Goats! Trains! Aeroplanes! Pet Shop Boys!

 

I've finally heard The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble, and it's fab! Hurrah! Hugh Quarshie is a splendid Ibrahim Bihi, utterly real and grounded. And Sam O'Mahony-Adams as Jude is a terrific comic foil to Quarshie. The BBC economics correspondent, Stephanie Flanders, really threw herself into it, and her interviews from Hargeisa Goat Market are a delight. (I love creating such unstable moments, where the real and the fictional are perfectly mixed. A real BBC correspondent fiercely interviewing a fictional character about theoretical goats... Bliss!)

The director Di Speirs did a great job making all these elements, and performances, work together. A tricky task, mixing actors and non-actors, present tense and flashback, thoughts and actions, and keeping it all clear and artistically coherent. And I'm very happy with David's sound design... Goats! Trains! Aeroplanes! Pet Shop Boys! Beautifully blended.

That distant wind you hear is my great sigh of relief.