"Strange is good."
—Edna Turner
At three series, this is one of the longest running comedy dramas made especially for BBC Radio 7. Undone tells the story of Edna Turner, and her new job in London. When she arrives to work for "Get Out!" Magazine, she discovers that there is a weirder version of London, called 'Undone'. She is given a second job, to patrol the gaps between, and stop the weirdness coming through, helped by her new friend and mentor, Tankerton Slopes.
In the first series finale, we discover the existence of many other parallel Londons, such as Donlon, a more boring version, or LONDON!, where everyone is an angry cockney. We also meet Edna's half-sister, Ida, and their father, The Prince.
Tropes:
- Alternate Universe Or, more specifically, Alternate Londons.
- And the Adventure Continues: Each of the three series ends this way.
- Benevolent Boss: Edna's boss, Carlo Jones, is one of the nicest people you could possibly meet.
- Borrowed Catchphrase: The final scene of series 3, "I'm Golfer Mackenzie, and welcome to Undone."
- Britain Is Only London: Oddly so for a British programme. There are many alternate versions of London, but the rest of England is rarely mentioned. Edna's home town of Towcester gets the occasional look-in but that's about it.
- A Day in the Limelight: In series 2, we get an episode from (London) Carlo's bewildered point of view
- Foreshadowing: Plenty of this throughout.
- Happy Ending Override: The promise of this is used as a Sequel Hook at the end of series 2. Series 3 follows through on it.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Except for the pilot, all the episode titles begin with "Un".
- Mineral Macguffin: The Gem, split into five Gemlets, a key part of series 2.
- Outdated Name: Our narrator lampshades how unusual it is for a 20-something woman in The 2000s to be named Edna and jokes about being "the youngest Edna ever!".
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: The final scene of the last episode "Unending" suggests that this applies to Golfer Mackenzie.
- Sequel Hook: The second series in particular ends on an enormous one, with Edna telling us that despite the apparent happy ending to that series, within a year one of the people present in the series finale would be dead and Undone would be destroyed.
- Unreliable Narrator: Mentioned as a possibility in the third series finale.
- Unseen Audience: Series 3 finale. Edna has been telling this story to all the other characters, as a part of the Cancellation Point.
