DAVE COHEN

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer. Welcome to 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. My guest this week is Dave Cohen, writer, comedian, Edinburgh Festival Perrier Award nominee, and founder member of the Comedy Store Players. Dave has been a constant presence on the British comedy scene for more than 35 years. He’s written for some of the most successful TV shows, including Have I Got News for You, Spitting Image, BBC sitcoms Not Going Out and My Family, and dozens of radio shows, including News Quiz, Dead Ringers, Sunday Format, and the award-winning 15-Minute Musical, which he co-created. After spending 10 years as a standup, he became a full-time comedy writer in the mid-1990s, but continued to perform and in 2000, made the series Travels with My Antisemitism for BBC Radio 4. He’s written nearly 100 songs for the multi-BAFTA-winning BBC hit Horrible Histories, written two books on how to write comedy, and in 2015 began his podcast, Sitcom Geeks with James Cary. Dave Cohen, welcome to the off-cut straw.

Oh, thank you very much. And I’m surprised, I don’t know if there’s going to be any time left for me to talk. Who is that guy? He sounds amazing.

I’ve not had another podcaster on before. You’ve been doing it for five years. I’ve not been going yet five months. I hope you’re not going to judge me too harshly.

Oh, don’t worry about that stuff. I actually am a complete technophobe. And in fact, we are Sitcom Geeks, James Cary and I, but James is definitely the podcast geek. I’m terrible. I’m a bag of nerves before every episode that we record. Not because of the content. I just think something will go wrong technically and it’ll be my fault.

So let’s start with the basics. Do you need to have anything in particular around you to be able to write?

Funnily enough, this is not as stupid as it sounds, if I say a pen and paper, which is something that happened to me about a year ago. I was writing my first ever novel, which we’ll talk about a bit later, but I’d gone away for a couple of days and didn’t take the laptop and suddenly had some ideas and I was on a train and didn’t know what to do. So I didn’t have anything at all. So I had to get a napkin, paper napkin from the buffet car and borrow a pen from someone. And I wrote about 300 words of my novel on this napkin. And I realized in the process of doing it, and I was sort of scratching around here and changing bits, by the time I came to type it, I realized this was almost like a sort of third of draft. And I thought, God, writing with pen and paper. This is fantastic. And I love doing that now. No distractions. You know, when you’re working on your laptop, which is the same place that you can check your email and argue with someone about Brexit on Twitter or, you know, all this stuff. And it just, it’s really freed me up. And I can actually quite famously work anywhere, anytime. I always like writing on the tube, or I can just sit anywhere and write. That’s always been a very helpful skill to have, I think.

But it’s a very good idea. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms.

It’s the future of writing, Laura.

I think for me would be the cutting and pasting, because you read through it and you go, oh, do I want to say and or but? And then, you know, by the time there’s so many things crossed out and scribbled over, that I can never read what I’ve written. That’s why I love computers for that. But then, of course, you’ll write about distractions.

That was the great revelation, was because you get so used to cutting and pasting and editing that, you know, when you look at that clean type that you’ve written, it’s kind of, you think, oh, well, that’s fine, but you’ve probably missed something that, you know, you might have written something in the moment and just kind of erased it. Whereas sometimes when I’m reading back on my pen and paper notes, now I find something that I’ve kind of scribbled over and I’ll just think, oh, actually, no, that’s all right. I can use that and or I can move that bit over there. And there’s lots of lines. It looks like a sort of Leonardo da Vinci sketch pad. You know, arrows pointing everywhere and lots of doodles.

That sounds like a quite interesting and sage advice.

Give it a go.

Yeah, I might well do that. Anyway, let’s get started with your first off-cut, shall we? Can you tell us what this one is called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Yeah, it’s actually a sketch from a radio pilot, a sketch show that I wrote in 2004 called You Are Here.

Thanks very much for coming, John.

No, that was great, John. Thanks, John. Thanks. We’ll be in touch, John. Well, he was rubbish. Capital of Australia, Ramsey Street. Geez, he wants to be in a pub quiz, he could barely answer his name. Where’s my pen? I bet John bloody nicked it.

Shut up, Trevor. I thought he was all right. I mean, I don’t think he was too bad, do you, Professor?

Current affairs, sound, geography, average, pop trivia, weak. It’s all right knowing Madonna, but what if Girls Aloud come up?

He was good at maths, though.

We don’t need maths, I do maths.

What we need is leadership, dedication, inspiration.

