something I Prepared Earlier - 2007 - 15 mins


Set in a Britain of the near future, this dark comedy takes a satirical swipe at privatisation and the nation's continuing obsession with TV cookery shows. It follows the last weeks in the life of surgeon-droid SD-M9-55 - human name James Swallow - a super-advanced artifical itelligence in the form of a Mark IX android indistinguishable from the humans that created him.

When Swallow is not performing major surgery in the high-tech Wall-Mart hospital (motto: 'your health is our business'), he occupies a luxury south coast apartment where he lives a reclusive existence devoted largely to watching his favourite TV cookery shows.
One evening he receives the shattering news that he is to be replaced by a next-generation Mark X surgeon-droid. Adding insult to injury, his employer, has now reassigned him to supervising the training of nurse-droids, assisted by a lowly Mark III.

Filled with resentment towards the humans that gave him life, he is also fearful they will take that life away: ''How long before reassign becomes recycle?" he tells us. "I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid!''


Swallow retreats to his apartment and awaits the arrival of his executioners while watching his favourite cookery shows. But the belief that his useful life is now over induces a breakdown in his delicate artifical brain, producing bizarre hallucinations and self-destructive behaviour. Encouraged by the belief that his beloved TV chefs are talking to him and aided by immense surgical skills, Swallow spends the final weeks of his life turning his artifical flesh into gourmet meals that are consumed with increasingly demented enthusiasm.

And then came the biggest surprise of all...

Premiere: 2007 Brighton Festival
Festivals: 2007 Canary Wharf Festival, London; 2008 Strawberry Fair Film Festival, Cambridge; 2008 Workhouse Festival, Wales