I’m still going, I’m still doing the thing, but the sheer amount of pen names will tell you that publishers constantly look for a debut, they constantly look for freshness, they keep pretending I’m fresh, and rattled though I am, I go along with it, and yeah, still haven’t quite got there, but they all get published, they all get read, so I’m certainly not complaining.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcut’s 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 today is known by multiple different author names, nom de plumes, or noms de plumes, all of them writers differentiated by genre. She’s Juliet Ashton, but also Claire Sandy, Bernie Gaughan, and M.B. Vincent, and the original persona under which she was first published, Bernadette Strachan. To date, she has written 28 novels, starting with The Reluctant Landlady in 2004, cosy titles that include What Would Mary Berry Do?, Snowed in for Christmas, and Diamonds and Daisies, through to later novels that include the more quirkily titled Jess Castle and the Eyeballs of Death.

For the stage, she co-wrote the book for the musical Next Door’s Baby with her late husband Matthew Strachan, which was based on her own radio play. This has been produced at the Orange Tree Theatre in London, and again at the Tabard Theatre. Her other musical, About Bill, was also staged at the Tabard recently, and starred West End veteran Kim Ismay.

And finally, not content with the five already mentioned, she’s added two more to her harem of author identities, Alice Kavanagh, responsible for the 2023 novel The House That Made Us, and Catherine Miller, who has written a trilogy of books which are prequels to The Archers series on Radio 4, recently turned into a two-part radio drama, with the possibility of reaching our TV screens as well. So, Bernadette, Bernie, Juliet, Claire, MB, Alice and Catherine, welcome all of you to the Offcuts Drawer. Thank you.

We’re all very happy to be here. So, you’ve just moved home. Did that give you the impetus to go through old boxes and find actual paper copies of old projects, or am I presuming you’re 182 and actually was everything neatly organised on a computer or online? No, there were lots of boxes.

And actually, I had to not give in, because there were so many of them. And I found myself pouring over the notes for a novel I never wrote in 2005. So, actually, I dragged myself away.

And also, I had to chuck out a lot because we downsized. So, I kept every notebook, which is insane, as if I’m Arthur Miller, you know, and I’m going to lead them to Yale or something. So, I actually just kept one or two notebooks from each novel, because I do a mixture of longhand and on the screen.

So, yeah, I had to get rid of a lot. And once I looked at them, you know, most of it was, you know, smileys and, you know, sort of insert humour here and things like that. So, it’s no great loss.

But it was, yeah, it was quite sobering. Well, I imagine you have to be pretty organised if you’re juggling so many different professional personae. I think so.

Yeah, you do. And, you know, all the writers you talk to say this, and you know this yourself, it’s a job, you have to be organised, you have to get up and you have to turn up. But yes, when you’re writing two books a year, and one’s a cosy crime, and the other is romantic, you do have to change your hats with great fluidity.

So, yeah, I’m used to it. But that’s one of the most fun parts, actually, I don’t find it a problem. I find that a complete plus because you don’t get bored.

I do think seven different names, presumably seven different personalities. I’m thinking like Snow White’s dwarves, have you got like a sleepy, grumpy, happy? Do you sort of inhabit them as different personalities themselves? Or are you more practical about it? I think of myself, I always remember Margaret Rutherford in Blind Spirit saying when she goes anywhere on a bicycle, she ups with her heart and over the hill. And that’s how I feel in the morning.

I think, well, who am I this morning? Oh, I’m the dreamily romantic, you know, I don’t know, decorating a house or something. Or I am the detective who’s working out what the DNA is. So yeah, it really helps to sort of sit down, centre yourself and get into it.

Normally, what I do is I read a few pages back, and then I just sort of gallop. But I’m very fast. I plan to maniac degree, actually, I over plan.

But that does mean that once you start, I’m sprinting through the whole thing. And that’s the fun bit. That’s the really fun bit.

Right, well, let’s kick off with your first offcut. Can you tell us please what it’s called, what genre it was written for, and when it was written? This is a radio play. And it’s called, rather pretentiously in hindsight, Reflection in an Acton Loft.

And it was written in 2019. away. So the world looks pastel and dusty.

I wish I could touch it. I’d love to touch it. But one of those elderly volunteers would waddle over pointing to the sign and saying it was Jane Austen’s actual mirror.

And it’s very precious and keep your steaming mitts off it. And they’d be right. Things only last this long if they’re cared for.

Imagine this looking glass actually reflected Jane Austen herself, a real face, her eyes and her expression. I know Simon thinks I’m bonkers coming here to Chawton to her museum over and over, but it’s because of this mirror. The other stuff is fine, all correct period and style, but this was hers.

And look at the way her bedroom, her actual real bedroom looks in the mirror. So much more characterful than it does in this raw, sunshiny afternoon. If I lean to the left, I can see the little iron bed, just like the one the poor thing died in, tiny and bruised, hardly making a dent in the bedclothes.

I could almost be there in 18… looking after her, if it wasn’t for all these people around me in polyester separates and bum bags. I’m a Jane Austen fan, you see, a proper one, not… There is loud beeping. Oh, hang on.

Body Biz Spa, promoting wellness for all, how may I help? Just putting you through. A proper Jane Austen fan, not of the films, not of the TV stuff, not even of Colin Firth in Drenched Britches. The books, the books do it for me.

I was too young, really, when I picked up my first one, Emma. I fell in love with… More loud beeping. Oh, hang on.

Body Biz Spa, promoting wellness for all, how may I help? He’s not in on Thursdays. I’m sure Janine can help. Putting you through.

Just totally fell in love with Emma. The language, so witty and so correct. Jane always said exactly what she meant, never scrabbled around.

It was pithy, that’s what it was. I gobbled all the books up, then the biographies, the letters. I can quote her comments to Cassandra.

They were so close, they were sisters, like sisters can be. Good morning. I need a towel.

There you go. Have they fixed locker number 12 in the changing room? I don’t know, madam. Probably.

I hope so. It’s my favourite. I love it at Body Biz.

All these nice people. A people watch, you see, because I write. Excuse me, excuse me, may I see your membership card, please? No, I’m afraid I have to see it.

Oh God, we’ve got to run ahead of the spinning class. Hang on. Judy leaves her desk, suddenly knocking over things.

Madam? Later. Tea break at last. Not much tea gets drunk.

It’s all scribble, scribble, scribble. I’m working on my fourth novel, based very closely on the style of my heroine, Jane Austen. It’s a kind of epic about a fierce love between star-crossed estate agents.

Freehold of the Heart. Good title, I think. Or is it terrible? This, well, I thought it was the beginning of a sort of chiclet type book.

I mean, Jane Austen is every chiclet writer’s favourite writer and all that. But then I looked back on your notes and thought, oh, hold on. This is not that at all.

Can you explain to the listener what this project was, please? Yes, I can. Gentle listener. This is a very dear thing to my heart that, yes, all chiclet, which we’re not supposed to say anymore.

We’re supposed to say commercial women’s fiction. But I’m very happy with chiclet. Everybody loves Jane Austen, but there is an assumption that you love her for the sugary, pastel dresses and the romance.

And actually, I did really, really love her and always have for the genius. So it was partly a reaction to how annoyed that made me. But yes, I went to Jordan many times with my long-suffering husband in tow.

And I always looked in that mirror, thrilled to think that Jane Austen looked in it. And I used to think, I wish I could nick this. I’ve got a criminal mind.

What can I say? So my heroine actually does steal it, which is very unlikely, but she gets away with it. She props it up in her attic bedroom. She has a terrible relationship with her sister.

Her husband doesn’t support her, is never home, is always away on business. She’s very neglected and she pretends things are okay. And she’s actually very unhappy.

And she slowly dies like Jane Austen did until she disappears. And there’s no reflection in the mirror at all. So yeah, it does veer away from Chick-fil-A quite speedily.

Perhaps why it didn’t get put on, Laura. So it started out as a sort of, oh, is this going to be Jane Austen helps this woman either become a writer or find her the love of her life? No, it kills her in a horrid, nasty, she basically fades away. Wow.

Yeah. And so you wrote the whole play? I wrote the whole play. I always write the whole everything.

I never half write anything. I write the whole everything, which is why if you had two years of airtime, we could fill it with my stuff. But yes, I wrote the whole play and yeah, my agent wasn’t mad about it.

I sent it to a couple of, you know, the way it goes, you can send it to people, you know, who might send it to people they know. And I think it was just, it was a mixed bag. And if I’m really honest, I never expected it to get made.

It was just something I really wanted to write. We have to be quite strict about genre. It’s a business.

It’s a depressing business at times, but yeah, it did straddle two genres and neither quite happy. When you’re saying disciplined about genre, you mean when you’re writing novels or everywhere within the writing? Well, certainly in novels, I mean, strictly in novels and in my experience elsewhere. Yeah, especially if you introduce humour.

I mean, I have seen very successful humour drama and humour crime and humour thriller, but they’re not as pure, I think, and they don’t gain as much attention or get as many green lights as a purer thing, because the worst thing a producer wants to be is confused by what you’ve written. They want to go, I know exactly who will listen to this. I know exactly how much to spend on this.

So yes, I do think unless you’ve got a track record, if you want to try and hit the spot, it’s best to be clear about your intent. And I don’t think much as I enjoyed that play, and I really was great hearing it dramatised. That was great fun.

I always thought, yeah, this is not going to go on. You do, don’t you, when you write things? Sometimes you think, yeah, not going to go. Right, time for another off cut.

Can you tell us about this one, please? Well, this is more radio. This is a comedy and it’s called Number 89 and I wrote it a thousand years ago in 1985. My name is Nancy.

I’m 20 something, five foot something, and I have no distinguishing marks. I live by the river in what the estate agent described as a spacious mansion flat. I don’t own it, I rent it, so there are in my life two very special people, my flatmates.

Breakfast time is the only time when Joanna, Susie and I are all together, when we can relax and enjoy each other’s company and discuss matters of great import. No milk again! Why is there never any milk in this place? Oh dear, oh Susie, I think we’ve got some coffee right now. Oh my cornflakes! There’s no cornflakes either, so you’re in luck.

Oh God, would I be asking too much to try and scrape up a boiled egg? Oh dear, oh Susie, the last egg went into Bernard’s quiche. Great, I starve and your fancy man stuffs himself with quiche. You’re not starving, Susie.

God knows Bernard’s not fancy, and anyone who’s tasted Joanna’s quiche knows better than to stuff themselves with it. Oh Nancy! Make yourself a slice of toast. Oh yes, some lovely toast and marmalade, Susie.

Mmm, lovely, delicious, luxurious toast. I can hardly wait. Why is the grill so filthy? Presumably because you neglected to scrub it after that sausage orgy last night.

