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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His three assailants lie groaning. Titles. The Diamond.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

There’s a great thing about being a writer is it doesn’t cost anything to sit down at your computer and write something. And if it’s a novel, that’s it. I mean, obviously, if it’s a script, you then rely on loads of other people and millions of pounds to turn it into something.

But that’s the great joy of being a writer is you don’t always have to wait for somebody to say, oh, here’s some money, go and do some writing. You can write something and hope to sell it later. 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. My guest this episode is Charlie Higson, who began his creative career in the early 80s as lead singer of a band named The Higsons. He then moved into comedy writing and performance, teaming up with Paul Whitehouse to write for the successful Harry Enfield sketch show before co-creating and performing in the BBC sketch series The Fast Show, which ran from 1994.

Beyond sketch comedy, he worked in television drama, serving as writer, producer and occasional actor on Randall and Hopkirk Deceased in the early 2000s and created the 2015 ITV series Jekyll and Hyde. On the literary side, he authored four novels in the 1990s and he gained wide recognition for writing the first five instalments of the authorised teenage-era James Bond novels, beginning with Silverfin in 2005 and ending with By Royal Command in 2008. He also created the hugely successful post-apocalyptic horror young adult series The Enemy, with seven novels between 2009 and 2015.

In 2018, he wrote a game book for the revived Fighting Fantasy series and returned to the Bond universe in 2023, this time featuring Bond as an adult with On His Majesty’s Secret Service. More recently, he launched the podcast Willy Willy Harry Ste, exploring the history of the British monarchy, with a companion non-fiction book, illustrated by Jim Moyer, also known as Vic Reeves. And at the time of broadcast, he’s on a national tour of An Evening with The Fast Show, which celebrates 30 years since the series started.

With such a busy and diverse career, there was an awful lot to talk about and Charlie’s offcuts and interview contained so much good stuff that rather than try and cram it in and cut it down, I’ve decided to release it as two episodes. And this is the first part, which began with me asking him what project, if any, he was writing on at the moment. Yes, well I am working on another book.

It was commissioned some time ago. It’s already late because my most recent book, my first non-fiction history book, consumed my life and took over my life in a way that I hadn’t quite taken on board the amount of work it takes to do a non-fiction. It’s much easier to just make stuff up and not have to do any research.

It just comes off the top of your head. Although, of course, that does rely on you being able to squeeze things out of your brain. Yes, so the other thing I am working on is a new adult James Bond novel.

Ah, is that the follow on from the 2023 one? Yes, it is. On His Majesty’s Secret Service. Yes, which went down very well and I sort of initially work with the Fleming Estate and we developed an idea for a novel.

And yes, they went out and sold it and that is going to be out kind of September 2026. And I thought I could write it in parallel, in conjunction with doing the history book. I thought, well, you know, I could do fiction in the morning and non-fiction in the afternoon or the other way around.

But the history book was so much work, researching it and structuring it and wrestling it into a narrative that it was just my brain, I was just too exhausted. And it’s much easier, you know, I found I’m 67 now. When I was younger, I could quite easily work on three things at once and just flit about.

And I had the energy for that. I do find that a little bit harder now getting the concentration. And of course, there’s all the other things in life that come in and distract you and things that you have to do.

There’s a great story about James Cameron. The film director. The film director and obviously also screenwriter that he had three scripts to work on when he was a lot younger.

And he basically shut himself away in a hotel when nobody could get to him. And now I think he has himself said he had not necessarily a suitcase full, but quite a lot of drugs to keep him going and room service. And he set up at three separate tables, three different typewriters, and he would hammer away at one script until he could do no more.

Then he would refresh himself and move to the next table and carry on on that one. And by the time he came out of the hotel, he had the Terminator, Rambo and Aliens. No.

Well, I, you know, I think I’ve probably slightly embellished, but he was certainly working on those three things at the same time. And you can do that when you’re young. But, you know, then when he was older, it took him like 20 years or something to write Avatar.

And it was crap. Well, let’s kick off with your first off cut now. Can you tell us, please, what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written? This is Cheese Shop and it’s a comedy script I wrote for Harry Enfield’s spoof history of BBC Two, which was called The Story of the Twos back in 2013.

Interior. Cheese Shop. Day.

Enter a customer. Hello. I wish to register a complete.

Hello, Miss? What do you mean Miss? Mister! I’m sorry. I have a cold. I wish to make a complete.

We’re closing for lunch. Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this cheese, what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

Oh, yes. The Norwegian Blue. What’s wrong with it? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad.

It’s gone off. That’s what’s wrong with it. No, no.

It’s ripe. Look, meaty. I know an off cheese when I see one and I’m looking at one right now.

No, no. It’s not off. It’s ripe.

Remarkable cheese, the Norwegian Blue, isn’t it? Beautiful veining. The veining don’t enter into it. It’s gone off.

No, no, no. It’s perfectly ripe. Mmm.

Smell the aroma. Beautiful aroma. Very pungent.

I’ll give you pungent, sonny. It’s pungentness is virgin on the emetic. He unwraps the cheese and thrusts it in the owner’s face.

He winces, recoils and gags. Oh, delicious. Perfectly ripe.

A good cheese should make you want to gag, sir. It’s a sign of maturity. He throws up in a bucket.

You did more than gag, my good man. You just threw up in a bucket. No, I didn’t.

Yes, you did. I saw you. That was clear in my throat.

That’s a lovely bit of cheese. Oh, now look, mate. I’ve definitely had enough of this.

This cheese is definitely off. And when I purchased it not half an hour ago, you assured me that its uniquely eye-watering aroma was due to it being fresh out of a cow’s underbelly. Well, the wrapping’s made it sweat a bit, that’s all.

You need to get it on a cheese board. Get it on a cheese board? What kind of talk is that? If I take it out of its wrapping, it’ll run all over the place like a toxic spill. The Norwegian blue is famous for its resemblance to a toxic spill.

Look, I took the liberty of examining this cheese when I got it home. And I can assure you it’s passed its sell-by date. It’s bleeding off.

It’s rank. Rotten to the core. Its metabolic processes are now history.

It is beyond putrid. It is decrepit, atrophied, unsavoury, decomposed, mouldering, high. It smells like the shithouse door on a tuna boat.

It is giving me the wiggins. It is, in short, off. This is an off cheese.

Well, I’d better replace it then. He takes a quick peek behind the counter. Sorry, Squire, I’ve had a look round the back of the shop and we’re right out of cheese.

I see, I see. I get the picture. I got a parrot.

Ha ha ha. So those who are in the comedy know will probably recognise that being an amalgamation of the dead parrot and cheese shop sketches from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Very clever.

Well done. Well, it was fun doing that. It was a fun sort of technical exercise because, you know, the style of Monty Python is so strong.

It is easy. Well, not easy, but it is a fun challenge to kind of write in that. Well, it’s very recognisable.

Yes. And Harry didn’t use it in the end. And in fact, I was going to work on the whole series with him, but something came up and I had to go away and do something else, so I didn’t.

And Harry slightly took the series in a different direction to how we had originally discussed it. It was less sort of parodying. It was a fantastic programme, though.

Yes, it was great. There was a lot of really good stuff in it. There was some nasty stuff on there.

I loved it. Some really cutting, evil stuff. But you wouldn’t work on that in the end because you were doing something else? Yes.

And it was always a problem because, you know, I worked a lot with Harry in his first TV sketch show. And then we parted company because we both had quite strong personalities and we would often pull in different directions. And Harry just thought in the end, well, this is my show, so I’m in charge.

Charlie can go and do something else. Ah. But Paul, you see, Paul is very good.

In writing partnerships, it’s like a marriage. You both have to bring something different to it. There’s no point you both being the same and being able to do the same thing.

And in a writing partnership, you tend to have one of the pair who kind of wanders around the room throwing out ideas and going into routines and just doing crazy stuff. And then the other is the one who sits at the computer or typewriter, as it used to be, kind of writing it down and structuring it and thinking, how do I make that into a sketch? Oh, I use that bit and put it with that. And so you have the sort of, it’s the left hand and the right hand of the piano.

So the left hand is sort of doing all the structure and the right hand is doing all the fancy stuff. So which one are you? I am very much left hand. I mean, obviously, you’re both coming up with funny ideas.

But I tend to be the one who always was at the computer. Is that with both of them? Is that with Paul and Harry? Well, that’s the thing is Paul is very much right hand. And when he’s with Harry, Harry is left hand and he’s right hand.

So Harry is the one who’s sort of scratching his head and worrying about things. And Paul is just saying, no, this is funny, let’s do this, let’s do that. So there was, once there were three of us, there were two left handers and one right hand.

If I’d been right hand, would have been different because I could have just been throwing out ideas and not worrying about anything else. But I tend to sort of get in and worry about stuff. Now, in public recognition terms, you’re probably most well known for the TV sketch show, The Fast Show as a writer and a performer.

Now, apart from enjoying the huge success running on and off for like 20 years or so, including specials, the show is notable for being different from sketch shows that went before in that an episode would have a lot more sketches, which would be much shorter than the norm. And a lot of the comedy came down to recognise characters and their punchlines. How did that format come about? Was it a deliberate decision? It was, yes, because there were several factors.

One is that Paul and I, Paul Whitehouse and myself, had been working on a Harry’s sketch show at the Harry Enfield television programme. And the first stuff we’d written with Harry was character stuff, doing Stub Ross, and then we all created loads of money together. And we both, Paul and I both really loved character comedy.

That was, you know, probably our favourite type of TV comedy. And we’d grown up on things like Dick Emery, Benny Hill, Monty Python. Although Monty Python, well, they did have some recurring characters.

And I guess it sort of goes back to the British musical tradition of people creating your stage persona and having your character. So we loved doing that. So we did that with Harry.

But we didn’t want to be stuck as Harry Enfield’s writers forever. We wanted to do our own stuff. But we knew if we were going to do another character-based sketch show, it couldn’t be exactly the same as Harry’s.

But that would be our template, because Harry had the same influences that we did. So we were always looking for a way… Because we collected material, which for one reason or another wasn’t right for Harry. Either there was a thing that Paul could do, but there was no role for Harry, or he just didn’t think it was funny.

So we collected quite a lot of material, and we were thinking, well, how do we do this? We wanted it to be a team show, not just a star pairing as Harry and Paul had done. And the producer, absolutely brilliant comedy producer, the best around, Geoffrey Perkins, who we’d worked with on Harry’s show and on Saturday Night Live, for the launch, I think, of the second series of Harry’s sketch show, he cut together a sort of highlights reel to show off the new characters and some of the highlights. And Paul and I said to him, oh, no, you need to show whole sketches or a whole episode, because the characters won’t work if you’re just showing one or two lines.

And he said, no, no, it works really well, actually. You’d be surprised. And he showed it, and Paul and I watching it, we simultaneously had a lightbulb moment and said, what if we tried to do a whole show like this that was just the highlights, just do the funny stuff and cut out all the rest? Because, you know, there’d been shows like The Two Ronnies, very funny and enormously popular, but some of their sketches were, like, eight minutes long.

And it was that old-school writing thing where it was building up towards a punchline. But obviously you have fun along the way, and you’re laboriously grinding towards the payoff, and you’re usually there a couple of minutes before the sketch ends, and you’re just waiting for them to catch up with you. So we thought, no, let’s keep things short.

Let’s just have the characters come on and do what it is that makes them funny. And actually, if you keep it short enough, the sort of sketch is its own punchline, as it were. You don’t have to build up towards the… That’s what the joke is.

You’re just enjoying being with the characters and what they’re doing. Yeah, obviously you need to know when things end, but if you keep it short enough, I mean, like, Mark Williams had the character Jesse, who comes out of a shed and says, This week I have been mostly eating terramacillata, and goes back in the shed. As I say, it’s kind of the essence of a joke distilled to absolutely, well, nothing, really.

So the character coming out is the punchline, in a way. So we thought, yeah, if you keep it quick and keep it light on its feet, you can move on quickly and people won’t get bored. And also, you know, the first series went out in 94.

This was, by then, videos were popular and home taping people were doing. DVDs were coming out on the market. And we realised that people were consuming television differently.

You were able to go back and look at it again. You know, when Paul and I were growing up, you’d see a Monty Python episode and you’d try and remember it so that you could do it the next day at school because it might be another year before you saw it again, if ever. You couldn’t guarantee things would be repeated.

But we realised by the 90s that people could watch things over and over again, and people were. And our kind of imaginary audience was a band on a touring bus. And the show was very popular with musicians who, after a gig, they say, I’ll put some of the fast show on.

And it’s short and fast and you’re not overstaying your welcome and you can watch things over and over again because you’re not explaining everything all in one hit. Sometimes you might watch a character three or four times before you sort of twig. All right, OK, that’s what this is all about.

So it was designed for repeat viewing. It was almost as if we anticipated YouTube. But, you know, it’s very popular on there because that’s sort of how it was designed.

And also, digital editing was coming in. When we did the first series, we started on tape and then moved over to digital. And with digital editing, you can deal with lots of small bits and pieces much easier and move things around because we’d be shuffling sketches over a whole six, seven, eight episode series and thinking, well, that sketch goes well with that.

We’ve got too much of this performer here or this character’s too much. We need to move that there. But that means we’ve got to move that.

With digital, you can do all that. It’s really easy. With tape, it was a nightmare.

So it was technology. It was the way viewing habits were changing and it was a desire to do something different to Harry’s. Right.

Well, time for another Offcut now. Tell us about this one. Right.

This is The Frost Child, which is a short story that I started in, I think about 1988, and I haven’t quite finished it yet. It wasn’t snowing. It hadn’t snowed at all this winter, but the frost and the whiteness of the fog reminded him of Courchevel, the Alps coated in white.

Nearly a year ago it was now, and still vivid. It would always be vivid, whenever it was cold, whenever it snowed, whenever they showed skiing on the TV, he’d remember. Of course, he’d never actually go skiing again himself, the thing he’d loved doing most in the world.

He could picture Amy now, the person he’d loved above all else. Yes, he had to accept that. Loved more than Kate.

He’d tried not to think about Amy for the whole journey, but the fog ahead was like a blank page, and her picture kept drawing itself across it. There wasn’t anything else to look at. He sees her now, how she was, standing in the cottage door, the wreath still up from Christmas.

She likes it so much she’s begged them not to take it down, though it’s looking rather tatty. She’s wrapped up against the cold and wearing the new bobble-hat that Kate gave her for Christmas, and she looks utterly, utterly miserable. Please don’t go, Daddy.

Do you have to go? Yes, Amy dear, we’ve told you. You’re a big girl now. It’ll be fun for you, an adventure, having the run of the cottage.

I don’t want to run round the cottage. I don’t want to be alone. Yes, well, you won’t be alone, will you, darling? Kate says briskly.

Claudia will be here. You’re too young to come skiing. It’ll be dangerous for you.

We’ll be back before you know it. And once again, Kate goes over the instructions with Claudia. If it weren’t for Claudia, they wouldn’t be going at all.

The last girl they had had been completely hopeless, more work than if they hadn’t had a nanny at all. But Claudia’s great, totally confident and competent. But she looks so young, almost a child herself, so small.

But competent. She’s a treasure. Phil shivered.

It had been on this road that it had happened. No, no, that wasn’t right. Claudia wouldn’t have come this way.

The hospital was the other way, wasn’t it, up through the woods and over the ridge? Stop it. You know you must never think about that. You can’t change what happened to Amy.

But it was impossible. Her thin, sweet voice, her face. They’re everywhere.

As they get into the car that time, that last time, Amy runs down and presses her face against the window. Can’t you take me with you? No, Kate snaps. Now you’ve been told, so just behave yourself.

Amy opens her mouth wide and screws her eyes shut and begins to wail. Phil winds the window down and tries to touch her, but she pulls away. No, she shrieks, you don’t love me.

Phil feels like he’s been kicked in the gut. But Kate just laughs. Don’t be a silly, she says.

And Amy, embarrassed, looks at her feet. Now Claudia comes over and gently but firmly leads Amy back to the cottage. Why can’t she understand that she can’t come, Kate says as they drive off.

Phil says nothing, because the thing is, he can’t understand either. This was unfinished, you said. Yeah, that was like a Sunday afternoon with Radio 4 on, sitting by the fire in December.

Yes, well, it was finished, but I never liked the original ending. Oh, what was the original ending? Well, in the original ending, I mean, you could tell from that reading, you know, it’s about a husband and wife who’ve lost a child. And you can tell from that reading that the wife appears to be unsympathetic.

And in the original end of the story, she was. But, and I’m still working it, because I want her to actually, that all the time she has known more and has been trying to protect her husband. Oh, so this is really still ongoing, you weren’t being flippant? Yes, yes.

And that’s why I haven’t published it. I mean, I wrote it. My wife’s family have a little cottage down in Wales, and we went down there, pre-kids, for New Year’s Eve with a bunch of friends.

And somebody said, oh, Charlie, why don’t you write some kind of spooky story that you can read out? Because it’s quite a spooky, isolated cottage. So I did, I wrote this story quite quickly. This was in 1988? It was around about that time, yes.

But I wrote it on an old Amstrad, so I can’t, I thought I’d lost the story, but my archive went to my old university, UEA, and it turned up in a bunch of old papers. And they said, oh, we found this. What is it? I thought, amazing.

So I’ve been working on it since. And yeah, the story went down very well, but I thought I could do a better and more interesting ending. The thing is, it’s still a story rather than, say, a novel.

Yes, yes, it’s a short story. I mean, you know, it could be adapted into a sort of one of those BBC ghost story for Christmas type things, because it is a ghost story. I mean, the other thing, actually, when I reread it again, because the central conceit in it is that there was this fairy tale that the wife read as a child called The Frost Child, which is about a sort of evil kid that if it touches you, it turns you to ice.

And of course, since writing the story, Frozen has become a big thing. And I’m reading it, I’m thinking, oh my God, actually, this is the same story as Frozen. I need to change that or at least have the characters acknowledge, well, that’s a bit like Frozen.

So yeah, there’s a few things to sort out, but I return to it now and then and kind of tinker with it because it has got a nice atmosphere and it is quite, quite spooky. Well, this is the earliest piece of writing you gave me. So tell me about your childhood.

Where did you grow up? Did you come from a creative family? Where’s all this writing-y, acting-y stuff come from? I had a very ordinary sort of home counties upbringing. I was born in Somerset, but then I grew up in first Sussex, near Crawley, and then in Kent down near Sevenoaks. My father was an accountant who then became a management consultant, classic commuter.

He would set off in the morning with his bowler hat. Did he have a bowler hat? Yeah, he did to start with, yes. I was born in 58, so yeah, in the late 60s into the 70s and then he stopped wearing it, but yeah.

My mother was, she did a bit of teaching, I guess what today would be called special needs. She’d go into schools and spend time with the kids who were special needs, as I say, that’s what they’re called now. She also did a bit of amateur dramatics, which was the closest we came to doing anything creative really.

But not writing? No writers? No, no, nothing. No. The best advice my father ever gave me, when I was 16, he said, look, you obviously enjoy writing and you’re a good writer, because I’d been writing stuff since I was 10, little books and things.

You know, if I read a book I liked, I’d write stories in that vein and draw little drawings and things. And yeah, I was writing sort of fantasy novels when I was a teenager. And he said, look, obviously you’re good at writing, you obviously enjoy it.

It’s a fantastic thing to do. You can do it all your life, doesn’t cost you anything. But whatever you do, make sure you get yourself a proper job, because you will never make any money as a writer.

And the reason that was such good advice is because I was 16, I completely ignored everything that my father said to me. And I did the opposite of what he said. And I’ve never had a proper job.

And I’ve been lucky enough, and I appreciate that I am very lucky, to have been able to make a living as a writer. You know, making things up, people pay me to do it. Did you always want to be a writer? I always enjoyed writing.

I mean, but, you know, as we were saying, I didn’t know any writers. It wasn’t anything… It wasn’t a tangible goal. Yeah, and certainly, you know, TV, I wouldn’t have dreamt of going on TV.

This was before media studies or anything like that. These felt like things that other people did. But I carried on doing it.

I carried on writing novels. And then when I went to university, I wrote a couple of sort of student novels, should we say. This was the sort of heyday of postmodernism.

So unreadable novels. But I was using, you know, I was quite interested in people like William Burroughs, who would use genre elements in a sort of cut up way. So there’d be bits of sort of Western fiction or pirate fiction or science fiction in his books, all kind of jumbled up together.

And I’d been doing stuff like that. What did young Charles dream of being when he grew up? Well, my sort of fantasy thing was I thought I would really love to make films. So creative.

You didn’t want to be a train driver or an astronaut? I always knew I was going to do something. No, no, no. It was always going to be creative.

I loved art as well. So I thought I might be a painter. I might be a writer.

I would love to make films. But again, I didn’t know a way of doing that. But then at university, I carried on writing.

So I was comfortable writing. I enjoyed writing. And I met Paul Whitehouse in Norwich University in 77.

And this was pre-alternative comedy. So you wouldn’t have dreamed of going on stage doing comedy, but you would form a band. So we formed a punk band together.

So then I really got into music. That’s the other thing I’d really liked doing was music and playing the piano and stuff. So I always knew I would do something creative.

Well, appropriately now, tell us about your next offcut. This is a pitch document that I knocked up quite quickly in 2016 and it’s called Ghosts of Dead Rockstars. A hugely popular and successful rock star is backstage getting ready for a monster comeback gig at the O2.

It’s not going well, however. He’s wasted, edgy, arrogant, insecure and losing it fast. He rows with his band, who seem to hate him.

He rows with his gorgeous girlfriend over his infidelities. He rows with his long-term and long-suffering manager. He even rows with his chef and the guy selling merch.

In short, he’s a mess and the gig is shaping up to be a disaster. In the end, he locks himself in his dressing room and refuses to talk to anyone. Things have taken their toll.

Years of constant touring, late nights, a rootless existence, losing touch with family and friends, alcohol and drug abuse, meaningless sex with groupies, more money than he knows how to spend have left him disillusioned and wrung out. He has lost his mojo, completely disillusioned with not just his own music, but all music. Nothing seems to matter to him anymore.

His dark night of the soul now takes a turn for the worse. He swallows a gut full of sleeping pills and whisky. In his semi-comatose state, he imagines, or perhaps it’s for real, that he’s visited by the ghosts of several dead rock stars.

The likes of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Louis Armstrong, Buddy Holly, Elvis, Billie Holiday, Cass Elliot, Mark Bolan, John Lennon, Bob Marley, Keith Moon, there are so many possibilities. Just like the ghosts in A Christmas Carol or the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life and the heavenly spirit guide in A Matter of Life and Death, he’s taken on a tour. He has shown how his music has touched people’s lives, how important it has been for them.

The young girl brought out of a coma in hospital. All the couples brought together and starting families. Depressed, suicidal teenagers who his music gave hope to.

He’s shown his past, his early days, playing in tiny clubs when he was so excited about music. He’s shown the present, the fans in the auditorium waiting in intense anticipation for the gig. His fellow bandmates, yes, they moan about him and give him a hard time, but it’s clear they do actually love and respect him and wouldn’t be here at the O2 without him.

He’s also shown the future, all that he might achieve, coming to terms with his demons and settling down and starting a family of his own. The dead musicians also talk about their own lives, those that died young, for instance, lament what might have been, all they might have achieved, how none of them really meant to end it all. Some of the ghosts will be funny, some moving, some inspirational.

Jimi Hendrix, for instance, could keep banging on about the ridiculously pompous rock opera he was planning to write. And it’s a great opportunity for some fun cameos.

This was a pitch for a TV series, that’s that right? No, it was for a film. It was for a film, right. It sounds very much like a cross between It’s A Wonderful Life and Channel 4 Star Stories.

How far did it get? Yes, it didn’t get very far at all. I put it together quite quickly because a friend of mine, who I also met at university, Dave Cummings, who was in the band with me and Paul and ended up as a commotion with Lloyd Cole and as part of Del Amitri. And somebody had mentioned to him that someone was wanting to do some kind of music-based, rock-based project, and we have any ideas.

So I sort of came up with that. And the idea was if they bit that Dave and I would write it together. And they said, oh, no, that’s not what we’re looking for.

And I didn’t do any much with it because I was doing other stuff. Well, you know, listening to it there, it does sound like a really good idea, actually. It is, yes.

And a way of looking at music. Because, you know, I was in, well, two bands when I was younger, and I was a singer, professional singer for six years. And, you know, I probably know more people in the music, who make music than who do comedy, you know, right up to good friends with Paul McCartney’s musical director.

So I have a lot of contacts with that world and sort of thought it could be a really good idea. And, you know, it sort of touches on the idea of the 27 Club, you know, that so many musicians apparently died when they were 27. But actually, it’s a tiny fraction.

But, you know, if you just concentrate on them, it looks like that’s when they all died, which is why I put in people like Louis Armstrong, I think. Also, it was quite a lot of fun. And I thought it was a different way of, you know, looking at how important music is for people.

I mean, this was quite interesting digging out all this stuff for this podcast. I mean, what I sent you is a fraction of what I got over the years. You throw stuff out there.

Some of it you paid for, some of it you just develop yourself and you see what sticks and something else. At the time, I got commissioned to do something else. So that ended up in the bottom drawer, as it’s called.

But going through it all again, I’m thinking, oh, that’s actually quite good. Maybe I should try and do some more. Yes, I think you should.

I mean, you’ve now got a fair amount of heft behind you. You should be able to generate. You can imagine being a big Christmas special film or Netflix or Amazon, you know, a big production.

I definitely can see that. I was very surprised that that didn’t get anywhere. But if you are busy doing other things, that makes sense, I suppose.

So you were in a band, you were in two bands and when you say you were a professional singer for six years, was that when you were in a band or you were a professional singer anyway? Yes, yes. No, no, no. So the first band was a student punk band with Paul and Dave called The Right Hand Lovers.

And in true punk style, we burned brightly and burnt ourselves out. Within a year, we’d come and gone. So then I formed another band because Paul, other than Dave, everyone else in the band was kicked out of university.

So then I started another band with a fresh intake of students, which ended up being called The Higgsons. And that I carried on doing after university for six years. And why did it all end, the band thing? Many factors.

One was that the bass player and I started doing decorating when we weren’t on tour as a way to actually make some money. You did decorating with Paul Whitehouse? Well, that was later on. First of all, it was with Colin Williams, the bass player, because we didn’t make any money in the band.

When we were on tour, it was fine because we’d be given free sandwiches and beer. But between touring, there was no income. So we started doing decorating and we were pretty good at it.

We worked well together. And we were living in London by this point and, you know, there is no shortage of houses to decorate in London. And we realised that the band was getting in the way of our decorating.

So we thought, well, if we stick to just the decorating, then we make quite a good living, which we did. But also, you know, I’d been doing it for six years. I was feeling I was starting to get too old for it.

And really, in my heart of hearts, well, not in my heart of hearts, I knew, I completely knew that I was not cut out to be a rock star, to take it to the next level. To do that, a lead singer has to believe in themselves as being God, as being a messiah. You’ve got to go out on stage at a stadium and stick your hands in the air and put them together and expect 10,000 people to clap along with you.

It requires a certain level of ego and self-belief and belief in what you’re doing there. And you do have to behave as, I am a rock star. And I could never do that.

We always had too much sort of self-deprecating humour. So we were great at a club level and at the sort of medium-sized venues. But I knew that really, I didn’t have what it took to take it to the next level.

Because this was, by now, we’re in the sort of second half of the 80s, and music was changing. Most of the places that we hit, the small music venues we’ve been able to play at, were all stopping having live bands and just going over to DJs. And some of the bands who’d been doing stuff like we had did manage to kind of reinvent themselves as club bands, like someone like The Farm, for instance.

And we thought, do we want to do that? And I thought, actually, you know what, I don’t think I really want to be doing this for the rest of my life. It’s not, whilst I’ve had a great time doing it, I thought, I’ve had enough of it now. I want to do other things, and particularly writing.

So yeah, we became full-time decorators. And then Paul and I started writing together. Okay, let’s move on to the next offcut now.

Can you tell us about this one, please? All right. This is King Bullet, which is a film script from 2001. You should have left me.

I was going to, but right now you’re all I’ve got. Me, and a bag full of money. What did Tom have all that money in the house for, anyway? Your birthday present.

How do you mean? He was buying you a painting, off the Russians. An icon? Yeah. Tom was doing that for me? Yeah.

Look, I’m sorry to fuck up your birthday party like that. It was nothing personal. I can’t believe he was buying me an icon.

We saw some on holiday. I told him I thought they were beautiful. He remembered.

Rublev smuggled it out of Russia. Jesus, Danny, you haven’t got a chance. He’s just a man.

An old man. He’s past it. Being young’s not so fantastic.

Yeah, but don’t you ever think about it? What it used to be like? Don’t you ever think about, you know, a young man’s body? A young man’s stamina? You haven’t got a chance. I don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t have run.

Maybe we should have stayed to fight. He doesn’t frighten me. He frightens me.

Still now, after 30 years. Sometimes he can look at you and he knows. Is that why you’ve stayed with him? Because you’re frightened of what he’d do if you left? I’ve stayed with him because I love him.

And in his way, he loves me. You’re sure of that, are you? Long time ago, I found out he’d been cheating on me. A German girl singer, Annalise.

He had a kid by her and everything. Well, I hit the roof, didn’t I? We’d not been married long and it looked like it was all over, but he promised me he was finished with her and she didn’t mean nothing to him. Said he’d never see her again.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. And he proved it. He used to have a boat.

Big motor launch, you know. He and the lads used to stock up with beer and that and go out fishing. One day, they all went out with Annalise.

And when they came back, she wasn’t with them. Jesus. When Tom fixes something, he fixes it.

Like our Paula’s husband. Paula? Our daughter. She married a guy called Antonio.

Best looking bloke you ever saw. Well, one day, same old story, Tom finds out he’s been playing away from home. He burned his face off with a blowtorch.

Father of our grandchildren. Didn’t kill him, but I guess Antonio couldn’t live with it. After three months in hospital, he jumped off the roof.

Like I said, Danny, you haven’t got a chance. That’s a cheery little story, isn’t it? Yes. Tell us about this story.

It’s quite violent. Yeah, it is. It’s a British gangster story.

I mainly wrote it because I had a new computer and new software. Final draft or something? Well, possibly final draft. I can’t remember when that kind of launched.

And I wanted to practise writing a full length script. And I had an idea for a story. This was sort of, I guess the 90s had been the heyday for the sort of British gangster movie.

So I thought I’d have a go at writing something in that style. And I’m not sure I ever showed it to anyone, actually, when I’d finished it. I can’t remember.

So it was mainly, as I say, it was a technical exercise. Did you read through it this time before you sent it to me? No, I read a bit of it just to check that it wasn’t complete rubbish. Yeah, it’d be interesting to go back and revisit it.

But yeah, it’s about an ageing British gangster. And in my mind at the time, I was thinking of Michael Caine, who’s living in a proper gangster’s mansion in Essex with his younger wife. She’s not like a 20 year old, but she’s younger than him.

And this guy comes in and robs him and takes his wife hostage. And that’s the two that are speaking in the car and they kind of, they end up falling in love and the main man comes after them. And yeah, there’s a lot of violence and killing and shooting.

I wrote, in the early 90s, I wrote four crime novels. I was a big fan, well, still am a big fan of American kind of hard-boiled crime writing, but also the pulp writers, really interesting writers of the 50s, 60s and 70s, people like Jim Thompson, who is my all time favourite writer. And I’ve always liked trying to write that sort of thing that’s a bit sort of twisted at its core.

Right. And that’s what this was. This was a film version of something like that, you’d say? Yeah, it was a bit of the sort of pulp fiction type of writing, a bit of the British gangster fiction.

I think probably by the time I’d finished it, there was a feeling like we’d had enough of British gangster films, and nobody was going to be that interested in making another one. But I always keep thinking, well, when I’ve got time, I’ll go back and look at these and see which ones to develop. Right.

This one never had an audience until now. Yeah, no, I mean, well, I think I showed it to Mark Mylod, who we worked with on The Fast Show and ended up directing it. And then I worked with him, made a series of Randall and Hopkirk Deceased with Vic and Bob.

And Mark then went off to Hollywood and he now does things like Game of Thrones. He was the lead director on Succession and he’s now overdoing the new Harry Potter TV series. So I think I showed it to him and he found some of the bits of it funny, but I think he would have preferred if I’d written a comedy.

I mean, there is elements of comedy in it, but then it sort of turns serious. So I like that juxtaposition of something’s quite funny and then it turns really dark. Now, you’d recently finished or had a break from The Fast Show at this point.

It’s difficult for me to have a timeline, like you say, you do a lot of things at the same time. So it’s difficult to know what you were actually working on because the dates that I can have access to are publication dates or broadcast dates. So I don’t know what you were actually doing.

But I think you were also working on other TV projects, but none of them were comedy, or at least not sort of pure comedy, sketch comedy like The Fast Show. Were you kind of comedied out at that point? Did you have enough of that format? Well, writing sketch shows is, it burns through a huge amount of material, particularly on The Fast Show where we’re trying to keep things as short as possible. So you’re having to write, you know, 30 mini dramas, an episode, and it’s got to be funny, and the characters have got to work, and there’s got to be a point to it.

And it’s quite tiring. So inevitably, you kind of think, well, I’d like to do something a bit different to comedy, you know, use a different part of the brain and flex some other muscles. And that can make it easier for you to then go back and write more sketch comedy.

So, you know, there are two things I’d always wanted to do. One was, I loved growing up in the 60s, I loved all those fantastical TV shows that people used to make at the time. Things like The Prisoner, The Avengers, The Champions, Adam Adamant.

There were loads of them. And these were big mainstream shows, a lot of them made by ITV. And that’s what people loved watching.

And of course, there was all the American stuff coming in, Star Trek and whatever. And that’s what I really loved, that sort of slightly fantastical TV drama, which it stopped in the 70s. It was killed by kitchen sink drama.

And everything started to be, it was all about gritty, gritty realism, which is fine. But it meant that everything was judged on how realistic it was. And we stopped making those shows.

We still kept in port and all the American ones, which were very popular. But if you tried to do anything like that in British TV, people would say, well, this is for kids, isn’t it? It’s fantasy. So it died out.

So when I had the opportunity to do a remake of Randal Hotkirk Deceased, which was another of those ATV shows from the 60s, 70s, I thought, brilliant, that would be a lot of fun to do. And everybody, you know, that we got involved in it thought the same. We had a fantastic lineup of actors and designer, cinematographer, whatever, because they said, we never get a chance to do this sort of thing.

This is so much fun. But inevitably, it goes out. People said, isn’t this a kid’s thing? One of them’s a ghost.

So people didn’t get it. So I was quite pleased, actually, that well, I mean, you know, it’s interesting because the first episode got 10 and a half million viewers, which is pretty phenomenal. But unfortunately, it kind of dropped from week to week over the two series.

And we ended up around about kind of four million. So that trajectory was going in the wrong direction. Perhaps if we’d pushed through and been able to get a third series, we might have been able to reverse a trend.

But it didn’t happen. But then not long after that, Russell Davis rebooted Doctor Who and managed to do, you know, to bring back a sense of fun and fantasy and science fiction. But what he was really clever at doing was mixing fantasy and rooting that in solid family drama with Billy Piper and her family and all that sort of story.

And he was really clever about that. But what I found very gratifying is that a lot of people who I’d worked with on Randall Hotkirk ended up working on that. So Murray Gold, who did the music for us, did the music for Doctor Who.

David Tennant, who had starred in our first episode, ended up as Doctor Who. Writers like Gareth Roberts went on from there. Mark Gatiss from The League of Gentlemen had worked on Randall Hotkirk.

So, you know, I was thinking, well, well, Russell is coming really from the same sort of place as I am and hats off to him for making it successful. And it did change the TV landscape. Well, it didn’t, it didn’t.

I thought, great, now we’ll be having more fantasy shows and maybe some stuff for adults, but it didn’t happen. It was, no, we can do that in Doctor Who because that’s a special thing, but don’t try and do it anywhere else. But I mean, but through the, I suppose, I suppose Charlie Booker with Black Mirror has done something much more interesting.

But it’s really through the streamers that now they are less focused on kitchen sink dramas. Very much less and very much more focused on fantasy. But you look at, you know, you look at drama on TV, it’s, I mean, there’s some great stuff, but it’s, you know, it’s cop shows, it’s doctors, it’s missing children.

Oh, well, time for another off cut now. What have we got? Right. This is a pilot TV script that I developed in 2018 for a series about the young Winston Churchill.

Maudie. And what do I call you? My father is, well… At school, they used to call me Copperknob. My hair? Oh, right.

So come on then, Copperknob. What do you want? What does any young man want? I can tell you that in one sentence. A man wants three things.

He wants money, he wants excitement, and he wants to make his mark. To be someone. That’s a longer sentence than mine was going to be.

Maudie leans in on him, but Winston breaks away and circles the room, reciting verse in mock heroic style. And then out spoke brave Horatius, the captain of the gate. To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late, and how can man die better than facing fearful odds for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods? Winston? Winston! Still in his shirt and tie.

Come along, Cinderella. It’s way past midnight. If we don’t look lively, the milk train will leave without us and we’ll be missed at barracks.

Don’t want you done for dereliction of duty, do we? Oh lord, I lost all track of time. I’m not quite sure of the etiquette. Dylan reaches for his wallet and nods to Winston to get a move on.

As Winston ducks back through the door, Maudie comes out still fully clothed. Dylan slips her some money. She looks at it ruefully before folding it up.

I’m not sure I earned that. All he did was talk about himself all night. Then you indulged him in his favourite pastime.

Winston comes back out, putting on his jacket. I’ll be seeing you then, copper knob. Yes, good morning to you.

Dylan is intrigued by this little exchange. Dad, this seems like an excellent idea. How come this didn’t get snapped up instantly? Well, well, it’s a tricky one.

I worked on this for a long time with a fantastic production company with proper backing. And yeah, I worked out, I wrote a pilot and worked out a whole series. And it is the young life of young Winston.

And the thing that really, I thought, actually, yeah, this could be interesting is they showed me this fantastic photograph of him. This was when he was at Sandringham, I think, training to be an officer. And there’s a photograph of him in his uniform.

And he must be about 20. And, you know, he’s young and handsome and dashing. And I thought, we never really see this side of Winston.

We forget, you know, he was a young man. He was a Victorian man. And, you know, we only think of him as he was really in the Second World War.

And I thought, well, that’s fascinating to try and show that side of him. And I mean, at that instant in the scene, that’s based on something that actually happened. That he and the officers came down to London and got drunk in a theatre and had a sort of mini sort of riot.

But also then he went off and he was a war correspondent in Cuba. There was a Cuban War of Independence broke out. And just thought, well, you know, this is really interesting to look at, you know, the makings of the man.

Unfortunately, I think there were two reasons. One, in the original way that I developed the series, I tried to put too much in. It would have been way too expensive because it followed him from there through to being out in India and fighting in the northwest frontier.

And in actual fact, towards the end, before we stopped working on it, we were scaling it back and it was just going to be about his time in Cuba, which is what I should have done in the first place. So that was one problem is I think it put people off the scope. And the other thing was the fact that it is Winston Churchill, because people are very much reassessing him.

And young people certainly don’t want anything to do with him. So you have he’s quite a divisive figure. On one hand, you have sort of certain members of society in the establishment to saying, you know, Churchill was a great, great man who saved us from Hitler.

And then you’ve got and it’s often younger people saying, well, no, actually, he was a terrible man. He was involved in exacerbating the famine in India. And he said some quite racist things.

So it’s kind of like, I mean, the interesting thing about this was this was trying to show him before all that when he was just a young man finding his way in the world. But I think a lot of people thought, I don’t know. I want to keep away.

It’s a touchy subject. But surely that would mean that anything set in, you know, more than sort of 60, 70 years ago, if it’s historically in any way accurate, is going to feature people who would have insulted the sensibilities of people today. Surely there’s a kind of understanding.

Maybe you don’t put those bits of dialogue in. Yeah, but it’s a tricky one because I think it was he’s controversial and he splits so many people that, yeah, you could A, you could see that as, well, this would be a really interesting thing to explore. Or B, you could say, no, it’s too controversial.

We’re going to get into a lot of hot water on this from both sides of the camp because the sort of traditionists will say, well, you can’t be showing Churchill doing this. This is terrible. And then the other side is saying, well, you’re whitewashing him or whatever.

So I don’t know if, again, if other things hadn’t taken over, we might have been able to pursue it more. But we sort of felt we’d gone about as far as we could with it. And yes, I wish actually from the start I’d scaled it back and just concentrated on what he was doing in Cuba.

And you couldn’t do that. I mean, I know you’re busy right now, but you could do. Yeah.

I mean, if someone else would be interested in a series of Winston Churchill, then I’ve got all you need. You have to choose, you know, which thing am I going to push now? And as I say, as I’ve got older, I can’t, I found I can’t work on so many things at once. And, you know, you have to go with where you get a sense of what Netflix are looking for.

The likes of Netflix, well, I’d use them as example of a streamer. They’re not really looking for a series about young Winston Churchill. They want a series about the prime minister’s husband being taken hostage.

But history is your thing, though. I mean, you have, well, you’ve got a history podcast called Willie Willie Harry Stee. Yes.

Based on the mnemonic rhyme for remembering kings and queens of England that I was taught at school. Did you learn it? Yeah. Willie Willie Harry Stee.

Oh, no, how embarrassing. Harry Dick John Harry Three. Oh, I did know it now I’ve forgotten.

That’s great because I mean, so many people didn’t. So it’s nice when you meet someone who did. Even though she can’t remember a single word beyond stee.

Never mind. So, yes, obviously, that’s why you called it that. And of course, you’ve got your book coming out, which is also based on that.

Does it cover the whole of British monarchy from the first Willie of the Willie Willie Harry Stee? Yeah, it’s pretty much a history of England over the last thousand years from 1066 onwards. Yeah, it’s a narrative history about this extraordinary dysfunctional family. And it’s a family saga.

You can follow it from one generation to the next, from William all the way down to King Charles III. It’s the same family. I mean, it takes some mad detours and it gets a bit tangled up here and there.

But but it’s amazing that you can follow that. And it’s a great way of using that story as as a lens through which to to to look at our history in a way to it’s a washing line to hang it all on. And so many people know little bits of English history and they’re not quite sure how it fits together and how one monarch is related to another.

So it’s really for those people who know a bit and want to know a bit more. And the podcast is an episode or two per king, queen? Yes. Yes, that was the idea.

I thought it’s a great would lend itself to a great narrative podcast. And then once I had got to Charles, I’ve gone back and I’m I’m going over the same story again, but looking at other people along the way. Now, in my Facebook feed, I often get adverts for you and Vic Reeves or Jim Moyer doing live shows based on this.

Is it based on the same thing, the same Willie Willie Harry Stee? Yeah, Jim has done the illustrations for the book. So, yeah, we’ve done we’ve done a couple of events together. We’re hoping to do some more.

But it felt like, you know, because Jim and I worked together a lot back in the late 80s and through the 90s, I worked on a lot of Jim and Bob’s comedy shows and what we did live stuff with them before they were on the TV. And there was a lot of crossover between what they were doing and what Paul and I were doing. Paul obviously playing one of Slade on their show.

And Bob actually wrote quite a lot for The Fast Show as well. Oh, did he? So, yeah, he wrote all the filthy lines for Swiss Tony. And so it felt right that because they’ve left us and have buggered off our partners, Jim and I, our partners have gone fishing together.

Oh, yes, of course. I had to put those two together. Yeah, that Jim and I should work on our own project.

Yeah, stuff them. And there we leave it for part one. Listen to the next episode to hear the rest of my interview with Charlie and some more offcuts that include a horror version of Beauty and the Beast, a potential Indian James Bond and a Doctor Who episode that delves into the murky world of alternative computer games.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Charlie Higson. The offcuts were performed by Shash Hira, Kenny Blyth, Christopher Kent, Keith Wickham, Emma Clarke, Noni Lewis and Nigel Pilkington. And the music was by me.

For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

Tony Jay and I didn’t agree on anything politically, and I didn’t want people to think that the Yes Minister was a Tory programme, which it wasn’t, because we both implicitly had a right of veto. We never discussed it, but if I didn’t like something that Tony wrote, I could change it. If Tony didn’t like something I wrote, we’d change it.

We’d find a way through. And in those days, unlike more recently, it was really possible for people with opposing political views to still be friends. That’s less probable today.

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 Jonathan Lynn, a writer, director, and actor whose career spans television, film, stage, and books.

He first came to prominence in the Cambridge Footlights, performing alongside contemporaries that included John Cleese and Graham Chapman, and on television, he acted in series including Doctor in the House, The Liverbirds, The Good Life, and the Jack Rosenthal plays Burmits for Boy and The Knowledge. As a writer, he penned episodes for the Doctor series, for sitcom On the Buses, and for comedian Harry Worth, but he is best known for co-creating and co-writing the acclaimed political satires Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, awards for which are too numerous to list here. He later co-authored companion books The Complete Yes Minister and The Complete Yes Prime Minister, which spent 106 weeks in the Sunday Times Best Selling Top Ten list.

His career in film includes writing the screenplays for The Internecine Project, Clue, and Nuns on the Run, also directing the latter two, as well as directing other films that include My Cousin Vinny, The Distinguished Gentleman, Sergeant Bilko, The Whole Nine Yards, and The Fighting Temptations. Other directing credits include award-winning stage productions for the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and multiple West End shows. In fact, he has contributed to a wide range of film, stage, and television projects over several decades, which we just don’t have time to include here.

And most recently, he has returned to the world of political satire with a new stage play, I’m Sorry, Prime Minister, which is set to premiere in London’s West End in January 2026. Jonathan Lynn, welcome to the Offcuts Drawer. Thank you.

The Yes Minister, Yes Prime Minister project has seen various iterations. Firstly, you had two different levels of government, which turned into two very successful TV sitcoms, and then they became books, which were also hugely successful and bestsellers. And this time round, it’s theatre.

Why this genre? Well, I’ve always worked in the theatre before I worked in television or film or anything, and I like the theatre. And about 12 years ago, I’m not sure actually, maybe a bit longer, we did a play called Yes Prime Minister, which was all original material, it wasn’t from the series. And it opened at the Chichester Festival, and then it transferred to the Gielgud Theatre in London.

And after that, it played at the Apollo Theatre, and then the Gielgud again, and then the Trafalgar, and it did two national tours. So it went on for two or three years and was immensely successful. So I thought, why not do one more about a final chapter for Humphrey and Jim? All right, so you’re keeping the same characters? Oh, yes.

It’s about Humphrey and Jim, and they’re both old men, they’re in their 80s. Right. Are they both still in government? No, no, they’ve been retired for years.

And they’re bewildered by the world the way it is now, as most people are. And it’s a sort of LSA play about loss, about loss of friends, family, job. You know, what do you do if you’re forced to retire around about the age of 60? And that was your whole interest in life.

What do you do for the next 20 years? What do you do, well, for the rest of your life? What do you do when you were used to everybody hanging on your every word, everything you said mattered? And now nobody really cares what you think or say about anything. So it’s about the loss of power, loss of everything. The only play I’ve seen that’s on this subject really is King Lear.

But my play is funnier. So it’s not so much a satire on British government anymore then? Well, it is in a way, because it’s about, you know, Jim. What it’s about is Jim is now master of Oxford College.

And the student body and the fellows want to get rid of him because he’s been politically incorrect in a variety of ways. And he gets Humphrey to come and help him, or he hopes he can get Humphrey to come and help him. They haven’t spoken for years.

And so it’s a reunion. But I think of it as the final chapter in the story of Jim and Humphrey. And who have you cast for Humphrey and Jim? Jim is being played by Griff Rhys-Jones and Humphrey by Clive Francis.

And we tried out to play about a year and a half ago in Cirencester at the Barn Theatre, and then Theatre Royal Bath and now the Theatre of Cambridge. And I played Jim at that point. Did you? And Clive played Sir Hertford, yes, which was a bit nerve-wracking.

I hadn’t been on stage for 41 years. How’d it go? It went incredibly well, as you can tell, because we’re opening in the West End now. And you’re not tempted to go back into the play yourself? I’m not, no, because I have Parkinson’s disease and my movement is now pretty strange.

And also, I’m not a famous actor. And Griff Rhys-Jones is. And he’s wonderfully funny.

Excellent. Successful sitcoms, especially British successful sitcoms, they’re often sold abroad to be turned into the American equivalent or the Israeli equivalent or the German equivalent. Did you ever have any country try and do their own version of Yes Minister or Yes Prime Minister? Not as far as we know.

I think there was one tried in Sweden that was so clearly based on our show, but they hadn’t bought the rights, so we stopped that. But I’m not sure about that. This is the distant past.

And we had a lot of enquiries at the time, a lot of people wanting to make an American series based on our series, which has happened, as you know, with so many others. But it doesn’t translate. The separation of powers, the presidency, Congress, all the power structure is different in America, or was at that time.

Now it’s a sort of dictatorship. But it just didn’t translate. And we didn’t mind that.

And it had been shown in dozens of countries. And the books had been published in lots of countries. And then it was shown here, not on a big network, but on PBS and public television, and it was very well received.

So we’re pretty happy with all of that. 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? Yes, this one’s called The Bottom Line.

And it’s a screenplay I wrote in 2008. Good morning. As the Chief of Surgery, it’s my doubtful pleasure to welcome you to the Morbidity and Mortality Meeting to discuss the week’s surgical complications in the hope that we can prevent similar screw-ups in future.

You all know the drill. This is a closed meeting. Are we all clear what that means? It means that by tomorrow, half the hospital will know everything we said.

Maybe. So let’s really try to keep it confidential today. Lawsuits at this place have been increasing exponentially, and some of the surgical mistakes on the agenda are even more embarrassing than usual.

Tell me about it. I’m being sued again. I’m wondering if there have been leaks from these meetings.

Oh dear. This must stop. Who’s suing you? Victor Rich.

He’s suing me too. Yeah? I’ve never been sued before. He’ll get used to it.

All right. First, Dr. Duff, your hip replacement. Let’s see the x-ray.

Lights. Lights go out. Duff, an orthopaedic surgeon, speaks as a hip x-ray is shown on a screen.

This is prior to surgery. The hip at the point of disarticulation. Everyone stares at the x-ray, slightly puzzled.

Looks perfectly normal to me. Well, yes, yes. In point of fact, it is perfectly normal.

Now everyone stares at Duff. You removed a perfectly normal hip? Yes. However, we choose to regard this as a positive measure.

There is very severe osteoarthritis degeneration, admittedly, of the other hip. But when the other hip needs replacement, next Thursday, actually, since we didn’t do it this week, electively, of course, his new hip will certainly help speed up his convalescence. They are all still staring at him.

You’re pretending you replaced the wrong hip on purpose. That’s almost worse than doing it by accident. Dr. Duff, may I remind you that the purpose of this meeting is not damage control.

It’s to learn from our mistakes. There were no mistakes in the surgery itself. I did it perfectly.

I don’t know how to reply to that. Everyone shifts uncomfortably in their seats. The question is, why did it happen? Excellent question, sir, if I may say so.

Thank you, Julia. The X-ray wasn’t labelled. There were no left and right markers.

Why not? Someone else was using them. There aren’t any others. It’s the cutbacks.

I see. Cut to interior, a panelled boardroom, day. And now what we’ve just heard is from a film script called The Bottom Line, which you mentioned when you sent it to me, had subsequently changed its name to Samaritans.

And it’s now a novel and has, in fact, been acquired by a UK production company to turn into a TV series. Have I got that right? Yes, that was right at the time we spoke. The UK production company was not able to turn it into a TV series because at the time we made that deal, Netflix and other similar streaming companies were looking for material.

By the time we got something to show them, they were not looking for any more material, which is the situation now. But yes, it became a novel and people could get it on Amazon. And I’m very pleased with it.

It got a lovely response. Yes, excellent reviews from lots of famous people as well. Yeah.

Yes. So are you still looking to turn it into a TV series or a film? Which would you prefer, actually? I don’t think I’m looking to do it anymore. I mean, you reach a point where either you get the show on or you move on.

You can’t keep batting away at something forever. If somebody else buys the rights, I mean, a couple of people have bought the rights to Samaritans already and not managed to get… I mean, somebody else, Linda Obst, bought the rights for Sony Pictures Television, but she came up with a pitch for the series, which I didn’t like, so I vetoed it. And I’d rather it’s not done than unless it’s done properly.

Right. So what I had to say, which was about the American healthcare system and how catastrophic it is, is all in the book. And sooner or later, somebody will probably think, oh, I could make a film or a TV series.

But obviously, the novel is much fuller. I mean, I added a huge amount of material because the screenplay is very short. You know, the screenplay is about 120 pages and a lot of white space on each page.

