Fay Rusling Audiobooks

Who is Fay Rusling?

Comedy writing rooms rarely produce famous names, and Fay Rusling is a fine illustration of how much of British television is built by people the audience never sees. A writer and performer, she has worked in partnership with Oriane Messina since 1999, and the pair sit behind two of the most distinctive comedies Channel 4 has broadcast.

The first was Smack the Pony, the sketch show that put women at the centre of the joke rather than at the end of it, and won International Emmy Awards for doing so. The second was Green Wing, created by Victoria Pile, where Rusling was part of a large writing team producing a hospital comedy with no interest whatsoever in medicine and an enormous interest in the emotional chaos of the people who work there.

Her register is deadpan absurdity delivered by characters convinced they are behaving perfectly normally, which is the hardest kind to write and the most rewarding to listen to.

Fay Rusling in audiobooks

Green Wing: Resuscitated (Series 2) is the Audible revival of that Channel 4 series, co-written by Rusling with Victoria Pile, Oriane Messina and Robert Harley. The staff of East Hampton Hospital pick up more or less where they left off, which is to say mid-catastrophe, and the original cast return to play them.

Oliver Chris leads a full ensemble across a little under five hours. Audio suits this material better than you might expect: stripped of the visual gags, the writing’s real engine turns out to be rhythm, interruption and people talking themselves into corners they cannot leave.

Knowing the television series helps, and newcomers may prefer to begin with the first run of Resuscitated, though the jokes land perfectly well without either. Do explore the listing below.