大象传媒

Ruby Wax joins presenter Tim Samuels to curate and create the festival of her wildest dreams

What if you could create your own festival - where you set the agenda, chose the guests, pick the acts, and dictate the weather, the food and the ambience? A festival where anyone - whether dead or alive - can be summoned to perform, and nothing is unimaginable.

Fantasy Festival is a chance for someone to become the curator of the festival of their very own dreams. And the festival curator in this programme is poster girl for mental health, writer, performer and comedian - Ruby Wax

Ruby outlines her dream festival - entitled 5 Star Anarchy and taking place in Notting Hill. It's a festival of the extremes. Radiohead are playing in the distance and scientists are giving lectures about the latest advances in their fields. But centre stage is a series of outrageous experimental theatre shows designed to fry Ruby's mind. It's an event for Ruby to feed the animal side of her own nature.

She says, "Why my festival is so nuts is cos I've seen too much. If I was a kid, I'd just want a merry go round. So I'm not so proud that I need such extremes, but I'm on that high a dose of adrenaline. We all want to be pulled out of our heads, so I'm feeding that."

Ruby Wax is a comedian, writer and mental health campaigner. With her own periods of depression and now a Masters from Oxford in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy to draw from, Ruby is now focused on mental health through writing and lecturing. She encourages people to understand how their brains work and rewire their thinking in order to find calm in a frenetic world.

Produced by Rosie Boulton
A Monty Funk production for 大象传媒 Radio 4.