DAN MAIER on The Format Challenge That’s No Laughing Matter

One of the big problems I have, and I’m writing virtually anything is format paralysis. That I kind of have an idea for something, but I don’t know whether it should be a book, a play, a film, a radio piece, uh, an interpretive dance, an animation. And I end up sort of not writing things ’cause I can’t work out what they should be.

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 episode, my guest is Dan Maier , whose myriad writing credits span all genres of comedy, television, radio, film, print stage. Just to pick out a few. He was a core member of the writing team for the entire 11 year run of itvs BAFTA award-winning series, Harry Hills TV Burp. He collaborated with Charlie Brooker co-writing, the satirical police procedural.

A touch of cloth for Sky and contributing to Brooker’s other shows. One of the films he’s written on is Sasha Barron Cohen’s The Brothers Grimsby. He’s created comedy and drama on BBC radio with two series of his own comedy, life on Egg, a comedy drama series co-written with his brother Mark Mayer called Trapped and his own debut radio drama, the Not Knowing which was nominated for a Writer’s Guild Award.

The list of his credits runs to literally pages and further includes among other things. Books, newspaper articles, the TV soap opera, Emma Dale, and even game shows with his own creation quizzes for Channel four. A very busy man indeed. Dan Maier, welcome to the Offcuts Drawer.

Thanks very much. I’m exhausted just listening to that.

So many projects you’ve been working on so many formats. What’s the most recent bit of writing you’ve been doing? Or indeed are you still working on?

Uh, I’ve just written totally on spec, written a horror film. Oh. Which is something I’ve never done before. But, um, screenplays, I’m quite enjoying. At the moment, it’s the sort of form that I thought was too big and intimidating to ever attempt. And then I co-wrote screenplay with a very talented John Niven.

Oh yes.

And that was, that was really enjoyable. And we’ve subsequently, um, done something else that’s kind of started as a telly thing. I’ve turned into a screenplay and then I’ve written another one. Nothing has yet made it as far as the screen.

Mm-hmm.

But that’s quite an enjoyable process. So that’s the probably the thing I’ve been doing the most. Right recently. Uh, horror though. I’m looking at your other credits. I don’t see any horror. So why are the leap? No, and I’m not particularly a horror fan, so I thought it was quite interesting. You know, I’ve seen a few horror films, but I’m not steeped in it, so I thought I’m going in there with kind of naivety.

If I’m writing kind of very familiar horror tropes and cliche, then I dunno that I’m doing it. So I’m sort of going in quite innocently rather than second guessing myself though, I quite like the idea that I’m. Sort of trying to write a genre that I only have a superficial knowledge of. And you’re writing this one on your own, are you?

Yeah. Yeah. That’s very brave. If you are writing a project on your own about a subject, you are not that clued up about that. That’s that’s confidence. That is, well, it’s all stories, Laura isn’t, it’s all stories. Oh, it’s so true. You are so right. Um, 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?

Okay. This is a radio sketch that I wrote for a well-known double act in 2013, and it’s called Shop Bell fx Door opens, shop Bell, Tinkles prominently Street Sounds Door Shuts Street. Sounds cut out.

Good morning, sir. Can I help?

Yes, I’d like to buy a shop bell.

I’m sorry.

I want to buy a shop bell. A bell That Tinkles when you open the door. of a shop.

I’m afraid we don’t sell those,

but you’ve got one on your door.

Nevertheless.

Look, I’m not an idiot, okay?

No.

What I mean is this isn’t a situation like that joke. That joke where a man goes into a pet shop and says, I’d like a fly, and the assistant says, we don’t sell them. And the customer says, well, you got one in the window.This isn’t like that, right? He’s clearly an imba seal. That’s the joke. But this is a hardware shop.

It is.

Which specializes in shop fittings.

It does.

So it’s reasonable of me to expect you to sell Shop bells. I’m not just saying it because a shop bell rang when I opened the door.

I understand.

I mean, if this were a fishmongers or a nail bar, my argument would be untenable.

Yes.

But it’s not. It’s a hardware shop

which doesn’t sell Shop bells.

What about the one on the door? It’s not for sale. I thought it might be some kind of display model.

Well, as we don’t stock shop bells, a display model would be at best, misleading.

Sell me the bell.

Do you even own a shop?

No.

Then why do you want a shop bell?

I’m an audio engineer. I record radio comedy and drama. I need a Shop Bell sound effect to establish that certain scenes and sketches are set in a shop.

It’s a bit old hat, isn’t it?

What do you mean?

Well, shops don’t really have shop bells anymore. It’s one of those slightly archaic radio conventions that no longer records to real life. I’m not sure of anyone under the age of 40 would even understand what the sound signified.

I mainly work for Radio four.

Oh, fair enough. But in any case, you don’t really need a Shop Bell to establish that a scene is set in a shop.

What do you mean?

Well, let’s say that instead of this conversation happening in real life, it was happening in a sketch set in a hardware shop.

That’s difficult to imagine, but I’ll try.

Immediately after you came in, I addressed you as sir, and you explained you wanted to buy a Shop Bell. It would’ve been readily apparent to anyone listening that this was a shop. There would’ve be no need for a shop Bell.

Then why have you got one?

Because if you remember, this isn’t a sketch, it’s an actual shop, and I wish to be alerted to the arrival of customers.

But if this is a real shop and not one in a sketch, it undermines the other strand of your argument about shop bells having become archaic. If shop bells only exist as facile scene setting devices in fictional shops and not in real shops, perhaps this shop is in a sketch after all.

Oh my God.

And can I have a packet of three quarter inch wood screws and a modest deadlock, please?

I don’t know anymore.

Um, if I hadn’t seen the character’s names in the margin, I think I would’ve guessed who this was written for because the voices are very clear. But confirm it for the listener who this was written for.

That was written for Mitchell and Webb. Ah, um.

