Stories have power. Stories can inspire, comfort, provide escapism, give hope, broaden horizons. Stories can define a person. They can even define a society.

Camlann creator Ella Watts knows this. Her new show deeply understands this.

DAI:
Listen. I’m going to tell you a story about hope. Well, it’s a story about losing hope. It’s a story about losing everything and everyone you ever loved. Even the people you didn’t know you loved until ‒ anyway.
The point is that this is big. I’ve got so much to tell you I feel like I could have forever and I wouldn’t have enough time. I guess it’s kind of like life that way. But this story is nothing like the life you’ve known before.
This is a story about magic and monsters. It’s about knights and dragons, witches and kings. It’s about life and death and dreams and love and everyone who’s ever hidden in the dark where you think they can’t see you.
Yeah. Me too.

Further, people with Names recover from injuries quicker, provided their namesakes are not injured in precisely that way. Anyone named Achilles (if they lived in Greece) may die from an arrow in the foot, or someone named Baldur (in Scandinavia) may die from mistletoe poisoning. But they wouldn’t need a hospital if a truck ran them over.

You’d be right in assuming that Arthuriana and legends of Camelot hold a great deal of power in such a Wales. But that doesn’t mean this story is about someone named Arthur. Arthur is not the hero of this story.

DAI:
Did the mountain just stand up?

PERRY:
(strangely calm) Idris Gawr, if I’m not mistaken. We’re looking at Cadair Idris.

MORGAN:
In Gwynedd? That’s almost a hundred miles away.

PERRY:
Which is why we can’t see the actual mountain. But according to the story—

​DAI:
Cadair. The original mountain is a chair, and what we thought was the mountain ‒ Idris Gawr ‒ is…

MORGAN:
…a giant. Wow. Do you think he can see us?

PERRY:
Honestly? I don’t think it matters. To him, we’re dust.

Camlann follows Dai (Tobias Weatherburn), Morgan (Angharad Phillips) and Perry (Robyn Holdaway) as their travels across the Welsh countryside leads them to a cottage in Cwmduad, just outside Carmarthen, where they set up their home in the apocalypse. The main trio is eventually joined by Gwaine (Paul Warren) and Gwen, or Shújūn (Nicole Miners).

All of the characters were students before the Cataclysm: Dai and Morgan made their great escape from the Welsh town of Aberystwyth, where they grew up together, to the disappointingly English Bristol, where Perry, who is originally from Portsmouth, was working on their PhD. Perry’s path never crossed with the others before the Cataclysm, but Gwaine’s path did: he and Dai were boyfriends, though they’d broken up before the world ended. Gwen, meanwhile, was a medical student in Leicester and meets the main trio in Cwmduad.

That attention to detail, be it the sound of bedsheets shifting when a character wakes up or using an actual camera to get the sound of a recording right, is how Devereaux has developed one of the most distinctive sound signatures in audio fiction at present. The same is also true of the guest sound designers: Cai Gwilym Pritchard, the creator of Chain of Being, and Oliver Morris, the creator of The Lightning Bottler (and also producer of Kane & Feels, which, given it just spent a year-long season of real-time-released episodes about the Fair Folk, is why hearing Morris worked on an episode called ‘Under The Hill’ makes so much sense.)

Devereaux’s unique sound is also apparent in the music. The occasional whacky tune aside, Tin Can Audio productions are known for haunting, slightly dissonant chords accompanying gentle, melancholy scenes, and the Camlann score certainly delivers in that department. But it’s the collaborations which truly go above and beyond. Just as traditional stories are the focus of this show, so too are traditional songs sung by the cast in nearly every episode of the season. Further, Devereaux and Alessa Catterall worked together to create a beautiful theme song for the show. It is moving and huge and hopeful, the call of the wind as it travels across the land and through the trees and far and wide.

