Oliver Emanuel was an award-winning playwright and radio dramatist who became a prominent voice in Scottish theatre.
He was named as the ‘Outstanding Contribution to Audio Drama’ winner at the BBC Audio Drama Awards in 2024 and was described as “one of the great audio writers of his generation.”
He was also Reader in Creative Writing at St Andrews University. But in the Spring of 2023, Olly found that he could no longer read… He’d started to have seizures. Tests later revealed that he had brain cancer.
Olly died in December aged just 43 – a huge loss to his partner Vickie and their two young children, his dad, Peter (who had already lost Olly’s mum to cancer years earlier), his sister and to all his friends and colleagues.
One of those colleagues was his producer Kirsty Williams who explained why his family, friends and colleagues were determined to complete his last play and ensure it was broadcast:
Kirsty said: “Throughout his illness, Olly talked about finishing the play he was writing for BBC Radio 4: The Great Wave – a play about a man and a woman caught in a rip tide and imagining the life they might have had together.
“But once he could no longer read, he also couldn’t finish the play. Instead, he wrote – some days with both eyes shut – about what was happening to him. He’d just type, describing it as ‘writing forward’ because he couldn’t review, refine or redraft his words.
“He documented his experience from his first seizure to the day he was told the treatment wasn’t working. That’s the day he told his family, friends and – most importantly – his two young children that he was close to the end of his life.”
Olly asked Vicky and Kirsty to find a home for his “creative response to brain cancer” as well as unfinished audio drama.
So, a year after Olly’s first seizure, they started work on his final words by abridging his writing on brain cancer and weaving it through the unfinished play.
Kirsty said: “The two pieces started to talk to one another, as if Olly’s characters were sitting in his imagination – at times supporting him, at other times distracting him with stories of their own.
“The result is – we hope – something incredibly special. Painful, funny, insanely insightful; a unique view into the experience of cancer and of the slow disintegration of language that brain cancer can have. Ultimately it is a beautiful meditation on life and love.
Kirsty
“And obviously it was made precisely because of that love – for us all to be able to walk back through Olly’s experience and honour him through a medium he loved so much, was a pilgrimage into grief and gratitude and loss.”
They recorded the drama in late summer with three actors with whom Olly had collaborated often. One Hundred and Fifty Days is a combination of his unfinished audio drama (The Great Wave) and extracts from his autobiographical work (All My Reading).
It’s being broadcast on Radio 4 on Thursday 21 November at 2:15pm and will then be available on the BBC Sounds app
It’s also available on BBC Radio 4’s Drama of the Week podcast feed, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Images from the recording of “When the Pips Stop” by Oliver Emanuel.
You can read other stories about how people have used creativity to cope with their brain tumour diagnosis such as Anna’s book Little Nipper here, Phoebe’s Glad Game here and Kit’s award-winning film Red Herring here