And someone who doesn’t mind skipping one night of Big Brother highlights on a wet Wednesday night.

Who are you?

I’m the man who knows everything.

Prove it.

That pen you thought John nicked, it’s on the floor there.

Where are the Basque separatists from?

Spain.

Correct. What is Barbie’s full name?

Barbara Millicent Roberts.

Right again, handsome.

What is 111 squared?

We don’t need maths, I do maths.

12,321.

I knew that.

Who wrote the importance of being earnest?

Oscar Wilde.

Footballs.

Jules Rimet.

God, you’re good.

Faye, please. Who wrote?

John Steinbeck.

All right, smarty pants. Name the three steps to heaven.

You find a girl to love. She falls in love with you. You kiss and hold her tightly.

Oh. Well? You are so in.

Not so fast. This pubquist team is a democracy or it’s nothing at all. Professor?

Well, you are so in. Ha ha ha ha.

Start from the beginning, just explain what the project was.

So this was originally a TV pilot in 2001, which was a little bit ahead of its time because the idea was that we had a multicultural cast. And so the cast was, you were actually in it, Laura, if you remember correctly. But it was Gina Yashere, Omid Jalili, Luella Gideon, Jason Byrne and you. But the idea was, okay, this is a sketch show with multicultural scope, but none of the sketches are about race. It’s just a sketch show. And hence the title, You Are Here. They’re sort of playing on the arrow and you are here, something. But it was also these people live in this country, get over it. Which 20 years ago when we came up with it, it was still kind of a reasonably lively kind of issue. So rather than try and attack people who disagreed with that, it was more an attempt to sort of say, okay, the arguments are over now. These people are here and deal with it. So we did things like the pub quiz. We had some stuff about a local council. I think I remember The Man Who Knows Everything. That was Jason Byrne. And then there’s a sketch that happens later where the husband comes home and finds the wife and the man who knows everything is in the wardrobe. And the husband comes home and he finds him in the wardrobe. How long have you been sleeping with my wife? Since 13th of March 1968. That was something that’s so ridiculous. That was, we didn’t get a radio pilot. We didn’t get a TV pilot, of course.

Do you know why? Did they give you any idea why they didn’t like it?

We had a few kind of problems in the making of it. It was all right. It wasn’t sensational. And I think it just, we kind of lost our way a bit. Paul McKenzie, the writer who I created it with, we had a vision for it, but then the BBC had other ideas about how they saw it. And we were kind of new and naive and just thought, oh, we’re making telly. This is the BBC. They must know what they’re talking about. So we’ll do it. And I think it just became one of those sorts of things that it lost the sense of what we felt it should be. And it was, you know, it was okay. I think it had some really great stuff in there, but sketch shows, you know, they are always incredibly hard to kind of get them right. I think they just thought, okay, well, we’ve had a try. You know, we’ve ticked a few boxes by making the pilot. So that’s it really. And I would never ever say, oh, well, it was just because they couldn’t handle the idea of this multiracial cast. But I think there is a kind of problem at the BBC and it’s still a problem 20 years on from that, which is that they do want to have more diverse people, but it’s a bit of a kind of box ticking thing. It’s like, well, we tried to do that and it didn’t work. Okay, let’s move on. I don’t get a sense that there is like a sort of overall policy. And I think that was the problem at the time. There was a guy who was championing us was Paul Jackson. He wasn’t involved in the day to day running of the show, but he got us the pilot. And he of course was the man who pioneered the young ones. And you know, he got Lenny Henry on mainstream TV and things like that. And he was really good, but I sort of never really felt, he didn’t feel to me like he was running a BBC policy. It was just, oh yeah, Paul wants to do that. Let Paul do that. Great. We’ve made a pilot, got Jeannie Yashere, and I’m a Jellily in it. So, you know, we’ve done what we can to try and get more non-white faces on TV, et cetera.

Right. You never learn. Well, these things happen, don’t they? Yes.

Yeah.

Although if it was on now, of course, probably would be picked up, I would think, wouldn’t you?

Well, I’m not sure because sort of quite soon after that, more shows came in and people like, well, in fact, Goodness Gracious Me had already happened. And that was very much a kind of, this is a show pretty much about, you know, it wasn’t about race, but that was a kind of a strong theme. And the real McCoy before that. But I mean, because people like Sanjeev and Meera were becoming sort of breakout stars and nominated as well. So they started to be in more shows. And so it became less of a kind of, oh, we have a token black person in our show. It became, oh, this is Omid Jalili’s latest show, or this is Sanjeev Bhaskar’s latest show. And so it was happening really, I suppose.

