CAIMH/CK McDONNELL – Double Writing Identities, Double Reasons For Rejection?

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity pave the way to subsequent success. My guest this week, Caimh McDonnell, bills himself on his website as Comedian, Writer, Irishman, all of which is true. Firstly, as a comedian, he was a professional standup for many years, and wrote comedy for other standups on TV, including the Sarah Millican television program, Mock the Week, and Have I Got News for You. Secondly, as a writer, his work has spanned radio plays, TV comedy, a BAFTA nominated children’s animation he created called Pet Squad, and most recently, a lot of bestselling novels, categorized by Wikipedia as comedy crime thrillers. Under both his own name and that of CK. McDonnell. And lastly, as an Irishman, he likes to confuse by having a name that is a bit of a mystery to pronounce. But I’d done some research, so I called him out on it. I know you must get a lot of questions about your name and the spelling and all that sort of thing, but I have an Irish neighbor who comes from Gort. And when I showed her your name, she said that’s Cav or Kev.

Yeah, tactically, a couple of things there. One, it is Kev, and it’s the translation of, because Caimh is short for Caoimhín, which is the original Kev. Yes, most people believe, or a lot of people who know about these things believe there should be an O on it. I, one, you can’t misspell something that’s not a proper name in the first place, because I’m the only person who uses it, which is, though I have got some very angry emails from people who disagree with that point of view. And secondly, the reason I genuinely had the O in it, because I basically, my name is, Kevin is my, on my birth certificate.

As in K-E-V-I-N?

Yeah, as in Kevin, Kevin. That’s the original Gaelic of Kevin is Cueveen. And when I was in bands back in Dublin, lads just started referring to me as Cueve. So I started, you know, we started using it, and then we just song called theme from Cueve, bizarrely, and which was a big instrumental thing that we worked out. And then when I started doing standup, I just started using it. And be clear, it’s not a stage name, because people say that, go, no, no, no, it’s what my wife calls me. It’s just, it’s my name in Irish, and I’d prefer it. But yes, there should probably be an O in it. But I genuinely took it out, because if you think people mispronouncing Cueve when it’s C-A-I-M-H is bad, you should see what you get when you throw the O in.

And you are, for writing purposes, for novel purposes, you are CK. Why are you CK and not Caimh or Kevin?

Oh, well, we use Caimh, there’s sort of two different things. All my sort of Bunny McGarry, The Crime Books, are all under Caimh. And then basically, when The Stranger Times, which is done by Transworld, just part of Penguin Random House and all that, one of the first things they had was sort of, could we maybe not use the name no one could spell? Which actually works out fine because it differentiates them well. Although the only person that got annoyed about it was my father, because he was English. And he was like, I understand that Caimh is your name in Irish and I respect that, but CK are not your initials. And he’s exactly right, because what actually happened is my agent, I put C slash K. McDonnell, as in we can call it C. McDonnell or K. McDonnell, if they want to use the initial. And he went, oh, CK sounds good. So it’s actually what my initials was already are is, my name in Irish, my name in English. So it’s, yeah, neither of those are my middle name, but that’s why it’s CK.

Okay, well, let’s get started with your first off-cut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

This is called Chaos Theory, and it’s the first episode of a sitcom I wrote in about 2000 called Kyo’s or Kyo’s Law.

Exterior, Smith’s doorstep. Smith opens the door. Kyo and Reason are standing there.

Good afternoon, sir, census.

But there’s not another census for eight years.

That’s correct, sir, it’s a pre-census. Census helps us to predict where people will be when we go looking in eight years’ time.

What?

Are you a Mr. Paul Smith?

Yes.

Are you the sole resident of the property? Yes. And what do you do for a living?

I’m an assistant bank manager.

Very nice. Any children?

Not that I’m aware of.

I’ll put you down for don’t know there then, shall I?

Sorry, that was supposed to be a joke. I don’t have any children.

Right.

You do realize it’s against the law to lie on a census, sir?

Yes, I’m aware of that.

Good.

Question four. Have you ever engaged in any criminal activity?

No.

Do you want to take a second to think about it?

No, I’m sure.

Would you engage in any criminal activity in the future?

No, of course not.

Say for example, your children were starving. Would you still bread to feed them?

I already said I don’t have any children.

It’s a hypothetical question, sir.

Well, I suppose I would.

So you wouldn’t pay for the bread?

What? Well, if I had money, of course I would. I assumed your question, implied I didn’t.

You’re an assistant bank manager, sir. Surely you’ve money for food.

Yes. Look, these questions all seem most unusual.

It’s just procedure, sir. New labour.

Keogh turns his eyes to heaven.

Just a few more questions and we’ll be out of your hair.

Okay then.

If a gorilla and a crocodile were having a fight in six inches of water, who’d win?

What kind of a question is that?

It’s a standard psychological profile question.

Right. Well, what size is the gorilla?

They’re both fully grown. Hmm.

I’ll have to go for the crocodile then.

Right. What about if the gorilla had a stick?

The gorilla then, I suppose.

Right.

Keogh acts as if this is some kind of a significant answer, makes a note on his clipboard. From Keogh and Reason’s point of view, we notice Nero the dog appear behind Smith in the hallway carrying the philofax. What?

What about if the crocodile was replaced with a dog?

Nero disappears into the front room. Smith looks spooked.

What kind of a dog?

Bulldog.

Why would a bulldog and a gorilla be fighting in six inches of water?

Let’s assume the bulldog was a friend of the crocodile’s. It’s a revenge thing, sort of West Side Story.

Right. Then definitely the gorilla.

Are you sure so? Bulldogs are notoriously vicious.

And they are well known for disliking gorillas.

