Sci-fi warning at the Festival of Chichester

But its creator Graham Richards is quick to point out: there's also a hefty dose of the ridiculous about the whole thing and plenty of laughs throughout. The show comes to the Old Dojo, New Park Centre, Chichester on Saturday, July 8 at 6.30pm courtesy of Audible Visions Drama. Far among the stars, a group of freedom fighters battle against a brutal police state which is pushing the universe down a path of controlled identity, as Graham explains. Cyclone blends action, drama and absurdity in equal measures, all against a backdrop of a 1980s check-out girl, out of her depth, Graham promises. Tickets: £10, seniors £7, students £7.

“It is about freedom fighters fighting against a totalitarian police state that are clamping down on identity and who we are. Predominantly they are very much against women in positions of power. It is basically a dystopian story but it can be enjoyed at lots of different levels. One is a very keen sense of total absurdity. We're not afraid to play for laughs because absurdity is all around us in real life and I want to take a little bit of that absurdity into the ridiculousness of what occurs. But it's a bit of a warning. It looks at what our species could become.”

The stage version of the show comes from a podcast version which Graham launched last year, itself a new version of a sci-fi audio drama he began 40 years ago at the age of eight.

“It began on cassettes recorded over the school holidays of 1982 and then shared later with BRCC classmates. It's a story that's stayed will me all my life.”

He launched it as a podcast series last autumn on all the main streaming platforms including Spotify, Audible, Amazon etc through Graham’s Audible Visions Drama, free to download – just as he offered the stories free to class mates several decades ago.

“It all goes back to when I was eight years old and I was inspired by some of the TV programmes on at the time but not in the usual way. I was inspired by the fact that the sci-fi used to aggravate me. I used to think ‘I wouldn't do it that way. I would do it this way.’ They were getting it all wrong! It mainly stems from Doctor Who. My parents were big fans of Doctor Who and I really loved it but every time there was something like a new companion I would wonder why the companion wasn't someone who was a little bit off the wall and would go along messing everything up. I started drawing out little ideas when I was a nipper and I stole my sister’s tape recorder. I started inventing little dramas and storylines. I kept those storylines to myself for a while and then I started sharing them around at school.

“It was about two years later that I started to rope other people into making the stories as well. Before that was just me on the tape recorder playing all the characters. When I was 12 or so I started getting others to join me. When I was about 12 I was so embarrassed by my eight-year-old self on the recordings that I wiped my eight-year-old self, but I do still have some of those I made from when I was 12 onwards and I kept on doing them through my teenage years until I was about 16 or 17. I've still got quite a box full of the recordings and I started putting them on CDs some time ago but then I just forgot about it for a while until around 2004 I got the bug for recording again and I started doing what I call Audible Visions Drama whilst I was at work where the boss was very kind and let us do it during the breaks. I roped everyone together and we made some new recordings.”