Oh, it’s always my fault, isn’t it? I only left it because I had to get to bed and rest my voice. I do have a gig tonight, you know. Yeah, Sus does have a gig tonight, Nancy.

She has a gig tonight, you know. Resting for this gig also stopped you taking out the rubbish? Erm, the rubbish? The rubbish? Are we going to say everything three times? Just so I know, just so I know, just so I know. So, I didn’t take the rubbish out.

Beat me, shoot me, leave it out my bones for the vultures to pick at. The flat’s starting to smell like a Calcutta backstreet. Oh no, oh really? You should- Anyway, you were home all day doing sod all, Joanna.

What’s stopping you taking the rubbish out or cleaning the grill? Well, the rota. I mean- Oh, the precious rota. It’s made out by Nancy, not Moses.

She didn’t stagger down from Mount Sinai with it. It’s chalked onto a blackboard which has a transfer of a care bearer on it. You can ignore the blessed rota, you know.

Susie, pack it in. She’s going to… Cry. No, please.

Anything but that. Don’t, Joanna. I’m sorry.

I’m sorry. Jo, don’t. Shh, shh, shh, shh.

Just because I don’t have a job, I can’t do everything. I try, I really try. But Bernard’s had a virus and that budgie’s more work than he looks.

Poor Joanna. It’s a strain for her to be unemployed, to be the odd one out, to be, well, to be alive, really. Particularly to be alive in the vicinity of someone like Susie, who’s rather sparky.

It’s the artistic temperament, you see. The artistic temperament of a builder’s yard typist who sings in pubs at night. Maybe you’ll hear Susie sing later.

Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to be horribly murdered first. My day promised to be a gruelling one. I had to leave Joanna snivelling on the formica and yoke myself between the shafts of Bootle, Bargle, Hefty and Warnes.

When I became a copywriter, fresh-faced and newly sprung from university, nobody told me I was selling my soul to the devil. That I was prostituting my only skill. That I would one day write a commercial for dog toilet paper.

Ah, the gals in the flat chair scenario. Was this you? It was me. It was me and my two cousins.

Very much me and my two cousins. I mean, the whole budgie thing, I could, you know, I could write War and Peace. But it, do you know, it’s really fascinating listening to that.

It’s so of its time. The humour is so of its time. You could pinpoint that as the 80s.

I sent this off completely cold. I was working in radio advertising at the time. I was in a production house.

And I sent it completely cold to a producer who produced comedy I liked. And she sent me back such an encouraging letter. It was wonderful.

She said it was this, it was that. In short, I loved it and I want to hear more. But this is a topic that is tackled by a lot of first-time writers.

So if you can think of something else and write something else, I’d love to hear that. And I, as you can imagine, went straight back to the desk. And well, the kitchen table in this case.

And scribbled and scribbled and scribbled. And by the time I’d finished it, she’d moved on. And I’d sent it to a guy who took over and he sent me back.

I will never forget what he said. He said, thank you for this. It did raise a titter, he said.

And then he turned it down. I mean, he really hated it. But that stopped me in my tracks.

And instead of just saying sod you and carrying on, I kind of let it lie and went back to doing my little stories for weekly magazines, which I really had a huge cottage industry going. But yeah, that was really interesting. I mean, that wouldn’t get made now.

All the jokes were really obvious because they were made a thousand times during those days. But it’s lovely to hear. It’s a period piece as much as crinolines are.

And I think what she was trying to say to me was that she got a lot of this. And you need to have an original idea. You need to think outside, like literally raising your head from the table and describing what goes on around you.

But it was super encouraging. And I’m really grateful to her. And I think that producers should never underestimate the impact of what they say.

I don’t mean they should be careful or anything. I just mean they should train themselves and think, yeah, I made someone happy with that one word of encouragement. It really is.

It’s important. It matters. Yeah.

Now you mentioned just now about the writing of the short stories. Is this for the Just 17 magazine stuff? Just 17. Yeah.

So what happened there? Oh, another bitter story. I had… Keep them coming. I can get very twisted.

I’ve been sitting there, you know, I had one of those great jobs. I was working with two guys. I was like the girl in the office.

Literally, I did everything. They paid me really well. They took me out to all the restaurants with them.

They treated me like a little sister. Because of that, I was abounding with unearned confidence. And so I sent a soap opera idea to Just 17, which was around the corner from us.

Now, to those people who aren’t as old as us, explain what Just 17 is. Just 17 was like a precursor to Heat magazine, which of course is now defunct as well. I have to explain Heat before I explain Just 17.

Just 17 was one of those sort of magazines. They had the gossip and they had fashion stuff and they had lots and lots of silly photographs of celebrities. It’s where that all started.

I was sort of pointing out what celebrities were wearing and who was going out with who. And their office was exactly what you would wish. It’s all full of girls wearing too fashion-y clothes, laughing their heads off and going out to lunch.

And I just sent it to them and it came out every week, amazingly. Can you imagine a weekly magazine? And it was kind of huge, like all the girls I knew read it. And it just seemed to me it should have… It always had a short story.

And I thought, I’ll punt it a soap opera. Right, when you said a soap opera, so it wasn’t a photo story? No. It was written in words.

It’s actual words. Actual words. And it was basically, yes, a saga that happened every week.

Yes. And you wrote it. And were the lead characters or the lead character, were they 17? They were not.

They were older. They were flat-sharing. Ah, I see now.

I thought, sod you, BBC. Someone’s got to buy this. So yeah, it was literally the house I lived in.

And she said, oh, I’m looking for a serial. Yeah, give me five of these, 200 quid a go. I couldn’t believe it.

And it was great. It was all fun and games until indeed someone did lose an eye. And it was me.

Suddenly, I got a call saying, I’m going to give it away. I’m going to give it to… And she named a guy who was on the writing staff there. And I said, oh, are you sure? She said, yeah, you know, he’s got more experience than you.

It was literally done like that. And I said… Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let me say. So hold on.

You sent an idea for an ongoing story to a magazine. You actually gave them the plot and the characters, et cetera. They went, yes.

They agreed to pay you 200 pounds or whatever to write per episode. And then they gave that story and those ideas to someone else to write. Are they allowed to do that? Well, I did four episodes and thrilled skinny with the whole thing, doing it at work with the guys cheering me on.

And then the vocal came. And it never occurred to me until you just mentioned it that perhaps I owned it. And they couldn’t do that.

But to quote my grandmother, God pays debts without money. And actually paid them with money this time, because for some reason I stayed on the payroll. And I kept getting 200 pounds per week.

And I remember mentioning this to my mum and she went ashen and she said, tell them, tell them it’s fraud. So very, very reluctantly, I told them. And I said, do I have to pay you back? And they said, no, don’t worry about it.

But did they stop paying you the 200 pounds? They did stop paying. Yeah, God damn it. So yeah, but it was a learning curve.

And also I just, I carried on giving them weekly stories, just, you know, one offs for years. You weren’t sort of cast back into the cold. No, no, no.

I’m still in the fold. And I’m giving them very, very genre-based stories where people either got together happily at the end or one of them died. There was no in between.

As it is in life, always. It’s my relationship history. Okay, then, right.

Well, let’s move on and have another offcut. What is this? This is a stage play. And this was about 2006, maybe a little earlier.

And it’s called Troubled. Exterior, street at night. Mary strolls over to take Pat’s arm, both shivering against the cold as they walk along.

Mike, a soldier, nervous with a rifle at the ready, is manning a roadblock. Mary and Pat don’t see him yet. Did you see me, Uncle Brain? Head thrown back, bellowing.

I never heard Donny boy murdered so comprehensively. Leave him alone. He’s a grand voice.

A church bell begins to toll. Beneath the dialogue, it tolls 11 o’clock. That’s 11 o’clock, Pat.

Me mother’ll go through you for a shortcut. We promised half ten. We promised.

We should have gone down Shank Hill. There’s too many riots down there these nights. This is safer.

Oh. Mary and Pat notice the roadblock, hear the crackling of the soldier’s walkie-talkie, take in the cocked rifle. Where are you going? What’s your business? We’re… I’m walking me girlfriend home.

Let’s see some ID. Why? I’m walking me girlfriend home in me hometown. Sean Pat.

She gets out her ID. Mary O’Halloran. O’ this and O’ that.

Begara. It means son of. Pat.

Your ID, mate. Come on, then you can get home and canoodle on her doorstep. He’s obviously never met me ma.

Pat sullenly hands over his ID. Mike looks at it perfunctorily and hands it back. That’s all in order.

Don’t be so touchy, Paddy. Me name’s Pat. That’s what I said.

Paddy. Run along, there’s good kids. Mary and Pat walk away.

Pat looking resentfully back. Soldier appears to whisper urgently in Mike’s ear. There’s no point cheeking them, Pat.

Even poets have tempers, Mary. They shouldn’t be here. They shouldn’t be bloody here.

Oi! Soldier grabs Pat, throws him to the floor, plants a boot in his back and points a rifle at the back of his head. Mike contains Mary without brute force, pushing her to the other side of the stage behind him. It’s important that her face is obscured from Soldier’s vision.

Are you sure? You sure it’s him? Soldier nods. Your boyfriend’s wanted, darling. Dangerous.

That’s me brother. His brother. His brother is on the run.

You’re making a mistake. My mate arrested him once before. He knows him.

Pat’s never been arrested. You’re making a mistake. Me brother.

You want me brother. Soldier moves his boot to Pat’s head. Please, honest to God, he’s not political.

He keeps out of all this. Check his ID again. Go home, love.

Soldier drags Pat to his feet. Mike pushes Mary in opposite direction, not too harshly. Tell me Ma.

Well, you tell his Ma her baby boy’s been naughty and won’t be home tonight. He’s going for a little holiday in the kesh. Pat! Soldier drags Pat off stage.

Mike exits. Mary takes off her coat and tosses it as abrupt scene change to interior disco.

So, Northern Ireland. I know your maiden name was Bernadette Gorn, which is very Irish, but you didn’t grow up in Ireland yourself, did you? I did not, no. But I tell you, it’s got very long tentacles, Ireland.

Yeah, my mother was from Dublin and my dad was from Mayo, which is on the west, like the east and the west coast. And to be honest, when I was growing up, there was a very, very specific attitude to, especially in Dublin, which was, we don’t want to hear about the north. It was like the troubled or irritating brother who was always in trouble.

And I felt terrible when I grew up that I didn’t know much about it. So I studied it. And obviously you get friends when you’re older from everywhere.

And I had very good friends from Northern Ireland. And I really felt strongly about the fact that they were all just people, and especially they were young people together and they were falling in love with each other and they were not being allowed to do it, seemed preposterous. So yeah, it was quite passionately felt, but yeah, it feels quite juvenile.

And I wasn’t juvenile when I wrote it. So I think it was, is a stab at sort of getting into much deeper waters. And it was actually, it’s David Bowie’s fault because I used to, when I first listened to Heroes, I used to imagine it as being about the Berlin Wall.