And so you have to be very, very economical in what you say. In the novel, I was able to add characters, background, you know, more funny scenes. And on the subject of medicine and doctors, where I first remember you was as an actor in the Doctor in the House series, which you also went on to write on and on the related series, Doctor at Large, Doctor in Charge, Doctor at Sea and Doctor on the Go, I think.

I think so. But you were an actor first. So what prompted you to write the series? Were you part of the original writing team? No, I was engaged as an actor.

But I’d been trying to write for years because I was in my 20s and I discovered that being an actor meant being out of work a lot of the time. That’s so true. So I wanted to write because when I wasn’t acting, I was doing things like selling records at Selfridges and I felt that wasn’t very creative.

So I was acting in the series and then I left it. And one day I got a phone call from another actor in the series, George Layton, with whom I got along really well. And he said, the writers haven’t delivered a script for about three weeks ahead.

Shall we try and do one? And I thought, well, maybe this is an opportunity. I’d been writing for five years without any success. So George and I got together and we wrote an episode.

Was he still an actor on his own? Yes. And it was easy for us in a way because we all knew all the characters. And we wrote what turned out to be a very funny script.

And the producer, Humphrey Barclay, bought it and put it straight into production. And three weeks later it went on the air. And people absolutely loved it.

And suddenly we were deluged with offers. We suddenly became hot writers. And I’d been trying to get anything done for the last five or six years.

And then suddenly I was an overnight success. Well, Humphrey asked us to write lots of other Doctor episodes. And then we were asked to write for a series of On the Buses, which I found terribly hard.

Oh, why did you find it hard? Well, I was familiar with it, but it just wasn’t really my sense of humour. And our job was to make it seamless so that when Ronnie Wolfe and Ronnie Chesney, who had created the series, they were off making a film of On the Buses. And it was our job to continue, as it were, seamlessly.

And it worked very well. But I found it hard. You know, with jokes about the price of fish.

And I hadn’t really learned about research yet. So I suppose I could have made it easier for myself if I’d gone to a bus depot and talked to some bus drivers and bus conductors and inspectors. Although it might not have made any difference at all.

But George found it easier than I did. And we wrote a series that people really liked. As an actor, were you ever tempted to write yourself into the shows, into the scripts, on any of the projects you’ve written on? Yes, I was.

I was tempted. We did a series, George and I went on, to do a series called My Brother’s Keeper at Granada Television. And we wrote it for ourselves.

It was an idea of mine about when I was at Cambridge, sometime in the Dark Ages, criminology was one of the subjects I was doing as part of a law degree. And there was a twin study. You know, twin studies are used to determine whether or not characteristics of people are caused by what they used to call nature or nurture.

In other words, were they genetic? And there was an experiment with nine identical twins whose twin brothers were missing. And they were all policemen. And they managed to find 13 of these missing identical twins.

And interestingly, nine of them were convicts and the other four were policemen. Wow. So I don’t know what it really suggested.

I think it suggested that people genetically were either very law-abiding or very anti-law-abiding. Right. So we wrote these parts and we played the twins.

And it was well received. And we did two series of Granada. But then Granada didn’t continue it.

So at that point, George and I stopped writing together. And then I didn’t write anything for myself until we did the pilot of Yes Minister. Oh, who were you in Yes Minister? No, I wasn’t.

Oh. But I thought I might be. Ah.

When we were writing it. There was Jim and Humphrey and the part of Bernard Woolley I thought I could play. And then I decided that it just wasn’t a good idea.

It would be much better to find somebody else than for me to be able to look at rehearsals objectively. And it’s hard to be objective about something if you have written it and you’re in it. That’s true.

Yes. And we were very lucky we found Derek Foulds. And in the end, I was very glad I had not suggested myself for the part.

I never suggested myself. It was all in my head. So did you ever get to the point because you’re writing, you’re acting, directing, did you ever get to the point where you thought I’m not an actor anymore.

I’m a writer and director or has acting never really been off the table if the right part came along? Acting was off the table for years after My Brother’s Keeper and before Yes Minister. I was director of the Cambridge Theatre Company that was a touring company Arts Council subsidised based on the Arts Theatre, Cambridge and it toured all over the country. And I was director of that for nearly five years.

And we did about 40 productions in that time. And I never cast myself at all. I think it’s very unusual for actors who are directors.

So it was clear to me I could always find someone who I would rather see play the part. So at that point it was clear to me that I wasn’t really interested in acting anymore except occasionally with people who I really liked. Okay then, let’s move on.

Time for another off-cut now. Can you tell us about this one? This is a one-act play that I wrote only a few years ago. I think it was 2018.

It’s called Primitive Murderous Rage. The audience should become convinced that something has gone wrong. Forgotten lines.

Somebody missing. Who knows what. Eventually.

You’re supposed to say something. He nods. That’s up to you.

How about, why are you here? Not really. He nods. Bill nods again.

Look, I didn’t come here to be bored. I can be bored at home. Are you bored at home? Yes.

Why are you bored? I don’t know. So, in the absence of anything better to do, you decided to bore me too? No, that’s not fair. Are you chronically bored? I think so.

You’re not saying I’m boring you? You are boring me, actually. But I’m not the cause of your boredom. No.

So, what now? Ball’s in your court. Why? You’re the one who’s bored. Can you tell me why you’re bored? No, I just am.

Why don’t you tell me? That’s why I’m here. I can’t tell you anything until you tell me something. There’s nothing to tell.

There must be something. Something about your life. My life’s boring.

Is that why you’re here? Because you’re bored? Yes. He nods. Now you’re bored too.

No, not now that I know that your boredom is in fact the presenting problem. He waits, nodding occasionally. Eventually.

Is there anything else you want to mention before you go? You want me to go? Do you want to go? Why do you always answer a question with a question? Why do you think? You mentioned when you sent this that this was in fact written as part of a double bill. So what happened to the other play? The other play was called Oedipus Gate and it was about Oedipus the King, Sophocles, in the form of Donald Trump. Oh.

And that play is no longer relevant because Trump has, it was written during the first Trump presidency and now it’s all quite different. So it was a topical political play. But I wanted to write a play about boredom because I thought that was a challenge.

Just the challenge of boredom that you were interested in. There was no point that you wanted to make or any kind of conclusion you wished to reach? Oh well yes there was. I mean as the play goes along it’s clear that she suffers from a condition that the play calls primitive murderous rage.

Ah, hence the title. And the psychiatrist is really inept and doesn’t really know what to do about it. He’s very, he thinks he’s very scholarly and original.

But in fact he’s very pedestrian and he outlines his theories. Other than about boredom it’s a play about psychotherapy. And my wife is a psychotherapist.

And so I’ve known dozens of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts during her career. And this play is a sort of satirical version of the worst of them. Do you know lots of people with primitive murderous rage or just those who treated them? Yes, large numbers of people.

I think most people have. Have primitive murderous rage, which manifests itself as boredom? No, no. It can manifest itself in all kinds of ways.

But as you know anger management is quite a big thing nowadays. I mean a lot of people do things because they’re angry or because they’re very angry, which are not necessarily the right things to do. So I wanted to investigate all that.

And in fact this play is on my list of things to rewrite and expand into a full-length play. Ah, so it doesn’t have to be part of a double bill anymore. That’s right.

When you started your show business career, it was live performance in the theatre, you were in the Footlights and the breakthrough show was Cambridge Circus, which went to Broadway and on television stuff. But you originally joined the cast as a musician, is that right? Well I didn’t really join the cast. I mean I joined the show.

I was in the orchestra, in the orchestra pit. I played drums, percussion. Which at that time I thought I was going to do professionally.

I thought I was going to be a jazz drummer. And I spent a lot of my time at Cambridge playing in the jazz club with some wonderful musicians. But then I joined the Footlights Club with Eric Arnall.

We knew each other, we were in the same college. He wrote a sketch, which we both did. And the only way you could get into the Footlights in those days was to make the committee laugh.

And we did. We got into it as members. Was it a musical sketch? Because he’s obviously very musical as well.

No, it wasn’t musical. No, it wasn’t a musical sketch. I can’t remember what the subject was exactly.

I think it was two centuries outside Buckingham Palace, but I can’t remember more than that. And I found the script, oh, 30 years later, literally in a bottom drawer. And so I had it framed and sent it to Eric.

I think it was the first sketch he ever wrote. Oh, lovely. So the show went to the West End.

A producer called Michael White saw it at Cambridge. And it went to West End, where it did pretty well, actually. And John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Bill Oddie, Timbrook Taylor, Joe Kendall, and a couple of other people.

And then I left it because I was just in the band. And I went on to work at the Edinburgh Festival. Still as a musician, or were you acting then? No, no.

This was a production of Waiting for Godot, which Stephen Frears, another Cambridge friend, was directing. And then I went back to my third year. All the others that were leaving Cambridge, and I was a year behind.

And the year I graduated, the following year, I got a phone call from Bill Oddie right after my exams. And he said, Cambridge Service is going to Broadway. Do you want to come? And I said, well, they have a Musician’s Union there.

I wouldn’t be allowed to. He said, no, no, in the cast. So I said, yes, of course.

So my first acting job was actually on Broadway. And my first TV show was the Ed Sullivan Show with 70 million viewers live. Spectacular.

And it’s been sort of downhill ever since, really. So you took over as an actor. Did you do any writing there too, or was the script already set in stone by then? The script was already more or less set.

And I wasn’t the writer then. I mean, at Cambridge, I hadn’t started writing. And I didn’t know how it was done.

I very much admired John Cleese and Bill Oddie, who wrote the majority of the show, because they could write funny scripts. And I thought it was sort of a magic gift. So when did you find out that you could do it too? Well, I told you about Doctor in the House.

Oh, that was literally the first time you’d done any writing. Because I thought if you’d been involved with the Footlights, that you would be contributing to the shows a bit yourself. But not at all.

No, no, not at all. They were all writers and comedians. And I really wanted to be an actor at that point.

And after we were on Broadway, they came back and started a radio show that was immensely popular called I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. And I wasn’t in that because I didn’t write. And Graham Garden joined the cast of that, because he could write.

And I just acted in plays. You mentioned the Ed Sullivan show with the 70 million audience. Did that give you more confidence, do you think? And possibly even too much confidence, because that’s one hell of a gift for an actor.

It didn’t give me any confidence at all. I mean, I was doing it with a group of people, who we did a song and I did a very short sketch, which people thought was funny. But no, it didn’t really give me confidence.

I mean, we were there on Broadway, which sounded very glamorous. But we were getting 30 quid a week. And I was staying in a really run-down hotel in Times Square.

And it was distinctly unglamorous. But, you know, it was a terrific opportunity for someone aged 21, who had been in Susan three months earlier. Of course, yeah.

Okay, moving on now. Let’s have your next Offcut, please. What’s that? This is a treatment for a screenplay called The Rocket’s Red Glare, which was written in about 2006.

And I wrote it with somebody called M. G. Lord, who’s a writer in Los Angeles.

This is not based on a true story. This is a true story.

This is a tale of two scientists, perhaps the two most important rocket pioneers of the 20th century. One was an idealist, an internationalist, and a humanitarian. He was an American.

His name was Dr. Frank Molina. He is the protagonist of the film. He was interested in pure science, and he developed a rocket to study meteorology, our planet, and space.

He was not interested in money. The other was his nemesis, interested in fame, wealth, and power over his fellow human beings. He was German.

He is the antagonist. His name was Dr. Werner von Braun. He developed his rockets with Hitler’s personal approval as revenge and terror weapons against the British.

Molina, troubled by the poverty he saw during the Great Depression, flirted with communism very briefly in the 1930s, until Stalin signed a pact with Hitler, and the scales fell from his eyes. Von Braun was an active Nazi and a member of the SS until he surrendered to the Americans, who protected him because they wanted his knowledge, and they didn’t want the Soviet Union to have access to his knowledge. Molina was from a dirt-poor background.

He was interested in social justice, and he was tolerant of all people, if not all points of view. Von Braun was a baron, and was not interested in social justice. He handpicked Jewish scientists to work on the V1 and V2 at the Mittelbau-Dörer concentration camps, and allowed them to starve to death.

Molina had nothing to hide, didn’t care about money, lived a good life and, by a quirk of fate, ultimately died both wealthy and fulfilled. Von Braun died famous and powerful, but he lived the second half of his life in fear that his past would be revealed in spite of a massive and deceitful PR campaign. Molina, who developed the rocket that first went into space, is almost completely forgotten.

Von Braun, the lesser of the two scientists, has been immortalised as the father of the American space programme at NASA. This is their story. Now this didn’t make it because… What happened to it? What happened to it was David Brown, who was a very important producer, produced The Sting and Jaws and Driving Miss Daisy and a number of very successful films, was extremely interested in it and we were just about to start writing a screenplay when he died and we, I don’t know, for some reason we didn’t get anyone else interested and it sort of fell away from our priorities.

But I think it would be a wonderful film still. But there isn’t a screenplay yet, it’s just, there’s a long treatment, I think it’s about 20 pages, telling the whole story. So you could still be shopping it around then? I could be but I’m not.

M.G. Lord, who’s a terrific writer, she teaches creative writing at USC, University of Southern California, and her father worked with Melina and that’s how she knew the story. So we worked on it together and enjoyed it very much. But I don’t know, for one reason or another, my agents were unable to interest anybody else in this and so it fell by the wayside.

I think it’s because it would have been a very expensive film. It’s again another project along political lines. Are you very politically active? You wrote Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister with Anthony Jay, who was very close with Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government.

Were the two of you politically aligned or were you more neutral and just interested in the entertainment of it all? I’m not politically active really, although I take a great interest in it. I am very politically aware. Tony Jay and I didn’t agree on anything politically.

He was quite right-wing, and increasingly so as he got older, and he did a lot of work for speeches and things for Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson and Mrs. Thatcher, Norman Tebbit, and I had very little sympathy with all of that. Mainly because, apart from the fact that I didn’t agree with their political views mostly, I had very little sympathy with it because I didn’t want people to think that Yes Minister was, as it were, a Tory programme, which it wasn’t. Because we both implicitly had a right of veto.

We never discussed it. But if I didn’t like something that Tony wrote, I could change it. If Tony didn’t like something I wrote, we’d change it.

We’d find a way through. And in those days, unlike more recently, it was really possible for people of opposing political views to still be friends. That’s less probable today.

And Tony and I were very good friends. And we tolerated each other’s views amiably. And I just used to beg him, you know, to make sure that his conservative connections weren’t written about in the papers at the time.

And on the whole, they weren’t. And your West End play coming up, the I’m Sorry Prime Minister. Well, government behaviour has changed beyond recognition since the 1980s when you were writing Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister.

Do you have to incorporate those changes? Or do you think that the politics is still, at its heart, kind of the same beast? Politics is always the same beast. Politicians are always people who are interested in short-term changes in order to win the next election. The civil servants were interested in something long-term and that they felt was good for Britain.

But of course, they weren’t elected. And it wasn’t for them to say what was good for Britain. That was the essential conflict.

But this play, which is now being called I’m Sorry Prime Minister. But when I actually wrote it, the full title was I’m Sorry Prime Minister, I Can’t Quite Remember. And that’s what it’s going to say outside the theatre and in the programme.

And, you know, they both have memory problems. You know, they’re old. And it’s about what it’s like to be old and forgotten and ignored.

And about all the mistakes they made in their political careers. Orrin Humphrey in his civil service career. So it is about politics, but it’s not about contemporary politics.

The series was never about politics either. People always used to say it was a political series. But actually, it wasn’t.

It was a series about government. Politics is quite separate from government. Politics is what goes on in the House of Commons and people make big speeches.

And, you know, it’s essentially theatre. Government happens in Whitehall and nobody really knows how it’s done. Right.

OK, time for another off-cut now. What have we got? This is called Mayday and it’s a screenplay I wrote in the late 90s based on a novel I’ve written of the same name that was published two or three years earlier. Scripts, sandwiches and half-eaten pizzas litter the room.

Three melancholy, hard-bitten writer pals, Max Kirsch, Sidney Byte and Jerry Kelly. Jerry is reading aloud from the screen of his word processor. How about she says, I’m trying to break it off, but I don’t want to hurt him.

Then sex therapist says, Then don’t break it off. Wait till it goes soft. That’s funny.

Maybe. Jerry types. Mayday enters.

Hey, Ernest, come to help us punch up the show? Jerry, I don’t think I’d be much use. Still blocked? Yep. I finally told Fanny Rush.

What did she say? Do you have to give back the money? I can’t. I spent it. She suggested I plagiarised one of my other books.

That’s not plagiarism. It’s plagiarism if you copy someone else’s work. That’s right.

If you copy your own, they call it your style. What do you know? You’re just a bunch of sitcom writers. That’s how we know.

Plagiarism’s what we do. Come on, fellas. We got 20 minutes left to write this scene.

Somebody think of a gag we can borrow. They all chime in with ideas. I envied their facility.

Interior Mayday study night. The cursor is blinking on the screen, which is still empty apart from chapter one. Mayday is unshaven, unwashed, apathetic.

He stares hopelessly out of his magnificent picture window, then at the wall, then at an in-tray full of bills marked past due in red. I had nothing to write, nothing to say. I was living on credit, literary, emotional, and financial, and time was running out.

The one bright spot was the masseuse I shared my life with. We hear the front door open and shut. Randy Toner comes in.

She’s very attractive in her 30s, carrying a folded massage table and big sports bag. Hi. How’s it going? Still blocked? He nods.

She sits on his knee and kisses him hungrily. I can think of something that’s much more fun than writing. Her name was Randy Toner, and I was seeing her at the time.

Seeing is an L.A. word for fucking. I’d been seeing her for a couple of years. She was great at it.

They tip slowly backwards out of his chair and out of view. Interior Mayday study day. Mayday is sitting blankly at his desk again, still staring at his computer.

The words chapter one are still on the screen. Beside him is a glass of scotch and a nearly empty bottle. He stands and wanders into interior Mayday’s state-of-the-art kitchen day.

He pours himself a coffee. Consuela, his pudgy, smiling Mexican maid, is busily cleaning out the fridge. Dramatically, she picks up a milk carton and points to the sell-by date with a reproachful look.

Sell-by date. And she makes a kill gesture, pretending to cut her throat, then hurls it into the garbage. Consuela, my maid, spoke no other English words.

She finds some half-eaten cheese holding it aloft in triumph. Sell-by date. And the offending cheese is cast into the outer darkness.

And as I spoke no Spanish, the relationship was simplified to a level at which I felt entirely comfortable. He sips his coffee and idly opens the copy of LA Weekly, which is lying around on the kitchen counter. Suddenly, he sees something interesting.

Insert the personals. We pan down the column. Stop.

Zoom in to read. Joanna is in desperate need of $10,000 now or soon. No holds barred.

It was then, in that copy of LA Weekly that I’d picked up by chance, that I saw the answer to my problem. This was based on a novel that you wrote, which was successful and seems like a great story, perfect for a film. So why didn’t it get made? I think they thought it was… I think they thought it was too clever.

And being clever is a real problem in the world of Hollywood. But I don’t know. It’s about a man with writer’s block and he finds this ad by Joanna and gets the idea that if he will pay her whatever she asks, she will tell him how much money she earns from her ad and how she does it.

And that will make a story. And it’s a very good idea. But it doesn’t work out very well for him because what it’s really about is how writers manipulate people in their own lives in order to get stories that are interesting.

It’s about what is the writer’s obligation to people that they write about, even if they fictionalise them. And some people really loved it. But, you know, you never know why things don’t get made.

The truth is that about… I think every writer I know maybe has a ratio of about one project in six that gets made. That’s part of the course. There’s only a limited number of films that can be made.

They don’t get made without star names or a star director. And it’s all finally decided by the marketing department. You weren’t tempted to maybe, I don’t know, try it in the UK? Well, it’s set in Los Angeles.

I don’t think it would be possible to make it in the UK. It might have been possible, but that would be very expensive because you have to be some shots in LA. It’s an LA novel.

It’s not about Hollywood. Although he’s a writer. It’s about Los Angeles in the 1980s.

What it was really like. He’s a British expat living in LA then. And you were too? Were you in LA at that point in the 80s? I was, yes.

So how much of him is you? Well, it’s not really me. What I have in common with the character is that we’re both writers. There’s no masseuse hanging around.

No, there’s no masseuse. I had been married to the same woman who I loved for nearly 60 years. And there was no masseuse.

No, no. It’s about what I observed in Los Angeles. Well, we did hear in that particular clip mention of the sitcom writer’s room.

Is that something that you’re familiar with? Did you have much experience of that, working in a stereotypical American-style writer’s room? I did, actually. I was asked to join a show called Mr. President. And George C. Scott was the star in it.

And I didn’t want to do it because Ed Weinberger, who had created The Cosby Show, was the producer and head writer. And I’d read his pilot. And it was a very cosy show.

It was like The Cosby’s in the White House. And it lacked bite or any sort of real comment on Reagan, who was president at the time. So I said no.

And then he kept asking me to do it. And finally, we made a deal by I was going one day a week on Monday for what they called the punch-up. And the script would be… There’d be a read-through in the morning.

And then everyone would give their notes. That is, everyone meaning all the executives. And then the script would come back to the writer’s room.

And we would have to fix it that day. And there were always lots of fixes necessary. And there were about six or seven writers around the table.

And we all worked all day, usually from about 11 a.m. to about one or two in the morning. And of course, this was pre-computers. So we had a chain of typists or secretaries making all the changes during the day.

And I was paid extravagantly for this one day. And I used that to live on when I wrote the complete Yes Prime Minister for the rest of the week. But they never tempted you into a writer’s room as being part of the core team? That really was the core team.

That was the week in which everything was punched up. The day in which everything was punched up. I’m thinking more about developing the plot.

No, that was whoever was credited as the writer on screen. But I did do that one time. I got in one morning and Ed Weinberger said, I want you to read this script.

And I said, when do you want me to read it? He said, now, don’t go into the writer’s room. Go up to your office and read this and tell me what you think. So I read this really dreadful script.

And I went back downstairs half an hour later and I said to Ed, I think this is terrible. And he said, oh, I agree. I’d like you to rewrite it.

And I said, when? He said, today. And I said, well, nobody will rewrite the script today. He said, yep.

Don’t go back to the writer’s room. Rewrite the script. So I went upstairs.

I worked on it all day till 8 or 9. And I got halfway through. So I took it down to Ed’s office and said, this is as far as I’ve got. I’m halfway through.

Sorry, I couldn’t finish it. And so I went home and I expected to get a phone call saying that I was fired. And instead, I got a phone call saying, it’s great.

Next week, do the second half. So it wasn’t great. Great is the minimum adjective of praise in an American show business.

So I went in the following week. I wrote the second half. And incredibly, two weeks later, it went into rehearsal and on the air.

And I never saw it. Well, I didn’t want to. I thought it was terrible.

Oh, no. I thought it was just better than what I’d been given to start with. And the series didn’t really work.

And at the end of the first series, George C. Scott left it. And the series finished. Because he’d also thought it would be something much more acerbic and politically interesting.

And he was really upset by the way the scripts were being done. So he left. And that was the end of that series.

But it was a very nice two or three months when I got extremely well paid for one day’s work a week. OK, well, we’ve come to your final offcut. Can you tell us about this one, please? This is a repair I wrote a long time ago.

I’m guessing about 1997. And it’s called The Prenup. Interior.

The dining room. Night. The table is piled high with wedding gifts.

Alice enters, followed by Zach. She turns to him. OK, what is it? Well… Babe, what is it? My dad wants us to have a prenup.

So I didn’t want to mention it before because I knew you’d take it the wrong way. The wrong way? What’s the right way? It’s just that my dad says it’s just sensible. It’s a sensible… Go on.

No, that’s it. Sensible what? Precaution. Precaution? Against what? You think you need to protect yourself from me? Well, I… You don’t know me.

No. I knew you’d react like this. Look, if you feel so strongly, let’s forget it.

Forget it? How can I ever forget this? It’s my dad. What has this got to do with your dad? If we don’t do this, he’ll stop me getting the trust fund. So what? It’s 40 million dollars.

We don’t need his money. Tell him to shove it. Of course we need the money.

40 million dollars? Are you crazy? Am I crazy? You spring a prenup on me the night before our wedding and you ask me if I’m crazy. He only just sprang it on me. Why is a prenup such a problem? You always said you don’t care about money.

I don’t care about money. I’m not marrying you for your money, you doofus. So what’s the… I thought our marriage was going to be a partnership.

Sharing everything. For richer, for poorer, for better, for worse. You just have to trust me.

I have to trust you, but you don’t trust me. I do trust you. It’s just my dad.

Please sign it. You’ve got it with you. You have, haven’t you? Shame-faced, he pulls out a contract from his inside pocket.

Without a word, she holds out her hand for it. He gives it to her. She barely glances at it.

You said he just sprang it on you. A few days ago. You were lying.

I was not lying, just not telling. You said it was hypothetical. You said you were just talking about your father, but now you’re saying you do want me to sign this.

Yes, I do, but only because… Why did you say you didn’t? I just couldn’t see a way to mention it without upsetting you. I’m not upset. I just hadn’t realised I was dispensable, that’s all.

But money’s important. We must be sensible. I understand that.

Alice, darling, I love you. I… I’ll just take this away to read it. I must read it carefully.

Of course, you understand that. She crosses past him, towards the door. He tries to take her in his arms.

Carefully, she disentangles herself. Excuse me? She leaves the room. The accompanying note with this was you couldn’t find a name to play Alice.

Was there anyone in particular you’d approached and they just turned you down, or you just had no particular inspiration for it? I really can’t remember. But the film is about the culture clash between America and England. She’s the daughter of an English judge and she’d been to a fancy school.

She’s quiet and thoughtful and she’s a writer. And he’s a banker and doing rather well. And so it’s about marriage and it’s about the difference between English and American attitudes to marriage at that time.

So the premise of the film was the difference between the cultures of American and English. That was one of the things it was about. It was also, there was a space of romantic comedies in recent years, which weren’t about anything.

They were about just silly, silly setups. This is about a serious dispute. It’s about money and it’s about, you know, whether or not Zach is prepared to marry her and risk losing the fortune that his father was going to give him.

So it’s not an artificial setup. It’s a very real problem that exists in many marriages in those days in America. And now I think in Britain as well.

I think the high court in Britain recognised prenups a few years ago as things that should be taken into account in divorce settlements. And so it’s not quite about a culture clash anymore. But also the script is about romance and that it’s an anti-romantic comedy.

It’s not a romantic comedy. It’s an anti-romantic comedy. Because finally, it’s about what’s important in the relationship.

And it goes into other generations. It goes to Alice’s parents who have lived together not entirely successfully for 40 or 50 years. And to Zach’s father who’s been married lots of times.

He’s a rock star. And so, you know, it really sort of addresses a lot of questions about what’s the basis of marriage and how much money or financial interests or vested interests intrude upon the relationship. And would you have directed this film? I would have, yes.

Because you’ve obviously directed a lot of films, many of the scripts that you didn’t write. Yes. For example, My Cousin Vinny, which is a great film.

As a director who’s also a writer, do you find yourself making changes to someone else’s script? Are you allowed to do that? Oh, yes. Do you need permission? I was hired by 20th Century Fox to actually do the production rewrite of My Cousin Vinny. Is that before you became director? No, when I was director, it was part of the deal.

Ah, I see. But they weren’t happy with the script. They thought it was potentially successful, but they weren’t happy with a number of things about it.

So I did do a production rewrite. I made a number of changes. And I’m not credited, which I think is appropriate because a director has to write at least 50% of a script in order to deserve a credit, because otherwise it’s too easy for a director who’s quite powerful just to rewrite bits here and there and then claim a credit.

That used to happen, but the Writers Guild doesn’t allow it anymore, and I think they’re right. So I did write some of My Cousin Vinny, but most of it, of course, was written by the original writer Dale Lorner. Did you have to consult him when you were rewriting it at all? I chose to.

I chose to, and he didn’t like anything I suggested. So I did it anyway. I mean, there’s bits of dialogue that people still quote, you know, when Vinny says there’s these two utes to the judge, and the judge says, what? And Vinny says, two utes.

And the judge says, what’s a ute? And that was just a conversation that Joe Pesci and I actually had at the Mayflower Hotel in New York when we met to discuss the script. And he said to me, there’s these two utes. And I said, what’s a ute? So I realised that had to go into the script.

And, you know, so I added stuff here and there. I changed the ending. I got Dale to rewrite the very last scene, which wasn’t working.

And, you know, he wasn’t very pleased with what I did, and he should have been, because the film was an enormous success. Okay, well, we have come to the end of the show. How was it for you? Well, fine.

Thank you very much. You know, it’s nice not to have to feel guilty about talking about myself for an hour. Okay, well, let me ask you one final question.

Yes. Is there any advice that you would give a younger you, knowing now what you know about life, the business? Oh, so much advice. I wouldn’t know.

I hardly know where to begin. Is there one snappy little phrase that you would use for the sake of the podcast? Let me think. Advice that I needed or that I could give as a result of my experience? Is there anything, thinking of yourself 50, 60 years ago, is there anything you think, ah, you just need to don’t worry about that, or slow down with this, or this is more important than you think it is? That sort of thing.

I think I would say, that’s a really tricky question. I’m having to think about that. Maybe the answer is no.

I think I did everything pretty much the way it should have been done. No, I think I did nearly everything wrong. So the question is, what did I do? Which of the many things I did wrong? I think I wasn’t always sufficiently open to other people’s ideas.

And I would say, although in the end, you have to be true to yourself. You have to be open to other people’s suggestions and comments. And it took me a long time to learn that.

And I think I would also say, when you’re starting out in this business, take any job that’s offered. You can learn from anything. And the main thing is to keep working and get to know people.

And gradually you’ll find bigger and better opportunities. And I think that applies to everything. It applies to acting, writing, directing, anything in our business.

Now, that is excellent advice. Very useful indeed. Well, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you today, Jonathan Lynn.

Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcut straw with us. Oh, well, thank you. My pleasure.

Thank you very much indeed. The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Jonathan Lynn. The Offcuts were performed by Keith Wickham, Shash Hira, Emma Clarke, Kenny Blyth, Christopher Kent and Beth Chalmers.

And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s important. It matters. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Begara. It means son of. Pat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

(0:01) We once got a Dave Podmore show on because there was a, I think there was a new commissioner or the person who was responsible for commissioning and I knew didn’t greatly like or understand cricket and I said well we want to do an another Dave Podmore episode this year because as I’m sure you know it’ll be the anniversary exactly a thousand years since cricket began and fortunately this person believed me and commissioned it.

(0:40) 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. On this episode my guest is Christopher Douglas, a British writer, actor and bastion of Radio 4 comedy.

(1:11) He is the co-writer and voice of the titular character in long-running radio sitcom Ed Reardon’s Week, co-written with the late Andrew Nicholds which recently reached its 16th series and groundbreaking 100th episode, having earned the Broadcasting Press Guild Award for Best Radio Programme in both 2005 and 2010. His other long-running writing credits for radio include the creation of the character Dave Podmore, the world’s most disappointing cricketer, a role he has voiced and co-written for over 30 episodes since 1997 and then there’s the writing of two radio series of Mastering the Universe starring Dawn French and the three series radio comedy Beauty of Britain. Additionally he adapted the Victorian novel New Grub Street into a two-part radio drama and wrote the radio play Tristram Shandy in Development which won the 2021 Tinniswood Award.

(2:05) His screen work includes scripting and directing the recurring on-screen persona of actor Nicholas Craig, played by Nigel Planer, for both stage and television in productions such as the Nicholas Craig Masterclass and later programmes for BBC Two and BBC Four which all originated from the spoof autobiography I, an Actor he co-wrote with Planer in 1988. Christopher Douglas welcome to the Offcuts Drawer. Thank you Laura.

(2:34) Now I have to start with I, an Actor because that was one of the most influential books I read as a drama student. I mean after all the serious po-faced navel-gazings of real thespians that we were told to read this was an absolute blast me and my friends were obsessed with it. I have to ask you was it inspired by anyone in particular?

(2:55) No it was inspired by everybody including ourselves really and we were warned against doing it by older professionals who said not that they were worried about being insulted but because they thought it was too much of an in-joke and that sort of we thought well what’s wrong with an in-joke? It’s funny, it’s funny. And there was a sort of spoof acting book that was published I think in the early 60s sometime called the Art of Course Acting and it was much broader than than Nicholas and it was sort of aimed at a wider readership.

(3:34) It was more about amdram? Yes it was really yes and so we were told oh no there’s already a book you know and we thought well that’s that’s got nothing to do with the the world that we observe which is everybody going on about how incredibly dangerous and tough acting is and we just thought it was so funny. Yes.

(3:54) And especially as the people who went on and on about how tough and dangerous it was all seemed to be so so comfortably off and very highly paid. Yes I think Simon Callow’s book had just come out at that point and I remember reading that nodding sagely at it but then when your book came out it was just oh my god it was absolute blindingly fun. Yes I think he slightly took offence and we had to reassure him that it wasn’t his book in particular.

(4:23) The whole bunch of them came out around that time but I don’t think we really we really targeted anyone in particular. As I say it was that you know it was it was sort of against ourselves as well because we’d been actors for you know we’d both been doing it for quite some time 12 years or something I think and I’d done quite a lot of the sort of lower end of the repertory career path and Nigel had done it worked at a sort of slightly more elevated level so we had the whole acting profession pretty much covered really between us. Okay well we’ll talk more about it and Nicholas Craig later in the show but in the meantime let’s get started with your first off-cut can you tell us please what it’s called what genre it was written for and when it was written?

(5:11) This is a scene from The Scarlet City which was written around the late 90s 97 I think and it was a TV pilot script. Hair and Beavis at the dining table. Mrs. Bracewell clears up. Nellie the skivvy enters. Beg pardon sir but it’s one of them girls at the door sir. One of which girls Nellie?

(5:35) You know one of them girls as is all wet and bedraggled what fetches up on the doorstep not knowing however it was they got here sir. Not again I’m sorry sir I’ll get rid of her immediately. One moment tell me Nellie does she wear a velvet trimmed cloak and beneath her hat a cascade of auburn tresses?

Speaker 2

(5:54) Yes sir.

Speaker 1

(5:55) And in her hand a pathetic strap of paper? Yes sir. Forgive me Mr. Hair but we’ve had this so many times whenever we let one in it always leads to trouble. Thank you Mrs. B I think you’ll allow my instinct in these matters is without equal. I have a suspicion that this young woman’s plight is in some way connected with a network of enemy agents. Extraordinary deduction Hair.

(6:17) Is this the same reasoning process that led you to the conclusion that Jack the Ripper is really Mrs. Beaton? It’s by no means as clear-cut as that at this stage. Show her in will you?

(6:28) Very well sir. Emily enters. Mr. Hair thank goodness I’ve found you. Well well what have we here? Proper little pre-Raphaelite wet dream. Forgive me for calling on you but I believe I am in great danger.

(6:42) That is quite all right my dear. Pray sit down and compose yourself. Oh thank you.

(6:46) Perhaps you would be good enough to tell us in your own time how we may be of assistance. An anonymous well-wisher gave me your name and address on this pathetic scrap of paper and I have this strange feeling that you’re the only man in the world who can help me. That is more than likely child.

(7:01) Oh my threadbare cloak has slipped from my shoulders. Sir isn’t this rather predictable? Mrs. Bracewell be good enough to put this pathetic scrap of paper with the others and allow me to conduct this interview in my own way. Now tell me Beavis have you ever beheld such a heart-rending picture of defenceless maidenhood? No indeed it is quite pitiful. The sodden hair, the trembling lip, the tears like mourning dew on an unopened bud.

(7:28) Mrs. Bracewell we need some towels and a change of clothes immediately. Oh for you or her? Her of course.

(7:34) My child I suspect you are in unfortunate circumstances. Give me a break. Is it by any chance the case Emily that you have become the unwitting tool of a group of foreign agents embarked on a plan to attack London with a secret weapon in all probability a large submarine with brass instruments and red velvet upholstery?

(7:56) No I was running away from home. Yeah I apologise for the somewhat devious means by which I was obliged to tease out your true story. I would have told you anyway that’s why I’m here.

(8:08) Then pray continue your narrative girl we are wasting valuable time. This script was commissioned was it? Yes it was it was a sort of intended as a sort of Holmes and Watson parody except that the two men commit crimes rather than solving them and they do things like they go around stealing things on behalf of the British Museum.

(8:37) I seem to remember that I wrote a sort of outline for some other episodes and I think he invented a time machine and there was that sort of territory and it was commissioned by the producer the late Andrei Tichinsky who produced an earlier sitcom that I’d had done on BBC2 called Tiger Road and it was well it didn’t get a second series but Andrei kept faith with me and commissioned me to do this Scarlet City script and the idea was I think we had Stephen Fry in mind for the the sort of Sherlock Holmes character and Joe Brand for the housekeeper Missy Bracewell. I can’t remember why it was turned down or indeed who turned it down but it was it was fun to do anyway.

(9:25) I bet it was were you going to play a part in it? No no I wasn’t actually I didn’t start to sort of interfere in my own scripts until some years later. All right well this was a TV script which is interesting because I suppose what you’re most known for recently probably is radio with your beloved curmudgeonly character Ed Reardon as I mentioned before having just completed his 16th 16th series on Radio 4, 100 episodes in the bag.

(9:54) That is extraordinary for a radio sitcom I mean that’s the sort of numbers you expect from like an American TV show with a room full of writers and you know 22 episodes a series, a hundred episodes. Yes it’s it is unusual. There were shows in the in the 1950s that I think did rather more episodes but that is you say they had teams of writers but I think possibly one of the reasons it’s it’s kept going is that Ed Reardon reacts to whatever’s currently in the air not so much actual events it’s it’s more fashions in the arts or TV or sport journalism politics and so there’s always something new for Ed to be annoyed about and he’s he’s certainly written more than I have and he’s probably earned more but but I think what what makes him a more interesting person than me is that he never feels sorry for himself. Most writers moan on about how hard done by we are but Ed never does that and maybe that’s what’s allowed him to keep going as a comedy character.

(11:00) Well he does bitch about other people though I mean he’s he may not say I’m doing badly but he does resent it when other people do well. Oh yes yes and he’s driven by extreme jealousy for other writers. Has he changed much over the years do you think?

(11:15) Well he sort of has to, he reacts to whatever’s in the air. But none of his attitudes have changed would you say? Well I would like to say no but I suspect they have.

(11:27) I suspect there’s stuff that he said in earlier episodes that I wouldn’t I wouldn’t allow him to say now. You know it’s not like mind your language or anything like that. You know it’s been going for 20 years and I think fashions have changed.

Speaker 2

(11:41) Yes that’s true.

Speaker 1

(11:42) The show I think has changed a little bit because in recent years the budgets everywhere you know inevitably shrank a bit and so we had a jazz band to begin with. Ed used to play in a jazz band. We had a writing class.

(11:58) Ed used to teach creative writing and they sadly have had to go for purely budgetary reasons and you know it’s just what everybody’s had to put up with. And so I think the effect that that’s had is it’s made the stories a bit tighter because there aren’t so many other characters and it takes a bit longer to construct the stories but I think on the whole it’s it’s worked quite well. I mean the latter two series which have been done in this sort of slightly new way and so these sort of recent ten or so episodes are more like plays really, farcical plays rather than topical sitcom that it was when we first started.

(12:40) But it’s hard work but I love writing plays so it suits me. Okay time for another off-cut now. What’s this one?

(12:49) Right this is a play called Oedipus at the Crossroads of Motel. It was written in the early 90s. Your parents are both other men now Martin but their accident could have been much more serious and it made me realise that you should know it was me who first brought you to them.

(13:06) I was adopted? Yes. What so are you my real father?

(13:12) No my dear. He’s entitled to know. He’s over 18.

(13:16) You are aren’t you Martin? Yes. Thank goodness for that.

(13:20) 19 years ago I was directing the Sheffield Panto, Aladdin and Felix who ran Bolton Rep had just done Chinese Bungalow so let me have the drapery in exchange for a favour. Felix Sheppard? Who ran Bolton yes.

(13:33) He’s in the cast of our programme. The Motel? No.

(13:37) He’s Gaston, the chef with a past. Well isn’t that typical of this business? It really is just one big family.

(13:44) And how often do we say that fact is so much stranger than fiction? Not very often at all on this show. We had two fires and a plane crash last week.

(13:54) Felix we need you to answer a very important question. Did you give this man my baby? Your baby?

(14:00) I remember giving him some costumes. Green satin I think. The fabric is immaterial.

(14:06) Felix you told me the baby was sent to Loveday and Latouche’s orphanage in Streatham where he subsequently died. They sent me a lock of hair. Loveday and Latouche was a firm of wig makers and parookiers.

(14:17) I used the moniker to throw everyone off the scent. I thought it was an odd name for a church orphanage. It came off the top of my head.

(14:24) The idea not the hair. So who am I exactly? You mean there was no orphanage?

(14:29) No polio epidemic? Call it a white lie for the greater good. So you two are my real parents?

Speaker 2

(14:36) No.

Speaker 1

(14:37) Your father was the actor whom you replaced as the motel’s likeable barman. He was at Bolton too. The old bloke who killed himself when he was given his notice?

(14:46) Not your fault. Not directly but I was a cause of his death. I wouldn’t go that far.

(14:52) Unknowingly perhaps but I was. This calls for an ad in the stage. You may be cheeky waiter and charming chatelaine to 18 million viewers but in real life you are mother and son.

(15:03) It’s almost like one of the motel’s own more sensational storylines. God this is terrible. It’s alright.

(15:09) No it’s not. It means I’ve killed me father and slept with me… Don’t worry about Dennis.

(15:14) He was going to be written out anyway. And as for the other thing darling I told you it doesn’t count on location. Well that’s quite the punchline.

(15:26) Oh gosh that was… Is this the end of the play? That was complicated wasn’t it?

(15:32) No I don’t think it was. I think it… It went on from there?

(15:36) Yes. I think I did finish it actually. I couldn’t get anywhere with it.

(15:42) My agent said it was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. It was rather sort of complicated how it came about because I was actually in Crossroads when I was about… I think I was 18 when I went into it and I played a cheeky waiter.

(16:01) They gave me a trial three weeks to see how… And then at the end of three weeks they said right you can stay on. We’ll make you the waiter and then they realised they couldn’t make me the barman because I was too young.

(16:17) So they gave me a birthday so that I could serve behind the bar. And I had a party but I was only 17. So then a few weeks later I had another birthday.

(16:30) No party this time and then I was able to go and serve behind the bar. And I was in it for a year and a half or something. And the other sort of inspiration for this I suppose was that I was an only child and for a while I was slightly unsure about who my father was.

(16:47) When I was very little anyway I had a stepfather. But that was a pretty standard upbringing. But I think only children often feel they’re doing things wrong all the time.

(16:59) I did especially when I started working in theatre. And then when I was surrounded by all these older more experienced people when I went into Crossroads I sort of felt I was doing something wrong the whole time. Many years later really when I read Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy I was struck by the way that Oedipus believes everything he’s told about his origins.

(17:21) And he never questions anything even though he wants this terrible history not to be true. And my instinct is to see comedy in any situation. It seemed logical to set the Oedipus story in the Crossroads motel.

(17:35) I thought it would be quite fun. Obviously having heard that I think I’d been probably reading a lot of Joe Alton when I sat down to write it. But I think what you’ve just heard was a bit too big for its boots really.

(17:49) The general idea is quite funny but then when you get right to that punchline you go oh this is potentially a little darker than we previously thought. But this is the earliest offcut that you sent and you mentioned your parents just now. They both worked in entertainment.

(18:05) But what about you? Did you know you wanted to act because you were following your parents? And all this writing, did you do writing at school?

(18:12) Were you good at it? Where’s that come from? Well yes all three of my parents worked in theatre and then in television.

(18:22) So the first paid writing job I had or the first thing I got paid for was on a game show called Huey Green’s Double Your Money. I think it was 1964. And I got half a crown for sending in a question.

(18:36) And I think the question was which of the following heavenly bodies is closest to the earth? Is it the moon, is it Mars or Brigitte Bardot? That tells you when it was.

(18:52) How old were you when you wrote that? At the age of eight or nine. I can’t imagine that was original.

(18:59) I must have got it from somewhere. But anyway I got paid two and six for it. And then I progressed to writing, helping to write questions for the TV game show Mr and Mrs, which my stepfather directed and for which my mother wrote the questions.

(19:16) So in school holidays I used to help her write the questions. Oh wow. I remember Mr and Mrs. They had a child writing the questions. Yes they did, yeah. Well I only sort of helped, I suggested things. It was actually my first experience of literary rejection, with my mother telling me that the questions weren’t good enough.

(19:34) And then I sort of followed their lead. I left school when I was 15 and sort of went to work in theatre. And one of my first acting jobs was playing a Christmas turkey in Mr and Mrs. So I had to run on the set, do something mischievous, I can’t remember what. And then as a punishment I was sent into the soundproof box. And when I went into the soundproof box in my turkey outfit, having got my laugh, I remember that, I could still hear the show’s host talking to the audience. I thought, well if I can hear that, all the people who go on Mr and Mrs must be able to hear the questions and the answers that their spouses give.

(20:13) So I thought all these years, and nobody thought to cheat. They just, well maybe some of them did. But there’s something quite moving about that.

(20:22) Yeah, well unless of course there was some kind of music or something played in there.

Speaker 2

(20:25) Ah, maybe there was.

Speaker 1

(20:26) Yeah, you see, maybe something else. But it was quite shocking to me at the time. But the writing thing, I mean, I don’t mean to in any way dis your writing at a young age.

(20:35) It’s not really the same thing as writing plays. Were you writing much at school? No, I mean, I left school with very few O-levels and I had really very little education at all.

(20:49) And I did manage to write a play when I was quite young. I’d been working as an actor for some years by then. And when I was in my early 20s, I did manage to write a script which I tried to sell as a film script and couldn’t get anybody to read it.

(21:04) And so I sent it to a radio producer. The play was about cricket. It was about a cricket tour in the 1930s called the Bodyline Tour where the English team were thought to have pushed the boundaries of sportsmanship or cheated, as the Australians saw it.

(21:18) Anyway, this script, the producer I sent it to, Jane Morgan, she was mad about cricket, I’ve been told that. And she wanted to do it. And we got it on.

(21:29) It was 1980, I think, so I was still quite young. And then after that, having tried to sell it as a film script and then it becoming a radio script, then David Putnam bought the rights to it. And I thought, oh, great, this is the ability.

(21:43) The film was never made. But I got commissioned to write the biography of the leading character who was a man very well known in cricket circles but had never had a biography written, a man called Douglas Jardine. And so writing this book became my education.

(22:02) So I hadn’t learnt very much at school, but I learnt an awful lot over the year and a half or two years to write this book. So that was my education, really. It was an odd way of going about it.

(22:13) But that was where I sort of learnt to write, really, at that time. Interesting. Well, moving on now, let’s have another off-cut.

(22:21) What’s this one? Well, this is from a radio pilot script. It’s called Nicholas and Lysander and it involves Nicholas Craig and his son, Lysander.

(22:36) Dad, have you seen my lucky scarf? Are you in for supper tonight? No, don’t worry about me.

(22:44) I’m not. I’m worried about parting with significant sums of money at Morrison’s for food which gets wasted because you don’t turn up to eat it. Yeah, that’s why I’m saying don’t worry.

(22:52) Really need my scarf. It’s got an 8 out of 10 strike rate. Right.

(22:57) But what tends to happen, Lysander, is that you say don’t worry, so I don’t, and then you appear with a pitiful countenance and I have to divide my meagre past in two, which is more than a little vexing. So are you complaining a do turn up or a don’t? Because it can’t really be both, can it?

(23:12) Maybe I left it in Chiswick. Oh, got to stop sleeping with models. They always nick your clothes.

(23:17) Where is it? Lysander. Why don’t you make one of your favourites, like kidneys, brains, then you won’t have to share it, will you?

(23:25) Or get vexed. No, I’ll have to leap to the AGA and make you a Spanish omelette while mine goes cold because that’s all there is in the house. Well, don’t.

(23:33) A house, moreover, which is falling down and whose running costs have just quadrupled. So sell it. Don’t worry, dear, it’s going on the market this morning.

(23:41) Cool. Cool? It’s too big for you.

(23:43) You fall asleep drunk on the sofa every night. You don’t even need one bedroom, never mind five. Sell it, Dad.

(23:49) You wouldn’t think it was very cool if I turned around and said we’re moving to Bounds Green. Well, I wouldn’t mind because I’m getting a place with Max. Max appears in feature films he won’t want to share with you unless he needs someone to wait in for the drug delivery man.

(24:01) Might get somewhere on my own. Depends if I get this job. Running another club night at the Hubbly Bubbly Bar is not a job.

(24:07) I told you, I’ve got an audition for a movie. That’s why I seriously do need my scarf with the silver threads running through. Corporate training movie?

(24:17) Or don’t forget to turn the gas off movie? It’s a short. Oh, the creative activity of choice for the latter day layabout.

(24:24) Has Orlando got a job yet? No, he’s making a short film. Is this the gilded youth who’s directing it?

(24:31) Dad. Lucy Bunting. Why do they always sound like characters from a nursery rhyme?

(24:36) Give it back, I need the address. 48 Hoxton Square. Who’d have thought it?

(24:40) Lysander snatches the paper. Thank you. I was in a short film once.

(24:45) I had to be a ludicrous farm labourer with lines so fatuous I spoke them precisely as written just to confront them with the evidence of their own imbecility. Good one, Dad. Can you tell me where my scarf is so I can actually do something with my life?

(24:56) Like take part in a Tosspot Trustafarian Vanity Project? Dad. Which scarf?

(25:01) It’s like Liberty’s in our understairs cupboard. The one Max got me from Turkmenistan. Darn.

(25:06) You’ve taken it to go to your Russian lesson again, haven’t you? I have not. Just because she recognised you from an old episode of Middlemarch don’t kid yourself you’re cougar prey.

(25:15) Lysander starts something about in the cupboard. What’s delusional, Lysander, is to suppose you will not be out on your arse or indeed flogging said orifice up and down the award-winningly restored Regent’s Canal towpath unless one of us gets a paid job. Where’s my scarf?

(25:31) And talking of rental, I’m charging £100 a week from now on. Good. I’m charging you for ruining my life and being a smug, self-obsessed, poisonous, gay-arsed, alcoholic, scarf-stealing, criminally inadequate father.

(25:44) So we’re quit! FX Front Door Slam. Then the sound of a drink pouring.

(25:48) Nicholas dials on his phone. Hello, Miriam Medeiro. Geriatric client here.

(25:54) You may want of a person called Lucy Bunting. Not as would be reasonable to assume a character out of Motherfucking Goose but yet another Whitechapel wanker squandering her parents’ money on a short film. I know we said never again, but it might be worth a nudgelet.

(26:14) Nicholas Craig moved on a bit there, hasn’t he? He did that very well, didn’t they? Yes.

(26:19) Yes, I remember we had a… It didn’t get anywhere, but we did have a reading of it. I think we had a reading at Attrick and it’s mentioned, isn’t it, the short film job and I think Lysander, he tries to start a festival of short films and his father’s very sort of dismissive of it, but because they live in Primrose Hill, hundreds of people come round with their short films wanting to enter the festival.

(26:46) They charge, you know, a £500 entry fee and so it ends up with Nicholas on his wonderfully large dining table with about £5 million in cash just moaning about, all I’ve got is this endless, endless admin to deal with and he’s just being given all this money and he’s still moaning about it. I thought it was quite funny, but obviously nobody else in power did. You wrote it with Nigel Planer.

(27:17) How did you meet the two of you? I’d known him for quite some while, I think, through Andrew actually, through my late writing partner who had a wonderful office just off Charlotte Street and he used to write Agony with Stan Hay and there were two cartoonists he shared the front office with and everybody just dropped in for lunch. It was one of those central London places that just became a bit of a meeting place and I met Nigel there and then, you know, we’d sort of see each other’s shows and so we’d become friendly by the time we started on Nicholas.

(27:54) And had you started with the view to let’s invent a good character for Nigel or did you just start writing something together and then go, oh, do you know what? Nigel could play that. No, it was his idea.

(28:04) He said, I think there’s an actor character. That’s all he had really at that point and then we just started reading around it and realising what sort of… He was a bit young to do it, really.

(28:14) He was still in his thirties when we did it and he should have sort of been a bit older because he was sort of on the way out, as it were, but he was terrific. And the character got richer as Nigel got older and we did a lot of shows, a lot of Nicholas shows.

Speaker 2

(28:32) Like what, theatre and TV?

Speaker 1

(28:34) Yes, yeah, we had a stage show that we did and we’d sort of get that out of its box and take it out on the road. But we began on TV by doing the Late Show unit and they wanted a sort of 20-minute piece from Nicholas and a sort of master class type thing and because BBC obviously had all the rights to the Wogan show, we did a master class on how to be on Wogan. And I remember I had two old VCR machines and just a pile of VHSs of Wogan and I’d be on my hands and knees putting these cassettes in and watching this stuff over and over again.

