Olly Emanuel

It is devastating and heartbreaking to be typing the words that my friend and collaborator, Olly Emanuel, has died.

Olly and I worked closely together on our radio adaptation of Emile Zola’s 20-volume ‘Rougon-Macquart’ novel sequence which broadcast in 2015-16 on Radio 4 as Emile Zola: Blood, Sex & Money. Olly and I were on the same wavelength throughout the process; I was lead writer on series 1 and 3 while Olly led on series 2. What I loved about Olly is he was always someone to accept a challenge and when I had doubts or cold feet about some idea, Olly would insist we go for it. We decided that the enormous, epic novel L’Assommoir should be rendered, preposterously, as a monologue and Olly wrote it beautifully, heartbreaking - and it was performed magnificently by Julie Hesmondhalgh. In series 3, he was tickled when I told him he’d be writing an adaptation of a novel that Zola never wrote. (The looming Franco-Prussian War casts a shadow over all the novels, but Zola never writes one about how it started, so I storylined one using some of the characters and Olly wrote it - no one seemed to notice we’d made a novel up!). In season 2, Olly assigned me two 45’ plays to adapt La Curée and Le Rêve. For the first, he liked the idea that this huge novel that covers years of time should be done as a one-room real-time drama. And he was delighted when the second novel, with its peculiar religious and sexual intensity erupted into a hallucinatory scene where stone saints in a church start debating theology. The whole project was, for various reasons, difficult but Olly was a great champion, a creative powerhouse, and a cheerleader for what we were doing. He was deeply serious about writing - his own and others’ - and expressed it through an enormous generosity of time, spirit, energy. He was extraordinary fun to be with.

And he was a fantastic writer. I’ll be clear: there is no radio writer I admire more than Olly Emanuel. Every one of his plays is formally inventive, conceptually daring and - the difficult bit - emotionally rich and resonant. Earlier this term, I taught a radio drama course and gave the students his play A History of Paper (2016), a play I will find it hard to listen to for a while, so beautifully does it express a world of loss. My students were very moved by it, one expressing shock that something so apparently simple and delicate could be so powerful. In summer 2022, I was working on my play 7 Ghosts and realised I hadn’t yet listened to Olly’s new play A Close Approximation of You. It’s a risky thing listening to a play when you’re writing one of your own. If it’s bad, it can muddy your thinking. If it’s good, it can throw you into despair about your own inadequacies. Olly’s play was very very good (and, now I think about it, another heartbreaking play about loss). But like its author, it was encouraging. It made me feel everything was possible and, rather than feeling daunted, I just felt joyful that this play existed in the world. It made me want to make work with that integrity, clarity, ambition and daring.

Radio drama flies under Britain’s radar. Despite its loyal audience of millions, despite 100 years of innovation, despite its unique ability to get inside the audience’s head and to take the audience out of itself, it doesn’t seem a major part of the public cultural conversation. In some ways, this is good; it’s easier to get on with it, without the pressure of that kind of attention. But on the other hand if Olly had the status and track record in TV or the novel that he has in radio, there would be books written about him. And there should be books written about him.

I was introduced to Olly in 2008 by my friend Lewis Hetherington. I was doing a project at the CCA in Glasgow, workshopping my piece for Suspect Culture, Theatremorphosis. Olly was a warm, funny, generous personality, with laughing eyes and boundless enthusiasm. We became friends immediately and then I listened to his radio plays and to that friendship was added admiration and awe . And then we worked together and we egged each other on, held each other’s nerve, kept each other going. His daughter was born two weeks after my son and we bonded over the joys of fatherhood.

We’d always meet up when I was in Scotland. I was there in January this year and we had lunch together. We’d both been commissioned to write plays celebrating 100 years of BBC Radio drama. His idea was about objects that captured long lost sounds. I don’t believe he’s managed to write it. (Though in fact his amazing play, When the Pips Stop [2018], is as fine a celebration of radio as you could ever want.) We met again in London for the BBC Audio Drama Awards. There was a video presentation celebrating the centenary of radio drama with illustrious plays and playwrights swimming across the screen; afterwards Olly and I preened comically about the fact that were the only writers to have two plays listed. Take that, Harold Pinter.

That was March. Then a couple of months later, at the beginning of May, I sent him a message and didn’t hear back for a few days. Then he sent a WhatsApp message saying he found it hard to read so was sending a voice message. Found it hard to read? The message explained he’d been in a park and had had a seizure and some of his language processing seemed to have been hit. He was having tests.

Then the tests came back and they weren’t good. Grade 4 brain cancer. The prognosis was not encouraging. How Olly did it, I don’t know, but he maintained positive, buoyant, life affirming. He made videos, talking us through every stage of his treatment, how he was feeling. He was never self-pitying, never bleak. He seemed more concerned for us, the people who loved him and how we might be feeling. He shaved his head. He put on some weight. He laughed about it.

He said he was still finding trouble reading so he said he’d quite like me to read him some poems, if I had time, only if I had the time. Through the summer I found poems and read them and sent them to him. We enthused over Sophie Collins and Jack Underwood and Zaffar Kunial.

The week Glenda Jackson - who was our narrator for the Zolas - died, he wrote me ‘what a loss for us and a gift. We were sooo lucky. It was like a dream. whole thing shocks me still’.

And on Tuesday this week, he died. He’d been in a hospice having palliative care. I am desperately sad I didn’t get to see him, but I know he was with friends. It was wonderful to know him and work with him. I was so lucky. It was like a dream. Whole thing shocks me still.

RIP you brilliant man.