And I remember hearing about people who’s like, their loved ones were murdered. And I’ve always had a very strong feeling that the best revenge, if somebody kills somebody you love, is to get them to love you and then you kill yourself. That’s one hell of a plan.

So that’s what this girl was going to do. And it was also about the incredible sort of whimsicality of the Irish, which is just a coin’s turn away from complete bleakness. And so it was sort of a mystical and very brutal kind of treaties on how love gets really screwed up in war, which makes it so much better than it was.

But you know, it’s all an ambition, isn’t it? Every work of art is an ambition, but that was the idea. And what was your childhood like? Did you come from the cliched big Irish family, all sitting around being incredibly witty and basically the cast of Derry Girls? But you didn’t grow up in Ireland, did you? No, no. I was born in Fulham in London and my parents met in London and they brought me up there.

And I did come from the archetypal big Irish family, but our part of it was just me, my mum and my dad. So I was like the unicorn. And if you can begin to imagine how spoiled I was, you haven’t scratched the surface.

And I was spoiled by my parents, then I was spoiled by my aunties, then my grandmother got in with the spoiling. So it was great. I mean, it was very Derry Girls in that there is no privacy and everything is up for discussion.

Everything you do, say, if you walk across a room, you get 18 comments. But I only got that some of the time. Most of the time it was a very quiet house with the dog and my parents and lots of books and too much food.

And so it was nice. It was almost like I holidayed in it. But as I’ve grown older, I realised I am very Irish in that the way I think about things and the way I relate to people.

And it’s interesting to see my daughter. I married a completely English person, but I can see it cropping up unstoppably in her. And I don’t know if you feel that, Laura, that as you get older, your sort of inherent culture starts like bursting forth with the chin hairs.

And I’m just really enjoying it. So yes, it was, I feel like I had a very Irish background, but at the same time, much more sedate than your traditional thoughts of an Irish childhood. And were there any writers or creative types in there? Any great grandparents who turn out to be Brendan Behan or something like that? I don’t know how strongly I can say no.

I mean, a long line of carpenters and painters and basically genteel working class people. That’s what it was. And I mean, also a lot of poverty in the generations before me and then they got okay.

But having said that, my uncle John once got paid a shilling by Brendan Behan. He met him on the bus and Brendan Behan had just got his typewriter out of the pawn shop and he gave it to my uncle John and he said, here’s a shilling, take it to me, Ma, or I will pawn it again. So yeah, it was very, not Dublin stuff, lots of countryside stuff, but no, not one single creative person.

We’ve got a lot of musicians actually. A lot of musicians, lots of singers, but nobody’s written a word except me. So you’re the family first.

I’m the bard. Yes. Right, time for another off cut.

Tell us about this one. This one is, oh, it’s another odd one. This is a novel very close to my heart, which I wrote in about 1999, probably five years before it.

And it’s called Tiddles Gets Life. He stared. It stared back at him.

As incongruous in Pete’s damp, custard-coloured quarters as Gina Lollobrigida, the kitten leapt out of the open box, paws high. It goose-stepped here and there, suddenly fast, then still. Every soft inch of the animal quivered with curiosity, as if it might fart, question marks.

It was agog at the plastic-coated iron leg of Pete’s bed. It held out a paw to bat the roll of toilet paper, standing by the stainless-steel pedestal. It stared up at him, unafraid and seemingly fascinated by his big, soft face.

It’s not an it, Pete reprimanded himself. This thing was a girl. A lady? A child, really, only just torn from its mum.

It’s a she. A she in his cell. That was a first.

Who are you? he asked, softly, afraid his voice might knock her off her fat, beferred feet. Your Tiddles, he answered for her, the name coming so naturally to his lips that it was surely preordained. My Tiddles, he said, quieter still, in case the morbid plasterwork should soak up this new tone of voice and broadcast it to the wing.

How in the name of God was he supposed to pick her up? Tiddles was so small, and Pete’s hands were so big. He flexed his fingers, long, elegant enough in design. They were stained by too many cigarettes and unhappy wanks beneath cheap bedclothes.

L-O-V-E, said his right hand, in dirty blue. H-A-T-E, more convincingly, suggested the left. Paid a pound a day just to be Pete Kennedy, he made no decisions, had no responsibility.

His meals were prepared for him, his clothing washed, ironed badly and returned. There was no manual strapped to the kitten, nobody looking over Pete’s shoulder. He needed a diagram.

His own instincts had led him to this place, after all, and couldn’t be relied upon. Rubbing his nose hard as if he wanted to rub it off, Pete counselled himself to be calm. This morning felt important, it glittered.

The kitten’s debut was sharp and certain in a life defined by its lack of everything, deadlines, change, urgency. The only other distinct moments were conflicts. This moment was fluffy and strange and funny.

That took a minute to sink in. Tiddles was comical. She had funny bones under her tabby stripes.

Pete’s nana had used that expression about some god-awful comic on the screeching 1970s television she’d sat as close to as if they were lovers. Across a chasm of 30 years, Pete understood what she meant. Some people can make you laugh just by doing ordinary things.

Tiddles was one of those people. This was a very interesting piece and certainly your description of what happens in the story again takes a turn that nobody listening to that bit would have any idea of. So, tell us what happens to Tiddles and friend.

Well, yeah, the genesis was I read a long form, really fascinating article about lifers in American jails having a terrible trouble with violence because the stakes were very low for them. They were going to be in prison forever so they may as well act up. So they wanted a way to get them engaged with life so that they could live more calmly.

They introduced the thing that if you were good for long enough, good in inverted commas, whatever that means in prison, you were given a kitten. I know, not very fair on the kitten. But it turned into like a cat lover’s circle.

They became obsessed and in love with their kittens as they grew into cats. The cats were cosseted, they were kept clean, they were fed. And of course, the prisoners knew that if they got into fights or if they disobeyed authority, that the cats would be taken away.

So it had a massive impact on their behaviour, but also, and this was something that really fascinated me, on their feeling, they felt happier and they felt love, like genuine, clean, ordinary love for some other little thing that they were responsible for. And it really moved me because I think men in general, I mean, we’re changing things now the way we talk openly about it, but men in general have always been very in two minds about being frank about their needs emotionally or even having needs that are emotional. So I thought it was lovely that these men who had lived in a really grim and smelly, violent and transactional place suddenly had a fluffy kitten with big eyes looking at them for everything.

So that fascinated me. So I thought, yeah, we’ll start there. And it just grew.

Tiddles is given to this guy who’s imprisoned for life at the horrific murder of an elderly lady. He robbed from her, but he was really violent with it. And he can’t face it.

He can’t talk about what he actually did to her. And he kind of blames her for getting on his nerves, as it were. She was a neighbour.

And as he softens up with Tiddles, he becomes able to talk to his therapists in prison about it. He becomes absolutely besotted with Tiddles. And then we start hearing Tiddles in a voice.

And Tiddles in a voice is that of the old lady he killed. Because as always happens, don’t you hate it when this happens, Laura, the murder victim has been reincarnated as a kitten. Again! I know, that old chauvinist.

And she is being, of course, cared for by Pete, who is finding new dimensions to his soul and falling in love. And she hates Pete. And by the end, she engineers a riot and the prison burns down.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Back, back up. She’s a kitten.

Well, presumably even as a fully formed cat, she’s going to have some limitations as to how she could do something like she creates an entire riot. She does. Tiddles, without even an opposable thumb, manages to get the entire prison rioting.

Basically, she fakes being injured in his enemy’s cell. And Pete thinks that this guy has hurt Tiddles. And, of course, it looks like he has.

And so there’s great enmity between them even more than before. And Pete tries to control himself and he can’t. And Tiddles does it again.

And basically, Tiddles, of course, is sinuous and sinewy and can go all through the prison. And she manages, I can’t quite remember, I know it all fell together very well, Laura, very, very, very believable. But yeah, the whole thing burns down.

And, you know, Pete’s on the roof looking for Tiddles and Tiddles is sauntering off down an alleyway as the whole area is lit by the flames of Pete’s demise. So, yeah, she gets her own back on him quite spectacularly and fair play to her, I think. Yes, that’s an unusual turn up.

Well, that’s what my agent said. And I was always saying to her, I’m still working on Tiddles and she would be very, well, don’t neglect your other stuff. And she didn’t show it to anyone.

She didn’t show it to a single person. So that is in a drawer waiting for its time. Well, who knows? Maybe some publishers listening to this podcast go, do you know what we need? Our company needs a book like Tiddles Gets Life.

We need a reincarnated cat burning down a prison. That’s what’s going to get Netflix on its feet. Yeah.

But yeah. But then after that, you published your first actual book. Yeah, actual book, which was called The Reluctant Landlady.

And did that have any reincarnated cats or prison riots in there? No, not a one. No, shelled. Right.

But that was a romantic novel. Yeah, it was chiclet and we were still allowed to say chiclet then. And it was the next big thing.

And it was touted everywhere and highly exaggerated versions of how many copies it had sold were sent out. And it did really well. And I had an amazing editor.

She’s called Philippa Pride. And she was also Stephen King’s editor, which gives you, I know, which gives you an idea of the power she had. But then Philippa got rid of everyone except Stephen.

She had sort of changes in her career. And I was then handed over. And, you know, when there’s a changing of the guard, it’s not so good to be inherited.

It’s much better when somebody finds you. So things got it. I’m not complaining.

I have consistently published books ever since. But I wasn’t like the next big thing. Suddenly, I was, oh, and I also have to look after you, which did change things.

So yeah, it was, you know, if it hadn’t been so exciting at the beginning, I think it would have been a lot better for me. But as it was, I felt like, I don’t know, I felt like Noel Coward when he was a child star, and he was billed as destiny’s tot. And suddenly, I wasn’t anyone’s tot.

And so it was, yeah, it was, it was, it was quite humbling. And in retrospect, really useful, a really good life lesson. Because 28 novels later.

Well, yeah, I’m still going. I’m still doing the thing. But yeah, it’s, but the sheer amount of pen names will tell you that, you know, publishers constantly look for a debut, they constantly look for freshness.

They keep pretending I’m fresh. And rattled though I am, I go along with it. And yes, don’t quite got there.

But they’ll get published, they’ll get read. So I’m certainly When you say got there, you mean what top of the Sunday Times bestseller list? Exactly, or on it even. But yeah, I mean, I have readers, and I have a career, but I don’t have any name recognition.

How could you with the umpteen names, but even so, and you know, I’d like that. But more than anything else, I like being able to keep myself and to have something to do every day. So I’m plugging away, Laura.

Yeah, well, I’m trying not to feel sorry for you. I mean, 28 books. Are you sold in airport bookshops? Some of them are.