(29:12) Now it was just such an easy job to do but it took me weeks to do this 20-minute piece. And then we did two series and then quite a lot of single hour-long shows for BBC Four, so we did a lot of shows. Excellent.

(29:27) Well, he deserved it. He was a brilliant creation. I speak on behalf of me and my entire generation of drama school graduates.

(29:34) Oh, thank you. Loved it. Anyway, time for your next off-cut now.

(29:37) Can you tell us about this one, please? This is from an unfinished novel called Ghost Story. I wrote it in 2007 and this is the first page.

(29:49) I had been expecting this particular death for some years and given the peculiar closeness of my relationship with the dead woman, it was going to be a busy few hours.

And given the peculiar closeness of my relationship with the dead woman, it was going to be a busy few hours, possibly days. News of a celebrity demise often comes to people in my trade as a welcome excuse to set aside the task in hand, put the kettle on, perhaps have a hunk of low-fat mature cheddar and think about composing an apposite soundbite. Almost invariably the holiday mood sours once it becomes clear that no one is much interested in what a freelance writer has to say about the late national treasure or the time when our professional paths crossed.

But last Tuesday morning I knew it would be different. Not long after the turn of the century, I spent 15 intense months inhabiting the role of Joy Adams’ analyst, flatterer, collaborator and, somewhat resentful, servant. She, in turn, proved to be my tormentor, victim and financial saviour.

You’d have to go back to the days of Nelson’s Navy to find an enforced intimacy between two people so wholly out of sympathy with each other. Joy and I were yoked together by a publisher and set to work to money. A truckload for her and a much-needed Nissan Micra for me, Mike Green, the anonymous ghost.

When the news of Joy’s death popped up on the screen, I hardly needed to think about which would be the best stories to toss to which particular hacks. Nobody else alive has more facts at their fingertips about this woman. It’s not something I’m in any way proud of.

In fact, I would much rather not have had so much show-business trivia cluttering up my memory. As I sat at the computer, braced for the first wave of demands for information, Twitter threw up the usual inadequacies. R.I.P. Joy Adams, drivelled, a million-pound-a-year television executive, truly spelt T-R-U-L-E-Y.

An incredible comedy genius, her split-second-timing was amaze-five-ays. I know, of course, that criticising the spelling of a tweeter is widely considered to be a cheap shot and, in all probability, a criminal violation of a stupid bastard’s personal journey. So I confined myself to observing that you can always tell when someone doesn’t know what to say about an actor if they resort to commending their split-second timing.

The overpaid executive’s lame eulogy received 80,000 likes and 14,000 retweets, plus several compliments for his beautiful words. Out of the radio came the voice of a footballer remembering the day Joy paid a presidential visit to the lad’s changing room and he found himself shaking her hand while wearing no shorts. A stand-up comic said she was a game-changer.

(3:48) An actor who was the last but one Captain Birdseye said she was incredibly down-to-earth. By the time the Director-General of the BBC appeared on Newsnight to deliver his tribute, Joy’s timing was crafted to nanosecond perfection. I realised that they were probably not going to ask me for my recollections.

So instead, I’ve decided to set down for my own satisfaction the true story of what passed between Joy and myself. This is a record of 15 unpleasant months in the life of the nation’s favourite nan, who was also, although the nation is not yet aware of this, their favourite murderer. Ooh, that sounds so intriguing.

But this is based on your real-life work, isn’t it? Well, very loosely, yes. I mean, not with a murderer specifically. I spent a year and a half, I think, as June Whitfield’s ghostwriter, around 1998-99, and we actually got on pretty well.

But for the purposes of this story, it works better if the two characters are at loggerheads. Yes, of course. I say we got on pretty well, but she could be quite hard to please sometimes.

And I think it was Chapter 5 went through dozens of, literally dozens of drafts, and we had a big argument when she insisted that the height of the popularity of the Beatles was during the Second World War. So we had sort of rather circular arguments like that. And I developed a strategy.

I invented the Museum of Social History. So anything that she challenged, I said, well, no, I have actually had that fact-checked with the Museum of Social History. No.

Which she accepted without question. And the trouble was, though, that she then thought the Museum of Social History sounded so interesting that she wanted to come with me to go there. So I had to say it was a bit sharp for refurbishment or something.

But anyway, in the novel, I made the National Treasurer, I gave her a different name, made her a murderer. And of course, June didn’t murder anyone. But the idea did seem sort of good fun because she was at the peak of her National Treasure status.

And I’d say that sliding into June’s character there, because Andrew Nickolds and Nick Newman, who I also worked with, they worked with me on a proposal for a film script sort of based on this novel idea and the real experience called Killing June Whitfield, in which June murders her arch rival in order to And we took this to June, who was very keen on the idea of being a master criminal, but she didn’t want to murder anyone. So we thought, okay, so how can we make this way? She said she’d much rather be a great train robber or something like that. And then she decided that she didn’t want to be a criminal at all, because people would think she really was.

And she had a good point there, because I’d read some of the fan letters that she received. And, you know, fan mail is very odd. And she might have had to spend, she feared she might have to spend hours on chat shows and local radio explaining that she wasn’t a murderer.

So that was the end of it, unfortunately. But you actually wrote, you ghost wrote her autobiography as well. Yes, that’s right.

(7:19) They actually did get written. And it was on the whole, you know, absolutely fascinating experience. And she kept so much, I imagine he’s gone to the Theatre Museum now or something.

But this sort of vast archive of scripts, Hancock scripts, and, you know, absolute sort of milestones of comedy that she had in her sort of attic room. Yes, well, she did work with everyone, didn’t she? Oh, yes, worked with everyone. And at a time when it was quite difficult for women comedians to get work.

And she didn’t particularly see that as an achievement. But I think she was aware of how good she was, obviously. And yes, I mean, she worked with, you know, Arthur Askey, Noel Coward, Tommy Cooper, you know, just about everybody.

(8:07) So what’s with the recent fashion for cosy murder stories? I don’t know if you’ve noticed it on television casts of older actors playing detectives. And in fact, the Thursday Murder Club, the success of Richard Osman’s book now made into a film where the lead characters are pensioners. In fact, a lot of TV detectives are now middle aged, if not older women as well.

(8:32) I’m wondering, is it worth possibly reviving this? I know that she’s the criminal in this. But as a cosy character in a cosy murder story, is this something you might consider? Yeah, that’s a very good idea. It’s such an obvious connection.

Honestly, it hadn’t occurred to me that. But yeah, that’s a good idea. Okay, let’s move on to the next offcut.

What have we got now? This is a clip from my adaptation of Tristram Shandy for Radio 4. It’s an ad for a donkey charity. And I’ve chosen it because the director cut it. Graham’s slow pastoral music or melancholy piano.

(9:11) If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not save a donkey from dying senselessly? By donating just three pounds a month, you could relieve the suffering of donkeys abroad who are hungry, thirsty, and struggling with loads that are far too wide. Text SAVE to 0007 or call 0800 099 0774. Or why not adopt an ill-treated donkey? I’ve chosen the perfect donkey for my husband and two for my best friend, Linda.

(9:40) They’ll love their adoption pack with pictures of their new donkey friends. Visit donkeyaid.org and click donkeys in your inbox now. Thank you.

(9:49) The music ends. Oh, it’s lovely to hear that. Yes, the director cut it, so I was very pleased.

Thank you. Oh, excellent. Our pleasure.

Now, this was an interesting play. I heard this, Tristram Shandy in development. It wasn’t Tristram Shandy, to be fair.

It was Tristram Shandy in development. It was a play, if I remember rightly, about a production of Tristram Shandy. I can’t remember if it was a film or a play that it was being produced.

(10:14) Well, the idea was that it was a sort of rather pretentious radio drama workshop, and it was broadcast as though it was a podcast. But yes, it’s not as wide of the mark as you might think, actually, because Lawrence Stern, when he wrote Tristram Shandy, part of the joke was that he needed money to subsidise the writing. And so he peppered the text with adverts and appeals for money so that he could keep writing, rather in the way that podcasters do now.

(10:47) We don’t, by the way. Well, that’s why I hope to sneak that clip on there. So just as Stern sort of satirised the world of publishing, I put the boot into radio drama.

But, you know, you could really, it’s so malleable, this story, you could sort of set it… That’s Tristram Shandy, you mean? Yes, you could set Tristram Shandy anywhere, really. Frank Cottrell Boyce did a wonderful film version about 15 years ago. It’s set in the film world and, you know, you could set it in the world of publishing or the world of theatre.

The beats of the story work equally well, I think. Well, we’ve heard from that and earlier Off Cuts that you sort of like a bit of historical comedy because you spoofed the Conan Doyle and similar style detective yarns we heard earlier, and this is taking a well-known 18th century novel as its subject matter. Have you always had a love of historical literature? Are you particularly well-read? No, no, I’m not.

Not at all, really. But I suppose, well, there are adaptations that are out of copyright. I see, it’s a financial issue.

(11:57) No, I think actually I’ve sort of, rather than being inspired so much by English comedy or literature, I think that I probably learnt more from theatre and from American sitcoms, actually, than from British ones. I taught comedy for New York University for a few years and I thought, there’s no point in teaching American students about British sitcoms, telling them about Heidi High or Hello, Hello. So, I watched a great deal of Frasier, Seinfeld, Simpsons, Roseanne and so on.

(12:28) And I learnt a huge amount from them. The main lesson being that you can’t keep more than three plots running at the same time. You can just about get away with three.

Two is better. Best of all is one. Really? I thought best is three, isn’t it? The ABC plot system.

(12:45) I just think, if you can do without them, and if you think that. Well, it’s a way of involving all the characters, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s the thing. Sometimes you can’t do it in one because you’ve got too many characters, absolutely, as you say.

But if you think of your favourite sitcom episodes of a particular favourite sitcom, they’re often the one that just has one plot or one plot with two very slight digressions. But, you know, it’s 28 minutes or in the States, 22, 24 minutes. You know, it’s not that long.

(13:16) You have to keep the narrative quite simple. Right. But you’ve never been tempted to write a sitcom in the way that Americans do.

Your style seems very British, whatever American influences you may have picked up. Is that true? Yes. I’m very envious of the American system.

I’d love to be involved with it, the writing team, I think, because, you know, they take it so seriously. There’s a lot of money in it, so they take it very seriously. And so there’s a show I particularly admire at the moment called Hacks, which has a team of writers and, as do all the great American sitcoms, but they’re also in it, some of them.

And I think that’s a very good system. I’d love to work in that. But I think it’s that we can’t afford to do it in this country.

I’m pretty sure it’s that. But when you talk about the technicalities of plotting, particularly, to execs in this country, they often just cover their ears and hum. They just really don’t want to know about it.

(14:19) They just want you to get on with it and finish it as soon as possible. And maybe they know that they can’t afford a writing team, so don’t even think about it. Right.

Time for your final offcut now. Can you tell us what it is?

Yes, this is called Rum Bum and Biscuit, and it’s a radio sitcom pilot written by Nick Newman and myself in 2003.

Interior. War-room of HMS Indubitable, 1804. Captain Francis Peckham scratches out his ship’s log as the ship rolls and creaks.

I, Francis Fairfax Peckham, captain of His Majesty’s ship Indubitable, do hereby commence the log of today’s action upon the island of Rhodes on this first day of June in the year of our Lord, 1804.

(15:06) The engagement cannot, in the strictest sense, be termed a naval battle, being more of an argument in a restaurant. It is nonetheless another valiant chapter in the career of HMS Indubitable. Exterior.

The main deck. FX distant battle. Another famous victory, Francis.

Thank you, Septimus. I’ll wager that Taverna will think twice before trying again to seat a captain of His Majesty’s navy at a wobbly table. The waitress was doing her best with a folded-up napkin, and it was the poor girl’s first day.

And her last, I fancy. But what of my wound, Septimus? Is there any hope that your medical skills might staunch the blood and save my arm? It’s only a paper cut from the menu. Septimus, my old friend, I bleed.

(15:51) Oh! Oh! Have you removed the limb? No, just drawn a smiley face on your sticking plaster. Ah, then once again I appear to have cheated death. Well, you certainly cheated the restaurant.

You didn’t even pay for the retsina that we had at the bar. Ah, Mr. Runkle. Um, aye aye, sir.

Captain, matey, whatever. You appeared to relish your first taste of combat. Yeah, it was a really good laugh.

(16:17) It’s like being back in the sixth form at Stowe, basically. Perhaps that explains why you went into battle flicking a wet towel rather than a cutlet. Quite so, Septimus.

I see nothing escapes the keen eye of the scientist. Mr. Runkle, how many enemy diners did we dispatch? Yeah, so I reckon we slotted, like, about seven of them. Does that include the German tourists whom I ran through with a kebab skewer? Oh, for sure, yeah.

And the guy with the guitar? I de-bagged him first. That was quite a laugh, too, actually. And our own losses? Probably about a hundred, sadly.

Our guys got so tanked up waiting for a table, they just, like, fell off the quayside and, like, drowned, basically. Oh, that is, I suppose, the terrible price of war. Give those impertinent Greeks a broadside of grape for their trouble, Mr. Runkle.

(17:10) Right. Okay, so you want me to throw some grapes at them? Oh, damn it, man, I’ll do it myself. FX fires a big cannon.

(17:20) Excellent shot, Francis. You flattened most of that ancient Venetian fortress. Let us not waste time on the idle exchange of compliments, Septimus.

(17:27) We must set sail for mainland Greece with all dispatch. Excellent. Are we going to, like, nick some more archaeological treasures? Francis, we haven’t got room for any more temples and statues.

(17:38) I desire some assorted marbles which will look exceedingly well in my dear wife’s new bathroom. Way anchor, Mr. Runkle. Raise the gallant yards and set a course for the Argolid.

(17:50) Okay, for sure. Yeah. So it’s probably going to be quicker if I write to my mum and get her to do what you said, yeah? Uh, right.

So this, according to the notes that came with it, is based on the novels of Patrick O’Brien and is about Nelson’s navy. Where was this going to go story-wise? Um, well, I think we hoped we could involve an audience, actually. A bit like doing Mrs. Brown’s Voice, because it would be very difficult to build a convincing early 19th century man of war.

And if you film it, it’s just ruinously expensive. So we thought it’d be quite fun to do it in a sort of slightly Heath Robinson way in a studio. As a TV pilot, we intended it.

(18:37) So it’s going to be an audience show? Yeah, an audience show, yeah. And we had for many years, both the shows that I’ve done and done with Nick and various other people, we’ve had a very good sound effects technician called Alison, who arrives when you’re going to record with all these strange bits and pieces that make the noise of something else. And when we have done live shows or audience shows, when Alison sets up her table, the audience just becomes absolutely transfixed by it.

(19:10) And we thought, well, actually, it’s Alison who’s the star of the show. So we made Alison a character in this nautical yarn so that she would actually make the noises of the battles as they were going on in the studio and you would see her in vision. It’s an idea that I noticed becoming adopted everywhere.

I sort of nicked it from myself in my Tristram Shandy adaptation because it was the sound effects technician who ends up having to play Tristram Shandy. And when Nick Newman and Ian Hislop wrote a stage play about Spike Milligan, there’s a sound effects technician in that as well. So I think if we did it now, we’d have to sort of find a slightly different way of serving it.

But you asked me earlier if I’d read a lot of historical novels and stuff. And I thought, well, no, I haven’t. But then I thought, well, actually, Ed Reardon is based on the anti-hero of George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, which Andrew introduced me to years and years ago, 40 years ago or something, a novel that we both loved.

And the leading character, he’s actually called Edwin Reardon. And we were going to call him that Edwin. But right at the start, Sally Hawkins, who plays Ping, Ed’s agent, she improvised a line down the phone calling me Edward.

We didn’t have time to re-record it. So I’ve had to sort of avoid the issue of what his name is for 96 episodes or something. But there was a serious purpose to basing Ed Reardon on Edwin Reardon because Edwin is sort of the archetypal ill-used writer.

He lives in a garret, he gets very badly paid and very badly treated, and he’s a terrible failure. But in recent times, he’s become to seem less so because I’ve written a bit about George Gissing who based the novel largely on his own experience. When he wrote this novel, he got 150 quid for it.

And in today’s money, that would be enough to build yourself a house. I mean, you’d be lucky to get a fraction of that for a novel. I think you sometimes don’t even get any money at all until a novel starts to sell.

So Ed Reardon started out as being a reflection of Edwin Reardon, the Victorian ill-used writer. But yeah, but now it’s sort of, it should be the other way around. And Ed is quite unusual in that he actually earns his living from writing.

And very few jobbing writers, jobbing hacks of his level, managed to do that. The same with jobbing actors, they mostly have a side hustle of some kind. Although Ed was doing teaching, which is what a lot of writers and actors do as well.

(21:52) That’s right. Yes, we had to do away with that. But yes, yes.

(21:56) So that’s the thing. Now you mentioned when you sensed the rum, bum and biscuit, but I must ask why rum, bum and biscuit? I get rum, possibly could get biscuit, but what’s bum? It’s an old saying about the Navy and I can’t remember who first used it, but it’s just what life in the Navy is. It might have originally been rum, buggery and the lash.

(22:23) I think it’s Winston Churchill actually. Oh, I see. And then it got sort of shortened to rum, bum and biscuit for some reason.

(22:30) Oh, okay. Well, that’s an education. Yeah.

When you sent it to me, you mentioned that you had had a project on a similar subject turned down by the BBC last year. What was that about? I get so many, I have so many offcuts. I’m reminded of them every time I wake up the computer and there’s a folder saying, it’s like a sort of writing necropolis saying, BBC drama proposals.

This vast collection of rejected stuff. So I can’t actually remember, there’s so many of them. Oh, I know.

There is a similarity. The crew of this Man of War, they go around stealing stuff. Again, more thieves.

(23:13) Like the Elgin Marbles. And so I wrote that sort of Holmes and Watson parody where that’s exactly what they do. And in fact, I got another one turned down just a few months ago about the man who was accused and sort of convicted of defacing the Elgin Marbles in the 1930s.

You know, the British Museum over-cleaned the Elgin Marbles and this man took the rap for it. He’s completely innocent. And I thought there was an interesting subject for a radio play, but no, it’s not to me.

But yes, you’re quite right. That thing keeps popping up. Hmm.

Interesting theme to have. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show. How was it for you, Christopher Douglas? Yes, it was nice to hear those things that I thought were dead and buried come back to life.

(24:00) So that was lovely. But I suppose it’s a bit shaming in a way just for the sheer, vast quantity of rejection. But I don’t think they’re terrible.

But yes, I have to acknowledge that they didn’t hit the spot with the commissioners. Are there any that surprise you? Anything you might wish to go back and perhaps redevelop? Yes, I think that the sitcoms, there were a few in there, weren’t there? I think some of those could work still. Yeah.

(24:31) Yeah, because obviously there’s a turnover of staff at the BBC, just like anywhere. So somebody who turned you down once may have come. Yes, we once got a Dave Podmore show on because there was a, I think there was a new commissioner or the person who was responsible for commissioning.

And I knew, didn’t greatly like or understand cricket. And I said, well, we want to do another Dave Podmore episode this year, because as I’m sure you know, it will be the anniversary of exactly a thousand years since cricket began. And fortunately, this person believed me and commissioned it.

So you can get round it sometimes. Excellent. Well, it has been lovely to talk to you, Christopher Douglas.

(25:18) Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcut straw with us. Thanks very much. The Offcut straw was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Christopher Douglas.

(25:35) The Offcuts were performed by Nigel Pilkington, Jake Yapp, Beth Chalmers, Christopher Kent, Emma Clarke and Helen Goldwyn. And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us.

Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

Pi Tour Day. Welcome to the Offcut Straw.

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

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

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

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

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

Laura: Yes.

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

Up to other people.

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

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

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

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

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

Laura: Yeah, too intense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actor 4: Okay, thanks Paul.

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

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

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

Actor 3: had arising and active love life.

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

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

A fat neighbor comes barreling past,

Actor 3: excuse me.

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

Actor(s): you sure this is safe?

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

Actor 2: suddenly

Actor(s): turns

Actor 2: it

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

Actor 2: Exactly.

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

Actor 2: Didn’t mean to do what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(music): right,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura: Oh, right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura: Okay. Time for another off cut.

Now, tell us about this one.

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

Actor 4: Many questions.

Piers: Local problems solved

Actor 1: by famous people.

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

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

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

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

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

Actor 1: whether it be community based,

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

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

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

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

Actor 1: We’ll do our best to help.

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

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

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

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

Actor 1: a local character.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, it does, it does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura: That was

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

Laura: never.

Go on this show like this, this never

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

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

Piers: Tony Banks is either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(music): Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Laura: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(music): Right.

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

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

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

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

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

(music): Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah. ‘

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

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

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

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

Laura: on a true story?

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

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

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

Laura: Yeah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(music): Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So tell us about this

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura: move.

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

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

(music): It’s very clever

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura: Did anything there surprise you at all?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks very much for having me.

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

Thanks for listening.

Adele: I think it’s a really important thing in life, admitting to yourself that you do things that are not up to scratch and that’s okay. And I think that’s obviously the whole point of your podcast. You know, there are things that we didn’t, that didn’t reach its full potential, and maybe that’s fine because we’re just learning from them.

And learning is all part of life. Everything can’t be perfect straight away.

Laura: 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 here, the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success.

My guest on today’s episode is Adele Parks, MBE, born in North Yorkshire. Adele is the author of 24 novels, including several Sunday Times Bestsellers and her 25th novel. Our Beautiful Mess is published this summer. Her books have sold over 5 million copies in English and been translated into a further 31 languages.

She’s also written for national newspapers and magazines and served as executive producer on a feature film, an adaptation of her novel, the image of you. And added to that, Adele is also an ambassador for the National Literacy Trust and the Reading Agency, and in 2022 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature.

Adele Parks, welcome to the Offcuts Drawer. Hello. 25 novels in 25 years. That is so impressive and must be very organized. Do you have an end plan though? Do you have like a magic number you are aiming for? Do you know?

Adele: I don’t, which I, I, I’ve struggled a bit this year ’cause this year is 25 and 25 and I have been very focused on 25 in 25, and now I’m going, oh.

So now I’m doing 26. And then I suppose 27th, what come, you know, when is the end game? But I suppose at some point there will be an end game. But um, but I feel 25 and 25 years I should be quite happy with. I shouldn’t overanalyze.

Laura: It’s like the wedding anniversaries, isn’t it? So this would be your silver novel?

Yes. And if you make it to 50, it’ll be your golden novel. I’m not very clear about the ones in between things like, well

Adele: hilariously, the proof for this 25th one was this beautiful golden cover and I sort of said, oh, don’t you think it should be a silver cover? ’cause it’s 25. And then we all looked at each and thought.

There’s no way I’m gonna get to 50. So we were, yeah. No, gold’s good. Gold’s great.

Laura: Right. Well, let’s kick off with your first off cut. Can you tell us, please, what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Adele: This is an outtake from my 2020 novel called Both of You.

Actor 1: At the bar. Everyone had been so shiny and groomed, way more groomed than she remembered.

People being in her day, men in her day smelt their clothes were awful. Checked shirts, red trousers. Still, she had fancy to fair few attracted to their wiffy pheromones. Despite the challenge, sartorial sense, she really resented getting old because amongst other things it meant she fancied no one and was fancied by fewer Still.

Women weren’t as well groomed back in her day then neither her day. Oh my God. But then she thought, and she hoped, this wasn’t just wishful thinking. She thought maybe they talked about bigger things and they had more fun. They were more sincere. Jesus. If that thought ever drifted onto paper out of her head into God forbid her voice box, they’d make mince meat out of her.

The careful emotionally vulnerable. Millennials and Zeds were so easily upset. But they had, it was true. They had more fun and they spoke about bigger stuff. They were their authentic selves, although the wanky phrase hadn’t been thought up, the only time the word authentic was used was in conjunction with antiques.

That’s how authentic they were. This station Waterloo had witnessed some of her most drunken dreadful moments. Some, not all. It would be hard to prioritize and categorize her drunken moments. There had been a few, but then again, too few to mention, sorry, outdated reference. Frank Sin er, if you’re interested.

Hell of a voice. She didn’t believe that talent had stopped. She’d never say they don’t make ’em like they used to because they did. There were numerous incredible singer songwriters, young enough for her to have given birth to. They could hold a candle up to Sinatra if they’d been given years and years of support.

But no one was Nowadays, they weren’t even given 15 minutes of fame, just three or four. It was reflecting on it impossible, probably to find your true, authentic self in three or four minutes. When she was 21, she’d been at no fixed abode. Now they’d call her homeless. They’d say she was sofa surfing at the time.

She just knew she was okay. If she could sleep on the sofa of a friend with more money or experience, it wasn’t great. It did affect her mental health, but again, that’s not how they described it. Then she was just seen as weird, bonkers, highly strung, maybe on a good day, creative.

Laura: This reads very scatterbrained to me. The, the character’s always digressing. Is that the character in the book or was it the way you put down all your thoughts as they occur to you and then you tidy up later? I mean, whose voice is it? Is that yours or is it the character’s voice? Do you

Adele: know this character and the reason this isn’t off cut.

She never appeared. It never happened. No. Um, yeah, she didn’t, this isn’t the character that ends up in the book, but she was my starting point. So yeah, there was so much, so much in that. It’s really interesting to listen to it because. Pretty much none of that gets in. First of all, she sounds as though she’s in her fifties.

That character, both of you. Character is in her forties, so she’s a good decade younger, so a lot of that is irrelevant ’cause she is a millennial. But it was the first. I quite often start writing or think of my book whilst I’m still coming to the end of the book before. And I remember being in Waterloo Station and watching a whole bunch of.

Mostly women. I mean, men were there, but I tend to focus on what women are up to. Uh, saying goodbye to their friends, saying goodbye to their lovers, getting on trains, saying hello to all those people coming off trains. So there was a sort of stream of consciousness going on and I was definitely looking at it, but I.

Was already trying to feel a way into a character who did have some kind of emotional instability and physical instability. You heard straight away that she sofa surfed. In the end, the character and both of you, and I’m really talking around this ’cause I’m really trying not to give a spoiler, but. She’s as mad as a box of frogs in some ways.

Sorry, very terrible thing to say, but I don’t think I’m offending any books as frogs yet. But she has a very deep rooted problem, uh, she goes missing in this book. And there are two women that go missing in this book and, and both of them are very deep rooted problem. I was feeling my way into that.

Laura: So you didn’t have an equivalent of her then?

You didn’t go, well, I’m gonna make her 10 years younger and have a different name. But it’s

Adele: No. Do you know, in fact, she didn’t become Art. She was a management consultant, one of them. And the other one was a sort of woman who’d married well about married a younger man. So didn’t work at all. But both of them were incredibly organized.

The only thing they had. In common with this character is they had, as I say, some emotional instability in their early part of their lives. So they were still reacting to that, and I would say that was the only thing they had in common really.

Laura: So are you not tempted to maybe sort of put her aside and then drop her into another?

Adele: Do you know? Many, many of my characters in my books are. Slightly bonkers. And I think that was, Hmm. Uh, well, you know, it makes a good psychological thriller to have a, a unstable narrator. I mean, it does. And I, I think at the time with both of you, I wanted to move away from that. But I have written a woman since that I think could be this woman.

I don’t think she is to be abandoned. I think there’s a lot of ideas and a lot of people in my head that may or may not come out in the future. And, and I like her. I like that stream of consciousness. She’s like a, a sort of slightly mad, low down at heel Mrs. Dalloway, isn’t she just out there saying her thing?

Laura: Well, I was reading it going, this is like everyone I know Yeah. People, people of a certain age. Um, just go, yeah, that’s basically, that could be me. Well, time for another off cut. Now. Tell us about this one, please.

Adele: Well, this one it’s called the warning and it’s a short story I wrote when I was 12 in 1981.

Actor 2: Don’t be daft. Chris, you don’t want to go in there. Yes, I do. Why? I wanted to read my cards. You know, tell me if I meet a tall, dark stranger. They began to giggle. Then as Chris was so headstrong, she went along in inside the stage green caravan. It was dark. In the center of the room, there was a round table with a green and white spotted tablecloth.

At the back of the table, a woman with jet black hair sat. She frightened. Chris, sit down child. Don’t be scared. The fortune teller spoke in a clear voice. I’m not scared. Chris tried to be as confident as she sounded. The fortune teller chuckled. Chris, how’d you know my name? Chris asked. Again. The fortune teller chuckled, but did not reply.

Child, the fortune teller continued child. I cannot answer your question because all I see on the cards is one thing. What is it? Death Chris let out a whimper despite herself. Your death where when? I can’t say exactly, but child, be careful of the number. 8 0 1 and the color red. This is my warning. Chris didn’t listen to anymore.

She ran. Ran out of the caravan. Straight into Sue. Hey, what’s the hurry? I’ve just been on the eggs with You’ll never guess who? Steve Carter Sue walked briskly in the night air. Hey, is there anything wrong? What did the fortune teller say? Oh, nothing much. Just that I’d meet some guy. It’s probably Steve.

He’s asked us around his house tomorrow to play some records. That’s nice. Hey, I thought you’d be thrilled, ecstatic, or at least pleased. I’m said Chris, and normally she would’ve been. The next day was Saturday. Chris woke up and looked at our clock, nine 20. Heck, she’d have to hurry. She was meeting Sue at 10.

Chris dashed out of our house, bang, splat into Sue. Hi. Hi. I’m sorry I’m late, but don’t worry you’re not. They walked and talked as they set off towards Steve’s. This is, it said Sue with a grin. Chris looked up the steps at the red door with a brass. 8 0 1 hung above the letter box. The fortune teller’s warning came back to her.

Beware of the number 8 0 1 and the color red. Chris began to run. Chris, come back, Sue, yelled, frantically, look out. But Sue’s yelling could not be heard above the noise of the traffic. The young girl had no chance. The driver of the red bus number 8 0 1 couldn’t stop

Adele: laughing so hard right now.

Laura: Um,

Adele: yes. I didn’t really get the brief on this. I really, that’s not showcasing my best work is it? That is just giving everybody a big giggle. But

Laura: this is really important ’cause this is what you were writing at. 12, there’s not many 12 year olds that will be able to write something quite as coherent and complete and, um, with a twist at the end, or two twists as it turns out.

Very, I impressive that double twist. Double twist. I’m always,

Adele: I still do a double twist. Uh, maybe Do you think I read it squirming because I’ve always thought. I was a good writer and always thought it was my thing at school, and I found this in an excise book, and I just thought it was really funny because I didn’t think it was very good.

When I look back, I think my 12-year-old son probably wrote better. He’s not 12 now, he’s 24 now, but I think when he was 12 he was writing way better than that, but I might inflated ego with the distance of past. I thought I was great and looking back at it, no, not that great. Average.

Laura: Oh, I dunno. Well, I think you’re probably comparing your 12-year-old self.

Thank you. And what you know today to be good writing and, and you can pick out points that are maybe false with a, a weakness maybe. I mean, my only issue is it with, it was possibly that you’ve never been to a fortune teller before, because that’s not generally how they operate. Sense. They don’t tend to say things like, I see one word death and can you imagine?

Adele: So adorable. Dramatic, isn’t it? You know, it’s got everything in there. There’s a romance, there’s a bus, there’s a fortune tell of everything’s going on. I mean, that could be, that could be several short stories, really, couldn’t it? Yeah.

Laura: I was impressed with that. I thought you, you sent it to me to go Look, look, see how clever I was when I was young.

Adele: Oh gosh. No. But I suppose it did point out that I always wanted to be a writer. Yes. Well, I was gonna ask you. I really always did. Yeah.

Laura: What were you like at school? Were you really good at English, et cetera?

Adele: I was. I was good at. I tried. Yeah. And

Laura: were you good at everything or just was English clearly the way forward?

Uh, well

Adele: even English wasn’t clearly the way forward ’cause I’m dyslexic. Oh. So I think I had lots of imagination and I had a fair amount of confidence and I liked school and I liked my friends and we had a good giggle, but I think it came back over and over again ’cause I hid it very, very well. You know, I was clever enough to be able to hide it, so I did hide my dyslexia.

I didn’t even know I had dyslexia. I just thought I was really, really rubbish at spelling out. My di dyslexia wasn’t um, diagnosed until I was 21, about a month after I’d graduated. Oh, right. So I just. Spent a long time thinking, why doesn’t it stick with me the way it does with other people? And I just put it down to my northernness that people would say, spell it, how you say it?

And I thought, well, I have, I just have said it. But it said, uh, how I speak was different to a lot of other people. I was then meeting who had sort of queen received English, and I absolutely didn’t because there was all of that going on. And actually, the other thing about dyslexia, people think, oh, it’s about bad spelling.

And it, it’s that it’s not, it’s not just about that. It’s so complicated and so confusing, and you don’t know why you’re not like anyone else. And you don’t understand why you might have known something the minute it was being taught to you. You really got in, you really understand it. And then when you try and write it down or explain it back to someone, you can’t.

Laura: Mm.

Adele: And that was all part of it. Um, and my left and right was very bad and lots of things were confusing for me. But on the other hand, I do to this day now believe that my dyslexia. Helped me think around things more creatively and made me who I am. So I’m actually very grateful that I had it. But going back to the question of how did I do at school, I would say I was a mixed bag.

’cause I could go. To one exam and get the highest mark in the class quite comfortably, and I could go again to another exam and get the lowest mark in the class quite comfortably, depending on how stressed I was and Oh, really? Okay. How the dyslexia was kicking in and Yeah, so I wasn’t. Particularly consistent, but I tried so hard that it tended to get me quite far, you know, the kid in the class that underlined everything and put borders around everything and drew little pictures and um, you know, and I did that with all my English story.

I really liked art as well. So I did that with all my English, uh, homework assignments. It was illustrated. I tried so hard. I actually am quite good at. Mass. Mm-hmm. Um, sport was a real letdown for me. I hated sport and I was really bad at that. But you know, I was at a local comp where sport was sort of two hours a week and nobody cared.

So you could get away with not being good at sport in my school.

Laura: Well, listen, 25 books in 25 years, we are not worried about whether you’re good at netball. Exactly. That’s not an issue. Right. Well, moving on now. Let’s have your next off cut, please.

Adele: Uh, this is from 1988 when I was at university, and it is a clip from my second year dissertation.

Actor 3: Seduction is a theme which recurs in literature. Psychoanalytic and feminist critics argue that in literature, whether the woman is the seducer or seduced, she’s portrayed as more sinful than the male protagonists. Critics suggest Adam and Eve precipitated a literary tradition, which mistrusts women. The female seducer Seducable is condemned as unnaturally, aggressive, and simultaneously ruined.

Where did these stereotypes originate from? What is their purpose? I have decided to carefully examine four female literary characters who were subjected to the temptation of seduction. The characters are Middleton’s Beatrice from the Changeling. 1622 Milton’s Eve from Paradise Lost 1667 and Richardson’s Pamela 1740 And Hardee’s Tess from Tess of the Villes 1895.

The genres play epic poem. Epistolary novel and novel are unified by the aspects of the archetype seduction, which they have in common. Seduction is physical and spiritual. To seduce is to lead astray, tempt into sin or a crime. Corrupt persuade a person into abandonment of principles, especially chastity or allegiance, persuaded by tempting ness or attractiveness.

All the women are seduced either physically or spiritually. They are all part of a triangular relationship of one female, two males. All texts depict several seductions. The texts are written by males primarily considering a female point of view. I wish to consider if surface similarities justify the claim that the Biblical Eve as archetypal seducer is perceptible in all sexually subverting females, and why these common elements reoccur in the fallen woman myth I.

Laura: Fun stuff there.

Adele: Yet again, I’m cringing. As I say, I didn’t realize the brief was to put me in a good light. This is definitely not doing that.

Laura: No, no. This is, again, it shows that you have a serious academic background. You gave it some serious thought. Were you doing English at university? It sounds like you were.

I was, but English was your degree. Where were you? Where did Le you go? Lester? And how did you find university? Were you very social or were you sort of cloistered away being academic? What kind of teenager were you?

Adele: Uh, I was very social. I was very, very social. Yeah, I was very, very social until the final year really, when I thought I better do some work.

But I’m laughing a lot at the ambition of that, you know, four genres, three centuries, all the great works. Oh, I’m just gonna, I’m gonna do them all. I’m gonna do them all. I think, um, what that shows is I didn’t know how much. I didn’t know. And I think that was quite interesting about me ’cause I, you know, first generation university and all of that.

So I really didn’t know what to expect And um, I actually, and this is, I’m just telling you all my failures all at once, but I had applied to university the way everybody does through uh, you know, through in those days cca. Mm-hmm. And I’d have five rejections which nobody could understand because I was, you know, I dunno, I’d done gold dv You predicted to

Laura: get AS and stuff I imagine?

Yeah, and I’d done

Adele: gold DV. You know, done, um, a student, sorry, gold Duke of Edinburgh. Yeah. Who did the gold Duke. Oh. Oh goodness. And I did student governor and I was, I was as swaty as they got in our, in our little comp, you know, and you

Laura: got five rejections. How did that that happen? And I got five rejections.

Adele: Well, how it happened, well, first of all, if you remember back, you, in those days, you hand wrote your replication and I’m dyslexic, and they didn’t know. So it will have been littered with mistakes. Mm-hmm. You know, we didn’t pick up on. Mm-hmm. But secondly, because I had no idea how university worked, I thought she went there to learn things.

Now I understand that’s not necessarily always the case. So I knew I wanted to do English, but I thought, gosh, this would be a great opportunity to learn something new as well. So maybe if I went to York, they’re really good at music, I could do English and music, and if I went to Warwick for example, I could do.

English and acting. And if I went to East Anglia, I could do English and art. And so I applied for five very different courses, which obviously we all know shows a lack of focus, which actually I do have, um, lack of focus. So, you know, fair, fair that I was pulled out on that one. Um, and so they just said, God, this kid doesn’t know what she wants.

Or, or you know, maybe it was the spelling, how

Laura: wrong they turned out to be. How wrong? 25 books in 25 years. Hilarious. They, they have no idea. I

Adele: mean, I think it’s quite fun. I mean, it wasn’t fun at the time. It was heartbreaking at the time. Everybody else was getting offers and my headmaster and to his credit said, well, you’ll get the grades and then you’ll be able to have your pick.

You’ll go through clearing and you’ll have your pick. And there were two places. In clearing available Royal Holloway and New uh, and New Bedford. And this one, uh, Leicester. And I went to Leicester ’cause it wasn’t as far away. And I went to uni and I met amazing people there who are still my best friends.

Now I’ve got, you know, great people from Leicester University and I’m so. Prior to the friendships I made there, but I think I was very, very, very unprepared for what that experience would be.

Laura: Who were you at 18, 19, 20. What were your, ’cause obviously you’re in between living at your parents’ house and then getting a job and settling down into the rat race.

Who were you at that age? Who did you want to be? Who are you dreaming of being at that point? I was

Adele: definitely dreaming of being a writer. I was quite artsy. I had this. My hair’s actually supernaturally curly, even though I now always blow dry it to a smoother version. But I had this sort of big pre ruffle light hair going on.

I was always in my dunes and my dms. I was quite this sort of. Screaming feminist slash I’m a pre ruff light muse. I mean, what is that? If not a split personality? I didn’t, you know, I was trying everything out, which I think excellent is. Yeah, it is excellent. It’s exactly what young people should do when they go to university.

I was trying out lots of different versions of me. I think I’d like, I mean, you’d have to ask the other people I went to uni with, but I didn’t take myself particularly. Seriously. I don’t think, you know, I tried lots of, I dunno, clubs and things and I, you know, I had

Laura: a gigle. I had Gigle Yes. As we all did.

Yeah,

Adele: exactly. And um, and I had a giggle and it was fun.

Laura: But you dreamed of being a novelist specifically or just. You didn’t know exactly. Maybe you’d be a journalist, maybe you’d be a novelist, A researcher. A novelist. A novelist. You already knew that. Never,

Adele: yeah. Never crossed my mind to, in fact, funny story.

I thought I had kept it a massive secret though, because everybody, there’s 40 people on that English course back then, and I think everybody probably wanted to be a novelist, so I felt slightly embarra. Because, you know, it’s a, it’s a relatively vain thing to think you want to be, that you think you have something to say that other people should read.

And I was self-conscious of it and, and didn’t want to say it. And then many, many years later, ’cause I wasn’t published until I was 30, but when I did get my book deal and I rang up all my friends and told them, I went, you could be so surprised ’cause such a secret. No one ever knew this about me until the last person they said.

No, every time you got drunk you would say a funny in office. Every single time you would bang on about it and you were so boring and you’d tell us your parts and they were really boring and we didn’t wanna know. But you’d do it. And the funny thing is, obviously I blanked that out. The next day I get up smiling, thinking my little secret was still mine, Kar.

Uh, so yeah, funny old days. Yes.

Laura: And you never worry about running out of ideas. Kind of after 25 books that you’ve written, are you still as hopeful and positive about it as you were at 1819? Do you still think Yep. I’ve still got loads to say.

Adele: Uh, well, interestingly, no. Interestingly, I think I’m. I’m in a better place now than I was then, I think 18 or 19.

I desperately wanted to be a writer, but nothing had ever happened to me or nothing I was prepared to talk about. Um, and even if I was prepared to talk about it, I didn’t really have the skillset to, to do that. Um, but the skillset being. Uh, genuine empathy for other people’s points of view. Um, so, which I think is a really important skill for a novelist.

Laura: Yeah,

Adele: so I think now I have more to say. I’ve, I’ve been a mother, I’ve been a, a wife twice. I’ve, um, had friendships come and go. I, I’ve had. Great successes and huge disappointments. I’ve had gains and losses. I’ve more to say now than I did then. So I don’t worry about running out of ideas. I think I’m in a particular situation now where I’m writing psychological thrillers and I am very much known for my twists and my twists and my twist.

So I think people read me waiting for a twist and I keep saying there may not be one. That might be the twist. That’s the twist. Yes. Yes. That might be the twist. I might give you a book that isn’t twisty, turny, because I might decide that’s what I want to write next because not all my ideas are necessarily psychological thrillers.

I know the one that comes out in 2025. It’s a psychological thriller. I know the one that is in 2026 is ’cause I’m two thirds of the way through writing that one. I don’t know. Beyond that, I don’t know if I will keep always writing psychological thrillers. I always say, I think I’ll run outta time before I run out of ideas.

I often have three or four ideas in a in a year, and I have to sort of drill down on them and make sure they’re not just short stories and they’re really genuinely and novel. And sometimes this year, 2020 book was one of those times where I really wanted to do. Two books I couldn’t choose and I, I started one and then I changed my mind and then I went back to it and then I changed my mind.

I could have done either one

Laura: and could the second book be 20, 27 or it might be, yeah, let’s

Adele: face it, that might, it’s sitting there, isn’t it? It’s asking for me to give it its attention, but there was also a reason I left it alone. And actually I’m quite brutal. If there is a reason, if there’s something and even a tiny thing that is a reason I abandon something.

Then it probably needs to stay abandoned. I’m quite the ruthless editor.

Laura: Okay, let’s move on now. Your next off cut, please. What’s this one?

Adele: This is my second off cut called the warning, but this one is a poem and I wrote it in 2002

Actor 3: to disallow the possibility of too much happiness. I married to protect myself from unadulterated pleasure.

I settled to safeguard from unreasonable horror. I paired. To avoid being alone on a dance floor at 40, you’ll marry like a diamond as big as the Ritz. You came along to fill up my tits. I was always so careful and sensible. Licentious behavior was indefensible paid my taxes crossed at the green man. Now I fuck you.

Whenever I can. My lips are sore, my thoughts are raw. Whenever we say goodbye, I just want more. I’m perpetually wet between the thighs. What we are doing isn’t, especially wise, it’s sticky and tricky, but I don’t want it to stop. If ever you ask my knickers, I’ll drop. I love you.

Laura: Goodness me.

Adele: You’re allowed to laugh. I do.

Laura: Yes. Yes. We, we all went, crikey. That was, um, well, I dunno, I’m,

Adele: I, I mean, it’s hilarious that I put it out there for you to have it. First of all, can I just say that there’s this fact that I’ve got two called the warning. I obviously spend my entire life worrying about stuff, don’t I?

Oh, don’t do that. Don’t

Laura: do that. From the age of 12 to the age of whatever that was, 20 something. Yeah. Yes. You’re busy warning people about different things. Yeah. But, um, this poem is surprising content aside. To me. It reads like two poems joined together. It’s like you’d written the first. Poem fairly sort of hardened and cynical and, and, you know, realistic about relationships.

And then like somebody called you out and you’d gone off for a drink or something, or possibly something else, I don’t know. But you come back maybe two or three drinks, uh, worse for wear. Yeah. And you’ve completely forgotten about your basic theme and you’ve been distracted by a lovely man.

Adele: I think that’s very possible.

Laura: You don’t remember? I mean,

Adele: I feel that’s my life. No, well, I do. I know exactly when this is written. So I think what happened is it was two parts of my divorce process, so I think it may not have been a quick couple of drinks and straight back to it, but, um. The poem. I mean, oh yeah. It was, uh, it was more that I would’ve written the bitter sad stuff.

And then the very first night I went out after my divorce, I met my now husband, which is unusual. I, I understand that.

Laura: The very first night you went out,

Adele: I had, oh, I had one night being single. Hilarious. Technically single. You are

Laura: kidding.

Adele: I know, I know. Weird. So I, I mentioned that I was, you know. It was a surprise that to me, that I was a single mom and I had a 10 month old baby.

And then when the baby was, I dunno, 13 months, so not much in it, three months. Um, my friend had a birthday party. She said, you’ve got to come out. You can’t still stay in the house. You know you can’t stay in the house forever. And I was like, literally have nothing to wear than maternity clothes. And she said, oh no, you we’ll go out.

We’ll go out, we’ll go shopping. And I remember buying these. Brown leather trousers from whistles. Oh, I still own them. Very lovely. And I had every objection here. I was like, oh, I can’t, because you know I haven’t got a babysitter. She said, oh, I’ve got a babysitter. And uh, so her babysitter sat for both our babies and we all went out.

Six women that had all had babies a year ago, and. All of the others announced their pregnancy and they were all there with the husbands. And I announced my divorce and said, you know, well he left me, you know, a while back and um, and I feel like rubbish. And then I turned around and there was this. Guy across the crowded room and I just thought, no, he’s hot.

Yeah. Oh, word. And I thought he’s hot. I think that will help tonight. And yeah, and everyone And then the romance for want a better term that sort of. Followed. The very intense were months that followed. Everybody kept saying to me, you do know that this is your rebound shag. You do know this isn’t gonna make it, and this isn’t gonna be a big deal.

Don’t lose your head, don’t lose your heart. Don’t fall for him. And I just thought, no, I have fallen for him. This is it. He’s amazing. I, and now we’ve been married 21 years.

Laura: Wow. That’s a story and a half. That one, isn’t it?

Adele: Fantastic. So I suspect there were two poems shoved together. I’ve, funnily enough, never tried to get my poems published and I think No.

Having heard that one broadcast live, yeah. I never should.

Laura: Well, well, you know, I would say don’t, don’t give up the day job. Your day job is doing so well. You so well you. Exactly. Yeah. Don’t really need to. Fun. It’s,

Adele: it’s fun that, um, it’s out there. And, and you know, the, the fact that I obviously was looking for a different way to express myself.

’cause obviously I could have, I could have done prose and actually did go on to write a, a book about mine and Jim’s relationship.

Laura: Oh, which one is that?

Adele: I, so. Oh, it’s called the other women’s shoes. Yeah, the other women’s shoes. It’s almost a word for word account. Yeah. I mean, you will now recognize the night that I’ve just described is, is in that book.

Oh, wow. Um, the only thing I do is split my character into two different women and I give myself two children. I only had one. But other than that, it’s pretty much the same thing.

Laura: Right.

Adele: Um, anyway, that aside, I do think that’s hilarious that that poem has now had an earring and I felt I’ve always wanted it to have an earring to read secretly.

Secretly I have because I was so right about him and everyone told me I was wrong and I was, you know, obviously to start with just a lot of pent up passion. Let’s go with passion. But, um, but it quickly moved on to something very deep and very important to me. So I think it’s quite fun that that’s now had its little moment, even though I accept that it’s, it’s never gonna make it into an anthology.

Laura: Did you write a lot of poetry then?

Adele: Mm. I think I’ve done 12 in my life.

Laura: Oh, I see.

Adele: Yeah. Not a lot. I think he can see that, that it needs some practice. I think I could work on that skill before we, uh, we, we rush out to try and publish them. And I think also I do write them. It’s hilarious that you said you probably went out for a drink and came back.

’cause that is. When I write them, so well done. Good spot. Yes, Ralph.

Laura: Oh, how satisfying that is. Oh, excellent. Okay. Well, right. Let’s move on to your next off cut. Now what’s this one?

Adele: Well, this is an earlier poem, so this is one of the 12. Really getting them out. Yeah, but can I say, in my defense, I think everything else I’ve ever written other than my poems has been published.

If I’ve tried for it to be published, it’s been published, so that’s why the poems are getting an airing. But this one was written in 1989 and it’s called The Ruse. I was at university at the time.

Actor 2: Would I want you if I were first? I would not. The savage satire that you are pulls me in pounding. You are appalling at articulating, expressing.

I deliberately try to confuse. But this is just a ruse as we both long to be understood, and yet it is this coldness, this icy fjord that you are impenetrable aquamarine. So beautiful, so terrible. It is all of these things that I need and want you deliberately try to confuse, but this is just a ruse. As we both long to be good.

Laura: This one’s slightly less shocking. Um, but you wrote to me, uh, when, well, it was, the note I received with this poem was when you were dating an unknowable, posh boy. This was at university, was it?

Adele: Yes. Yes. I didn’t confess far too much.

Laura: Yes. Does the Un Noble posh boy know that he was a subject of a poem?

Adele: I very much doubt it.

I don’t think the un noble, posh boy would even still know my name. Um, oh, well he must now, I suppose he may now, he might have got, yes, I think you rings bell. Uh, but I don’t think I was very important to him at all. I think I had a phase, definite phase sort of thinking, oh, I’ve gotta get out there and.

Meet posh boys. ’cause I never had, I’d obviously, you know, as I’ve mentioned, I went to a comp and all my boyfriends had went from there. And I found them fascinating for a while. And then I literally found them unknowable. Couldn’t get through to them. They wouldn’t talk to me and they, they wouldn’t tell me how they were feeling.

And, but at first, I think there was a stage where I found that. Fascinating. It’s probably a thing to do with self-confidence and lack of when you’re quite young. ’cause I think as you get older you should be able to say, gosh, if you can’t tell me what you’re thinking and feeling, perhaps this isn’t for us.

Mm. But uh, uh, in 1989, I did not have that in my vocabulary.

Laura: You’ve sort of gone on, haven’t you? The unknowability of others seems to be something you write about a lot in your novels regarding sort of truth and fidelity that seems to come up. I do quite a lot. I think

Adele: there’s, I think all of these. Um, off cuts.

They’ve got something of that. Even that crazy, terrible dissertation, which can I say, I’ve got a two one in all my life. I’ve always been shocked at that two. One thinking I should have been a first. I’ve now listened to that dissertation. What can I say? I’ve noticed that dissertation. I was like, look, it wasn’t a third girl, uh, because it was shocking.

Uh, so all of this, this sort of recapping it. Very good for me. But yes, I think I am interested in fidelity and infidelity. I think it’s one of the few things that we have. That we select as a moral code for no other reason than we select to do it. There isn’t really anymore, there isn’t really a sort of evolutionary path that tells us that this is what we should do.

I can see where there would’ve been in the past, but I think most of us would still opt for it if we can.

Laura: Yes, of course we would

Adele: still opt to know and to be known and to remain faithful. And yet nearly all of my books are about people. The struggle with that.

Laura: Oh, I suppose that’s the interesting part of conflict, isn’t it, the Unknowability.

Mm-hmm. Of others, but that was the subject of a lot of your books, but your 17th novel, the Image of You where one woman tries to discover the truth about the man that her twin sister’s fallen in love with. Mm-hmm. That definitely seems to be on that subject. That particular novel has been made into a film.

Adele: Yes.

Laura: Yeah, tell me about that. You didn’t write the screenplay for this one, did you? But No, I

Adele: didn’t, but I worked on it. I worked with, um, Christopher, who was fantastic and we worked on it through, uh, lockdown, which was great to have a project. And I worked very hard on. On the exec producing. So getting it made, uh, exec producer can be anything, as I’m sure loads of your listeners know, it can be anything from, you know, you throw in money.

