New West Sussex YouTube comedy series looks at lockdown life

A group of young actors, mostly current or ex-Chichester Festival Youth Theatre plus National Youth Theatre and Stage Box Kids, are uniting on the series Dropping Marmalade, a title which means, as they see it, simply gossiping.

Aged 16-21, they are promising an intimate and funny exploration of middle-class village life in the south of England.

When Carol is elected chairman of the parish council of the quaint English village of Little Pecker in the spring of 2020, her first move is to set up a local website for the residents. It rapidly becomes a vlogging outlet to air grievances, share opinions and events and tell stories from lockdown.

Rumours and hidden truths come to light as the villagers discover that the camera never lies.

How long until the residents can no longer live side by side in lockdown? Who will crack first and show the village their true colours?

Dropping Marmalade’s creator Daisy Roe, who lives in Thakeham, is a member of National Youth Theatre and Chichester Festival Youth Theatre; her many productions include Crossing Lines (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2019) and Femme (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2020).

Daisy said: “We hope that Dropping Marmalade will entertain and inspire audiences, proving that creativity and the arts can flower online until this pandemic eventually, hopefully ends. It’s about representing relationships through online communication in a time when keeping connected online has been many people’s only option.”

The pilot aired on YouTube on August 1. The next episode came out on September 1 – and the plan is to bring out an episode every other week.

Playing Carol in the series is Georgina Liley who lives in Storrington.

“The whole thing came from Daisy, from a social media page of a local village, and she saw all the slightly futile grumbles of the locals and she thought it would be really good to turn it into a comedy show.

“She didn’t use the identities exactly! But she brought the most outrageous sets of these posts and put them into the comedy. It is very character-based.”

Each episode is ten to 15 minutes: “Little Pecker is your stereotypical English village, and you hear the characters in the introduction. Each of us filmed our introductory videos, and you get an idea of the characters, who they are, whether they have been in the village for years or whether they use it as their rural home from a busy working life in London.

“You never know what is going to happen when you put something out on the internet, whether someone is going to pick it up, but at the moment, we are just having a lot of fun for ourselves doing it. We hope that people will start watching. We just want to put a comedic light on the past few months which have been pretty devastating.”

Performers: Georgina Liley – Carol Hall; Aadi Mudhar – Thomas Crouch; Ellie Bradbury –Angela Rawlin; Daisy Roe –Jane Smith; William Grist –Gavin Rich; Joe Smith –Christopher Reynolds; Georgia Cornell – Ruby Towner; Amy Glenister – Becks Craig; Florence Clarke – Sharon Hunt. Writer: Daisy Roe.

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