Beth's Uzo Oleh: "The best type of sci-fi is something that is kind of plausible"

Channel 4's first digital original drama comes to YouTube as three shorts, ready to be devoured in no time at all. While it very much is a family story at its core, as Oleh tells me, it ends on quite the stark note that will shock and surprise many.

After all, it is a sci-fi drama, and while it's one that is steeped in realism and human emotion, it is a watch that will prompt many to go on a similar trawl through the internet, searching for answers and discovering (perhaps new) scientific terms and phenomena.

It's all very exciting for Oleh, who says that it's been just over two years of having the ideas swirling round in his head, writing and getting it to the release stage. Intrigued by how people will receive it, it's clear that it'll likely be one of those watches that people will rush to watch again, looking for clues and details that they may have missed on the first try.

While it will air on Channel 4 as one 35-minute episode, Beth really is a series of shorts, demonstrating the sheer scope of storytelling that is possible in the creative medium. "I love a short because of what it forces you to do," Oleh tells me.

He goes on to talk about the explosive Edicius, another short he wrote and directed, and which saw Michael Socha deliver yet another gripping performance as a lawyer who is visited by his intuition.

"I wanted to try and make a full-on psychological thriller with action and stunts in, I think, 22 minutes," Oleh says. "What I think shorts force you to do is to really be economical and use symbolism and subtext to get a point across and keep things moving. So I always knew that Beth was going to be three parts when I was writing it."

Oleh says that, actually, Beth is part of a bigger story entitled Echo, but that Beth hones in especially on Nicholas Pinnock's Joe, delivering the father's perspective of what happens to Molly (Abbey Lee).

Approaching the story from Joe's point of view harks back to the biblical tale of Joseph and Mary, Oleh tells me, a classical well-known story that, when steeped in the current day's realism, presents plenty of questions. At its core, like Beth, is a tale of a woman who miraculously gets pregnant to birth a child that bears no resemblance to its father.

"If her husband is trying to come to terms with a virgin birth, you've got all that ego, all that male s**t, all that kind of human instinct of jealousy and ownership," Oleh says. The story of Beth is very much concerned with Lee's Molly, we're just seeing it from a different angle by going through the motions of rightful confusion with Joe.

After years of trying to conceive via IVF, the pair are granted their major life wish when Molly finds out she's pregnant. The joy is palpable, life is good. That is, until that fateful day in the hospital when Molly – who is blonde-haired and blue-eyed – cradles Imogen in her arms, a newborn that is pretty much the spitting image of her.

While we have the very visual reminder of the fact that Imogen, who is white, looks nothing like her Black father Joe, Oleh tells me that Beth isn't political. "We're humans and, honestly, the stuff that brings us together is greater than the stuff that pulls us apart. I was being very careful to make sure that it is about family, and family is so important."

Joe's thoughts – like the viewers and even the nurses in that birthing room – go straight to thinking that Molly could've cheated on him. But of course, by the end of it, we realise that it's not a soap opera tale of an illicit affair. Actually, it's something a whole lot more mind-bending and common within the animal kingdom: parthenogenesis.

The natural form of asexual reproduction sees the embryo develop directly from an egg without the need for fertilisation, occurring in the likes of algae, as well as some fish, reptiles and amphibians, to name a few. But where did the inspiration come from, to centre on this scientific process but make it a human story?

"I was a photographer for many years. But before being a photographer, I was an optician, which is hilarious to people," Oleh laughs. "So, I spent my younger years as a scientist and then became an artist – I always think those two things blend really well.

"So, Numéro magazine and Paris Vogue, I used to collect. But I also used to collect Monocle and Scientific American. I collected Scientific American more than all of the other magazines. I once read in the magazine about parthenogenesis and I was like, 'Get f**ked. This is not a thing. What are you talking about?' And basically, it's every other animal, apart from mammals. So, it was like, ‘Why is no one talking about this?’

"And then you start thinking about the possibility of it happening in a human being: What would that story be like? What would that feel like? What shock would you be in? Because it's actually completely utterly plausible in the real world. It's completely natural and the more you dig into it, the more it makes sense because survival is king, everything is hellbent on survival.

"So then, I think, 'Well, what's the most interesting way to tell the story?' You've got so many angles."

