The Great Cricket Con

In July 2022, reporters in the Indian state of Gujarat broke a story that seemed unbelievable. In a tiny village in north-western India, police had arrested a gang of villagers for running a fake cricket tournament that they had made to look like the Indian Premier League. According to reports, the villagers broadcast their spectacle on betting websites and targeted gamblers from Russia.

The story caught fire, drawing comparisons with the 1973 movie The Sting, in which Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s plucky conmen run a fake gambling parlour to rip off a mob boss.

This drama-documentary explores the police allegations and media coverage of a story that could be ripped straight from the pages of a Bollywood script.

This Week Is Family Week

Xinjiang Province, China. Uyghur student, Nur, is able to ‘pass’ as Han Chinese, and exploits this as much as possible in a society where Uyghur people live under constant surveillance.

Nur and her mother, Meryem, want to avoid being sent to one of the re-education prison camps, where it is thought a million people – mostly Uyghur – have been detained without trial. But then they are assigned a live-in Chinese ‘relative’ by the authorities – Auntie Wang Shu – who comes to stay in their apartment as part of a Family Week initiative to ensure lifestyle conformity: “Cook together, eat together, study together, travel together, sleep together!”

But Wang Shu has other motives, which involve marrying her son to a Uyghur woman. And she has Nur in her sights as a prime candidate. Any missteps by Nur or Meryem could result in their being sent into re-education. But will Nur play by the rules?

A fictional story inspired by real accounts. Writer Avin Shah has drawn on testimonies from the 2021 independent Uyghur Tribunal (chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, chief prosecutor on the trial of Slobodan Milošević) and on research by Raminder Kaur, Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex, who served on the tribunal, as well on interviews with other Uyghur and Chinese cultural and political consultants.

Cry If You Want To

Single parent Ana is pretty sure she isn’t being paid fairly at work.
She’s tried her boss; she’s tried HR – to no avail.
So now she needs to find out how much her colleague Dave earns in order to make her case.
So one night, she turns up at his flat to ask him…

Crackling two-hander from award-winning writer E.V Crowe that asks: how far would you go to get what’s fair?

A House Called Insanity

Anne-Marie Duff stars as Elsy Borders, the working-class heroine whose remarkable true story deserves to be far better known. Even though she became a national figure in the late 1930s, no play celebrating her achievements has ever been written – until now.

The wife of a South London cabby (played by Karl Davies), Elsy did something a working-class woman was not supposed to do. She broke the rules and conventions of acceptable behaviour. Determined to expose the poor quality of workmanship in house-building which continues to resonate today with scandals such as Grenfell Tower, she took the unprecedented step of refusing to pay her mortgage owing to the dire state of their new, but poorly-built, house on an estate in Kent. When the building society responded by suing for repossession of the house which the family had by now christened Insanity, Elsy counter-claimed for damages.

The fight was on…

With contributions from Stella Etheridge, Jeremy Tagg and Phillipa Tagg who are current residents of the Coney Hall Estate where Elsy lived.