Nero appears from the living room and heads out the back door.

Look, this is ridiculous. I’m a busy man and I’m not going to answer one more stupid question. Goodbye.

Smith slams the door in Keogh and Reason’s faces.

Oh, he’s our man, all right.

You introduced this as episode one of Keogh’s Law. How many episodes did you actually write for this?

Oh, this was just a pitch. This was very much on its own. Because it was also the second ever sitcom script I ever wrote, bizarrely. And what’s really weird about that is, because the first one kind of got in this competition with Channel 4 and got me in meeting with the lovely Robert Popper when I didn’t know what I was doing, I just started. Bizarrely, can’t remember what the first one was. No idea. Still, I spent ages trying to figure it out, no clue. I know this was the second one, no idea what the first one was. But that’s the way my brain works. But yeah, no, this was just, you can tell this is pretty much the first time I’ve ever written a sitcom, because I genuinely, I believe, have a scene in it where there is a jumbo jet. Which, if anyone who’s written for TV knows, that is not something you can get on a budget. Even Netflix will go, do you need a jumbo jet?

Hold on, to be fair, is it a jumbo jet in the background? Are you inside the jumbo jet? Is it a jumbo jet exploding?

No, no, no, it’s a jumbo jet that’s moving and flying over somebody, if I recall correctly. But as I say, the interesting thing about hearing that clip is, it does, there are certain things. First off, that question about the gorilla and the crocodile, that’s one of those things that keeps coming up in my think, weirdly, because a job interview I did once, the two guys just asked me about it repeatedly. That’s all they did for the interview. They kept going, because they basically just wanted to find someone they thought they’d get on with. So they just interviewed me by asking me about those two things, that fighting. And then, bizarrely, the dog in that is, I have this thing for hyper-intelligent dogs. I’m a little bit obsessed with Turner and Hooch and that sort of genre of film, where it’s buddy cops with dogs. And I’ve actually, weirdly, there’s a very intelligent dog in my Bunny McGarry books as well, which one of the first things, because they’ve been optioned for TV with the Brie and Chris Addison, sort of associated with them as we were, or attached, I believe the American word would be. And one of the first things he said was about was like, do you have any idea how hard it is to get a dog to do anything while you’re filming them? Like, it was like, there’s really highly trained dogs, not this highly trained.

Now, this clip was from the year 2000 and it was the earliest clip of all the clips you sent us. Who were you in 2000? What were you doing?

I was working in IT and stuff and bizarrely, I think I started, I wanted to do something. I hadn’t done standup comedy or anything at that point. I did a writing for radio course run by, I think it was attached to RTE, certainly to the Irish broadcaster. And I basically did that course because I just kind of wanted to create your outlet. But I was working in IT, I was living in Dublin. I came over then to London basically because I wanted to try and do a standup comedy. So I came up just after about this time, I moved to London on a six month thing at my work and I started doing a standup course because I’m the kind of person that tries to go find a course if I need to do something. Everyone else just starts doing standup. I started doing a course and then I did a course on writing sitcom as well.

Did you have any luck with it? I mean, obviously you mentioned the Channel 4 competition, the first sitcom that you wrote got you the meeting with Robert Popper, but did you write sketches for the radio shows that were on or did you get anything in anywhere?

I certainly tried a few different things. I think I did radio play in Ireland that I wrote for this competition that got into the final that was based on a radio station and it was about a radio station being taken over by some nutter who believe conspiracies because hardest is to believe back in the year 2000 we had nutters who believe conspiracies. I mean, obviously we’ve all moved on from there now, thank God. But I mean, at this point, that thing’s basically a documentary. And at Bizarrely, I got a phone call and actually when I was living in London and they were trying to get hold of me because they’d recorded the play. Like one of the producers involved had liked it and they were trying to find me to get the rights to broadcast it. And I was like, I would have rewritten it for free because by that point they’d done a bit of writing and other stuff. But yeah, I remember Bizarrely, I went home to Dublin. I flew home for a couple of days to hear it on the radio.

Oh, that’s adorable.

Because back in those days, you couldn’t hear the Irish. You couldn’t get it anywhere in the world. So I remember I flew home, listened to it on the radio, cringed because, oh, would have rewritten this for free if they’d asked. And then I remember getting very, very drunk. Yeah, that also happened. But yes, that was my first thing. Anything got broadcast anywhere.

So in fact, you were a playwright before you were any of the other things.

I would never refer to myself as that. And nobody who does refer to themselves as a playwright wants me on that team.

But that was your first professionally performed or published work was, in fact, a play. Is that right?

Yes, a radio play. I suppose you technically correct. I might add playwright to my CV now. You’ve talked me into it.

Right, well, let’s move on to your next off-cut. Can you tell us about this one, please?

This is called Breath. And it’s a short story I wrote in 2014 as part of the entry requirements for my creative writing masters at MMU University, which I have to say I haven’t actually finished.