Yeah, they’re very Mitchell and Webby kind of words, I suppose. As soon as I realized that, I thought, of course it is. Of course it couldn’t be anyone else. Did you do a lot of writing for them?

I have done no writing for them whatsoever, funnily enough. Oh, I, um, I know this was from, I think this is when they’d been on the radio, been on the telly, and then went back to radio, if I remember rightly.

Mm-hmm.

And I’d never written anything for them. And, um. Was commissioned to write a few minutes of material and this was among the things what I wrote for them then.

Mm-hmm.

But it didn’t run. So, uh, yes, it’s a curio in that it’s a thing that didn’t go, but also for. A very talented pair obviously, that I’ve, that I never have actually otherwise written for.So it’s kind of my, my go at writing in those voices, which was kind of enjoyable.

But you say that they commissioned you to write to some stuff. Did you write some other stuff and this is the one that didn’t get made? Or this, the stuff that you wrote that didn’t get made?

I think this is the stuff. So I mean, I think I was, for those that don’t know the way it works or used to work anyway in radio and some telly writing is that you would get commissioned by minutes if it’s a sketch show quite often, rather than somebody saying write five sketches, they will say, write five minutes, or they’ll commission you to write two minutes for an episode, or 10 minutes for a series or something like that.So I think I had like a five minute commission. Uh, so I think I wrote two or three sketches of which this was one. It’s interesting. I find that, um, hearing it now, I kind of think the problem I have is I get very attached to things and I’ve, you know, I’ve listened to other people on your podcast, Laura, who sort of hear their old stuff and they’ve completely forgotten about it and they sort of laugh it off as veia.

Mm.

And part of my problem is I get very attached to stuff and I don’t really let anything go. And I still think things that I wrote 25 years ago might have a chance. Mm. Uh, so in a way I’m more relaxed with this ’cause this is so specifically. Written for, um, David and Rob. That I sort of feel quite content that it’s just sort of, it’s not a thing that anybody else is ever gonna make.So I sort of feel,

well, I dunno. I mean, I think you could, I think you could get another sketch team doing it. It’s just the David Mitchell’s particular delivery style works very well with this script. But I don’t think it could only be David Mitchell’s delivery style. And obviously Rob, uh uh, Rob Webb doesn’t have quite as much character work to do in this bit, but I reckon you might even be able to get women to do it.I’m, I’m just saying what I know.

Crazy magic women. I know just as a women are allowed to work in shops.

I thought you say comedy.

No, no. Did Yes. Yes.

But all I’m saying is that I thought that this sketch could stand alone, could be performed by any half decent comedic pairing. Frankly,

thanks very much. I mean, I also like it ’cause it’s so absolutely radio, because obviously it’s, you know, yeah, it’s deconstructing the form and all that kind of stuff that you, it wouldn’t really work anywhere else.

So do you find it restricting or freeing when you’re writing in someone else’s voice?

Uh. That’s a good question. I probably haven’t done it that much in a way that’s quite so pronounced as this. I mean, I enjoyed it here. I found it sort of quite freeing and inspiring that once you have that character, that kind of David Mitchell pedantic character, that was enjoyable to do because he takes his time over every part of an argument.That’s quite enjoyable to do as well because you don’t have to. Self-edit quite so much. That particular character. You just lay out an argument very sort of clearly and patiently, which is quite enjoyable in terms of writing and other people’s voices. It’s a funny one because I suppose the, you know, the person that I’ve wrote for the longest was Harry Hill.

Mm-hmm.

And he has a very distinctive voice. But once you’ve written for him for a while, you are doing it subconsciously, I suppose. You’re not sort of really thinking about it. Mm-hmm. And also the brilliant thing about Harry is you write a joke in your own voice in a sense, and he’ll take it and make it into his.

And I think the best performers will probably do that if you’re talking about writing for writer performers. Mm-hmm. You don’t necessarily have to write so perfectly in their voices because I think if they’re good and they’re on it, they will take something you’ve done and finesse it so that it is in their own voice.I can’t really think of too many instances of writing for a very distinctive voice.

You write for Charlie Brooker, though he’s quite different to Harry Hill and you, you wrote, I dunno if they were gags or whatever, that you wrote specifically for him, but he was the one performing them

Well, yeah. For the wipe shows and the um.The review of the year shows that we did a couple of those on wipes. I think it’s similar that you, you have an idea, but he will, he’ll rewrite it in his own right voice. I think he’s not someone who just sort of sits there and you put a script in front of him, which is the great thing about people like Charlie and Harry that um, you know, they’re not just sort of mannequins that are just parroting what you say.

Oh, otherwise known as actors,

they’re actually helping you by improving what you say. Yes. Um, yeah. Okay. Yeah. But, um, yeah, they, so they, you know, they make you look good as a writer because they’ll, they’ll take the best of what you’ve done and, and then finesse it and put it in their own voices, which I think is the best kind of people to write for, really.

Right. Okay. Well, time for another off cut. Now tell us about this one.

Uh, so this is a post written in 2004 for a blog, and the blog is called The Diary of fw, Cleve Gentlemen.

My aunt Mr. Gallion, informs me expressly desired that her carriage be drawn by four lama, a gentle reader, I confess, a degree of despair.Those of you blessed with both a fair memory and the courtesy to have studied prior entries in this journal will doubtless associate my deceased relatives remarkable post-mortem demand with the time described by her to me, and thanks by me to you spent amongst the people of the Andes. You may see the employment of the llama in the funeral procession as a touching symbol of the close and kind relationship fermented betwixt my aunt and the pipe playing squat faced children.

She so ly described in her letters, however, scrutiny of her papers in the days following her death revealed how I, and by unfortunate association, gentle reader, you were led by Aunt Perpetua on the journey of such fictive extravagance. I can scarcely bring myself now to relate the truth of the affair.