Let’s move on to time for your next off-cut. Can you tell us what this is?

Yes, this is called In Loving Memory. And it’s a novel that I wrote when I was 14. And the reason I know that is I found it looking through my old stuff. And at the end it says, I finished writing this on 25th of June, 1973.

We’re all equal in death, Alan replied cynically. And Leonard felt that his high status had been somewhat deflated. Your credentials don’t matter to me. What was this? He was still Leonard Squire, in mind, body and views. He had his same golfing sweater on, his same drainpipe trousers and even his same socks and shoes. The same pen was in his pocket. And yet his surroundings felt like something totally new. He felt very much like asking exactly where he was. Where exactly am I? he asked. Janice, show the gentleman to the machine, sighed Alan. For the first time in this weird place, Leonard felt happy because he loved fiddling around with machines. Ever since he’d mucked around with the inside of his television, he had had a craving for gadgets, switches and buttons. This machine with a cardiograph, an oscilloscope, 17 switches, 23 buttons and 8 levers, however, could only be operated by Janice Gates herself. Janice switched on the mains, set up numerous circuits and pressed la pièce de résistance, a button which proceeded to make amazing noises. And suddenly a pair of headphones popped out. Put those on, please, said Janice sweetly. Very well, was the reluctant reply. The machine began talking, as if in letter form. Dear sir, stroke madam, what I have to say to you may very well shock you. You may have realised by now that you are dead. It is my duty as a machine to detail you with your position here. You are not in heaven, you are not in hell. These two words constitute an earth type myth, which needs to be exploded. You are dead. You are in the English death country. Heaven, or whatever you wish to call it, is one long road. On either side of the road, you will find blocks of buildings. Each man is put into each block according to his job. So there are therefore more blocks for, for example, packers than architects. On the other side of this road are the blocks containing their wives. This is an infallible method for patching up divorces or separations. You will now proceed to pick up the microphone on your left and you will give me the correct information when asked. Name, Leonard Squire. Job, architect. Age, 64. You may now take your headphones off. Thank you.

So, there are so many bits in that that just made me laugh. It’s such a sweet little piece.

A lot to unpack there, I think, isn’t it?

Yes, I feel like I ought to ask you about your childhood after listening to some of that. Do you remember writing that?

What I remember was that I was obsessed with architecture. I really wanted to be an architect. And one of the reasons was there was a guy at school and his friend of mine and his dad was an architect. And I just thought this guy was really cool and amazing. And then a horrible story, but there was a really bad fire at a place in the early 70s. A lot of people died. And this man had designed the building, this man that I knew. And I went to see him 50 years later or something. I said, you know, I really want to be an architect. What advice can you give me? He said, don’t be an architect. It’s terrible. It’s the worst thing. But I discovered that you had to be very good at maths to do it. And in that moment, I knew that I was never going to be an architect. But yeah, I used to love kind of designing rooms and things. You know, I’ve completely forgotten all of this until you just asked me the question. Even having re-read the book, which made me cringe there. Quite apart from the slightly dodgy sexual politics there, and the husband’s all a one in. There’s a little bit of that, yeah. It sort of reminds me now, listening to it, of The Good Place. Ted Danson’s character is an architect, isn’t he? He’s sort of created this universe. And people are being dead, it’s not enough. I think I was obsessed with death, really, and I don’t know why.

Well, the heaven and hell thing, is that some kind of religious, were you brought up quite religiously?

I was brought up with a fairly orthodox Jewish upbringing. Of course, we don’t have heaven and hell, but I went to a school which was very sort of Christian school, so there’s a lot of heaven and hell comes out of that. And although we don’t have heaven and hell, we have good and bad kind of drummed into you. You mustn’t be a bad person. I was a bit of a bad person, I think. I was a bit naughty. In what way? I was a bit of a rebel, really. I was cheeky to the teachers. I smoked, actually, and got caught. I know, shocking. They were all in them days.

That was quite a serious crime in those days for young people listening, by the way. It was a big deal. You might get suspended or expelled.