8,409,600. That’s how many breaths the average person can expect to take in a lifetime. Give or take, best guess. As it happens, this man has just taken breath number 8,409,600, but he’s unlikely to go much above the average. The machine keeping him alive is about to be turned off. He knows this and he’s come to terms with it. It should be known he is a good man who has lived a truly good life. If you need an explanation for what happens next, that is it. As his body is left to fend for itself, strange visions appear before his eyes. On the ceiling of his sterile hospital room, the world spread out before him, full of lost souls, unseen miracles and wasted lives. He may only have a few breaths left, but he hopes to make each one count. He breathes out 8,409,601. Meanwhile, 1,429 miles away, she stands above his slumbering body, tears in her eyes, the knife in her left hand. The fingers of her right are teasing at the rip in her jeans absentmindedly. She’d had to climb the back fence to retrieve the key that he’d forgotten was there under a plant pot. As she looks down at his face, memories, conflicting emotions tear at her soul. She’d loved him once, although that is not what has brought her here. It is the rage at the thought she once loved this pitiful excuse of a man, someone who would take the most private thing, a silly game, an intimate moment between two people and share it with a voyeuristic world, making her loathe herself to the point that the only thing keeping her alive is a hatred so visceral, so real, it makes it hard to breathe. She wipes her eyes and raises the knife above her head and then the slightest breath of wind from an open window moves the curtain. It’s enough to stop her for a moment and there on the wall she sees two lives play out like spluttering old home movies. In one, the knife descends and she becomes a cautionary tale, vilified and glorified in turn by a world that doesn’t see people, only stories. In the other, the knife doesn’t fall. She takes a breath and decides that the harder road is worth taking. She moves on and away. In time, she becomes herself again. She learns to trust and happiness finds her when she least expects it. In aisle four, the international food section. She drops the knife and leaves without looking back. On her way out, she stops and empties the water from the goldfish bowl over his brand new 3D TV. Then she departs a despicable man’s life for good. Eight million, four hundred and nine thousand, six hundred and two.

Hmm. Intriguing story. But you wrote this as part of your application for your master’s degree, which you never completed. What happened?

Yeah, no, I never actually, I sort of started doing it. And because again, weirdly, this is becoming a theme that first thing when I wanted to start writing prose, which I hadn’t done up to this point, even though I had a lot of sitcoms optioned and whatnot, I went looking for a course. It seems to be very much my mother’s son. I need to find some educational thing to do it. So yeah, I started doing it. And what was great about it was they have the bit where you bring in three people bring in their work every week and you sit around and you read it and discuss it and stuff. And that was fantastic. I love that part of the process. But I remember like part of it is you have to pay to get your novel read by somebody and they give you feedback. And by this point, I published it. And a couple more besides because I, you know, I just sort of moved on. I was ready to go and I thought, I’m not paying someone else to read a book. Everyone else is supposed to pay me for reading the book. It’s already been published. It was useful for what it was. But the route I took into publishing and all that sort of thing, it didn’t really cover that. So I ended up going my own path, I guess.

Right. So you already have published writing.

I had an idea for a novel, which I’ve never written. And then I thought, well, I need to figure out how to write prose. So I started doing the masters. And then while I was doing it, I started writing short stories just for practice, which I’m always amazed more people don’t do, frankly, if they want to start becoming. Everyone seems to start trying to write a novel straight off. And that seems impossible to me. But one of them basically expanded beyond all plans and ended up becoming a book called A Man with One of Those Faces that I initially wrote just as a practice. And then we liked it. And so we ended up publishing it.

We ended up publishing it. So you self-published it?

Yeah, myself and my wife. Basically, we went looking for the traditional route into publishing. And we got very little interest. British publishing is frankly a little bit scared of funny books. Like not if they’re written by someone like a comedian’s biography or stuff. But actual funny books they can be a little bit wary of. And we were sort of warned about this. I got the feedback at one point that it was too funny and too Irish. And yeah, it was the most ridiculous thing in the world. And I remember the guy who gave me that, who had actually paid for feedback. This is how bad it got. And then he left a pause and said, you have to be able to take criticism in this game. And I was like, OK, I think the problem is I don’t accept that as criticism because I’m basically sitting in a flat that got paid for by me being funny and Irish. So, yeah, we ended up doing it ourselves, which worked great. And now I’m sort of a hybrid where we still have our, the Bunny McGarry books are still done by our publishing company, McFarley, which is my wife now runs it full time. She’s the CEO and I provide the raw material as in the book. And then I’m also very lucky to be published. McDonnell is published by Transworld. So it’s nice to be on both sides of the fence. But I mean, I highly recommend it because it kind of got us, you know, it’s one of those great things where it’s a little punk mentality. If the world isn’t what you, you can go out and do it yourself. And we did. And it worked out well.

So did you know when you were at school, did you have any ambition or dreams of being a writer?

Weirdly, I always had a huge trouble when I was in school because I’m left-handed and I’ve never learned how to hold a pen correctly. And they brought me to all these specialist and stuff testing me for dyslexia and all these things, which I don’t have. But my writing has always been appalling. So anything involving an essay, I had huge trouble. I used to get terrible marks. And my mother, God love her, constantly had to fight to basically prove to schools that I was intelligent. And she used to go in and go, no, he shouldn’t be doing woodwork. He should be doing the thing that gets him into university. He’s a smart child. And she refused to accept that I wasn’t. So anything with… I was weirdly… I ended up being captain of the school debating team, sharing the honour with the guy who’s currently Irish Minister for Finance, by the way. It was a random… Still reckon I could take him in a fight, by the way. I mean, an argument, not a fight fight. To be fair, I don’t think I would do pretty well in a fight. But yeah, we were both on the debate teams. And weirdly, one of the single things is, if you ever did debates in school, you had to do this thing, the rebuttal, when you were the captain at the end, and they give you six minutes. And what we discovered there was, I’m quite good at riffing. And I ended up doing a debate, and the famous quote, romance in Ireland is dead and gone. We did that debate against the local girl school on Valentine’s Day. So we won the debate. It’s fair to say it may have set my romantic life back several years. But I also, I technically should have been disqualified, because you’re supposed to have, I think it was five minutes to the end, and I did eight and a half, because I was just basically riffing, and people were laughing, so I kept going. And really, that was the moment where I probably decided I wanted to be a stand-up comedian and work in comedy.

How did your parents feel about you going into stand-up?