Oleh explains how the overarching story of Echo is full of multiple different angles. There's the angle of the daughter who's trying to be independent from her mother, the angle of the mother herself whose instinct is to protect, the angle of the jealous husband but then, also, the religious ties that come from a story like this.

There's "the other angle of religious fundamentalism", Oleh says, which could lead to "fractions" and "persecution", but then also the scientific community and the potential prospect of betrayal from Dr Balthas (Nick Blood), who has helped Molly all along.

While there's so many exciting paths that Echo could go down, Beth almost has the same innately distrustful tones of Black Mirror's The Entire History of You episode, in which the viewer – like husband Liam – is confused about whether or not Jodie Whittaker's Ffion is cheating.

"I think the best type of sci-fi is something that is kind of plausible," Oleh says. "Everything that I am excited about writing is like, 'Oh no, this could happen.' If it was like 10 degrees different or 20 per cent different, that's going down."

Taking classic tales and rooting them in reality is something that Beth achieves, with there being plenty of undeniable religious crossover.

As well as character names having links back to sacred texts ("Joe – Joseph. Gabby – angel Gabriel. Dr Balthas – Balthazar, the wise man. Imogen is, I think, Welsh for 'innocent child'. Molly, pet name in Hebrew for Mary"), one thing continued to leave me scratching my head after watching. Who the hell is Beth?

While Oleh hilariously gives me the floor to make my own guess, he informs me that Beth is simply short for Bethlehem.

If you keep your eyes peeled, Oleh reveals, there are plenty of a-ha moments for those well-versed in the Bible. There may or may not be some interesting time symbolism that corresponds to certain biblical passages, only further alluding to the subject matter at hand.

But is incorporating the religious into film and TV always something that you've set out to do, I ask Oleh. "No, not at all," he says. "I just think that when you read the Bible and you read the Quran, you go 'Oh.'

"What we've learned is if you watch a Hollywood movie, there's a system – Save the Cat. There’s a few other different archetypes of storytelling but it's the same in the Bible, the same in many religious texts.

"So, what is it that we can learn from the human experience, from telling stories in this way? This story is super basic, it has all of the basic, emotional things – betrayal, trust, revelation, fear, hope, joy."

He adds: "You go from laughter into pain, laughter and pain being the same thing. Weirdly, I think all the stories that I'm telling have similar traditional storytelling aspects to it, but I think that that's because they are the best stories, we just want to express them in a different way. For me, you can't beat the classics."

Beth will surely be talking point TV, I tell Oleh, who says that he can only hope that people "fundamentally enjoy" it when it lands on screens. "I hope that people appreciate not just an interesting story, but an interesting story told in an interesting way. I hope people really like it and really enjoy it and the people that don't... I hope that they don't enjoy it because it's just not their thing."

Looking to the future, Oleh says that Beth is "essentially a prequel to Echo", and so there's plenty of gas left in the veritable tank. Is the hope to continue building on this story in a TV series format? "Absolutely, that's the plan. I've already written a bunch. So, yeah, those characters are flying," Oleh smiles.

"The little things you see of Molly's humour, her resilience and her feistiness, those are all great for the full-on series. Joe's stoicism, his depth, his richness and his passion is there. Imogen's character is insane because Imogen's a special child and like Molly, Molly has always known she's a bit special."

But that's not all that the writer/director is working on. Currently writing a feature film that is "way more bananas" than Beth, Oleh's new story is centred on his theory that "true love and passion is exactly the same as revenge".

"We're exploring that in a story where I'm going to hopefully get you to love someone and hate someone at the same time. I'm going to try and get audiences to be disgusted by someone and then go, 'Oh, my God, please can we please help this person?' That's what I'm going for," he explains.

As for now, all that's left is for Oleh to sit back and see how Beth is received, but one thing's certainly undeniable – just how hard everyone worked on this. As well as revelling in the mind-blowing luck of bagging both Pinnock and Lee as leads, Oleh admits that working all together on Beth was "effortless".

"When you just had the trust and the faith, everyone's pulling their weight and trying things... We've really delivered something that's actually quite beautiful."

Beth airs on Channel 4 on Monday 9th June at 10pm.

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