Despite the setup and winks toward common constructs, Everything is Alive is a delight to listen to precisely because it isn’t a joke. It never hides what it is about, never works towards an ‘aha’ moment where you suddenly realise what object you are listening to. The identity of each character is set up from the start; the conversations and dissections are compelling and gentle. With each episode crafted in conjunction with the comedian guest playing the object, a sense of humour and levity runs through the series in both content and form. It gently pokes fun at podcast tropes, but is, ultimately, a passionate composition which takes itself seriously. And working with comedians, comedy and wit aren’t at the forefront of the improvisations: instead, the conversations feel embedded in truth, improvisation used not for form laugh-out-loud comedic situations, but for the quiet studied way a character’s world can be built.
Everything is Alive is a delight to listen to precisely because it isn’t a joke.
Chillag’s previous work on the productions Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me and How To Do Everything has demonstrated his love of obscure trivia. Here, working with his guests, the facts are placed into the ‘brains’ of these objects: who would know more about elevator history than an elevator? Who would know more about the fate of un-bought pumpkins than a jack o’ lantern?
Much of the joy of the work comes from the curious oddity of thinking of a voice prescribed to these objects: a simple thought exercise in what we would hear from a pillow or a bar of soap. But Everything is Alive is so much more than that: stepping away from humanity and observing us from the outside – often from a place in the world which is defined and fixed – we get new and insightful meditations on humanity. How humans create things, and how these things can be destroyed. At various times, the work becomes a meditation on loss and grief; a consideration of trauma; a love-letter to rom-coms.
We sit within the anxiety of Ana the elevator (Ana Fabrega): given a view on the outside world, she asks, ‘Is there no weight-limit outside? So how do you know if you have too many people outside? […] It looks so overwhelming out there.’ We sit within the mindfulness of Chioke, (Chioke I’Anson), a grain of sand: ‘All of my existence is observation and reflection’, he says.
Frequently, we return to the very human question of how can a life be measured. ‘I’m asking myself: Were you as important as you thought? Were you as valuable as you thought? What kind of a mark will you leave?’ says Tara (Tara Clancy), a bar of soap. ‘Mildew? A soap stain?’
We are taken through stories of the limited lives of a can of cola, of a pumpkin; of the eternity of sand. The nightmarish story of the Tooth Fairy, as told by a tooth: one who threatens to take you away from your family. The pressure put on a pillow to give its person a good night’s sleep.
Launched in July, at first the production seemed to be a look at our relationship with objects humans create; but by October it began to show a shift towards inanimate objects which exist outside our engineering: the tooth, the sand, a jack-o-lantern which wholly existed as a pumpkin before being carved, and who remembers every twist of the knife in her flesh.
The interview construct of the show allows it to go on strange segues … At times it explores the mundane … at others the utterly bizarre.
The interview construct of the show allows it to go on strange segues: a question as to why we have a grain of sand, but not a grain of human, leads to conversations about mass nouns, unity and divergence. At times it explores the mundane, such as Maeve (Maeve Higgins), a lamppost, talking about her workday; at others the utterly bizarre. In the series’ first (and still arguably strangest and most beguiling) episode, Chillag ends the interview by drinking Lewis the cola can. ‘Are you sweating?’ asks Chillag; ‘With joy,’ Lewis breathlessly responds.
Although no other episode released to date ends with such finality of the object at hand, it is possible I view this episode as the strangest only because, as the first episode, I had no point of comparison. Much like the work could, at first, be mistakenly read as a joke; its conceit could seem limited. And, of course, we are only eight episodes in. But as each episode takes in the big questions of our lives and asks us to look at them in a new way, with introspection and a dash of humour, never sticking to a singular set of rules for how each of these disparate objects should behave, there is a long way for the work to grow yet.