I think they, because my parents basically don’t really understand stand-up. They know who stand-ups are. And I regularly get told that Dara Breen wears a lovely suit. My mother sees him on things. I mean, that woman, when I say she likes his material, she loves his suit. She’s very impressed by Dara’s suits all the time. So yeah, they never really understood that kind of thing. But now I’m a published author, they kind of go, oh, this seems to be proper. Yes. They’re much happier. They understand this a lot more. And my dad, bless him, spends a lot of time showing my books to people. He’s in a hospital because his health isn’t great. But every time I go in, I’m sitting there and one of the members of staff walk in, he goes, you’re the author. He’s like, oh, you were telling me about your book, which is very sweet.

Right, let’s go on to the next offcut. Can you tell us what this one is, please?

OK, this is from about 2008. It’s called The New Fred. And it’s the first episode of a sitcom I was commissioned to write, which was going to be called Seedogs. And it’s about my time working on the ferries.

Interior, the lobby. Close up on a name tag saying Martha. Pull out to reveal Martha, the attractive and surly Belgian receptionist. A very smartly dressed man walks up holding his phone out.

Yeah, hi, I’m not getting any mobile phone reception.

The guy holds his phone out towards Martha.

That is correct sir, you’re not.

Is there some kind of problem?

No, you’re just in the middle of the sea. What?

Martha points at a map of the British Isles on the wall.

Well, you see the green bits there? That’s land, where all the mobile phone masts are.

See the blue bit?

That’s where we are.

But this is totes ridiculous.

How am I supposed to talk to people?

You’re doing it now, well done.

But what about emails?

No.

Texts?

No.

Video calls?

Yes.

Really?

No.

Look, I’m in first class.

Oh, I’m very sorry sir, I didn’t realise.

So you can do something? Martha puts a plate of mints on the counter.

No, but you get a complimentary mint as I point out yet again, that you’re on the ocean.

This is barbaric! People can communicate from space, you know.

Yes sir, but it takes even longer to get to France from there.

He glares and walks off, still waving his phone around. Cut to interior the galley. Duncan is now fully dressed, in clothes that are clearly too big for him. He stands before Bridget, Barry and Graham.

How do I look?

Like the after picture for a brilliant diet.

Or a terrible disease.

Right, here’s the plan. Bridget, all that stuff that accidentally made its way from the passenger areas to the crew’s mess, that was going to make its way back over the next two days.

Quick cutaway to the crew’s mess, with its luxurious looking leather sofas, big screen TV, table football etc.

Yeeeep.

You’ve 20 minutes, go.

Bridget salutes and departs.

Graham, like normal, just do your job.

Graham nods.

Barry, unlike normal, just do your job.

Barry nods.

And I will distract the new Fred.

How are you going to do that?

With a little thing I like to call charm.

Duncan straightens his newly acquired tie.

Excuse me a moment.

He opens the rubbish chute and calmly throws up into it. He then turns to Graham, who sprays breath freshener into his mouth.

And to think I was worried.

This was set aboard a ferry between France and Ireland, this sitcom, which you worked on as a proper job. When was that?

Well, that was when I was in university. It was my first year in university and I was a boy at sea, because I was one of the only members of staff that was under 18, because I was very young when I went to university. So, bizarrely, that meant you couldn’t do a lot of jobs. Weirdly, one of the ones I could do was the one called Heavy Gang, which was literally cleaning up vomit. Because that’s the one they can give to children. I have never understood that rule, but that was the rule. Couldn’t be a waiter, but I could clean up vomit.

Literally, was that the only responsibility of the job, or were there other things as well?

No, it was generally just keeping areas clear. But when you’re on a ferry between Ireland and France, vomit is a big part of the gig. And yeah, the weird thing about this, by the way, is how this got… Because I basically got asked to write a pilot. How this happened was, I was basically out having a drink with people who would just commission something else. And we started talking about jobs. And I was talking about various tales I had about working on the ferries. And it was just talking about the first rubbish job you have. And obviously they enjoyed the stories. And I literally got a phone call the next day. And they basically said, yeah, could we commission that? And I was like, what do you want? The story I just told you in the pub. Yeah, can you make that into a thing? We’re like, OK. So yeah, I ended up basically writing the whole thing just based on some stories I told someone in the pub.

How far again with this one, was it just the pilot episode you wrote?

It just got a pilot and they sort of like a lot of TV things. What generally happens with TV things is you write a pilot and stuff and they’re interested. And then everybody swaps companies because they’re always moving around and then it just gets lost in the shuffle. I had a lot of things, frankly. I think I probably had about 10 different sitcoms optioned, which is the thing, you know, various different stages, none of which took off, although one bizarrely became The Stranger Times book. Really, that’s the one that came out, this first one, the CK. McDonnell one, that came out last year, which is sort of a paranormal thing set in Manchester. Really oddly, I wrote that as a sitcom years and years and years ago, which my age at the time didn’t bother saying to anybody and I don’t think she didn’t really sort of get it, but I always had the idea in my head. And what’s really annoying is, you’re talking about the off-cuts, even before I started doing this, the one script I can’t find is the original script for, it was called The Stranger Times initially and now it’s called The Stranger Times, it’s set in the newspaper. And I actually wrote the whole first few chapters were exactly as I recall, essentially what happened in the sitcom. But I literally recalled it like 15 years later out of nowhere. And while in the shower one morning, and by the time I’d walked to my office, I went, right, I’m going to make that into a book.

I noticed on your Wikipedia page that you have something like seven books in total that came out either last year, this year, or due out next year. And I was going to ask you about that. I was going to say, do you normally write that much? I mean, obviously, I appreciate there has been a pandemic, but was it the pandemic that this happened to? Or has it just been a backlog of stuff that their publications have been delayed and they’re just all coming out now?

