My question would be, who's he missed? Who's carrying the oranges? Who's he missed? And I look at the list and I go, you'd be struggling to put anyone else

in there.

I can help you with a few that I've missed because I have noticed a couple of unlucky omissions, boys.

Yeah, please.

Happy for me to read those.

Yes, go for it.

Nathan Bassett just missed.

But

We've got to fulfill the book.

I'd always felt connected to my heritage while growing up in Birmingham because my family was quite big, and so connection to the Jamaican sensibility was always very, very strong in my family.

But the track gave me a sense of pride in the history, um, that lay behind our arrival in Jamaica, and that was something that I think is, is very, very important.

It's unspoken, but it's kind of laced into our stories and our education and our idea of ourselves that there is a certain latent pride in who we are, why we're here, where we're from, and what we can be, and that really matters.

I've the cunning of the tiger and the wisdom of the trees.

There was always a ritual before they went to school where I would do their hair, whether it would be plaits or quarter partings or, or zigzag partings or beads or, you know, something I could do within 10 minutes while they were watching TV or listening to music.

And I remember doing their hair in stages because it took so long to do it.

So I would do half the hair on a Saturday and then the other half of the hair on a Sunday, so they were ready for school on a Monday.

Mm-hmm

... to pay for all of this stuff.

Um, I'm not from the nominal culture where this stuff, um, is, is appreciated, and I've luckily found that people have come, opened the doors, and said, "Come in." So there I am in, in Birmingham, and I'm going to the Midlands Arts Center, and, um, I joined the opera company, and I remember doing...

It was a, a new piece written by Richard Blackford called Dragon Tales of Granny Chang, and the idea being that we were a group of kids that were in a village, and when the adults went out to work, we entertained ourselves with stories, and those were the pieces of the opera.

I had a, a, a solo, but this is the point.

M- the you- members of the youth theater, because the kids, we were young, we stood and we sang, but the members of the youth theater would do a dumb show and mime what the stories were, and I was watching them.

I kept trying to watch the conductor [laughs] because it was in such a complicated time signature, but my eyes kept drifting over to what the youth theater were doing, members of the youth theater, who were all older than me.

Mm

So there's a verse form for each

character? Yeah, Debra has gone through the play, and rather than sticking to the Alexandrine verse that Rostand wrote the original in, look it up, she...

Oh, Radio 4 listeners.

Yeah, they'll all know.

Adrian had to look it up.

But everybody I'm talking to, you'll all know what it is.

So she's created a form where, for instance, de Guiche, who's one character in the play, he speaks in iambic pentameter, Shakespeare's form.

Did you

Deborah obviously coming in involved as well.

The fir- the very first conversation I had with Simon was, um, I met him at a party, and we were chatting about our love of sleight of hand and magic and things like that.

And he showed me a magic trick.

And we got chatting about, uh, 'cause I was talking about hustle and how hustle was actually a magic trick.

A con is a magic trick.

There's set up, expectation, misdirection, and then the, the, the result is not what you expected and so on.

So, um, we were talk- talking about that and the script, and I thought, "This guy's really, really great, and he's a director." And I said to him, "Look, if you have anything that you wanna work on, maybe we could continue this conversation over a, over a project." And he said, "I'd love that.

It's, it doesn't feel like it's sort of done in an, a- an artificial way.

Um, so is there anybody in your family who likes tracing your family back? Who's, who's had a go at it? Who's the historian?

Um, I think my generation of cousins, there's, uh, quite a few of us, we've all, um, been asking our parents questions, and for them it was, "Oh, well, you know, I was born here, and we came over, and we just did this." "Yeah, but where? What, you know, what did you do?" My mom let slip one day that they would pack all the peas and the produce up in the house that they had in Saint Mary in Jamaica, and shell the peas, and they would pr- prepare them to, um, go to market or go to other, um, houses.

And then I realized that there's a habit that my family have, which is if you were, when I was growing up, if you were going to visit another family in Birmingham, they would say, "Oh, take that for so and so.

Oh, and make sure you give this to Mr.

So and So, and take this jumper for...

And I forgot to give the..." And you'd have to take all these packages to people.

But when my mom spoke about growing up in Jamaica, I realized that there was w- a family across the way who would do, who had, um, farmed chickens.

This is a brilliant story of unrequited love, isn't it?