WE ARE NOT ALONE
ILLEGAL ALIENS
GHOSTS WRITERS LAURENCE RICKARD AND BEN WILLBOND MOVE INTO SF TERRITORY WITH THEIR NEW COMEDY, WE ARE NOT ALONE, A UNIQUE MASH-UP OF ALIEN NATION AND THE THICK OF IT
WORDS: STEVE O’BRIEN
Ben Willbond as Darrenth, Larry Rickard as Cirsh.
Amanda Abbington (left) stars as Greives.
IT WAS ON A DISMAL, OVERCAST DAY a few years back that Ben Willbond found himself on a train bulleting through Peterborough when a thought struck him. What if aliens invaded planet Earth and ended up in Cambridgeshire? As a comedy writer he immediately recognised the rich comic promise of an alien invasion force setting up base in the middle of a quaint Cathedral city, 100 miles from London. When he got home, he shared the idea with his partner-inlaughs, Laurence Rickard.
“It just kept coming back to me,” Rickard tells SFX. “Then, about three months later, I pitched it back to Ben: ‘What about a series where we start it at the point where science fiction invasion movies usually stop?’ So instead of the invasion being attempted, and the humans won, it’s that we fought back, didn’t win, they took over and then went, ‘Ah, trying to run this place is really difficult. What do we do now?’”
Though Rickard and Willbond originally conceived We Are Not Alone as a series, it’s as a feature-length TV film that it has landed. Already well-schooled in sitcom, the pair had penned a half-hour pilot and shopped it round a few possible homes, until UKTV proposed making it a 90-minute special instead.
“Initially we were like, yeah, we’ll take that half hour and make it feature-length,” says Rickard. “But it never works out like that. So we ended up putting a lot of the story of our script in the drawer and largely starting again.”