I didn’t do that. You throw in time. I absolutely did do that. Mm-hmm. Because the producer that had opted the book in the first place, I remember sort of talking to him through lockdown saying, oh, every. You know, nobody’s doing anything and everybody’s locked down and it’s gonna disappear. And he said to me, well the thing is, Adele, nobody will ever care about this as much as you, everybody’s got lots of projects on, you are the one that can make this happen or not.

And I found that really empowering.

Laura: Mm-hmm.

Adele: And it had never crossed my mind that I could be the one that could make that happen or not. Which is odd. ’cause actually, if you think about being a novelist, all you do is make something from nothing. Exactly.

Laura: Yeah.

Adele: Um. But I really enjoyed the process and, uh, and I’m proud of the film.

It’s a, it’s, uh, a fun popcorny version of a. Psychological thriller. It isn’t a dark, nasty, psychological thriller, although arguably really nasty things happen. But they happen in a relatively tongue in cheek way, which is, is the vibe of the book and trying to get that. So sort of

Laura: romcom as far as films are concerned, would you say?

Uh, well,

Adele: interestingly, you see, this is interesting because the image of you was. Uh, the crossover book from romcom to psychological thrillers in terms of the genre, when I was writing and I had written quite a dark ending, and at the time, my publisher at the time said, oh, we feel that’s a big jump from where you are at now.

Can you soften your ending? And I did. And then when it, the book was. Being turned into a film, I said, oh, don’t read the book. Here is the ending, and, and pitch the ending that I’d I’d originally wanted, which is much darker because you need to have a genre. If you’re going to go into film, you can’t say, oh, it’s a bit of a hybrid.

You can do that in reading and writing because. People give you their time, their undivided, 15 hours, 20 hours, however long it might take them to read a book. They’re giving you the undivided time. But in a film, you’ve got, you know, an hour and a half. So you need to be able to say to the producers, it’s in this genre.

So I, I shoved it quite firmly into psychological thriller, but with a bit of fun. Twists and tongue and cheek and, and I think, I think it’s successful. I like it.

Laura: Why was that novel, the one that you chose? ’cause you’d written 17 up to that point. So what was the particular draw of turning that one into a film?

I

Adele: think it was a relatively commercial decision, actually, that I knew psychological thrillers were being bought up by producers. And at that time that was me going into psychological thrillers. I had a couple that were very new, still one read, written one that. Just come out the week I was approached. So this one had a little bit more of the sales behind it, and I was able to say, look, it’s sold x amount of books already.

Um, it, it’s, it’s this idea. Off we go. And actually, it’s a really strong idea, isn’t it? I think everybody loves the idea of our identical twins and we’re fascinated by them because, you know, they can. You know, spoiler boat, not spoiler. Uh, they can play each other and they can, uh, they have things in common.

They have differences that are, you know, this whole going back to the knowability and not knowability of a person. And if you, if your twin doesn’t know you, who does, you know? So I thought there’s a lot of mileage in it. And actually it took. Three years from, from being sold as an option to getting it made.

So, you know, there’s always that. By then I was three years done. Maybe I would’ve chosen something different by then. ’cause I had other books out with other sales records. But at the time it was just a sensible choice.

Laura: Okay. Right. We’ve come to your final off cut. Tell us about this one please.

Adele: This is an off cut from my 25th and most recent novel, our Beautiful Mess, which is published in 2025.

Actor 4: At first he’d been scared of it. Yes. Actually fucking scared of the money because they called it a reward. They said it was a thank you for not calling the police. That was bad enough. He didn’t spend it, at least not at first, but the second time they found him, they said it was a loan. He tried to hand it back then it was still in the envelope.

They laughed and said there was interest on the loan. But I never borrowed anything off you. You have our money. You’ve had it a month, now you’ve given it back. What do you call that if not a loan? I never asked for it. They just shrugged. You owe 800 pounds. What? That’s stupid. Where am I gonna get 800 pounds?

What’s the interest rate you are charging? But the question was idiotic. He knew that they said he could clear things if he delivered something for them. Started talking about interest rates. If only he’d done that in the first place. Taken out a credit card to think. He used to think 24% was too much interest to pay.

They said he owed them more than 10 times the original sum. Now it kept going up. No matter what he did, he had no idea how they calculated the interest. He doubted there was an exact rate, a hundred percent fucked 30 times over. Wasn’t a processable mathematical formula. He wasn’t a fucking idiot. He knew that he wasn’t going to be delivering pizza for the sort of money they’d loaned him.

But the first job was a message, something that can’t be sent in a text. The second job was a document. Papers. He decided not to open the envelope even though it wasn’t sealed. He thought it was a test. Could he be trusted also, he didn’t wanna look. What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him. Right. He’d assumed it might be dodgy accounts or something.

The next package he was instructed to pick up was different. No instructions as to where it should be delivered. Were texted. The package had the words open me, scratched on with a blue biro, all in capitals, uneven letters that looked like they were scratched out by someone uncomfortable holding a pen at school, but happy to carve their name on the desktop with a pen knife.

He didn’t open the envelope, not straight away. He dipped into a coffee chain, went into the Scuzzy Lu that was supposed to be for customer’s use only when the door was securely locked behind him. He looked inside the packet. The notes were dirty, used. He counted them 2000 pounds, A lot of money. His instructions were to take this and bring another package back.

If he did, as he was told he was buying drugs, he was a dealer.

Laura: I thought we’d add some, uh, testosterone to the reading team there. Just, uh, excellent. There’s too much estrogen flowing through this particular episode, but this passage, was it just this passage that was cut out or the whole idea of this character becoming a drug dealer? What, what’s the story behind this offcut?

Adele: Well, this is an off cut that I did myself. I quite often, um, I mentioned I, I self-edit a lot. I think by the time I. Give my book a I’m, I’m pretty much hoping it’s, it’s done deal. So at the beginning I sort of overwrite and I might have ideas and I quite often get as far as sort of 50, 60, 70,000 words and then could reduce it by as much as a half, which does horrify some people.

But for me it’s just the way I get into it. So this is a character called Zach. Zach is still in my book. He is really important. And it’s funny though, you’re right, we are talking, um. From a female point of view a lot in this, uh, podcast, but in fact I actually often write from a male point of view, and I often have male characters, but he’s a, he’s quite a young one.

He’s only 20 and. He in the actual finished book Our Beautiful Mess. He is a character that has a secret that is life-threatening. Uh, he has got himself involved in something way above anything he can deal with, and it is to do with drugs, but it’s nothing to do with alone. I decided that was all too complicated and I just even hearing it then I was like, oh, thank God I cut this.

So, yeah, so, so it was just, there’s, there’s some nice bits in there. You know, I can’t remember the numbers, but he, he talks about the mathematical formula that he can’t do, which is how fucked he is. Yeah. And I think that’s a nice concept and that, that carries through with Zach. He is out of his depth and he’s struggling, but it isn’t a sort of small turn loan.

He. Gets in something much more vicious. And actually I can’t tell you what, but he gets into something much more vicious, much faster into the novel where this all seemed a bit slow burn. And I thought like, I don’t really care. If I don’t care, nobody else cares. Um, so yeah. So that’s the only reason that this was taken out.

Laura: Now this is a belated sequel. The book Our Beautiful Mess. ’cause if I’ve got this right, um, this is the sequel to the first book you ever wrote. Is that right?

Adele: It is in a way, I suppose. So the very first book I ever wrote was, um, about a woman called Connie. And at the time she was nearly 30. And all my audiences, as you can imagine, were women of about that age, or some men, but mostly women, and the book’s called Playing Away, and it’s about a woman who.

Uh, falls madly in love with somebody who shouldn’t. And it, um, it wrecks her, her marriage, a very, very new marriage. And it’s about her struggling back from that. And it was, it came out in the year 2000. It was a huge hit. It was the, uh, biggest selling debut of that year. Um, and Connie set me up without Connie.

I probably wouldn’t be sat here talking to you. You know, she was amazing for me. And in the book at the time, in playing Away, she had four best friends who were really good fun and they were in the background. They all had their own problems and they own their own backstories in one thing, in another.

And I always resented that really quietly, that it eventually got put in this sort of Chiclet banner. Mm-hmm. Because when it was published, it was originally published at Penguin and the the editor at the time, and I. I swear this is true. This is an absolute true story. He said to me, would you like this published as a commercial book or a literary book?

And I said, what’s the difference? She said, A literary book will probably sell about 8,000 copies, and a commercial book will probably sell about 80,000 copies. And I thought, I’ll have that then. But it’s um, but it’s interesting, isn’t it, because it was a matter of how they were going to publish it, not the content of the book, which by that time was signed, sealed, and delivered.

Laura: So how they package it and what the cover would look like and that sort of thing.

Adele: Yes. And who they would reach out to and you know, and all that sort of thing. Interesting. Wow. Isn’t it fascinating? So it could have

Laura: been either, you could, you could could’ve been a literary author or a bestselling novelist at

Adele: that time.

I don’t think that would happen now, because I think I would’ve been edited slightly differently to be distinctly one thing or another, Uhhuh. But at that time there was a little bit more flexibility in everybody’s world and, and we weren’t quite as. Welded to genres as we are now. Anyway, at the time I wrote that book and I had all these characters and.

Over the years, I’ve sometimes gone back to pick out the best friends that were sort of the subplots and brought them forward and given them their front story. So there was a book called, uh, young Wives Tales, and that had two of the characters, Lucy and Rose in it. And then many years later, I think my 19th book, there was a book called Lies, lies, lies, which was a full on psychological thriller.

You know, prisons, murders a lot. Very, very different to my initial playing away, and yet it had those characters. I just moved them with me. I thought you can come. You are fantastic. You are complex, interesting humans, you can come with me And lives, lives, lives was actually my first number one. And so it was 19 years before I got my number one.

I was a 19 year overnight success, which I like to, you know, point out. Uh, so it was really, those characters have always been so exciting for me ’cause they were my debut and then they were my first number one. And going back to that story of. Originally, you know, she was in her thirties. I wanted to look at Connie.

Now, where is she in her midlife? Did she mature? Did she hang on to that relationship? Did they go off and you know, have a family. So I sort of wanted all of that, but I really wanted a psychological thriller. So I put. Lovely Connie’s poor family in huge jeopardy. This poor woman there, she was bouncing along in a romantic comedy.

Here she is like fighting for her life and fighting for the life of her family.

Laura: Right. And this is book number 25? Yes. Which is. Our beautiful mess. Yes. That is due out any minute now. If you happen to be listening to this podcast at the time of its initial broadcast. Yay. Well, we have come to the end of the show.

How was it for you?

Adele: I loved it. Lots of fun. I feel I haven’t really talked about my books. I just think everything I’ve told you about my like off cuts, there’s so random. Who talks about the 12-year-old writings? But it’s been so much fun to do that.

Laura: I’m very glad. I’m very glad you enjoyed. I’ve enjoyed it tremendously.

I suppose I should ask you one more question. Let’s think. Are there any offcuts that you’ve still got that you haven’t shared with us today that you think you might should have done? I actually

Adele: have a process when I write every single book I mentioned that I quite often can cut anything up to, well, my worst ever is cutting 80,000 words once.

Oh wow. But I can cut. Anything up to, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20,000 words. Uh, when I’m writing a book and what I do is I take them outta the manuscript that I’m writing and I stick them in a file that’s very creatively named bits. Um, and I just pop them in there thinking, oh gosh, if I really panic and I want them back, they’re just there.

And you know what? Over 25 years, I’ve never gone back. Pulled anything out of the bits file you never do. If it needs to be cut, it needs to be cut. Mm. So I suppose I have 25 bits files if ever you really want to dig through them. Um, but yeah, I can’t think there’s anything really great in there. So

Laura: it sounds like almost an idea that you should put them all together and see if you can make a book out of them.

Just see

Adele: what happens. You’re gonna be a really average book, wouldn’t it? Because there were all the things that didn’t make the grade. And I think it’s, I think it’s a really important thing in life. Admitting to yourself that you do things that are not up to scratch, and that’s okay. And I think that’s obviously the whole point of your podcast.

You know, there are things that, that we didn’t, that, that didn’t reach its full potential. And maybe that’s fine because we’re just learning from them and, and learning is all part of life. Everything can’t be up. Yeah.

Laura: It’s all part of the process. Yeah.

Adele: Everything can’t be perfect. Straight off. Yeah.

Laura: Yeah.

Well, it has been wonderful talking to you, Adele Parks. Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Adele: Thank you so much, Laura. I’ve loved every minute

Laura: the Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shaven with special thanks to this week’s guest, Adele Parks, MBE. The off cuts were performed by Emma Clarke, Beth Chalmers, Helen Goldwyn, and Chris Pavlo. And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit Offcuts Drawer.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us.

Thanks for listening.

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.

Louise: When I think about poor Miss Marriott, who was my English teacher, she used to get sort of 12, 15 page stories from me. And you know, and I, I’m never considered for a moment that, you know, it was gonna take her time to, to read them, that she must have seen my little green exercise. Sick and thought, oh no.

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

my guest for this episode is novelist Louise Candlish. She’s the author of 17 novels including Our House, the Other Passenger, and The Only Suspect With Her 18th. A Neighbor’s Guide to Murder published this month. Her 2018 novel, our House won the British Book Award for Crime and Thriller book of the year in 2019, and was adapted into a four-part ITV drama, which aired in 2022, starring Tuppens Middleton and Martin Compton.

And since then, she has written across genres including domestic suspense, psychological thrillers, and earlier in her career, romantic fiction. Several of her novels have been Sunday Times bestsellers, and her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Louise, welcome to the Offcut Straw.

Louise: Thank you for having me.

And may I say straight away that I wouldn’t describe any of my books as romantic fiction? Oh my God, I’m the anti-romantic author, if anything. Really? Not even the first one. No. Well that was, it was, you are right. It was, it was marketed as a rom-com. But it was, it was actually a stalking story. It was a sort of, I would just.

Describe it as a sort of stalking comedy. So there were a couple of comedies in the early days, and then there were, there were sort of family dramas. I would describe my sort of middle section.

Mm-hmm.

Louise: Um, and then they segue very, very naturally into darker suspense stories. Because I had never been writing, um, stories of hope and, um,

Laura: nobody could accuse you of being too positive.

Louise: Sadly not. So it was all too easy to get darker and darker and darker. But I think I’ve always retained that, um, that satirical element, you know, that sort of comic element. And I think. That’s the kind of counterpoint to it, because actually if an academic sat down and analyzed my message, they would say that I was extremely pessimistic about society.

To, to, I mean, I kind of do it naturally. I’m making it sound as if it’s all deliberate, but I quite naturally do include some comedy in my, in my tone and my voice to, um, you know, to counteract, you know, that sort of slightly more pragmatic message. Do, do you know why you lean towards bleakness? I dunno. I, I guess I always have, and I think it’s, you know, it, maybe it’s to do with my background.

I mean my, my parents and um, family are Geordie, so, you know, you’ve got that kind of very modern sense of humor that Geordies have, and I think that’s in there. I grew up in the Midlands, which has another kind of, you know, characteristic that has the certain kind of understatement and pessimism. Now I live in South London, so you’ve got this kind of trio of influences, but it’s really hard to know.

I mean, it could be, um, you know, all the books I’ve read and all of the, the TV drama and comedy that I’ve watched over the years, just being Gen X. Yes. You know, I, I feel like I’m very typical of my generation. You know, we are. Um, sarcastic and sardonic and, you know, I think all of that comes through and, you know, we’re very much a sort of bantering generation as well.

You know, all of the things that you are sort of, you know, in inverted commas not allowed to say anymore. Gen X will say when the, you know, when we’re all together. And I think all of that comes through in, um, the voice of my characters.

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

Louise: So this is a prologue I wrote in around 2022 for an as yet untitled thriller.

Beth (Actor): We have an excellent view of the scene from up here. Our faces are turned as one to the monstrous Atlantic to the figures gathered on the shore, shrunken by the high tide plen. The search and rescue boat has departed, but Isaac says it’s too dangerous to launch the helicopter.

To be honest, the bad weather is preferable to the grinding heat of previous days, but I do worry about my plane taking off safely into that horrible churning sky. I hope my flight won’t be delayed. I say, I are so egocentric. Isaac says laughing. What about the poor bastard lost out there? I hope his flight won’t be delayed either.

I say. And I flare my eyes at him. Playful. Flirtatious in a different context. We might have hooked up Isaac and me, but I’ve had bigger fish to fry, to catch and kill. First it was a hostile manager, Teo, who tipped us off about the crisis, letting us know one by one as we trooped through reception and we’d scurried up to the roof to watch like good little rubberneckers.

The alarm had been raised an hour ago by some rich Honeymooner at the Pale Hotel whose new husband was missing. No one was too bothered until his board washed ashore, but by then it was surely too late. The wife’s in a right old state. Apparently Isaac said you would be. I said agreeing. He should never have gone out alone.

He’d only had a few lessons apparently. Apparently this, apparently that. This is what happens when you run before you can walk. He added, yeah, you drown before you can swim. You are completely outrageous. Taxi for Viv, someone yells from the stairwell, and that’s me. I call back, I smile at Isaac and the others as I depart a proper goodbye gift of a smile.

I’ll never see them again. I’ll never think of them again. Serves me right that their heads turn back to the action even before my beam fades. Beyond the swell rises and grows. It’s a beautiful place. Spirits a savage place. Strange, but I felt a profound sense of belonging while I’ve been here.

Laura: That’s a very satisfying, apposite way to start a podcast about writing with an offcut called prologue.

I want some extra points for that. So we were just talking about generation X and it seems very much like that character is exactly as you described, a Gen X lady. Where was this story going to go?

Louise: Hmm. Well that was actually, um, the prologue was in fact quite a long way into the story. So it’s one of those structures where you sort of see a catastrophic moment and then you go back and discover how the character, who’s called Viv Uhhuh, um, why she’s in Bears.

And, um, you know, what havoc has she. Wrought there before she makes her a rather blithe departure. I love the, um, the reading of it sounds so clipped in 1930s and it’s actually making me think and making me remember one of the reasons why I didn’t take it on and I did something else instead. And it’s because it was very much a sort of old fashioned kind of vibe.

Ah. And the plotting alone would’ve worked a lot better before mobile phones and, you know, all of the, the various sort of apps and things we have now to track everyone. And so, you know, I was thinking, actually, this is gonna be quite tricky because I, I need to make this historical, I need to set this in the sixties maybe, or the very latest, the eighties.

And so I abandoned it. But yes, she’s quite a typical. Sort of Noirish character of mine. There’ve been a few of these 20 something girls who are on the Make.

Mm-hmm.

Louise: Who, you know, come from nothing and, um, need to find a way to better their circumstances. And this book, which I seem to remember, I was going to call the Sun Trap or something like that.

I had a few titles. This was inspired by Henry James is the Wings of the Dove, where a couple. Target a wealthy sort of res type in the hopes that the male will be able to marry her and she’s ill. And it’s a kind of, um, you know, pre prenup era. So all of these kind of elements did lead me to abandon it, but I actually hit the voice very quickly, loved the character, and also could see how easily it could be structured as well.

So, you know, maybe I’ll go back to it one day, but I think it does need to be set. Pre phones, pre-mobile phones,

Laura: do you not write novels that are set in a different time period to the present? Not

Louise: really. The only one I’ve done is the only suspect, which is partly set in the nineties. And again, that was chosen.

I went back, I kept it as close to the present days, I could, but before mobile phones would’ve had an impact on the plot. Mm. And, and the only suspect has occasionally been described as historical, which really makes me laugh. Because I think of that as extremely recent. So do I, but of course, it was 25, 30 years ago.

1995 was the year that I set part of the action. There was a heat wave that summer. I remember it very clearly and you know, it proved to be a really successful novel and is in fact going to be the next one on the, on the screen. So, Ooh, I know that you can do it. I know it’s okay. But I think the further back you go.

The more research you need and the harder it will be ultimately, if it’s ever adapted for the screen as well, which is, you know, sort of always on my mind, you know, in a hopeful way.

Right.

Louise: Um, so no, I haven’t, but maybe I

Laura: will. How much of it did you actually write? ’cause you said this prologue is not actually at the beginning of the book.

So presumably you didn’t just start in the middle or, or do you do that? Oh

Louise: no, I did. Yeah, I did. I did do that, but I had plotted out loosely what was going to happen. And then I thought, what’s an interesting way to, to enter the story? And I love entering a story at the end or in the middle. And then, you know, seeing, you know, something often fatal, um, but certainly catastrophic in some way.

And then going straight back to show. The character before it all went horribly wrong.

Laura: Have you planned it in advance? Do you plan it and then go, I’m gonna start in the middle and then go back and forward or whatever? Or do you go, I’ll start in the middle. I’m guessing it’s the middle. Who knows? We’ll see.

I dunno what’s happened before. I dunno what’s gonna happen afterwards. ’cause that seems extremely confident.

Louise: Yeah, I think I’m, yeah, I think I’m quite confident I just plunge in. Um, because for me the most important thing by far is voice. Mm-hmm. I even really fundamental important things that other authors will cite as the most important thing, like plot, character and setting.

To me, voice comes before those, obviously, voice and character are very strongly linked and they, I guess they’re the same thing actually. Um, now I’m talking about it. Mm-hmm. And generally I will, I’ll be writing from the point of view of a character or several characters. I won’t be a kind of overarching narrator.

Mm-hmm. I don’t tend to adopt. That puppeteer mode ever. Mm-hmm. So you get straight in the head under the skin of the character. So with this one, I honestly can’t remember. I certainly knew that it was going to start in London and that Viv, the character, was going to work in a department store, and that probably will be the next scene that I would’ve written, but I only ever wrote the prologue, which is after she’s done tremendous harm.

To the other two characters in the Love Triangle, and she’s making her her exit from the hostel where she’s been staying. Sounds intriguing. Do write it. Please, please, please.

Laura: Anyway, time for another off cut Now. So tell us about this one.

Louise: So this was written in 2018 and it’s a deleted scene from my novel, which at the time was called the Victim and later became our house.

Emma (Actor): Allison and I were the last to go to bed, clearing up the party debris, stacking the dishwasher, draining the ends of the Prosecco. At the top of the house. The kids were asleep, or at least resisting in relative peace and quiet. She put on the soundtrack to Betty Blue, and I lost my thoughts to the mournful sacks, the pleasurable mood of doom.

I remember seeing this at the cinema. I said we were well under age. I dunno how we got in. I’d never seen a French film before. Wonder what she looks like now. That actress. Oh, I expect she’s a middle aged crawl like us Allison said, pouring the ends of blood colored drinks down the sink. Canna, just say how well you’ve done this weekend, darling.

It’s been a tough time for you this whole year. It certainly has. I picked it a pat of green icing that had hardened on the floor tile like concrete. A suburban life goes on, doesn’t it? The Trinity Avenue hole is greater than the sum of its parts. Aristotle, she said, though, I don’t think he knew about Trinity Avenue.

The street was a true home. I thought with a gust of sentimentality. I wasn’t prepared for. Weekends like this might begin as an escape from older eyes, but they tended to end as a reinforcement of its gravitational pull, the unalterable correctness of our place at its center. Did you, oh, you made me jump Kirsty.

She stood in the doorway in spotted pajamas. I just remembered. She said the clocks go back tonight. So it’s not one, it’s only midnight. Me’s gone to bed. She says goodnight. One for the road. Alison offered pouring, cursing a drink without waiting for an answer. You know, I’ve always thought that this will be a great time to commit a crime.

When everyone’s confused about the actual hour, it’d mess up a bys. Witnesses had forget whether the time had gone forwards or backwards. An autopsy is pretty accurate regarding time of death. I said, I love how you assume someone’s gonna die. Allison laughed. It was an odd thing because we were only doing what we’d done for years, a nightcap after the Halloween party, the finale of the holiday.

But the scene had an end of an era mood about it, as if tomorrow we had to surrender ourselves for a witness protection program or less. Melodramatically. Allison had announced plans to sell the cottage to next year. I raised my half empty glass, and when Allison looked up, her agreement was too simple, too immediate to be sincere, and I thought with complete clarity, we won’t do this again.

The sense of loss was briefly unbearable.

Laura: So why was this cut?

Louise: Oh my God. Well, I don’t know. I, well, I kind of know and um, I’m now thinking it sounds so familiar to me because deleted scenes are just as familiar as the ones that stay in the book. So I’m now thinking, have I got this wrong? And was that cut? Because it feels like it’s almost. The profound sort of center of the novel.

And for those who’ve read it, they’ll immediately know who all the characters are. I certainly know that I, I had to do some cutting because the book was quite long and, you know, that was very much establishing the mood and the character. So this is from the early part of the book, is it? It’s got, it’s actually from, it’s the middle section, which again is, you know, it’s hard and you know, sometimes.

Can can be thought to drag by editors. So I’d imagine there was that element, you know, let’s move on. Because while they are basically on a mom’s holiday during half term, and they do it every year and it’s Halloween and they have a Halloween party, but while this is happening, something criminals going on in fees.

In London. And so it is a really, really important time. And so maybe I thought that that conversation about a crime being committed when the clocks change, maybe I felt like that was being too obvious about telling us what was happening. The other thing I remember is that, um, and this happens a lot with me, is I’m really bad with timelines.

And this came out in the edit and I remember thinking, oh, no. Again, this is me putting myself into the book because I remember Betty Blue and I remember going to the cinema to see Betty Blue, and then I had to remind myself that I was older than the characters I was writing, and that they would’ve been just far too young to have gone to see Betty Blue.

They would never have got in. They would’ve been under 10. And so, um, so rather than changing the movie, I obviously, um, just deleted the whole scene, but, but to me it’s really special to hear it because the Betty Blue soundtrack was. The music I listened to when I wrote our House. Oh. So, um, you know, it really set the, the mood for the book, which is full of melancholy.

You know, it was, as you mentioned in your intro, won prizes for Thriller of the Year and crime and Thriller book awards. But for me it was a tragedy. It was a love story, gone horribly wrong, wrapped in a, in a crime novel.

Mm.

Laura: Uh, but do you have one particular, like the Betty Blue, uh, music was what you listened through throughout the writing of that book, and maybe you have another piece of music or another selection of music, there’s a mood background to the writing of a particular book, or do you just generally listen to music and it could be jazz one day or classical next day or whatever.

This isn’t the Betty Blue Book.

Louise: No. No, and I, and actually I don’t really listen to music when I’m writing. It’s. More when I’m thinking or in, you know, the off hours with the, the new book, A Neighbor’s Guide to Murder. That’s probably my first book where music isn’t incredibly important. Normally, you know, the kind of music, the characters, like the only suspect, which I mentioned, um, set in the nineties, you know, that’s got a, a playlist.

Mm-hmm.

Louise: That’s very easy to follow. Of the nineties classics and

Laura: But you don’t listen to them yourself as you are writing. They don’t, they don’t inform the mood or they do. Yeah, they

Louise: do. They do. I might do. Yeah. Absolutely. And, um, thinking about Our House, I think that there’s one scene where Bram is listening to Portishead Sour Times, and I would’ve ly listened to that.

And it, it does inform the mood, absolutely. But it’s not every book and it’s, I don’t really have a process that I follow with every book. And as I say, my most. Recent book, I’m not associating with music at all. Mm-hmm. I did have a whole subplot where the narrator Gwen, who’s a 70-year-old retired woman, had a Rod Stewart obsession.

And so, you know, I had a whole scene planned where she goes to the O2 to see him with her 20 something friend Pixie as the book’s about an age gap relationship, an age gap. Friendship. Mm-hmm. Among other things. But in the end, I just thought, well, actually, I think this is for my own amusement. I’m not really sure what that’s going to add to the reader’s understanding of Gwen.

So, you know, it begins a self-indulgence and sometimes it does pervade the whole mood of the book, and sometimes it’s just for me, and then I’ll just, I’ll just ditch it. Interesting. Let’s move on now and what’s your next soft cut? Oh my goodness. So this one is an excerpt from a story I wrote in 1981 when I was at school called Murder in the Alps.

Beth (Actor): Marella smiled happily to herself. She loved life in the Alps. The sky was blue, the snow glistening in the sunlight, and everything seemed perfect. Everything except Livy. That was. Glanced at her sister and felt worried Livy was sitting on a ledge, readymade from the rock looking the picture of misery.

Marella had had enough look, she shouted, making Livy jump. I dunno what’s got into you this week, and frankly I don’t care, but I wish you wouldn’t try and ruin mine. And Dan’s holiday as well as your own. Livy looked up at her with pure hatred. I’m so sorry. She replied sarcastically. Am I upsetting you? I had no idea.

You are jealous, aren’t you? More shouted. You can’t bear me to love Dane and him to love me. You are pathetic. Really pathetic. Livy unkempt her skis from her boots and said defiantly. Well, since I’m so pathetic, you can go on your stupid walk on your own. Morela sighed an exasperation. They were getting nowhere standing on the top of a mountain shouting at each other.

She too sat down and gazed at the snowy slopes below her back to Livy. Livy looked up seething with jealousy. Her sister was only about five meters away, sitting still and silent. Livy knew this was the moment. There would never be another as good as this. She picked up a ski and stood up without making a sound.

This is it. Then, Marella, she thought, gritting her teeth. You’ll never see your darling Dane again. She crept up behind her sister and lifted the ski over her shoulder. Suddenly more turned and gasped with surprise and horror. No, Livy, please know you’re crazy. The ski came down and hit her on the head with a terrific force.

She gave a pathetic groan, then fell slowly into the snow. She was without doubt dead for a moment. Livy felt no emotion. She just stood like a robot, staring at more’s limp, lifeless body. Then she thought of Dane and felt happy. Now she could have Dane and Marella couldn’t again. She looked at the dead body, lying in the snow you’ve had all you deserve.

Dear Marella, she said aloud. Suddenly the sound of an approaching cable car caught her attention quickly. She came to her senses and began kicking snow over Marla’s body. She then attached her skis to her boots and set off down the mountain. She didn’t feel in the least bit guilty. Just terribly pleased and satisfied.

Leah (Actor): Grade a teacher’s comment, very well written, but avoid melodrama.

Laura: Um, do you have a sister by any chance?

Louise: Oh my God, I’m crying with laughter at that. That is absolutely hilarious. Um, I do, yes. My sister Jane and, um, yes, she’s not,

Laura: she’s not your, uh, your muse for this in any way. Your inspiration.

Louise: I dunno. I mean, maybe she was, I don’t think either of us had boyfriends ’cause I was 12 at that age when she’s only 18 months older than me.

But um, yeah, for those who haven’t gathered the motive for this, this grizzly murder is just that one. One sister’s got a boyfriend that the other one wants. Oh my God. That is just hilarious. And also, I should tell you that I’ve got the book in front of me, that exercise book, and it comes with an illustration of You did an illustration.

Yes. Oh my word. I did an illustration of mountains and then there’s a cable car. That runs between these two peaks in my little illustration and the ca, the cable card does, um, come up later in the story when there’s another death.

Laura: Oh my God. That was quite a long story. It was almost self-contained.

You’re telling me It’s sort of

Louise: so it’s a little novella. Oh, that’s, yeah, that’s an excerpt. This was about 10 pages long. I mean, when I think about Poor Miss Marriott, who was my English teacher, she used to get sort of 12, 15 page stories. From me and you know, and I, I never considered for a moment that, you know, it was gonna take her time to, to read them, but she must have seen my little green exercise book and thought, oh no.

Oh, I bet she was thrilled.

Laura: It sounds like you were an amazing child to have in class looking under a novelist there. And then, although I had say my favorite line there, she was without doubt dead. That is, I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard, like in any of the off cuts we’ve ever done.

Louise: It’s just so funny, isn’t it?

And the fact that she’s. She’s only pleased and satisfied. Yes. Not guilty, not ashamed or in any way traumatized. Just immensely pleased and satisfied.

Laura: Yes. Well, I mean, it’s, it’s obviously it is a very simplistic, you know, it’s a 12-year-old view and there are obviously things that are stated that, that are obvious and wouldn’t be stated by you as a novelist, but still it’s very much got the bones of a thriller novel.

Louise: Totally. And what’s really, really funny and fascinating for me is. Seeing the influences because my influences at that time would’ve been Agatha Christi. So you can see the kind of death on the Nile mm-hmm. Type melodrama, yeah. In there. But also, um, you know, the glamor of shows like Dallas and Dynasty.

Right. ’cause yeah, because I lived in North Hampton, which, um, you know, isn’t a terribly glamor. Place, and it may be more glamorous now, but certainly in the early eighties it was a Midlands industrial town and I don’t think we even had any restaurants at that time. I’m sure it’s very different now. And so all of my access to glamor was through books and tv.

And so even their names, there’s no way I would’ve had a more in my school or a, or a Livy. You know, they’re all kind of American sounding names. Ah, yes, yes. So, yeah. And Dane. I mean, there would not have been a Dane that is very American in my circle. Yeah. It’s so for me, I can see, I can really see the, um, the influences and, you know, and also I hadn’t traveled at all.

I don’t think I’d left the country at that point. Mm-hmm. Um, so the Alps would’ve been to me impossibly glamorous. Oh,

Laura: so this isn’t based on any kind of memory of having gone skiing? No.

Louise: It’s not a school trip. No. No. Gosh, no. I mean, I, I don’t ski now. I mean, I have been skiing, but No, not until my twenties.

You know, I had a very, um, small town upbringing where I didn’t really leave the, the area even to, to go to London until I went to university. So, yeah, it’s really fun to imagine 12-year-old me watching Dallas and then, you know, turning to my English homework. Do you know what the prompt was

Laura: for the homework?

Did they give you the title? What I did on my holidays? For example?

Louise: No, no. Any prompt that I was given, I would turn it into a story of murder and melodrama.

Laura: How brilliant were you actually? Did you become a goth or an when you were Oh, a teenager. Oh my god, this

Louise: is so hilarious. No, the um, my aforementioned sister Jane, was the queen goth of Northampton.

She was a goth, but I was a tennis nut, so we used to walk to school together and I would wear tennis. Kit and she would wear a wedding dress dyed black. We were quite a famous pair of sisters.

Laura: Goodness, that sounds like the beginning of a novel in its own right. That’s incredible. So your sister looked like she had the dark side, but you all dressed in tennis whites and bouncing around with no doubt.

Your hair in a ponytail. Yeah. You were the one that was secretly planning murders. Yes. Underneath it all. Isn’t

Louise: that interesting? Because I actually think that that is true. I think I’m a much darker person, but she looked very dark. She, you know, she had all the appearances of being, you know, sort of returned from the dead and you know, was in a big gang of goths.

And I seem to remember her boyfriend, who wasn’t called Dane, had a coffin. He had a coffin in his, in his flat.

Laura: That’s just brilliant. No, that’s very funny. Oh my word. What an interesting family you have. Louise. Oh my goodness. Um, right then. Well, let’s move on. Next off Cut please. What’s this one?

Louise: So this is called the Gurs, and it’s from 2022 and it’s a pilot for a TV drama,

Leah (Actor): Mitchell Flat Day Saturday.

And Mitchell, middle aged, low key, casually dressed. Rings Sarah’s doorbell, tradesman’s van at the curb. He glances about him. Obviously not familiar with the street. The door is opened by Sarah in jeans and a t-shirt. Makeup free

Emma (Actor): Ewen. Hi. Come in.

Marcus (Actor): I’m sorry I’m late. Traffic was horrendous on the ring road.

Emma (Actor): Oh, you should try

Marcus (Actor): not having

Emma (Actor): a

Marcus (Actor): car.

Emma (Actor): The morning bus I sway. You could walk on your hands faster.

Leah (Actor): She wraps on Evie’s door as they pass calls out with classic divorced parent cheer

Emma (Actor): Dad’s here. Sorry. It’s a bit of a mess. We’re still getting sorted.

Leah (Actor): They enter the tiny dim living room and Sarah opens the curtains to reveal a cozy, colorful space.

Only one or two unpacked boxes remaining. She sits but you and stands,

Marcus (Actor): how did she get on

Leah (Actor): this

Marcus (Actor): week? She hasn’t answered my messages

Emma (Actor): really well. Already slaving over the textbooks every night.

Marcus (Actor): Sounds like a laugh a minute.

Emma (Actor): Ah, she’s off to a party tonight though. The cool crowd. Since When’s

Marcus (Actor): Evie been in the cool crowd?

Emma (Actor): Well, this is the whole point of moving to a new town. You can reinvent yourself. Okay, so maybe I know the mum of the cool kids.

Marcus (Actor): There it is. In like Flynn. What’s that supposed to mean? It’s just you’re on a mission, aren’t you? You won’t stop till she’s at Oxford or wherever.

Emma (Actor): I don’t think going to a party gets you into Oxford.

Come on. You know how clever she is. Why shouldn’t she aim high?

Marcus (Actor): Of course she should. I just don’t get why you want this over what you had, what we had.

Leah (Actor): Is that school really worth it? They look accusingly at each other. The civilized veneer has well and truly cracked. Don’t do this ewen. What

Emma (Actor): make out like the school is why we split up.

It’s not fair on Evie and it’s also not true.

Marcus (Actor): Look, if she’s happy, I’m happy

Emma (Actor): she is. You know this other mom, we were friends at school. It’s a bit of a shock seeing her again. What’s she called? Nikki, the American

Marcus (Actor): girl. Isn’t that a bit awkward?

Leah (Actor): Well, I’m hoping it won’t have to be. No. I’d be careful if I are you.

Hi dad. Evie enters and Yuen wraps his arms around her sensing how much his daughter needs this hug. Yuen catches Sarah’s eye, quizzical exterior, more cliff common and interior. Uber night, Saturday as night darkens. The common empty and unsettling a taxi crawls along the west side. Sarah and Evie both dressed up.

Peer out in search of the Walden residence.

Emma (Actor): 35. This is it. Bloody hell. Evie. Look at it. It’s like selling sunset

Leah (Actor): as the cab pulls up a security light flicks on illuminating a grand electric gate to the side of the house. A pair of Gulliver students are tapping at the entry pad.

Beth (Actor): Oh, that’s my entrance.

I’ve got the Cobra. Martha, want me to come in with you?

Emma (Actor): Make sure it works. No, you mad

Leah (Actor): fine.

Emma (Actor): Go Have a great time.

Leah (Actor): Evie scrambles out and Sarah watches her head up the drive before the cat falls away.

Emma (Actor): You too, mom.

Leah (Actor): You too.

Laura: So this is interesting. Tell us about the premise. Is this a thriller as well?

Louise: Um, yes. It’s, it’s a drama. So this was, um, a TV project that I worked on for a long time with a TV company called Red who are No More. Um, and it was inspired by the, everyone’s invited. Sex scandal in the schools that blew up around that time and led to a, you know, extremely shocking Ofsted report.

It was a huge story where it was discovered that boys in quite young boys, but certainly sort of senior school had been. Treating girls in a sexually inappropriate way, sometimes assaulting them, asking for nude pictures, and basically just making the atmosphere extremely uncomfortable and at times criminal.

And so there were a number of investigations in the schools, some of them quite high profile schools. And, um, and the government got involved and like so many other things it, it didn’t really go away because it’s all linked to porn. And, you know, the age at which. Boys start watching it. And the nature of porn now, which is very different from back in the day, uh, much more violent.

Um, and so, you know, I was really shocked. And also just sort of, you know, I, I, I felt unusually interested in a current affairs story. And so when, um, my agent suggested that I built a drama around it, an original drama, it just. Felt completely right. And so I did, and it came together very quickly. All of the characters.

I planned eight parts. I worked very closely with a development executive who was absolutely brilliant because I was so lucky I’d never written a, a script before and I had a kind of one-on-one tutor.

Hmm.

Louise: And it was really, really good fun to do and such a fantastic learning experience. But like so many.

Other TV projects, nothing happened and it hasn’t been made. So, you know, so it’s a, that was a lesson in itself with a, when you are writing a book, you know, when I write a book, I have a contract. I know there is going to be a project at the end of it and, you know, it might be a bestseller or it might not, but the story is shared and it’s there for people to access.

But with a TV project, it’s speculative. You know, I put in easily as much work into the gulls, um, as it was called. As I would’ve done a novel during that period, and yet, you know, there’s nothing. This is all, there is your lovely recording, which is so interesting to, to see which scene you’ve picked from the, the pilot, um, between the two estranged parents rather than the kids.

Part of the issue with selling it was that I had a 50 50 mix between the parents’ lives and the teenager’s lives, which kind of placed it a little bit too much in a gray area. So, you know, some broadcasters would say we love it, but can it be more kids, more like euphoria? Mm-hmm. And then others would say, Ooh, you know, can we minimize the teens and focus on the adults?

Like big little eyes. So it kind of fell between two camps, but I’m still very proud of it and I’m hoping actually to, if, um. We can get past the legalities of it. I’m hoping to be able to take it back and transform it into a novel.

Laura: I was about to say, surely that’s the obvious next step, isn’t it? Yes,

Louise: I think so.

The, but I think that the problem with being inspired by something very current and zeitgeisty, which everyone’s invited, you know, this campaign for, you know, school survivors of peer abuse. That’s old news now. You know, five years old now. And so I think what I would probably do is structure the community.

I’d keep the community in the characters, and I’d probably structure it around a different crime and possibly relegate the peer on peer crime to a subplot. I have to have a think about it, but it does. As someone who could only previously. Written things that had then been published. I’ve never had any novels sort of sitting in a drawer that haven’t been published.

Mm. It’s, it was actually quite hard for me to find off cuts because everything I’ve written has been published. So this is the first time I’ve done a huge project that hasn’t seen the light of day. And so, you know, it was really character building. I was very disappointed. Mm. And, um, you know, and had to sort of try and bounce back from that.

So it’s been, it’s, it’s a good one to include because it’s a re it really does show you that, you know, it doesn’t matter how successful you are, um, you, you get rejections all the time. And also writing this script came very easily and I now think, well, you know, had this been in the hands of an experience, screenwriter, you know, maybe it felt easy because it.

It wasn’t quite good enough. I just don’t know because I think the idea was very sound. Mm-hmm. But it was really lovely to try another format, another form of writing. And I always love writing dialogue and I always believe in, you know, showing through dialogue rather than telling what’s going on. And so, you know, TV is the perfect way of doing that.

Laura: Or you could break yourself in gently and do radio.

Louise: Yes. Yeah. Oh, I’d love to write a, a radio play. I love radio. Dramatizations of novels is one of my favorite forms. Um, I absolutely Could the Gallers be

Laura: a five part or I, I dunno, I dunno what the format are these days.

Louise: Yes. Or

Laura: an afternoon play.

Louise: Yes. Maybe. I mean, I only wrote the, it’s an eight episode.

Um. A series and, and I only wrote the pilot. I only wrote episode one. And you only write the rest if it’s commissioned and it wasn’t commissioned. Yeah. But all of the planning is there, all of the plotting. If this was a novel or anything else, I wouldn’t have to do any relotting. It was. Really interesting compared to my novel process.

My thriller writing process is very much kind of loosely plan it, know what the crime is, who’s done it, all the mechanisms sort of in my head, and then I just get going to find the voice. But with this, every single minute of every single episode was plotted. Well, hopefully, hopefully it’ll be

Laura: resurrected in one or multiple formats going forward.

I hope

Louise: so. I hope so. It’s an important story and you know, it hasn’t yet been told in, you know, any, any depth I don’t think. Well time for another off cut. Now what have we got? So this is a book idea I called the residents and I wrote it in around 2020.

Leah (Actor): The residence is an aspirational collection of Riverside apartments where city meets suburb.

Where domestic bliss has been curated to the last detail where you can’t fail to live your best life, they say nothing when you sign up about the threat of murder in a cafe across the road from a West London coroner’s court, three witnesses share a table. They are linked by their association with the residents, the development that promised dream living, but delivered a nightmare.

Just three months after the first renters moved in, a woman named Marina met her death in one of the apartments, and the police have been asking questions ever since. Lois is the neighbor whose husband’s erratic behavior derailed her hopes for a new start, for their young family, and placed her at the scene of the tragedy.

Bridget is the building manager. A former police victim advocate whose attachment to her work and interest in Marina was starting to blur lines even before the fatal event. And Tom is the accidental player, all his worldly possessions in the bag at his feet. He’d moved into the unit next door to Marina only two weeks before her death, and was the last person to see her alive.

Just hours later, the coroner delivers a verdict of accidental death and the police investigation is closed. Life for the residence resumes, but Bridget won’t let go. It’s her job to pay attention to detail and the details in Marina’s death. Don’t add up. Instinct tells her the answers lie with those fellow witnesses, Lois and Tom.

But no sooner does she try to reconnect with them, then they’re gone. It soon becomes clear that whoever warned them off intends the same disappearing act for her because something’s going on at the residence so monstrous that it makes people like them expendable. It makes murder look like child’s play.

Laura: Ooh, this is a document that book I did. Who is this for? Is this to inspire you or was it as a treatment to sell

Louise: to a publisher? Yeah, this was for me, so I am before all else an ideas person, so you know, I would love to spend my day just generating ideas. And not actually completing the projects. And so I’ve got, over the years, there’ve been lots of these to the extent that when I was looking for them, I’ve thrown lots away.

Some of them it was like I’d never seen them before. I couldn’t remember them. It’s um, I always start a new novel with a blurb and I think it’s the former copywriter in me that I just like to crystallize. The main plot theme, you know, the mood, just how is it gonna be, the elevator pitch, you know, just a couple of paragraphs.

And so I’ll often start that way and then just abandon the idea. And this one is really interesting and the reason I chose it because it’s a classic case of it just being all style and no substance. I didn’t know what the monstrous crime was, um, going on behind the scenes and obviously you dumping.

Yeah. Yeah. Or Cass under ING one of the two. Yes. Yeah. Well,

Laura: it’s called the residence.

Louise: Yeah, it was, it was just an empty shell of an idea and it wasn’t going anywhere. It didn’t ignite that kind of feeling that gets ignited when I know something’s got legs. It just didn’t have legs. But having said that. I did know what it was going to be built around, and it was going to be built around a particular Hitchcockian trick that I had wanted to try for a while, and I didn’t give up on that element.

I actually used that in my novel, the Only Suspect. So I think that this must have been around the time that I was thinking about the only suspect, because I used the trick that I’d planned for the residents and I also. Took the character name of Marina. So it must have been how my mind was working before I decided to write the Only Suspect.

So it’s actually quite, you know, for any writers listening to this or creative writing students it, you know, it just shows you that it’s well worth putting those early ideas down because they lead you to the right idea. And I’ve always found getting it on paper and trying to crystallize it in a blurb or a short synopsis is very helpful.

Even if I then go straight onto something else, somehow it just kind of solidifies the idea a bit. So yeah, I mean, it sounds great, but there was nothing behind it. I think. I love the idea of a kind of Ballard style, you know, sinister apartment block and a way of drawing the characters together, but ultimately it wasn’t going anywhere.

Mm.

Laura: That’s an interesting idea that you write the pitch for it before you actually have the substance. It’s normally the other way around.

Louise: Yes, it is. And it does help you kind of see if it’s a strong enough idea. Mm. Because you know, in publishing and, and tv, the hook is everything. You know, sometimes book order will, will take place on the basis of the hook because not every retail buyer is going to be able to read every book before deciding which ones they’re going to stock.

Mm-hmm. You know, book sellers need to be intrigued and they know as well that. They’re gonna be hand selling books and they need to be able to say in a couple of lines what it’s about. And so that’s how I approach it. And then I sort of build around it. You get the first, yeah. Yeah.

Laura: Property is quite a theme in your books.

I noticed that when I read our holiday. And then the other passenger. Yes. Um, I thought as a middle class, middle-aged woman, I was going, she’s speaking to me. Property prices, property values, people being priced out or not. And then of course, the residents comes up. Property seems to well people’s home. I suppose it makes sense.

But your latest book that is out, I believe any day now, is called A Neighbor’s Guide to Murder. So that also has a kind of property implication there if you’re talking about someone who lives next door to you. Yes, absolutely. Does it have

Louise: a property element too? It does, yes. And in fact, um, how interesting that we’ve, that you’ve just said straight from the residents, because this is an apartment block.

So obviously it was, it’s been sitting there in my mind, but this is a Mansion block in a Neighbor’s Guide to Murder. It’s one of those swanky, you know, Edwardian mansion blocks, um, full of people who care deeply about rules and restrictions and service charges, et cetera. And this is where, where the, with 70-year-old narrator Gwen.

Lives and meets the, um, young girl Pixie who’s renting a room from her neighbor, Alec. So this is, again, it has a property theme and this is the first time I think I’ve tackled the rental crisis. I mean, I’m doing so through the eyes of someone who does own their own property, but Gwen has in her circle, pixie, who falls into an extremely.

Unpleasant rental arrangement with Alec. Mm-hmm. And she also has her son who is in his thirties and he’s boomeranged back. So he’s living with her rent-free and has a right old pain and she doesn’t know when he’s going to leave. She’s also got a daughter who has abandoned her. Sort of former activist instincts to become a trad wife.

So she’s sort of, you know, living off this rich banker boyfriend. And then there’s also in the building, the Nepo baby daughter of Gwen’s friend Dee, to whom everything has come easy through connections. And you know, she’s the only one of the young people featured who doesn’t need to worry about where her rent’s coming from.

Emma (Actor): Right.

Louise: So yeah, this was the first time I wanted to, to think about how it feels to be in your twenties and, you know, ’cause I love, I love generational conflict stories and I love those kind of age gap relationships and friendships. And so regular readers of mine will see some of my pet. Peeves and my pet subjects cropping up, but in I think quite a different tone for me, this book has got a real sort of notes on a scandal vibe to it with this sort of slightly odd narrator who has got some murky stuff in her past that she’s atoning for and you know, her interference in this 20 something neighbors.

Life is, you know, deeply inappropriate. And she, you know, she puts two and two together and makes 25 and scandal erupts in the building. And eventually as the, as the title suggests, a murder takes place. So, yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff going on in this book, but there you’ve only got one narrator. So, you know, let me just warn readers that, you know, there, there could be other sides to the story that you are not hearing.

Ah.

Laura: Right. Well, we’ve come to your final off cut. Tell us about this one, please.

Louise: So this is another excerpt from a story I wrote at school. It’s called A Long Walk, and was written in 1982

Beth (Actor): when the Ress roughly awakened me. At first, I didn’t remember for my thoughts were in drowsy disorder. Then it dawned upon me today was the day, the last day.

The day when after 19 years and four months, my whole existence would come to a slow, painful, and merciless halt. I felt a strange, calm flood my body as I stretched my filthy limbs clad in the once beautiful white gown, which had now become indecently torn and stained and ugly. Brown. All good things must come to an end.

Mocked the ress, watching me with a crooked grin. My eyes were focusing on that hideously disproportionately large head with its wild eyes, but my thoughts were elsewhere remembering, almost understanding why Celia had done it, but not quite. My face didn’t betray a flicker of the emotion, which the twisted mind of the ress would’ve gleefully, pounced upon, but my mind lost its calm and suddenly became desperate.

Surely, surely Celia would never be able to live with such intense guilt with the knowledge of having murdered one and convicted another. Surely she would never live as a free, happy human being again. The hours passed cruelly slow, and throughout the same thoughts occupied my mind. Celia, standing with a pistol in her gloved hand, her eyes flashing and her face contorted with jealousy as she regarded the glittering ring on my finger.

Then Roderick drawn and white falling to the floor as the blood steeped into his sandy hair. Celia screaming, hurling the pistol into my hands and sobbing an endless stream of tears onto roderick’s lifeless face.

Leah (Actor): Grade A minus. Teacher’s comment. Avoid allowing your style to become as melodramatic as your subject matter.

Laura: Well, this is positively, uh, Barack. I, I feel like I need to know what led up to this imprisonment and why is her dress presumably a, a white wedding dress stained brown, or do I not want to know? I don’t.

Louise: Why use one adjective when you can use two, three, or four? Is, is my takeaway from this. I can’t remember, um, whether it’s a wedding dress or not, but she has been framed for the murder of Roderick

Laura: Roderick.

Great

Louise: name. Yes. Another great, great name and another jealous act. From a sort of pubescent child who had never met a boy, probably let alone had a, had a romantic encounter. Very funny. Her, her rival wasn’t a sister again, was it? No. No, it wasn’t a sister. Just checking. No, but I’m now seeing in this. Um, this is a whole other anecdote, but very briefly, when I was 12, I got in trouble with the police.

I was in this sort of little crime ring. Exciting. Yeah. And my parents found out the, the police came to the house actually to caution me, and I was grounded for a whole summer. And, um, the, you know, the whole school summer holiday, which is six weeks, I wasn’t allowed out except to go to the library with the goth sister.

I don’t think she was a goth yet then, but she had to accompany me and supervise me, right? And so that summer I read the complete works of Aha Christi and. Maybe not the complete works, but certainly at least 40 Barbara Cartland. Oh my word. And so, yeah, so I think that there’s some Barbara Cartland in this one, don’t you?

