CHARLIE HIGSON – More Writing That Failed & What Happened Next

My problem is I keep developing things which are big and expensive and extravagant because that’s what I would like to watch but I have to write to my strengths of what I think I’m good at. I can’t write a sort of Sally Wainwright domestic drama which you know she’s brilliant and there are many other rights like that but I can’t write that. I try and write something like that and before I know it you know an alien’s arrived or they’ve gone back in time or half the cast have been shot in a gruesome manner. I like genre stuff so I’ll leave the other stuff to those who do it much better than me.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success.

This is the second part of my conversation with Charlie Higson. So rather than run through his many achievements all over again, you’re better off hopping back one episode for the full introduction. The headlines though, you probably know him as the co-creator, writer and star of The Fast Show and or as a best-selling novelist, author of the young James Bond series and a whole range of crime, horror and young adult books.

In part one, Charlie’s offcuts included a mash-up of two Monty Python sketches for a Harry Enfield show, a scene from the first episode of a big-scale TV drama about the young Winston Churchill and a wonderfully creepy short story that predated Frozen by several years. And the variety continues in this episode. So picking up where we left off, here’s Charlie introducing his next offcut, though do be warned there is a fair bit of swearing quite early on.

This is a film script which I wrote in 1998 called Don’t Go Crazy. Interior, pool at the gym, evening. Alex, Phil, Lester and Rob are sat around the pool.

It’s good to have you back, Phil. The pool felt empty without you. Well, I just… Don’t say anything depressing, Phil.

I came here to relax. Alex, have you ever considered taking a bit of exercise while you were here? It is a gym after all. I only come here for the pool and the sauna.

You do two lengths, then you sit there drinking wine. It relaxes me. But maybe if you did some exercise, you wouldn’t be such a fat fuck.

I’m not a fat fuck. Well, you’re not a thin fuck. Who says I have to be any kind of a fuck? No, you’re definitely a fuck, Alex.

That’s not in dispute. And you’re definitely getting fat. You’re a fat fuck, Alex.

Let’s face it. You only need to be as fit as your lifestyle requires. All these freaks doing weights and tramping for hours up imaginary staircases.

What do they need to be so fit for? They all work in offices, for lifting phones to their ears, for opening their car doors. No, to look better, to be healthier, to not be a fat fuck. I’m perfectly healthy.

All blokes think that. Look, it keeps Sarah off my back. She thinks I get some exercise so she doesn’t keep on at me about me dying young.

Christ, I would have thought she’d be relieved. The thought of living with you. We’re perfectly happy in our own way.

We’ve worked out a system. If you want to be successful in a relationship, Phil, you have to have a system. You pompous prick.

Well, I hope it’s cheering you up, Phil, having a go at me. You know, what you need is a fuck, Phil. It’s fucking that’s fucked me up, Lester.

Girls, what I actually need is to stop thinking about fucking. Your problem with women is you appear too fucking desperate, Phil. Can you tell me something? Can you tell me why I should take any advice on women from you lot? You, you’ve been 10 years with the same woman.

You, you’ve never spent longer than about 10 seconds with one woman. And you have an almost supernatural ability to attract mad women from miles around. Hello, I’m bonkers.

Ah, well, you must go out with Lester then. Well, at least we’re all getting a fuck. I don’t know.

I don’t really like sex anymore. What? I find it too troubling. I know Sarah too well and I just feel so… I feel so ridiculous.

And it reminds me too immediately of my longing and my need. Yeah, I know what you mean. You’re all fucking bonkers.

Okay. There’s a lot of bad language in there, isn’t there? Yes, a lot of… there will be a warning before this episode goes out. Don’t worry.

Explicit. E for explicit. But it’s all right. Don’t mind a bit of swearing. So Don’t Go Crazy is the name of the film’s script. Tell us about it. Tell us about the story.

Well, one of my favourite American crime authors is Charles Williford. He wrote some brilliant books.

And I was reading one of them and it was… quite a lot of it was these four guys sitting around a motel swimming pool in America, just kind of shooting the breeze with each other. And then it develops into a crime story. And I quite liked that idea.

I thought, I want to just start a film like that. So it starts with these four guys around a swimming pool in a gym in London with a view out over the city. And it was a way of writing about men.

And it was a way of writing about London. And I developed it originally. I thought it would be good for me, Paul Whitehouse, Mark Williams and Simon Day.

So we would play these four friends. And the basic premise is one of them, which would have been Mark Williams’ character, announces to his mates that he’s had enough and he wants to kill himself. Right.

And I thought I would turn around what the normal story is that it’s about how they try and persuade him not to. And, you know, he’s got a great life. He shouldn’t throw it away.

But in this one, they go, all right, then, well, we’ll help you. And so they do. And they sort of discuss how they should do it and and what should happen.

And and they sort of set up things which he doesn’t go through with. And obviously, in the end, he doesn’t kill himself. And everything that they’ve done actually persuades him that he doesn’t want to do that and that they are good friends.

And along along the way, it’s a it’s a comedy, a comedy about blokes, really. And a lot of it is about how blokes don’t, you know, when they get together, they don’t really talk about personal things and emotions and stuff. Mostly talk about films they’ve seen or football or cars or whatever.

So, yeah, and I quite like the script. I thought it was good. And for a while, I was developing it with Working Title, with Working Title Films, who I got to know through doing Random Hot Coat Deceased, because that was through Working Title Television.