Aunt Perpetua did indeed visit the land of the inker, but unwillingly her steamer capsized on route to Bueno Aires, and she was washed up on a beach in Peru, bitten by an antler crab. She became delirious in the care of local villagers with whom she stayed for just two days before a hospital ship. The ascension collected her and the other survivors are made for port in the Argentine.

Bad weather denied them. However, and the extraordinary decision was made to sail for home. Seven weeks later, the exhausted crew and gravely ill patients arrived in South Hampton. Unfortunately, when words spread to the harbor authority that the ascension bore amongst its cargo were touring North hum and Cricket 11, all suffering with typhoid permission to disembark was refused and the ship was forced ahead for Ireland.

Where such concerns over public health are of course less apparent. Still delirious and now touched by Typhus. Aunt Perpetua was committed to the county Sanitorium in Cork, where according to the crumpled practitioner’s notes recovered from her papers. She not only developed a complexion of sallow skin and angry pustules, but sank into a deeper and more unpredictable delirium.

By turns the notes record, she believed herself to be a Manchester Baker’s wife named Joyce Carter. Hands valet to Arch Duke, Gregory of West Failure, and a Bevel Edge, Sheratan Mahogany side table. It was presumably as the last of these that Perpetua suffered a twisted knee and bruising to the ribs as the consequence of an incident involving another patient, a Mr.

FL, who labored in turn under the unfortunate conception that he was a large vase of chrysanthemums.

It feels like it should be animated. It feels like the, all the mad activities going on there, I could just see like a little cartoon.

Oh, that’s interesting. I never thought about that, but that kind of goes to a, a problem that I have. I find a thing in writing. It’s interesting you should say that. ’cause one of the big problems I have, and I’m writing virtually anything, is format paralysis. I kind of have an idea for something, but I don’t know whether it should be a book. A play, a film, a radio piece, uh, an interpretive dance, an animation or, and I end up sort of not writing things ’cause I can’t work out what they should be.

Wow.

So, um, it’s interesting you should say that ’cause that’s not a form I’d really thought about for that, but yes.

Well, it is a, a memoir. Yes. I was gonna ask you why it was a blog and not a book. ’cause it, it’s a very, very diary of a nobody very Pooter. But is it blog just ’cause we live in the 21st century?

Well, the time it was written, it was, I think that’s kind of one of the things that hopefully is funny about it in this case is the medium that I chose to write it in. I sometime in the early two thousands, sort of discovered the blogging community and started reading a few people’s blogs that would just be.

As they were. They’re just sort of daily journals of different stripes. And so the way that that worked is, you know, you would write a blog, you would leave comments on other people’s blogs, and by doing that they would hopefully read yours and you build up this sort of network of people who write and read each other’s stuff.

And I found that quite interesting. And I tried it as myself, I think. I think I wrote a few blog entries just sort of everyday quoted in bits and pieces, but I didn’t have the discipline to stick with it. And at the same time, for some time, I’d been collecting books from secondhand bookshops, books of Victorian and Edwardian, thought generally written by men with too much money and too much time on their hands.

There’s a sort of strain of these books you’ll find of people doing experiments, people having theories, people just writing about. Whatever they fancied writing about, because they sort of wanted their names presumably to go down in history for a thing in the realm of science. Um, but yeah, I just found it a fun way of doing it.

And so I wrote I think two or three stories each broken down into, uh, a series of entries I shall continue in my next entry kind of thing. Uh, and then. Being me, I, again, I lost the discipline to carry on doing it, but I, I think at that point I thought, well, maybe this should just be a book. And, uh, it is one of those things that I, I do think about revisiting because kind of like it’s had something in common with David Mitchell.

Again, it is, it’s writing in character. I mean this time, you know, for a cr, completely created character, but it’s a similar type of enjoyable verbosity where you can write at length, but it’s still choosing the language in a nice, specific, enjoyable way. But it’s long-winded. It’s verbose, but it’s, I hope, elegant as well.

Well, I think it is. Okay, well time for another off cut. Now what have we got? Okay. This is a radio sketch that I wrote in 2010, and it’s called Five Live Trailer. This is a trailer for five live. I’m saying some things and so am I. There’s no real reason for us both to be here. It could just be me. Oh, it could just be me.

But this way it sounds like more effort’s gone into making the thing. Than if it was all one person saying all the words. We usually make it sound like I’m in the room and I’m in the room as well. But sometimes we make it sound like I’m in the room and I’m on the phone, and then other times like I’m in the room and I’m on the phone.

But we never make it sound like we are both on the phone because that would mean. There’d be no one in the room then who would feed the cat. Often the things I start to say are finished by me. Sometimes he finishes them in the room and sometimes on the phone, but occasionally, instead of finishing each other’s sentences, we just repeat what the other person said, repeat what the other person said.

The person in the room says the thing, says the thing, and the person on the phone repeats it, repeats it. Until they start to sound like an annoying child ing child. We might jazz things up with a clip of commentary from the motor racing or the horse racing or the people racing, but it doesn’t really help.

Perhaps they’ll use some of the money they save on six music to make five live trailers sound a bit less. Tossed off. Tossed off, but probably not. Probably not. Shh, you shush.

So your original description of this, when I asked you about what genre it was written for, you said it was written for your own amusement with you as a performer. What were you hoping to do with it? Eventually, I, I put like, put it on YouTube or something. Probably it’s just an observation about five live trailers really.

I just, I started noticing that these tropes about. The trailer’s on five live and I, I just ended up writing this. I didn’t think, I never really had it in mind that, uh, it was beyond a radio sketch or anything. I really just did it to please myself and thought it would be good if I could, um, record it, but I didn’t really have the technical wherewithal.

Um, but I think you can feel the sort of rage when you, when I hear it back, I can sort of hear that sort of fury. Fury, uh, the frustration of having to listen to that kind of writing. I mean, not really. It’s just that sort of, those tropes, once you, once you notice them, you can’t unno them, that that’s what five live do, that they’ll have a bit like this and then they’ll have a bit like this and that.