It was quite funny. I was given a 500-word essay that I had to write on the dangers of smoking and cancer. This was in the early 70s when people hadn’t made the connection, apart from science people, and it was a science teacher who caught me. But yeah, I suppose I was a bit of a rebel. I grew up in a very provincial Jewish upbringing and very, very sort of claustrophobic, but it was also very sort of moral. And so in order for me to kind of justify the fact that I wanted to get out as soon as possible, I had to know in my mind that I wasn’t an evil person, that actually I had good reasons for wanting to break out. And I think I did, probably.

So as a child, you were fairly creative, or was this a one-off? Did you do a lot of writing? In between your smoking?

Yeah, I did. Again, something I’d completely forgotten about. But I’ve always written songs, song lyrics, and a little bit of music, but mostly songs. And in fact, I do remember the song that I first wrote when I was eight years old, which went something like, Nobody loves me. Oh God, I’m so embarrassed just remembering this.

Interestingly, that does bring us nice and neatly into your next off-cut, talking of your songwriting career. Can you tell us a little bit about this one?

Yes, this was a song, as well as the kind of being obsessed with wanting to escape. I did have self-esteem issues in my teen years. I had sort of quite a low. But I always found that comedy was a way out of that. And I wrote this song soon after I’d written the novel about the heaven and hell. And it was a song about me. And we had a show at school. We put on a kind of charity show for Oxfam or something. And this is the first time that I ever performed in front of an audience. This was a song. I wrote this, yes, in 1974. I was 15.

I’ve those precocious virtues that attract girls at the dance. And in my dreams, you’ll find Paris, the centre of romance. I’ve been through all the pages, read all of the books. There’s just one thing that’s lacking. And of course, you’ve guessed, it’s looks. I was a bouncing baby, 18 pounds to be precise. When mummy first saw me, she thought that she’d been pregnant twice. As they held me up to slap me and caress me upside down, imagine their surprise and fear, for I was right way round. The face that launched a thousand ships was Helen’s, that is true. The face that sunk those thousand is now looking out at you. Remember though that crocodiles are not such sexy creatures, unless they’re worn as handbags which bring out their special features. The Lord God made us all, they say, and that’s how showbiz goes. At least like you, I’ve got two eyes, two ears, a mouth and nose.

It was a very upbeat song, and it kind of…

Oh, was it?

It sounds like a kind of serious poem there, but it was a sort of… And it got big laughs as well, so that sort of launched my performing career, really, that song.

That gave you a taste for it, did it for audience approbation.

Oh, God. I mean, you know, when you sort of go in front of an audience for the first time and you say something and they laugh, it’s just like, why did nobody tell me about this, you know? This is it.

But this song doesn’t have a title.

I can’t remember the title. There was more to it as well, actually. And I just couldn’t remember the rest of it. That was the only bits that I could remember.

And so you were singing that on stage. Were you playing guitar?

Yeah, yes. Basically, I always wrote the words first. And then I sort of taught myself how to play guitar. And I learned just enough to teach myself to write some really basic songs, very sort of Bob Dylan style, almost, you know, three chords, and that was it. And in fact, I don’t think my guitar playing improved from 1974 through to 1994, which was when I stopped performing stand-up. And I’d used my guitar for 10 years at the Comedy Store and Jonglers and all those places. I never really developed as a music writer. So all my songs are basically funny poems with sort of not very imaginative tunes.

You were a punk though, haven’t I got that right?

Yeah, I was totally swept away by punk. You know, punk really paved the way for alternative comedy. You know, if it hadn’t been for punk, I would not have had a career as a comedian. I’m absolutely sure of that.

You. Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a podcast like this. And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. But you actually did work for a bit, or you were a bit of a mover and shaker in the music world, around about that time, weren’t you?