Yeah, the most recent three are the Archer’s ones. Well, there you go. I’m sorry, my sympathies just got out the window.

So you’re obviously doing extremely well. I’ll put away my tiny violin. Yes.

Right, well, we’ve come to your final offcut now. Can you tell us about this one, please? This is a TV screenplay, and it’s called Turpin, and it was written around 2019. Interior, Dick’s house, kitchen, day.

Martha is busy making a list, counting jars on a shelf, pondering, scribbling. Jane is shelling peas at the large scrubbed table. It is sunny and pleasant.

The kitchen lass can do that, Miss Jane. Don’t dirty your white fingers. It’s calming, Martha.

You used to sit me on the barrel over there and tell me I wasn’t allowed to talk until I was done. That was then, and this is now. The lady of the manor won’t shell peas.

Then I must make the most of my freedom before I’m expected to press flowers or read poetry or embroider my own straitjacket. Honey. We’re nearly out of honey.

Dick enters, scowling. Ah, thwit. Down the head, fool.

And good morning to you. Dick slams down the tiara on the table. Martha and Jane gape.

Is that… Martha involuntarily looks about her. It is, madam. Booty from last night’s jape.

What are you doing with it, sir? What do you think, woman? I stole it last night. Dragged it off that ugly aristocrat myself. Father! Lord Jane, were you out the day they delivered irony? This was left with poor widow Fleetwood by our kindly highwayman.

Surely that’s a good deed, father. The poor woman could buy herself a home with the proceeds of such a bauble. She wouldn’t need a home.

She’d have a nice, cosy coffin. If any of Prothero’s men caught an old widow woman with such a trinket, they’d march her to the gallows. Surely not.

This is England. Aye, England. Where the poor have no voice.

Where they hang old women. Dick feels his neck, suppresses a shudder. Young fool riding around our woods nearly got an innocent killed.

Dick bangs the table. And you, sir, I wouldn’t care to be in your shoes if Prothero had picked you up with that in your pocket. He can’t hurt you, father.

Dick and Martha exchange a look. You’re a man of substance and you have nothing to hide. You could have explained that you simply… Simply? Nothing simple with the likes of Prothero.

He’s been looking for a chance to jump on me and this… He puts the tiara on his head. Would hand it to him on a plate. Your head’s empty, Jane.

Life’s not all singing and shedding peas. Dick sweeps the peas off the table. Jane jumps up, shocked, and runs out the door.

Jane! I didn’t… We watch Jane race across the yard and jump the gate into a field. You never did let those skirts get in your way, girl. I handled that magnificently, eh, Martha? I can hear you thinking it.

Tack that off. It don’t suit you. Dick has forgotten the tiara.

He takes it off. Where does she go, Martha? When she runs off for hours on end like a tinker child. Where does she go? Right.

A TV series about, well, Dick Turpin. And in this case, the daughter of Dick Turpin. Tell us about that.

Yes. Dick has reformed and thinks no one knows he used to be a… A highwayman. And his daughter certainly doesn’t know it.

But he doesn’t know that she’s a highwaywoman. What? Well, yes, I know. Excuse me.

Get out of here. When she runs off like a tinker child, that’s what she’s doing. And she’s about to be married off to a local bigwig, who is a perfectly nice young man.

But she doesn’t want to marry him. She wants to have a wild, crazy life. So, yeah, it was about the pair of them circling each other, father and daughter circling each other, starting to think, hang on, this is a family business.

What’s going on? But Dick being very conservative because he knows this could mean death, all their houses stolen from them and everyone in prison and hanged. And she’s, of course, much more giddy and thinks they can get away with it forever. So, yeah, it’s very Saturday evening.

It’s that early Saturday evening romp where they always seem to have huge budgets, always lots of horses in them. And also a real throwback to a film I was obsessed with as a child called The Wicked Lady. Ah, yes.

Margaret Watson Fonteyn, isn’t it? No, Margaret something. Oh, we’re going to have to look this up now, Laura. Margaret something, the mum at the beauty spot.

Go on, look it up. It’s called The Wicked Lady. It’s called The Wicked Lady.

It’s Margaret Douda. Rutherford, no, not Rutherford. No, that’d be different, Margaret.

Margaret Lockwood, of course. Margaret Lockwood and that wonderful actor with the plummy voice in it as well. Hold on, we haven’t got his name yet.

James. No, that’s Michael Winner’s version. Did you know there was a Michael Winner version? 1983.

Not Mel Ferret, hold on. Oh, James Mason, of course. James Mason.

James Mason. And he was her lover and I just loved it. It was all sort of rushing out of rooms and cracking whips and a hat on the side with a feather in it.

And I just thought it’d be brilliant. If I was an actress, I’d love to be playing that role. So yes, again, it was kind of comedy.

It would have been a series serial. I mean, you know, the end of the series would always be Dick or Jane escaping from the gallows. And it was just fun to write.

And it did get sent to people, but it never got any interest at all. I think there were probably half a dozen other similar things circling. It’s now I know that it’s kind of a perennial thing to open.

Oh, is it? Yeah, there’s a lot of it. I mean, there’s two Harryman things on at the moment. There was that Noel Fielding one that was cancelled and that really lovely one.

Renegade Nell. Renegade Nell as well, which was lovely. So yeah, I don’t think I was the right person to write it, but it was fun.

And I’m very, very proud of the line, booty from last night’s Jape. And to hear it said so, so actorishly is a delight. But that’s the thing, like all that language.

And do you know who else is in there? Lorna Doon. We did Lorna Doon when I was about nine. And that being out in the wind, being a girl and having to struggle with all your 50 petticoats, but still jumping on the horse and getting away.

I just love all that. Right. But you’re working on another TV project at the moment based on The Archers.

Yes. Got three books set in Radio 4 hit soap opera, The Archer’s Village of Ambridge, taking place before The Archers started. Now that is an excellent idea because The Archers has a huge audience in this country anyway, very popular.

I mean, it feels like the prequel options are endless. Well, that’s what I think. We’re trying to get it away.

It just so happens that my agent also is the agent of the editor of The Archers. And she kind of got us both in a room and said, this could be great, couldn’t it? So we did it with the Biebs blessing. And I had the staff on Speed Dial to talk about what kind of tractor would they have had before the war? Bovine diseases.

I actually have a folder of bovine diseases. And of course, keeping the kind of lineage, the pedigree of the families straight because people take it as they should incredibly seriously. It’s a delightful world to dip your toe in.

I can’t tell you how safe and lovely it is in the world of The Archers, but not in a kind of silly way, just in a kind of really nice people doing important jobs. Well, it’s very what the BBC does best. But yeah, I mean, I’d watch it.

But yeah, we’re talking to people and there’s lots of meetings that should have been emails. But yeah, I hope one day to see that, but it’s not like it’s not coming to a screen near you anytime soon. It just seems like a really good idea.

It does. It seems like an excellent idea. You’ve already got three books out of it, have you? Yeah.

And presumably there are endless others. You just have to keep going. And yes, but before that, the Archers in the Stone Age, I mean, yeah, we can just keep going back.

And it is, of course, the war is just like prime archers going to time, isn’t it? Yes. You know, all that kind of gritting your teeth and getting on with it and, you know, putting up with rationing. And I had a ball writing those books.

I presume you have many more plans coming out, surely? Don’t stop. No, they haven’t asked for any more. And do you need their permission to do that? Yes and no.

The problem is the plan was always that the end of the last book in the trilogy would be the day of the first episode of the radio serial. So we’re getting a crossing of universes and a crossing of ley lines. So I can’t get my archers to do what I want them to do.

But what about, you know, like the Star Wars, did it for God’s sake? Yeah, that’s true. Surely prequels of prequels. I mean, also the American TV series Yellowstone has about four spinoff series already.

Pre that and then pre that and pre that. I mean, the question, I suppose, is whether you’d be allowed to, do you need to apply to them for the IP and all that? Absolutely. Yeah, you do.

You do. And you have to share the profits with them. So yeah, you do.

You know, I can parley this into a pension if I keep yakking. But yeah, I mean, that is the idea, to kind of flesh it out and make it, you know, really nice sort of period thing. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I can’t do it on my own, Laura.

You mean for the TV series? Exactly. So we’ll work on that. But yeah, it was a joy and is a continuing joy to write about the archers, I have to say.

Excellent. Well, we have come to the end of the show. How was it for you, Bernie? It was lovely.

It was really lovely. I enjoyed the podcast anyway. And it’s surreal to be on this end of it, I have to say.

And yeah, thank you for being so gentle with me, Laura. I’m not quite sure what you thought I should be doing. I’m generally, I’m a very vanilla presenter.

I don’t do anything to anybody. So you’re always going to be safe. But having heard your offcuts, do you think any of these offcuts are worth going back to and having another stand back? Or do we think that their time has passed? I think if I’m honest, I think their whole time has passed.

But hearing Tiddles, I want to write about the cat who burns the prison down. I’m going to forcefully… And not as a children’s book, which the implication is the cat that burned down the prison. Exactly.

The lifeless cat that burned… No, I just, I want to get back into Tiddles. I love Tiddles. So yeah, I think they’re all backdated.

I think they’re all in my rearview mirror now. I really do think they are. And I think that’s great.

It’s nice to have a very crowded rearview mirror. But yeah, it is reminding me actually, just how… I remember someone saying to Ronnie Barker once when I was a kid watching him on, I think it was on Parkinson, said, do you ever worry that you won’t be able to make any more jokes that you’ve used up all your jokes? And he said, no, it’s like writing music. There’s only a certain amount of notes, but there’s no end to the amount of music you can write.

And I think the same is true of kind of literary endeavours. It’s just like a self-generating machine inside you. It’s an engine.

And it’s kind of nice to be reminded that your engine works. So thank you for that, Laura. It was absolutely our pleasure.

Well, it’s been great fun to talk to you today, Bernie, Juliet, Claire, MB, Alice, Catherine and Bernadette. Best of luck in your new home. And thank you for sharing the contents of your offcut straw with us.

Thank you, Laura. The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Bernadette Strachan. The offcuts were performed by Shash Hira, Noni Lewis, Beth Chalmers, Marcus Hutton and Emma Clarke.

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.

Piers: I was like many people at the time, turning way too much time on Facebook. It was the beginning of the great sort of distractor crisis. But I posted these little things on Facebook and people, I think they were just like, oh God. Piers is obviously having a nervous breakdown. I’ll post some nice comments and maybe he’ll step off the ledge. So I kept on posting them and gradually the comments got less and less. They were like, yeah, we didn’t need to carry on. And a loose narrative kind of formed and I just enjoyed doing them, but they’re completely mad. I dunno what was going through my head.

Laura: Hello, I’m Laura Shavin and this is the Offcut Drawer that 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.