They haven’t really, they haven’t really changed. I think what struck me about it is I, I used to, I spent five years writing radio commercials in the 1990s. That was my one proper job. Ah, and that was really good training. As I say, that’s really good like bootcamp for writing radio sketches because you are having to write something in 30 seconds, 40 seconds, and you have to sell something at the end of it.

And you’ve gotta be really focused and there’s no time for indulgence. I, I was lucky enough to work for a company that wanted to make radio advertising more creative. Basically, so it was a good opportunity to do creative work. So radio is kind of your springboard into comedy. Is it? Before getting your job in radio, were you kind of always a bit of a a comedy geek?

A comedy fan growing up through school and all that sort of thing? Or did it just happen because you had to be witty and grab people’s attention within the radio ad sort of spectrum? I was always, I was never a comedy. Geek, I would say. I’m not one of those people that is, has an encyclopedic knowledge of every episode of Eastbound and Down, or, you know, knows who the grip was on Steptoe and Sun and things like that.

I, I, I’m not that guy, but yes, I was like writing, I always enjoyed comedy and I was like writing comedy since I was at school. Me and my friend Nick Brownley used to write sketches in the six form common Room. Oh. Which, if I could find, if they were digitally and it’s on a digital form, I would’ve sent you some of those.

Laura, but I dunno where they’re in a, they’re in a lockup somewhere in a notebook from the, from the 1980s. Did you perform them or did you just write them for No, we just sort of wrote them for our own amusement, I think. And then after I left university, I got the opportunity to, to write radio ads, which was a great way.

You know, I wanted to, I knew I wanted to write professionally and this was a, a really good opportunity to do so that a lot of people probably wouldn’t think of or wouldn’t get. And as I say, I was lucky enough to be writing for a company that wanted their ads to be fun and creative and to use kind of celebrity voices on some of them rather than the sort of circuit voiceovers and that.

So that’s. That was nice. That’s a, you know, opportunity to work with actors and comedians and things like that. But then how did you pivot from writing for straight ads to actually actively being a comedy writer? What, what was the connection? Well, I did that for five years, as I say, and one of the. ’cause we were sort of good at it and we won a lot of awards.

We, we started writing some ads for, this is slightly confusing for the radio advertising bureau. So there’s a body called the radio advertising bureau, which was kind of the body that promoted ad uh, radio as an advertising medium to businesses. And, and they themselves as a way of promoting radio for advertising.

Had, um, monthly awards. So I wrote the ads that announced the results of the radio advertising bureau best out of the month. Uh, and we had Johnny Vaughan. Oh, uh, voicing them, right? Yeah. And this was in, uh. 1997 I think. And it was just before he started working on the big breakfast. And he liked the stuff that I was writing and I’d come down to London.

I was still working in Bradford then, and I’d come down to London once a month and do a recording session with him. Uh, and he seemed to sort of like my sense of humor. So when he got a job on the big breakfast. They’d never used comedy writers before. It had always been producer written before Johnny and Denise started doing it.

Uh, but then they decided to use writers and he recommended me, he as a, to have a trial writing on the big breakfast, uh, which I did. And then that sort of became a longer term thing. And from there I wrote on another stuff. So I, I have Johnny Vaughn to thank for my entry into the world of comedy writing, which was quite the, the baptism of fire from going from.

Writing radio ads to getting up at two in the morning, be it standing in a cold porter cabin in bow at quarter past five, going through the day’s newspapers, having to write a 15 minute newspaper review that was gonna be broadcast three hours later. That was quite, that was quite a pressure first. It’s quite good to have that as your first job in, in comedy writing, I think.

’cause after that, most of the other stuff seemed like, uh, you know, a breeze. Yeah. Um. On now let’s have your next off cut. So this is a theater piece that I wrote in 2009, and it’s called The Plagiarist.

Channel five are looking for a precinct. Drama says Harriet typing. Ian Emerald leans against Harriet’s window, forehead pressed to the glass and gazes at the street below. What the fuck he asks is a precinct drama. For a few moments, he thinks the tapping of keys is to be her only answer. It’s a drama.

Harriet eventually replies set in. Don’t say a precinct. It’s something like the bill or casualty, something with a central location that can generate, you know, storylines infinitely good. Christ well says Harriet. Finishing the email to one of her more successful clients, confirming the format rights she’d negotiated for him on a new hidden camera TV show.

Give me something to flog and I’ll take it to whoever you like. Ian leans back from the window leaving a small, greasy arc unnoticed on the glass. TV is dead. He informs his agent. Then write a play. Ian sits down opposite Harriet taking a script from her desk. Fuck that. He looks at the title sheet. Hot Wash by Mark Litten.

Hurst. Let me guess. Is it a sitcom set in the Lare by any chance? Harriet says nothing, and Ian turns the page. Scene one, interior Laundre fucking bullseye. Who’s Mark Hurst? It was sent in on spec. She says he’s looking for representation. Good luck with that, says Ian. Dropping the script on Harriet’s desk and sending a pencil rolling over the edge, at least says Harriet, showing no interest in recovering the pencil.

He’s fucking written something. Back in his flat, Ian waits for the kettle to boil and stares blankly into his small courtyard garden in which things grow equally unfettered and unencouraged. He’s written nothing today. The meeting with his agent while essentially redundant, nevertheless constitutes work.

And so he could now go and watch a DVD unencumbered by guilt, taking his mug of tea into the living room, though Ian reflects that, he wrote nothing yesterday either or the day before. In fact, as he sits down and Absently manipulates the legs of the incredible Hulk action figure recently given to him by his friend Jerry, as an ironic 40th birthday gift and purchase it on the handle of the hot mug.