Yeah, I was living in Bristol in the 1970s. I was a student there. And then we had a sort of jokey thing, which was in 1978, the BBC changed the names of all the radio stations. So Radio 4 used to be called something like the Home Service, I think, and Radio 2 was the Light Program. And they changed it, or they introduced Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4. And we, for a joke, and this was around the time of Rock Against Racism, we set up a thing called Rock Against Radio Wavelength Changes, and got a few bands together to play this gig. And off the back of that, we set up this thing called Wavelength Records, and we were terrible. We had a couple of quite good bands, but then the guy who I was running the record label with, he was obsessed with Genesis, which was not a thing you admit when you’re a punk, but what happened was Peter Gabriel had left Genesis, and he lived in Bath, just down the road from us, and he’d set up this recording studio. So we went and we recorded all our stuff at Peter Gabriel’s studio, which bankrupt us completely. But the guy I was running this with got to meet Peter, and sort of befriended him, and I left at this point, and I went on to become a journalist elsewhere. But this other guy managed to persuade Peter Gabriel to take an interest in world music, because he already had an interest, obviously, but Peter had the interest, but this other guy just said, well, let’s put on a festival of world music. And so out of Wavelength Records, this thing, WOMAD, was born. And I’d already left, as I say by then, but about a week before the first WOMAD festival, another guy who worked with the company said, oh, Dave, would you like to come to the WOMAD festival? We just need a bit of help. I said, yeah, okay, that’d be fantastic. And little did I know that they already knew that the festival was gonna go bust because they haven’t sold enough tickets. There was a rail strike and they weren’t gonna sell enough tickets. And they knew they were gonna lose a lot of money. The only way that they could get round it was get somebody who didn’t know how bad things were, i.e. me, and put me in charge of giving money to the people not knowing that the money I was giving them wasn’t worth the check it was printed on. So I was kind of walking around this festival for two days paying all these acts with these checks and gradually learning that actually, oh, this is gonna go really, really badly. And so at the end of this festival, going round giving people money, people threatening me and take my knee cups out and all this kind of stuff. And then at the end of the whole thing, I was sort of sat calmly in the little booth with Peter Gabriel’s accountant. And he said, okay, this has been a complete disaster. We’ve lost quarter of a million pounds. Peter’s gonna have to sell one of his houses. Dave, you’re probably gonna go to jail for fraud for five years, blah. And obviously that was the bit I heard and nothing else. Oh God, you know. So I went back to my work on the Monday morning, having spent this weekend at this festival, thinking I’m gonna go to jail. But then I was saved. My saviour was a man called Phil Collins. Phil Collins said to Peter Gabriel, okay, so what is this quarter of a million? All right, let’s organise a one-off Genesis reunion gig at Milton Keynes Bowl. And they did that and they made all the money and they made a bit of money for themselves as well. And I was spared jail by Phil Collins.

Phil Collins saved your ass, so to speak. That’s a peculiar but interesting claim to make.

Yes, it is. I always felt really guilty because obviously being a comedy writer in the 1980s and the 90s, Phil Collins was the go-to gag really for everything. So even as I was doing gags about Phil Collins, I had this dirty secret that actually I owe Phil Collins, my freedom, really.

Let’s have another off-cut. Tell us about this one.

So this was a book that I started, which was like a sort of comedy book. I suppose it’s called Slops, A Portion of History. That was from 1983.

Walking through Piraeus one day, I chanced upon Socrates and begged his good time to discover where to for he was bound. The great philosopher raised his head, his gentle features shining with tranquility and replied with succinct clarity. I’m off to Beredemus’s. Would you care to accompany me? Honored by this request, I hailed a winged chariot and we sped forth to the house of Beredemus without further ado. A maidservant ushered us in and we were informed that today the great Beredemus would muse upon the state of the nation. Anxious to discover his views on this vexed subject, I begged his opinion on the use by lower citizens of arms. But he seemed more interested in examining the contents of his nostrils, excavated by the second digit upon his left hand. Relax, young man, he bellowed. There are a thousand days and nights to ponder such imponderabilities. Today, I may proclaim that the bearing of arms is a good thing and a young blackguard may seek to terminate my existence with such. Or I may oppose the bearing of arms, then find myself in the far beyond being attacked by a lion with only arms to protect me. So, relax, a toss will not be rendered by any human participator in society for my preachings. Will you require chili sauce on your Donner kebab? During our past, I was graced with the good fortune to have recounted to me a wise and worldly fable by the great man. This garnished pig’s intestine with cream and sorbet pickings brings to mind the ancient tale concerning the pauper and the chicken leg and bread crumbs, he recounted. A lowly pauper was walking amid the thoroughfares when he has spied in the distance a lowly chicken, desperately picking at the few bread crumbs scattered around the courtyard for sustenance. Unable to contain his own great hunger, the pauper rushed across the courtyard, snatched the chicken by the throat and proceeded to consume the animal, taking care to pluck the meat off the bones. There was a brief silence as the gathered guests waited with bated breath for the great orator to continue. You see, if only he had thought to douse with the bread crumbs before consuming of it, he would have encountered a meal of considerable relish far superior to that of which he partook. Truly the words of Berendimis were the words of a master among men.

You didn’t finish this then?

