‘Unable to manage, mum resisted help until there were gaps in the wall big enough for birds to fly in… Her dementia took over my life.’
Ming Ho writes for stage, screen, and audio drama.
The personal is political
Being a carer, and how it felt to become invisible, worthless, disenfranchised.
Belonging and a sense of place
A sense of place in the past, a feeling of belonging in memory and imagination.
The sense of an ending
Remembering the day Amy Winehouse died and the onset of her mother’s dementia.
Ming Ho in conversation with Gabriel Gbadamosi
Ming speaks on dealing with her mother’s dementia and care, the loss of self and its impact on her writing.
Biography
Ming Ho writes for stage, screen, and audio drama. Her play, The Things We Never Said (BBC R4; featuring Siân Phillips and Lia Williams), won WGGB Best Radio Drama Award, 2018. Other credits include EastEnders, Casualty (BBC TV); Heartbeat, The Bill (ITV); Riot Girls: Male Order (BBC R4), and commissions for LAMDA, RADA, Leeds Playhouse, and Theatr Clwyd.
Born in England of Chinese/Welsh heritage, Ming wrote Citizens of Nowhere? for Chinese Arts Now (Southbank Centre & Edinburgh Fringe), exploring roots and identity in Brexit Britain. Its central character, aspiring Tory politician Jane Lo, spawned short film British People, commissioned as part of The Uncertain Kingdom anthology (BFIPlayer, Amazon, iTunes, Curzon Home, GooglePlay, 2020).
Ming has also worked in TV drama development, script editing series such as Hamish Macbeth (BBC) and co-creating McCready and Daughter for Ecosse Films/BBC Northern Ireland. Her play, Exhumation, written on the Royal Court Theatre Writers’ Group, was workshopped there with director Lucy Morrison. Comedy drama Male Order, in BBC R4’s Riot Girls series, looks at gender politics through the story of Bristol dentist, Barbara, who returns from holiday in Rio with a toy boy new husband and finds herself arrested for human trafficking.
The trauma of gradually losing her mother to dementia over a twenty-year progression of the disease inspired Ming’s signature piece, The Things We Never Said, and led her to become involved in campaigning on behalf of people living with the condition and their family carers; she sits on the Carers Advisory Panel of charity Dementia Carers Count and the Advisory Board of Raising Films, an organisation supporting parents and carers in the screen industries. Her blog, (Dementia Just Ain’t) Sexy, chronicles her experiences and thoughts on the issue.
In 2019, she was Writer in Residence at Theatr Clwyd, which also sponsored her on Sphinx Theatre’s Sphinx 30 development programme, a main stage play seed commission for women writers. She is currently working on two classic dramatisations for BBC Radio 4 (set respectively in Russia/Ukraine and Hong Kong/China), due for transmission in 2023, and developing TV projects.
