The UK based Malawian Comedian Daliso Chaponda is to return to BBC Radio 4 . His Citizen Of Nowhere is set for a third series and will be addressing the coronavirus crisis.
Set to record next summer, the latest episodes of the radio series will be about “hope” Chaponda has said.
“Because it has mostly been written so far during Covid, it is very much about hope in the face of hopeless situations”, the former Britain’s Got Talent finalist told an online audience at The University of Wolverhampton, in a talk titled “Joking about Race, Politics and Your Lovelife without Offending People”.
“It’s very much like not giving in to despair, ways of coping” he said. “Each episode has a theme and there’s going to be an episode of blame. There was a lot of worrying, blaming different groups for Covid. So there’s an episode on blame and forgiveness and then other episodes with how you cope with despair.”
Citizen Of Nowhere‘s initial four-episode series aired in 2018, following Chaponda’s BGT success the year before. It was followed by a second series in 2019.
“So the first series of Citizen Of Nowhere was very much concerned with history and immigration” he recalled. “It was mainly about colonialism, slavery and then it was also talking about things like immigration and interaction between different societies. That was what was really on my mind back then.
“Then the next series was very much about, interestingly, cancel culture and about what’s appropriate to say, what’s not appropriate to say,. That was probably what motivated me.”
Chaponda, who is based in the UK, also disclosed that he’d been against casting James Quinn as the patrician voice of the Establishment in the series, and how that had shaped the writing.
Citizen Of Nowhere is produced by Carl Cooper. Chaponda , son of former cabinet Minister and Member of Parliament Dr George Chaponda has performed several times in Malawi
***Origina Posting British Comedy Guide+***