They set up a television arm. So I got to know Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, the two guys that run it. And we started developing the film.

But the film world works very differently to the TV world. And it’s quite slow and cumbersome. And this is one of the reasons, I think, why we’ve made so few comedy films.

You know, in America, someone’s got a funny character on Saturday Night Live. Oh, we’ll make a film. We’ll do it quickly.

It might be a hit. It might be rubbish. But we’ll get it out there and get these things done.

And then we put these guys together. They’re good. But it’s a lot slower and more cumbersome in this country.

We don’t really have an industry. And if you look back, it’s amazing. We’ve had so much good comedy on the TV.

Very few good comedy films. So this would, in fact, sort of be a fast show film. Yes.

But not with the millions of characters. Although, you know, the way these things go, once you get into the film world, suddenly it’s, well, we can’t get the financing if it’s you guys. But if it’s Hugh Grant, whatever.

But surely that would be part of its appeal, no? The fact that it’s the fast show. Yes, but they’re film people, you see. And there is a gap between film people and TV people.

And often when someone eventually gets around to making a film, it’s a bit late. It’s a bit after the event. You know, like the Alan Partridge film was 10 years too late, really.

Great film, though. Probably not as good as a TV show. But so it was quite cumbersome and it was taking a long time.

And then there was the Twin Towers attack. Oh, yes. And they said, and it may have just been an excuse because they wanted to get out of it.

They didn’t want to make it. They said, you know, since the Twin Towers attack, people don’t want dark humour. They want things to be light and breezy and fun.

And we think this central idea of them trying to help him commit suicide, could you change it that actually they’re trying to persuade him not to? And I said, well, yeah, but that’s the whole joke. That’s the whole idea of the film. And things do get changed because of this.

I remember I was asked by Working Title if I wanted to work as a script doctor on this thriller script that they were developing. And I read it and I thought, I don’t get this. And I went back to them.

I said, I really don’t understand what it is about this film that you wanted to get it made. What’s this kind of USP that you thought? Yeah, because it’s mystifying me. And I said, well, we were originally developing it as it was going to be the first Channel Tunnel thriller.

And it was about someone planting a bomb in the Channel Tunnel. But then someone else announced they were making a film of that. So we took that part out of it.

And I said, yeah, but that means you just don’t have an idea. There’s no idea behind this film. And this happens a lot in that world.

You know, you get a certain amount down the line. We’ve got the financing. We’ve got this.

Oh, we can’t do that. But we’ll take that out. And suddenly you’ve got something that makes no sense at all.

So I didn’t pursue Don’t Go Crazy. And obviously, if I did go back to it, it would not be with us in it anymore. But I still think it’s quite a funny script.

And they’re quite interesting characters. Well, I mean, there’s a renewed interest in the Farsha. You’re going on tour.

Yeah, but we’re too old. You know, this was written for people in their late 30s. And it couldn’t be for people in their early 60s or mid 60s.

However old your team are? We could do. Well, I’m just thinking, could BBC finance it partly or, you know, sort of as a, not a TV special, but… A BBC couldn’t. We can’t be seen to encourage people committing suicide.

Oh, God, right. OK. Again, you know, I’ve got hundreds of these things.

I’ve got so many unmade films. I’ve got so many pilots and Bibles for TV series that I’ve worked on. It’s often something will lie fallow for a while.

And then you’ll meet someone, you’ll have a conversation. Oh, we’re looking for this type of thing. You say, oh, I got something like that.

It’s like my picture book, my first picture book. What’s that noise? I’ve done with a fabulous Nadia Shireen. I was with her and she said, oh, have you ever written anything we could work on together? I said, well, when my kids were little, I wrote this story.

I never really finished it. But a boy who gets inside a cardboard box makes a lot of noise. She said, oh, I’d like to see that.

And I dug it out. And I think the last version of it was from 1994. And she said, this is great.

Let’s do it. So I kind of finished it and we published it. So, you know, things can get a second lease of life and come back.

OK, let’s move on to your next offcut. What is this one? This is a Doctor Who script that I wrote in 2016 called The Birthday Present. Interior, house in the desert, back room, day.

Amy and the Doctor find themselves in a bedroom full of British Eighth Army desert troops in shorts and wide helmets. A bed stands against one wall. There’s a back door here and two glassless windows.

The troops are firing from the windows and through the open doorway. Throughout the scene, they completely ignore the Doctor and Amy, who duck down as an explosion outside sends a cloud of dust into the room. Sniper! A bullet cracks and one of the soldiers falls away from the window, dead.

Grenade! He lobs a grenade out. There’s an explosion across the road. It’s chaos.

Bullets everywhere. The Doctor and Amy cower, trying to avoid being hit. German machine gun nest at five o’clock! I’m on it! He runs out into the street.

There’s the rattle of machine gun fire and a cry. The machine gun rakes the building. Two more soldiers fall back, dead.

See the pyramids and die. There’s something not right here, Amy. Will you stop seeing that? Another soldier goes up to the window.

All soldiers look the same in uniform, but he looks identical to the one who ran out into the street. Sniper! I’m on it! Look around you, Amy. What is wrong with this picture? What, even apart from the guns and the explosions? Grenade! The soldier who just shouted grenade.

Wasn’t he shot before? I don’t know. I was too busy ducking. Concentrate, Amy.

We’re in the middle of a battle and yet… There’s no blood? There are no bodies. Indeed. As they look around the room, there’s no evidence of the several soldiers who have been shot.

