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Limelight

One Five Seven Years: 1. Anya

Limelight

BBC

Fiction, Drama

4.4698 Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2022

⏱️ 33 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Imagine you could live for two lifetimes. Would you want to? How would it change you and those you love? What would you do with all those extra years? What second chances might you get? Would this be a blessing or a curse?

This world is an alternative version of our own. Except in this world, a minority of people are discovered to have Extended Life Syndrome (ELS). The condition might give an "Elser" two decades in their thirties, two in their forties, double the time in their fifties, and so on. Little is understood of the biological factors that govern ELS except that it affects a random selection of people. It is the ultimate lottery of genetics, crossing class, race, culture and gender.

And if a simple test existed to check your DNA for this double life, would you take it? Would you want to know?

Now think again. Would you?

Anya works in an ELS diagnostics laboratory. When she and boyfriend Luke - a semi-professional athlete – disagree about testing, their world is turned inside out.

Written by Marietta Kirkbride

Cast: Anya ….. Rose Wardlaw Luke ….. Ragevan Vasan Esther ….. Jessica Murrain Tarik ….. Asif Khan Lucy ….. Clare Corbett Pete …. Jacob Tombling Caller ..... Pamela Miles Selwyn ….. Anton Lesser

Other voices played by the cast

Sound Design ….. Adam Woodhams and Steve Bond Theme Music ….. Ioana Selaru and Axel Kacoutié

Academic Consultants ….. Tamas David-Barrett & James Fasham Executive Producer ….. Sara Davies

Series created by Marietta Kirkbride Directed and Produced by Nicolas Jackson

An Afonica production for BBC Radio 4

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.

0:09.6

Would you have lived your life differently?

0:13.6

What?

0:15.1

If you'd known, as a young man, that you were going to live such an impossibly long time would you have lived

0:23.6

differently?

0:24.6

Monday.

0:42.9

So, I once read this article that said lobsters are biologically immortal.

0:45.6

Something about how they repair their DNA.

0:47.1

They can just keep growing.

0:48.1

Forever.

0:49.9

It's mad, right?

0:52.0

I got obsessed with that for a while.

0:55.0

Never been a vegetarian or anything, but made me think, how could you take something that might have scuttled around the ocean for centuries and just like...

1:01.0

...eaten.

1:03.0

Just have a bit of chicken, you know?

1:06.0

Taste the same. Probably.

1:08.0

But then Luke found this other article

1:11.3

bit less clickbait

1:12.7

a bit more science

1:14.6

turns out lobsters being immortal

1:16.8

is actually bollocks

1:17.8

because when the lobster gets bigger

...

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