I don’t think I did, or if I did, I did and just didn’t do anything more with it. So it was one of those books that you sort of see in somebody’s toilet that they got for Christmas, basically that sort of thing. The idea was to have cartoons with it as well. So, but I was working during the day as a journalist and I would sort of come home and just write a thousand words. I was really, I was so desperate to get away, you know, that I was doing whatever I could do to get away, I think.

Was it around this time that you started doing standup?

Yeah, I think what happened then was that the Young Ones was like a huge success and I knew them through various ways. And I was working in Pontypridd and they came and they did a gig in Cardiff. And it was incredible. It was like, they were like rock stars. And I was just amazed. And I went and chatted to them afterwards and they said, oh, come and join us for a meal. So I went out with them for a curry after this gig. And they were just saying, oh, you gotta come to London. You must come. There’s all these gigs, there’s all these places. And they gave me a list of all the names of places where there were clubs. These were places that they used to play and then they become big TV stars. So they stopped. So I just thought, oh, I saw that I’m gonna do that. I planned to leave and I worked out what to do. And I got really, really lucky because when I moved to London at the end of 1983, there were all these gigs, but there weren’t enough comedians to play them. So my generation of standups were able to be not very good, but we could learn on the job. And so, you know, they were just grateful for anyone really. So there was a few of us who stopped at the same time, myself, Jeremy Hardy, John Sparks, Mark Thomas, I think, round about then as well, Mark Steele, Paul Merton. So we were all kind of not very well formed performers and we were able to get better. So, yeah.

And you got into sketch writing as well. Do you remember the first sketch you got paid to write?

I was trying to remember this actually. Again, we start-

What show is it for? Do you remember what it was for?

It would have been Weekending, which was a sort of topical comedy show radio form. And there were a few of us who all start at the same time, which was myself and Jeremy Hardy and Pete Sinclair. Pete, I ended up writing with a lot. So it’s amazing that there’s not friendships you made then, but I think I wrote a sketch about something to do with Hong Kong. Oh yes, there was a guy called Percy Craddock, who was this sort of guy in Hong Kong. At the time there was this famous cooking show starring a woman called Fanny Craddock. So I did a sort of Sir Percy Craddock’s cooking the books in Hong Kong or some terrible thing like that. But then Jeremy and I got some stuff on the spitting image around it. It’s just started up. And the first sketch I remember we got on was a thing about Tomorrow is World. And I still have somewhere a check payable to me and Jeremy for 29p, which was the Hong Kong royalty payment for that episode.

Excellent. Okay, another off cut now. What’s this one?

This is from a screenplay, which I wrote in 1994, which didn’t get made funnily enough. The film was called Thatcher, The Last 10 Minutes.

Interior Milltown Conservative Meeting Room, early evening. A black and white photograph of Margaret Thatcher in a frame under glass fills the screen. The picture is slowly and deliberately spat on, then wiped with a cloth by the cleaning lady. This is the local headquarters of the Conservative Party in a small market town in the middle of England. The room is large and reeks of faded grandeur, wooden panels, some tattered flags of St. George and old paintings of former prime ministers. It has been more recently decorated with publicity for the next election. Large photos of smarmy, spiv-looking, manically grinning Simon Charles adorn the room, next to slogans such as Your Current and Future MP, Family Man, Working for You, Kay. The cleaner spits venomously on one of these photos, thinks about wiping it, but doesn’t. She walks away. A few chairs are set out in two sets of rows towards one end. The cleaning lady jumps as she hears a strangled snort. Colonel Surrey sits slumped at a large table at the end of the room, glass of port in hand at an angle. He is in his 60s, bald with a moustache. A copy of the telegraph lies open in front of him on a page featuring models in bikinis. She walks over to the table and studies the Colonel for a moment. She gently jolts the port holding arm to see if he wakes up. He doesn’t. So she places her mouth under the arm and tips the hand more so the port pours into her mouth. She gets up, spits on her cloth, polishes the Colonel’s shiny pate, then shakes a bottle of liquid by his ear and he wakes with a start.

So, that’s obviously a very political title. So would you call yourself a political writer?