Keep your eyes on one of them. Okay. Wait till he’s shot.

What? Just watch. Amy watches as the second British Tommy is shot and falls dead. He sprawls in the dust on the floor among broken pottery and ammunition cases.

Nothing’s happening. What am I supposed to be looking at? Over there! Amy spins around to look where the doctor’s pointing. Can’t see anything.

Turns back to the dead soldier who has disappeared. Where’d he go? I’m not sure he was ever there in the first place. What’s going on? I think we’re caught in a wrinkle of time.

We’re seeing different times at the same time. But that’s impossible. No, it’s not.

Space is folded in on itself. That’s how the TARDIS is able to travel anywhere and to any time. Look.

As the gun battle rages around them, the doctor pulls a blanket off the bed, uncovering a white sheet. He fissures a large marker pen out of his pocket and draws a dot on the sheet. Okay, we’re here.

North Africa, 1943 or thereabout. And over here… The doctor draws another point a long way away on the sheet. Is ancient Egypt.

4567 BC, okay? He hands the marker pen to Amy and points to the dots. So how would you get from here to there? Amy draws a straight line across the sheet. No, too slow.

That would take centuries. The doctor tugs the sheet off the bed and scrumbles it into a ball, oblivious to the bullets that smack into the wall all around him. Then he carefully peels back the layers, revealing that the two dots are now touching.

Abracadabra! You didn’t submit this script, you said. Well, it’s a long story. I knew Russell Davis enough to say hello to him and have a conversation.

I knew Stephen Moffat much better. And when he was showrunning, we talked about me possibly writing a script. And I wanted to do something, because they’d never done it.

I said, look, computer gaming is such a big thing with kids. You haven’t ever done anything about that. You should do.

But the interesting thing about the showrunners is that Doctor Who very much kind of is a representation of whatever their concerns are. So Russell Davis, there was a lot of human drama, but there was also quite a lot of satire in it. Stephen Moffat, as we know, is a brainy fellow.

And he likes kind of complicated, brainy things. And that’s what he likes writing about and making up incredibly complex, folded in stories. And, you know, his Doctor Who was quite similar to Sherlock Holmes.

So he liked some aspects of what I was talking about. But obviously, he wasn’t that excited by the idea of computer games. It wasn’t really part of his world.

But I play a huge amount of computer games and my boys did, too. And it was interesting that under Stephen, the Doctor Who probably started to move away from being aimed at 10 year old boys and girls. But what was great was it was a series.

You know, there was science fiction and there were adventures. And it was great that the hero of it was different to the other sort of heroes you were shown. A male hero who didn’t have a gun, wasn’t beating people by fighting.

He used his brain and he used technology and wizardry. He’s a wizard. But Stephen, the scripts became very complicated and complex.

And he started getting very interested, really, in what was the online fan community and particularly American online fan community. He was trying to push it into America where it would be aimed at an older audience. And I felt it did slightly move away from being a fun Saturday night show for kids to watch.

And so mine was about how it’s the sort of Tron idea that the Doctor and Amy get trapped inside a game, which I mean, obviously you can’t do. So it’s essentially it’s a game. The game essentially gets inside you.

It starts to manipulate your brain so that you think you are in a in a real world. But it’s a game that this thing is playing. So, you know, I had a lot of fun writing it and working it up.

And I worked up a pitch document and Stephen was so busy that it was months, I think years before I eventually could have a meeting with him. And I developed it to a certain extent. And it’s quite interesting, the Doctor Who world, there was a huge team, a sort of support team to keep this thing running.

And, you know, it was a bit like trying to get to see the emperor, only dealing with his minions and his court or trying to get access to the pope or something. So eventually I got through to Stephen and he’s very energetic, full of ideas, throwing ideas out there. And my story was quite, quite straightforward.

It was about gaming. You know, it’s about the universe could be about to be destroyed. And he realises that someone is playing a game and they don’t realise and they are actually controlling everything that’s going on.

And it turns out that it’s just a young teenage kid. And Stephen says, well, you could try this or do that. And, yeah, it’d be great if he went there.

And it started becoming more Stephen Moffat-ish. And I was saying, well, that sort of makes it a lot bigger and expands it. Also, don’t worry about that.

No, no, no, no. We’d never worry about that when we start. We’d make as big as we can and throw as much as we can and make it exciting.

And then and then when we know what the budget is, we worry about this stuff and then we pull it back. But, you know, don’t restrict yourself now. So I went away and did what he said and came back.

And the team said I didn’t get access back to him again. The team said, well, it’s just too big and expensive. We can’t do this.

And by that point, I thought I’m not pursuing this. I’ve been banging my head against the wall. And I’d been I’d started writing it just just to see for myself whether it worked.

And so then I thought, well, I might as well finish writing it. Have some fun with it. So I did write it up into a complete script.

I mean, you can tell when it was written. Yeah, it was still Matt Smith and Amy Pond. And yes, and I’ve just sat on it since.

Could it be resubmitted now, do we think? Well, Doctor Who has changed so much now that it’s it’s become a different show, really. It seems to be about something else. And nobody really knows where it will be next.

I mean, it was interesting because when Chris Chibnall took it on, I’d been working with him on I was in Broadchurch and he was talking about what he was going to do with it. He thought that the bar to entry was set too high and that a 10-year-old kid coming to this would be absolutely mystified. He said he was going to strip away all that, go back to basics.