I’ve

Laura: not read a lot of Barbara Cartland, I’m afraid. I hope my hands up there. No, but I was thinking more Duchess of mouthy, to be honest.

Louise: I probably was studying the Bronte’s. Maybe at school by then I might have been doing Jane ey or something. So there is a sort of gothic feel to it,

Laura: right? I mean, I dunno how violent Barbara Cartland gets.

If she gets violent, then possibly,

Louise: yes. Well, they’re historical romances. So Roderick sounds like a Barbara Cartland sort of name.

Ah.

Louise: To me. And then you’ve got the death on the Nile type influence in there as well. You know, the glittering ring and the gloved hand. And you know, I loved all those sort of costume details.

And as you mentioned, the filthy brown dress

Laura: stained, the stained brown dress st. It was white stained brown. That’s the specificity of that. Maybe my eyebrows hit the top of my head when I read that. And the drowsy

Louise: disorder. And nice phrase, the disproportionately, disproportionately large head.

Oh my God. Was there a

Laura: happy ending? I mean, I dread to ask, but there have been a happy ending for this. Of course. Yes. Because

Louise: again, this is only a small fragment of a 12 page story for Miss Marriot. Mm-hmm. And, um, yes, she’s freed. She has a last minute pardon,

Laura: changes her dress, I hope. Yeah,

Louise: I think they might bring her a, a new dress and say, come, you can take those filthy rags off now.

Laura: Wow. And what I really liked about this, and the other one was the teacher’s note. Yes. Miss Marriott, I presume again, is it? Yes.

Louise: Miss Marriot? Yes.

Laura: Would you say Miss Marriott had any particular influence on your writing style? I mean, she, she feels like she’s a constant throughout this program. If nothing else, she’s my English

Louise: teacher for years and years and, you know, we haven’t been in touch since my writing career began, and I have tried to google her, but it’s very hard with misses because they tend to marry and then change their name.

So I haven’t been able to track her down. For whatever reason, she’s not felt that she’s wanted to contact me. She probably fears I’ll start sending her stories that she asking, asking for an A.

Laura: I’d like to read her notes in the margins. It,

Louise: yeah, I think she was an amazing influence because, not in terms of, you know, I didn’t read any of her work, or she didn’t really, I mean, she tried to reign in the melodrama, but she wasn’t successful.

I continued to, you know, get more and more melodramatic, but she was just. Very encouraging and obviously allowing me to do these ridiculously long stories for when she probably only asked for a couple of pages to get people to use adjectives. And you know, she never said, look, this is too long, or this isn’t what, what I wanted, wanted.

Well, I imagine she

Laura: would’ve been delighted. Delighted to have a child that is that interested and is that imaginative and is that committed to, to creativity? I imagine there weren’t many kids in your class

Louise: doing that. No. Oh, there definitely weren’t. I mean, this is. Just the tip of the iceberg. There’s loads more.

There’s one called The Mirror of the Future, which we, which I, what’s a

Laura: great title?

Louise: Oh, my word. And again, there’s an illustration for the title and the two Rs in mirror are back to back, like ab, like the bees in Abba.

Laura: Very clever. Yeah. It’s all there. Oh yes. 12-year-old Louise. She was a, a bestselling novelist waiting to happen there.

She was. Fantastic. Right. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show. How was it for you?

Louise: Oh, it was so much fun. I mean, I’ve literally cried with laughter, so you know, it doesn’t get better than that. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.

Laura: Well, it has been fabulous talking to you, Louise Kish. Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcut straw with us.

Louise: Thank you for asking me to.

Laura: The Offcut straw was devised and presented by me, Laura Shaven. With special thanks to this week’s guest, Louise Kish. The offcuts were performed by Leah Marks, Emma Clark, Beth Chalmers, and Marcus Hutton. And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcut straw Do com and please do subscribe, rate and review us.

Thanks, listen.

Yeah, I don’t tell lies. Not because I’m a deeply honest person, I’m just terrified of getting caught. And in advertising, that’s a really big thing. You know, in other walks of life, you do cover versions of people’s songs or a new production of Hamlet or something. In advertising, to rip somebody else off, even though it happens, is beyond the pale. You just don’t do that.

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 Paul Burke, a copywriter, producer and novelist whose route into writing began three days after he left school with almost no qualifications and landed a job as a runner at an ad agency. Working his way up, he moved into copywriting and went on to create some of the UK’s most recognisable and best loved commercials. His campaigns include Barclaycard with Rowan Atkinson, which later inspired the Johnny English films, British Gas’s Mrs Merton and Malcolm with Carolina Hearn and Craig Cash, John Smith’s Bitter with Jack Dee and The Widget and he’s written multiple ads for the PG Tips chimps, though he’ll be quick to tell you that that campaign was invented before he was born. Paul has won more awards for radio advertising than anyone else in the UK, including three D&AD pencils, a lifetime achievement award from the Aerials and a radio advertising fellowship at the House of Lords. As well as this, he has published four novels and continues to contribute regularly as a pundit for mainstream media, including publications such as The Spectator, The Telegraph, The Mail and The Critic. Paul Burke, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

Hello.

A radio advertising fellowship at the House of Lords. Does that come with a title? Should I be curtsying to you?

No, I remember going to the House of Lords for a celebration of radio advertising and a lot of us were invited. Somebody made a speech and I just remember standing there. And they said, we’re going to present this award to somebody who’s done this and been marvelous and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I turned to my friend Nick Angel and I just said, God, this would be some useless time serving fuck or something like that. And they said, and the award goes to Paul Burke and he goes, yes, you’re absolutely right.

So they didn’t give you a warning, did they not say, come get an award?

I had no idea. There was a celebration of advertising. We went to the House of Lords, we went to wear proper clothes, because you know I tend to wear… I don’t know whether it’s what’s now fashionably termed ADHD, but it always takes me ages to get ready. I’m titivating myself in front of the mirror. You know at school when you’ve got to get changed after games, I was always the last one doing up buttons and laces and things like that. So I do remember having to do up buttons and put a tie on. Yeah, we looked absolutely fine. I would just take five minutes longer than most people. So I put my tie on for the House of Lords. That’s what I remember about it. I don’t remember it, yeah, just got an invitation. It seemed like a nice drinks party.

So it’s like a big surprise party for you.

They talked about other things, but I think they gave someone else an award because I’m so vain and self-regarding.

They don’t matter whoever they are.

I don’t remember. It wasn’t somebody I knew, put it that way. I think it was somebody that worked in the radio industry, you know, worked for one of the stations or for the BBC or something like that.

But they didn’t make you Lord of advertising or anything like that.

No, and I think they should. I really do.

I think they should too. That would be hilarious. 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?

It’s a radio commercial entitled Beckham, David Beckham, and it was written in 2008.

We open on a news reader.

David Beckham has been killed. He was hit by a car while visiting family in London this morning and died at the scene. 14-year-old David was a gifted footballer and had just joined the Youth Academy at Manchester United. Manager Alex Ferguson is devastated. David, he said, was a real talent. What a terrible, terrible tragedy.

One teenager is killed or seriously injured on London’s roads every day. Don’t die before you’ve lived.

Wow, could this have been made? What permissions would you need to basically say that somebody who’s famous and living has died? How does that work?

It would have worked perfectly well. It was a campaign. I didn’t come up with a campaign. Don’t die before you’ve lived. It’s all about young people who had their whole lives ahead of them, who run out in front of a car and were killed. That’s the idea I had. It was somebody famous and Beckham, well, Beckham is famous now, but he was, I think, even more famous at the time. The thing is, you wouldn’t have needed permission. There’s a fine line. If somebody is regarded as in the public domain, for instance, Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage, they’re definitely in the public domain, so you can impersonate them. But normal people, you can’t impersonate, you can’t use their name to promote your business or your product. Beckham was probably somewhere in between. Not the Prime Minister, but very, very famous. So what happened was this producer said, we’ll have to talk to Beckham’s people about that. I said, do not talk to Beckham’s people. I said, A, he’s in the public domain, and even if he’s not, if it runs, the worst they can do is say, will you take it off air? And they wouldn’t have said that. And it would look very bad if David Beckham or his people. It wasn’t a profit-making thing. It wasn’t for a product like Vodafone or something like that. It was a genuine road safety campaign. It was very important. And it would have done Beckham a lot of good to have his name associated with. But this woman, I said, don’t ask their permission because they’ll say no, just because they can. She asked their permission. They said no. Then you can’t do it. And it just taught me a lesson in life that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. Just do it first.

Presumably, they would have been justified because they could say something along the lines of, we don’t want people to believe that David Beckham is dead because if they’re not listening properly to the commercial, they might just hear that he’s died. And that might scare or alarm people.

I suppose they’d have to hear it from a passing van out of the window because they’d hear it. And if they heard the words, David Beckham has been killed, they would listen for the next line. And the next line is a talented 14 year old.

Right.

No, it would have been absolutely fine. But, you know, and I think that kind of things only got worse. We’ll just run it past compliance with it.

But you’ve always had to do that. Was this more of a recent thing?

No, I beg your pardon. What I should have said at the beginning is every commercial you do has to be cleared by the Radio Advertising Bureau.

Yeah.

And that’s absolutely right. In case you’ve lied or said fuck or something like that. And you have to get a stamp and a number and you have to have that clearance number before you can go on air. Same with television, quite rightly. Yeah, that’s the bit I meant to say. Most important bit. I forgot. It had been cleared by the Radio Advertising Bureau.

Oh, OK. Oh, that’s different then, I suppose.

They saw David Beckham in the public. I thought, great. I thought, I wonder if he’s in the public. And they passed it. It was cleared. And we were about to record it with a real newscaster. And just ran it past Beckham’s people, you know. And of course, they said no. Of course they did, because they’re lawyers.

Yeah. So you have a history of writing memorable ads, high-profile ones that have gone into the public consciousness. And do you remember the first ad you ever wrote?

Yeah, I do. I remember the first two. I’d gone to this agency called Young and Rubicon when I was very young. And the first brief I was ever given was for Croft Original Sherry. And you served your time almost like an apprentice, like an electrician. You had little jobs. And the smallest jobs of all then were ads in the trade press, like the heating and ventilation news or something like that. You know, very little money at stake, very little media spend. And gradually, if you did those quite well, you’d get another one and another one. And then you’d work your way up to radio and television and big things. So the first one I ever did was the off-licensed news. And it was for Croft Original Sherry. Because you always look into the background. And Croft Original Sherry was the second best selling Sherry brand in the UK. The biggest was Harvey’s Bristol Cream. But for some reason, in the West Country, Croft Original was number one. So I put my line, Bristol’s favourite cream. Oh, I was happy with that, for Croft. And then they gave me the poster at Christmas for Croft Original Sherry. And I had the gift box with a little gift tag outside, you know, with a bottle of Sherry at Christmas. And I put, bottle in a message. Oh, I was so happy with that.

Bottle in a message?

Yeah, because the message outside said, happy Christmas. And the bottle was inside the gift box.

Very good.

And I thought it was good, but it wasn’t that good. And it was absolutely everywhere, at bus stops on billboards. I mean, it’s not good or bad. You wouldn’t go, that’s rubbish. But on the other hand, it’s the artist’s early work. And you have to be careful, because I remember the first TV commercial I remember doing was for Cadbury’s Whisper. And I had Julie Walters and Victoria Wood. And I remember sat there because she knew that the media people were telling me it was always on at 7.42 in the break of Coronation Street. And I said, it’s my commercial, hold here. And it was okay, but it wasn’t that funny. And I thought, no, don’t tell anyone ever again.

Oh, because you told everyone to listen out for it.

Here it is. Here it is. And I was at home going, look at this, look at this. And it wasn’t often that good.

Yeah, but you did have two famous people in it. Presumably that could be overlooked, the standard of the writing.

Yes, oh, am I allowed to talk about them?

Yeah, of course you are.

Julie Walters was lovely. Victoria Wood, she wasn’t horrible. Don’t get me wrong, she was just a bit grumpy. And very often with comics, they’re not quite the barrel of laughs you think they’re gonna make. They’re not horrible. And I think the only way I can put it is their bar, their humor bar is set higher than most people’s.

Yes, that makes sense.

So I have worked with an awful lot of comics and very few of them, I think Paul Whitehouse is definitely one. Paul Whitehouse would have been the funny kid at school doing impressions of the teachers. But most of them, I mean, Rowan Atkinson, for instance, who’s a charming and lovely man. But if you’d never seen him, you didn’t know who he was, you would never guess that that man performed and did what he does for a living. You know, you’d think he was a shy academic, something like that. And a lot of them are like that. Well, you know as well as I do. But whereas actors, I love actors, like Julie Walters and actors and actresses. I mean, you know, they’re, you know, vain and self-regarding, which of course I can identify with. But I find that it’s sort of like human beings, but more so. You know, the ups are very up and the downs are very down. But I love them. I love them. Generally, I’ve seldom met a horrible one.

So you’d rather write for an actor or actress than a comic?

Yeah, definitely. A, comics, they can be brilliantly funny on stage, but I think they feed off the audience. They’re also used to writing their own things. They’re also unaccustomed to having to get it into 30 seconds, which is a real art, as you well know. So it’s other people’s material. There’s no audience. They’ve got to force the name of a product in, and they’ve got to get it into 30 seconds. So they’re not the ideal people to do it usually.

Anyway, enough about other people. Let’s go back to you. Let’s have another Offcut now. Tell us about this one.

This one is called, it’s a newspaper article for the Times Educational Supplement called St Dominic’s. And I wrote it in 2009.

This story should have been told 30 years ago. And it very nearly was. Dave Redmond, Brendan Harris, Joe Callanan and I convened in a wimpy bar, consumed with teenage fury. This can’t be right. We rage people ought to know. And somebody spluttered something about going to the papers. In the end, we didn’t. At 17, we weren’t quite as media savvy as 17 year olds are today. Back then, there were no mobile phones to take pictures and no social media Facebook to tell the world what was going on. So we accepted our fate and tried to forget about it. And the email arrived. As part of the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of St Dominic’s Catholic Six Form College, it said, There will be an open day on Saturday the 4th of October to which all past staff and students are invited. And from the bottom of a 30 year ocean of memories, the shipwreck of our education was dredged up to the surface. Dave, Joe and I, three veterans of the Wimpy Bar Convention and pupils from that very first intake, journeyed over to Harrow to see what an earth there was to celebrate. On the surface, there was plenty. St Dominic’s had been transformed into a successful and well-resourced college. Missions and values were boldly stated. Pictures of happy smiling students, including the obligatory girl in hijab, were all present and correct. The college had now attained beacon status and Patrick Harty, the affable principal who welcomed us in, was justifiably proud. When John Lipscomb, his predecessor as affable principal, welcomed us in 30 years ago, it was all very different. St Dominic’s Six Form College was created to merge and accommodate the Six Forms of the Sacred Heart Girls and the Salvatorean Boys’ Schools whose own Six Forms had been abolished for reasons never satisfactorily explained. We were halfway through our A-levels, having had the lower six at Salvatorean. Salvo, as it was always known, was an old-fashioned Catholic grammar school which even in the 1970s was a fairly brutal place. Great emphasis was placed on academic excellence, religious fervour and iron discipline. At Salvo, they believe very much in the carrot and the stick only without the carrot. It was far from perfect but as a grammar school, it offered working-class children their only chance to compete on level terms with those from more privileged backgrounds. It was in a tough, predominantly Irish suburb of North London, surrounded by factories where many of the boys’ parents worked, securing the knowledge that their sons would have any unruly behaviour beaten out of them and a good education beaten in. Every year around 40 or 50 Salvo boys would matriculate at the finest universities in the country, many at Oxford or Cambridge. It now beggars belief that anyone, particularly those who claim to be socialists, would want to downgrade this school into a comprehensive and close the one door that could have opened so many others. But this door to opportunity was slammed in our faces and the doors to St Dominic’s were flung open. When we walked through them, we could not believe what we saw.

So, your school days there. Apparently, you left school with little to no qualifications. So, what were you like actually at school academically? Were you clever?

I was clever and I was thick. I am one of the thickest people you will ever meet. I really am worse than most people at most things. So, I was bottom of the class at all sciences, and I was the only one who didn’t have to do physics, chemistry or biology in the year because they knew it was a waste of time. I was also bottom of the class at art, bottom of the class at woodwork and metal work. So, the O levels I took were the only ones left. I was fine at things like history, geography, you know, French. I was okay. I was fine. But the thing I was good at was English language. I wasn’t even good at English literature. I could always write stories and make them up. Top of the class at that. But what happens, and this has been discussed many times, is that English language, the writing of stories, storytelling, as people now like to call it, you’re not allowed to do that after your GCSE or your O level. That’s it. When you do English A level, it’s Chaucer, it’s Shakespeare, it’s Thomas Hardy.

It’s literature.

It’s literature.

It’s not creative writing, that’s true.

It’s not creative writing. To me, that’s as mad as you’re doing an art O level, and you’re not allowed to do any painting or drawing, music A level, and you’re not allowed to play a musical instrument. So the one thing I was good at didn’t exist anymore.

Was your family fairly academic or creative or anything like that? I’ll take that as a no.

No, they were quite clever. I mean, my dad was a, I hesitate to say builder. He was an, I just a labourer, and that’s when he was well enough to work. I mean, this is how you don’t know a whole other podcast on the poverty, like the financial poverty of my background, because he didn’t work for about three or four years. So we lived on benefits, we had free school meals.

Yes, but money doesn’t necessarily equal academically starved.

No. And my mum was, my mum in later life became the Nan from The Catherine Tate Show. So that was, howdy, Liberty, come up here. And so her family, she was one in nine, and they were all, you know, that sort of, my uncles were a bit like Reg Varney, a bit like Max Pate, one for the younger listeners, Max Pike. They were those old school Londoners. They weren’t rough, but they were criminals. In Savaris, it was always knocked off stuff from the back of a lorry. I don’t mean serious criminals. So it wasn’t academic. My older sister Susan was the first person from my family, and that includes all my cousins. I mean, I’ve got 43 first cousins. I don’t know most of them. And I remember someone saying something about your grandparents. And I said, my dad’s parents died before I was born. And my mom’s parents, obviously, I do remember them. But I worked it out. I was their 27th grandchild. Jeez. And their 25th and 26th, that’s my cousin Peter and my cousin Wendy. We were all born in the same week. Just knocking them out. I’d love to say it was so sad and I was so poor. It was great. And also, I’ve seen this in later life with North London Jewish people, and Sloan Rangers. They have a ready made social life almost from the day they were born. And I actually think I did as well. The Catholic Church, that was like I didn’t have enough already. All the people from around our way, the Catholics and went to the Catholic schools, it was like having another, someone put it very well, it’s like having another 200 cousins. So it was great. I had a very happy childhood. Very, very happy.

Lot of people involved, not much education.

I had four sisters, no brothers. So all girls at home, all boys at school. And I now realize that was a really ideal balance.

But no, no, no.

I mean, my ambition, when I was just waiting till I was 21, I was going to be a black cab driver.

Really?

Yeah, that’s what I was going to do.

I can see you as a black cab driver actually. I mean, just the way you talk, you’ve got something of the old school black cab driver about you.

No, I have. And what you never see is if ever I’m in a black cab, by myself, with a cabbie, I become like them. Yeah, new term. Hang them all. Yeah, my boy had trials for West Ham and all. I behave exactly like that. So in answer to your question, the one thing that my friend Brian Jones pointed out, what my dad used to do was every Sunday, he after mass would buy The Sunday Times and he would read it. And Brian goes, there you go then, there you go. You’ve got your football results from The Sunday Times, I’ve got mine from The Sunday Mirror. So I don’t remember it being an influence on my life, but the only newspaper there was in the house to read was The Sunday Times. So that’s all I used to read. So I was immediately exposed to well-written football results and the art of The Sunday Times magazine, which was a huge thing. But maybe I’m just trying to post-rationalize how I ended up typing for a living. But I think that’s all I can think of, really.

Right, let’s move on. Next offcut, please. What is this one?

OK, this is called The Saved and it’s a radio play I wrote for BBC in 2019.

Do you come here often? Actually, I already know the answer to that. Four times in the last six weeks.

How did you know I was here?

I’m a psychic. All right, I had you followed. Don’t look at me like that. You’re lucky I didn’t have your phone and your bank details hacked. Could have done.

You could not.

Of course I could. I’m a multi-millionaire. I can do, or rather I can get other people to do, whatever I like. I’d forgotten how much I loved the English coastline.

I don’t know what to say.

What about, I love it too, or how wonderful to see you. Nice house by the way.

What did you say?

I said, nice house. If you like large semis in the suburbs, which I’m not convinced you do.

You’ve seen my house.

Not personally. I’ve never been to Rickmansworth and I’m not about to start now. No, the surveillance guy emailed me the video so I could see it all the way from LA. All perfectly legal. This guy, Trevor his name is, ex-CID. Well, you may have noticed him sitting outside your house in a blue BMW. No, actually you probably didn’t. He’s very discreet. And blue BMWs aren’t exactly rare in Rickmansworth. He explained it to me. As long as he keeps a certain distance from the property and doesn’t bother the suspect in any way, it’s fine. All very proper and above board.

Suspect?

Sorry, his turn, not mine.

Proper and above board?

You think it’s proper and above board to spy on someone? Why on earth would you do that?

Love? Concern? Call it what you like. I was like a ghost. No, no, make that an angel. Invisible but watching over you. I just wanted to check you were happy.

I am. Very happy.

No, you’re not.

Yes, I am.

No, you’re not. You’re content, but you’re not happy. Big difference.

I don’t believe this.

Yes, you do. And now the initial outrage is starting to wear off, you’re actually quite flattered. As well you might be. A man of Trevor’s calibre and experience does not come cheap.

So what do you want?

Just to talk.

You could have phoned.

You changed your number.

I’m sure your mate Trevor could have found it for you.

Yeah, I suppose he could. Well, he did. There you go. Not the same though, is it? I wanted to see you face to face, just to see if you still have that beautiful skin, dazzling smile and eyes ablaze with mischief and curiosity. Skin still lovely, eyes as described. As for the smile, I’ll have to get back to you on that. So what’s with the easel? What’s with the painting?

Therapy.

You’re in therapy?

I was, after mum and dad died. Complete breakdown. I was in a place called…

Fenton House.

How do you know that?

I phoned. And this was pre-Trevor, when I didn’t have a pot to piss in. I phoned quite a few times, all the way from America, whichever state I was in, and yes, you can take that either way.

No one told me.

No. Well, they said you were in a bad place. I said, that’s no way to describe your own hospital.

Which probably didn’t endear you to them.

It didn’t, but the gag reflex kicked in. Couldn’t help it. They said you were doing well, but it was going to take a long time, and that any cause of past trauma…

Like you?

Like me, might set you back. But I did phone. Next thing I hear, you’ve met the man of your dreams and you’re really happy. Best if I just stay out of the way forever. A lovely man, apparently. Simon, isn’t it?

You know damn well it is. Have you had him followed too?

Only by proxy when he happens to be with you, which is quite a lot, isn’t it?

Why did you choose to write a radio play rather than say a TV script or a theatre show or why radio?

Because it’s in many ways my favourite mediums and all the clichés are true, the pictures are better on radio, you fill it in yourself. And I’ve done so many radio commercials and I do love actors and just the, also I had no, I was bottom of the class at art, you know, I had the visual sense of, you know, blind lemon Jefferson. So I couldn’t really, and if you look at the TV commercials I’ve done, they’re largely just radio commercials that you can see. So I just thought I’d create that story. And the story just, oh, you’ve probably got the gist of it, is their boyfriend and girlfriend, sort of in their thirties, turns out he’s a stand up comedian. And they split up, he goes off to make it in America, and he works there for a while, and then he becomes absolutely huge, like Ricky Gervais, levels of fame. But he’s still in love with her, and she’s done what I always beg. Any unmarried younger, especially girls, not to do is take the stable option. She marries the Dullard, and he becomes her rock. And the Dullards get lucky, and I’ve seen it happen quite a few times, and you think, oh God, if only she’d have waited for him. And he begs and begs her to come back and to leave this. And the Dullards are never, I’m not saying they’re unkind. I mean, it transpires that he’s just, she’s the little wifey at home, and she’s so smart and so funny. She used to run the comedy clubs. And all it is, is their dialogue on the beach where he’s come. And you just reveal bits of the stories. I’ve revealed already that her parents had been killed in a car crash. And it goes on, he begs her, and you’d have to know the ending to tell you what happened.

I’ve read the ending, but I shan’t tell anyone in case anything comes of it. What did happen with it, by the way? Did you submit it?

Yeah, I couldn’t believe it. Now, this sounds really arrogant, but because radio commercials, yeah, I mean, that Beckham one got blown out, and they do, but I thought, this is good. This would make a great afternoon play. I still think it would. And a producer got me to sort of record about as much as you had, no, a bit less than that, and submit it to something called The Offers Round or something with the BBC. And they talked forever. You think, if you like it, great. I don’t mean I want to decision this afternoon, but honestly, it was like, you know all this. I can’t even see you, and I know you’re nodding your head. Months and months, they came back, no, it’s a… And what they said, apparently, was it’s not really comedy or drama. It sort of straddles both.

What?

Yeah, like real life. There’s nothing in the course of a day, usually, that doesn’t either make you slightly angry or make you laugh.

They have plays that are supposedly humorous, especially the romantic ones. That’s rubbish. Sorry, carry on.

No, that’s what I was told and I could always submit it again.

You could.

I could. I had no idea because advertising for all its faults, and sometimes the ads don’t turn out as well as you wanted them to, but somebody has put the money up already, and they booked the airtime on ITV or on Channel 4 or on the radio. So they tend to exist, they tend to run. And I was horrified how, I don’t know, maybe the person who read it and everything in life is purely subjective just didn’t like it.

And there’s also the possibility that when you submitted it, someone had submitted a similar tone of play or a similar subject, which is why you could keep submitting it once a year.

Endlessly.

Yes, because there’s a changeover of staff as well.

And someone might just think this is great. And so what the girl, who I called Laura in that play.

Marvelous name. Marvelous name.

She’d taken the stable option and she’d married the prissy controlling housemaid. And as the play goes on, he doesn’t do anything wrong. He doesn’t beat her up or anything, but he’s very controlling. And she’s the little wifey. And I’ve seen this more times than I care. So that’s what that was about.

Right. So it had a message. So you had a message.

I had a message. Yeah. I mean, I just had what I would regard as a true life observation. Exaggerated for comic effect.

Okay. Well, let’s move on to your next Offcut, please.

This is from 2022. And it’s part of a screenplay based on my published, first published novel, Father Frank.

Interior, day, St. Joseph’s Church. It is the 11 o’clock mass and the church is packed. The congregation are keen to see their new parish priest deliver his first sermon. Frank is up on the altar, about to do just that. He gazes out into the congregation in silence. He surveys them. He remains silent for a few more moments, then a few more. Finally, he speaks.

I want money. Your money. Together, we’re going to build a parish centre. Your parish centre, your money. I know these were not the first words you expected from your new parish priest. I would, of course, apologize for taking such a direct approach, but asking for cash in this way is nothing new. Read St Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, full of appeals, begging letters, whatever you want to call them. He wanted money and wasn’t shy about saying so. Matthew, in his gospel, takes a similar line. Ask and thou shalt receive. I do hope he’s right. We’re very lucky. Next door have that enormous church hall. Yes, it’s in a pretty sorry state. Left to rot, left to die. But the life of our parish centre is a life that can be saved. And its life will become our life. The life of this parish, the life of this community. And that’s where we’re even luckier. When I look at the skills of the people I see in front of me, right here, right now, I can see that we’re truly blessed. Our Lord did the world in six days. So surely we can do a church hall in six weeks. So, stand up any bricklayers.

One man stands up a bit tentatively. A few more join him.

Plumbers.

A few more stand.

Plasterers. Roofers. Chippies. Sparks.

Lots more stand.

Any useless people who can’t be trusted to do anything practical. Oh, well, as you can see, I’m already standing. So I’m nominating myself as General Labourer. Father Linum, come make the tea.

This was your first published novel, Father Frank, that it’s based on. So it’s written about your London Irish Catholic upbringing.

Yeah.

Obviously that’s a huge inspiration to you.

I think it’s just right about what you know, and all fiction is autobiography and all autobiography is fiction. So I just wrote about what I knew. And when I was a child at Mass, I just remember thinking I’m about nine. I’m thinking, this isn’t true. I’m not sure this is true. I’ve never known anyone rise from the dead. And I understood, you know, when the priest makes the sign of the cross and blesses the wine, according to the Catholic Church and transubstantiation, it doesn’t just represent the wine, it becomes the wine. And even I, as a child, could think, but you take that down to a lab and they go, that’s wine. It’s not the blood of somebody who died 2000 years ago. So I thought, if I think this and I’m nine, what’s the priest think? So I did a book about a priest who doesn’t believe in God. He’s a brilliant priest. And as you can hear from that thing, he builds a parish center. That actually happened. We had a priest at school with Father Raymond, who in the end, of course, got defrocked for having an affair with a girl in my class. But no, he did. But he was fantastic. And he did that sermon.

How old was the girl?

Sorry, even 18. Okay, sixth form.

All right.

He was just really cool and really intelligent. He just was. And he started his sermons. I want money, your money. We’re going to build a parish center, your parish center, your money. So that was the basis of that. And honestly, that book is still being optioned. I mean, so many people have had it. The worst one was…

Optioned for film or TV, you mean?

Film or TV. BBC had it. And they wanted and I think, A, it’s too long ago and he’s too old. But there was a moment. If I could describe what Father Frank, the London Irish priest looked like. He looked like Shane Richie in EastEnders. That’s what he looked like. And they wanted Shane for the part. But the trouble was, they got, oh my god, it makes me cringe just thinking about it. They got an EastEnders staff writer to do that. And he’s, Frank’s in the street. This would never happen, didn’t happen in the book. And he talks to the camera like Alfie. And he’s wearing shades and he’s putting his shades on it. And he looks to the camera, sees this girl and goes, Yeah, girl, she’s a bit of a salt incher. You’re going, no, no, no. But I’d already had it. It was the worst piece of writing, just horrible. Because EastEnders, I mean, you might see me as some kind of class warrior, but the reason EastEnders is so absurd is written by middle-class people and they just get it wrong. They just get it wrong. And this girl, this EastEnders staff writer, couldn’t have got Father Frank and the Irish community of Kilburn wronger if she tried. But I was in a terrible bind because the BBC owned it. They’ve got it. And it was their big BBC One Sunday night series. And it went to a woman called Jane Tranter, who was the head of the BBC comedy. And she went, no, no, we’re not greenlighting this. And she saved me from just being embarrassed for the rest of my life. On the other hand, it would be nice to have it made. And what happened is a lot of advertising TV commercial companies have taken my books and gone, yeah, we’ll make this, we’ll do this. And they don’t realize, and I’m sure you do, that getting a film or it’s a full-time job. If you gave them all the money, they’d make a brilliant job of it. They got the directors, they got the crew, they got, you know, get the actors, but you have to raise the money. And none of them, including me, realized how difficult that is. So that remains, and someone’s got it at the moment.

So it’s for film or TV, TV presumably, is it?

It’s written as film, but you cut it out for TV. And what I meant to say in the end was, then someone else had a go at it, and you’re just going, no, that wouldn’t happen. And I just thought, do it yourself. You’ve made loads of TV commercials, and it wasn’t as easy as you think. I thought, I’ll tell you what, I’ll just take this book of mine and write it as a, I know it backwards. And of course, it’s a wholly different thing. So the TV, the TV or film screenplay is very different from the book, because it sort of had to be. Because you can make all those, remember Peter Mayall, a year in Provence. That was very lovely to read. He was a superb copywriter. And the way he described the food and the French people, the way he described them, a bit like Woodhouse, was really, really funny. When it went on the screen, there was just a table laid with lovely French food, but his funny descriptions weren’t there, so it didn’t quite work. And I always had that in mind, that I can say all the funny things I like about God and about the Catholic Church.

Yes, how do you get it into the mouths of the people?

Yeah, exactly. And sometimes you just didn’t. So, yeah, there’s so many little things you can do, it had to do with the characters. So it was a learning curve, but that’s still out there, if anyone wants it.

Right. So it’s an ongoing thing.

Yes, it’s an ongoing thing. Someone’s looking at it at the moment, but they haven’t got an exclusive right on it. And they just, I mean, you know the curse of life, don’t you? It’s people not getting back to you. It’s what I call FTJS, full-time job syndrome. If they’ve got full-time jobs, they get their salary anyway. Yeah. And when, like most of us who’ve appeared on this program, in you and people we know, we work freelance, we’re not saying, well, they approach you, don’t they? Hey, do you fancy doing this? You go, yeah, that’s great. Well, we’ll call you on Tuesday. And Tuesday comes around and you think, well, you started it. And that happens a lot. And so it’s very hard to get people to get back to you. But you’ve got to believe in it. It took me a long time. And I had some help from some proper screenwriters. And it’s good. Better than the book.

It comes from your first novel. What made you decide to go into sort of long form pros rather than short 30 second ads? What was the leap like there?

I just wondered if I could do it. And it was the time when borrowing a laptop from work was quite a cool thing to do. So I’m on holiday and I had to go, I had a proper run at it. And I actually thought, oh, this is quite good. And I just kept going at it and kept going at it. I mean, I always had an ending. I think when you’re writing anything, you need to have an ending. You can change the ending, but you need to have a sense of going somewhere. So I had a beginning, I had an ending, and I filled in the bit in the middle. Well, what happened was to raise funds, it’s no secret, to raise funds for his church, Father Frank drives a black cab, you see, right there. And I was in New York doing some commercials for Budweiser. And I just saw this thing, where all the New York City yellow cab drivers, they had a day Thursday, the 14th, or wherever it was, where they were giving 50% of their takings to children’s charities. I thought, I’ve got it, got the middle bit now. Once I had him, he literally had a vehicle for him. They just made it so much more interesting then. Yeah, it’s things like that. And I just kept going it. And then my agent said, I was away in a shoot, she goes, so darling, darling, I’ve got you a two-book deal. I remember thinking, two, two? I don’t know any more things. Because I put them all in there. And she goes, oh, you must do. And so I said, I don’t. I said, I was born in London. I still live here. I went to work in advertising three days after I left school. I still do. I’m not a Holocaust survivor. I wasn’t brought up by wolves. I’ve got, I’ve got nothing.

Ah, get out of here. You’ve got an imagination.

Well, no, no, but she said, she said, what about your school? I said, my school told her about the beatings at Salvo and going to St. Dominic’s. I told her how we used to work in the cinema and steal loads of money. And that was the basis of the sec. And she goes, hello. That’s more experience than most people have got. So I think once you’ve done two, do more than two, I ended up doing four.

Have you stopped now? Or do you think you might write more?

Yeah, I’m doing a non-fiction thing at the moment, which is actually harder. It’s half memoir and half music journalism. Because the other thing I used to do when I was a kid is I used to work as a DJ. And so I’ve got a lot of DJ stories and just taking music and attaching it to things that happened. And there’s been a lot of things about music that people don’t realize. I mean, punk was always, oh, punk was amazing. Punk was so insignificant because I was there. People at the time, most people didn’t notice punk. They might have noticed it because it was in the news a bit, but there was only one punk record that’s ever made the top 10. That was God Save the Queen by the Pistols. At the time, it was Stevie Wonder, ABBA, Saturday Night Fever, Rumors, Fleetwood Mac. These are all huge. And yet, for want of a better word, the nerds who were into punk, they went off to work for the BBC or the Observer or whatever. So it’s 20 years of punk, 30 years of punk. And you go, this is nonsense. And so I just thought a first hand account of music and how it affected, and that again, the Irish childhood, that’s coming along really well. But it’s coming along slowly because I have to make it interest. I have to make it read like a story. Yeah. But I can’t tell any lies. So that’s what I’m doing at the moment.

Oh, exciting.

But fiction, as you know, it’s, I’ve got any more fiction stories.

Not for the moment.

Well, again, if you’re on a salary and say, this is your job, you work in this office, and your job is to write novels and fiction like it is with advertising. I could do it. It was much easier. When I wrote those books, I had a full-time job, and it was much easier because not that you wrote the books while you’re supposed to be doing your real work, but you thought, right, I’ll get four weeks holiday, I’m going to have Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday off, and I’m going to sit down, and no one will bother me because I’m on holiday, and I’d sit at home and do them.

Yeah.

Whereas when you work freelance, you know what it’s like. You’re supposed to be concentrating on something, and those people don’t phone me back, I’m supposed to be doing it. And you haven’t got that stability, that bedrock that allows you to write. I mean, you can do it, and it’s a pathetic excuse if you don’t, because you can always make excuses. I’m just saying it’s far easier if you have a full-time job from which you can take a legitimate holiday and get into your work, which is what I used to do.

Good point. Right, we’ve come to your final offcut now. Can you tell us about this one?

This is quite recent. It’s an ad from a TV campaign for guide dogs written in 2023.

Open on Guy, an animated dog in the hallway of a small house just inside the front door. He addresses the camera.

Hello, I’m a guide dog. My name’s Guy. I know, Guy. I’m not a guy.

I’m more a bloke.

Can’t really call a dog bloke, can you? So it’s Guy. Guy Dog. Get it? He thinks he’s funny, my owner. Actually, he is quite funny. At guide dogs, we do a lot more than just guide. We do everything we can to help people who are blind or partially sighted live normal and independent lives. Like my owner. Oh, he’s independent, all right.

And about normal.

We see the legs of his owner approaching and hear whispers. The owner’s hands then fasten on to Guy’s harness and open the front door. Cut to Guy and his owner’s legs, leaving the house and walking outside in the sunshine.

Here we go then. Who knows where he’s going to take me? And vice versa.

To find out more or to make a donation, you can go to guidedogs.co.uk. GuideDogs. Looking Ahead.

You mentioned when you sent me this that working with a charity can be problematic. What happened with this one?

They’re called GuideDogs for the blood. That’s the name of the charity. We don’t want to concentrate on dogs. We just do say much more. Your name’s GuideDogs. Yeah, but we don’t want to feature any GuideDogs. And you just think, what? And I was proud of this because he was a distinctive dog. And you could see the opportunities, the merchandising. You know, he was called Guy. You get little toy Guy dogs. Or you could have, say, was a Labrador. And you’d just get one that looked exactly like him in Manchester. And there’d be a fundraising thing in Manchester. And they’d be shaking a tin with Guy in Manchester. There’d be another Guy, the dog, in London. Had it all worked out. I’m not saying you must do as I, as you’re told, and do my guide dogs act. But surely if you’re called guide dogs, and you would raise a lot of money, because people like dogs. And if the dog was there, it was all so well worked out. And I wrote them really easily. And you always know you’re on to something when the gags sort of come. That’s if you’ve, I mean, you know yourself, if you create characters properly, you get to a point, I do with my books, it sounds so pretentious, but might break the habit of a lifetime. You get to a point where you’re not thinking, what funny gag can I put in here? You’re almost like a court reporter and you just write down what they say. If you’ve created the characters properly, he would say that, she would say that. Like that radio play just wasn’t very difficult to do because I knew, I knew that, not that particular woman, I knew that kind of woman and I knew that kind of comic. And so they almost write themselves and Guy the dog almost wrote his own script. So yeah, advertising is full of things like that. So I just always think that that campaign, again, mine might be a bit pompous, might have been quite famous. And Guy, the guide dog, might have been quite famous too. A bit like the meerkat, a bit like, you know, the pudsy bear or things like that. In fact, my inspiration for him was Nookie Bear. You know, that’s what I wanted him sounding like. And your man did quite a good job. So that’s never going to see that. Well, it might do. Again, somebody could just, whoever said that, I wasn’t in the meeting, could leave. Somebody else could join and they might have it. So who knows?

Well, it was fairly recent, as you said. So it still exists.

Perhaps they’ve been sacked.

So they were one of the less good clients to work for. Who’s been your best, your favourite client or favourite campaign?

I used to like Volkswagen because Volkswagen had a network of dealers. And we would go in and as long as it had been passed by the, it went to the client and they looked at them. And as long as they got passed by the radio advertising bureau, we just used to do what we liked, just make sort of pretty much any commercial we wanted. And then they go on a CD and the CD would be sent to all the dealers. And they go, we like that one. Yeah, can you put our name on the end of that one? Or yeah, we’ve got a bit too many Volkswagen Golfs to shift. Can we have the one that does the Golf? And so that was nice. And some people really understood it. Barclaycard were very good. They really understood it. They bought into Rowan Atkinson and the spy thing.

Yeah, that ran for years, didn’t it?

For years, then it became Johnny Inglis. Well, it didn’t become Johnny English. Because in the Barclaycard ads, he was actually very, very suave and smart. And we’d sometimes have him doing something quite smart. But then he’d be just a little bit pompous for his own good. And it would all go wrong because he didn’t take Boff’s advice and use the Barclaycard. Whereas Johnny English was Mr. Bean with a gun, wasn’t it?

Yeah, that’s true.

It was just very different.

Is there a lesser known campaign or tagline that you’re particularly proud of? One that maybe isn’t as famous as the Barclaycard?

I got one that’s really famous, though it wasn’t. I came up with a line, have your five a day.

Did you?

Yeah.

You invented the five a day thing?

I invented it. But the brief was, make sure you have five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. And you think, well, it’s not a huge leap to make sure you get your five a day. It took about, yeah. It was pretty much done for me.

Yeah.

So most of the ads I’ve ever done aren’t famous. And most of them aren’t particularly good. And I think that’s true of anyone. Yeah, you tend to keep the ones that are good. You tend to talk about the ones that are good. But they’re a minority like any other work you do.

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

Cathartic.

Are there any unexplored formats or genres writing wise that you haven’t explored that you still like to try?

No, no. It’s all I can do. I’m a useless human being.

No, what I mean is that you don’t think I want to try writing. Well, you’re going into nonfiction. So you’re working on that now.

Yeah, I’m doing that. I suppose that’s come out of doing so many magazine pieces.

Or poetry or something that you haven’t. There’s nothing you go, I’ve still got that left to do as a writer.

No, no. I judge poetry by how well it rhymes, just like I judge. I mean, I really, honestly, I remember when we said this before. I mean, a lot of your guests have had a lot of early stuff they wrote as teenagers. I didn’t do anything like that. My favorite book was the Argus catalog. I didn’t write really. I didn’t really start writing until I was getting paid for it.

Right.

I was very good at writing stories at school. I did win a nationwide story writing prize when I was about 10. But secondary school education and English literature sort of bums it out of you, doesn’t it? I was lucky enough to work in an advertising agency and admire the way the copywriters wrote so succinctly and so persuasively. I thought, that’s more like it. I think gradually, I’ll just say that there was a mechanism in my head for writing. It was seized up. But gradually there were little sprays of WD-40 that got it going again. I’m glad it did. Otherwise, I’ll be going, we’re too gov? Yeah, my boy. Because that was it. I couldn’t do anything. So I’m very, very fortunate. Very, very fortunate.

Well, we come to the end now. And that was great fun and very informative. And all I need to say now is Paul Burke, thanks for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thank you for letting the contents of my mind spill out as well. It was lovely. It was a real honour to be on it among such brilliant people. Thank you.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Paul Burke. The Offcuts were performed by Helen Goldwyn, Chris Pavlo, David Lane Pusey, Marcus Hutton and Christopher Kent, 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.

I had an agent at the time, she’d say, darling, it’s not so much a draft as some used pieces of paper. And sometimes I’ll say that to myself. When I’m writing something, I’m like, this is bullshit. And I go, well, you know, the worst idea written down is still 100% better than the best idea never written down. So even if it’s just like used pieces of paper, that’s still okay.

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 episode is the brilliant Lynn Ferguson, writer, performer, story coach, occasional stand-up, and yes, the voice of a certain plaster scene chicken. You might know her from her writing on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, her award-winning solo shows, or her work with Pixar on the animated film Brave. Originally from Scotland, Lynn first moved to London to pursue her wonderfully varied career before heading stateside in 2008, when TV and film writing took her to Los Angeles. She’s done everything from serious theatre at the National to glorious chaos at the Edinburgh Fringe, and she has a real gift for uncovering truth in stories, whether she’s writing them, performing them, or helping others shape theirs. When I asked Lynn for her offcuts, she sent me loads. And honestly, I’d love to have included more, but we just didn’t have the time. So naturally, my first question to her was, how easy was it to find them all?

Everything’s difficult to find. I think the thing that was, it was such a brilliant task, Laura, I have to tell you, because it made me realise how many things I write and don’t really finish.

Oh.

Yeah, I do. I write a lot. Well, I write less now because I have, I do a weekly blog that has to go out every Sunday. So it’s meant that writing bigger projects, I’m much more picky about what one I pick up. So it was interesting, really, because I found all these things and I was like, I totally had forgotten I even wrote that. And some of the stuff that I’ve given you as well was, it’s fascinating because, well, it’s fascinating for me. Because there was, before I moved to America, there would be things that I would write that I was all passionate about. Right. Like, so I wrote a sitcom for BBC Four, right, Radio Four, which I did three series of. And I was really passionate about it. And the reason I did the sitcom was because I cared about it and it mattered to me and it was all about the stuff, right? And then I moved over here and there’s a whole thing in America about stuff you just have to do. And so like a whole load of stuff was like pitches that I’d forgotten, that I’d written. And one of the things that I nearly sent you and then didn’t, because I was like, that’s just too weird, was something that I wrote for, it was a musical for, I know, a musical for a bunch of Christians from Middle America. And then I was like, oh no.

So you were commissioned by them?

Yeah. Yeah.

They said, Lynn Ferguson, please, you’re the woman to create a musical about our religion. Is that what happened?

Yeah. Well, you know, they were in a band and they did stuff and they were devout Christians and they needed something to promote their band. So they wanted this thing and I wrote a pitch for it. And I think it went quite well. And then I was like, no, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to give you that because it was too weird.

You withheld it from them after that. No, you can’t have this now.

I think they felt it was too populist. I don’t know. Right. But it’s in a sort of haze of… I’ve done a lot of work in America where I just… Someone says, can you do that? And I go, yeah, okay. It’s one of the things that I really, really wish British writers would understand about themselves. It’s how incredibly flexible they are and how skilled it is. The way that America works, not now because things have changed, but… So when I first went into a writer’s room here, people had trained at Yale and Harvard and stuff like that to write jokes. And I was like, whoa. I mean, basically, when you’re writing a joke, you’re looking at two sentence, three sentence structure with a return in there somewhere. It’s like not rocket science. But yet they’ve, you know, they trained at it. And if you ask those people to write a play, they’d be like, oh, well, I don’t know. Don’t know that I could do that. Whereas British people, you’re sort of expected to be able to take it from the beginning and take it right through to the end. I mean, having said that, I do think it’s a good idea for writers to work in a writer’s room even just once because it does something to the speed of your writing, which I didn’t have before. Like now, if someone says, can you write something? If I say yes, then it’s done. I don’t really do a thing where I’m like, but can I write it or can I not write it? I’m like, OK, you want that? When do you want it for? Yeah, OK. Well, I don’t know what it’s that fantastic. It just changes the way you are. But that’s what a writer’s room does.

Well, let’s get started with your first offcut then. So can you please tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

This is ridiculous, proves my point. This is The Real Duck Dynasty and it was written about 2013 and it was originally a pitch for a Nick Jr. animation series.

Real Duck Dynasty is an animated series full of intrigue, double dealing, sex, power and jokes of animated ducks in the oil industry. Drake Mallard’s family have been in the oil industry since his great-great-grandaddy flew over from Ireland. Though it may have started with humble beginnings, Mallard Oil is now a billion dollar business with thousands of employees. Drake may have been born into riches, but his life is far from perfect. He has two ex-wives, his present wife in therapy, trying to work out why she’s unable to lay an egg. He has six children, countless grandchildren and the weight of the Mallard business on his shoulders. And in business, a crisis is looming. On one side, the inevitable dwindling of fossil fuels and the constant struggle to find new supplies. On the other side, environmentalists constantly harping on about destroying the planet. Main Characters Drake, the head of the family.

Distinguished, elegant and refined. He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty when the situation arises. He tries to live his life with strong moral principles, but sometimes he has to do the wrong thing to make something right. Now in middle age, he knows he should retire, but he has had the business for so long, he wouldn’t know how to let go. And besides, there’s no one he can trust.

Ariel, a beautiful Scandinavian white-crested duck, a former model, she’s the envy of many, but she is emotionally fragile, having discovered that she for some reason is unable to lay an egg.

Shirley, Drake’s ex-wife, glamorous, scheming and devious. She’d do anything to take Drake’s fortune and get him to come crawling back to her on his knees.

Bill, Drake’s younger brother, smooth, handsome, a playboy, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, though that depends on what kind of bush it is, of course. Though a partner in the firm, Drake has stripped him of most of his responsibilities because of his gambling issues. He receives the equivalent of an allowance rather than have any active involvement in Mallard Oil. Of late, his realization of his lack of involvement, smoldered by the poison from Drake’s ex-wife, Wendy, is fueling a burning resentment for Drake.

Joey, Drake’s 25-year-old son from his first marriage to his late wife, Patty. Patty was the love of Drake’s life and an idealist. Joey has inherited both his mother’s looks and belief that there could be a better world. Joey has become more and more involved with the environmental movement. His efforts could destroy the very foundation of the Mallard Empire.

Drake says, You don’t understand, Ariel.

Every day is just about keeping the wolf from the door.

Drake opens the front door. On the doorstep stands a wolf wearing a suit and holding a clipboard.

Excuse me, sir, we’re conducting a survey about…

Go away!

Drake slams the door shut.

So, tell us what happened to this, the Wealduck Dynasty.

Well, firstly, if I’d had those actors, if I’d had them, maybe it would have gone through. No, the point is, it was originally a pitch for a Nick Jr. animation series, right?

Picture Nick Jr. Picture the three-year-olds who might be watching this.

They were like, yeah, she can’t lay an egg. Oh, wow, they keep the wool from the door, I think. This was within a kind of cluster of things I was asked to write about at the time, these pitches. And I found it, I found it that I was just trying to do what they wanted me to do, but I couldn’t quite nip it in. Like at one point before the Realduck Dynasty, which was the one that I fleshed out, I had an idea for cheese and crackers was the thing I was going to do. And cheese and crackers was a double act. That one guy was a cheese and the other one was a cracker.

Quite literally, cheese and crackers.

Yeah, yeah, because it’s animation, right? But crackers had schizophrenia and cheese was like, was an alcoholic. And I’m like, I don’t know that this is going to work for Nick Jr. So like, there’s a thing with the writing where sometimes you just can’t stop yourself. But also, around 2013, what I realized at the time was a whole load of reality shows were completely like animated shows. And that also reminded me of the whole kind of stuff of actual dynasty that happened, Dallas and dynasty and this stuff that they used to do in the, I guess it would be the 80s and 90s. And that actually, that what they had done in entertainment was they’d taken kind of real life people and placed a narrative structure on top of them and were presenting real life as something that was like dynasty or Dallas, you know. So I was into it in that and then I also just, the characters in reality shows at the time and even still are so ridiculous. I was like, it should be animation. It could be animation.

Not for very small children.

No, for very small. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go through. It didn’t. They were concerned about the real Duck Dynasty. They were concerned about it. And it was generally agreed that probably Nick Jr. was not a good market for me. And I had a similar thing with Disney, actually, where the people at Disney were lovely, lovely people. But I was like, it’s not something that I can write. I have a little bit of darkness in me that seems to not fit for Nick Jr. or Disney that well.

But this is animation and it’s about poultry. And it’s fair to say that you’re probably best known to the general public for your work on a specific poultry animation. Do you see how I did that segway there?

I did. I did.

Chicken Run in 2000 and its sequel, Chicken Run Dawn of the Nugget, 2023. You voiced the character of Mack. How did that come about?

It was quite simple, really. I was in London at the time and my agent said, will you go up for this thing? And I went up for it. And I met Pete and Nick at the audition.

Nick Park?

Yeah, Nick Park and Peter Lord. But there was a group of people there. I just did the read for them. And then I said, you know, the thing is, is there’s a problem you’ve got in your script. And they were like, oh, shut up. And I said, no. The thing is that if it’s a Scottish chicken, you’re going to have to put in hen because Glaswegians particularly will say, are you all right hen or is everything right? And they pissed themselves laughing and looked at me like I was making it up. I said, I shit you not, honestly. Like, Glaswegians will say, are you all right hen? Like, check it out. I said, you don’t even need to give me the job. I’m just telling you, for a matter of detail’s sake, hen has to go in.

Do you think that’s what swayed them towards you?

I do not know.

Did you get involved in the writing at all?

