Introducing the world of The Aliens

23 February 2016

Okay, so 40 years ago a UFO crash landed off the British coast.  

You might think that a close and ongoing encounter with aliens would’ve had a big impact on human history or even make us newly humble about our place in the universe. But no. The creatures inside the UFO looked just like us. And they turned out to be not especially scary or clever or sexy. They weren’t the shock troops of an alien landing force. They didn’t bear messages from a dying planet. Or bring a new technology, or have special powers. So yeah, just like us. Exactly like us.

As other inter-human prejudices have fallen away, the one that survives and thrives and unites humans is a distaste for aliens; a perceived sense of their inferiority, their “otherness”. Generally, humans don’t like them and that’s okay. So if you can imagine the smallest possible impact on human history that an alien landing could have, you’re about there. Humans then put the aliens in a ghetto, known as Troy, and they just got on with it. Ebay still happened, Radiohead still exist, and there’s always a new Jason Statham film.

To be a tiny bit more historically precise, for a long time human prejudice was enough to ghettoise aliens. We let them into our schools long enough for them to lose any sense of their own identity. But they never mixed and bullying them was encouraged. Plus there’s a huge demand for ‘fur’ – alien hair and Troy’s biggest export – a powerful hallucinogen when smoked by humans, and the humans’ latest recreational drug of choice. This all led to a lot of crime originating in Troy. This half-arsed attempt at integration by humans in turn confirmed and established what they believed all along: the aliens are all crims.

The next time an election came around, the number one item on every party’s manifesto is to section off the alien ghetto, put a fortified ring around it and that way keep crime in. So now an alien can leave the ghetto to go to his or her shitty, menial job on the other side of the fence in human society. Or to illegally sell humans their hair. But in order to be allowed to cross to the human side they have to wear a high-vis wristband and they have to abide by the night-time curfew.

There’s no schools in Troy, no NHS, no infrastructure of any kind. The aliens are left completely to their own devices and the humans have turned their back on them entirely.

This show is set in both sides of the divide, the human side of town and Troy – and also in the border crossing between them. The human side is a small English town that’s on the skids. The alien side is much more colourful: ‘Sin City meets Tijuana’.

Troy is lawless. Every street corner has its own fur house, where alien hair is shaved, before being cut with more readily available dog hair, and packed into tight marijuana-like blocks to be smuggled over the border. There’s no police. Gang wars go unchecked and uninvestigated. As far as everyone’s concerned the aliens can kill each other as much as they like as long as they do it on their side of the wall.

But when the unthinkable happens, and our hero Lewis discovers he’s the world’s first alien-human hybrid, he finds himself tumbling down the rabbit hole and embroiled in gang wars, fur smuggling, shootouts, jail breakouts and hostage situations…