I do like the reboot like they did with the Marvel comics and stuff. Year zero. And he sort of did that a little bit, but he did also at the same time change quite a lot of the for want of a better word, the DNA of the series.

It became a bit of a team and also much as I love Jodie Whittaker again, who I’d worked with on Broadchurch and she’s and she’s a brilliant actress and she was great as Doctor Who. I felt it was a shame because it was the only show on TV in which a male hero wasn’t an action man. And I thought that was such a good role model for boys and was giving them something they weren’t getting elsewhere.

It was really interesting to see what happens when you make it a girl, a woman. But for me, that changed what I thought was a real strength of the show. Now, another huge TV franchise you got involved in, as you mentioned, is the Randall and Hopkirk deceased relaunch, which I loved as a child.

The original. I also loved yours as well, but I had a bit of a crush on Hopkirk when I was very young. But you wrote and produced the whole series and it starred your mate, Jim, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer.

That sounds like a huge endeavour from being a writer or a performer dabbling in the two. I also played a different character in every episode, rather foolishly. Oh, did you? Very Alfred Hitchcockian.

I didn’t. Yes, it was. I didn’t write all of it.

I was the lead writer. I was the showrunner, although we don’t really have that role in this country. But I did manage to get in a lot of really good writers to work on it with me, like the League of Gentlemen guys and people like that.

It did look like a lot of fun. It was. It was huge fun.

And it came about because Working Title TV was set up. And at the time, they were sort of under the umbrella of Universal, who had bought up the whole of the loo grade, the ATV catalogue, all those great shows from the 60s. They were looking through it to see which ones would stand up to remake.

And they went for Adderall and Hopkirk to see because it was a really good idea. It had been a popular show. Two detectives.

One of them’s a ghost. But it had never quite gained the respect of, say, the Avengers or the Prisoner. So whilst people sort of remembered it, they didn’t remember it in that great detail.

And, you know, it was proficiently made, but it wasn’t like a sacred classic that you couldn’t touch. So they felt, you know, well, we could update it and just keep the idea. But Vic and Bob, though, Vic and Bob, an interesting choice.

Well, Vic and Bob got in touch with them and they said, here you’re talking about making Randall Hopkirk deceased. Vic’s white suit was obviously inspired by the original Hopkirk deceased. I did not know that.

Yeah. And so they said, look, we’d love to have a go. We want to get away from doing shooting stars.

We want to do something different. Have a go at doing something with a story. And suddenly it became a package.

You think, yeah, Randall Hopkirk with Vic and Bob. That’s a thing. And they said, would I? Because they liked me as a writer and someone they like working with.

They said they didn’t want to write it themselves. They didn’t feel that that was their forte. But would I like to write at least the pilot? So we did and we developed it and people liked it.

And then we came up, you know, to run the series. And I said, well, you know, why don’t I show run this thing? Because I know how it works. And this is something I wanted, you know, I always wanted to do that kind of thing.

And also direct some of it. But it nearly killed me. It was so much work.

And yes, it was huge fun, but incredibly stressful. Filming is, you know, it’s a grind. You’re constantly fighting time, money, the weather, actors getting it right.

And to be stuck with no escape, you know, from right from the day run, writing it to filming it, to editing it to all of that is a huge amount of work. And it was very, it was very stressful. But you went back for the second series, did you? Yes.

Yeah. But also, I think by the end, that was when it was more stressful, because by the time we’d finished filming the second series, we kind of knew that the show hadn’t taken off the way the BBC wanted and they weren’t going to do another series. So once you’ve got that drive and energy taken out of it, it becomes even more hard work.

But it did mean that the last couple of episodes we shot, we just said, look, let’s stop trying to keep everyone happy and let’s just go bonkers. OK, let’s move on now with your next Offcut, please. This is a children’s story called Far Away Forest Friends that I wrote in 2004 and never published.

I am the happiest and the prettiest fairy in the forest. And with one tap of her magic wand, they would forget all about being cross and start dancing and singing and clapping their hands with joy. If anyone was ever bored, then Dingle would sit down on a spotted toadstool, wave her wand and fill the forest with sweet music.

In a flash, they would be bored no longer and they would spring to their feet and dance and sing and clap their hands all day long. And sometimes well into the night. It didn’t matter that their feet might start to bleed and that they couldn’t stop dancing to eat or drink, for their smile would be wider than the river bright that winds through the forest.

In fact, the smiles that Dingle put on their faces were so wide that it sometimes hurt quite badly. The river bright is as much as 45 feet wide in some places. Can you imagine a smile 45 feet wide? That’s going to hurt, isn’t it? But Dingle didn’t care, because it is quite the most awful thing to be bored, isn’t it? Yes, little Dingle brought happiness and joy with her wherever she went.

If anyone was tired and just wanted to sleep in their beds all day long like a silly lazybones, then Dingle would fly in through their bedroom window, sprinkle fairy dust on them with her silver wand and they would jump out of bed with a cry of joy and begin to sing and dance and tidy their room and do the washing up and maybe fix the roof and oh, how merry they would be. And when it came to bedtime, they would see their soft cosy bed with its goose down pillows and its coverlet all covered with a pattern of pretty flowers. But would they lie down? No, they would not, because they would be dancing away and singing like mad and clapping their hands like a lunatic.