Yeah, I think what happened was in the 1980s, because the Conservatives were so dominant, really, they dominated kind of every sphere of life. In terms of comedy, which had grown out of punk, naturally, most of the people who did it were left-wing or against Margaret Thatcher. I was a bit of a politics nerd, which helped me for writing topical comedy. And I think that’s always been an element of what I’ve written, I suppose. A thing that I haven’t spotted as well is that that colonel reminded me of the architect, actually. I haven’t thought of that at all. But yeah, I’ve always sort of… I know it changed after the 90s, but there’s this sort of Tory general type people with handlebar moustaches and the Daily Telegraph and worshipping Margaret Thatcher. I was sort of always quite interested in them as characters. You know, character has always been the thing that’s the number one thing for me. But I happened to be quite interested in politics as well. And you know, I was interested in architecture, so I wrote about that. But that was also… But that was character as well, now that I think about it. But it was actually about the people in that local town. It was about people who have basically lost out through the Thatcher years. But I think that’s what always fascinated me about Margaret Thatcher, was the people who voted for her despite the fact that she made everything about their lives worse. And so that was really what interested me, rather than it being about a particular political story.

Right. OK, let’s have another off-cut. Tell us about this one.

Yes, this is a piece that I wrote actually earlier this year about writing comedy. And it’s a piece that I wrote for a blog for my podcast, The Sitcom Geeks.

When you’re creating a new person, a good place to start is your copy of Roger’s Thesaurus. By the book cheapskate is so much more satisfying than the online version, and it helps broaden your vocabulary in the process, although proceed with caution with regard to verbosity, loquaciousness and, like, using too many word thingies, where you can get away with not using too many word thingies. If you have a rough idea about the kind of person you want your character to be, it will be helpful to look up a key word you might use to describe them and see where this takes you. For this experiment, I’ve looked up the word rigorous. It comes in a block of words headed by accurate and includes the definitions precise, exact, detailed, meticulous, scrupulous and even perfect. Nothing too bad yet about this person, wouldn’t you say? However, included in that same small block of definitions are the following words, pedantic, hair splitting, nitpicking. Already you can start to create a picture of this new character. They see themselves as thorough individuals with a sharp eye for detail and an ability to arrive at the correct answer. You and I see them as the kind of irritating, controlling perfectionists who make our lives a misery when they’re not annoying the hell out of us.

So you’ve now become a sort of teacher of comedy now. You’ve written books on the subject and of course your podcast, Sitcom Geeks, is all about the skill and craft of it. How or when did that happen?

It kind of happened by accident, I think. I was kind of tootling along in my comedy career perfectly well and then my wife, we had one child at this point, and I was getting enough work and then my wife said, well, it turned out that she was pregnant with twins and I suddenly thought, ah, right, okay, we are a family of three and we’re about to become a family of five. Am I earning enough from what I do to kind of support a family of five? And the answer was, I don’t know. And so I started to think about things that I like around comedy and things that interest me. I mean, I did also try to get quite a lot more work as well, but I was kind of getting to the age by then where they were starting to look for younger, cheaper versions of me. So I began doing this kind of teaching and script reading just became something that I really loved doing. I just love reading people’s scripts much more than my own scripts. I’m a pretty bad judge of my own, but I can read someone else’s gut. Wouldn’t it be great to do this and that? And then I kind of got to know James Cary, and James is the original Sitcom Geek, and he started running these evenings at the BBC where he’d get like a video in of a show like Father Ted, and he’d get a bunch of comedy writers. We’d all sit there and discuss them, which probably sounds like hell for most people. But James and I just lapped it up, and we realised that we love talking about comedy and about writing, and so it’s become one of the central things that I do now.

And the teaching as well.

Yeah.

Do you think that’s the way your career is going to go now? Do you find teaching especially satisfying, more satisfying than writing?

I find that actually it’s one of the things that I like most about it is that from a purely selfish point of view is that I’m teaching myself. Because when you’re writing and you’re writing stuff for deadlines and you’re writing to someone else and things, you know, you kind of, you tend to forget the basics. And every time I teach a new class or every time I do a thing where I sort of get people to write a sitcom in eight weeks, somebody does something and I think, ah, oh yeah, that’s a mistake I make. That’s a really basic error. So I sort of think it’s made me a better writer in some ways, but it’s also allowed me to take time off to do other things, really develop my own projects. So it’s been quite good from that point of view.

Okay, time for your final off cut. Can you tell us about this one, please?

Yes. Well, it hasn’t got a title yet. It had a provisional title, Edinburgh Diaries. I think at the moment it’s called How I Invented Alternative Comedy and Other Self Delusions. It’s my first proper completed novel and I finished it a few weeks ago.