Today’s guest is Piers Torday. After working as a producer and writer in theater and television, he turned to children’s fiction. His debut, the Last Wild, published in 2013 was shortlisted for the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He followed it with the dark wild winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Wild Beyond, and the Prequel the Wild before he also published

There may be a Castle and more recently launched a fantasy geology with midnight treasure being named Children’s Book of the Year by New Statesman among Others, and the Sequel Wolf Crown Due late 2025. Earlier this year, he released letters to a dog, a title published with dyslexia, friendly accessibility in mind.

In 2016, piers completed the death of an owl finishing his late father’s final unfinished novel on stage. He adapted the box of delights for a premier at Wilton’s Music Hall in 2017 with further revivals up through 2023 at the Royal Shakespeare Company. His theater credits also include a Christmas Carol, the Wind in the Willows, a child in the Snow and Plum, a Homage to Happiness, staged earlier this year.

Pi Tour Day. Welcome to the Offcut Straw.

Piers: Thank you very much for having me. I’m excited and nervous and equal measure. Excellent.

Laura: Right. Um, well you’ve written for both stage and page. How does your creative process differ between the two? Do you, do you start with the format in mind or do you have the idea first and then decide what format it best suits?

Piers: Well, I’ve been incredibly lucky in the sense that everything I’ve done for stage has more or less been someone else’s idea. At least initially in the sense I was approached to adapt John Mayfield’s box of Delights by Wilton’s musical. And it very different to writing a book of your own. You’re beginning with someone else’s, uh, story.

Mm. And I’ve, after that, I then suggested books I’d like to adapt. And we’ve, we’ve done them, but it’s so different because you not only have someone else’s story. But you are collaborating with other people from, from the start. And everything I’ve done has begun conversations with the director who’s also read and loved the book, and a producer and a designer, all of who’ve got, uh, sort of ideas and visions and things they want to bring to it.

And. I’ve loved doing them because when you’re writing a novel, you are a total opposite. You’re a complete control freak. Uh, but the, the flip side to that is you get everything you want, but you have to do everything yourself. So you are director, script writer, designer, actor, lighting designer. And it’s lovely, but quite intense.

Laura: Yes.

Piers: And so I’ve, in the last few years, I’ve doing more. Just put work at the moment, but I’ve, I’ve enjoyed that switch between intensely solitary in your head, creativity and then the sort of freedom of collaboration where your job is literally with a, you know, you are telling the story and you’re putting the word, the dialogue down on the page, but so much else is.

Up to other people.

Laura: Right. And you’re not tempted to translate one of your books into a stage production? Is that double the work?

Piers: No, it’s really interesting. L Little Angel Theater did a book of mine called Thou, maybe a Castle. They did it as a musical with puppets, which was joyful. Oh. And I really trusted the people doing it, and it was.

Lovely. And now the National Theater and the Unicorn Theater are doing the, my first book, the Last Wild. And again, a lot of people assume that I’m going to be, uh, uh, adapting. It’s not, it’s being adapted by a wonderful writer called Jude Christian. And the, honestly, the feeling is relief. ’cause I took me four years to write Last Wild, and I angsted and.

Agonized over every word of that book, and I’m really proud of it. But I’ve absolutely stated my need to tell that story. Ah, and I’m now really excited by hopefully someone else, another team of people gonna tell in a different way. And so far I’m loving what they’re doing and I’m sure it’ll be great.

And I’m sure there’ll be things about it that I, choices I wouldn’t have made. But I think you have to sort of. You have to sort of accept that and when you hand something over for ad adaptation. So yeah, I like adapting other people’s stuff. I think adapting on my own is just too inside your head.

Laura: Yeah, too intense.

Yeah. Makes sense. Mm-hmm. Okay, then well let’s kick off with your first off cut. Can you tell us please, what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Piers: So, uh, this is from Dead Animals and this is a sick pom pilot. I wrote in 2005,

Actor 1: scene one, exterior Country Church, yard Day, Dartmore rain, a small family funeral.

Actor 2: We have entrusted our brother Harry Thick, and our sister, his wife, Margaret, to God’s mercy, and we now commit their bodies to the ground.

Actor 1: We focus in on Paul and hear his voice over the following scenes. As I watched my parents’ bodies finally going into the ground, I asked myself the question, how did I get here again?

Cut to scene two. Interior classroom day. Close up on Paul reading aloud, there is a book poster behind his head and piles of novels in front of him. I was a writer living

Actor 3: in London. He had never made love in an intensive care unit before it felt wrong and good fucking Bridget in there next to some dying people.

As they both climaxed noisily together. He heard the alarm on a nearby heart monitor Sound. Beep. How ironic he whispered in her ear. Um, that’s, uh, that’s about as far as I’ve got. But you, but you get the idea.

Actor 1: Pull back to reveal that he is in fact reading to a creative writing class of old ladies.

Actor 4: Okay, thanks Paul.

That just about wraps up our brief encounter session everybody next week. I’d like your interpretation of my strangest Christmas ever

Actor 1: cut to scene three, exterior bus stop later. I was from the country, but I hadn’t been home for 10 years. I just loved London. Paul with several large supermarket shopping bags, tries to get on a packed bus, but some kids barge past him outta white gimp.

They push him over to get on and he falls into a puddle. They jeer as the bus recedes. Cut to scene four. Interior vegetarian cafe bar. Later establishing shot the wet lettuce cafe I

Actor 3: had arising and active love life.

Actor 1: Paul struggles into the cafe with shopping bags. A stunning blonde by the bar smiles and then moves past to greet someone else.

She reveals Paul’s blind date ugly in bifocals and a cable knit jersey. Reading how to Talk Yourself Thin. Paul fleas. Cut to scene five, interior apartment block stairway night. I had a room of my own. You could say I had everything I’d ever wanted. Paul struggles up to his door with his shopping as he tries to get his key out.

A fat neighbor comes barreling past,

Actor 3: excuse me.

Actor 1: He sends Paul shopping, tumbling down the stairs, and then tragedy struck. Cut to scene six, interior barn night. My parents both suddenly died in a freak farming accident. Harry and Margaret sick are bending over a bailing machine, poking about, are

Actor(s): you sure this is safe?

Harry, of course is, as long as nobody comes and

Actor 2: suddenly

Actor(s): turns

Actor 2: it

Actor(s): on, you mean I shouldn’t press this switch?

Actor 2: Exactly.

Actor(s): Oh, silly me. I didn’t mean to do that.

Actor 2: Didn’t mean to do what?

Actor 1: There’s a horrific mangling noise. Blackout.

Laura: So did you write the whole thing? Was this a, a whole script or just like a few scenes?

Piers: I, I did, I think write a whole pilot. I mean, yeah, roughly about 30 odd pages, but that was as far as it got. I, I had a look when I was looking in my offcut draw and I think there were maybe some different versions or other episodes, but this was the kind of only fully completed. Episode. Right.

Laura: What was gonna be the premise of this sitcom?

’cause I mean, the title Dead Animals is quite intriguing for a sitcom, but, uh, from those scenes we just heard, I, I don’t think I would be able to understand why it was called that. What, what was No, I’m

Piers: not sure I can remember, understand why it was called Dead Animals. I think it was, I was trying to do that thing of, as you should do when you start writing, is trying to write about what you know and.

I had been working for a TV company a few years previously, and, um, we’d been talking about some various ideas for sort of family. Family television involving animals in the kind of doctor who slot. But it became clear that wasn’t gonna happen and I certainly wouldn’t be the person to write it. But one of my colleagues said, well, look, if you want to write something, you should start.

Don’t try and write something real expensive that no one’s gonna make. Why don’t you try writing something that’s based on your own experience? And I, I did grow up on farms and I did move to London and I was trying to be a writer. I wasn’t, obviously not called Paul. And this. Sitcom was an attempt to sort of, not at all really be truthfully about my family, but take lots of some of the funnier, more extreme anecdotes of my childhood and country life and try and turn it into a sitcom about the difference between.

Country life and the idea of someone with artistic pretensions coming from a very agricultural background and the jumping off point for dead animals, which is alluded to in the script, was the foot and mouth. Virus in 2001, whenever it was. Um, because that was a time when actually the countryside felt pretty dark because certainly in the farm I grew up on, there were sort of Paso animals being burnt, and the army were called in and there was, you know, the first lockdown way before COVID, it was the first lockdown.

So that was the kind of, that was going to be the backdrop,

(music): right,

Piers: uh, to this. To the sitcom ideal subject for sitcom, but in my pandemic, what fun, I can’t imagine why this wasn’t made, but, um, but it was, it was an attempt to try and, and some of that I, I, I, I wince at hearing, but it was an attempt to, to try and sort of at least go back to my own life and experience, which I do think is always a good place.

To begin, even if some of this execution leaves a bit to be desired.

Laura: But in the note that accompanied this, it said that this script inspired the last Wild, which was the first of your wild series of children’s books. That that’s quite a leap. How did, how exactly did that happen?

Piers: It is, it is certainly quite a leap from someone reading out that story that begin withing Jill’s books, but, and do you mind me thinking what on earth.

But in a way, that’s why I chose this, because I think it is so weird and unpredictable how the creative process works. And when I wrote this, I was working for Tiger Aspect TV back then, a TV production company. Did a lot of comedy and stuff and I was. My, my day job was to come up with entertainment formats, so sort of game shows and entertainment shows, but I was, uh, enjoyed it, but I was feeling a bit creatively frustrated, and so I was working on this in the evenings and the weekends, and when I’d written this draft episode, I sent it to a former colleague to say, look, will you, what do you, what do you think of this?

You’re someone who’d worked in sitcoms and stuff and knew about it. And he said, um, well, he said it’s perhaps not quite ready to go, but, uh, one of the things he said was in terms of the farm scenes and that it gets to, and there’s a treatment that takes onto the farm, he was wondering if the animals could talk so the animals could have a voice in this as well.

And I think he was imagining something in along the lines of desperate housewives, you know, where. You hear the, the dead former housewife kind of narrates that series.

Laura: Oh, right.

Piers: Yes. He was imagining could one of these dead animals, a cow or something, actually be a very sardonic narrator for this stick com.

Oh, see? And I was like, see, I

Laura: thought he was picturing animals like in a field talking to each other.

Piers: No, he was thinking much more like a grownup kind of sardonic, a voiceover. Voiceover and I thought it was quite fun, but I didn’t really know how to make it work, but it really got me thinking about talking animals.

And I then had a break from, uh, I, I finished my job at Tri Aspect and I had a, a summer off for the first time since leaving university. Really? And I just felt like a creative kind of recharge. And almost on a whim really, I booked myself onto this creative writing course, an Arvin course in Ted Hughes’s old house in West Yorkshire.