Yeah, it’s a sort of mixture of things because traditionally published books, which The Stranger Times is, that’s probably written nearly 18 months before it actually came out. And you usually write books a year in advance with the way the big traditional publishers work. So, for example, the book that’s coming out in February, which is called This Charming Man, which is the second book in The Stranger Times series, I finished that last Christmas. And I’m now going to start on the third book in that series and stuff. So there’s that. To be honest, Jenny, with the pandemic, I was supposed to go on a big holiday in March when things started to go a little bit wrong for the entire planet. And as my wife remembers fondly, we were supposed to be in Mexico on a beach and she ended up going to the dump on the day we were supposed to be. We managed to go to the dump. That’s where we went. We got a picture of her standing in the dump with some bin bags looking really happy. And I did a weird thing or a short story that I’d previously written that I really liked. And everyone was sort of like, this sort of feels like the first act or something. And I basically took it. It’s a book called Welcome to Know where I ended up being. And I basically let myself go down to my office and come up with the weirdest ideas I could. Like for a crime book, it’s very strange. It ends up in the middle of a desert in a sort of Mad Max weird thing that happens. And it’s one of those books where of all my books, it’s the one people either love or go, ah, this is a bit too far. But I really love it. And so I ended up doing that. So I ended up like probably about three or four books came out in one year. But I do generally write quite fast. And I started dictating now as well due to back issues. And it turns out I write faster when I do that because enough you’ve noticed, I speak quite quickly. But, yeah, so I do. Because I think it’s quite easy to write more than one book a year. I get bored. And I’ve retired from stand up comedy now and I’ve got two dogs. So it means I can’t go out as much because I have to take care of the two of them. So I end up sitting at home with two dogs beside me in my office writing books.

There’s no chance of you going back to stand up, you don’t think?

No. Although to be fair, as my friend of mine, Gary, said, it’s the greatest piece. We started off together and it’s like the greatest piece of comedic timing of my career was I retired about seven months before everyone else had to give up for a year anyway. So honestly, to be honest, I’m genuinely, I was, I was like my wife gives out because every time I talk about stand up, she says, I do it, do myself down a bit. But I was a good, I was a good stand up, like I made a good living and stuff. But I honestly think I’m better as a novelist than I kind of, I think I honestly think I’m better at this than I am at doing anything else. So this is the thing I’m going to do for the next while, I think.

Okay, let’s move on to the next off cut. Can you tell us about this one, please?

Yes, this is called Me, Myself and I and it’s a piece of prose I wrote in 2015.

Chapter one, drop ins and drop outs. There are many ways to find yourself. Usually it involves a trip to somewhere a lot more exotic and poorer than where you come from, where you experience a spiritual awakening. But this awakening generally takes the form of realizing you are insignificant in the grand scheme of things coupled with an inexplicable urge to tell people about that over and over again. Oh, and often you lose your taste for meat. In short, I can only conclude that the number one export of Thailand is selves, which are very dull at parties and difficult to cook for. When I found myself, it was different. There was no road to Damascus moment of revelation. Just the slate-shatteringly loud thump of something heavy hitting the roof of the house, rolling under the soft thud of an unhappy landing in the garden. You’d think that’d tweak my interest. It’s not every day something heavy falls from the sky onto your house, after all, and you’d be right. Thing is, at the time, I was busy losing interest in pretty much everything. The sleeping pills, the vodka and the diet coke were seen to that. The one thing that makes me think I didn’t really mean it was the addition of a mixer. And if you really wanted to end it all, surely you’d treat yourself to full fat coke. I apologize for the glibness. It may be a defense mechanism, the mind not wanting to look directly at what it had allowed to happen on a darker day. If you really could die of embarrassment, then suicide would have a 100% success rate. Nothing is quite as cringe worthy as realizing you’d failed at the ultimate failure. Sure, it could have been a cry for help, as these things often are. Thing is, I lived alone. If I didn’t want it to happen, then I had a terrible sense for dramatic timing. I should have done it at a time convenient for the cleaning lady to come in and discover me. Come to that, I should have first hired a cleaning lady. The first anyone would have known would quite possibly have been when the landlords came round to serve notice due to the unpaid rent. Maybe work would have sent somebody over to look, but it had probably have been Barry. He’d have knocked a couple of times and pissed off. I never liked Barry. Maybe Karen would have tearfully found me. Maybe that’s what I’d wanted. She’d taken all her stuff, though, and been very careful to give back the keys, so maybe not. I really hope that’s not what I wanted, as that would make me think much less of myself as a person. And if my current situation proved anything, it was that I didn’t think that much of myself to begin with.

Was this going to be a novel or a short story? Got any idea what this was?

Basically, it’s an idea I’ve had for ages that I couldn’t ever really get to work, because you know that idea that there’s multiple universes where if your decision’s sort of… you split, every time you make a decision, it splits off, and there’s two different versions of you going forward.

Like sliding doors?

Exactly, like sliding doors sort of the sci-fi thing, where there’s thousands of these sort of universes, or an infinite amount of them really, kind of going on, and they split from different points and all. That’s the theory. And I always had this idea of basically this guy tries to commit suicide, and then weirdly, versions of himself from other things just keep falling into this reality. And literally, he just has versions of him keep popping up every now and then. And I could never quite figure out how it worked, but I just liked the idea that they kept falling from the sky, and the end of that chapter was he opens his front door and finds a naked dead version of himself, which I think we can all agree is quite an arresting idea, because if you ever walk by a mirror at the wrong time and cut yourself, it’s always quite… So I just think the idea that he’s standing there trying to… and he eventually recognizes that it’s himself. But yeah, it was one of these ideas where there’s a lot of strands that I like about it, but I could never quite figure out how the whole thing would work, so it never went anywhere else.