Dingle the magic fairy never rested. You should have seen her as she flitted through the forest, bringing happiness and laughter and dancing, lots and lots of dancing, into the lives of all the forest friends who didn’t know what on earth they would have done without her. Which is why it was such a shame when one day she was eaten by a giant toad called Roger.

Now, this is a children’s story that you never developed. How far did it get? I did show it to my people at Puffin, and we talked about it. The idea was that there was going to be a whole series of books about different characters in the faraway forest.

But partly I couldn’t think of another story. Right, so this was going to be a collection of stories. Well, it would be like a little collection of books, you know, like Mr Men.

A lot more text than Mr Men. Well, that’s the thing, but at the time there had been things like A Series of Unfortunate Events, which was a lovely set of little hardback books for slightly older readers, but, you know, sort of breaking down the barriers, I suppose, of what you expect for certain reader ages. But yes, as I say, but partly I didn’t press on, because again, probably something else came up and I wrote another book instead.

But also, and you could see there’s a couple of moments in there that even as far back in 2004, that people were starting to think, and certainly publishers, they have to be very, very careful, you know, about what you can and can’t put in a kid’s book. And there had been a rise in more irreverent books, but… There was a backlash, wasn’t there? Yeah, to a certain extent, you know. What could you not say? What were you not allowed to imply? Well, you know, bleeding feet, someone being described as a lunatic.

The story ends with her, there’s this sort of big fairy tale book that she produces, and she ends up, they free her from Roger the Toad, but then she flies off and gets snapped shut inside a big fairy tale book, and everyone cheers, because they don’t want her back. But it’s, you know, you can’t do that, have that sort of violence and trauma. So, you know, you can have fun.

You can’t have violence in a children’s book. It’s a tricky one, it’s a tricky one. Children are very violent.

I know, but publishers sort of worry about encouraging that. It goes in waves. You know, it’s like what happened, they did a version where they toned down the Roald Dahl books, because, you know, you can’t call people fat.

You can’t call people ugly. You can’t say a woman is a witch. If they’re evil, they start to look ugly.

And things like that, which is all the fun of the books and why kids love them. And you can see why you don’t necessarily want to be saying those things, you know, equating ugliness with evil and old women are evil, whatever. But without that, books can be boring, a little boring and bland.

So, you know, I think there was a certain sensitivity about that when I went, even back in 2004, when I wrote that story. OK, fair enough. I think if I had come up with loads of other stories and ideas, I would have pushed it.

But alternatively, I might go back to it one day and say, well, let’s just try and make this work as a fun little one off. And let’s see what we can get away with. So obviously, if anybody doesn’t know, apart from your fame from The Fast Show and also being a prolific novelist, you’ve written a lot of stuff for younger readers that has been published, but you’re probably most well known in the younger reader space for your novels featuring the young James Bond.

Now, how did that come about? Was that your idea or was it suggested to you? Well, no, it wasn’t my idea at all. It was generated by the Ian Fleming Estate, Ian Fleming Publications, IFP. They were looking ahead to the release of Casino Royale and the whole of the James Bond film franchise being rebooted and refreshed.

And so they knew there was going to be a lot of stuff about Bond. It was also coming up to the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth in the early noughties. And there had been many continuation Bond novels after Fleming, more than he wrote.

There’d been more continuation novels. That had been permitted by the estate? Yes, they’re all commissioned by IFP. They were wanting to remind people where Bond started as a literary creation.

So they were looking at finding, you know, serious, inverted commas, adult authors to write continuation novels, which ended up being the likes of, the first one was Sebastian Foulkes. Then they had William Boyd and eventually Antony Horowitz. But Antony Horowitz had had huge success at the time with his Alex Rider books, which were very much a contemporary teenage James Bond.

Yes, my sons read the whole lot of those. Yes. And so they thought, well, we’ve got the actual James Bond.

We should do our own books about the early life of young James Bond. And really on the back of Harry Potter, kids’ books had become a viable thing. There was money to be made.

Writers were being taken seriously. There was a big resurgence in kids’ reading. And there were various other authors who were doing things.

There was Robert Muchmore who wrote a series, a sort of young secret agents called the Cherub series. Oh yes, we read those as well. Yep.

And so they were thinking, well, we should do our own young James Bond books. And I wrote these four crime books in the early 90s. And I had a fantastic editor working on them called Kate Jones, who ended up working for IFP.

And she was in charge of these new projects. And she suggested that I might be a good possibility to write the young James Bond books. She knew I had boys.

She knew I was a big James Bond fan. And she felt that my writing style, the sort of very stripped back, hard-boiled American style, would work very well with kids because it’s very unfussy and unflowery and it’s sort of straight to the point. And so she approached me and said, was I interested? And I said, God, yes, I’m interested.

I’d love to do that. It’d be the perfect thing to write for my own boys. So I got the gig.

And I had a huge fun writing them. I wrote five of them. But then I thought, if I don’t move on and do something else, that’s all anyone will want for me.

Because they sold really, really well. And I thought, I don’t want to be stuck for the rest of my life working on somebody else’s creation, essentially. Sure.

Time for another Offcut now. Tell us about this one, please. This is another unmade film script I wrote in 2013, based on Beauty and the Beast, called Beast.

She goes up the wide staircase. She sees an open door and walks along the landing towards it. Interior, madame’s room, night.

Bella’s bags are in the old lady’s bedroom, which has been tidied up a little. It is dimly lit by an old lamp. Bella opens the wardrobe and finds that her clothes have been hung up neatly.