A beautiful place. And they wanted you ideally to bring something and it was, it was general how to start writing fiction. And I was like, oh God, what am I gonna do? I’ve got time. So. And I thought, well, the only thing I’ve got knocking around is this sitcom dead animals. But obviously that’s not right ’cause it’s fiction.

And so I just started writing this thing, thinking about talking animals and something very different to my surprise came out, which was this kind of dystopian children’s book with a young boy in a world without animals who discovers he can talk to the few who’ve survived and became a very different story.

But funnily enough. It’s still in a way about my childhood growing up in a remote can with loads of wildlife and there’s lots of farming scenes in it. There’s a character in the sitcom called Kester who’s a Lord of the Rings obsessive, uh, who becomes ke last wild, who’s not a Lord of the Rings set of the world, but a Lord of the Rings doesn’t exist.

But it’s just curious to me how these things very different, very grown up. Sort of sitcom. Yeah. Becomes this kind of children’s book. But I guess that’s how ideas twist and shape in the mind.

Laura: Yeah, that is very interesting. ’cause no one could have predicted that pathway at all. And nobody directed you.

Nobody said what you should do really is right. A kid’s book or what you should do is make it dystopian. It came completely from you. There was no influence apart from your friend who said maybe have a talking animal in it.

Piers: Yeah. I mean the only, because this was in 2008 that I ended up doing the. Course and the starting the book, and I’d been trying to work on the sitcom, hadn’t been getting very far and was getting a bit frustrated, and the same friend said, well, look, if you can’t get it made as a teller, you could always try writing as a novel.

And again, I just. That sitcom you heard there was no, I tried turning that into a book for about 10 seconds and that was never gonna work. Um, and, but I think part of it is, I think part of the trick with writing is not wanting it too much. And I’d grown up really loving sitcoms. I mean, I dunno, it’s who watches sitcoms now, but I’d, I do really love them.

Uh, I do, I do. But I mean, it, it feel, it was very much a form of the. Definitely of the nineties and the early naughties. It was a really exciting form and so many great writers and I kinda really wanted to do it. And I think I wanted it too much. I didn’t really want to write children’s books. I kind of like, I loved children’s books as a child and obviously some very big children’s books came out at the start of this century.

Uh, and that was, that intrigued me and I read them, but it wasn’t such a sort of deeply held ambition in a way that freed me up just to try and. Understand it and get good at it without writing and constantly second guessing myself and trying too hard to be funny or clever.

Laura: Okay. Time for another off cut.

Now, tell us about this one.

Piers: So this is many questions, which is a treatment, actually I think for a radio format that I wrote in 2003.

Actor 4: Many questions.

Piers: Local problems solved

Actor 1: by famous people.

Actor 4: Monday, 6:30 PM and Sunday, 12:00 PM 30 minutes.

Actor 1: A question and answer show where local communities have their real life dramas solved and advised upon by a panel of celebrities.

We’ll come to your town and advise you on how to get your neighbors to turn down that stereo or what to do if you think your daughter’s staying out too late with the wrong sort. Our panel of comedians, writers, lifestyle commentators and personalities will soon have you seeing the funny side of your domestic problem, whether it be them next door or her upstairs.

Actor 4: The increasing amount of advice columns in the papers, the burgeoning number of message boards on the internet where people exchange tips on anything from DIY to social etiquette, not to mention the ever expanding lifestyle industry shows us however, ever more prepared we are to get the best advice for any problem.

If there’s a dilemma, you can guarantee someone somewhere will have the answer. We don’t claim to have that, but we’ll give you at least four to choose from,

Actor 1: whether it be community based,

Actor 4: who should get the use of the village green on Sundays, the cricket team or the local kids, domestic. What would the panel do if they won the lottery?

I recently won a hundred thousand pounds and don’t know what to do.

Actor 1: Or just one of life’s mysteries.

Actor 4: Where do the socks go? In tumble dryers.

Actor 1: We’ll do our best to help.

Actor 4: Chaired by Mark Radcliffe. Our panel of advisors are here to help if they can, but they’re more likely to make you smile. The panel will typically be made up of a range of personalities,

Actor 1: a lifestyle guru, Trini or Susanna from BBC Two’s, what not to wear, or Mary Killen, the spectator’s social agony aunt or guardian, colonist Mill Millington.

They’ll always carry a profoundly different spin depending on the philosophy and the most likely to offer some genuinely good advice,

Actor 4: a political figure. Perhaps the Bumptious comedy of Boris Johnson or the more seic wit of Tony Banks. Or we might have a political commentator such as Matthew Paris or Polly Toby, and attempt to see the personal in context of the bigger national picture,

Actor 1: a local character.

We’ll find someone from your hometown who’s known outside it and see if they still have the local touch. Did Michael winner go to the local school or did Julie Birch Hill once live around the corner? Either way, this third panelist will be someone local. But whose strong opinions may no longer be welcome?

Actor 4: A comic, a comedian of the more whimsical, kind, perhaps Ross Noble or Daniel Kitson to take a less than prosaic approach to life’s problems.

Actor 1: It’s a bit like home Truths Live, but without the Schmalz, our opinionated, diverse panel will take your queries and problems seriously. But the range of their answers combined with the disputes they’re bound to have with each other over the best solution is guaranteed entertainment.

Actor 4: A traditional and simple radio format given a modern twist.

Piers: Okay. Can’t imagine why that was a odd.

Laura: Well, I mean, it’s, it’s not a terrible idea. It just does sound like quite a lot of things. Uh, particularly radio things,

Piers: other things. Yeah. It sort of sounds, I think that program exists. I think it’s called Question Time, and it’s not so funny.

I mean, it does, it does

Laura: feel very familiar. So it doesn’t feel like a terrible idea, just too similar to stuff that was probably already around at the time, I imagine.

Piers: Mm-hmm. I, I, I chose this because I can’t, I can’t remember exactly who, where this was, so obviously a radio format, so I was, uh, I guess pitching for Radio four, but.

Until I started writing books. This was kind of my bread and butter and, uh, there’s many, many worse ideas I came up with in this one, believe it or not.

Laura: Oh, really? Such as, but I didn’t wanna share

Piers: them ’cause they’re probably owned by, technically owned by huge media giants. Well, so you sold them then. Well, I was paid to come up with them.

So they still technically in them, not that they’re worth anything, but they’re often of this kind of ilk and you know, it’s not great. It is derivative, but actually, you know, writing one of these a day or you know, a few a week, it’s sort of, again, going back to that weird thing about creative process, it was.

Bizarrely. I know it doesn’t sound like it, but it was such good training to, to become a writer because you get given this idea or come up this idea with someone else, I can’t remember the genesis of this one. And you sit down and write it and you just had to do it. And sometimes they, you know, we did actually come up with some really good ideas that got made into programs, but most of the time you came with ideas as all ideas are really, that are sort of not quite, as you say, they’re a bit derivatives, a bit similar to everything else.

Mm. But you don’t really know that until you’ve written it up. And just that sort of discipline of writing up stuff, uh, nonsense and gradually weird as it may sound, learning how to tell a story, like learning how to present an idea. Mm. And tell a story. This was very early and not in any way, particularly anything to be and, and particularly remarkable about it.

And, but it was through writing stuff like this that I sort of found my way to writing. Fiction or does it maybe the

Laura: discipline prepared you and the pressure. Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, I have to say that the thing I did enjoy most, as I’m sure, uh, probably the listener will, uh, the elements of historical interest, the many questions suggested guests, Boris Johnson and his Bumptious comedy,

Piers: no, God, I really hate my former self.

Laura: That was

Piers: Oh, that, that’s one for the archives. Definitely don’t blame me, but I mean, reality, you know. The idea of a panel of that included Michael, winner and Poly Toby. I mean, it’s just, and Ross Noble, it’s just not gonna happen. I mean, and also I love the fact I suggested Ross Noble, Daniel Kitson, who are famously iconoclastic and really quite reluctant to do stuff that’s not, yes, Daniel kids would

Laura: never.

Go on this show like this, this never

Piers: in a million years, never wouldn’t touch it with a barge

Laura: pole. And Ross no Will. Well, if you put him on, he would probably, who knows what show would be the result of it. Yeah, yeah. Quite, quite. But, uh, Trinny and Susanna. Wow. Oh, I to love that show. I can’t remember who

Piers: Tony Banks is either.

Laura: Oh, he was the, he I know who I’ve met him. Oh, he’s off the close show. Was your coach? No, no, no. Tony Banks was the mp. He was an MP for, I think he was the culture secretary at Point. Oh, that’s it. Yeah. Cultural sport. He was very charming. Sort of smiley eyed, kind of. Uh, no. He died about 20 years ago. But no, he was a very fairy char.

I remember being overwhelmed by his charm in real life. I had no idea who he was at the time. But you know, some people have larger than life kind of charisma. Yeah, he was one of them. So I’ve never forgotten Tony Banks. No. He died about 15, 20 years ago.

Piers: Killing, killing people off through, uh, putting them in formats while they may.

Laura: Yes. There’s not many of them that are alive or certainly their careers aren’t so alive. But anyway, that’s not, that’s not

Piers: for us to say. And, and I think it’s an interesting, I mean, it’s not a great idea, but it’s also one of those funny things where actually you’ve probably added one more ingredient that was original.

It might be. It’s just that it, it’s, there’s not enough to it.

Laura: Yeah. Okay. Moving on now let’s have your next off cut.

Piers: Um, this is a one page treatment for a romantic comedy novel. I started writing in 2007, called the year everyone else Got Married.

Actor 1: Hi, I’m Josh, and this is my story.

Actor 4: Excuse me. I think you’ll find it’s mine as well.

I’m Myra, by the way, and he never introduces me properly. Another one of the many things which

Actor 1: brought us closer together over the last year and what a year it’s been. Josh Haynes is now friends with Myra Duke. They hooked up at New Year and it was fucking freezing. You see, this was the year everyone else decided to get married.

Everyone else I know. Anyway, I didn’t even know half of them. That’s because we just met, and not everyone literally, but I think 12 weddings in one year is about as close as you’re ever going to get. That’s right. 12. One wedding a month.

Actor 4: Every month for a whole year. That is two stag dues, 10 weddings. One of them is mothers, one of them gay, and one of them literally at the bad end of a shotgun, an engagement party, and a divorce celebration, whatever that is.

Actor 2: Status update. Josh Haynes is deciding that he really hates weddings, especially other peoples in foreign countries. Status update. Myra Duke is having an amazing year. So many beautiful weddings, and now she’s off to one in Italy.

Actor 1: I’m not kidding. I really hate weddings. We’ve got 12 to get through just so long as it doesn’t give her any ideas,

Actor 4: just so long as it doesn’t put him off.

Actor 2: Relationship. Josh Haynes and Myra Duke changed the relationship status to, huh?