You said at the end of that chapter, so presumably it was a book rather than a short story.

Yeah, I think it probably would have been a novel, but yeah, I just never figured out really how you sort of go about… I could never figure out the internal logic of it exactly, about why these other versions of him kept turning up. I think that was the thing. When you can’t get the logic to quite work, you quickly realize you’ll end up tying yourself in knots and it won’t go anywhere.

Now, this is from 2015 and The Man with One of Those Faces, the first of your Dublin trilogy novels, that was published in 2016. So was this one of the stories you were writing before you had your breakthrough novel moment?

Yeah, I think this is sort of one of the things where I said I did a lot of short stories. And I think, yeah, I was just sort of scrabbling around trying to find a voice. And yeah, this is one of the earlier things which wasn’t quite right. Weirdly, when you’re hearing this one live, which I think was maybe the voice of the brilliant narrator, because Christopher Brookmire, who you’ve already had on the show, was a massive hero of mine. And he’s definitely had a huge influence on, weirdly, me writing the same kind of genres in some ways as well. And I think he sort of, reading his books was like, oh, you can be funny and have a plot that really moves along and keeps going, you know, and keeps people really engaged in the importance of character and all that sort of stuff. So I think certainly you can hear a bit of that in there and there’s like the Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett with the other two big influences on me all throughout my life. So I think, yeah, you can probably hear a bit of that, where it’s me still trying to find my own voice in there somewhere.

So when you’re writing these projects, when you’re writing these novels, do you show your writing to anyone as it’s going along or do you wait until it’s finished?

On my first book I did, there was a Godloven, there’s a few standard comedian friends of mine who I constantly were sending bits through to and getting feedback and stuff. And it was really just more assurance than anything and my wife as well. But weirdly when we finished A Man with One of Those Faces, I think after that point I have never shared anything with anybody until they’re finished. And now what happens is my wife is reader zero, she reads everything first. But until that point nobody sees anything until it’s finished. I even don’t really explain things to my wife before I finish the book. I might occasionally ask her a question or something because she’s obviously read all the other ones and stuff. But I don’t, I think weirdly there’s a thing, and all my books is kind of a thing. I have a big background story I’ve never explained to anyone regarding the main character in The Crying Bucks called Bunny McGarry. And it sort of explains a lot that happens in the later books. And the only person I’ve ever explained it to is my wife. It’s just referred to constantly in the books but nobody really knows except her.

And you’re going to be revealing it, are you, gradually?

Basically, I think at some point it’s quite a dark idea. And I have this idea for a prequel. I’ve already written, fans of my books will know I’m terrible. I’ve written several, a couple of prequels already. I’m an awful disrespected of timelines. And I think at some point I will write this which will sort of explain an awful lot. But it’s quite, I have a story in my head really quite clearly but it’s a very dark story. So I kind of keep thinking, will I write that next? And I’m not going to do it I think for a while but maybe sometime next year or the year after. It will come out eventually at some point. I will write it at some point soon I think.

Well, time for another off-cut. Can you tell us what this one is please?

Sure. This is from 2007 and it’s another sitcom pilot I wrote called Other Plans.

Interior. The dog and whore pub. Anna and Kat are sitting at a corner table in a busy pub. Anna glances at the young couple at the next table, sitting close together and staring lovingly at each other.

So come on out with it. What? A casual drinkie after work. Something’s up. Don’t shitter shitter. Siobhan got the lead in a touring production. And I’m really happy for her. Of course. We’re delighted for the talentless bitch who couldn’t act her way out of a brown paper bag. You, my darling, are the young, gorgeous Meryl Streep of your generation. And not the Meryl Streep who’s in Mamma Mia. The other one. The good one. Eventually somebody bar me is going to figure that out. Thanks. It’s just… Keep the faith, love. Meanwhile, I know what to cheer you up. Don’t say cock. I wasn’t going to. So what then? I was going to say cocks, plural. You need to raise your ambition, sweetheart. Duly noted. Right, I’m off for a piss. Why do I need a man in my life when I’ve got you?

Who’s the daddy?

Cat departs for the loop. Anna takes a sip from her glass of wine and looks around the bar. We now hear Anna speaking as a voiceover.

Everyone says, How can you be single in a city containing millions of men?

The action in the bar freezes. Anna speaks to camera.

Thing is, you’ve got to set certain parameters for yourself, haven’t you? So, gone are men who are too young?

Arrows fly in from off screen, hitting all the men under 20 years old in the room, who fall wordlessly to the floor.

Too old?

A similar hail of arrows takes down every man over 45 in the room.

Too married?

Another hail of arrows takes out several more men.

Some of whom don’t see themselves as out of the running, of course.

One of the corpses sits up and flirtatiously waves at Anna.

But they definitely are.

Two more arrows hit the married guy dead in the chest.

Also out are gay men, obviously.

Several more men are taken out by another hail of arrows, including the guy from the canoodling couple. Anna glances at this and raises an eyebrow. More guys go down as Anna lists off a few more groupings.

Weirdos, perverts, guys with mummy issues, anybody who has ever called anyone bro.

The numbers are really thinning out now.

And that’s before you even start on any of the physical stuff, because while we’d all like to believe we’re wonderful people who only really care about what’s on the inside, well…

Yet more arrows cull the physically unattractive from the remaining men. There are now very few left standing.

So you see, it’s not a jungle out there. It’s a bloody desert.

Cat emerges from the toilets and walks towards Anna over all of the fallen bodies. As she sits down, the crowd returns to its normal, non-dead state. Cat picks up her drink.