Not in one, but I did in two. Yeah, I did in two. They asked me to come in and look after my own voice in two. I polish different things. I polished on Brave, Pixar’s Brave and stuff like that. I polish on other people’s movies. I do a lot of writing where nobody ever knows that I’ve written on it. I’m okay with that because as long as they pay me cash, what does it matter? With Pixar, it was quite heavy polishing that happened. It got a little closer to actually being a writer, and then we did stuff. But at the time I was working on Brave, I was also working on The Late Late Show. It was like a weird thing because late night writing is basically the two sentence return thing, like you’re writing jokes, and animation is almost like it’s polar opposite. Because you are doing jokes, but you’re really thinking about, I guess maybe, as I talk about that, I’m like there’s a lot of similarities in the sense of economy is a similarity and that I would take sentences out and stuff like that.

Yeah, brevity is very important for gags.

Yeah, it’s important for gags. But in animation, it can be a joke about stuff in Chicken Run 2, where I take stuff out and go, have I saved you a small car? Because like a sentence from a character in stop motion can cost as much as a small car to do.

Well, moving on now, let’s have your next offcut. Can you tell us about this one?

I am cringing, just so you know, I’m cringing. This is pretty much the earliest thing I remember writing. It’s a poem called The Fox Hunt and I wrote it in 1973.

The hounds, the hounds, they’re coming now, with a bark and a woof and a bow wow wow. Got to get to water, because it’s I they’re going to slaughter. The cubs, I can’t go home. They might get the scent and the cubs might moan. Got to get to water, because it’s I they’re going to slaughter. The hounds, the hounds, they’re coming now, with a bark and a woof and a bow wow wow. Got to get to water, because it’s I they’re going to slaughter.

This was prize-winning, I believe.

Oh my god, I am mortified.

You were seven.

I was seven. I was seven, right? But technically I am still. Do you know that thing when it’s, you can sort of remember writing this. I can remember doing it. I wrote it in the class. It was a teacher called Mrs Doctor, who got us all to write poems and entered them into a competition. And none of us knew. And the first thing I knew about it is I won a Bobby Brewster book, Bobby Brewster’s Balloon Race or something like that. And I got to meet the guy who wrote Bobby Brewster. And I was third prize in the area, or I don’t know, Glasgow or something like that. I don’t really know because I can’t remember the thing. I remember it was a very big deal, but I didn’t. The thing I remember about it most, and God bless that actress for doing it, is that it taught me how to write there, there and there. Because I had to handwrite it out. And so the hounds of hounds of there coming now is T-H-E-Y apostrophe R-E. And I have never forgotten that. And so I can judge people really harshly on their there, there and theirs.

Well, they didn’t win a prize for it as well.

No, right.

But I have to ask, as a seven-year-old, that does seem quite a bleak and frightening tale. But, you know, most people go, I’m going to be a princess. I’m sorry to deal in cliches, but, you know, in a little, and with a unicorn and all my favourite puppy, or maybe I’m going to go horse riding. No, I’m going to be ripped apart by a pack of dogs. Well, did your Mrs. Doctor, fabulous name, by the way, did Mrs. Doctor say, you know, what’s your worst nightmare? Right about that, seven-year-old.

No, I think that, you know what, Laura, I think it’s something that I found while looking out these offcuts for you is like, the real duck dynasty was meant to be for three to six-year-olds. Evidently, it wasn’t going to work that way. Even the fact that I had to, like, abandon cheese and crackers because schizophrenia and alcoholism aren’t great for preschoolers. I suspect because of the way that if, if someone else had written this and I was reading that, I’d be like, you have entirely written this around the fact that you discovered that water and slaughter rhyme and could conceivably be within a thing. So I suspect it’s more like that.

But even so, the word slaughter, not a usual part of a seven-year-old girl’s vocabulary. That’s all I’m saying. But we’ll move on from that. So what were you like at school? Were you very good at English? And did you dream of being a writer at that age?

You know, I guess looking back, I was good at school, but I am the youngest of four. By the time I went to school, my mother was tired. So she started doing teacher training college as soon as I went to school. So she didn’t have an awful lot of time to kind of deal with that stuff really. So I don’t know, but I do remember in primary seven, so maybe what’s that, 11 or 12? They had three people, four people, they used to take out a class and we would talk about greater things like philosophy and stuff like that. It was like special needs, but the other way around, you know.

And the school had chosen you, as in they’d gone, you four, you’re going to this class, or had you volunteered for this? Did you go on that?

No, there was no volunteering. It was no, there was none of that. No, they’d chosen us. They took us out to talk about it.

But what was your dream? When you were a child, what were you thinking? When I leave school, I’m going to work in a factory, be a writer, be a princess, marry a horse. What was your dream?

Well, you know what I think’s interesting just in this is that I think I had more, there was more things that I didn’t want to do than what I did want to do. I knew I didn’t really want to be married, which is ridiculous because I’ve been married now for 25 years. So there we go. But I wanted to see the world. I wanted to see outside. But I really, I didn’t see my first play until maybe, I saw half of one when I was maybe a bit 12. But in Cumbernauld at the time, and all praise to Cumbernauld and local theatres, there was a theatre in Cumbernauld and it was part of a community and there would be people coming round to the schools. I guess they were doing plays, doing theatre and education. And I did think that those people were kind of my tribe, but honestly, I never really did have an idea of what I wanted to do. And I still really don’t. And I’ve spent most of, like, the Chicken Run thing, like turning up and going, look, it’s totally up to you. I don’t, whether you give me the job or not, it’s entirely your thing, but I will tell you, you have to put the word hen in there or it’s not going to work, right? Like a whole load of my life has been that, like literally just turning up to stuff.

Well, time for another Offcut now. What have we got?

Ah, now this is called Memory When It Suits You and it was a novel. I started writing in 2005.

Nobody noticed the women crying. It was 9.35pm and the people on the bus had places to go to, people to see. Thursday 16th December and the number 12 squeezed through the busy streets of London, through the maze of shoppers and traffic and decorations strung all around, proclaiming Joy to the World and Peace on Earth. The passengers had days of their own that they might have wanted to sit there crying about and didn’t, as the bus made its valiant trek from Marble Arch to Forest Hill on an already ambitious timetable. Not a sob or a snivel or even a dewy eye from any of them, and none of them paid the least bit of attention to the woman. In the double seat across from her, slumped somewhere inside a massive hooded sweatshirt and oversized jeans, the puffy teenage boy, eyes closed, a bag full of undecipherable revision notes in a bag beside him, rage against the machines screaming through his earphones. Four rows in front, the 56 year old lady in the pink designer anorak she had ecstatically bagged on the first day of the Debenhams sale 2001, believing when she first put it on that people might treat her with respect, might listen to what she had to say. Now when she puts it on, it only reminds her that it takes more than a designer anorak to change a person’s life. On the disabled seat just behind the driver, the wiry man in his early thirties, his forehead prematurely wrinkled, his fingers nicotine brown, his spindly legs defiantly sporting tracksuit trousers. Six rows behind, the bald man in the cheap pinstripes, face like a baby, simultaneously devouring a Mars duo and a copy of Sue. And at the very back of the bus, the painfully thin girl with big eyes, wearing summer clothes and wringing her hands together, willing the air to swallow her up. None of them noticed the woman in the smart clothes, her dark hair a perfect cut, a diamond solitaire on the fourth finger of her left hand, who sat looking out on a London night with tears silently trickling down her pretty face. She reached into her fendy handbag. There was the envelope. She wasn’t going to think about the envelope. What else? Lipstick, wallet, mobile phone, handkerchiefs, paper for emergencies. The thought forced a watery smile. Dabbing her eyes and putting her hankies, for emergencies, back into her handbag, she remembered her mobile phone. She cradled it in her hand, staring at it as if she’d find an answer. There must be someone. Surely there was someone. Was it really too late? Suddenly the bus jolted to a halt, and the painfully thin girl was flung forward in a flurry of cheap polythene bags and embarrassment. She landed halfway on top of the crying woman, and stammered various apologies in an Eastern European tongue.

This is a bus lane, you wanker!

The driver yelled through the front window to a cyclist, who was far enough ahead to breathe both a smile and a definitive hand gesture. You want to drive on the road, you fucking tosser? You can pay the fucking road tax! The lady in the pink anorak tutted. The man in the tracksuit sucked air through his teeth, and the bald man with the face like a baby ate another mouthful of Mars bar, still engrossed in his copy of Sue.

So presumably this didn’t get finished, this novel.

Do you know what? No, it didn’t at all. And it’s one of those ones that periodically I think I’ll pick it up again, and then I pick it up again, then I do a bit. Maybe I’ll do a day or two days work on it, and then I go, yeah, whatever. What made me laugh as I was listening to it, as I was like, yeah, because the voice of that writer there, that’s the voice of a writer where you’d go, you know what, you should write a series for Nick Jr. That would be awesome.

Yeah, it’s all coming together now.

It’s like totally, why would you even think that? The thing with Memory When It Suits You and it’s what is problematic about it as a book and what is problematic, I think, about my own writing is that I, when I lived in London, I guess from maybe 1996 to 2008, something like that. And London is just full of story. It’s like full of it. You walk down a street anywhere or go on a bus and you can feel it all around like all these people are running a story all at the same time. And with Memory When It Suits You, what happens at the end of that chapter is that she leaves the bus and she goes to Waterloo Bridge, I think it’s a bridge anyway. And she stands at the end of the bridge and thinks about what is possible. And then she holds her hands out and like Angel of the North or whatever and she jumps, right? And then the next chapter is a party boat and it’s these guys who work in insurance. And they’re on this boat going along the Thames. And it’s all about just work politics and the same kind of shite that’s happening on the bus, really, with all these blustery people of having their own story and not listening. And this guy is out, the main guy Ronan is out in the boat having a cigarette and he looks up and he sees the Angel of the North. And as she jumps, she lands on the boat of all the chances. And so then it’s a whole story, a kind of dance between him and her trying to work out how they go to where they go to and whatever. But I’ve written too many characters and the story gets too rich. And I feel like there’s a danger with writing. Don’t fall in love with your characters because when you fall in love with your characters, everything that they do seems too interesting. And actually sometimes it’s not that interesting and you have to thin it down. It’s funny, I’ve been watching a lot of Morse recently because the world’s going crazy. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that. And so like periodically what I do is I’ll binge watch something to kind of keep my head out of other things. And I’ve been watching Morse and it’s interesting one as in how miserable it is. Because he’s quite a miserable guy. But two, how much of the stuff they don’t tell you about him. And as I was listening to Memory when it’s… Your actors by the way are just brilliant. So thank you to them. When I was listening to that, I was like, yeah, you know, as a writer, I could really do with thinning it down.

Somebody to come and clean it up, perhaps.

Yeah, a polish.

I wonder who could do that. Do we know the one who does this?

But it’s to do with the thing of sometimes with writing, you need to be a little bit brutal. And I think I like these people too much, or I care about these people too much. And so, and actually I like London too much.

Yes. Well, you were there for quite a long time, weren’t you? And then you left in 2008 to, you went to Sunny LA to join the writing team on your brother Craig’s late night TV chat show. What was that like? I mean, what was it like writing for your own brother?

Doesn’t really make any difference. You know, like the thing with Craig is he’s incredibly talented. Like he’s, I know that people do praise him for being funny and all that stuff. And I know that I’m biased, but he’s like super smart and really talented. He’s a really clever guy. And so really what you’re doing is you’re just feeding it. That show that he did, we, you know what, we were like moving cushions around because most of the lifting, virtually all of it came from the jungle that is his head. And so I feel like, like I knew how to supply the kind of bricks to make the machine, you know, operate or whatever. My metaphors are all over the place. But basically, I knew enough to put enough coins in the machine, if you like, because you’re delivering two sentence, three sentence things. Yeah. But really, really it was him doing all that. And what it did is there’s not really any time to think about relationships. And I know that sounds mental, but there’s really not. So I had to go in it. The first meeting would be 10 o’clock in the morning. And then we’d have, I guess, maybe 15, 20 minute meeting on a rough idea of what topic we’re taking for the day. And then you go off to your office and you’d have two hours, maybe, till lunchtime to write jokes, two pages of jokes on that topic. And then after lunch, you’d have half an hour for lunch and then you’d write, you know, topicals, evergreens, you know, like so anything that was let say that, I mean, I’m glad I’m not doing it now because it’ll be Trump, right? Because that’s all that seems to be reported in the news. But there was a time, one that I do remember was there was a plane that landed in some river somewhere. So we had written everything and set out for the day. And then this guy, Sully Sullenberger or something like that, landed.

There was a film that Tom Hanks played the part in the film of his life, Sully Sullivan or something, his name was, I think.

So we were writing, we had written the topic that day and then that happened. And then we had to rewrite the topic that day. And then we still, everybody’s called back in, you had to rewrite it. And then you’re, you’ve got like topicals like about, I don’t know, Beyoncé or Jennifer Aniston or whatever, like just random shit. And and then the show is recorded at five. Right. And you’re doing that for, you do it Monday to Thursday and there’s two shows on a Thursday. So like the show isn’t written, it doesn’t start getting written until ten in the morning and it’s recorded in front of a studio audience at five. There isn’t any time for any of that shit. It’d be lovely to be wandering about going, yeah, well, you know, he’s my brother. It’s like, you’re at the coalface. Yeah. And the pressure is quite heavy because even if you don’t really feel like doing it, there’s still a show that’s getting recorded at five o’clock that’s going out that same night. So you don’t have any space for your feelings. It’s a little hardcore. But like I say, he is amazing. I don’t know how he did it for as long as he did. I guess it sort of fits with his rhythm really, which is that he likes to be fast in and out, you know.

Right. Another Offcut now. Tell us what we’re about to hear.

Now, this is from 2016. It’s called Red Riding Hood and it’s part of an idea for an adult storybook.

The front door stays shut. That’s the rules. The doorbell rings. Some idiot knocks on the door. You stay put. Sit in that chair and you do not make a sound. Do you hear? Or there’ll be trouble, big trouble. Because when there’s someone out there, that door must never open. Not ever. Rules, order, avoidance, restraint. Get that? Stop whimpering. Rules, order, avoidance, restraint. R-O-A-R. I call it roar. Made it up myself, you know. Yes. Amuse myself, no end. Piss myself laughing for days. What exactly are you whimpering for? Oh, I see. Oh, funny. You think that someone could rescue you? No, no rescue. It’s far too late for that. The doors are locked. The windows are nailed shut. And we’ll get on just fine. Cozy. 2008 was the last time that door opened when the bell rang. 3.37 on a Thursday afternoon. I saw them through the spy hole. Girl scouts with cookies. Tasty. Tempting. The kettle was on the gas hob. 3.45. I have tea. I would not answer the door. Not right. But I wanted one. I could almost smell them. Ding dong. I should not. I would not answer the door. The water started to bubble in the kettle. I could hear them chattering outside. If we sell this box of sediments, then we’ve only got these two to go. Like chirping little birds. Like you used to like to chatter. Once upon a time. The water in the kettle began to hiss. I’d ignore them. Maybe the bell’s not working. Let me try. The doorbell rang again. Persistent. I had to give them that. Let’s just go. There’s nobody in. Yes. Go. Run away. We’ve only got a couple of boxes left. My mouth was watering. Let them go. This will pass. But then the kettle started to boil. A long, lone wolf whistle. Did you hear that? There’s somebody in there. I turned off the gas. The house was silent. Maybe there’s an old lady in there. Maybe she didn’t hear us. Maybe she’s fallen and can’t get up. Maybe she’s in trouble. Then the unmistakable tapping of ten-year-old knuckles. Knock, knock, knock. Knock, knock, knock. It was out of my hands.

Stories. Now, you said this was for an adult storybook. You’re very much, as you mentioned, stories are your thing, aren’t they?

Yeah.

You worked a lot in the storytelling space. How did you get into that? I know you mentioned The Moth, which is a great podcast where people go up on stage and tell real life stories, things that happened to them in front of an audience. Were you at the beginning when The Moth started or you just stumbled upon it? How did all that happen?

You know, it’s well, I’ve always been interested in stories. I’ve always, it doesn’t really matter what I write. There will always be a monologue in it. I like people to get a monologue. And maybe that goes back to my acting days or whatever, but I like to give a character a monologue, particularly if they’re the one that I’m in love with most of all. The thing that I was doing, I did a thing in Edinburgh. I don’t know if it was the one before I came to America, but I did a project called Biographies in a Bag, which was solo shows where each actor, each solo show was half an hour and the only set was a chair. And each character had whatever props they needed. They could have it in one bag that they would carry on, sit in the chair, do their play, then leave. And as they left, the next character would come on stage with their bag and do their play. And they were basically just monologue stories. So I’ve always been into that. Then when I came over to America, it was complicated because I was working really hard. Like I was at The Late Late Show for two and a half years and there really isn’t an awful lot of room to do anything else. And then in the middle of that, I started working for Pixar at the same time. So I was doing…

On Brave.

Working on animation. Yeah. So it was just a lot. And there’s a friend of mine, Kemp Powers, and he wrote Soul. And he wrote One Night in Miami and he did Spider-Man and stuff like that. And he’s just a top guy. And we had both done an event where we were doing, I think we were doing readings at the event. And we just hit it off. We became friends, me and Mark and him and his partner Shannon, we just became mates. And they were around at my house one night and he had done The Moth where The Moth do this thing called a slam where in essence you sort of audition your story. And I was objected to that even as a stand up, I would never do an open spot because I was so fricking argumentative. So we get into this argument about it where he said, well, you know, what other way would you do it? And I said, well, you should just be able to just deliver a story. And he went, how many people do you think want to do a story? And I said, but I’ve done a lot of stories. I know how to do them. And he said, so nepotism, would that work? Would that be the way that you would do it? Or you would take your resume to do it? Or would you find it easier just to do the, you know, the slam? Because he had done the slam, right? And I was like, fuck it, I’ll do the slam to prove you wrong, right?

The proof being that you would pass, you mean?

Well, the proof being that I wasn’t so anti-rules that I couldn’t fit into anything.

Right.

I mean, I do have a natural resistance to things. So the thing that he had a point with was he was like, it’s fine to disagree with something if you’ve had the experience of doing it. But if you haven’t had the experience of doing it, you’re just being a cantankerous old bastard. And I was like, fuck you. So then I went to do it and it was funny because, you know, you get voted in that slam. I did told this story and you get voted in the slam. And the people who vote are like friends in the audience. So it turns out if you turn up to do Islam and you’ve brought 10 friends with you and they become the judges, then you will win even if your story’s shit. So I did the story and it went fine and I lost. I came third or something. And there was like a riot in this thing. It all went crazy. People were standing up. There was rage about it. Like people were really angry about me not winning the story thing.

Really? They were all arguing going, this is an injustice, Lynn must win.

Yeah. No, it was crazy. And so like I left because I’m like this. When I’d had the argument with Kemp, this wasn’t what I’d planned. So Mark and I did it sharpish. And then the moth called me the next day and said, do you want to do this main stage? And I did a main stage.

Same story?

Yeah, yeah, no, it was the same story. And then so I ended up doing that story like the town hall in New York where I think the recording is, which is, it’s like maybe 1,500, 2,000 people. I did the Albany, did it all over the place, actually Portland, Maine, loads of really Martha’s Vineyard. I worked with the moth for quite a while doing different stories and different things. And then from that, one of the people at the moth called Meg Bowles, who is just a sweetheart, she said, you know, you do know an awful lot about story. You might want to consider teaching people. And so then she helped me set up a story, kind of teaching block. And for a while, I did do that. I would do, I had a theatre and I would do four three hour classes with complete strangers. And we would pick stories from their life. And then on the fifth class, they would do, deliver their story without notes or cheat sheets to an audience, a live audience. And then I was kind of hooked because I realized that people are, the thing that’s problematic with people is not that they don’t have stories to tell. They are just one, not entirely sure that they’re allowed to tell those stories. And two, don’t really have the structure in place to be able to do it. So that when you can get people to tell you what’s really going on, and that takes a while, then you can help them structure it to be in something that’s wonderful. So like I had a guy that used to guard, he was a head of the Marines at Guantanamo Bay. And then it kind of lost it at one point. And we did his story about how he’d come to Guantanamo and why he was there. And he said about the reason that he lost it was he said, I stood looking out into the darkness for so long that the darkness started looking into me. And he said it without any kind of mystical, poetic thing. He just said it as in, that’s the truth. And I had another girl who’d, what story that came out was that she, well it was a horrible thing about being waterboarded and raped. And everybody in the class was freaked out by her telling it. But she was so reasonable when she was talking about it because she hadn’t really thought about it for years. And then it came out that what had happened. And I said, what’s the thing? What would be the message that you would wish me to understand from that event? What is the thing that’s clear in your head about the story? And she said, the sky looks so very blue when you think you’ll never see it again. And it made me really think about how story matters.

Right. Okay, now we’ve come to your final offcut. What’s that, please?

This is an amended scene from a theatre play I was commissioned to write in 2017, and it’s called The Weir Sisters.

Margaret and Grace are preparing a little party for their long lost sister Dorothy. But there are a couple of flies in the ointment. One, the person Dorothy desperately wants to see can’t come to the party. Two, Margaret and Grace are dead. Lights up, a Christmas tree, three old fashioned chairs, a buffet table, an old fashioned phonograph, a room decorated for a cosy little tea party. The recorded version of Vera Lynn singing We’ll Meet Again. Grace, early twenties, slight, gentle, dressed in the style of the 1940s, sings along with Vera as she fixes last minute details for the party. A solid older woman, Margaret, dressed in distinctly 1980s style slacks and blouse, enters carrying a stepladder. She walks over to the record player and pulls the stylus off.

Oh my god, Grace, change the record. This is a party, not a bloody wake.

But Margaret, it’s Vera Lynn. Dorothy likes Vera Lynn.

Nobody likes Vera Lynn, especially not at a party. And Dorothy is ninety-seven. She won’t even remember who she likes.

Vera Lynn was very much the thing in our day.

In your day, Grace, in your day, after you threw off your mortal coil, music changed, thankfully.

Grace takes Vera off the turntable.

A lot of things changed after you died, actually. They put a man on the moon. They invented the contraceptive pill, which, to be honest, if men had been the ones getting pregnant, they’d have invented a couple of centuries earlier. And they not only built a wall through the middle of Berlin, but they also knocked it down again.

Having positioned her ladder, Margaret exits through the stage left door.

It’s just, I remember Dorothy and I used to sing along to Vera Lynn at the dancing. She wrote a letter to me once saying, I looked like Vera Lynn.

And was that meant to be a compliment?

Of course it was. She was the Force’s sweetheart.

There’s an inspiration for you.

It is an inspiration. I don’t understand what you have against Vera Lynn.

Margaret returns carrying a fold-up banner.

Nothing personally. What I object to is being the Force’s sweetheart. I mean, is that really what women are supposed to do? Be pretty and sing songs, inspire the boys as they set off to war.

Is that not a nice thing?

Nice is exactly what it is. Nice means you don’t question anything. Nice means you sit in a corner. Nice means you sing pretty little songs and don’t demand to know why the boys are being sent off to fight in the first place. You know what I think, Grace? I think that if you’re the one deciding to have a war, then you should be the one fighting it on your own. Think on it, Grace. Hitler, Churchill, Stalin in the ring, bare-breasted, and we all stand around taking bets. Stalin, without his high heels, stands a mere five foot four in front of Churchill, who knocks him flat with his whisky breath. Then, fresh with success and a great gust of cigar halitosis, Churchill turns to Hitler and yells at him, Wagner’s Persian, your watercolours are shite, and Hitler runs off greeting and depressed and gobbles up one of his cyanide pellets and he’s gone before you know it. And millions upon millions of lives are saved. But that isn’t what happens and you know why? Because year after year, humans hand over power to those who have no other discernible skill than to claim they’re entitled to it.

She turns back to hang the banner.

Really? When you think of it, it’s much easier just being dead.

So, tell us about The Weir Sisters.

The Weir Sisters, there’s a theatre in Glasgow, Lunchtime Theatre that was run by the magnificent woman called Morag Fullerton. They do these one hour plays that go on for a week. She asked me to write a play and I came up with one, which was this, The Weir Sisters. Actually, during the process of writing this, which I knew it was these two sisters waiting for the other sister to arrive and how they would communicate and whatever. During it, I got diagnosed with breast cancer. So actually, I couldn’t see, I didn’t go and see the play because I was here going through surgery and a lot of unpleasantness generally. So my sister, bless her, who had been over here nursing me for a bit, had gone back and seen The Weir Sisters and found it very difficult as you would, I think. So it was an interesting thing to be writing a play about what is death.

But you’ve got breast cancer, you got diagnosis after you’d finished writing or while you were writing?

While I was writing, while I was commissioned. Yeah, no, it was intense. But you know, it was kinda, because at one point I had to say to them, I’m putting the draft in, I’m giving you this first draft, it’s not finished properly, but just run with it because I’m going to fund my mistake to me this Friday. It was like a weird kind of thing going on. It’s fine, I’m fine, you know, I went into remission, I’m a lucky person. If you do get breast cancer, you know, it isn’t the death sentence it used to be and it comes from me. Anyway, but it was interesting to write this because it was about death. I wanted to write a play about death that was really about life and the way that we choose life and that actually, I think that there is something maybe up until The Weir Sisters that hadn’t entirely considered was that, you know, death is not an option. That will be the one that comes for all of us. That’s just going to happen. But how you choose to live your life and how you choose to allow other people to affect your decisions is an option. There is power in it. And so the play itself, how it exists, once you die, you go to this place that is neither up nor down and you get to choose, once you remember how you die, you can choose where you felt at your best, right? Where you felt that you’re most defined. So that’s why Grace is young. She did die young, but she has a secret, which is why she’s based around that time because she’s got something she has to reveal. Margaret dies a bit later than the way that she is set, but she appears and lives at the time that she felt that she was most powerful in her life. And then Dorothy, when she appears, the challenge is to get her to remember how she died because she felt she died so many different times, right? So it is a thing about sacrifice, this play. It’s interesting. And the reason it’s amended is because it was an hour long play that I never got to see, but it did pretty well. And what reviewed well as well, people were saying it was like this movie The Bishop’s Wife. Oh, yes, yes.

With David Nevins.

Yeah. So it has the same sort of feeling. And so then I was like, OK, well, I can’t really do anything with it as a play play. So what I’ll do is I’ll amend it into being two half play, you know, so two act play, so with an interval. So I’ve done that. And then I’ve never done anything with it since then because I’m like, maybe it’s a movie. Maybe I want to do it as a movie. So like part of all of this stuff with all my offcuts is how much I realized I’m not a completer finisher. I think that’s what you’ve taught me, Laura Shavin. I am totally not a completer finisher.

OK, well, I’m sorry. I hadn’t intended to. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show and I was, you know, my normal question is, how was it for you? It seems that you’ve just answered that by saying, I think you discovered you don’t finish things. But that can’t be true. It’s just you didn’t finish these things.

Oh, there’s a load of other things too that I’ve not finished. I didn’t really think that there was a pattern and stuff. But I can see even just in these offcuts that there is a pattern. And I also…

Which particular pattern is it? Or is it just that you didn’t finish?

I think that there is a… I have a resistance to… I mean, I can write what other people ask me to write, but sometimes I resist it. But that’s definitely ducked in a state. And I think the other stuff is that it’s okay to not know… It’s okay to not know the answer. And I used to have this… Around the time that I got… That I was in Chicken Run, I was writing different things. My first play that I wrote was really successful. And so people thought that I could write…

The Heart and Sole?

Yeah.

I saw that.

Oh, did you?

It was very good. Yeah, I did.

Thank you. Well, it was… Actually, you know what? Heart and Sole was meant to be an hour of stand up, and I forgot that and wrote a play, it said. But after it, people seem to think that what I would write would be brilliant. And it wasn’t because writing doesn’t work that way. It literally is only what you can do at the time. And I had an agent at the time who I loved her, actually, because she’d say, she’d say, darling, it’s not so much a draft as some used pieces of paper. And sometimes I’ll say that to myself when I’m writing something, I’m like, this is bullshit. And I go, well, you know, the worst idea written down is still 100% better than the best idea never written down. So even if it’s just like used pieces of paper, that’s still okay.

Well, that’s an excellently wise piece of advice, that is. So listening to those Offcuts, was there anything that surprised you, anything you expected to hear but didn’t, or maybe vice versa, or maybe nothing?

You know, what was surprising about it was that I get through, you know, like I do this weekly blog, right? So I write a blog that goes out every Sunday, like every Sunday. And at the end of the year of doing a blog, I do a book, right? And my great terror is that I’m writing the same thing every week. And my great terror with writing is that I’m writing the same thing. And I noticed in those things where I was like, they’re really not the same thing. The real Duck Dynasty was about, I’m trying to do something that’s just not going to work. The Fox Hunt, God bless seven year old me and my weirdness. Memory when it suits you is about a love, actually a kind of love for London and don’t forget the good bits. Red Riding Hood I still believe in, but it’s a complicated thing and I don’t know how to do that yet. And The Weir Sisters, it is a thing about, you can write through the most difficult of times. And sometimes writing does make you feel better when you do. I think that The Weir Sisters would be, I think The Weir Sisters as a structure that it was and worked, I think there is a better structure for them. I just have to decide what that structure is. Because what was lovely here in it, because I wrote that what, nearly 10 years ago, something like that, eight years ago. And then listening to it, I was like, yeah, that’s the truth for now though. Like, you could totally see that a bit now. So I’m like, oh, maybe I should do something with that, right?

Yes, you definitely could, yeah. Well Lynn Ferguson, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today.

You too, my friend.

Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thank you for asking me.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Lynn Ferguson. The Offcuts were performed by David Monteath, Nigel Pilkington, Beth Chalmers, Christopher Kent and Gayanne Potter, and the music was by me. For more details, visit offcutsdrawer.com, and please subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

All the writers on The Thick of It were better than me. All the writers on Veep were better than me. I mean, I had a very lucky kind of stumbling through the last 25 years, I have to say, in a field that really rewards talent rather than a flailing chancer.

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 just kept hold of for nostalgia. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity pave the way to subsequent success. My guest this time is EMMY award-winning comedy writer and producer, Ian Martin. He’s written for TV on political comedies The Thick of It and its American counterpart, Veep, on films including Death of Stalin and In the Loop, on radio with his own BBC comedy drama, The Hartlepool Spy, which won the Tinniswood Prize for best radio drama, and in print as a journalist and commentator, as well as being an author of books that include Epic Space, The Coalition Chronicles, Lost in the Attic, and most recently, Unhinged, his parody of the Boris Johnson autobiography. Ian, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

Thanks very much for having me.

Now, working in all these genres, having had all these different experiences, do you find writing itself an actual chore or a joy? Which part do you prefer, the blank page or writing the words the end?

I, well, in order, in descending order, I would write invoice two, colon, as my favorite bit, the blank page number two, everything in between, it depends what the project is and how well it’s going, whether they’re paying me properly and whether it’s any good or whether, in fact, it is headed for The Offcuts Drawer.

So you’re not somebody, because I’ve spoken to a few writers who sort of, I’m always shocked when they go, oh, God, now the writing bit is the worst. I like it when it’s finished and then I can bask in the glory of people interviewing me or getting paid, as indeed you were talking about. Now, you actually like the writing process, then?

I do, yeah, very much at every stage. There is something obviously magic about a blank page waiting to be filled with bollocks. I like that very much. But also, again, there’s a load of stuff in my drawer that didn’t make it upstream.

And when you’re doing your writing, are you somebody who can just automatically turn it on if you just happen to have a notebook and a pen handy? Or do you have to like, you have your computer in front of you, your lucky gonk next to you, and you have to have no music or loads of music? Can you write in any circumstance?

Yeah, I can write in any circumstances at home. It’s fairly quiet here and I can write in any room. My favourite working environment is when the snooker’s on because you can have it nice and low. There’s this very calming green bays background and you can pretend to be working while you’re watching the snooker and pretend to be watching the snooker while you’re working. And somehow it pays off. I’ve got more stuff done quite often during an afternoon of the masters that I have sitting in silence in the kitchen.

And is it just snooker that casts his magic spell or is there football, rugby, darts?

No, football and rugby suits. I mean, you’ve seen all the pictures, every picture of a footballer on the back pages. They’re just screaming in rage. This is the last thing you want on when you’re writing.

Yeah, fair point.

No, when the snooker ended, I was very sad. But this year, there was the World Championship Indoor Bowls Competition on BBC Red Button. And that was quite good. It’s a very calming light blue background. The rink was this kind of trefalgar blue.

Okay, so presumably golf is also up there. Is it?

Fuck golf. Fuck golf up the ass with a number nine iron.

There will definitely need to be a warning before this show. Okay, let’s get started with your first offcut then. So, can you tell us please what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Okay, well, this is a scene from a feature film script that I started writing years and years ago, about 2013. And it’s called Reykjavik.

Exterior, Hofdie Haus perimeter, day. Reagan has suggested to Gorbachev that they take a break, get some air. Security personnel at a discrete distance. It’s just the two men and their interpreters. Simultaneous translation. Gradually the voices of the US interpreter and Gorbachev fade down, creating a two-hander.

No notes, no record, unofficial. You guys translate, but what’s said here goes no further. Understood? Okay, then, here’s a secret. Margaret Thatcher, while a student at the University of Oxford, enjoyed sexual relations with Rupert Murdoch. What? Yeah, if that gets out, we’re all dead. I guess what I’m saying is, this goes no further. Murdoch? He’s not even the most improbable part of the story. Now hear me out, Mikey. I want it to…

Not Mikey. Mikey sounds like a dog.

Okay.

A small dog. Yorkshire Terrier. Misha. You called me Misha at Geneva. You always call me Misha.

Misha, Misha, right. Not Mikey. Sorry. Forgotting things lately. Forget my own head if it wasn’t screw… Ronnie. Right.

Remember that thing we talked about last time.

Sure.

Aliens. Aliens attacking Earth.

Ha ha ha. We would stand together against them. A truce. Fight the bastards.

On the same side. You know, sometimes I think I’d like aliens to attack…

You would?

The Earth. No. Not if they had military superiority. I would like us to be on the same side only if we could defeat them.

Reagan kicks at the ground, alerting security guys.

Yeah, pesky space critters. You think there’d be anything like the aliens you see in cartoons?

I think… no. Maybe. Yogi Bear, for example, would be a fearsome enemy if armed.

They have Yogi Bear in the Soviet Union?

Hotel TV, all the time. At home we have Yuri Bear, the mascot. He’s not funny.

We could take Boo Boo down. If alien boo boos attack the earth, we shall be ready, Misha.

Fuck you, alien boo boos!

OK, so that was a scene, as you said, from a script called Recubic. So tell us about it.

I mean, I found that quite funny, actually. I’ve forgotten all about that. And it kind of isn’t what the film is mostly about. I mean, it’s a comedy drama. But it’s about those two meeting at Recubic to discuss abolishing certain long-range nuclear missiles, when Reagan, against the odds, springs this idea of absolutely total nuclear disarmament, which throws Gorbachev, because he knows that if he goes home to Moscow and says, okay, we’ve abolished all the nuclear weapons, they’ll kill him. But it was a genuine, devoutly held wish of Reagan. And this was what attracted me to the project in the first place, because I fucking hate Ronald Reagan. I was on marches against Ronald Reagan’s deployment of missiles at Greenham Common, whatever the air force next to it was, and hated him, hated him, hated him. And this made me reassess him as a person.

Right.

But I mean, it went on and on, this bloody project. I mean, I think I started in 2013, and endless drafts of little bits, you know, and the bit you just heard was the kind of preamble to the serious stuff where he gets into it and just says, right, let’s just ban all nuclear weapons. But it went on and on. There was funding, then there wasn’t, then there was alternative funding, and then there wasn’t. And it just went on for years with endless hours of talking about it and so on. In the end, I just banged out a first draft, which is what that’s from. That seemed to kill it stone dead.

I should add actually, because it occurred to me, one thing I did leave out of your introduction was the fact that when you were hired by producer Armando Iannucci for The Thick of It, you were given the title of swearing consultant. Now I’m sure this has been a question you get asked a lot. And of course, there was also some spectacularly creative profanity in the series, particularly from Peter Capaldi’s character Malcolm Tucker. So if that is actually the case and you were in any way a swearing consultant, how did that work exactly? Or is it just a gag?

I mean, it was a bit of both, to be honest. I mean, he hired me in because I was doing a very sweary website, my brother Paul, around the year 2000. And there was a character, the speaker at the time was Michael Martin, the actual speaker of the house was Michael Martin. And he was Scottish and he was incredibly sweary. And in our version, he had this stream of rage-filled baroque profanity, which I think appealed to Armando. And he just said he liked the stuff we were doing. And it was something called Hansard late. The premise was that it was after all the cameras, the microphones were turned off. And everyone was pissed in the House of Commons and could just say what the fuck they wanted. This is what they did. And it was just some genuinely horrible, nasty stuff, which I recoil from now. But the so he, you know, he liked the swearing. And then so I was just do you fancy doing this? And I was sent the first episode of Thick and didn’t know what to do. He just sprinkled your sweary, fairy dust on it or something.

The sweary fairy, that’s a much better term.

Exactly. That’s me. Nimble, nimble, leaping from bow to bow. And I stared at the script for about three hours. I think it was written by Jesse Armstrong, The Succession. Genius. Yes. I couldn’t see it anyway. And seriously, the prospect of trying to improve it was a bit daunting. I’d never seen a script before. Really? I’d never been a script writer. No, I’d never been a script writer before. Oh, wow. Okay. 2003-04. And yes, and I changed one thing. And the first thing I changed was he’s talking on the phone. We think it’s about Hugh, the minister who is completely hapless. And he says, he’s fucking useless. I changed it. I wrote an alt which went, he’s fucking useless. He’s as useless as a marzipan dildo. And he said, yeah, that stuff. Just do that. And that’s where my career in comedy writing really began with the marzipan dildo, which is not a swear.

No, neither marzipan nor dildo are particularly.

Absolutely right.

Although possibly not saying the word dildo in front of children, you don’t only have a difficult question to answer. But yes.

I mean, you wouldn’t put it in a blue piece of introduction.

All right. Well, time for another Offcut now. What have we got?

This is the letter that I wrote to Junior Mail, which was the sort of non-paramilitary wing of the actual Daily Mail for kiddlings. Yeah, I wrote a letter to Junior Mail in 1970.

I think there should be a sign in the highway code for sorry. It might stop people losing their temper in cars, which would make the roads safer.

Now, it may well be one of the shortest offcuts we’ve ever included in the show. So tell us the backstory behind this. There was some deceit, wasn’t there?

Yeah, short, powerful and really effective. I was a massive Beatles fan. I was 10 when they had their first hit and 17 when they split up, which is when this competition was organized. You could win all the Beatles singles if you were under the age, I have to put it up to 11, I think, for junior male. Write a letter to junior male and win all the Beatles singles. I was 17, so ineligible. So I entered as my brother Paul, the one I did the website with decades later. And so I wrote it with my left hand and just pretended to be the kind of smug little arsehole that would absolutely win the competition and I did. So it was the first win for me by writing deceitfully. And yeah, it set me up for the rest of my life.

So that was your first paid-for piece of writing. But that isn’t how you went, Oh, do you know what? I could make a living being a writer. That’s not what happened, I presume.

Never occurred to me. I just wanted the vinyl.

So at school, were you a righty kid? Were you the cleverest kid in class or were you like permanently on the naughty step?

No, both. I mean, I was expelled quite a few times and suspended and whatnot for stuff. Stuff? Well, you know, there’s a time when you weren’t allowed to have long hair and look scruffy and smoke and take drugs and all the things that, you know, everybody did. Right. And so, yeah, I did very well at English. Yeah, I was always good at English.

So, you knew that was the, no, you didn’t.

No, I had no plans to be a writer at all. I just quite like reading books and writing. But I did not in a professional way.

Right.

I think what I wanted to do was somehow put something back to society. Be helpful. Be a helpful member of a civil society. I should have written that to fucking junior male. I should have got another prize, shouldn’t I?

So you had no particular plans to be a writer. Do you have any plans at all for any kind of career?

No, no, not really. I mean, I studied sociology at Newcastle Polytechnic for three days before realizing it was the last thing I wanted to study. I had this idea of going to social work or doing something useful, and that didn’t really work out. So I just drifted for a bit. When all the people I went to school with were at university, I was at a sort of hospice hospital in Essex, looking after old ladies who would die every week instead of studying for a degree, which I suppose was more useful.

Well, it obviously hasn’t served you too badly. But then later in life, your experimental prose poem Panic has been set as a GCSE English question 1998. So that’s interesting.

Yeah. I mean, it was bloody interesting because I didn’t even know it was, I only knew it was an A-level question when my son’s best friend, who’d just taken the exam, dropped around and say, you’d never guess what question I got in my A-level English.

So it was an A-level English question, right?

Yeah, I think so. Actually, it was another competition thing. It was when a residential course to study writing for the radio by doing a mini saga. It was a 50-word thing, tiny little thing, and I couldn’t get any ideas. Then I got a timer, a five-minute timer, and I did a grid of 50 squares. I gave myself five minutes to write a 50-word thing, a narrative thing, and I just decided to do 51-word sentences. Did it in five minutes, sent it off. Bosh.

So again, another prize that you won from without planning, without…

I hadn’t even considered that. Yeah, it was another competition win, yeah.

And it was called presumably panic. So the one-word sentences made perfect sense. If you’re panicking, you just…

It did. It started with the pre-birth and then the birth of this character and ended with his death. And he was a proper anti-hero as well. Horrible.

Well, moving on now, let’s have your next off-cut.

OK, this was a speculative piece I wrote, called notionally 50 Things About Being Together for 50 Years. I wrote it in 2023, 50 years after my wife and I got together.

My wife and I have now lived under the same roof for more than 50 years. That’s a long time. A long, long, long time. And if there was one thing I’ve learned about sharing more than half a century, it’s that it’s not about compatibility or self-improvement. Here are some random observations about this, in case you’re interested.

Time’s up.

50 years trapped together in the same life. It’s not as bad as it sounds. You’re both moving through time. Negotiating time. Defying the ravages of time. Determining what the time is now the clocks have gone forward. Whether it’s time for those meds. If it’s time for bed. Sorry, what’s the time again all the time? It’s comforting to keep time with someone.

Same difference.

She looks the same to me now as the day we were married. Does she, mate? Yeah? Are you microdosing again? Stop pretending that anyone looks the same after half a century of time’s ruthless slow motion assault, after 50 years of gravity’s remorseless pull. The whole point is that you’ve both been beaten up by time and gravity and aggregated biological failure, yet you’re the same people inside. That’s what catches at the throat when you see her turn the corner heading home. She doesn’t look the way she looked in her twenties. She’s an old lady now, but she absolutely is still your missus. The same person, incredibly. The Good Mood Guide As the years live together start to rack up, high and low frequencies get tuned out. Not just in your hearing, but in your food spectrum. Received wisdom is that old people reacquire a sweet tooth that you regress from a crisp dry to a claggy soturn. Not sure that’s quite happened, but just as early memories come in to sharper focus when you’re old, so too do the home-made tastes of your childhood. There’s no day so good it can’t be further improved by a baked potato, no day so bad it can’t be improved by cottage pie.

Off script.

Laughter isn’t the best medicine. Medicine is the best medicine. Trust me, I’m on an anthology of pills and injections that would bankrupt us if we were American. But two people laughing at the same joke is definitely the best endorphin shunt.

Non-self-service.

All this modern self-affirming toffee, e.g. how you’re going to love someone if you don’t love yourself, can I get an armen? No, you twat, you absolutely can’t. We’re from the old school of self-loathing, which means we’re lucky that anyone else puts up with us. Love someone else. Much easier to process than self-regard.

Last words.

Who knows what your last words will be. Call an ambulance is a good short-ons bet. Stair carpets come loose again, or we’re not shelling out 200 quid for a builder, just hold the ladder steady. Or, I’m not sure this is a stitch, you know. Do you ever wonder what the last words you hear will be? Because I guarantee the last words I’ll hear from my wife as I drift away on my fentanyl-lofted throne of clouds will be, oh god, where have I put my fucking glasses now?

Now, this was considerably longer and had some actually wonderful sections, but they were too long to include, unfortunately.

Yeah, I wrote it just because I had to write it, because I thought that would be a fun thing to write. And there are things that are worth saying about being with the same person for 50 years. It’s a long time. And I thought, oh, I’ll pitch it to The Observer. But by the time I’d finished it, it was like seven and a half, eight thousand words long, obviously, much too long, except to go online. And they came back and said, we love it. But could you do like 20 things about 50 years ago? That’s the point. So into the fucking drawer it went, frankly.

So who were you 50 years ago? Presumably you were a writer already, weren’t you?

No, I was a musician. I was playing folkclubs and stuff.

You were a musician? Were you a songwriter or just?

Both. Yeah. But I mean, I started off doing folkclubs and just playing blues in folkclubs, basically mostly bottleneck guitar. The guys in the big chunky knit sweaters with their fingers in their ears didn’t really like it very much, which suited me very well. Now, what was I doing in 1973? In 1973, I started working for a local newspaper in the old days when there was an industry fueled by small ads that propped up thousands and thousands of jobs, proper old style, hot metal print back to front, upside down. Pubs opened at our past five where we were piled in. I mean, it was great times. And a three-year apprenticeship where you learn the craft, really, of writing economically with drama and wit. And actually, now I think of it, I did have a column quite quickly after I joined, which is a funny column.

Was it about anything particular or was it just Ian Martin’s side-eye on life?

Ian Martin’s silly old week. Yeah, 20-year-old silly old Ian Martin’s stupid fucking week. But yeah, I am very grateful for having that three-year apprenticeship. It taught you a lot about actually writing less rather than more. Happy days.

All right, next Offcut, please. What’s this one?

It’s a pilot for something called Ghost Squad. It’s a film script, a TV script rather, that I wrote with my son Dan in 2016.

Pure white screen. We hear an authoritative man’s voice. This is the Commissioner.

There are three destinations for newly deads. At heaven, of course, where all good people go at the end of their journey. Eternal life, at one with the Spiritus Sanctus, etc. At infinitum.

Interior. Hell. Night. Rows of identical gray pods stretch into a deep darkness.

Then there is hell. Irredeemable souls. The worst of the worst. Solitary confinement. No contact. Bad, bad ghosts. Locked away forever. Probably.

Interior. Reincarnation hub. Night. Fading in a huge retro-futuristic complex at night. Elegant architectural swoops and curves illuminated by gaslight.

Then there’s reincarnation.

A discreet sign. Reincarnation hub. Departure lounge. We push into interior reincarnation hub Atrium Night. A huge space. 1960s Dulles Airport vibe. Drifting calmly into it thousands of ghosts. Human ghosts, mostly elderly, with a jumble of animals. Fish and birds swim through the air. A giraffe lumbers patiently behind a group of old people. All funnelling into queues at reception where goth angels are processing them.

Some of the animals here will return in a new life as animals. Some will move up the chain and return as human. Some people will get another chance to be human. Others will move down the chain.

An angel receptionist is talking to a blind Englishman in dark glasses. His guide dog is with him.

I’m being judged now.

Oh, that’s right.

Kick a man when he’s dead and registered blind.

He suddenly realises he can see, takes off his glasses. A gasp of wonder.

Fuuuuck!

The angel consults a screen.

You were teaching your dog, Mrs Thatcher, to drive?

She was on my lap helping with the steering. I told her two bikes for a stop. Her road sense is shit.

Angel addresses the dog.

The crossing lady had firmly signalled.

We see a crossing lady way back in another queue looking towards the blind man.

Fuck you!

The dog speaks, a woman’s voice.

Technically, of course, she’s only there to stop human drivers.

Oh, and I see you’re coming back as a human too, so congratulations.

Woof, woof, marvellous.

Perhaps in due course I’ll get a dog myself.

The dog vanishes.

And me?

What the fuck am I? The blind man vanishes. Interior, Madame Meng’s soup bowl night. A friendly Korean noodle joint. Everyone’s having soup. We see identical Madame Meng’s at various tables, at different stages of serving soup, then leading customers through a bead curtain. As we pass the customers, uplifting music changes to whatever soothes them. Bach, Motown, folk, disco.

We try to make transition as easy as possible. Amnesiac soup. They forget who they were.

Zap. The blind man appears at one of the tables. Shit jazz plays. A Madame Meng brings him a bowl of soup. The blind man tries some, goes blank, is led through the bead curtain. Madame Meng returns alone.

Some souls have been here hundreds of times, but each time is always the first.

So this project called Ghost Squad, that was written in 2016. Interesting that Ghosts, the successful BBC series, began airing three years later. Would they have been similar?

No, I don’t think so. Although, because there’s a lot of faffing around with this, as usual, trying to get it out to people who were interested and they’re not that interested, or I’m not sure we’ve got that far. But yeah, obviously by the time Ghosts started, it was going to be very difficult to get this off. And also, my son Dan and I tried it in various iterations, as a feature script and then a TV script.

Okay, so it could have been a film, it could have been a TV series.

Yeah, I think in the end, we settled on a format that was like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but with ghosts was the pitch. An ensemble cast, different characters with different personalities, some of whom were destined to sort of move upstairs quite soon. Some, like our main protagonist, Song, had been there, I think, since the ninth century, because she was an absolute, ferocious asshole who hated people and would never, ever move on. And the idea was that they would just cull, they were sent out to cull the very worst of us who were irredeemably out of life credit. So, they would cause them to die in spectacular splashy ways and then be carted off back to the precinct to be processed.

So, this was a comedy which would have involved some really visceral death scenes with lots of blood and gore, is that right?

Yeah, absolutely. They had it coming. Trust me. Trust me. But the idea was that, because my son Dan lives in Korea, has made a life in Korea with a Korean wife and kids, I mean, he’s a professor of film studies and his specialism is horror, specifically Asian horror. Right. So, we decided it would be fun to kind of smash together a template for an Asian horror film with a kind of chaotic, darkly comedic stuff that I do, satirical stuff and just see what happened when we mesh them. And it was great fun to do. I mean, working with my son was just tremendously lovely. But I didn’t get anywhere. I mean, this is not ghosts. This is not a warm family watch, really.

Okay. All right. Well, time for another Offcut now. What have we got?

This was a short story I wrote in 2020 called Scout.

Citizens, attention. This is a message on behalf of the popular resistance. Praise be to the Holy Ghost. My handle is Scout. That is my name. I am setting this down to expose all the losers and the infidels and them in authority. May the Holy Ghost take them all. Look at this city. Last human settlement on Earth. Always dark. At noon, the dark is a light dark. At midnight, it is dark like space. Like this for more than 100 years. Why? The Net. The Net covers the city from deep below the Earth. All around like chain mail on nights of old, but fine, very fine and strong. Enemy trying to get inside, but holes in net so tiny they cannot. The city is masked, shuttered against the deadly enemy. Why? The Senate says the Net went over the city to keep out a new kind of enemy, a new super mosquito. This is the truth from the popular resistance. The Senate and the infidels and them in authority created the super mosquito. Back before the Net, people and mosquitoes lived in same world. Then comes malaria, then comes AIDS, then come the pandemics, then comes global hot temp. Global hot temp brings hot bloods and new diseases. Epi number 767 the most deadly, epi number 767 fatal to people, incurable, an easy spread from blood to blood. Death upon death upon death. Big senate meeting, shoutings, table bangings, oh calamity, oh something must be done, kill mosquito, kill mosquito, kill mosquito. Some citizens seek guidance from the Holy Ghost, blessed are they in the ways of righteousness. But the senate sought guidance from science and in the darkness of the laboratory, scientists invent a super vaccine to kill the super mosquito. The vaccine encodes a script error into human DNA, harmless to people, fatal to mosquitoes. They watch as a mosquito extracts human blood, see the phage injects its nucleic acid into host cells. Epi number 767 transfers the script error from human DNA to insect DNA. Now every mosquito has the error inside them. It is the Holy Ghost, it is the Angel of Death. Mosquitoes auto-destruct, victory! Within six months all mosquitoes are dead. Hooray! The senate shouts! This time the shouts are of joy! Death! Death to the mosquitoes! Fuck the mosquitoes!

But… But…

What is this? Two mosquitoes. One male, one female, ordained by the Holy Ghost. Immune to the human DNA, Holy Bomb. They mate. Now mosquitoes have mutated into something stronger. They multiply and go forth. They have decoded human DNA and synthesized a powerful counter-virus. Now they can kill people with a mutant version of human poison. Science has backfired. There is more. Now the mosquitoes have learned the holy ways of people. Submission, obedience, vengeance, human DNA crackles within them. The Holy Ghost is within them. They have language and self-consciousness and scripture. The Holy Ghost talks to them. The word for hear and obey is the same word. They are observant and organized and full of the wrath of the Holy Ghost. It is war. It is a holy war.

Goodness me.

Fucking hell. I forgot about that. That’s not funny, is it? Bloody hell.

No, it’s very good though. I had to include the whole thing as I was reading it, going, well, I can’t cut this off halfway through. We’ve got to know what happens in the end.

