The Afterlife Bureau
From Monty Python to Douglas Adams and beyond, there is a long-running and particularly British strand of comedy concerning the inherent exasperation of dealing with bureaucracy and its convoluted framework of processes, regulations and the endlessly inventive reams of paperwork to be filled in and filed or sometimes lost, cast adrift in a bottomless ocean of manila folders and paperclips, and death offers no escape.
For Officer GR 17 of the Afterlife Bureau it is almost time to clock off, ticket in hand for the train to Purgatory Station and watching the minute hand sweep forward when the alarm sounds, a newly arrived client who must be processed with all due haste, taking only a moment to hide her frustration and compose herself before inviting him in and beginning an interview which swiftly veers from the customary.
Written and directed by Dimiter Dimitroff, The Afterlife Bureau is a short satire starring Sue Appleby as GR 17, normally fastidious in her duties but suddenly aware of the yawning chasm of extra work she is creating for herself by trying to be helpful, across the desk from her Gordon Peaston as the recently deceased and most certainly dishevelled Gordon Miles, single minded and countering every question with one of his own but triggering warning signs with his evasive replies.
The Afterlife Bureau a place of inherited and invariant tradition which resists the frippery of new technology, it remains resolutely analogue with manual typewriters, rubber stamps and written records, a poor fit for a loose cannon such as the late Mister Miles who, despite claiming to have been a failure in life becomes in death a canny negotiator who has sees an opportunity, Officer GR 17 finding her hope of expediting the encounter by bending the rules is a slippery slope.
The Afterlife Bureau will be available on the Arrow platform from Friday 10th May