Harriet Fink was tall, serious and Jewish. She didn’t look like the pale skinned waifs who glided through the pedestrianised precincts of Leeds Polytechnic in their oddly stitched denim jackets and brightly flared loom pants. She dressed like my mum, sensible pleated skirts and plain white blouses. And she was talking to me. That was quite funny, Barry, said Harriet, I didn’t know you were a poet. Yeah, well, it’s, you know, stuff I think of. I said, painfully aware how clearer my words were on the page than those that came out of my mouth. She laughed, the faintest tinkle, with me or at me. I wasn’t sure and for a moment wondered if this might be it. It was the fact that I hadn’t previously found her attractive because I’d already convinced myself that no one from her stratosphere was ever likely to enter my dreary orbit. All I’d wanted for as long as I could remember was a woman to love. Someone who would look past my crippling shyness, accept me for who I was and love me back. A soulmate to live with in contentment for the rest of my days. Friend, lover, companion, mother to our children. Time was running out, I was getting old. Next year I’d be 18. How would I find this creature? Here was a starting place. Poetry reading. It was like a door opening into another universe, far from the boorish monsters and hectoring bullies of the school rugby team, with their self-assured swagger, abbreviated necks and graphic songs of sexual prowess among the girls of Inverness. I enjoyed the moral superiority of my pioneering attitude towards women for a 1970s Leeds teenager, silently weeping myself to sleep each night at my inability to ask out the ones I fancied. I hadn’t planned to perform as part of the Theodore Herzl Youth Club team at Chapel Town Community Centre that afternoon, but had been encouraged by mum and dad, who had guessed, correctly, that the only way they might inveigle me into Leeds Jewish life would be through arts and culture. I studied Harriet. Maybe her proximity demanded further investigation. What were teenage hormones for, if not to reduce the complexity of all human relationships to first impressions of physical appearance? When I’d said tall, had I meant elegant. For serious, thoughtful. And by Jewish, did I mean life partner that my parents would accept. What are you looking at? She laughed again, this time enough to produce a gentle smile. I had never seen Harriet smile. Oh, nothing. Sorry. Sorry for what? I had no idea. Saw the time. I have to go. Bye. See you. She said and stepped away.

You’re not supposed to go, are you? You’re supposed to go, oh, that’s hilarious.

Well, now it’s quite a touching little scene, isn’t it?

Yeah. I’ve kind of swapped it around a bit now. So that was the very beginning, but it’s now sort of tucked away a little bit. So it’s a very fictionalised autobiographical novel, I suppose. And I’ve been wanting to write that since about 1980. So it only took me 40 years.

Is this the one that has Rik Mayall in it?

Yes, that’s right. It’s about… The true story was that I met Rik in Edinburgh in 1979. In fact, I already knew his girlfriend, Lisa Mayall, because she lived in the same house as me in Bristol. She was a student at Bristol, but I was in a sort of different flat. So I knew her and I got to know Rik. And also, there were some people that he was at college with who were school friends of mine from Leeds. So we had quite a lot of people in common. So I saw them in 1979 doing this show called Death on the Toilet, which of course was like a year after Elvis Presley had died on the toilet. And they were called Twentieth Century Coyote. And it was as seeing that show was like a life-changing moment, really. I’d never seen anything like it and it really sort of blew me away. So this book isn’t actually about that, but it’s kind of trying to capture that moment of when alternative comedy was born, really, I suppose.

Well, final question. With your teacher hat on, what have these clips we’ve been listening to, what have they told you about the writing? What would you tell yourself if you were your student?

God, I wish I’d thought of that beforehand. I guess that there are themes, some themes have never gone away, I’ve noticed. I think whatever you want to do, I think, you know, whatever the form is that you want to write in, just do it. I don’t think I’ve ever been as happier as a writer as I was writing that novel. It was just a really nice place to be. If you can find your nice place to be as a writer, then just sit there forever.

Well, Dave Cohen, we’ve come to the end of the show. How was it for you?

It’s kind of reminded me that I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age and that everything else has just been a bit of a distraction. There’s so many adventures in there as well. I’m kind of quite pleased that things worked out the way they did, really. They could have gone seriously wrong at other times.

You could have been in prison for five years in order to meet Mr Collins.

I could have, yes.

I owe everything to Phil Collins. That makes me a little bit sad.

Well, it’s been fascinating to talk to you and thank you so much for sharing the contents of your offcuts drawer with us.

Thank you for having me.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Dave Cohen. The offcuts were performed by Keith Wickham, Rachel Atkins, Emma Clarke and Chris Pavlo, 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.