Gospels of the Flood is a new audio drama written and directed by me, with music and sound editing by Chris Christodoulou, starring the one and only Peter Wingfield. It’s a story about the yearning for faith, set in a world slowly vanishing beneath the waves, and I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written.
I wrote Gospels (quite some time ago now) out of a kind of desperation. I feel like our entire global culture is increasingly dominated by shockingly superficial material, banal stories for children, designed by committees and dressed up with the occasional joke spat out by an algorithm, and I find it profoundly depressing. It gets to me, it really does. Add to that the frustrations of working in games, where sometimes you will put years of effort into something only to see it twisted into a pale shadow of what it could have been, and… I just needed to do something that felt meaningful to me.
So I just wrote this thing, writing purely for myself, for the work, without any constraints. I wrote it with one particular actor in mind: Peter Wingfield, whose career I’d followed since first seeing him steal every single scene as Methos in Highlander: The TV Series. That voice, I thought even then, that glorious voice! I’d always wanted to direct him one day, so I wrote for him, but without really imagining that I could actually get him to do this. I mean, I’m just a working-class nobody from Greece.
Except… I’ve now been directing people for years. Sure, it’s not film or TV, but I seem to be good at it, and I know a few people in the business. So I reached out to SIDE, and they helped make it happen. When I got the confirmation that it was actually happening, I almost exploded.
I’m happy to report that Peter was extremely nice, very thoughtful, and delivered a spectacular performance. I’m sure there are people out there who would’ve just taken the money and phoned in their performance, but Peter took the work seriously and did an amazing job.
The first episode is coming out on Monday and I am very aware of how difficult it’s going to be to help the show find its audience. Chris and I are both known for work in a very different field, and while people do like our work, we’re not exactly huge celebrities. And reaching out to the press has gotten a lot harder over the years, particularly as so many websites have been absorbed by these corporate behemoths and very rarely write about an independent production such as ours. So word of mouth will be essential.
Chris and I both know that any kind of huge success is unlikely, and we didn’t set out to make this show for that purpose. But we do think there is an audience out there that will appreciate it, and any help we can get reaching that audience will be appreciated in turn.
You can subscribe to the show here:
Podbean / Spotify / Apple / Google / CastBox / PlayerFM / TuneIn / Soundcloud / RSS
More on Monday.