He tallies his professional achievements of the last three months. They amount to two days work on a doomed game show pilot for quite generic sketches with no specific recipient in mind. And the bullet points for an idea for an outline, for a treatment for a sitcom on the floor. A pile of the previous weekend’s, newspapers appears to be connected by a cable to a wall socket.

Ian removes the papers revealing his Sony via underneath. He opens the laptop, which has optimistically been left on standby for five days, and G logs onto the internet. Too many distractions at home, Ian needs a change of scene. He Googles Lake District Hotel BMB, and persuades himself that as a means to an end.

This too constitutes work. In fact, all in all, it was turning out to be quite a productive day.

Well, this, I’m guessing it is very true to life. I, I, I, just hearing it back now is so exposing. I didn’t realize quite how old biographical it was until I heard it back. I would say though I have never owned a Sony bio, so it’s not, oh, yes. In that case, you’re completely cleared. Uh, but no, I’m God almighty.

I, I mean, that’s. Yes. I mean, obviously there is a, it has a fantastic little microcosm of everything. You, if you wanna be a writer, listen to this. This will tell you everything you need to know about the life of a writer. Well, a writer for hire. Yeah. You’ve just summed up the entire existence. But I’m, I’m guessing this is true, not having been a, a writer for hire, but it sounds like it is absolutely true.

Is it? There is a lot about that experience that I, it is very true to life. I think. Yes, I’ve, I know I’ve obviously tried to make the character a bit more monstrous than I would be to hide myself somewhere. I think you always would always do that if you put anything autobiographical in any character. I think instinct is to exaggerate so that you know what is actually true.

To you is I loved the bitterness though. The bitterness. This conversation with his agent and this sort of like sort of almost snarling through gritted teeth about other people and fuck that. I hope that’s the exaggeration bit as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think I’d be that much of a prick, but obviously there’s that sort of internal voice, which is.

Fury impotence is, mm. I didn’t think he sounded like a brick. I think he sounded completely believable. There’s voiceover variations of that and active variations of that. I just heard that and went, yeah, that would be me if I was a writer. Completely. But it was written as a theater piece. Yes, I know. It’s kind of weird, isn’t it?

Because he just listen to that and think, well, this is obviously a book. Um, yeah, I did write the theater piece. I think I was inspired by sort of long form. Storytelling pieces, that sort of things that Ben Moore would do, and those kinds of really great gripping things where there’s just one person on stage.

But I thought, well, the idea here was that there would be, it would be that kind of thing. Mm-hmm. But there would be two narrators. And the two narrators are telling. Different stories and we cut back and forth between the two stories. And then the two stories seemed completely unrelated, but they then collide.

Yeah. And that was the form of the thing. And then as it goes on, it becomes a lot more deconstructed and meta as. The narrators, one of the narrators kind of breaks away from part of the story that he’s telling and kind of says, hang on, this doesn’t make sense. Points out sort of narrative inconsistencies in the story, and the whole thing kind of breaks down.

Oh, very Breton in a very indulgent, meta deconstructed way. So that was kind of the idea and that. What I was talking earlier about format paralysis is probably a good example. I wrote this for theater, but I think I, and I read the whole thing back. It was about two and a quarter hours, so it would be about two and a quarter hours of two people on stage reading out what is basically a short story.

Well, that’s a play. It is, but when it’s basically nothing to look at. That’s true. I think I asked a very lovely Jeremy Dyson of the League of Gentlemen. He read it. And he said, you are, you are just kidding yourself. You’ve written a short story here. There’s no point pretending that you haven’t written prose.

’cause that’s basically what it is. And that’s probably true. But again, it’s that thing of, well, what do you do with it? Well turn it into a book. A book of short stories or a longer story. No, it could be a, a novella, I suppose. Uh, maybe I revisit it and do that with it, but, um, but I quite like the deconstruction element of it and that I did think, again, could it work actually on the radio?

It might be a fun way of Yes. Playing with a form again. And it is, is kind of, it gets quite silly as it goes on, and just in terms of the structure, right, in that these two narrators start arguing amongst themselves or discussing and taking apart the narrative and pointing out the flaws in it. And then I, as a character, as the writer, Dan Meyer, sort of come out of this.

Audience of the theater and go on stage and start demonstrating with them for ruining the performance and say, why? Just stick to just read the stuff out that’s on the page. And then of course one of them rightly says to me, yes, but you’ve, you wrote this as well. You wrote. You interrupting this performance, why are you pretending that this isn’t part of it?

Do you really think this audience think they’ve all come on the one night where everything broke down and the, and the writer came outta the audience and I will, you know, and it sort of disappears up its own asrs slightly then where I’m sort of saying, don’t point that out to them. Your your you are.

Why are you constantly lifting the curtain so that they can see behind it? Yeah. And he the, and the guy says, but you wrote that as well. You, but you had me say that. ’cause it’s, you know, and it sort of becomes this a bit Yeah. Daft. And one of them spoils the ending of the play and I have a go at them for doing that.

Uh, but I kind of enjoyed it. Mm-hmm. So, yes, it’s a thing that in that sense would be. Harder to make work actually on the page. Mm-hmm. ’cause of the deconstruction, unless it turns into some sort of bs, Johnson deconstructed short story, I think stage or possibly radio. Yeah. Might be an interesting way of doing it.

Yeah, it’s a peculiar thing. ’cause is it, say there’s a, there are pros touches in there. It’s written as prose and I think written quite well as prose, but it, it then falls apart in a way which is not conducive. Which is practical. Yes. Uh, so the, and the narrative stuff is probably more laborious on stage or on radio.

So it, it weirdly sort of. It’s like some weird hybrid beast. Well, it feels like you’ve got two projects in there and you just separate them. The, the detail of the writer’s life and the other characters could be a book, but you’d have to obviously truncate it into a play. ’cause like you say, it would take too long Yeah.

