Churchill has identified ‘two obsessions’ in her early work: one, which was the focus of the opening chapter, was concerned with ‘mental states, lovesickness, schizophrenia, and so on’, and the other was an ‘anticapitalist, state of England sort of thing, usually in a rather negative and sad mode’. The Ants, Churchill's first professional radio production (1962), described as ‘the most successful of these political plays’, illustrates this second obsession.

The Ants uses a familial setting to dramatize an estranged set of parents arguing over the custody of their son, Tim, who is temporarily staying with his grandfather until marital disharmony and living arrangements are resolved. As a refuge from parental quarrelling, Tim focuses on a community of ants, but as tempers flare he turns on the ants, and, finally, joins his grandfather in setting fire to them:

The radio play ends with the directions ‘the petrol explodes into flame’ and Tim ‘shrieks with laughter’. Metaphorically, the burning of the ants is designed to express the horrors of war, and the ways in which people (Tim) can switch from identifying with a community of people (the ants) to bombing (setting fire to) them.