Interview: The Family Tree
The Family Tree is a magical realist dramatic fiction about family, belonging, change, belief and identity.When podcast producer Dave Pickering is approached by his dad with a mystery from the life of a long-forgotten friend, he decides to investigate it in the only way he knows how: by having conversations.
What inspired you to start The Family Tree? (or, what is your origin story?)
We wanted to create a show that explored a magical story through improvised conversation. We were interested in the idea of blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, and exploring and presenting a story as if it were true. We felt that this gave us a unique angle to reflect on wider issues in the world, while simultaneously telling a story we found exciting. We're both natural storytellers, and get excited about creating narratives together: creating The Family Tree gave us an opportunity to do this together in a way we hadn't done before, and because of the improvised nature of the show, we were able to develop the narrative and characters in collaboration with the other artists involved. This gave us an opportunity for an even richer narrative that encompassed more points of view.
What did the creation of The Family Tree look like? Did you plan out everything ahead of time, or did the story evolve as you went?
The creation of The Family Tree was quite an organic process. We planned the story we wanted to tell, and created outlines of all the characters. Once we had performers for all the roles, we developed the characters in collaboration with the people who would be playing with them. This influenced the story itself, so there were changes to the story as we went along. The episodes themselves were fully improvised: we had plot points we wanted to hit and certain bits of information that had to come out in each episode, but the dialogue itself was organic, and there were a lot of surprises, which influenced other characters and storylines. With each episode recording, new information that had come out of other episodes was fed back to performers so that we could maintain a consistent narrative. The story was constantly evolving, so although we told the story we planned to tell, we could never have predicted how it would come out or the richness of the detail the performers brought to the process.
You recently posted the season finale for season 3 - are there plans for a season 4?
The Family Tree won't be returning for a fourth season. Endings are complicated beasts, which is an idea we explore in Season 3, but we wanted to end the show after a three season arc. We believe that a good ending should leave room for a new beginning, so there's potential for the story to be explored and expanded further in the future, but we currently have no plans in that direction. There will be a little extra something for listeners at Christmas though!
Any plans to create something new you can share with our audience?
We have no doubt that we'll embark on another joint venture in the future, but for now we're taking a break to focus on our own projects for a while. Dave is working on a non-fiction series about his father's dementia. It's called 'Down to a Sunless Sea,' and will be coming out in 2020. He makes a monthly podcast for The Restart Project, and produces 'Made of Human' for Sofie Hagen and 'The Break Up Monologues' for Rosie Wilby. Jenny is not currently working in audio, but is working on a flash fiction collection, which she hopes to have ready by the end of next year.
Backing out of the details of The Family Tree a bit, I'd love to hear a bit more about your creative influences and inspiration!
It's difficult to pin down your influences: everything you watch; everything you listen to; everything you read contributes in some way. In terms of podcast influences, however, we were certainly inspired by 'The Bright Sessions', 'Within the Wires', and 'Imaginary Advice', as well as Jon Ronson's podcasts, 'S-Town,' Where Should We Begin?' and 'Have you heard George's podcast?' Much of our inspiration comes from TV, though, and we watch a lot of series. Amongst The Family Tree's influences were 'Sense 8,' 'The Leftovers,' 'OA,' 'Orphan Black,' and 'American Vandal'.
Any interesting episodes/special content/live shows coming up? Where can people find you on the internet?
There'll be a Christmas special in late December, which means it's not too late for listeners to sign up to our Patreon campaign (https://patreon.com/thefamilytreepodcast). We'll be releasing a few little extras to patrons between now and then. We'll also be recording our third conversation about creating the show, which will be released on the Getting Better Acquainted feed in December (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/getting-better-acquainted/id436643148). We've done this for the previous two seasons too, and these conversations are still available on Getting Better Acquainted.
The Family Tree website is http://thefamilytreepodcast.co.uk, and you can find us anywhere you like to get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter (@familytreepod), like us on Facebook (@thefamilytreepodcast) and follow us on Instagram (@thefamilytreepodcast).