Laura: Now that weird ending there is because the text you sent ended mid-sentence with a question mark, so it does, we didn’t know it does. How to

Piers: actually vocalize that question mark. I think that’s a great vocalization. Oh, brilliant.

I have no idea. There was much discussion, let me tell you. Okay,

Laura: so you only wrote this is a one page treatment?

Piers: Yeah, I mean, maybe this is the thing I sent, maybe there are bits of, but I never really got off the ground. I mean, it was. It was definitely a point I think so many people have in their lives that I was kind of in my, uh, early thirties and going through that experience of summers being, oh my God, we’re doing this weekend.

It’s another wedding. And they’re lovely and they’re go, they’re gorgeous and, uh, some are better than others. And some of them are in London, which is brilliant where I live and others are miles away, which is lovely, but also really expensive And, yeah. Sometimes you’re invited and you don’t know people very well, but you go, ’cause you really should sometimes, you know, literally everyone.

And there’s so much gossip and drama swirling around. Other times the speech just make you want the floor to swallow you up. Mm-hmm. And so on and so on. And I felt there was a lot of mileage in it. But I also think, and I think, I think there is, I think there is an idea, and I’ve talked to other people who’ve had this idea, who’ve had a similar experience.

But I think I was in that phase of writing TV formats where one day you’re asked to write a sort of, you know, a game show about winning loads of money. The next day you’re asked to write a really sensitive treatment for a documentary about treating, you know, some refugees who’ve ended up somewhere, or the next day you’re asked to write a kind of current affairs type format.

So you slightly kid yourself that you are a sort of, you know, master of all trades. Mm-hmm. And. I think interestingly, this was me a year before I started writing books properly. This was me edging towards writing books, but still with that very TV kind of commercial sort of mindset.

(music): Yeah.

Piers: And there is a book here to be written.

If I was a kind of. Brilliant romantic comedy novelist or someone who writes those brilliant beach, we, you know, if I someone like Jenny Corgan or if I someone like Emma Henry or there’s so, so many people who could write a brilliant version of this story. I’m not sure I’m that person, but it was an interesting exercise in, it was like a transition from tv.

It’s sort of very commercial and. But it’s not really grounded in enough real characters or set up to to work. But you know, it was a step.

Laura: Well, in the same year, 2007, your dad, Paul Toay, wrote salmon fishing in the Yemen, um, and became a successful writer. Did that in any way make you think, ah, actually that’s something I’d like to do as well.

Piers: Huge. Hugely. Yeah. He showed me how to do a good romantic comedy. Um. And I think because I, it focused my mind because I just, as you may be guessing, by all these half started things in the job I was doing, I had a lot of unfocused, creative energy mm-hmm. That I was making living from doing it for other pe for other people.

Laura: Yeah.

Piers: But the thing about developing ideas is it, it, I worked with some brilliant people and learned so much, but ultimately it’s. You get a bit frustrated because brilliant ideas are misunderstood and don’t get made. Terrible ideas do get made, brilliant ideas get made terribly, and so on and so on, and you don’t have any control over that, and you don’t quite get the follow through, uh, of least learning.

You don’t learn. Because you just write the proposal and it’s on to the next one. So I was slightly flaming around thinking, coming up with things like this, thinking I’ve got to try and do something else, but I just didn’t really know what was I gonna write sitcoms? Was I gonna write romantic beach reads?

And then my dad out of the blue who’d, I mean, he loved reading, he read English University and he’d got me into reading and it was a big part of his life. And I’d discovered once. In my parents’ house in a shoebox, an unfinished novel. Um, but that’s not unusual. A lot of people have unfinished novels in shoe boxes.

Um, but it was a total surprise when really he’d more or less was stepping back from work. He was in his, he was back to 10 60 and he took me out for dinner and said, I’ve got some to tell you something. It’s a secret and a surprise. And I was like, oh my God. Like my dad didn’t do surprises. Like he was a very.

Quiet, quietly spoken, modest. He just didn’t, I was like, this is bad. It’s like, oh God, you know what, what? What terrible news are you gonna tell me? And it was like, he said, I’ve written a novel called Salmon Fishing in Yemen. And I was like, it’s called the Whaty What? And uh. And then it was just this amazing thing where he, he hadn’t told any of his family.

He’d written three books and thrown three away, but this one he’d written half of, got an agent interested, who then said, please write the rest. And then it sold for, you know, I mean, especially now where publishing is now a huge amount of money and was lined up for film adaptations, all the rest of it.

And it was just so thrilling because it made him so happy in a way that I hadn’t seen him Oh, in a particular way. I’d seen him happy before, but in a very particular way and, and I was very proud and I didn’t want to do what the kind of stuff he was writing. That would’ve been a bit close, but it made me think, well, look, I spent my life reacting against my parents as you do.

’cause he was in business. And I was thought, I don’t want to go into business. I’m really creative. I want to go and be an artist in London. And then I was like, oh my God, now my dad’s an artist. I should have been a lawyer. Everything’s gone wrong. Uh, so I should have, I was like, what do I do? I can either.

Like, go and, uh, go to law school, don’t wanna do that. So I was like, well, maybe, you know, uh, I don’t, I’m not sure these things inherited, but I was like, look, your dad’s writing books. That is one of the things you thought about doing. So that kind of informed the creator writing course. I was like, well, let’s take this seriously and see if there’s anything in that.

(music): Right.

Piers: And it really helped because he. I was writing kids books, he was writing out books, so very different. But he was, he knew the publishing world before I did and gave me lots of advice. Um, so it was lovely and totally unexpected in the way these, the, the nicest things. Often now.

Laura: Oh. So the opposite of, uh, my father.

I, I felt I had to beat him, sort of the EPU situation, you know,

Piers: it, it wasn’t because he hadn’t been, I, I, you know, I’d got all outta my system with like, you know, you are a businessman doing engineering, and I’m working with cool comedy people in London. Um, and so I’d called that and he was totally, of course.

Completely unimpressed and wasn’t remotely interested in any of that.

(music): Yeah.

Piers: Didn’t understand any of it. It was like, what are you doing with your life? Um, so then when I started writing books, at least kind of got what that those were. Yeah. ’cause he was writing them. So it was nice. It brought us together.

Laura: Oh, that’s lovely. Right. Well, let’s have another off cut,

Piers: please. What’s this one? So, um, this is a social media status update. Uh, several, uh, that I wrote from 2013, uh, called Alfonso the

Actor 3: Weevil. I. As I mentioned in my status update this morning, there’s a small, dusty, great beetle, ought to be more precise, a weevil called Alfonso, who lives on my desk.

He’s a fan of early Tom Hanks movies, and some of you have come across him before. I believe he’s often too busy with his own projects to stop and talk. But this morning I saw him perching on the corner of my porridge bowl eyeing me suspiciously. What are you looking at, Alfonso? I said, unable to ignore him any longer.

What do you think I’m looking at? He said, I looked around behind me, but there wasn’t anything there. Just some books on a shelf and a pile of unopened post. Am I being thick? I asked him. Alfonso climbed down off the bowl and onto the strip between the edge of my keyboard and the screen, which he finds a very convivial temperature.

I’m looking at you. He said, why are you always on Facebook? I’m not always on Facebook. I said, yes, you are. I am not stupid. You know. Prove it. He got out a small weevil sized notebook and flicked through the pages and began to read off a list of times 9:30 AM 9:45 AM 10:00 AM 10:14 AM 10:16 AM 10:58 AM 11 or 4:00 AM I thought that you were meant to be writing a book.

It’s not that simple. I counted beginning to feel a little uneasy. What do you know about it? Anyway, you are only a weevil. Precisely. He replied triumphantly and I could tell he was giving a rather smug grin. Precisely nothing. You are not even on Facebook. And as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I saw that I’d fallen into his trap.

No, he said in that way of his, which always makes my blood boil. I am not on Facebook. And what have I accomplished this morning? Would you like to know? I pretended I hadn’t heard and visited myself with an urgent email demanding my attention about an extra cheap Cialis clearance sale in somewhere called Ano.

Now, do you know where, um, Botano is? Alfonso? I asked him, but he was not to be diverted. And first he began. I walked all the way across your desk and that is quite somewhere, you know, and then I walked all the way back. I climbed all over your books. I crawled up the wall a bit. I found some toast, crumbs to eat, and a piece of lint.

What have you done? It’s different. You are only a stupid weevil. I’ve got, you know, invitations to reply to groups to join people to spy on. It’s a whole new dimension to my social life. Whatever you say. He said smirking and he lent against the bottom of my screen with some of his legs crossed and filing some nails with the others.

Now, if you don’t mind, I said flicking him off, so he bounced with a crack against the window sill. I really am trying to write a book. Yes, came a weak little voice streaming up from the floor, and I really am trying to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, so I squashed him, dear Rita, but don’t worry, he’ll be back tomorrow.

Laura: It’s quite extraordinary. A a, a social media update. How, how many of these did you write and, and where?

Piers: I did loads. I did loads on Facebook. I was writing. This, you know, I was, well, 2013, I guess. Uh, maybe they get back even before then, but I was, I think that’s when I decided to collate them into a Word document.

Ah. ‘

Laura: cause the last world was published in 2013, wasn’t it?

Piers: Yeah. And I’d, yeah. And I started writing them when I was trying to, basically, when I was trying to write my book and couldn’t, and I think it was a way, I’m always saying, I, I coach. In my other obvious of day job where I coach writers, and one thing I’m always saying to ’em is like, don’t forget to be like playful.

Don’t, it’s quite intense writing a book. Yeah. And you can get a bit lost in your head and a bit stressed about it and, and you forget the writing is just should be fun as well. Mm-hmm. And these are just the silly I ideas, I mean. In the last while, there is a cockroach who’s a major character called the General who in who starts the story sitting on the rim of someone’s bowl.

So maybe there is some connection there. I’m not sure. Um, I can’t remember the sequence and I’d always liked, and there was a little weevil on my computer that kept. Distract or in my study or somewhere, dunno where it’d come from. It was distracting me and I was So you’re saying this is based

Laura: on a true story?

Piers: Oh this is definitely based on a true story. It’s gonna be a major picture and um, and I was like many people at the time turning way too much time on Facebook.

Piers: And it was the beginning of the great sort of distractor crisis. And, but I posted these little things on Facebook and people, I think they were just like, oh God, Piers is obviously having a nervous breakdown.

I’ll say, I’ll post some nice comments and maybe he’ll step off the ledge. Uh, so, so I was, I was, I, I kept on posting them and gradually the comments got less and less. They were like, yeah, we didn’t really to, we didn’t need to carry on. But I, I enjoyed doing them and they were a really nice sort of outlet.

