CAAT media volunteer Todd Higgs spoke to ‘Safety Catch’ writer Laurence Howarth, whose arms trade-based sitcom was first broadcast on Radio 4 in 2007.

What prompted you to write a sitcom set around the arms trade?

I got to thinking about how people relate to their jobs, and of people generally having a job but disowning it. I thought, is it possible to have
somebody who thinks he’s a nice person – which the main character does – and yet have a job like this. Would this create a comic tension?
Every day he has to find ways of justifying it to himself: having to use all those excuses, because I think when people within the industry talk
about it I think what they’re offering is not reasons but justifications and the sort of excuses that are along the lines of things that we all do. It has
this stark dramatic backdrop, but also it stands for a lot of things about ourselves we don’t like. There are also some aspects of his character
that I hope people do sympathise with.

Are any of the arms industry stories in the show based on real events?

One of the things I wanted to do with the arms trade side of it was to try and make it as close to how I would imagine it would be. So there
is a character called Boris who is sort of more a cartoon character who thinks that everyone should have a gun. I wanted him to be like an arms
dealer. There are often little satirical references to some of the more famous deals through Boris, things like ‘Saudi Arabian Princes don’t
bribe themselves you know’. But even if the attitudes are caricatures in some ways, I think the industry itself is portrayed fairly accurately. I
thought it was my responsibility to do that.

What was your individual take on the BAE/Saudi Arabia/SFO saga?

I was writing something dramatic, so in a way I didn’t want my view to be in there. This is about how a person with weak beliefs accounts for
himself. My own view about the trade, the more I look at it, is that it’s one of the great human scandals. I’d like to think that in 200 years time
we’ll look back on the arms trade as we look back now on slavery. And so, in retrospect, I think organisations like Amnesty and CAAT are
absolutely right, for the sake of humanity, to do what they do. I felt that I wanted people to know about this world.

To perhaps lead them to the door but let them open it?

Yeah. I think perhaps one of the things that struck me when I was researching was what a huge industry it is and how when you say
‘the arms industry’ to a lot of people they think of something that happens somewhere else. It’s huge, such a big thing.

Are there any plans for another series of ‘Safety Catch’?

We’re doing another series of six episodes for the radio in February next year, and I’m writing a TV pilot script at the moment. The reviews
were very good. There were some people who really didn’t like it, who felt that you shouldn’t do comedy about this. I think there’s no reason
why comedy shouldn’t tackle big questions. I’d really like to do it on TV; on radio you can’t quite jolt people with the reality of it in the
same way but visually it’s a lot easier to do that. People choose not to imagine. Whether that will happen is a long way off but it’s a very
intriguing challenge.