It’s a war zone in here today.

This was a plan for a sitcom. Now, when you sent it to me, in the email you said, it was like Fleabag, only written a decade before by a bloke who is nowhere near as good. And you were genuinely told that a woman talking to camera would never fly.

There was actually a female producer who commissioned it and stuff who really liked it. She gave me the compliment, said that she thought I wrote women really well, which is nice. But I remember thinking just as an author or writer, you think, that’s over half the planet. If you can’t write over half the planet, you need to stop writing. I mean, I’ve always thought that’s… I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are some horrific examples of men writing women badly. There’s hilarious threads I’m sure you’ve seen about if women wrote about men the way men write about women. But yeah, I had that idea and I liked the idea of talking to camera and doing all these kind of weird things because obviously something like that, I’ve always had a very visual sense with these things. But with something like that, you kind of have to rely on people getting the visual idea that you have in your head. And the great thing I found when I started writing books was I didn’t have to try and convince someone else because you put it in exactly the words you want it. Because a script is essentially raw materials, whereas a novel is a finished product. So you don’t have to rely on something, you know, it’s more, well, this is the complete thing, you like it, you don’t like it. Whereas with the script, you have to make sure people actually understand what you mean. But yeah, I mean, that’s very common though. I can remember when I did that course we referred to about writing sitcoms. The rule that they told us, one of the big ones is, never set a sitcom in an office. Nobody cares about offices. Yeah. And then the office happened. And this is hilarious. Exactly. And then about, oh my God, 10, 15 years later, I was in a BBC thing and an executive was talking about what dos and don’ts. And he actually stood up and said genuinely, don’t write a sitcom based in an office because everyone will compare it to the office. And you’re like, really? So we’ve changed the golden rule from that to that.

That’s so stupid.

But, you know, it’s the nature of these things when people are looking for reasons to not do stuff or to do stuff and stuff that you will get some very, very weird things. I mean, especially when it comes to involvement in TV, even with novels and stuff, I had that mind where The Stranger Times, again, it’s been optioned for TV with a very good company, which we’re delighted to have. But there was various companies’ interests, which is really nice. But one of them, I won’t say any names, are quite a big Hollywood company. But they went, OK, just hear me out now. Just a word I want to put by you. Puppets. What? I was like, what? Puppets. We want to do it with puppets.

What, like a children’s programme?

No, no, they just wanted to do it with puppets. People have tried that every now and then, doing an adult thing with puppets. And don’t get me wrong, I grew up with the puppets, I love the puppets. I actually wrote a lot of kids’ TV, but I was like, puppets. And I can remember my agent sort of said, they’ve sent you a taster tape, you know, and it’s a big deal. It was a company with a serious director behind it and stuff. And I remember my agent sort of asked me later on about the thing. He said, did you ever watch the taster tape with the puppets? And I went, no, no. As soon as you said the word, like, because I’ve seen a lot of puppets and there was no way I could see my novel being accurately portrayed by puppets. But yeah, that’s the joys of TV for you.

Now, you were a winner in the BBC’s Northern Laff sitcom writing competition and you ended up being mentored by Craig Cash and Phil Mealy from The Royal Family, the sitcom.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. I did that competition in, I don’t know when it was, we did a showcase in Edinburgh and stuff. So yeah, I had a sitcom that nearly, of all the sitcoms I had that nearly sort of got closest, there was one that was a radio one. I think it was just called The Man Comes Around, which was sort of, again, quite influenced by Pratchett in its own way, but it was about the Grim Reaper, a version of the Grim Reaper having to come and live on Earth due to some sort of customer service issue. And I got mentored by them, which was amazing because they were, the great thing about working with them, which I’ll now say because I don’t really work in TV anymore, every time I had meetings you went down to London into big fancy offices and you sort of got feedback from people who weren’t writers. And they’re like, you’ve seen some hilarious sketches about it. Mitchell and Webber have a brilliant sketch about this where it’s a guy going, I mean, not this, but could it have a unicorn in it? I mean, not that, but something like that. And that’s the classic sort of feedback you get in sort of TV things. It is the sort of joke about it. But the great thing about working with Phil and Craig was they were writers. So they actually kind of got into the script and said, what do you think? And then why we do this and maybe do this, but it was much more of an actual working with a writer as opposed to someone just coming in and firing ideas at you.

So they worked as like editors, potential editors.

Yeah, they were just sort of a sort of kind of collaborative, much more collaborative. And they kind of worked on all those different things because they’re used to working in a team because they’ve written for a team on loads of different things. So, yeah, they’re great people to work with. And it was kind of a way where you sort of go, oh, this is what it should be like. This is what this should be like. You should be working with people who kind of have this sort of sense for it, which is quite rare to find.

OK, we’ve come to your final offcut now. Can you tell us what this one is?

This is a pitch document I wrote in about 2012 for a children’s TV series, which was going to be called The Cannon Files.

