It can happen… especially to anyone working from home. You’re busy meeting some deadline or other, maybe waiting for a ‘crucial’ email to pop into ‘new mail’. The radio is on. Without realising it at first, you find yourself listening intently to something that distracts you away from the job at hand, something so moving or shocking that it triggers a moment of intense clarity.

Welsh scriptwriter Shôn Dale-Jones tells us his story, weaving together an unlikely mix made from his frustrations compromising a film script, his relationship with his ageing but by no means decrepit Anglesey-based mum, and the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. Interestingly, and no doubt to give the story some legs, he stirs some fantasy into the realities and adds the sublimely mundane to the catastrophic, as he searches for the real meaning of value and a balancing of priorities.

Sitting behind an office desk and armed only with a mike and a laptop that he accesses for background musical effects, Dale-Jones nostalgically takes us back to when his dad proudly shows him the Royal Worcester porcelain figure he keeps wrapped in sponge in a box under his bed – the Duke of Wellington on horseback. The opening bars of ‘Magic Moments’ sprinkle out over the Spielman audience.

Dale-Jones is able to spring forwards and back in time as he unwinds his parallel tales in helix-like spirals – refugee boats leaving Turkey for Greece, the sentiment behind a family heirloom, the fight for the integrity of a literary work.

He is an animated storyteller. Leaning over his desk towards us, he conjures laughs with some slick use of his jingles. And his timing is good, using the microphone to give us ‘other’ voices – like his dad or his mum or the disturbing off-duty police officer with an eye for Royal Worcester.

Like most of us, Dale-Jones explains, he is just “trying to keep his head above water” and make sense of the world. His reaction to hearing about refugees on the radio as he paused before making changes to his film script became his eureka moment. Applying the intensely personal to a wider international problem gave his show its raison d’être.

All too quickly it seems, the light charm of Dale-Jones’s storytelling wraps up to become more of an exhortation for kindness in the world, and we are gently urged to reach into our pockets on our way out for the Save the Children’s campaign for refugees. The show has almost reached its aim of raising £50,000. Maybe you can help get it over the line.

★★★☆☆     Simon Bishop    31^st October 2018