When Alan Met Ray

Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield star in a new drama set in 1948 in Milford Tuberculosis Sanatorium, Surrey.

Told he has only six weeks to live, 18-year-old Ray begins painful treatment to limit the spread of the infection. By chance he meets Alan - the same age - who has just been given last rites following a severe haemorrhage. Striking up a friendship, they discover shared interests - football, girls, watching comedy films and listening to the hospital radio.

Set against the banal routine of sanitorium imprisonment, where rules are strictly enforced, the play's production and sound design recreate the intense loneliness, horror and abandonment experienced by both young men in the prime of their youth, alongside the camaraderie, happy times and the lasting friendship between Alan and Ray, forged in such a challenging environment.

Alan and Ray are surrounded by a range of characters trapped in this regulated environment; fellow patients, compassionate nurses and an unempathetic head doctor who enforces the rules for all patients.

Alan and Ray start writing comedy sketches which they aim to perform on the sanatorium hospital radio. But first they have to get past the notorious radio committee headed of course by the Chief Physician and the presenter of the dismal hospital radio service, Alastair 'Mac' McGuire.

Alan and Ray battle for the right to broadcast their programmes to the patients. They manage to gain the support of their listeners and with the help of a sympathetic nurse, win over the radio committee, producing a satire aimed at the hospital hierarchy. The sketch show, Have You Ever Wondered? broadcasting from a broom cupboard they call the mini-BBC, is a hit with patients.

Ultimately, When Alan Met Ray is a story about two young men, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, stricken with TB, looking at more than three years of incarceration in the grinding tedium of sanatorium life yet finding a purpose and direction out of the mundane bleakness of their unwanted hospital sojourn; a purpose that would in time provide millions of radio listeners and TV viewers joy and delight as the writers of the shows Hancock and Steptoe And Son.