To, to explain it all. But then the theatrical convention and the fourth wall breaking and all that stuff is very, uh, you can break the fourth wall, whether what you call in radio the fourth. Glass booth. I don’t know, but you can, you can break that in radio play. Sure. Yeah. But then, yes, I’d say the narrative bit of it is the tricky bit.

Yes. There’s so much there. I can see why you’ve got the issue of, gosh, where do you start? Which bits do you won’t quite go in any box, which is why the box it goes in is a file on my computer where it sits. There’s dust. Right. Well, let’s move on to your next off cut. Now this one is what? Uh, so this is from a children’s book called 30 Planets One Barbecue, which I wrote around 2020.

Can you hear that? Ask Luca Pie. Lila couldn’t hear that. Whatever that was. She could only hear the angry voice in her chest trying to get out. The voice that spoke when she felt upset and started telling someone why, but only inside, not out loud, which felt sore. They’d flown for nine hours. The voice was saying, adding some basic swears because being inside it could get away with it.

Nine hours, and for what still. Lila thought better to feel angry than utterly terrified. She didn’t think that then, though she thought it a few minutes later, once she’d actually been utterly terrified and could more easily make the comparison. No, if you’d asked Lila Pie then standing in damp and total darkness, she would’ve told you her immediate plans involved stomping around after her dad, mainly looking at the muddy ground with some tutting, possibly a bit of eye rolling, and definitely being unimpressed with anything he tried to show or tell her.

She was kind of looking forward to it, and with all that, there was simply no room for feelings like utter terror. But now that her dad had asked her about the that, that she couldn’t hear. Well now that, that, that, that her dad had asked her if she could hear was louder. She could hear that distant thunder, but not coming from the sky, coming from the ground.

And it was getting closer, louder and louder. And then it stopped sounding like thunder. Oh, crud said Luca. No, not thunder. Feet, 400 Maddy feet. We’re in the middle of the hog. No course, Lila shouted, but could hardly hear herself over the sound of galloping. Suddenly she felt herself being pulled. Luca had her arm and was running towards row of lights.

Run. He shouted, letting go again, Lila run. And now very suddenly their lives were in danger and utter terror had very much jumped to the top of her things to feel list. But look, you are probably thinking it would help if you knew what a hog nail was or where Lila and Luca were. Or who Lila and Luca were or who Ampersand I, Amand and Ampersand uca were because you’ve somehow got hold of a glitchy e-reader version or who Jenky is because you are the kind of total toolbox that has to flick to the end of a book before they start reading.

So stop doing that and let’s go back a day.

So this is from the children’s book. How much of it did you actually write? All of it. Oh, um, I wrote an entire thing maybe during lockdown. Pre lockdown. It was locked, downy kind of time. I think I had this idea, and again, the running theme is things going through different versions. I mean, all of them were a book in this case, but different kinds of a book.

Mm-hmm. I’d had the idea of writing an Encyclopedia of Planets, a big thick book, and every page there would be a, a. An illustration of a planet on it. And on the facing page there would be a description of that planet. So they would all be made up planets, but there would be perhaps sort of 300 of them or something and, and they would each have different qualities to them.

And this, it kind of goes back to, I think it’s a thing that I always enjoyed as a kid, and I assume kids still do, which is. Different iterations of a single idea are quite exciting. And what I mean is, I suppose the first example I can sort of think of from childhood would be like the Mr. Men. Mm-hmm. So you read Mr.

Bump and you understand the world and you understand the idea. And then you see there’s another thing called Mr. Tickle. And you go, oh, I see. That’s exciting. And then you see, all right, each one of these things is gonna open with a description of their house, and this is what he looks like. And once you’ve established that as a thing, it seems like an obvious thing to say, but I think there’s something really exciting, particularly as a kid.

About what’s the next one gonna be? What’s the next one gonna be? What’s the next thing that fits into these parameters in this world that I understand? Yeah. And I think there is an instinct for that, which is somehow really exciting, which I wanted to kind of revive in a way, except in this sense it would be a bit different ’cause it’s all in one book that you would turn a page and see another planet.

And you could find your favorite planet and you could have this book for years and maybe find a page in it that you’d never noticed before because you dip in and out of it. And there was something sort of exciting about that. Mm-hmm. And I just kind of liked that idea. So initially it was gonna be that and a very heavily illustrated book, but then I had the idea of actually having a narrative running through it.

So I had this idea for this story and I had the story on one side and the sort of list of planets on the other, and I cut down the list of planets and then managed to weave the story through the list of planets. So it’s become a story about this girl, Lila Pine and her dad, Luca, going on a quest which takes in all these different planets.

So it’s very episodic. Yeah. Travel loggy in a way. And there is an overarching idea to it, but you can also sort of dip in if there’s a particular planet and all these different planets have different qualities to them and a different vibe to them. And some of them help them in their mission and some of them are kind of detours.

And so I just started writing and then by the time I’d finished i’d, I’d written 92,000 words. Oh, wow. My friend, the, the very talented children’s author, Nadia Sharine said, yeah, you can’t have a 92,000 word book for middle grade readers. Yeah. And she said, why don’t you make it into a trilogy? I thought, well, that’s quite good idea.

So I basically then broke it down. And put some sort of connective material between the bits and so entirely on spec. Nobody having asked me to do it. I, I’ve, I’ve written a trilogy of children’s books and Have you submitted it to anyone? Uh, yes. I have yet to find, uh, a literary agent who will take it on.

That’s where it’s at. But yes, it’s very much a thing that I haven’t, um. Written off that I would really like to do something with, weirdly. It’s another thing that would work as an animation. Mm-hmm. Um, probably like an animated series, but that’s not a world I know a huge amount about. So this is just a sort of one-off project on its own.

You’re not changing direction now, slightly that way. Well, mind you, you’re now doing horror film as against the children’s book. So this is yet another branch of your tree, so to speak? Uh, yes. I’d like to try and be a. Jack of all trades, um, a Dantes, uh, trying to muscle into other people’s territory. Why not everyone else does?