She looks around. There is an old-fashioned dressing table with combs and brushes, makeup and perfume, etc. The room is more grown up than her own room at home.

And there is something of a fairytale feel about it. She sits on the bed, takes out her cell phone, starts to dial. You’re as beautiful as your picture.

Bella looks up, startled. The Beast is in the doorway, backlit so that she cannot see his face. He is nevertheless a huge, menacing presence in the cramped space.

I wish I could say the same for you, but I can’t hardly see you. That’s for the best. So, what do I call you? As far as you’re concerned, I don’t have a name.

You will need to give me your telephone. Do you want to come and get it? First, turn off the lamp. Don’t you think you’re taking this anonymity thing a little too far? Turn it off! Bella cringes back, then turns the lamp off.

The Beast steps towards her, a vast, lumbering shape in the near darkness. Your phone is no use to you here. Oh right, I get it.

Spooky old house in the woods, young girl all alone, no signal on her cell phone. The Beast suddenly takes the phone and smashes it to pieces on the bedside table. He puts what’s left of it into his pocket.

Bella stands. Okay, do you want to get this over with then? What? Oh, come on. We both know what this is all about, why I’m here.

What do you want? She starts to unbutton her top. She is shaking with fear, but trying not to show just how scared she is. What are you doing? How do you want me then? In tears? A little girl on her knees with an upturned face? Oh please, don’t hurt me! Or maybe you want me frozen like a baby deer in the headlights? Or do you like defiant? Maybe you’d like me to fight back a little, huh? Maybe make you feel big and strong? Or do you want me to fake it? Oh yes, yes big man, oh my god, do it to me! How do you want me? She can’t keep it up.

She starts to cry. By now, her top is completely undone and hanging open, half covering her naked breasts. You are braver than your father.

Slowly, the Beast reaches out for her. Holds her arms with his ruined hands. She glances down and winces.

You haven’t answered my question. How do I want you? Yes. You would do this for your father? Bella nods, too scared to speak.

Breathing heavily, the Beast leans in toward her. A sliver of moonlight falls across his face. Bella’s eyes widen in horror, then she screws them shut and twists away from him.

With a roar, the Beast flings her onto the bed. She breaks down completely into a mess of tears. When she at last looks up, the Beast is gone.

What a scene. Yes, it’s not quite Disney. No, no, it’s not.

No. And actually, there was another scene that I really wanted to do because it was very funny, but then it became so shocking. And I just thought, no, it’s too shocking.

I think the audience might get quite upset by it because there’s a lot of comedy in this, but there is some really nasty stuff as well. Tell us about it. Yeah, well, my first novel was published in 1991.

It was called King of the Ants. And George Wendt from… Norm in Cheers. Norm in Cheers was over in London working on something.

A friend of mine was working on it. And for some reason, he gave him a copy of this book, King of the Ants, and said, here, George, my friend’s written this. I think it’s really good.

You might like it. And George Wendt did. And he became obsessed by it.

And he got in touch with me and said, Charlie, I really want to make a movie of this book and play the main villain. And I was a bit nonplussed. I said, well, great, let’s try it.

And we tried it. But I mean, that book is, yes, it’s quite nasty. I think many people are surprised, certainly in my earlier books, just they are quite dark.

And there’s a lot of black humour in them. I can’t write things without humour. But, you know, there are elements of, you know, there’s a lot of psychopaths and horror in them.

And as a result, we found it hard to get made. But George Wendt was a very good friend of the American film director Stuart Gordon, who probably is most famous for Re-Animator. And he then went on and did a lot of sort of kind of horror, fantasy, sci-fi stuff.

And his career was going great. And he developed and was about to direct Honey, I Shrunk the Kids when he had a heart attack. Oh.

And as a result, they couldn’t get insurance to make that. And he couldn’t make films over a certain budget. So George Wendt said, well, maybe we could do it with Stuart.

And so we did a film of King of the Ants, which I kind of Americanised. It was all filmed in L.A. and George was in it. And was it called King of the Ants? Can we look it up and see it? It was called King of the Ants.

And it’s just been re-released in a very posh DVD. So it is available to watch. It’s quite full on and it’s quite nasty.

And then later on, he said, oh, I’ve been approached by this movie company to try and develop a horror version of Beauty and the Beast. Oh. So that is how I ended up working with Beast.

And we worked for some time on the script. So it’s a sort of cross between a horror movie and a gangster movie. This big guy has been incredibly badly beaten up and disfigured by these gangsters.

But he’s immensely strong. And he’s a good guy like Beast is in Beauty and the Beast. He’s a good guy, but he’s quite violent.

And I had a lot of fun developing it with Stuart and trying to make it horrific, scary, but also with a lot of black humour. There’s a lot of things in these, particularly in these kind of cheap exploitation movies where someone says, I’m going to stick my hand so far up your ass. I’m going to work you like a puppet.

But then he does. You see, normally in these films, they never follow through on it. But the Beast does.

And so I had a lot of fun with things like that. So it’s kind of its body horror rather than supernatural. And we were developing it.

But I don’t know how much I can say. But I think the company that Stuart was working with, I’m not sure how bona fide they were in the end, because it suddenly all went quiet and I didn’t really hear any more about it. And I don’t know if he went off and made a version of Beauty and the Beast with a different script, but it just stopped and didn’t happen.