That hopefulness is integral to Camlann. The protagonists of this story have all lost so much, so many loved ones, and their own identities are in question like they have never been before; Dai, short for Dafydd (the Welsh form of David), doesn’t go by a Name and struggles with how vulnerable that makes him, Perry, being non-binary, no doubt spent a considerable amount of time figuring out who they were before landing on the name Peredur (the Welsh form of Percival, who may even precede the French), only to suddenly become the legendary figure in certain ways. Gwen, meanwhile, was given two names from either of her parents: Shújūn from her mother and Guinevere from her father.

But of all of them, Morgan may have gotten the worst deal when it comes to her Name. It’s never explicitly stated, but presumably the reason why she and Gelert managed to stay together isn’t because she took him with her when she left for uni. Rather, he came with her family when they visited her in Bristol just as the Cataclysm happened. Morgan watched her brother, Ben (KC Finn), die at the hands of the Phenomena. Whether her parents survived is unclear, but her relationship with them was always conditional, if not abusive. Yet the name they gave her, Morgan, probably helped her survive.

In the stories, Morgan Le Fay often has prophetic abilities, and Morgan the engineer’s nightmares often warn her of what’s to come. But beyond being portents of doom, her nightmares often incorporate her own trauma as well, especially Ben. Further, Morgan Le Fay is often an unsympathetic character, and Morgan the engineer dreads becoming someone who would hurt the people she cares about. Her name encompasses her history, the good and the bad, the parts of her she wants to show to the world and the parts she wants to hide.

GWEN:
What do you mean?

MORGAN:
You and me. In our story, we’re supposed to hate each other. Or at least, we’re on opposite sides. Enemies.

GWEN:
So?

MORGAN:
Do you… hate me?

GWEN:
I don’t think what I feel for you is hate, Morgan.

It goes to show that even in a world of monsters, humans can be the most monstrous of all. The show’s primary antagonists aren’t Phenomena at all, but rather people with Names who abuse the powers those names give them. Throughout the first season, the main characters are all running from Arthur (Pip Gladwin) and the so-called Knights of the Round Table ‒ in actuality uni students, mostly from the rugby team, whose only understanding of a medieval court comes from Game of Thrones. It is a threat that seems absurd on paper, something most people would only scoff at. But this is male entitlement sharpened to a deadly point.

Arthur understands he gains more power by acting kingly, or as he’s always been told a king would act. He’s also paranoid about the fate that befell his namesake happening to him. Further, he’s used to always getting his way. When he suddenly gains the ability to bend people to his will ‒ an ability Gwen also possesses ‒ he exercises it as he believes is his right. That lack of self-awareness is most evident in how he mainly deputises negotiating with the characters to come back to Kay, portrayed by the familiar voice of Felix Trench evoking an unfamiliar desire to slap him in audiences. Kay is manipulative without even needing the power, arrogant and condescending. Audiences grow so accustomed to Kay that when Arthur appears, it truly feels daunting. Hearing Pip Gladwin’s voice underlined by compulsion power sound design is exactly the kind of intimidating you need from a character you might otherwise simply roll your eyes at.

The Knights have heard their own stories being told so many times and been told they’re the heroes all their lives. But that blind self-centredness leads to the erasure and villainisation of others. They want Perry to be their binary brother and Gwaine to be their machismo soldier. They want to imprison Morgan and to keep Dai powerless under their thumb. If ever they captured Gwen, they’d never see her agency at all. Guinevere, after all, is just a damsel. This is critical because Camlann’s protagonists is about are an intersection of identities, queerness, ethnicity and neurodivergence, that are too often rewritten and erased. Camlann reminds us time and time again that a story may be about you, but that doesn’t mean you’re the hero.

PERRY:
I don’t think any of this is predetermined. I don’t think you’re infected or possessed or brainwashed.
I think there’s some kind of magic at work. But I also think that maybe, this time, we get to tell our own stories.

MORGAN:
You don’t know that.

PERRY:
I don’t. But I have faith in you.

Watts may have been surprised at hearing Camlann receive a horror label from some listeners, but fans of the show may tease her that she shouldn’t expect anything else from working with Devereaux. Be it the Beast in the third season of Victoriocity or an interconnected anthology of poems of a monstrous Glasgow in Folxlore, Devereaux’s work includes more horror than not, as does Morris’ and Pritchard’s.