Why not? Um, no, I, I didn’t necessarily see a future as a children’s author, although it’s a thing I would love to do if I had an idea that was good enough. Mm. But this was just a one idea. I think these characters could come back. But yeah, this idea just sort of took on a life of its own slightly. And, um, yeah, I really like it.

Um. I think there are a lot of, because of the nature of it, you’re hopping from planet to planet and each planet has its own characteristics. There’s a, there are a lot of ideas packed into these books and, uh, sort of fun visual ideas. Um. With all the different qualities that these planets have, and I think, um, yeah, it would be great to do something with it.

You probably just need to speak to someone who knows about the clear demarcations between the various children’s genres. You know, whether it would work for an animation or, yeah. Even a play, maybe a sort theater play with some imaginative staging maybe. Sure. Yeah. No, it seems a very inventive children’s theater, but that’s interesting.

Yeah. You just got all these different type of formats. I know you’re making it worse. Sorry about that. Yes. Ignore anything I have to say. Right. We’ve come to your final off cut. Tell us about this one, please. This is an episode from a proposed comedy anthology series. Uh, series was. It’s gonna be called the Function Room, and this episode was called Lookalikes and I wrote it in 2008.

Exterior, a night sky. We hear a man’s voice off camera. We are professionals, artisans, craftsmen, and women. Pan down to the exterior of an average pub on the high street of an average English town. We pan pass the pub, sign the rifleman, and across to an upstairs window over which we hear and we’re being treated like cattle.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m asking you to look inside yourselves and find the strengths interior, the function room. As the man speaks, we pan pass the optics behind the bar and reach Sandy the prematurely, aging and balding. 30 something barman. Sandy stands a GOG apparently transfixed by the speech. To find the courage to stand up and demand the respect your talent deserves, we pan down past the glass.

Sandy is absent, mindedly drying past the bar, front to the floor, then across to a pair of Gordy Woman shoes. Over which the voice continues. We’ve been lied to, cheated, kept in the dark. Over the next, we pan up over a camp over the top Be Jeweled costume, complete with Feather Bower. Keith West thinks he can get away with it?

Well, not anymore. What makes him think he can treat us like idiots? We come to rest on the speaker’s face. He is dressed and made up as Dame Edna Everage. It’s time for each of us to say, Hey, enough. I’m tired of being undervalued. Bottom up food chain, I’m an artist and I’ve got my dignity. For the first time we see Dame Edna’s audience from his point of view, seated in rows are around 50 men and women.

They are all dressed as famous people. The front row includes Elton John, wg, grace, and Hitler. We can see the likes of Victoria Beckham, Andy Warhol, Churchill, and the Blues Brothers. Tableau. After five seconds silence. There is a rhythmic clanking, buzzing sound cut to behind the bar where the glass washing machine has started up and broken.

The silence cut to sandy expression as before. Uh, yes. We see an arm has gone up in the audience. It belongs to a crocodile Dundee lookalike. What do you mean cheated? Oh. How long have you been with the agency? Chum? Four months joined from Faces Inc. When they got shut down. Well, if you’ve been with Keith for four months, he’s probably been ripping you off for three.

Usually gives a month’s Grace. A Princess Diana lookalike in the row in front of Crocodile Dundee turns to speak to him. Shut down. Is it Face says Inc. Yeah. He charges 15% for starters. What did Faces charge? 10 ne back sits a small man in his early sixties. Yassa Arafat. No wonder they shut down. No, no. We were infestation.

I was quite ply with Mel. Hi. Yeah. Nice girl. 10% book alikes. Charge 12. Jackie Anderson charges 12. Ian, you were with lasting impressions, weren’t you? We see a Winston Churchill lookalike trying to light a cigarette lighter. Oh yeah. What was their commission? Tens Posh Spice sits behind Crocodile Dundee.

Infested with what? 10%. Again, big deal. He’s upfront about it. You know how much he takes when you sign on white, but then he charges a signing on fee.

I was very worried about this piece that we couldn’t do justice as an audio piece because obviously a lot of the comedy depends on the difference between the way a character looks, who they’re dressed as, and whether they’re even a believable lookalike and how they sound. Um, but it’s quite visual, isn’t it?

It is. It is a particularly visual piece. No, I, I was. It was there. Uh, I thought you, you definitely did it justice. Ah, now you said this was part of a series called The Function Room. Yeah. I know you wrote that. Was that not made into a series then? No. There was a pilot that was broadcast. Mm-hmm. Not this episode.

Presumably not the lookalikes, not this episode. So it was. I think it might have been a Comedy Lab, channel four Comedy Lab. I think it was part of that. Oh, yes, yep. Yeah, I’d had the idea of, I noticed there were sort of drama anthology things that were set around a particular place or those sort of Jimmy McGovern things.

Um. Was clocking off. Is that one of those? Yes, yes. That’s one. The street or whatever. Yep. Where you would have different stories that had some linking theme, but they were all individual stories. Yeah. And I noticed that no one had done that in comedy. Really? It didn’t seem to be a thing in comedy. Mm. And it felt like you had opportunity to do.

Single half hour things that had some sort of thematic link. Yeah, so I had this idea of the thematic link being the function room, being this room above a pub. And every week a different group of people would hire that function room for whatever purpose, and that felt like a good fun. Conceit. Yeah. And also I thought you could then have some recurring characters.

So Sandy, the barman appears every week. Yeah. And also in the pilot, we cut away to a couple of barflies at the bar downstairs who are just sort of having bar chat that has no relation to what’s going on Upstairs. There’s a sort of light relief. I thought they could be a running thing. Yeah. And so I wrote this episode, another episode, which was about a neighborhood watch meeting mm-hmm.