Right. Are you ever tempted to be a director at all, considering you write so much stuff? Well, I’d love to. As I said, when I was a kid, that’s what I really wanted to do, was be a film director.

And I’ve directed TV. I directed some of Randall and Hotkirt Deceased. I directed, we did some online fast show stuff, which I’ve directed.

A series called Bellamy’s People, which I directed. So I love directing. And that always was my passion.

But you haven’t done a film. I haven’t done a film. Maybe I should, because, you know, maybe do a cheap horror film.

Because I do love horror. You’ve got enough scripts for it. Short of material, must be said.

Right. Well, we have come to your final offcut. Tell us about this one, please.

This is another pilot for a TV series that was never made. This was from 2020. And it’s a TV series named after the diamond, and it’s called Koh-i-Noor.

Exterior, main road, day. Vikram is walking along, the sounds of the demonstration in the background. He glances back to see Danny Boy, Colin and the thug following him.

He looks up, checking where he is. Makes a decision. Exterior, dead end street, London, day.

Vikram enters a nondescript side street, loading bays on either side. The sounds of the demonstration diminishing. Danny Boy, Colin and the thug come in after him.

Vikram stops, looks around. He can go no further. It’s a dead end.

You’re right. It’s dead. Nothing ever happens here.

Which is why there are no surveillance cameras. Result. Exactly.

Vikram squares up to the three men, still clutching his vulnerable sandwich bag. They can see now that he is tougher and more self-assured than they first assumed. There’s a hard glint of anger in his eyes.

You need to learn some respect. Your country’s only what it is because of what the British Empire give you. I think you’ll find you took away a lot more than you ever gave us.

No. You have a go at our country, but you’re happy to come over here and take our hand out. Most of the things you worship in this country, you’ve taken from somewhere else.

Your language, your monarchy, your music, your cooking. But the way you fight, that is all your own. You what? I’ve seen how you like to fight.

The English way. At a million football matches. He goes into a sarcastic impression of a football hooligan having a go.

That weird, slightly silly way they prance about. Chest out, arms swinging, elbows out. Little ineffective kicks darting in and out, not really wanting to get stuck in.

There’s something of the Monty Python fish-slapping dance about it. If you want to fight properly, you need to learn from filthy foreigners. Well, maybe we’ll learn you how to fight.

Colin shoves Vikram backwards, then advances. And as he goes to shove him again, Vikram neatly sidesteps and performs a quick, intimate yet devastating self-defence move that ends with Colin flat on his back. Now Vikram executes a perfect standing roundhouse kick to the head and the thug goes down.

Finally, as Danny Boy goes for him, Vikram does a balletic double kick to the chin and Danny Boy goes down. Huh, well, same difference. He walks off, his sandwich bag still intact and untouched.

His three assailants lie groaning. Titles. The Diamond.

That’s the cold open, then, of the pilot script. Yes. So Vikram is going to be like an Indian James Bond, is that right? Well, to a certain extent.

I mean, he’s a Secret Service agent and the plot of it is that the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the famous and controversial diamond, is stolen and he is tasked with trying to get it back. And the series sort of follows the diamond as it gets stolen and re-stolen by all the various different representatives of all the various different countries and cultures that claim that the Koh-i-Noor is theirs. So it is initially stolen by a bunch of white van men who are enraged that the British government is talking about giving it back.

But the history of the Koh-i-Noor diamond is fascinating in that it passed through so many different hands that it is actually sort of impossible to say who it rightfully belongs to. And the story involves the Taliban, it involves Indians, Iranians. I was trying to have fun with it.

If it had progressed to a series, I would have had to get in some Indian, at least one Indian writer to work on it with me because it is a multicultural series. And, you know, as with everything I write, there’s quite a lot of humour in it, but it’s a way of partly looking at history and, yeah, and modern politics and geopolitics. It’s the most recent of the offcuts that you sent us.

So that was a long ago, 2020. Is there any chance it might be resurrected, do you think? It’s a tricky one because, again, as I developed it, a bit like the Winston Churchill one, it is a huge, you know, spanning continents story. Budget are we talking about as a problem? Yeah, budget, but yeah, the scope of it is big, you know, because it follows a lot of Indian history and the Middle East and, you know, there is action and adventure through it and kind of reconstructions of the past.

Oh, right. So it’s a big deal. But, you know, it was developed at a time when the likes of Netflix were saying they wanted stuff, you know, they didn’t want everything to be American and about America.

And they were looking at, you know, they are now set up in somewhere like India. They make a lot of Indian content. And so there was a lot of talk of wanting to do series like that.

And this was commissioned actually by an Indian team. And I thought the only way to really tell this story to get away from some of the controversy was to was to put in quite a lot of humour. So it’s a sort of light hearted, a heist movie type of feel to it.

But my problem is I keep developing things which are big and expensive and extravagant because that’s what I would like to watch. But I have to write to my strengths of what I think I’m good at. I can’t write a sort of Sally Wainwright domestic drama, which, you know, she’s brilliant.

And there are many other rights like that. I can’t write that. I try and write something like that.

And, you know, before I know it, you know, an alien’s arrived. They’ve gone back in time. Half the cast have been shot in a gruesome manner.

I like genre stuff. So I leave the other stuff to those who do it much better than me. And, you know, we hit the same problems that you get on a lot of things where the Indian side of it tried to raise more money for them.

