DuPree. Chance has acquired all of the answers to health problems by virtue of being a white bloke who spent a gap year in South East Asia.
Stories of Ward's troubles with sleep (positioning, excessive fluids, too much heat) are interwoven with selections from the app, including tips and sleep stories. The tips are about as helpful as you might expect, but it's the sleep stories that shine.
These are intended (in the real world) to be a very boring tale told by a very boring person with a very boring voice, that you are going to be bored to sleep by. Imagine something along the lines of "The cup of cocoa and the Beast". Unfortunately for Chance, as the story runs on, it begins to go more and more adrift, in a similar manner to Joseph Morpurgo's Walking Tour, such that he goes slightly insane and ends up in a found footage horror film.
Interestingly, for a show written by Ward, she seems to give the best material to Mair, who rather brilliantly plays an incompetent bell-end, with a terrifying voice and traumatic history. Hopefully we'll see more of her in the remaining episodes, which I will definitely be listening to.
(I'm also hoping for more of my favourite "incorrect" sound effect, a fast-forwarded cassette tape, being applied to skipping ahead on a digital track.)
Tagged: Radio Comedy Two hander Stand-up Autobiographical