Another reason why listeners may have an expectation of Camlann as horror is Watts’ writing. She herself admits that The Lantern Man, as a monster and the eponymous episode, is rather spooky. But listeners may already have an impression of Camlann as horror from the trailer, which is a montage of recorded snippets of a crisis hotline where the main cast desperately seeks information on whether their loved ones are still alive. But the biggest contender for ‘Camlann as horror’ is the sixth episode: ‘The Sheep and The Goats’.

ARIADNE:
You don’t have to be him! You don’t have to make his mistakes. We know the story. We know every trick and every twist and every monster.

ODYSSEUS:
And every death. Every tragedy.

The captain Odysseus understands that his chances of surviving the Phenomenon in the Sea of Monsters are good. But the rest of the crew’s chances aren’t. In the story of his namesake, Odysseus is the sole survivor; this Odysseus cannot bear to be responsible for so many deaths. But the Mediterranean has changed and the nets are coming up empty and the only land the Ithaca can find is a deadly island. If the crew doesn’t want to starve, they have to go to Serifos.

Ariadne, meanwhile, keeps on reminding Odysseus that he’ll at least have her; Ariadne survives her story as well. That detail is a difference in the stories of the sailors; perhaps it’s enough to change the ending of Odysseus Papadakis’ story. This fact is only a cold comfort, however, in the face of how Ariadne may also be following her namesake’s story. Like the princess in the myth, Ariadne the first mate is a navigator. Could her story be leading her into the dark of the underground, to being abandoned on a strange and distant island?

ODYSSEUS:
It’s a crack in the door. It’s the light. Maybe there’s a way out.

ARIADNE:
Now you’re sounding like Odysseus.

ODYSSEUS:
Perhaps I can be both. Both the man he was and the man I am. Perhaps I can sail to Ithaca and find my Athens. Perhaps Nikolas can be my Penelope.

ARIADNE:
Or perhaps we sail forever through the waves of a broken myth.

In some tragedies, the characters know they’re doomed from the beginning, but act in the hopes that their actions will prevent their doom from unfolding. Odysseus and Ariadne can’t cope with the burden of holding other people’s lives in their hands; who would be? It is a deeply horror idea, and whilst it may seem disconnected from the story in Wales, it comes to the core of what Camlann is about: every stranger is known to someone. Everyone has a story.

GWEN:
Maybe it doesn’t have to be kill or be killed. Maybe this isn’t a story about heroes and villains. Maybe it’s messier than that.

Whilst there are only nine episodes and one minisode at present, there may be more in future. Watts has stated that the entirety of the Camlann story she has planned is five seasons, but at the time of writing there’s no guarantee of even a second season. The team behind Camlann is clear they’ll only work on the show if everyone involved is paid a living wage, which is never a certainty in podcasting. The first season was funded by the Inevitable Foundation and Creative Scotland, but there exist no grants beyond that and it takes considerable time for donations to help a show break even, let alone make a profit.

But there are reasons to keep hope. Just a month after the end of the first season’s release, the show hit 100,000 downloads. It has been nominated and won several awards. And it is making a cultural impact, as well; Watts has recounted that there have been numerous occasions that listeners have told her her show has inspired them to read The Mabinogion or other classic texts.

But if the nine episodes are all there is and will ever be, they still tell a complete, beautiful story. Over the course of those nine episodes, Camlann grapples with the question of what it’s all for. What is our fire and our fight worth when all it leads to is pain? What are our stories worth when all we do is struggle?

The answer is hope. The answer is other people, because other people, as Dai quotes the audio drama Wooden Overcoats, are all there is.

Or, as Watts puts it:

I hope that wherever you are you keep your own fires burning. Be they queer joy, resistance against oppression, solidarity with your fellow human beings, your trans siblings, your Jewish friends and a free Palestine, or just the fire it takes to get up and try again every day. Keep going, I believe in you.

Listen to the trailer below. You can listen to Camlann via your podcatcher of choice.