Where they all meet up to discuss the fact that someone has been throwing compacted balls of human feces through people’s windows. Uh, and that was commissioned and that was made as a pilot. And I had a, in, uh, the cast was fantastic. It was like the, the late. Paul Ritter was in it. He Oh yes. Great. Um, re shear Smith Simon Day playing one of the, the Barflies downstairs and, um, Kevin Elden.

It’s incredible. It, they were really great and it didn’t get commissioned as a series annoyingly. The sort of regret I have about it is we filmed it in front of an audience. Oh. ’cause they really wanted a studio audience thing. And actually, I don’t think it was at its best as a studio sitcom. Yeah, uh, I think it was a, should have been an on audience thing, but you know, I got to make a comedy program at BBC TV Center with an audience coming in and laughing at jokes.

So that was sort of one of the most incredible experiences of my professional life. That was very exciting to be able to do that. And then it just, um. Yeah, I, I had absolutely no recollection that I’d written a second episode. Obviously, as part of the process, I, I knew I’d sort of sketched out some more episodes, but actually until we did this, I had no recollection that I’d written another one, obviously, about these people from this lookalike agency meeting up.

So, I mean, it’s, the thing that was the back of my mind that I should say is if there are any inside number nine fans listening who are shouting at their broadcast devices. But that’s just inside Number nine. Did that, this was six years before inside number nine, so I hadn’t ripped off the idea of, of linked comedy one-off half hour things.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, at that time, really, I didn’t think, I don’t think anyone, I don’t remember anybody doing it. The thing about Inside Number nine, apart from it, is comedy, but it’s supposed to be horror and it is very much built around the two of them. So, yeah. Um, it’s, it, it is a very, very specific. Series, whereas this is, is much more general, doesn’t seem to have any specific rules apart from the fact that it’s set in that particular venue.

Yeah, yeah. So I, I don’t see how it would clash, especially now as number nine is no longer. So it could, but even if the B, B, C or whoever don’t have the budget for this sort of thing at the moment, again, radio. Maybe not the lookalikes thing because it is quite visual, but, um, as a series, yeah, there’s definitely ways of, of doing that.

I think as, um, on the wireless, uh, I mean that is, I I kind of did something similar, which you mentioned at the, at the start with my brother, we did write a sort of linked anthology comedy. Thing called trapped, where that was the conceits. Every episode is somebody trapped in a situation, either physical or emotional or, so yeah, I’ve done something similar thematically in, in that sense or structurally right in the past on radio.

And, um, it was quite good fun. It’s generating, generating the ideas is obviously the difficult bit when you’ve got a sitcom, when you’ve got your characters and you’ve got all your stuff, I suppose you’ve got some stuff. Pre-printed on the page in a sense. Yeah. It’s harder when you’re starting from scratch each time, which again is a sort of incredible thing about how they managed to maintain that quality on inside.

Number nine. Yes. When they’re starting with a blank page every time. But yeah, I had some other ideas for this, but, um, uh, the lookalikes thing was, I, I’d love to have seen that. I’d love to actually visually see these characters in their costumes, their comedy. The script was very funny, but to actually have that in context.

With, you know the people. Sure, yeah. Dressed up as your dam Mena. Average is Hitler. Hitler’s sitting. It’s been a lot of cool for Hitler lookalikes. Hitler. Never. Not. Funny. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show. How was it for you? Fun. Uh, it’s, it’s good. It was fun. I, with the reservations some this stuff, but it’s kind of like I say, I kind of don’t let stuff go very easy.

So I can’t be sort of, uh, pretend to be sort of embarrassed by my IL or something. It’s, I still like this stuff, you know? Yeah. There was nothing in there to sort of go, ha ha ha, weren’t you a rubbish writer in those days? Now. You’re terribly kind. You’re terribly kind. No, it is, it’s true. Well, those are the pieces you chose to give us, so Yeah, well that’s, yeah, I suppose it was quite self-selecting in that sense.

I left out the worst stuff, uh, the things like the, the FW cleave, the, you know, the Victorian diary. I kind of enjoy listening to that, and that’s a thing where I think where I could. Maybe it’s something to revisit. Mm. And yeah, hearing the stuff just exists is of its time is kind of interesting as well.

Mm-hmm. So, yeah, no, it’s very enjoyable. Felt very indulgent, but it wasn’t, doesn’t feel like it’s my indulgence, so it’s fine. So I, I thank you for that. From listening to that stuff. Is there any advice you’d give a younger you knowing what you now know? Um, the answer could be no, by the way, you’re allowed to say Not really.

No, I think write more and actually try and do something with it, because I think the fear of the sort of lack of confidence in things meant that a lot of stuff was written than I felt I’d scratched an itch and it would go into a draw. Mm-hmm. And I think with a lot of this stuff, I know didn’t make enough effort to actually pitch stuff.

I’m not one of nature’s pitches. Mm-hmm. I’m very much under promise and overdeliver. Whereas I think as a writer, probably just commercially, the reality is you, you sell your ideas and then you worry about actually trying to write them. And I would tend to be the opposite of that, that I think I’m better at that now.

But certainly at that, at the time I wrote most of this stuff, I would just think, well, I’m gonna write this thing just to see if I can write it. Yeah. And then having done that, I would probably lose confidence in it. And as I say, put it in a draw, whereas. Actually being committed to writing something and then being obliged to write it and obliged to show it to them is probably a, a healthier way forward, even though it’s a bit more exposing and a bit more scary mm-hmm.

Than this little solipsistic writers Garrett, that I probably inhabited during most of the, the early noughties from when most of this stuff comes. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, your offcuts have been very entertaining and it’s been fascinating talking to you. Dan Meyer, thank you for sharing the contents of your offcut straw with us.

Thank you very much.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shaven with special thanks to this week’s guest. Dan Maier, the Offcuts were performed by Emma Clarke, Chris Pavlo, Jake Yapp, Nigel Pilkington, and Helen Goldwyn, 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.