They said, oh, it’s too English. And the English side said, oh, it’s too Indian. And as I say, well, it’s kind of both.

It’s half and half. It’s telling the story of the story of India and it’s telling the story of the British Raj and it’s telling the story of contemporary nationalistic politics. Well, you’ve worked on so many projects, you know, high profile, big budget.

Some of them. Is it any easier pitching projects now or do you still get a similar kind of rate of rejection for TV anyway? It’s not easier at all. And I’m not the demographic that TV companies and streamers are looking for.

They want the new young thing. Often the new young things find they can’t deliver and they have to hire a lot of old crocs like me to help them out. But coming in as the face of things, you know, it’s hard.

It’s just it. Same here. Same in the States.

You know, showrunners in the States who massively more successful than me have made huge shows. You know, you read interviews with them. They say, I can’t get anything off the ground anymore.

I don’t know what’s happening. And when the streamers sort of burst onto the scene, it felt like there was a sort of golden age. It was a gold rush.

It’s like suddenly there’s all this money washing around. They’re making all this stuff so much more content and everybody was jumping on it. But they came in and they had a different approach and traditionally what you would do to pitch something, you would make a pitch document which outlines over a few pages what the thing is.

And then you would if they were interested in that, you would then knock up a sort of series breakdown and they would commission things based on that in the UK. In America, they had that hugely ruinous pilot season thing where you would have to make the whole thing fully budgeted and then they would make a decision. So the Americans have moved away from that.

They’ve got more sensible. But in the UK now, because the streamers say we will only look at a script, we won’t look at a pitch document. We need a script and a full Bible for the series, which you will then have to go in and pitch to them.

It means that all these production companies have taken on the burden and the cost of commissioning full length scripts, which inevitably you get knocked down because they start saying, well, we can’t really afford to pay you your full work. We’ll pay you this. And if it gets made, we’ll work it into the contract that you get the full thing.

So it’s kind of knocking everyone’s prices down. And there’s a massive over commissioning of stuff by the production companies. Yes.

And they’re having to pay for the burden of that. So a lot of them now are under the umbrella of larger media companies who’ve got more money, but it’s wasteful and it’s wasteful of people’s time and talent. So it’s better for the Americans because they are now making decisions based on scripts.

But it’s worse for the British because you’re having to write scripts. So that’s why I’ve got so many of these things is because I get paid. OK, to develop them.

But, you know, having to come up with ideas and characters and whole series, and that can be quite draining. And you go and pitch it and then you see what they’ve actually made and how different it is from what you were pitching. You think, OK, I can see why they made that and I can see why they didn’t want what I went in and pitched.

And you can tell within the first minute or two, really, whether they are actually interested. So, no, nothing is easier. And you talk to anyone on TV, they’ll say it’s a real struggle.

Production companies are really struggling. And yeah, you know, who knows what happens? But, you know, when things don’t move, I just go back and write another book. Well, we have come to the end of the show.

How was it for you? It was marvellous and it was great to be reminded of some of these old projects. Yes, you have certainly sent me a lot of stuff, more than I usually receive and of very good quality as well. Well, I thought you might whittle it down and say, oh, I want to do these five or whatever.

But yeah, but then there was, oh no, but if I do this and talk about that, it’s a total headache. Thank you, Charlie. Well, it’s lucky I didn’t send you everything.

I was very surprised that of all the offcuts you sent me, such a small percentage was actually comedy, comedy sketches. Considering how much comedy you have worked on in your career, there were no rejected fast show sketches. Why was that? Well, there probably were fast show sketches that we wrote and never used, but I don’t have any of that stuff on my computer because when I started writing a fast show, I had an Amstrad and it was all on floppy discs.

I don’t know where they are and whether you can still read the things. So yeah, some of that stuff was printed off. But I mean, in the end, most, you know, it would be like the odd sketch of a character where we wrote 10 sketches and only wrote eight.

And there would be a reason why we didn’t do the other sketches. And they would probably only be one line or two lines long. So it’d be quite short to actually demonstrate, I suppose.

Yes. So really, yeah, the stuff I wrote for Harry’s show, there were a couple of other bits I wrote for that. But that seemed to be the one that kind of explained itself best.

Also, I would have loved to read the pitch document for the fast show, how you actually described it written down in words. I don’t suppose you still got that. That does still exist.

That is… Oh, does it? Yeah, that’s in the archive. And also the actual, you know, the initial pitch document scripts. Oh, right.

Which, again, was hard to do because obviously they’re short sketches and you need to read three or four of them before you get it. So it didn’t fully reflect how the finished series was, but it was an idea. So if anybody wants to see it, they have to go to the University of East Anglia.

Yes. And knock on their door and say, could I look at Charlie Higson’s archive, please? I mean, one day might do some kind of a script book. But it’s interesting, you know, on paper, there’s not much to them.

It’s like one page. But if that’s the page that made everything happen, then it’s of historical significance. Well, yeah, as I say, my archive is there.

So if anyone wants to go and look at it, I think you just arrange in advance what you want to look at. You can go and have a look. Well, we are now at the actual end.

And all that’s left for me to say is Charlie Higson, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your offcuts drawer with us. Well, thank you for having me on.

It’s been a marvellous trip down memory lane. The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Charlie Higson. The offcuts were performed by Beth Chalmers, Shash Hira, Kenny Blyth, Chris Kent, Keith Wickham, Noni Lewis and Nigel Pilkington.

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.