Yeah, I mean, the very end is missing. The reveal is that Scout is a mosquito and that they’ve synthesized something that will melt the net and they’re offering prayers to the Holy Ghost as they finally prepare. Scout’s going to be the first one in to the city. They finally prepare to wipe out humanity once and for all.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, yeah. My son-in-law and I wrote a couple of short stories and that was from an idea that we both had about this net over the city, keep out the mosquitoes. But I kind of took it from there, really. Yeah, it’s not funny. It wasn’t funny. And it was one of those lockdown things. I started to do that same thing people sometimes do. You do pull out the drawer of Offcuts and see what you’ve got. Because no one’s commissioning anything because there was COVID and whatnot, and everyone was just cooped up at home. And I found it quite useful to convert some of the doomed scripts into short stories, just as something to do with them, just to see if the story broke during the transmission from script to prose, just to see if it worked. Some of them didn’t. Some of them did. I quite like Scout. I don’t mind that. I haven’t heard it ever, obviously, but I haven’t looked at it for ages. Yeah, it’s quite good.

I thought it was very good, isn’t it, that ending? So you wrote this, obviously, during the pandemic. You refer to the pandemic and stuff.

I do, yeah. I hadn’t remembered that either, yeah.

And during the pandemic, of course, Boris Johnson was our Prime Minister, and you went on to write a spoof autobiography of him, which is called Unhinged. At what point did you decide to write that?

It was my idea. I had just written a book for Bloomsbury that I had to do in a hurry to get it out for Christmas called So You Think You Can Be Prime Minister, which is a kind of stupid scamper through a nonsensical path for someone with no scruples to rise up through the party and take over as Prime Minister. A load of nonsense, but I had to do it in a hurry, I had to write it in four weeks. And I handed it in and then Johnson, who I loathe, whom I loathe, I should say, unleashed his own memoir called Unleashed, which predictably was a bollocks retelling of history. And my editor at Bloomsbury ran me up and said, ha, look, what about doing something called Unhinged that’s a piss take and do it as a kind of, you know, life coach book, you know, be more Boris. That’s what we all want to, you know, just rip into him. I said, yep, I’m up for that. When do you need it? She said three weeks. So yeah, I wrote it in three weeks and collapsed.

Well, let’s have another offcut. Tell us about this one, please.

Okay. This is working title Charlotte, which is a kind of big budget movie script written in 2021.

Interior, sitting room, night, a lady’s room seen from the dressing table, a little worn and shabby. Caption, Belgium, 1927. An old woman looks directly at us.

I have seen kings and emperors in their glory. Yes, in their glory and in their caskets. I once ruled an empire three times the size of France. Imagine that. It was a magical time. Ah, but now, all those I trusted, gone. Now there is only you.

Reverse shot. She’s talking to her reflection, which addresses us.

Where to begin? Over the lesson, I think.

Exterior, Laken Palace, Gardens, Day. Six-year-old child Charlotte wanders aimlessly through lavish landscaped grounds. Caption, Belgium, 1846. She hears the yelp of a dog and the cries of a young boy. She hurries to investigate, arrives at a large lawn. There’s a dog tied by its lead to a tree. Its owner, the crying boy, has been tied to another. Charlotte’s older brother, Leo, and friends carry wooden shields and are jabbing at the dog with wooden swords.

You do not frighten me, savage beast. Why, I’ll run you through.

Charlotte, incensed, unties the dog and then the boy, who runs off sobbing.

Go away, Lottie.

Boys only.

Even then, I couldn’t abide my brother, Leo. He’s bullying and cruelty, especially when our little brother, Philippe, was the target.

She picks up a sword and shield from a pile on the grass.

Fight me then, Leo, you coward.

Leo is outraged. He rushes at Charlotte, but she’s ready.

Thwack.

Her sword into Leo’s shield. He’s taken aback.

Thwack.

Again, this time so hard, she breaks the wooden sword. He counterattacks. She blocks his moves expertly, cheering from the boys. Leo gets mad, whacks her on the arm with his sword. She punches him back hard in the face. He’s astonished, crying. Their mother appears with a governess and Philippe in tow.

Charlotte, such vulgar, unseemly behaviour for a young lady. Apologise to your brother at once.

Charlotte lets out a roar of frustration, stomps off angrily back to the house, Leo smirking through his tears. Interior, Lackin Palace, Drawing Room, Day. A tranquil scene. Mother silently embroidering. Father, King Leopold, is reading and smoking. Into the silence bursts Charlotte, who has cut her hair savagely short and is wearing some of Leo’s clothes. They’re a little big on her. The parents are stunned.

Mama, Papa, I am determined to live from this moment as a boy. I shall navigate the world not as Charlotte, but as Charles.

Mother angrily moves to slap Charlotte. She’s intercepted by a calm father.

Don’t upset yourself, my dear. I shall deal with this.

Mother shoots Charlotte to look, swishes out. Charlotte bursts into tears. It’s all too much. Father comforts her.

Oh, Charles, you idiot.

I’m Charlotte again now.

Either way, I’m resolved. You shall be as thoroughly educated as your brothers. And, a secret, you will always be the cleverest.

Charlotte is pleased.

Hmm. This story is based on something that actually happened?

Yeah. Yeah. I knew nothing about her at all. She’s Charlotte. She’s Princess of Belgium. She grows up. She’s incredibly forceful and ends up marrying Maximillian, who’s a Habsburg, and together with the backing of the Pope and all the heads of the big families in Europe, sent off, parachuted into Mexico to become emperor and empress. I didn’t even know Mexico ever had an empire. And it was something I worked out with this brilliant Mexican director called Lorena Villarreal, who had this story in detail in her head. It was an absolute joy. And it was absolutely brilliant working with someone who had the story, the true story at her fingertips. So obviously, we kind of animated it and had a fall in love with a senior army guy. And it was all got very complicated sexually, the threesome and it was a kind of, it was a horrible end anyway. It’s a horrible end to the story that these two European idiots, I mean, they’re both very young, could in fact run an empire in Mexico. She, however, became very interested in the whole issues of reform. She was very progressive and she kind of took over from Maximilian, her bisexual husband, who just wanted to sort of shag around and write poetry. There’s a poem, absolute treat. I really, really love writing shit poetry. He fancies himself as a poet and she goes along, not knowing who he is, a bit pissed, and listens to his declamatory sort of Wordsworthian poetry. I love writing that. It’s so atrociously bad, but just good enough for you to think that he thinks it’s good. Do you know what I mean? As they say these days, I was proud of myself. This is a thing. I’m never proud of myself. We were talking about this by Mrs. Nye earlier on. People on every single program now say, I’m proud of myself. I noticed that one of the things that you pulled out of the 50 things about living with someone 50 was this whole idea of self-loathing. You know where you are. We all knew where we were.

It’s the British way. It’s the British way. Don’t mess with it.

It’s the 20th century way for sure. And I applaud people for believing in themselves and backing themselves and being proud of themselves. It just feels such an alien thing to think. Anyway, that was Charlotte and I think it’s kind of languish. I think I can’t ever, not in the current climate. It costs a fortune to make and it was a lovely thing to do. But I think that’s probably staying firmly in the drawer.

Well, how did you get the commission in the first place? What was your connection to either the director or the topic?

My agent was approached with the idea.

For you specifically, did they think we need the Swery Fairy?

No, no, no, no, no. I’m usually just like the 18th person who’s been asked because everyone else is busy doing worthy lucrative stuff. No, as ever, all these things, every writer’s life, it’s a series of serendipitous accidents. You just bump into people you get on with, you can write with and produce something and then forget all about it until someone says, oh, why don’t you dig out some shit from your drawer and we’ll do a podcast about it.

Okay, we’ve come to your final offcut now. So tell us about this one.

This again is a lockdown story I wrote in 2020 called Gethsemane.

James and Simon Peter were at the market when they were jolted by a familiar whispered voice behind them. Peace be with you. They knew it was him before they turned round. His appearance had altered. Beard cut in the Greek style, a publican’s clothes. But oh, Rabbi all right. Nothing said for a while as the three of them moved into a dusty shaded corner. James couldn’t make eye contact with his brother. He was shaking, quivering. Rabbi had seen that agitated trembling somewhere else. Yes, James looked at him like a dying sacrificial lamb. You, you dare return, betrayed Judas, brought to us in love, damn you, given to us in love, who loved you more than any of us. Rabbi then looked at James, presented his serious face, his gentle nod. Then, incredibly with beatific calm, he pointed to the sky, actually pointed up and said it was God’s will. He reminded James of the prophecy that the Messiah shall suffer, then rise from the dead on the third day. That repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, starting here in Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things, he told them. I am. That’s when James spatter, then punched, then kicked Rabbi, declaring too loudly that he was no longer his brother, that if he ever saw him again, he would kill him for the shame he had brought upon his family and upon them all. Just fuck entirely off forever and ever. Amen. The next day, he was walking north on the road out from Jerusalem. Ahead, he saw two of his old followers. One he thought a brother, no, maybe a cousin of John. They didn’t recognize him. Good. The three fell in together, making small talk about taxes, marriage, the politics of water, hoping for a merchant’s card heading their way to carry them on. You heard about Rabbi, he said, full of innocence. Is it truth or a lie? They crucified him, and did he, didn’t he rise again on the third day? They all agreed that such a thing was possible if possibilities were infinite. That’s when Rabbi recited the Lord’s Prayer and the companions froze. That’s who you are. You are him, you, the son of God. They were roiling with wonder and fear. It was him, really him. A cart appeared and Rabbi waved it down, beseeching the two witnesses to rise from their knees, commanding them to return to Jerusalem and secretly spread the word, for this was to be a new chapter in humanity’s covenant with God. He’d intended to settle back in the north, perhaps making a living in those familiar comforting hills in some peaceful crumbling village. A carpenter, he’d always had a talent even as a boy, but his mind couldn’t settle. His prayers went unanswered. God had withdrawn, perhaps forever. Yes, he was sure of his destiny now. He entered Tiberius at dusk, went to a holy place, offered his prayers to an empty room. In clumsy Aramaic, he wrote a note to, whom? His former disciples, his estranged brother, posterity. Judas did not betray the Messiah. He is the Messiah. I am Jesus of Nazareth. Pray for my soul. Then he found rope and a tree and finished his story.

Hmm.

This story was beautifully and very elegantly written, and obviously it was about Jesus and Judas. Body swapping was what you put in the note that you sent to me about it. Can you explain, because obviously that was the end of the story we just played.

Yeah.

So can you summarize the story in its entirety?

Okay. I mean, it is a sacrilegious story, and it’s not something I believe. Once I thought the thought, I couldn’t get it out of my head. And essentially, the story is of Judas and Jesus being in love, really, and Judas adoring him. And the moment in Gethsemane where Jesus has his doubt and asks, God, if there’s any way, he can get him off the hook, Judas decides there is a way, which is to put on the rabbi’s clothes by which the Roman guards will identify Jesus. And this was all sparked by this weird thing in the Gospel of Mark. I mean, they all tell the story of Gethsemane, but in Mark, he’s got this naked guy running away from the scene as Jesus is arrested. And I thought, well, it’s just safe at the moment. Let’s just hypothesize that the naked guy running away is Jesus. How would that work as a story? So yeah, I mean, the story is that Judas was crucified. Jesus was let off the hook. God withdrew because of the awful betrayal. And Jesus dies by suicide. But yeah, it’s not funny. I mean, there’s some funny bits along the way, you know, I mean, Judas is the joker in the crowd of disciples. And there’s a lot of banter back and forth. And anyway, I don’t know why I wrote it. That is what I’m saying. I have no idea. I mean, I am an Anglican, a very bad Anglican. But I wrote this horrible, terrible, awful, sacrilegious story in which Jesus is the coward and Judas is the hero who’s crucified.

We have now come to the end of the show. How was it for you, Mr Martin?

Absolutely brilliant. I mean, I wasn’t nervous about this because I just thought, we’re just talking about some stuff in the drawer that I don’t ever think about really. But it’s actually extraordinary to hear your stuff being read back, stuff that’s not commissioned, that’s not ever seen the light of day. It made me think about a couple of things. I think maybe-

Yes, because that would have been one of my questions. Is there anything there that you heard that’s given you a second thought about?

Well, I’ve always had a soft spot for Ghost Squad, and in particular, this Korean teenage girl who was betrayed and killed in the 9th century and hates everybody, hates humanity. But yeah, I’ve got a soft spot. I’d love that to go somewhere.

So that’s the one you might consider doing something with?

I mean, I don’t mind all of them. I mean, they all have their merits. I mean, why is it this anthology that I handed you? And it’s because I must care about them all, I guess.

Well, it has been fascinating and very enjoyable to talk to you, Ian Martin. Thank you very much for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

No, right back at you. I mean, this has been an absolute blinder for me. What a treat. Thank you so much.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Ian Martin. The Offcuts were performed by Beth Chalmers, Christopher Kent, Emma Clarke, Keith Wickham, Kenny Blyth and Nigel Pilkington, and the music was by me. For more details about the episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com, and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

I am, I’m hoping, a walking inspiration for people who are not a writer of any description, who would like to be a writer, because I was the absolute polar opposite of a writer, I guess. What is the polar opposite of a writer? Well, actually, I don’t know. That’s a really good question. Let’s rephrase that. I was not in a position in my life that anybody would have looked at me and thought, oh, I bet she’s gonna go off and write a novel.

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. My guest this week is bestselling novelist Lisa Jewell. Lisa’s first book, Ralph’s Party, was published in 1999 and was an instant hit, becoming the bestselling debut novel for that year. Since then, she’s written another 19 books from the chick-lit novels of the 90s and noughties like 30 Nothing and One Hit Wonder, two more family-themed novels like After the Party, The House We Grew Up In, and more recently, she seems to have found her home in the world of psychological thrillers with books like Then She Was Gone, Watching You, and The Night She Disappeared, which came out this summer and instantly topped the bestseller charts. I really enjoyed my chat with Lisa. She was impressively honest and unpretentious about her talents and career. Her pragmatic, no-nonsense approach seems almost surprising considering the success she’s had in all her different genres. Anyway, so this is our conversation, which took place a few months ago just as the summer holidays were coming to an end. Where are you in your work cycle? Are you in the middle of anything, or did you clear the decks before your holiday?

I have got into the habit since having small children of stopping work for the summer holidays. And now I don’t have small children anymore, but I do still stop work for the summer holidays. But it actually does work for me, because it’s nice for me to have that space. And so I’m now at that point where I’m having to gear up to get back into it, which is, it hasn’t quite happened yet, but I’m hoping it will happen in the next few days. I’ll get back to work.

But had you finished a project and now you’re ready to start a new one, or you actually-

Oh no, sorry, no. What I mean is I stop writing the novel that I’m writing for the summer holidays and then come back to it after the summer holidays. So I have half a novel. So my writing cycle is January to December. So it’s really nice and easy to remember what I’m supposed to be doing at any given point.

You have a cycle per book. So you start writing it in January, you have it finished by December. Is that right? Each book?

Correct, correct. Yes, yes.

That’s impressive.

It’s really not. People say this to me all the time, but I have to remind them that this is my job and I don’t do anything else. I literally have nothing else to do all year. I don’t even have to look after children very much anymore because they’re big teenagers. So this is my job. And it only takes me three hours a day. I mean, it’s not much of a job really. So yes, it’s not such an achievement after all.

Well, you say that, but I mean, presumably you have to come up with an idea. On January the 1st, do you know what the book is you’re going to be writing? Or is that when you start with your, right now I must decide on the characters or the plot on January the 1st?

Right, well on January the 1st, I am still probably in the throes of liaising with my editor about what needs to be done to the book that I delivered in December. And then I’ll probably spend the whole of January editing the book that I delivered in December, probably going into February quite often as well. So it’s generally, it’s probably mid-Feb, early March when I actually sit down and type chapter one with a nice blank screen in front of me. And at that point, yes, I do know what chapter one will be.

Right. When did you work that out?

Oh, at some point in the shower or walking down the street or at some point, it’s something that I describe as a golden egg. And it happens to me once a year. It’s like I ovulate once a year. And this golden egg arrives and I just know it and I feel it and I just think you’re my idea. Here you are, you’ve arrived. And I can’t write you yet because I’m in the middle of writing another book, but you just sit there and I’ll think about you from time to time. And hopefully by the time I start that new document in February or March next year, I’ll have more of an idea of what you mean and what else I need to do to bring you into fruition. So yes, that’s how it happens. It’s just, and the golden egg is usually the tiniest, tiniest little thing as well. It’s not usually a huge, big sort of grand idea or high concept thing. It’s just a person I’ve seen or a feeling I’ve had that I want to explore somehow.

Could you, for example, has it ever happened that you’ve had more than one golden egg in a year?

No, and in fact, if I did get another golden egg, I would find a way to make it work in tandem with the original golden egg. Yeah, so I would try and link the two things together and put them in the same book. I’ve never been in the situation where I’ve been working on one novel and had an idea for more than the next one ahead. I’ve never got anything in the bank.

That’s unusual.

I’ve got the novel I’m writing and the novel I want to write after that and beyond that is just a big black hole.

How interesting, goodness. So you’re almost flying by the seat of your pants, but after all 19 or 20 novels, clearly it’s working.

Well, this is the most wonderful thing about being a seasoned writer is just all the things that used to freak me out about the way I work and the way my books happen that used to make me think I was doing everything wrong and that I was on the edge of disaster constantly. I now know is nothing of the sort. It’s just how I write books that people like reading. So I now embrace it all. I embrace the fact that I’ve only got one idea and I don’t freak out and think I should have a notebook full of ideas. I embrace the fact that I don’t plan my novels and that I’ve got no notebook full of chapter plans and post-it notes and whiteboards and what have you. And I just think this is how I write the books that I write and people like the books that I write. So yes, I’ve come very much into myself as a writer over the past few years.

Well, let’s get started then. Let’s hear your first offcut. Can you tell us what it’s called, when you wrote it and what genre it was written for?

Okay, this clip is from The Girls, which is a novel I wrote in 2014, which was one of my first thrillers and it was not used in the final version.

The afternoon grew warmer and Leo called at four o’clock to say he was leaving work early. The pale gold orb of the sun arched slowly across the sky above the garden, sparking off window panes now and then. And a sweet breeze rippled the leaves of the ancient trees that grew in a line from east to west. Adele opened the packaging of the huge tent that Leo had ordered on the recommendation of a friend who was a veteran of family festivals. She stared blindly for a while at the instructions. A job for Leo and the boys, she decided. She found Sophia’s sun hat and a newspaper, filled a glass with water, tucked her phone into her jeans pocket, hooked Sophia onto her hip and headed into the garden. It was busier now that the other schools had broken up. She saw Henry and George with Dylan and Violet. The boys were on their bikes. Violet was on what looked like brand new roller skates, her elbows and knees bound with strapped-on padding. Dylan was still in his uniform, the gray and black of the private boys’ school at the top of the hill, the one where the celebrities sent their sons. He flicked his dirty chestnut fringe out of his face and laughed scathingly at something Henry had said. He was only two and a half years older than Henry, but since he’d started secondary school, he’d been making a concerted issue of his age advantage. Adele suspected their friendship, which had started when Henry was the same age as Sophia was now, was in its dying days. This summer, she mused, would be a challenging one for the boys.

Why was this not included in the book?

It’s so hilarious. So, gosh, that’s just bizarre listening to that because everything about that changed apart from the setting. I started writing Adele as a mother of two sons and a baby girl who live on a communal garden, which is based on the communal garden I live on, which I’m actually looking at now as I talk to you, the line of trees growing from east to west. And it was when I was still in that phase of not trusting my instincts and sort of wrong footing myself a lot while I was writing, which is how I often used to write, of just sort of making corrections as I went along rather than ploughing forward. And I just wasn’t getting along with Adele as this mother. And I decided that, I can’t remember the precise moment of this happening, but I decided that I would like her to be not a, she goes on in that unpublished scene to go and, I think she goes to school or something at some other points and she’s outside the playground and she was going to be a classic middle-class North London playground mum. And I just thought, I don’t want to write about a North London playground mum. I’ve done those and everybody’s done those. So I decided that she would have three girls and that they’d be homeschooled. And so we would see the comings and goings on the garden from the perspective of a woman who never really left the communal garden because she taught her children at home. So yes, this was from very early on in the book. And I backpedaled very quickly to make Adele a totally different sort of mother. And I can’t remember the thinking behind giving her three girls instead of two boys and a baby girl. The three girls in the ultimate version of the book were all teenagers as well. So there were no babies and no small children involved. But yes, that’s why that scene is no longer there because none of those children are there anymore. Those children are gone.

And it was definitely your decision. It wasn’t an editor didn’t have a read and go, I’m not sure where this is going.

No, this was very early on in the writing process. This was probably when I talk about my writing year being from sort of February to December, this would have been something that happened in around March, I would have thought.

Does that happen a lot? You do a complete U-turn.

No, it used to. It used to happen all the time. I was always questioning myself and my decisions and thinking, oh, there could be a better way of doing this or what about if I switched over? And I used to do that all the time. And I don’t do that anymore. I very much commit myself to my decisions as I, I’m the same in life actually. I don’t dilly dally around making decisions. I just, I go with my gut, I go with my instincts and then I sort of metaphorically close the menu and just get on with things. And I’m the same now when I’m writing a novel. I just think, no, I wrote that for a reason. I’m not sure what reason. I’m not sure how that’s going to pan out or where it’s going, but I’m gonna stick with it and just keep writing forwards and not write backwards.

Now, considering the family dynamic plays a very big part in most of your books, how much input do your own family have in your writing? Do you ever give them bits to read before the book’s finished? Or have your daughters or husband ever suggested or requested that you make changes?

No, I cannot stress strongly enough how uninterested my family are in my work. They have zero interest. My youngest is starting to become sort of slightly tuned into the fact that I’m a successful novelist because one of her friends searched for me on TikTok and found loads of fan videos from people. Yes.

How cool.

Yes, so, and she’s now quite sort of, I think she’s vaguely impressed that people of her age read my books and enjoy my books. But in terms of what mum does, there is zero interest. Neither of my children have ever asked me about my processes. They’ve ever expressed any interest in what I’m writing, where it’s going, what it’s going to be about. No.

Really?

Yeah, no interest at all.

They’ve never requested that you name a character after somebody that they like or don’t like.

No, no. I tell you what they do, and this is classic, classic kid. They’re like, oh, if it gets made into a movie, can I be in it? That’s about it. If it gets made into a movie, then suddenly they’re on board with it. But as a paper book, no interest whatsoever.

And your husband, he doesn’t either have anything to do with it?

I will occasionally use him as a sounding board. If we’re out having dinner and I need something to talk about, I will bring up what I’m writing about and sort of use him as a sounding board, as I say. But no, he’s not a reader of fiction. Well, he’s not a reader of anything, really. He read my first few books politely, and he buys my thrillers. He downloads them on Audible and listens to them on holiday and gets to about chapter eight by the time we’re on our return flight home. And that’s it, really. It was just fine. I don’t need them. I don’t need them. No, of course you don’t. They’re not required for my writing process or my writing journey, so it’s all good.

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

Okay, so this is an article called Thornham, which is a village in North Norfolk, and I was commissioned to write it for New Woman magazine back in May of 2005, just after my mother had died, but it was never published.

We braved the bitter North Sea wind as we strolled down the seafront towards the fun fair and laughed so hard on the waltzes that we thought we were going to be sick. Afterwards, feeling quite shaky, we decided to head back to our cottage in Thornham where we reminisced for a couple of hours about all the funny things that had happened over those long childhood summers. Like the time Claire and Sasha got stuck in sinking mud out on the marshes on Thornham Harbour and came home shoeless and brown from head to foot. And the time when there were so many children to pack into so many cars after a day on the beach that James got left behind, his absence not noticed until we’d all got home. We talked about Darren, who picked me up at Hunstantern Fair and took me for a Bacardian Coke while the younger kids loitered around outside the bar, giggling because Lisa had a boyfriend. He drove me back to Thornham in a Maroon TR7, which Claire and James’ big sister Emma promptly reversed into a caravan. The dent was still there the following summer, long after Darren and his sports car were a distant memory. It was funny, I noticed how our roles were still the same. As kids, I’d been the sensible one. Claire and Sasha had been the naughty twins and James was the baby. I was always so gullible and felt like I was a step behind everyone else, a bit slow to get the joke. I still felt like that even now. But unlike the time my dad let all the kids sleep in his camper van one night and Sasha and Claire locked the doors and tickled me until I wet myself, I was 12, they didn’t take advantage. The following day, we’re up early for breakfast at the Victoria in Holcomb, followed by a brisk walk on Holcomb Beach and a wander through the pine forest. As a child, I’d felt like the forest could swallow me whole, like I could walk forever and never get to the other end. Now it just seemed like a bunch of trees. And then as the storm clouds gathered over the North Norfolk Coast, we packed ourselves into my car and headed home in torrential rain, back to our children and jobs in the real world. My weekend in Thornham couldn’t have come at a better time. Before I left, I’d believed that uncontrollable, side-splitting laughter was like snogging and midriff tops for young people. I’d convinced myself that a lot of things I didn’t do anymore, like giggling, like flirting, like getting overexcited about silly things, I didn’t do because I was grown up, because I was a mother, because my own mother had been ill, because real life was just too damn serious. I came back to London remembering that even though I’m a woman, I can still be a girl. And I’m going to try my hardest to keep that feeling with me until I’m a very old lady indeed.

Oh, it was such a lovely piece.

Oh.

What happened to it? Why was that not published? Do you know what?

I have no idea. Yes, so this was my mother died in May, 2005, and she was only 61. So it was quite sort of a tragedy at the time. And Claire, James and my sister, Sasha, we were basically, as children, we used to go to Thornham every single summer, four families with static caravans side by side on a caravan site behind a pub in Thornham. And that’s what we did every summer for six weeks. And it was clearly incredibly formative. And someone had the idea that in that sort of post funeral thing that happens when someone’s passed and everybody wants to come back together in their absence and sort of recreate some sort of sense of the lost history that’s died with that person, that we should return to Thornham and just spend some time there. And as you can see from that article I wrote, we had a whale of a time. It was, and I think you do have to do these things after the funeral. I think there’s something very final and you can move on to that sense of closure. And I can’t remember being commissioned to write this piece and I cannot remember why it got killed. I know that New Woman Magazine doesn’t exist anymore. It’s defunct. And I can’t remember the backstory to this at all. It was fantastic actually for me to go through all my old pieces of journalism and unearth it and read it, particularly with all that sort of sentiment about clinging on to girlishness and helpless laughter and not taking life too seriously in that sense I’d had at the time of writing it that this is something I wanted to remember and take on with me into life. And I’m not sure that probably happened because it kind of doesn’t in life, does it?

No, real life intercedes eventually.

It does. And you sort of revert to normal behaviour. But even though it wasn’t published, I’m glad I wrote it because it really does sum up that sort of kind of, there’s that sort of post-loss euphoria that you sometimes have because when somebody dies and leaves a hole in the world, the people around that hole come together in a way that’s more intense than it was when that person was there. And that does create a strange sort of euphoria. And it was nice for me to have captured it in that piece, even though nobody ever got to read it.

But we just heard it now.

There you go, it’s been brought back to life, yes.

Now, your mother, I heard an interview you did, your mother has a fascinating story about her upbringing. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, I mean, yes. So I was brought up with a sort of story inbuilt into my DNA, the story that I heard from my mother from being a tiny child all the way through to adulthood, which was the story of my mother’s childhood, which was, you know, you could make a screenplay out of it. So she was born in India in 1944 to an Anglo-Indian father and a Scottish mother. And when she was four years old, the family decided they were going to emigrate from India to the UK where they had a lot of family. And my grandmother, my Scottish grandmother got on a boat, as he did in those days, with her twin baby boys and left my grandfather and my mother in India and they were supposed to be joining her. A few weeks later, I think my grandfather had some affairs to tidy up before he could leave the country. And instead of tidying up his affairs, he actually reunited with his childhood sweetheart and made a new life with her. This affected my mother very, very badly. As you can imagine, she was four years old, she stopped eating and she got rickets. And back in these really post Victorian days, the way that people dealt with unhappy children was just sort of guaranteed to make them even unhappier. They sent my mother off to a boarding school up in the hills in a town called Nine-et-Al for three terms in a boarding school full of teenage girls and this four-year-old child. Yeah, so by the time she came back to Lucknow, which is where her father and his new wife were living, they were married and a baby sister came along, not long afterwards and she was not allowed to talk about her mother. She was made to call this new woman her mother. She wasn’t allowed to cry about her mother and then she watched her father and her stepmother love the new baby physically in a way that they’d never loved her physically. She got all the hugs and kisses and my mother was not read bedtime stories as she told the story to us. Anyway, when she was 10 years old, the family finally left India. This was around the time of partition and they were in Karachi at that point and came to the UK, but they settled, unlike my grandmother who settled in the Midlands, they settled in North London. And my mother met my father, my mother had me and then when she was pregnant with my little sister, this man appeared at her front gate and said, are you okay? And my mother said, yes. He said, I’m Brian, I’m your baby brother. I’ve been looking for you for years. So he was only 18 at the time and he’d been looking for her ever since he was old enough to look for her. And he’d finally tracked her down. I don’t know how he did it. And yeah, so he came back into her life, which meant that also my mother’s mother came back into her life. And yes, so quite a tragic and extraordinary story. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very healing for my mother.

I was about to say, was there no happy, it sounded like there needed to be a happy ending.

Yeah, the happy ending was my mother’s relationship with Brian, they were two peas in a pod. They adored each other. But my mother never really bonded with her birth mother. She never really had that closure with her. The mother was very damaged as you can imagine. As you can imagine you would be if you’d gone halfway across the world with two baby boys expecting your husband to catch up with you with your baby girl. She’d already lost one child at a year old. So she’d gone through the grief of losing a child and then she’d lost her daughter as well and her husband. So she’s a very damaged person. She didn’t really have a lot to give.

Was she alive? Did you meet her?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. She, in fact, my mom and dad went on holiday once and she came and looked after us for a week in our house. We used to go up to the Midlands a lot and spend time with her. She was an amazing cook. She cooked Indian food. She was very Indian because she’d been born in India herself even though she was Scottish. Yeah, no, so she was a big part of our lives but she was quite a cold, cold, unknowable person really. But yes, so that was the story of my mother.

And you’ve never been tempted to do anything with that story at all?

Oh, do you know, that’s a really good question. That’s a really good question. I don’t know, it’s not my style, is it? It’s not the sort of thing I write about, but…

It’s the starting point of something.

It’s the starting point of something, yes. I mean, as with, you know, I had a very traumatic early marriage and I always knew I wanted to write about it but I never found the right moment to write about it until I found it. And I put it into, I think, my fifth novel. And maybe that will happen with my mother’s story. Maybe I’ll be writing something and I’ll think, this is it, I found the place for it, this can be it. We’ll see, we’ll see. I haven’t found that moment yet.

All right, let’s find out about your next offcut. Can you tell us what it’s called and where it comes from?

Okay, so this is a deleted scene from my very first novel, Ralph’s Party, which I started writing when I was 26 years old back in the 90s and was published, in fact, in 1999.

First of January, 1986, 276 days till UCL. I must be the only 18 year old in the country waking up this morning without a hangover. Another lovely New Year’s Eve with mother Lulu and Alex watching other people enjoying themselves on the television and feeling like I always feel on the outside. Oh, God, I can’t wait till October. I can’t believe this year has finally arrived. Ten months to go before I get away from bloody mother on this miserable little bloody hovel. Mother’s downstairs now taking down all the Christmas decorations, i.e. the bits of holly she stole off the tree outside the Rowan’s, without the berries, of course. I’m surprised she can bear to have them up even for eight days. I can tell it makes her all edgy. She’s so relieved after they come down. I’m listening to John Peel’s Festive 50 at the moment. I wonder what will be number one. Atmosphere by Joy Division again, no doubt. He’s playing teenage kicks by the undertones at the moment, and it’s making me want to cry. I’ve only got two years left of being a teenager, and I’ve yet to have one single kick. I wonder what it feels like. I wonder if I’ll lose my virginity this year. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. It’s weird and so exciting to think that there’s a boy out there somewhere who I’ve never met, and I’m going to fall in love with him and lose my virginity to him. I wonder what he’s doing right now. Just think, in ten months, I’ll be away from bloody, miserable bloody barracks and horrible bloody mother, and I’ll be living in a wonderful sunny flat in London, maybe in a mansion block with a balcony, and I’ll be able to make friends and wear makeup and pretty clothes and grow my hair and drink beer and eat Chinese food whenever I want. And when it’s Christmas, I’ll buy up the whole Christmas Bloody Decoration Department in Woolworths, and you won’t be able to move in my flat for baubles and tinsel and fairy lights, and I’ll invite my boyfriend round and we’ll drink cold lager, and I’ll get teenage kicks right through the night. 267 days to go, 8th February 1986. Oh God! I don’t know what to do! Justin Jones asked me out to the Valentine’s Disco! Justin Jones! Oh, he should have seen Melanie Albright’s face. He said he didn’t know why he fancied me, but he did. He said I had awful hair and wore awful clothes, but there was something about me that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Get that? I’ve got something about me. That sounds a hell of a lot easier than having to make an effort to be fancied like Melanie Bloody Albright with her huge bloody tits popping out of her deliberately too tight shirt. I could just walk about with my spastic hair and my nylon clothes and sensible shoes and have something about me. I am very happy with this newfound knowledge. There was no point in saying yes, of course. I was honest with him. I just told him my mother was a witch and a cow and wouldn’t let me go because then I might enjoy myself and that’s the last thing she’d ever want for me. He told me he’d bring a ladder and kidnap me from my room. Very romantic idea, but too rebellious by half. I explained to him that I am not a rebelling type. I feel sad now. I hate my mother. 238 days to go.

Oh no, awful, awful use of politically incorrect language in the middle of that.

But it was written in 1997 when we were all saying things like that.

Yes, and it wasn’t published.

No, no, but even if it had been, it wouldn’t be the end of the world because it was colloquial. That’s what it is.

Yes, yes. And also, she was a teenage girl writing in a diary and I can imagine that teenage girls probably even now are not that politically correct when they’re writing in their diaries.

Yes.

Yes. Anyway.

So this is marvelous. Ralph’s Party. I remember when that came out. I loved it. So this, though, the note that accompanied this script was it has a load of diary entries written for Jem’s diary that you completely forgotten about. How do you completely forget about something like this?

That’s quite a quite a big chunk of text and I still have zero recollection of having written any of that. Oh, so there’s there’s a storyline that runs through it where so Jem moves into a flat share with these two guys called Ralph and Smith. And Ralph doesn’t have a job, so he’s at home all day. And he’s slightly he’s got a big crush on Jem and he goes into her room while she’s at work and reads her diaries because he wants to get to know her, but he doesn’t know how to approach her because he’s a bit hopeless. And clearly at some point I thought it would be a really good idea if the reader could see what Ralph was reading in Jem’s diaries and I wrote these entries, which meant that I had to create this whole backstory for Jem about this awful mother she had, horrible and living in a barracks and wearing horrible shoes and nobody fancying her and not being allowed out and no Christmas decorations. And I do not remember thinking, writing, imagining any of those things at all. It’s absolutely extraordinary to me. So yes, obviously I had to do an awful, I didn’t just have these things to hand when I was asked to find offcuts. I had to do some deep dark ferreting around in the sort of bowels of my word documents. And this is something that took me more by surprise than anything, I think. Finding these dead diary entries for Jem. But it’s also interesting to me that I have no recollection of doing it and no recollection of cutting them out at which point in the, I think it must have been way, way, way early on into the writing process I took those out. I can imagine my thinking would have been along the lines of this is going to take up too much room.

So, again, it will be your decision, not an editorial one, for example.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, these were not taken out by an editor. These were very much taken out by me.

Now, this is your first book and what I want to know is, I mean, obviously everyone has a sort of, I wrote the first book and it got published and from then on I became a writer. But who were you before you wrote your first book? Were you actually a writer of any description?

No, see, this is, I am, I’m hoping, a walking inspiration for people who are not a writer of any description, who would like to be a writer because I was the absolute polar opposite of a writer, I guess. What is the polar opposite of a writer? Well, I actually, I don’t know, I don’t know, polar opposite, that’s a really good question. What is a, no, let’s rephrase that. I was not in a position in my life that anybody would have looked at me and thought, oh, I bet she’s going to go off and write a novel.

So it wasn’t at school, you had no particular writing talents at school?

Yeah, no, I was, oh yeah, no, I was very good at writing at school. I wasn’t very good at anything else at all. I was very, very average child, average to bad at most things, but really exceptionally good at writing. But by the point at which I started writing this in 1996, I hadn’t written anything for, well, since I was a child.

What was your job? What were you doing for work?

So, at the actual point that I started writing Ralph’s Party, which was in October 1996, and I remember that because I’d had the conversation with a friend on holiday. One of us was a teacher, so we had to go on holiday during the school half term, even though none of us had children. So that’s how I know it was October. And somebody else on that holiday had made me a bet to write a book because I’d just read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby and was feeling kind of inspired, kind of thinking that I’d like to write a novel. There’s a long backstory. It wasn’t quite as clean cut as that. I suddenly from out of the blue decided I want to write a novel. There’s an awful lot of other stuff behind that. So when I got back from that holiday and started writing it, I had actually been made redundant. I’d been working as a marketing, a PA to the marketing director of Thomas Pink, the shirtmakers in German Street in Mayfair. That was the precise job that I was doing. So I had been working in an office behind the Thomas Pink shop in German Street for the marketing director as a secretary. And I had just lost my job before we went on this holiday, this life-changing holiday where I had this life-changing conversation with my friend. And before I’d been on that holiday and had that life-changing conversation, while I was still a secretary, if you had asked me, what do you think you’re going to end up doing? I would have been thinking of pay rises and promotions. That’s where my head was at. I wasn’t living in a world where I thought that I was going to change my life or that I was going to take a risk or that I was going to do something brave.

It wasn’t a secret dream, for example.

It wasn’t a secret dream. It was something that I just, I knew I was good at writing, but I also thought that I didn’t have any right to write a book. I thought I was young and a flippity gibbet and hadn’t had any life experience and bad things hadn’t happened to me. And I thought that particularly back then in the 90s, there weren’t really any young female writers. Any books I read by women were middle-aged women, post-menopausal women on the whole. So it wasn’t something that I thought. And also as a human being who had not even been to university, didn’t even have a degree or any A-levels, I certainly didn’t think that I had the right to even think about writing a book. So yeah, it was only losing that job, but that pivotal moment in my life, losing that job and I cried. I cried for 24 hours after I lost that job because I loved it so much. But that was what forced the conversation that I had with the friend on that holiday, which led to me shaking hands with her and saying, okay, I’ll give it a bash. I’ll write three chapters. And those were the three chapters of Ralph’s Party. But it was an absolute sliding doors moment. It really was a sliding doors moment. It wasn’t something that was inevitable and that was going to happen anyway at all. It was something life presented me with a moment, which I could grab hold of or ignore. And I grabbed hold of it, thank God, and made it happen. And here I am.

What a fantastic story.

Yes, it is fantastic.

Right. Well, let’s move on to your next offcut. What’s this one?

Right. So this was from my, I think it’s one of my middle novels, The Truth About Melody Brown, which I wrote in 2008. And I can’t actually remember what it is. So I’m quite excited to hear it.

It smelled different today. The corridors smelled of sickly pine scented disinfectant. And the classroom smelled of chalk dust and wood polish, even though the floor was linoleum and the whiteboard employed markers. And the children seemed taller, taller, bigger, and somehow more ominous. But the strangest thing of all was that all day long, she’d had this worrying sense of watching her back as if someone was about to pounce on her. And worse than that, a voice inside her head, but somehow everywhere whispering her name. Melody, Melody, Melody. Wherever she went, it was a child’s voice in as much as it was a voice at all, more like interference, but harsher, deeper, without the softness of a child’s voice. Melody found herself turning abruptly to locate the source of the name calling at several points throughout the day. And each time she turned to face a blank wall or an empty corridor, her heart raced and her hackles rose.

I suspect that the reading we gave of this might be a little bit more sinister than the actual story in the book.

Whoa, that was spooky.

I thought we’d go for a change of tone there.

Yeah, definitely.

There are certainly creepy overtones or undertones in that clip. How accurate is that? Well, first of all, what happened? Why is it not in the book?

That’s a really good question. So Melody Brown is a dinner lady. She’s a single mother to a 17-year-old son and is a dinner lady at the primary school that he went to that she took the job because it worked in terms of being a single mother. And she’s still working at the primary school that he went to, even though he’s nearly an adult. And Melody Brown has forgotten, she experienced a house fire when she was eight years old and has forgotten everything that happened in the first eight years of her life. And she’s accepted the fact that she doesn’t remember the first eight years of her life. And then at the beginning of the book, somebody takes her on a date to watch a very fashionable back in the noughties, a live hypnotist show. And she is hypnotized on stage. And after this event, she keeps getting strange flashbacks, little fragments of things, vignettes, moments that she doesn’t recognize, but which she knows intrinsically are to do with her and her childhood. So the book, The Truth About Melody Brown, is about her voyage of discovery. She follows these little clues like breadcrumbs. She sees, for example, one of the flashbacks she sees is of a house by the seaside with a balcony that looks like a smiling face. And she locates this house and it’s in broad stairs on the Kent coast. And anyway, slowly chapter by chapter, she pieces together the truth about her childhood and about who she really is. But the whole book is set in the summer holidays. But clearly at some point I had written a scene or I had changed the timeline somehow because this is clearly Melody going back to work at the beginning of term. At the moment, the book finishes in July on her son’s 18th birthday, which is at the end of July. So yeah, I at some point clearly decided that I didn’t want it. I can’t remember what again, what mental shenanigans I was processing to make that decision to truncate the storyline so that it didn’t go over the summer holidays and into the new term. But yeah, so that scary stuff in that clip is merely the fact that Melody can feel that her memory has been infiltrated somehow and she’s feeling quite freaked out about it. So it sounds like from that dramatic retelling that it might be a horror or a ghost sort of thing. It’s not, it’s neither of those, it is very much just she’s feeling haunted, these encroaching memories.

This is actually your seventh novel. And you have, as has been noted by many people, you’ve changed from the Ralph’s Party, I think you called it, was it Flatmates and Curry kind of book?

Yes.

And obviously the books have gradually got darker. And I was trying to work out when the actual change occurred. Now I read an interview that you said it was The Third Wife in 2014 that defined your change of style.

Yes.

But your publisher appears to disagree with you because I’m looking at the book covers and hold on a second. Melody Brown is the book where the font changes and becomes a bit more stark, although the background isn’t quite scary. And then after that, they’re quite frothy, the earlier books. And then all of a sudden the images get darker, the font gets bigger.

Okay, well, there’s actually quite a dull technical reason for that, is that The Truth About Melody Brown was the first book published by Random House when I moved from Penguin to Random House. And they have just done a backlist rejacketing exercise. So they have rejacketed everything that they have published for me, which is The Truth About Melody Brown onwards. But this was a point at which I started giving my publishers books to publish that weren’t chick lit. And I think they found it quite challenging to know what to do with me over the next few books from The Truth About Melody Brown onwards until The Third Wife, which is when I finally killed someone. So then they were just like, okay. So I kind of wrote out of genre for about three or four books in the middle of my backlist.

But they went well, surely the publisher.

Yeah, so The Truth About Melody Brown sold really well. And after that came After The Party, which was the sequel to Ralph’s Party, which was a very grown up novel about long-term love and parenthood. And then after that came The Making of Us, which was a book about anonymous sperm donor, the four children that he’d sired coming together to go to his deathbed. And then after that was The House. Oh, I wrote a historical novel called Before I Met You, which had a historical dual timeline set in 1919 in London. Then there’s The House We Grew Up In, which was a novel about a family blighted by the mother’s obsessive compulsive hoarding disorder caused by a trauma within the family. So these were books that were fish nor fowl. Nobody was dying, but nobody was falling in love with anybody. And so for quite that chunk of time, my book sales did go down to the point where I was slightly worried about my long-term future as a novelist, never to the point where I thought I’d have to get a job, but certainly to the point where I just thought, if this carries on, I may have to rethink my long-term plans. And yes, very difficult to publish a non-genre book for publishers.

Is that why you, when you got The Third Wife started, did you make a conscious decision to go, right, I’m now going to make things a bit easier for my publishers?

No, absolutely not. Again, very much just, it was a very instinctive thing. I was actually halfway through writing The Third Wife and The Third Wife was going to be yet another out of genre book about a man who has clearly been married three times and it was just going to be a study of the impact that having a father who keeps going off with other women and having children with other women, the impact that that has on the families that are left behind and all those interesting inter-dynamics between ex-wives and new wives, young wives, old wives, teenage children, babies, all that sort of interesting stuff that happens in families like that. So that’s what I was going to write about and I got halfway through and just genuinely thought, I am bored. I’m bored. This is boring me. And if it’s boring me, then it’s going to bore the reader. And I just thought, I need something really exciting to happen. So I killed someone. And in fact, if you read The Third Wife and you’re expecting it to be a classic kind of domestic noir, domestic thriller, you may not get exactly what you want because it is a bit of a sort of a pig’s ear in a way, because I had to sort of rework things to fit around this new dead person in the middle of the book. So it’s not particularly successful, but as a diving board for me to then find my way into a genre, which I think I should always have been writing into being completely honest. And yeah, to head off in the direction that I’ve since headed off in, it was the right thing to do. And it’s not my favorite novel of mine by any stretch, but I’m so glad I wrote it because obviously had that novel gone out into the world and my publishers had said, hold on, this isn’t a Lisa Jewell novel, you’ve killed someone, what’s going on? Had my readers said, oh, I used to like Lisa Jewell but then she started killing people and now I don’t like her anymore. I’d have had to have pause for thought and rethink things and find another way to move on creatively. But neither of those things happened, which gave me carte blanche to just keep on killing people and keep getting darker and darker and going further and further into a place that I feel really comfortable in. So yeah, so The Truth About Mildy Brown was a turning point in as much as it was the first novel where the focus wasn’t a romantic relationship.

Right, well time for your next offcut. Tell us about this one.

Okay, so this is from my novel, Watching You, which I wrote in 2017. And again, it’s something that I cut out myself.

He was wearing a sky blue shirt and midnight blue trousers, a thin blue and gray striped tie. The jacket that made a suit with the trousers was hung haphazardly over the back of a chair around a board table. In the waste paper bin to the left of his desk was the cling film wrapping of a homemade sandwich and a crushed empty packet of chili flavored rice cakes. Paperwork in piles of varying sizes covered the surface of his desk. A hank of his hair hung distractingly over his forehead. I’m really well, she replied. Excellent, his eyes followed a triangle from her left eye to her right, to her mouth and back again. He pulled himself back, smoothed down his tie. Excellent, he repeated. Everyone being nice to you? Of course. Good, and now you’re off to the trips? I am, Sharon’s coming with me. Sharon was the attendance officer. She had just gone part time and had no problem sharing her remit with Joey. So she’s briefed you? Yes, fully. Suicide father, mental health mother, decreasing attendance. Tom leaned forward and touched a folder on his desk. Awful, just awful. Ethan, such a lovely boy, was on course for a full set of GCSEs. Too late for that now, I suspect, but maybe not too late to get at least five reasonably good ones. Set him off on the right footing. He looked up from the folder and smiled at her. It was a slow, serious smile. She felt a thud of yearning in the pit of her stomach, then a prickle of fear. Everything felt so onerous. Her job, her responsibility to these children, her need to please Tom, her terrible, overwhelming crush, as it was now. It was fully realized and undeniable. Her whole being had been reduced over the last few weeks to a hard, inflexible rock of wanting, wanting to see him, mainly from a distance, so she could hold the pleasure quietly inside her. But wanting these face-to-face encounters, too, wanting to be able to smell him, to study the creases in his shirts, the creases in his face, the hairs on his wrists, the pale gold band on his ring finger that he twirled and twisted as though it might open a portal to another dimension.

Do you remember why this didn’t make the story?

Oh, yes, so Joey is a, in fact, this is an interesting thing. Joey, in the original version of the book, was 36 and had just come back from 10 years working the sort of the hospitality scene in Ibiza, doing parties and what have you, with a much younger boyfriend, 10 years younger than her and moved in with her twin brother. And she finds that her brother is living next door to the head teacher of the big local comprehensive school and he’s called Tom Fitzwilliam and she immediately finds herself attracted to him in a quite unexpected way. And yeah, so clearly as you can hear in that clip, she has a massive crush on him. Before she went off to Ibiza, in my original version, she had done a degree in social work and then run off to Ibiza. And in the original version, she finds herself talking to Tom Fitzwilliam and he offers her a job at his school, working with children who have got social problems that she based on a friend of mine in real life who has that exact job. So I got her, I remember I went out for, that’s interesting. I’ve just had a memory come back to me. I took her out for a coffee to pick her brain because I knew I was gonna be writing about her having this job. So I got all this information. And yeah, so she goes to work at Tom Fitzwilliam School. And at some point, I clearly decided that that was absolutely the wrong path for Joey to take and for the storyline to take. And I went backwards and having said that I don’t write backwards, here I am. Here I am and this is only like four novels ago. So I’m misremembering my own past here, like doing the old rose tinted spectacles. Oh, I’m such a great writer these days. I never have to change anything. Clearly here, I absolutely changed Tak quite dramatically and removed Joey from Tom’s school and put her back in the house next door and have it had her just watching him once more from a distance and not being a part of his life. So yes, a little lost moment of what might have been had Tom Fitzwilliam offered her a job working at his school.

Would that have changed the plot very much, do you think?

Oh, it really would have changed the plot. The whole plot ultimately hinges on the distance between her and Tom Fitzwilliam and the fact that she does only get to see him from a distance and fantasize about him and make up stories about him and use him as some sort of emotional crutch to get through the sort of the feelings that she has of inadequacy and being lost in the world. So had she been face to face with him every day, that would have taken all that tension out of the story and all that sort of.

Did you have any idea where it might have gone?

No, I never have any, no, no, no. I never plan anything or know where anything’s going. I have the one thing, it’s on my screen and it just grows a thousand words a day. And that’s what it is. That’s all that exists is my brain and my fingers and this thing on the screen that is just for me, it’s words on a screen. I don’t have that sense of being sort of absorbed into my own imaginary world and the world around me doesn’t exist. I’m very, very aware of the world that I’m in. I’m very aware of the biscuit tin. I’m very aware of jobs that I need to do. I’m very aware of the fact that I want to go up and put some warmer socks on because my feet are cold. I’m very aware of the fact that I can hear my husband coming upstairs and he’s gonna want to talk to me. And yeah, all of these things, all of these things I am aware of. So what I do feels very, very mechanical almost when I’m doing it. It’s just a screen, fingertips, keyboard, words.

You make it sound very unenjoyable though. Is there no delight?

There’s very little delight. The delight comes afterwards. The delight comes when it’s finished. And the delight comes when I can give it to my editor and she tells me how to make it better and then I can make it better. And then people read it and say they’ve loved it. But actually writing is very rarely delightful. It’s very rarely delightful. There are moments where I just think something clicks into place and it feels a little bit like magic and then I get a moment of thinking, wow, you know, there is something else going on here beyond just my fingertips and the keyboard. There’s something else at play here. But mostly it does feel like a mechanical. I’m just watching the word count going up. I’m just selecting text and looking at the bottom of the screen to see how many words is in the thing that I’ve just written and it’s like 800 words. And I think, okay, let’s see if I can get another 200 words out. That’s what it feels like.

Wow, well, I admire your pragmatism. Okay, we’ve come to your final offcut now. So can you tell us about this one, please?

Wow, this is from The Night She Disappeared, which I only finished writing in December 2020. So hopefully I should remember very, very, very clearly why this didn’t make the final cut because, yeah, this was just from last year.

Thomas grabs her by her throat again and pulls her under the water again. Then he disappears too. And for a second, they’re in amorphous, LED-lit writhing mass at the bottom of the pool. And there is nobody here to help. And someone is going to die if they keep doing this. And so for the second time that night, Tallulah takes off her shorts and jumps feet first into the pool. Her hands find Thomas’s hands around Scarlet’s throat and try to unpeel them. But she feels Thomas’s foot hard just above her groin and recoils. She starts to feel her breath run out. She didn’t take enough in when she jumped. And she shoots to the surface of the pool gasping for air. Help, she calls out into the black night, her voice fighting hard against the pounding music. Help! But nobody comes. Nobody is here. She goes onto the water again and feels that Scarlet is starting to lose her fight, that she’s becoming soft and pliant. And she realizes that Scarlet is drowning. She throws herself bodily between Thomas and Scarlet. And finally his hands come away from her throat and all three of them emerge once more from the water, all choking, all gasping and coughing. Scarlet tries to make it to the side of the pool, but Thomas grabs her by her legs and tries to pull her under again. This time she manages to kick him away and swim quickly away from him. But she seems to have winded him and he’s curled up at the bottom of the pool. And seeing him there in a pathetic fetal ball, Tallulah feels a terrible shadow of repressed rage pass over her, blank fury at this boy who she used to love, this boy who ignored her throughout her pregnancy because he didn’t think her baby was his, this boy who wants her to stay small and compressed and stick her in a box on the side of an A-road, this boy who has just tried to take the life of the girl she loves, and she gulps in a big lungful of air and pushes herself to the bottom of the pool and sits on Thomas’s head. He struggles against the weight of her and is about to push her off when Scarlett appears by her side. They exchange a look through the pinky blue haze of the disco-lit water. And then Scarlett takes Thomas’s arms and pins them down against the bottom of the pool. And as the lights change from pink to orange to green to red, the fight slowly leaves Thomas’s body.