Meet Geoffrey Cannon, a consulting detective without equal. He’s exactly as you’d expect with his old school gentlemanly manners, razor sharp mind and distinctive deerstalker hat, a homage to his idol. While he may appear a tad eccentric, make no mistake. If you have a case, one nobody else can solve, then he is your man. There’s seemingly no secret he can’t uncover, but there’s one very big secret he’s trying to hide. You see, all is not as it seems with Geoffrey Cannon. Under that distinctive hat lies a surprising fact. Geoffrey Cannon doesn’t actually exist. Instead, he is the creation of Jake Burns, a 15-year-old genius faced with one of the oldest problems imaginable. Nobody listens to a kid, no matter how smart they are. Jake’s innovative solution is to invent exactly the character people expect of a master detective and then, through the art of disguise, become him. Jake’s motivation for all this is his guardian uncle Phil, or to give him his full title, Detective Inspector Philip Burns. Phil is a lovely, charming guy and a dedicated guardian who has put his heart and soul into giving Jake the best start in life since taking him in as a baby. He is also an absent-minded klutz whose mind is liable to wander so far it often may not appear to be on the same planet as the rest of us. A couple of flukey results got him promoted to being a detective inspector and although he doesn’t realise it, left to his own devices, it would only be a matter of time before his bosses discover what an incompetent he is. Jake would do anything to protect his uncle, which is why Inspector Burns always seems to end up working the same case as Jeffrey Cannon and getting the credit. Jake isn’t alone in all this as Jeffrey Cannon goes nowhere without his trusted companion, Leonard Barthing Stock III. The rambunctious Leonard is in fact Leona, Jake’s 15-year-old best friend. She’s a tomboy at heart with a puckish personality and a severe case of the sarcastics. She isn’t as into the whole detective thing as Jake, but she wouldn’t let him wander off and get into trouble on his own. The Cannon Files is a fast-paced action comedy closer in tone to the original Pink Panther movies than it is to any modern crime drama. Jake, in his alter ego of Jeffrey Cannon, has to solve the case, keep his uncle out of trouble and his true identity a secret. All the while dealing with the trials and tribulations of teenage life.

Now, this seems like an excellent pitch. I can really see this. Like, it’s a TV series or like a big film of summer blockbuster film. So, what happened? Why didn’t it get any further?

I just, it never really… It’s one of those things where I remember it gave it to my agent and stuff, trying to get it pitched out, and I don’t know if it ever really… I mean, kids TV in Britain is a little bit tricky because there’s… I think things might have changed again now, but there was only the BBC at the time really doing it because ITV was sort of out of the game and all that sort of thing. So, it was a… I guess this idea is maybe a little bit higher budget than some of the stuff they would do. So, I don’t know. I must admit, I was listening to it there going, this is a good idea.

It sounds like the description of a film. It sounds like it’s already been written. You can just see it. It should be a big budget summer adventure film.

Yeah, I mean, it certainly could. I think it’s got a nice feel to it. I think it’s a good sort of fun vibe. I know it was around the time that Sherlock was becoming big. So, I thought it would be fun to do a kind of a homage at the same time, which the key thing is that basically, as every kid knows, the biggest problem is that their parents don’t know anything. So, I think it does. I must admit, I agree with you. I think it is a great idea. I still don’t understand why it hasn’t been made.

Well, surely, as a successful novelist now, do you not have a certain amount of push anyway? Can you not sort of go, hey, I’m CK or Caimh McDonnell, depending on which books of mine you read. You know, I’ve been optioned, left, right and centre. What about this?

Yeah, people sort of ask me about weirdy when I was… because I had the pedigree in Kids TV and I’ve written, I don’t know, 60 or 70 episodes of Kids TV. I wrote a lot of Kids TV. I had a cartoon series that was my idea, that got commissioned.

That’s Pet Squad, isn’t it?

That was Pet Squad.

BAFTA nominated.

And then there was Bear Behave. Yeah, BAFTA nominated, which was lovely. We only found out after the fact because we thought we were up against something else. I can’t… Gumball, which is a very good series, which everyone thought that’s going to win by a mile. To the point where I was there, I was very lucky in Kids TV. I started working with a company called Darrell McQueen, who have won the award, the BAFTA, I think a couple of times for being the best indie. And they really are, with all respect. Because I haven’t worked with every company, but I’ve worked with, let’s say, internal stuff at the broadcasters and other companies. And weirdly, because I worked with Darrell McQueen first, and they’re so brilliantly organised, Maddie is so, she could literally, when I was working for them a lot, she could tell me what I was doing for the next year. Everything they do, their notes are organised, and they really taught me how to write. They really did. It was the best education you could have had. But then I had the thing where I went to other companies, and I was like, why is no one taking notes in this meeting? Why is no one timing this script? Why are we not doing all these things that Manny does every time? And you just sort of realise that, wow, once you’ve worked with the best people, it’s really hard to, like, the patience to kind of deal with people not doing it their way, which is the best way, was quite a thing. So yeah, I mean, it’s an idea I always had. Maybe I will at some point write the YA novel of it and things like that. I really do enjoy the idea of it. So yeah, you never know. You might have talked me into it.

Well, my work here is done. OK, we have now come to the end of the show. How was it for you?

It was brilliant, genuinely. It was wonderful hearing all the pieces. Thank you very much. It’s been a weird, delightful troll through my own inglorious past.

One final question. I suppose you’ve sort of answered it really. It was going to be which of the offcuts, if any, would inspire you to go back and try again with them? You’ve sort of answered that.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a few. The Me, Myself and I idea. If I could ever get the idea to work, I really would like to write it at some point. I think the canon files, I must admit, reading it again and even hearing it there, I was sort of going, this was a good idea. Why was nobody interested in this? This is the one that got away. So, yeah, I don’t know. I’ll have a chat with my agent. He’s on paternity leave at the minute, but when he comes back, I’ll stick the canon files in front of him and tell him that it’s got your official seal of approval.

Yes, and he’ll go, sorry, Laura who? And that’s the end of that conversation.

Oh, he’s a big fan. He’s a big fan.

Oh, of course he’s, yes. Well, thank you, Caimh McDonnell, for sharing the contents of your off-cuts draw with us. Bye. The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Caimh McDonnell. The offcuts were performed by Rachel Atkins, Darrell Maclaine, Kenny Blyt, David Monteith, Jake Yapp and Lizzie Roper, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com, and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.