Laura: Yeah,

Piers: just to like, I think partly also publishing takes so long and, you know, for books to be written and read and edited and, and so, and all that. So I just, I was itching to. Be out there and I was just kind of stretching my, they were just little kind of ex doodles. Really. Yeah. Exercises. But I enjoyed, and they, a loose narrative kind of formed and I just, I en enjoyed doing them, but they’re completely mad.

I dunno what was going through my head, but, um,

Laura: well, staying on the animal theme, your book this year, that letters to a dog, um, and it’s geared towards those who find reading and writing more challenging. Where did, where did that idea for that come from?

Piers: The, uh, Barrington State, this wonderful publisher who pub published books, um, for, uh, children with dyslexia and other challenges they may encounter learning to read their books are all quite short, so they’re all between about seven and a half thousand words and about 10,000 words long, and their printed on this special yellow paper, which makes it easier for dyslexic children to the, the letters jump around less on the page.

But Anthony McGann wrote a book for Barton Stoke, um, called Lark, the one, the Carnegie Medal for Children’s Book. So those restrictions are no. Barrier to the quality or the ambition, right. Of the books. Um, and this book isn’t like that, but it’s, I wanted to write them a long, long time. And actually I was asked to write for them in, in lockdown the first winter of lockdown.

They got in touch. Um, and I was like, most people at that point, the novelty of lockdown had worn off when we went to the winter phase. And ev we definitely was going not mad in the same way as writing about Alfonso the weevil, but slightly kind of like, am I ever gonna work again? Um, you know, his life stopped forever.

Uh, you know, because I’d been planning a play that’d been canceled. My book talk, my book had been postponed event. I mean, I look given what people endured in that time, it’s really, this is like the tiniest viol in the world. But it, it was. In my tiny world, it was like these, these were my preoccupations.

(music): Sure.

Piers: And, uh, I was living in the house with my husband and our dog, so I was probably spending an unhealthy amount of time as you weren’t allowed to see other people. Um, having sort of a magic conversations with, uh, my dog and Barrington Stoke got in touch and I just had had this idea about, you know, obviously dogs don’t talk back, and I’ve written about.

Lots of talking animals, but I wanted to do a kind of realistic story about communicating with animals, and this ideas came to my head about this little boy who is perhaps in hospital. I think that came from us all feeling slightly confined and cooped up, and he’s. Before he goes to hospital, he spotted this dog in a dog home and he really wants it.

And he doesn’t know how to tell his dad. ’cause they’re having, they’re not speaking for various reasons. And this very kind nurse says, well, why didn’t you try writing to the dog? And to his and her surprise, the dog starts writing back to him in hospital. Right. And it’s about the relationship that that develops.

And, um, spoiler, the dog hasn’t actually written back to him, but I’m not gonna say what. Oh no,

Piers: And it was really hard to write. It took me for such a short book. It took me far longer than I meant to, ’cause it was so different to stuff I’ve written before. I’ve written these big adventures and it’s like really short, uh, chapters and telling it basically a long, short story.

But I loved, absolutely loved, absolutely loved doing it, and it’s always, I think what I enjoy most the more I do this is being given new ways to write. Like, you’ve got to do it like this this time. I love the focus and constraints of, of that rather than trying to do it all yourself.

Laura: And talking of big adventures, we’ve now come to your final offcut.

So tell us about this

Piers: one. Uh, this is from last year, 2024, and is a treatment for moderate the damned, the first book in an adult fantasy series.

Actor 2: In Ancient Britain, a land of mists giants and wizards lives moderate the handsome, but arrogant, ambitious, and duplicitous nephew of King Arthur. He’s a knight of the round table at Camelot, who is sent on a quest with his mentor, sir Lancelot.

To investigate a valley terrorized by a strange beast, they find a mystical lion, which they pursue into Carlo’s forest. The lion attacks Lancelot, but moderate slays it, earning Lance Lott’s gratitude for life, returning to Camelot, bathed in glory. They come across a. Priest praying by a chapel. The monk reveals that Mordred is in fact, Arthur’s son, who will one day kill his father and do more damage to the kingdom of Britain than any other man.

The only thing that might redeem him is finding the holy grail, but that will never happen as he’s so treacherous, corrupt, and weak. Incensed and humiliated. Mordred kills the priest in a fit of. Peak Lancelot is appalled by his protege’s crime and drawing. His sword warns him. He must now face justice At Arthur’s court they fight and Lancelot injures Mordred, who flees back to the forest where the dead lions vengeful mate corners him.

Mordred jumps into the lake to escape the animal, but he does not realize it has been cursed by the Enchant Morgan La fey when he emerges. Not only has the lion vanished, but so has Cartloises Forest. Mordrid finds himself climbing out of London’s Docklands in 1984. He must make sense of this new world where the only giants are the dying ones of industry.

The mist is on the nightclub dance floor, and the wizards are all behind computer terminals in the city. He learns that his temporal exile must be a punishment from Arthur’s court in some way. Perhaps he will find his way back and claim Arthur’s throne by finding the holy Grail as the monk claimed to moderate surprise, his ruthless and treacherous nature allows him to thrive in Thatcher’s Britain.

He charms his way into a job as a trainee estate agent, which allows him to keep searching for the Holy Grail under the guise of sourcing and showing properties. Soon he becomes an investor and property developer of his own, and before long. Has attracted the attention of the conservative party who ask him to stand as an mp.

All the while he schemes, plots, lies, seduces members of both sexes, thieves, and murders to get his way, keeping the faith that he’s getting closer to the grail and a return to Camelot.

Laura: Dun, dun dun, dun dun. That’s very exciting. Sammy. I love the evil of the thatcherite years. The government, the ultimate arch villain.

He’s an estate agent. That’s the hilarious, um, yeah. Presuming you’re not a big fan of, of the thatcherite years, et cetera.

Piers: Not a, not a huge fan, but I wanted to kind of ex explore it. Through the ideas of someone you might see as from a heroic set of tales and where that, how that all intersects.

Laura: Would he have been a, an estate agent but a hero, or would he have been an estate agent and a villain?

Piers: I, I’ve always loved reading about kind of an antiheroes, like one of my favorite literary characters is, as you called John Self, but the MOUs hero of Marty Amos’s money. Yes. I like people who in books who are kind of awful and repulsive in every way, but you’re somehow still annoyingly drawn to them and kind of despite their horror show.

And so I thought the eighties was a good setting for that and a sort of good. Twist on a, on a very British kind of myth. And, and, and also I guess maybe looking at the idea that certain kind of ideas of Britishness perished during the Thatcher years and different ones were born. I dunno, I’m getting far too ahead of myself, but, um, it was just a proposal.

It

Laura: struck me that it would make a great TV series. Sorry to drag you back away from novel. Yeah. And back into television, the evil television. But, uh, it did remind me of things like Lucifer and Buffy the Vampire sl, and it, it seems to be a very popular format, particularly if the hero is a handsome, late teen female or male.

Yeah. That, um, I don’t want to drag you away from the, a novelist. No,

Piers: I, maybe you’re right. I, I’ve always been good at the high concept ideas unless, I mean, it’s really interesting. I, I was asked to do this. There was a. The Hawdon Foundation run a beautiful six week writing retreat in a beautiful Italian villa Oh, by the shores of Lake Como.

And you get invited to apply, which I was very lucky to be done with. The Society of Authors nominated me last year to apply for it, along with a hasten who had about 700 writers from across the world. It wasn’t, uh, so the competition was pretty stiff, and I. I, I was at a stage in my writing career back then where I was finishing various things and feeling very playful and very kind of like, I dunno what to do next.

And always toying with the idea of writing something for adults. And I had to do this quite quickly and it definitely has, to me, that feeling of something that’s, it’s sort of. It’s quite a nice headline concept, but it needs a lot more thought. And as you say, it does. I often think novels actually, it’s quite detailed and I actually think the best books often have just a much simpler idea at their heart, whereas this feels, as you say, it does feel a bit more like a sort of treatment for a, a almost a TV show or a movie rather than something that the kind of question you explore in a book, which is often a bit more.

A particularly a grownup book. And it also shows that thing where I’m still very much got one foot in children’s fantasy, even though I’m sort of literally, why don’t I take a thing children read about and put it in a grownup world? That’s how watch a grownup book. That’s just an interesting first

Laura: move.

Well, the ugly, the television series that always appear to be, uh, of the sort of Netflix charts. Yeah,

Piers: and I’d also read. Fabulous Fantasy series by Lev Grossman called The Magicians, which became a TV series. And that’s sort of about some grownup Americans doing Narnia, but they’re grownups, so they’re sex and violence.

(music): It’s very clever

Piers: and funny, uh, and that that always, that’s always appealed to me. So Netflix, if you’re listening Mordred The Damned is very much available.

Laura: Well, maybe if you put some casting suggestions in there, perhaps.

Piers: Yeah. How about that? Might Tony Banks or Boris Johnson.

Laura: Okay. Right. Well, we have on to the end of the show. How was it for you?

Piers: It was lovely. Thank you. It’s been really interesting and strange to go back to, well, not, not this, I wrote it last year, but everything else, which is from quite a long time ago now and feels like a different, definitely a different me, but also me, if that makes sense.

Which is quite odd, but nice to have that little kind of conversation in my head with, uh, former writing selves and I’ve, yeah, I’ve, I’ve really enjoyed considering the journey.

Laura: Did anything there surprise you at all?

Piers: The sitcom really surprised me because I started reading it. I mean, it’s not great, but like there are some gags in there and I was like, in my head, I’d completely written it off as totally.

Totally, totally terrible. And like in that way you do. And that’s also the first mistake. You mistake when you make, when you start writing is you immediately, when something doesn’t get made, you write the whole thing off as a complete catastrophe. It’s like, no, it’s just like, it just needs work.

Laura: Yeah. Are you someone who might go back into an old project and bring it back to life?

Or do you sort of done it now you’re moving on?

Piers: I a little bit always never say never, but I sort of think there is a weird thing certainly with, I think with stories that. There’s a moment when they’re really alive in your head and you are kind of tuned into them and you’re just kind of living them and excited by them in ways that require to explain.

And then what I found looking back at all of these is I can, I can view them quite intellectually and with detachment, but I don’t have that little spark of. That spark of the possible that makes you really want to sit down and write something. Ah, so we possibly won’t see dead animals then unless, I mean, as I said, if you know Netflix, apple tv, I feel this might be the breakthrough hit you’re after.

Uh, and I stand ready to find that spark of, uh, possibility for the right amount of money. But, uh, I suspect not.

Laura: Well, Piers Torday, it’s been fabulous talking to you. Thank you for sharing the contents of your offcuts drawer with us.

Thanks very much for having me.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin with special thanks to this week’s. Guest, Piers Torday. The offcuts were performed by Kenny Blyth, Helen Goldwyn, David Monteath and David Lane Pusey, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com and please do subscribe, rate, and review us.

Thanks for listening.