Oh my God.

Why didn’t you put that in?

Oh, right. Well, here you go. Here you go. Well, here’s one little interesting factoid about that. So Tallulah’s boyfriend throughout my whole first draft was called Thomas. And then I gave it to my editor and she said, Thomas, Thomas just sounds like a nice boy. He doesn’t sound like a, you know, an evil boy. I think, can you not give him a slightly harder name? So I changed his name to Zack. So he’s in the final book, he’s called Zack, not Thomas. And this was a perfect example of what happens when you don’t plan. And I knew, I had assumed, all I knew from the beginning was that Thomas and Tallulah, and now obviously Zack and Tallulah, go to a pool party at a mansion in the middle of the countryside and they never come home. Until I got to the closing chapters, I still wasn’t, I had no idea whether they were dead, whether they were alive, whether one of them was dead, the other one wasn’t, whether, who’d killed who. I had no idea. The only thing I could assume was that because they’d been at a pool party, a bad thing happened in the pool. So I was just geared towards making something bad happen in the pool. Gosh, that’s shocking. She sits on his head. I mean, that’s really quite shocking. But when I got to writing that scene, I suddenly went into a tailspin of realizing how many loose threads this was going to leave.

Such as?

Oh, like the sort of the DNA evidence of what would they do with Thomas’ body? How would they manage to get it from the pool? Where would they hide it? How would nobody see? There was still other, in that draft, there was still other people around. So there’d have been more people complicit in what had happened because there would have been witnesses to it. It also meant that Tallulah had killed Thomas, which at that point I still wasn’t entirely sure was the right outcome. I wasn’t, because I didn’t know how the book was going to end. I felt uncomfortable with being so sure at that point that it was Tallulah. Maybe at that point I was thinking they could like pass it off as an accident. I suppose that’s what I was thinking. If that had been the case, if he had drowned and they had allowed him to drown at the bottom of the pool, call an ambulance, say we just found him there. There were so many things that a reader would read and think, well, why didn’t they just do that? Or why didn’t they just do the other? Or it left just too many questions and vagueness about it. And I just thought this is not, it’s having listened to it just now, it’s a great scene. It’s a really great scene, but I just, it wasn’t going to work. It didn’t do what I needed it to do. So I sort of pressed the rewind button on it, got them all back out the pool and then I got them back in the pool, but I let the narrative take a different direction just to see if there was, and it’s interesting actually, you can almost visualize it in your mind as a video with a rewind button.

Yes, that was as you were saying it.

And you press it and you go backwards.

And he’s alive again.

They’re outside the pool, they’re all alive. They’re all about to get in the pool. And, but something bad is going to happen, but I just knew that the bad thing was going to happen, but it wasn’t going to be that Thomas stroke Zach drowns in the pool or is drowned in the pool.

Right, well, we’ve come to the end of the show. So I’ve got one final question for you, which is particularly of interest to me actually, because apart from the unpublished article about Thornham, every piece we’ve heard has been from a published work where it’s just that particular clip that didn’t make the final cut. We haven’t heard anything from a rejected or an unfinished project. Normally we have quite a few of those. Is that because you don’t have any?

Yes.

Really?

I have no unpublished work. Every single book, I’ve beaten it into shape somehow. Every single book that I started, I have finished.

So you don’t waste a single bit of your output. You make sure everything gets used.

Yes, it’s the investment of my time. I find it really painful to think, I’ve invested six months of my life into this and I can’t just abandon it. I’m somehow going to make it work, which is what happened with The Third Wife. I could have abandoned it, but I chose to just keep thrashing it until it made itself work.

That is unbelievably impressive, that nothing defeats you. At no point do you go, I’ll come back to this later, or more to the point, nobody’s ever gone, nah, not good enough.

No, that hasn’t happened either. Finding some wood to touch here, there you go. I’m touching the wood. No, that hasn’t happened either. Or maybe it would have been more fun if I’d introduced some projects that didn’t ever come to the lighter day.

But if there aren’t any, then it doesn’t matter. Well, that is now the end of the show. How was it for you?

Oh, loved it, absolutely loved it. And the acting was absolutely superb. Really, really spine-tinglingly good. I enjoyed listening to my own words being spoken to me. Strangely.

You must hear that quite a lot. Obviously, all your books are audio books, I imagine.

I don’t listen to them. I deliberately don’t listen to them because I feel like it will make me uncomfortable. But now I’m wondering if I should.

Yeah, well, they’re very good. You’re a very good writer.

Yes, babe, you should. Right, so that’s it, really.

Thank you, Lisa Jewell, for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Oh, thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed every minute.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Lisa Jewell. The Offcuts were performed by Beth Chalmers, Christopher Kent and Rachel Atkins, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com, and please subscribe, rate and review us. It helps to grow our audience so we can keep making the show. Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good afternoon, sir, census.

But there’s not another census for eight years.

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

What?

Are you a Mr. Paul Smith?

Yes.

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

I’m an assistant bank manager.

Very nice. Any children?

Not that I’m aware of.

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

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

Right.

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

Yes, I’m aware of that.

Good.

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

No.

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

No, I’m sure.

Would you engage in any criminal activity in the future?

No, of course not.

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

I already said I don’t have any children.

It’s a hypothetical question, sir.

Well, I suppose I would.

So you wouldn’t pay for the bread?

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

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

Yes. Look, these questions all seem most unusual.

It’s just procedure, sir. New labour.

Keogh turns his eyes to heaven.

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

Okay then.

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

What kind of a question is that?

It’s a standard psychological profile question.

Right. Well, what size is the gorilla?

They’re both fully grown. Hmm.

I’ll have to go for the crocodile then.

Right. What about if the gorilla had a stick?

The gorilla then, I suppose.

Right.

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

What about if the crocodile was replaced with a dog?

Nero disappears into the front room. Smith looks spooked.

What kind of a dog?

Bulldog.

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

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

Right. Then definitely the gorilla.

Are you sure so? Bulldogs are notoriously vicious.

And they are well known for disliking gorillas.

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

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

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

Oh, he’s our man, all right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did you have any luck with it? I mean, obviously you mentioned the Channel 4 competition, the first sitcom that you wrote got you the meeting with Robert Popper, but did you write sketches for the radio shows that were on or did you get anything in anywhere?

I certainly tried a few different things. I think I did radio play in Ireland that I wrote for this competition that got into the final that was based on a radio station and it was about a radio station being taken over by some nutter who believe conspiracies because hardest is to believe back in the year 2000 we had nutters who believe conspiracies. I mean, obviously we’ve all moved on from there now, thank God. But I mean, at this point, that thing’s basically a documentary. And at Bizarrely, I got a phone call and actually when I was living in London and they were trying to get hold of me because they’d recorded the play. Like one of the producers involved had liked it and they were trying to find me to get the rights to broadcast it. And I was like, I would have rewritten it for free because by that point they’d done a bit of writing and other stuff. But yeah, I remember Bizarrely, I went home to Dublin. I flew home for a couple of days to hear it on the radio.

Oh, that’s adorable.

Because back in those days, you couldn’t hear the Irish. You couldn’t get it anywhere in the world. So I remember I flew home, listened to it on the radio, cringed because, oh, would have rewritten this for free if they’d asked. And then I remember getting very, very drunk. Yeah, that also happened. But yes, that was my first thing. Anything got broadcast anywhere.

So in fact, you were a playwright before you were any of the other things.

I would never refer to myself as that. And nobody who does refer to themselves as a playwright wants me on that team.

But that was your first professionally performed or published work was, in fact, a play. Is that right?

Yes, a radio play. I suppose you technically correct. I might add playwright to my CV now. You’ve talked me into it.

Right, well, let’s move on to your next off-cut. Can you tell us about this one, please?

This is called Breath. And it’s a short story I wrote in 2014 as part of the entry requirements for my creative writing masters at MMU University, which I have to say I haven’t actually finished.

8,409,600. That’s how many breaths the average person can expect to take in a lifetime. Give or take, best guess. As it happens, this man has just taken breath number 8,409,600, but he’s unlikely to go much above the average. The machine keeping him alive is about to be turned off. He knows this and he’s come to terms with it. It should be known he is a good man who has lived a truly good life. If you need an explanation for what happens next, that is it. As his body is left to fend for itself, strange visions appear before his eyes. On the ceiling of his sterile hospital room, the world spread out before him, full of lost souls, unseen miracles and wasted lives. He may only have a few breaths left, but he hopes to make each one count. He breathes out 8,409,601. Meanwhile, 1,429 miles away, she stands above his slumbering body, tears in her eyes, the knife in her left hand. The fingers of her right are teasing at the rip in her jeans absentmindedly. She’d had to climb the back fence to retrieve the key that he’d forgotten was there under a plant pot. As she looks down at his face, memories, conflicting emotions tear at her soul. She’d loved him once, although that is not what has brought her here. It is the rage at the thought she once loved this pitiful excuse of a man, someone who would take the most private thing, a silly game, an intimate moment between two people and share it with a voyeuristic world, making her loathe herself to the point that the only thing keeping her alive is a hatred so visceral, so real, it makes it hard to breathe. She wipes her eyes and raises the knife above her head and then the slightest breath of wind from an open window moves the curtain. It’s enough to stop her for a moment and there on the wall she sees two lives play out like spluttering old home movies. In one, the knife descends and she becomes a cautionary tale, vilified and glorified in turn by a world that doesn’t see people, only stories. In the other, the knife doesn’t fall. She takes a breath and decides that the harder road is worth taking. She moves on and away. In time, she becomes herself again. She learns to trust and happiness finds her when she least expects it. In aisle four, the international food section. She drops the knife and leaves without looking back. On her way out, she stops and empties the water from the goldfish bowl over his brand new 3D TV. Then she departs a despicable man’s life for good. Eight million, four hundred and nine thousand, six hundred and two.

Hmm. Intriguing story. But you wrote this as part of your application for your master’s degree, which you never completed. What happened?

Yeah, no, I never actually, I sort of started doing it. And because again, weirdly, this is becoming a theme that first thing when I wanted to start writing prose, which I hadn’t done up to this point, even though I had a lot of sitcoms optioned and whatnot, I went looking for a course. It seems to be very much my mother’s son. I need to find some educational thing to do it. So yeah, I started doing it. And what was great about it was they have the bit where you bring in three people bring in their work every week and you sit around and you read it and discuss it and stuff. And that was fantastic. I love that part of the process. But I remember like part of it is you have to pay to get your novel read by somebody and they give you feedback. And by this point, I published it. And a couple more besides because I, you know, I just sort of moved on. I was ready to go and I thought, I’m not paying someone else to read a book. Everyone else is supposed to pay me for reading the book. It’s already been published. It was useful for what it was. But the route I took into publishing and all that sort of thing, it didn’t really cover that. So I ended up going my own path, I guess.

Right. So you already have published writing.

I had an idea for a novel, which I’ve never written. And then I thought, well, I need to figure out how to write prose. So I started doing the masters. And then while I was doing it, I started writing short stories just for practice, which I’m always amazed more people don’t do, frankly, if they want to start becoming. Everyone seems to start trying to write a novel straight off. And that seems impossible to me. But one of them basically expanded beyond all plans and ended up becoming a book called A Man with One of Those Faces that I initially wrote just as a practice. And then we liked it. And so we ended up publishing it.

We ended up publishing it. So you self-published it?

Yeah, myself and my wife. Basically, we went looking for the traditional route into publishing. And we got very little interest. British publishing is frankly a little bit scared of funny books. Like not if they’re written by someone like a comedian’s biography or stuff. But actual funny books they can be a little bit wary of. And we were sort of warned about this. I got the feedback at one point that it was too funny and too Irish. And yeah, it was the most ridiculous thing in the world. And I remember the guy who gave me that, who had actually paid for feedback. This is how bad it got. And then he left a pause and said, you have to be able to take criticism in this game. And I was like, OK, I think the problem is I don’t accept that as criticism because I’m basically sitting in a flat that got paid for by me being funny and Irish. So, yeah, we ended up doing it ourselves, which worked great. And now I’m sort of a hybrid where we still have our, the Bunny McGarry books are still done by our publishing company, McFarley, which is my wife now runs it full time. She’s the CEO and I provide the raw material as in the book. And then I’m also very lucky to be published. McDonnell is published by Transworld. So it’s nice to be on both sides of the fence. But I mean, I highly recommend it because it kind of got us, you know, it’s one of those great things where it’s a little punk mentality. If the world isn’t what you, you can go out and do it yourself. And we did. And it worked out well.

So did you know when you were at school, did you have any ambition or dreams of being a writer?

Weirdly, I always had a huge trouble when I was in school because I’m left-handed and I’ve never learned how to hold a pen correctly. And they brought me to all these specialist and stuff testing me for dyslexia and all these things, which I don’t have. But my writing has always been appalling. So anything involving an essay, I had huge trouble. I used to get terrible marks. And my mother, God love her, constantly had to fight to basically prove to schools that I was intelligent. And she used to go in and go, no, he shouldn’t be doing woodwork. He should be doing the thing that gets him into university. He’s a smart child. And she refused to accept that I wasn’t. So anything with… I was weirdly… I ended up being captain of the school debating team, sharing the honour with the guy who’s currently Irish Minister for Finance, by the way. It was a random… Still reckon I could take him in a fight, by the way. I mean, an argument, not a fight fight. To be fair, I don’t think I would do pretty well in a fight. But yeah, we were both on the debate teams. And weirdly, one of the single things is, if you ever did debates in school, you had to do this thing, the rebuttal, when you were the captain at the end, and they give you six minutes. And what we discovered there was, I’m quite good at riffing. And I ended up doing a debate, and the famous quote, romance in Ireland is dead and gone. We did that debate against the local girl school on Valentine’s Day. So we won the debate. It’s fair to say it may have set my romantic life back several years. But I also, I technically should have been disqualified, because you’re supposed to have, I think it was five minutes to the end, and I did eight and a half, because I was just basically riffing, and people were laughing, so I kept going. And really, that was the moment where I probably decided I wanted to be a stand-up comedian and work in comedy.

How did your parents feel about you going into stand-up?

I think they, because my parents basically don’t really understand stand-up. They know who stand-ups are. And I regularly get told that Dara Breen wears a lovely suit. My mother sees him on things. I mean, that woman, when I say she likes his material, she loves his suit. She’s very impressed by Dara’s suits all the time. So yeah, they never really understood that kind of thing. But now I’m a published author, they kind of go, oh, this seems to be proper. Yes. They’re much happier. They understand this a lot more. And my dad, bless him, spends a lot of time showing my books to people. He’s in a hospital because his health isn’t great. But every time I go in, I’m sitting there and one of the members of staff walk in, he goes, you’re the author. He’s like, oh, you were telling me about your book, which is very sweet.

Right, let’s go on to the next offcut. Can you tell us what this one is, please?

OK, this is from about 2008. It’s called The New Fred. And it’s the first episode of a sitcom I was commissioned to write, which was going to be called Seedogs. And it’s about my time working on the ferries.

Interior, the lobby. Close up on a name tag saying Martha. Pull out to reveal Martha, the attractive and surly Belgian receptionist. A very smartly dressed man walks up holding his phone out.

Yeah, hi, I’m not getting any mobile phone reception.

The guy holds his phone out towards Martha.

That is correct sir, you’re not.

Is there some kind of problem?

No, you’re just in the middle of the sea. What?

Martha points at a map of the British Isles on the wall.

Well, you see the green bits there? That’s land, where all the mobile phone masts are.

See the blue bit?

That’s where we are.

But this is totes ridiculous.

How am I supposed to talk to people?

You’re doing it now, well done.

But what about emails?

No.

Texts?

No.

Video calls?

Yes.

Really?

No.

Look, I’m in first class.

Oh, I’m very sorry sir, I didn’t realise.

So you can do something? Martha puts a plate of mints on the counter.

No, but you get a complimentary mint as I point out yet again, that you’re on the ocean.

This is barbaric! People can communicate from space, you know.

Yes sir, but it takes even longer to get to France from there.

He glares and walks off, still waving his phone around. Cut to interior the galley. Duncan is now fully dressed, in clothes that are clearly too big for him. He stands before Bridget, Barry and Graham.

How do I look?

Like the after picture for a brilliant diet.

Or a terrible disease.

Right, here’s the plan. Bridget, all that stuff that accidentally made its way from the passenger areas to the crew’s mess, that was going to make its way back over the next two days.

Quick cutaway to the crew’s mess, with its luxurious looking leather sofas, big screen TV, table football etc.

Yeeeep.

You’ve 20 minutes, go.

Bridget salutes and departs.

Graham, like normal, just do your job.

Graham nods.

Barry, unlike normal, just do your job.

Barry nods.

And I will distract the new Fred.

How are you going to do that?

With a little thing I like to call charm.

Duncan straightens his newly acquired tie.

Excuse me a moment.

He opens the rubbish chute and calmly throws up into it. He then turns to Graham, who sprays breath freshener into his mouth.

And to think I was worried.

This was set aboard a ferry between France and Ireland, this sitcom, which you worked on as a proper job. When was that?

Well, that was when I was in university. It was my first year in university and I was a boy at sea, because I was one of the only members of staff that was under 18, because I was very young when I went to university. So, bizarrely, that meant you couldn’t do a lot of jobs. Weirdly, one of the ones I could do was the one called Heavy Gang, which was literally cleaning up vomit. Because that’s the one they can give to children. I have never understood that rule, but that was the rule. Couldn’t be a waiter, but I could clean up vomit.

Literally, was that the only responsibility of the job, or were there other things as well?

No, it was generally just keeping areas clear. But when you’re on a ferry between Ireland and France, vomit is a big part of the gig. And yeah, the weird thing about this, by the way, is how this got… Because I basically got asked to write a pilot. How this happened was, I was basically out having a drink with people who would just commission something else. And we started talking about jobs. And I was talking about various tales I had about working on the ferries. And it was just talking about the first rubbish job you have. And obviously they enjoyed the stories. And I literally got a phone call the next day. And they basically said, yeah, could we commission that? And I was like, what do you want? The story I just told you in the pub. Yeah, can you make that into a thing? We’re like, OK. So yeah, I ended up basically writing the whole thing just based on some stories I told someone in the pub.

How far again with this one, was it just the pilot episode you wrote?

It just got a pilot and they sort of like a lot of TV things. What generally happens with TV things is you write a pilot and stuff and they’re interested. And then everybody swaps companies because they’re always moving around and then it just gets lost in the shuffle. I had a lot of things, frankly. I think I probably had about 10 different sitcoms optioned, which is the thing, you know, various different stages, none of which took off, although one bizarrely became The Stranger Times book. Really, that’s the one that came out, this first one, the CK. McDonnell one, that came out last year, which is sort of a paranormal thing set in Manchester. Really oddly, I wrote that as a sitcom years and years and years ago, which my age at the time didn’t bother saying to anybody and I don’t think she didn’t really sort of get it, but I always had the idea in my head. And what’s really annoying is, you’re talking about the off-cuts, even before I started doing this, the one script I can’t find is the original script for, it was called The Stranger Times initially and now it’s called The Stranger Times, it’s set in the newspaper. And I actually wrote the whole first few chapters were exactly as I recall, essentially what happened in the sitcom. But I literally recalled it like 15 years later out of nowhere. And while in the shower one morning, and by the time I’d walked to my office, I went, right, I’m going to make that into a book.

I noticed on your Wikipedia page that you have something like seven books in total that came out either last year, this year, or due out next year. And I was going to ask you about that. I was going to say, do you normally write that much? I mean, obviously, I appreciate there has been a pandemic, but was it the pandemic that this happened to? Or has it just been a backlog of stuff that their publications have been delayed and they’re just all coming out now?

Yeah, it’s a sort of mixture of things because traditionally published books, which The Stranger Times is, that’s probably written nearly 18 months before it actually came out. And you usually write books a year in advance with the way the big traditional publishers work. So, for example, the book that’s coming out in February, which is called This Charming Man, which is the second book in The Stranger Times series, I finished that last Christmas. And I’m now going to start on the third book in that series and stuff. So there’s that. To be honest, Jenny, with the pandemic, I was supposed to go on a big holiday in March when things started to go a little bit wrong for the entire planet. And as my wife remembers fondly, we were supposed to be in Mexico on a beach and she ended up going to the dump on the day we were supposed to be. We managed to go to the dump. That’s where we went. We got a picture of her standing in the dump with some bin bags looking really happy. And I did a weird thing or a short story that I’d previously written that I really liked. And everyone was sort of like, this sort of feels like the first act or something. And I basically took it. It’s a book called Welcome to Know where I ended up being. And I basically let myself go down to my office and come up with the weirdest ideas I could. Like for a crime book, it’s very strange. It ends up in the middle of a desert in a sort of Mad Max weird thing that happens. And it’s one of those books where of all my books, it’s the one people either love or go, ah, this is a bit too far. But I really love it. And so I ended up doing that. So I ended up like probably about three or four books came out in one year. But I do generally write quite fast. And I started dictating now as well due to back issues. And it turns out I write faster when I do that because enough you’ve noticed, I speak quite quickly. But, yeah, so I do. Because I think it’s quite easy to write more than one book a year. I get bored. And I’ve retired from stand up comedy now and I’ve got two dogs. So it means I can’t go out as much because I have to take care of the two of them. So I end up sitting at home with two dogs beside me in my office writing books.

There’s no chance of you going back to stand up, you don’t think?

No. Although to be fair, as my friend of mine, Gary, said, it’s the greatest piece. We started off together and it’s like the greatest piece of comedic timing of my career was I retired about seven months before everyone else had to give up for a year anyway. So honestly, to be honest, I’m genuinely, I was, I was like my wife gives out because every time I talk about stand up, she says, I do it, do myself down a bit. But I was a good, I was a good stand up, like I made a good living and stuff. But I honestly think I’m better as a novelist than I kind of, I think I honestly think I’m better at this than I am at doing anything else. So this is the thing I’m going to do for the next while, I think.

Okay, let’s move on to the next off cut. Can you tell us about this one, please?

Yes, this is called Me, Myself and I and it’s a piece of prose I wrote in 2015.

Chapter one, drop ins and drop outs. There are many ways to find yourself. Usually it involves a trip to somewhere a lot more exotic and poorer than where you come from, where you experience a spiritual awakening. But this awakening generally takes the form of realizing you are insignificant in the grand scheme of things coupled with an inexplicable urge to tell people about that over and over again. Oh, and often you lose your taste for meat. In short, I can only conclude that the number one export of Thailand is selves, which are very dull at parties and difficult to cook for. When I found myself, it was different. There was no road to Damascus moment of revelation. Just the slate-shatteringly loud thump of something heavy hitting the roof of the house, rolling under the soft thud of an unhappy landing in the garden. You’d think that’d tweak my interest. It’s not every day something heavy falls from the sky onto your house, after all, and you’d be right. Thing is, at the time, I was busy losing interest in pretty much everything. The sleeping pills, the vodka and the diet coke were seen to that. The one thing that makes me think I didn’t really mean it was the addition of a mixer. And if you really wanted to end it all, surely you’d treat yourself to full fat coke. I apologize for the glibness. It may be a defense mechanism, the mind not wanting to look directly at what it had allowed to happen on a darker day. If you really could die of embarrassment, then suicide would have a 100% success rate. Nothing is quite as cringe worthy as realizing you’d failed at the ultimate failure. Sure, it could have been a cry for help, as these things often are. Thing is, I lived alone. If I didn’t want it to happen, then I had a terrible sense for dramatic timing. I should have done it at a time convenient for the cleaning lady to come in and discover me. Come to that, I should have first hired a cleaning lady. The first anyone would have known would quite possibly have been when the landlords came round to serve notice due to the unpaid rent. Maybe work would have sent somebody over to look, but it had probably have been Barry. He’d have knocked a couple of times and pissed off. I never liked Barry. Maybe Karen would have tearfully found me. Maybe that’s what I’d wanted. She’d taken all her stuff, though, and been very careful to give back the keys, so maybe not. I really hope that’s not what I wanted, as that would make me think much less of myself as a person. And if my current situation proved anything, it was that I didn’t think that much of myself to begin with.

Was this going to be a novel or a short story? Got any idea what this was?

Basically, it’s an idea I’ve had for ages that I couldn’t ever really get to work, because you know that idea that there’s multiple universes where if your decision’s sort of… you split, every time you make a decision, it splits off, and there’s two different versions of you going forward.

Like sliding doors?

Exactly, like sliding doors sort of the sci-fi thing, where there’s thousands of these sort of universes, or an infinite amount of them really, kind of going on, and they split from different points and all. That’s the theory. And I always had this idea of basically this guy tries to commit suicide, and then weirdly, versions of himself from other things just keep falling into this reality. And literally, he just has versions of him keep popping up every now and then. And I could never quite figure out how it worked, but I just liked the idea that they kept falling from the sky, and the end of that chapter was he opens his front door and finds a naked dead version of himself, which I think we can all agree is quite an arresting idea, because if you ever walk by a mirror at the wrong time and cut yourself, it’s always quite… So I just think the idea that he’s standing there trying to… and he eventually recognizes that it’s himself. But yeah, it was one of these ideas where there’s a lot of strands that I like about it, but I could never quite figure out how the whole thing would work, so it never went anywhere else.

You said at the end of that chapter, so presumably it was a book rather than a short story.

Yeah, I think it probably would have been a novel, but yeah, I just never figured out really how you sort of go about… I could never figure out the internal logic of it exactly, about why these other versions of him kept turning up. I think that was the thing. When you can’t get the logic to quite work, you quickly realize you’ll end up tying yourself in knots and it won’t go anywhere.

Now, this is from 2015 and The Man with One of Those Faces, the first of your Dublin trilogy novels, that was published in 2016. So was this one of the stories you were writing before you had your breakthrough novel moment?

Yeah, I think this is sort of one of the things where I said I did a lot of short stories. And I think, yeah, I was just sort of scrabbling around trying to find a voice. And yeah, this is one of the earlier things which wasn’t quite right. Weirdly, when you’re hearing this one live, which I think was maybe the voice of the brilliant narrator, because Christopher Brookmire, who you’ve already had on the show, was a massive hero of mine. And he’s definitely had a huge influence on, weirdly, me writing the same kind of genres in some ways as well. And I think he sort of, reading his books was like, oh, you can be funny and have a plot that really moves along and keeps going, you know, and keeps people really engaged in the importance of character and all that sort of stuff. So I think certainly you can hear a bit of that in there and there’s like the Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett with the other two big influences on me all throughout my life. So I think, yeah, you can probably hear a bit of that, where it’s me still trying to find my own voice in there somewhere.

So when you’re writing these projects, when you’re writing these novels, do you show your writing to anyone as it’s going along or do you wait until it’s finished?

On my first book I did, there was a Godloven, there’s a few standard comedian friends of mine who I constantly were sending bits through to and getting feedback and stuff. And it was really just more assurance than anything and my wife as well. But weirdly when we finished A Man with One of Those Faces, I think after that point I have never shared anything with anybody until they’re finished. And now what happens is my wife is reader zero, she reads everything first. But until that point nobody sees anything until it’s finished. I even don’t really explain things to my wife before I finish the book. I might occasionally ask her a question or something because she’s obviously read all the other ones and stuff. But I don’t, I think weirdly there’s a thing, and all my books is kind of a thing. I have a big background story I’ve never explained to anyone regarding the main character in The Crying Bucks called Bunny McGarry. And it sort of explains a lot that happens in the later books. And the only person I’ve ever explained it to is my wife. It’s just referred to constantly in the books but nobody really knows except her.

And you’re going to be revealing it, are you, gradually?

Basically, I think at some point it’s quite a dark idea. And I have this idea for a prequel. I’ve already written, fans of my books will know I’m terrible. I’ve written several, a couple of prequels already. I’m an awful disrespected of timelines. And I think at some point I will write this which will sort of explain an awful lot. But it’s quite, I have a story in my head really quite clearly but it’s a very dark story. So I kind of keep thinking, will I write that next? And I’m not going to do it I think for a while but maybe sometime next year or the year after. It will come out eventually at some point. I will write it at some point soon I think.

Well, time for another off-cut. Can you tell us what this one is please?

Sure. This is from 2007 and it’s another sitcom pilot I wrote called Other Plans.

Interior. The dog and whore pub. Anna and Kat are sitting at a corner table in a busy pub. Anna glances at the young couple at the next table, sitting close together and staring lovingly at each other.

So come on out with it. What? A casual drinkie after work. Something’s up. Don’t shitter shitter. Siobhan got the lead in a touring production. And I’m really happy for her. Of course. We’re delighted for the talentless bitch who couldn’t act her way out of a brown paper bag. You, my darling, are the young, gorgeous Meryl Streep of your generation. And not the Meryl Streep who’s in Mamma Mia. The other one. The good one. Eventually somebody bar me is going to figure that out. Thanks. It’s just… Keep the faith, love. Meanwhile, I know what to cheer you up. Don’t say cock. I wasn’t going to. So what then? I was going to say cocks, plural. You need to raise your ambition, sweetheart. Duly noted. Right, I’m off for a piss. Why do I need a man in my life when I’ve got you?

Who’s the daddy?

Cat departs for the loop. Anna takes a sip from her glass of wine and looks around the bar. We now hear Anna speaking as a voiceover.

Everyone says, How can you be single in a city containing millions of men?

The action in the bar freezes. Anna speaks to camera.

Thing is, you’ve got to set certain parameters for yourself, haven’t you? So, gone are men who are too young?

Arrows fly in from off screen, hitting all the men under 20 years old in the room, who fall wordlessly to the floor.

Too old?

A similar hail of arrows takes down every man over 45 in the room.

Too married?

Another hail of arrows takes out several more men.

Some of whom don’t see themselves as out of the running, of course.

One of the corpses sits up and flirtatiously waves at Anna.

But they definitely are.

Two more arrows hit the married guy dead in the chest.

Also out are gay men, obviously.

Several more men are taken out by another hail of arrows, including the guy from the canoodling couple. Anna glances at this and raises an eyebrow. More guys go down as Anna lists off a few more groupings.

Weirdos, perverts, guys with mummy issues, anybody who has ever called anyone bro.

The numbers are really thinning out now.

And that’s before you even start on any of the physical stuff, because while we’d all like to believe we’re wonderful people who only really care about what’s on the inside, well…

Yet more arrows cull the physically unattractive from the remaining men. There are now very few left standing.

So you see, it’s not a jungle out there. It’s a bloody desert.

Cat emerges from the toilets and walks towards Anna over all of the fallen bodies. As she sits down, the crowd returns to its normal, non-dead state. Cat picks up her drink.

It’s a war zone in here today.

This was a plan for a sitcom. Now, when you sent it to me, in the email you said, it was like Fleabag, only written a decade before by a bloke who is nowhere near as good. And you were genuinely told that a woman talking to camera would never fly.

There was actually a female producer who commissioned it and stuff who really liked it. She gave me the compliment, said that she thought I wrote women really well, which is nice. But I remember thinking just as an author or writer, you think, that’s over half the planet. If you can’t write over half the planet, you need to stop writing. I mean, I’ve always thought that’s… I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are some horrific examples of men writing women badly. There’s hilarious threads I’m sure you’ve seen about if women wrote about men the way men write about women. But yeah, I had that idea and I liked the idea of talking to camera and doing all these kind of weird things because obviously something like that, I’ve always had a very visual sense with these things. But with something like that, you kind of have to rely on people getting the visual idea that you have in your head. And the great thing I found when I started writing books was I didn’t have to try and convince someone else because you put it in exactly the words you want it. Because a script is essentially raw materials, whereas a novel is a finished product. So you don’t have to rely on something, you know, it’s more, well, this is the complete thing, you like it, you don’t like it. Whereas with the script, you have to make sure people actually understand what you mean. But yeah, I mean, that’s very common though. I can remember when I did that course we referred to about writing sitcoms. The rule that they told us, one of the big ones is, never set a sitcom in an office. Nobody cares about offices. Yeah. And then the office happened. And this is hilarious. Exactly. And then about, oh my God, 10, 15 years later, I was in a BBC thing and an executive was talking about what dos and don’ts. And he actually stood up and said genuinely, don’t write a sitcom based in an office because everyone will compare it to the office. And you’re like, really? So we’ve changed the golden rule from that to that.

That’s so stupid.

But, you know, it’s the nature of these things when people are looking for reasons to not do stuff or to do stuff and stuff that you will get some very, very weird things. I mean, especially when it comes to involvement in TV, even with novels and stuff, I had that mind where The Stranger Times, again, it’s been optioned for TV with a very good company, which we’re delighted to have. But there was various companies’ interests, which is really nice. But one of them, I won’t say any names, are quite a big Hollywood company. But they went, OK, just hear me out now. Just a word I want to put by you. Puppets. What? I was like, what? Puppets. We want to do it with puppets.

What, like a children’s programme?

No, no, they just wanted to do it with puppets. People have tried that every now and then, doing an adult thing with puppets. And don’t get me wrong, I grew up with the puppets, I love the puppets. I actually wrote a lot of kids’ TV, but I was like, puppets. And I can remember my agent sort of said, they’ve sent you a taster tape, you know, and it’s a big deal. It was a company with a serious director behind it and stuff. And I remember my agent sort of asked me later on about the thing. He said, did you ever watch the taster tape with the puppets? And I went, no, no. As soon as you said the word, like, because I’ve seen a lot of puppets and there was no way I could see my novel being accurately portrayed by puppets. But yeah, that’s the joys of TV for you.

Now, you were a winner in the BBC’s Northern Laff sitcom writing competition and you ended up being mentored by Craig Cash and Phil Mealy from The Royal Family, the sitcom.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. I did that competition in, I don’t know when it was, we did a showcase in Edinburgh and stuff. So yeah, I had a sitcom that nearly, of all the sitcoms I had that nearly sort of got closest, there was one that was a radio one. I think it was just called The Man Comes Around, which was sort of, again, quite influenced by Pratchett in its own way, but it was about the Grim Reaper, a version of the Grim Reaper having to come and live on Earth due to some sort of customer service issue. And I got mentored by them, which was amazing because they were, the great thing about working with them, which I’ll now say because I don’t really work in TV anymore, every time I had meetings you went down to London into big fancy offices and you sort of got feedback from people who weren’t writers. And they’re like, you’ve seen some hilarious sketches about it. Mitchell and Webber have a brilliant sketch about this where it’s a guy going, I mean, not this, but could it have a unicorn in it? I mean, not that, but something like that. And that’s the classic sort of feedback you get in sort of TV things. It is the sort of joke about it. But the great thing about working with Phil and Craig was they were writers. So they actually kind of got into the script and said, what do you think? And then why we do this and maybe do this, but it was much more of an actual working with a writer as opposed to someone just coming in and firing ideas at you.

So they worked as like editors, potential editors.

Yeah, they were just sort of a sort of kind of collaborative, much more collaborative. And they kind of worked on all those different things because they’re used to working in a team because they’ve written for a team on loads of different things. So, yeah, they’re great people to work with. And it was kind of a way where you sort of go, oh, this is what it should be like. This is what this should be like. You should be working with people who kind of have this sort of sense for it, which is quite rare to find.

OK, we’ve come to your final offcut now. Can you tell us what this one is?

This is a pitch document I wrote in about 2012 for a children’s TV series, which was going to be called The Cannon Files.

Meet Geoffrey Cannon, a consulting detective without equal. He’s exactly as you’d expect with his old school gentlemanly manners, razor sharp mind and distinctive deerstalker hat, a homage to his idol. While he may appear a tad eccentric, make no mistake. If you have a case, one nobody else can solve, then he is your man. There’s seemingly no secret he can’t uncover, but there’s one very big secret he’s trying to hide. You see, all is not as it seems with Geoffrey Cannon. Under that distinctive hat lies a surprising fact. Geoffrey Cannon doesn’t actually exist. Instead, he is the creation of Jake Burns, a 15-year-old genius faced with one of the oldest problems imaginable. Nobody listens to a kid, no matter how smart they are. Jake’s innovative solution is to invent exactly the character people expect of a master detective and then, through the art of disguise, become him. Jake’s motivation for all this is his guardian uncle Phil, or to give him his full title, Detective Inspector Philip Burns. Phil is a lovely, charming guy and a dedicated guardian who has put his heart and soul into giving Jake the best start in life since taking him in as a baby. He is also an absent-minded klutz whose mind is liable to wander so far it often may not appear to be on the same planet as the rest of us. A couple of flukey results got him promoted to being a detective inspector and although he doesn’t realise it, left to his own devices, it would only be a matter of time before his bosses discover what an incompetent he is. Jake would do anything to protect his uncle, which is why Inspector Burns always seems to end up working the same case as Jeffrey Cannon and getting the credit. Jake isn’t alone in all this as Jeffrey Cannon goes nowhere without his trusted companion, Leonard Barthing Stock III. The rambunctious Leonard is in fact Leona, Jake’s 15-year-old best friend. She’s a tomboy at heart with a puckish personality and a severe case of the sarcastics. She isn’t as into the whole detective thing as Jake, but she wouldn’t let him wander off and get into trouble on his own. The Cannon Files is a fast-paced action comedy closer in tone to the original Pink Panther movies than it is to any modern crime drama. Jake, in his alter ego of Jeffrey Cannon, has to solve the case, keep his uncle out of trouble and his true identity a secret. All the while dealing with the trials and tribulations of teenage life.

Now, this seems like an excellent pitch. I can really see this. Like, it’s a TV series or like a big film of summer blockbuster film. So, what happened? Why didn’t it get any further?

I just, it never really… It’s one of those things where I remember it gave it to my agent and stuff, trying to get it pitched out, and I don’t know if it ever really… I mean, kids TV in Britain is a little bit tricky because there’s… I think things might have changed again now, but there was only the BBC at the time really doing it because ITV was sort of out of the game and all that sort of thing. So, it was a… I guess this idea is maybe a little bit higher budget than some of the stuff they would do. So, I don’t know. I must admit, I was listening to it there going, this is a good idea.

It sounds like the description of a film. It sounds like it’s already been written. You can just see it. It should be a big budget summer adventure film.

Yeah, I mean, it certainly could. I think it’s got a nice feel to it. I think it’s a good sort of fun vibe. I know it was around the time that Sherlock was becoming big. So, I thought it would be fun to do a kind of a homage at the same time, which the key thing is that basically, as every kid knows, the biggest problem is that their parents don’t know anything. So, I think it does. I must admit, I agree with you. I think it is a great idea. I still don’t understand why it hasn’t been made.

Well, surely, as a successful novelist now, do you not have a certain amount of push anyway? Can you not sort of go, hey, I’m CK or Caimh McDonnell, depending on which books of mine you read. You know, I’ve been optioned, left, right and centre. What about this?

Yeah, people sort of ask me about weirdy when I was… because I had the pedigree in Kids TV and I’ve written, I don’t know, 60 or 70 episodes of Kids TV. I wrote a lot of Kids TV. I had a cartoon series that was my idea, that got commissioned.

That’s Pet Squad, isn’t it?

That was Pet Squad.

BAFTA nominated.

And then there was Bear Behave. Yeah, BAFTA nominated, which was lovely. We only found out after the fact because we thought we were up against something else. I can’t… Gumball, which is a very good series, which everyone thought that’s going to win by a mile. To the point where I was there, I was very lucky in Kids TV. I started working with a company called Darrell McQueen, who have won the award, the BAFTA, I think a couple of times for being the best indie. And they really are, with all respect. Because I haven’t worked with every company, but I’ve worked with, let’s say, internal stuff at the broadcasters and other companies. And weirdly, because I worked with Darrell McQueen first, and they’re so brilliantly organised, Maddie is so, she could literally, when I was working for them a lot, she could tell me what I was doing for the next year. Everything they do, their notes are organised, and they really taught me how to write. They really did. It was the best education you could have had. But then I had the thing where I went to other companies, and I was like, why is no one taking notes in this meeting? Why is no one timing this script? Why are we not doing all these things that Manny does every time? And you just sort of realise that, wow, once you’ve worked with the best people, it’s really hard to, like, the patience to kind of deal with people not doing it their way, which is the best way, was quite a thing. So yeah, I mean, it’s an idea I always had. Maybe I will at some point write the YA novel of it and things like that. I really do enjoy the idea of it. So yeah, you never know. You might have talked me into it.

Well, my work here is done. OK, we have now come to the end of the show. How was it for you?

It was brilliant, genuinely. It was wonderful hearing all the pieces. Thank you very much. It’s been a weird, delightful troll through my own inglorious past.

One final question. I suppose you’ve sort of answered it really. It was going to be which of the offcuts, if any, would inspire you to go back and try again with them? You’ve sort of answered that.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a few. The Me, Myself and I idea. If I could ever get the idea to work, I really would like to write it at some point. I think the canon files, I must admit, reading it again and even hearing it there, I was sort of going, this was a good idea. Why was nobody interested in this? This is the one that got away. So, yeah, I don’t know. I’ll have a chat with my agent. He’s on paternity leave at the minute, but when he comes back, I’ll stick the canon files in front of him and tell him that it’s got your official seal of approval.

Yes, and he’ll go, sorry, Laura who? And that’s the end of that conversation.

Oh, he’s a big fan. He’s a big fan.

Oh, of course he’s, yes. Well, thank you, Caimh McDonnell, for sharing the contents of your off-cuts draw with us. Bye. The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Caimh McDonnell. The offcuts were performed by Rachel Atkins, Darrell Maclaine, Kenny Blyt, David Monteith, Jake Yapp and Lizzie Roper, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com, and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

 think it’s so easy to give ourselves a hard time. And funny enough, when you write down things that have happened, you do actually find a scrap of compassion for your younger self and think, oh, well, you know, I was doing my best. Perhaps I’m not the biggest idiot on this planet.

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. My guest this week is multi-award-winning comedy and drama writer, Georgia Pritchett, whose US credits include HBO’s Succession, Veep and Avenue Five. And in the UK, she’s written on The Thick of It, Not Going Out, Have I Got News for You, Smack the Pony, and that list doesn’t even touch the sides of her achievements. She is showrunner for the new Will Ferrell-Paul Rudd series, The Shrink Next Door, which is just launched on Apple TV. And her memoir, My Mess Is a Bit of a Life, was published this summer. Her offcuts are a mixed bunch, reflecting only a small part of her prolific output. And I will say this is the most musical edition of the show we’ve ever done. On the day I talked to Georgia, it was her son’s 13th birthday. So we started by discussing the various challenges of having teenage sons. Do you find that your boys are in any way impressed by anything that you do from a work perspective?

No, never, never.

But you’re involved in some of the coolest projects on the planet. Surely, surely they might have given you credit for it, no?

No, I mean, maybe if I was a YouTuber, they would be impressed, but no. I mean, TV is old hat.

Oh really?

And that’s for boomers.

Oh right, yes. I’m not sure, are we boomers?

I don’t think we are. Why don’t we too young to be boomers, aren’t we?

I think I’m right on the cusp of boom and whatever the one is after, a generation X.

Right, yeah.

Because succession is so cool. How can they not be impressed with that?

Well, I’ve never seen that. Yes, I might be a bit rude for them.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, they’re quite prim still.

How did you manage that?

By being emotionally stunted myself and passing that on successfully to my children.

Well, congratulations. That’s an excellent tactic. I wish I’d thought of that myself. Well, let’s get started with your first off-cut. Can you tell us what it’s called, when it was written and what genre it was written for?

Yes. So the first one is Bump, which was a script I wrote that was made into a mini pilot. I did this about four years ago for Channel 4 with the brilliant Kathryn Parkinson in it. And yeah, it got turned down. Bummer.

Interior Motel Diner, afternoon. Charlie and Gemma are eating in a grim-looking diner.

I’m just saying we mustn’t count our chickens before they’ve been artificially inseminated. It might be better to think of this as a holiday. Try to have fun. And if we come back with a baby-shaped souvenir, then that’s a bonus. Don’t you think?

No, I don’t.

Suddenly, Lily, Californian, 20s, in touch with every single emotion she’s ever had, descends on them.

Oh, my God. I’m so sorry. It’s so good to see you. I’m so happy you’re here.

She hugs Gemma for a long time and keeps talking.

This is literally the most exciting day of my life. I don’t ever want to let go of you. Let’s just stay like this forever, like Siamese twins. We don’t say that, do we, conjoined? I saw this amazing documentary about Siamese twins joined at the forehead. And one was also kind of a dwarf, so she had to be pushed around backwards on a trolley. It was so inspiring, and they were so different, you know? One was into thrash metal, and the other one was a cheerleader or something. Is this Charles? Can I call you Charles?

She lets go of Gemma and hugs Charlie.

I’m gonna call you Charles. I’m so happy to meet you. We’re gonna make beautiful babies together. My ovaries are singing. Do you know what I mean? Like I can actually feel my actual ovaries. It’s chemistry. My womb is like so receptive right now. Can I get a Caesar salad, but with the chicken on the side and also no Parmesan, but extra anchovies?

Charlie is confused, but a passing waitress takes the order. Lily sits in Charlie’s seat.

I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to pick you up. Nothing, literally nothing, would have kept me from picking you up. But my boyfriend had an accident and I was in the ER with him.

Boyfriend?

I thought you were single. I was.

I always will be, in a way. But I met this guy. He’s amazing. You’ll love him. He’s parking the car. But is he? Don’t worry. He’s totally on board. He will not distract me from my goal, our goal. Two women coming together to make a baby. It’s actually very empowering.

I’m sort of involved too.

Totally. I’m just here to serve like a serf. They did this in biblical times. Did you know that? This is biblical. It feels biblical. Shall we get outside?

Interesting subject matter. Was that your idea or Channel 4’s?

This was actually inspired by my friend, who was one of the producers on it, Stevie. She had a child by surrogate. She was telling me that it’s actually illegal in this country. Is it? Gosh. People do do it, but if it goes wrong, there’s nothing you can do about it. Basically, the surrogate can come and get their baby, as it were, anytime they want. So if you want to do it in a sort of above board contractual way, you have to, I think most British people go to either India or America. And so this really fascinated me, A, because I sort of had some trouble having children and understood the kind of madness you can go into when you want something so much and biology won’t cooperate. And then also because I’ve spent a lot of the last eight years in the States for work, I was very aware of the cultural differences and thought it would be interesting.

So it’s legal in America then definitely?

Yeah, it’s legal in America. And so quite often British people go there. And I just thought it was kind of like a funny area for a comedy, but also with, you know, you can’t really get higher stakes than a human life. So that seemed like a good subject.

And you said, as you introduced it, that Catherine Parkinson was in the pilot that got made.

Yeah.

And I believe the other English performer is a deal actor, is that right?

Yeah, he’s great. Yeah, a deal actor. And then the American surrogate was Amber Tamblyn, who was brilliant.

So was the whole series going to take place in America, or were they going to come back and be pregnant or expecting over here?

They were going to stay in America for the first season. Yeah. And so, yeah, they’re kind of, I mean, it’s pretty traditional sort of ideas, but, you know, fish out of water. And although in that scene, I was being, it could have sounded like I was being a bit hard on Americans, that actually it comes from a place, I think, really of being a sort of classic, repressed British middle-class person, and then suddenly being exposed to all these Americans who are so emotionally eloquent and good at expressing all their emotions. And actually, I think I’m a bit harder actually on the British people than I am on the Americans, because I sort of love just how open they are. I’m terrified by it, and I kind of love it as well.

So the entire cast, apart from those two, would be American and it would be set in America. So sort of like episodes, the Matt LeBlanc one? That sort of feel.

Exactly. Yeah, or catastrophe, but in America, as it were.

Right. And had you planned like a four season arc, or is it just, because presumably at some point, the baby has to be born and then what happens?

Yeah. Well, I had various incredibly ambitious ideas.

A whole family tree, generations.

Yes. Well, there’s so many interesting things about surrogacy. One is, particularly in the States, because so many people do do it, that there are some sort of support groups for the surrogates and also for what they call IPs, the intended parents. That would be a good way of meeting other people going through it. Obviously, there are lots of reasons people need a surrogate. It could be that it’s two dads or that there’s some fertility issue or that there’s some genetic issues. But also the reasons that people have surrogates is really fascinating. Obviously, because it’s legal, it’s a financial thing in the States. But I discovered when we were doing the research, we found that like in army bases, huge numbers of the wives would be surrogates because their husbands were away for such a long time.

And you mean like it gave them something to do?

Well, it sort of gave them something to do without them having to get a job because they move around so much, it’s hard for them to get jobs. So they thought, I can earn money, I can stay at home, my husband’s away and the husbands thought that it would keep them faithful. So I had this whole idea that we kind of, the first series is this first baby and there’s lots of, we worked out all these kind of ups and downs that this couple go through with their surrogate. And then we thought that the second season, there was sort of an option of either sort of doing it again with a completely different surrogate or the surrogate coming to England, you know, kind of better the devil, you know, kind of thing. Or there’s another option where you sort of follow all the surrogates you’ve met in the support group and all the intended parents you’ve met in their support group and sort of follow lots of little stories. But yeah, it’s one of those ones where I still think, oh, you know, that’s a fun idea.

And so you’ve got so much potential, the way you’ve just explained it, I’m thinking, oh, I could totally see that. Now I was going to ask you because the transatlantic cast there reflects sort of on your career, I suppose, because I know you started in British comedy and you had been transported to America to work on things like Veep and Avenue Five more recently, the last eight years. And of course, Succession, was that a move you planned? Had you always thought, oh, what I’d really like to do is write for American comedies because they are rather good?

No, I mean, it didn’t ever occur to me that that was a possibility. I thought I’d be at home in my pyjamas for my entire career. And yeah, so I did the thick of it with Armando, which was a wonderful experience. And then he, of course, did the American version, to put it crudely, which was called Veep. And so, yeah, I got to work on that. And that was absolutely that was just so exciting. I couldn’t believe that I was working on an American show.

And you were actually in America when you were writing it.

No, we were all here. Yeah, for the first four seasons of Veep, it was all British writers, all writing from home. But we filmed in Baltimore in the winter. And it is bitterly cold in Baltimore in the winter. And all the writers, actors, crew, everyone were in this one hotel together. And I suppose it was a bit like being in a touring rep group, because we were all homesick and we didn’t have anyone else to see. So we just spent every minute of every day with each other, which I think means we were much closer than lots of, often writers don’t particularly know actors or get to spend time with them. And so that was absolutely wonderful. It was really fabulous, sort of everyone kind of bonding and, but it was just, I mean, I only went obviously to Baltimore for filming kind of on and off, but I remember the first time I went away, I was going for like five days and I had to explain to my children, you know, I’m going away for work and they were like, but you haven’t got a job. And I was like, I have, and they’re like, you should get a job. And I was like, no, I have got one. And they were like, lots of people have jobs. You might like it. And I was like, no, I promise you, I have got, you know, that thing you see me doing on my computer. And they were like playing solitaire. I was like, no, the other thing you see me doing on my computer. That is my job. So, yeah, it was a bit of a shock to the system to go away. And then what happened is that after four seasons, Armando left to sort of focus on, because he had spent so much time over there. So he left to do stuff he could film in the UK. And it was taken over by an American showrunner and then had an American writer’s room. And I continued on it. So that was just mind blowing to suddenly find myself in LA at Paramount Studios. So they had to ship the Oval Office from Baltimore to LA and everything else. And yeah, all the writers were in this huge office. And suddenly I was in a room with like 12 of my heroes who had written all my favourite shows, like Simpsons and Seinfeld and Friends and everything, all my favourite things. And it was very nerve wracking, but incredibly exciting.

I’ve always meant to ask, because I loved Veep. And yet, as I bored my children going, that person’s British, shut up, mom, we’re just watching. But I was still amazed at how many British names I recognise from the writing team. How do the series is literally about the most American thing possible, the American political institutions. How does an English team of writers get to write stuff that sounds so absolutely spot-on, believably American? I’m sure it must be because obviously it was played to an American audience. Did you have like an advisor in there who goes, no, no, we Americans say it like this? You would never believe it was basically an English team or certainly the majority started. How did you achieve that?

Well, I mean, I didn’t.

Well, you must have done because you wrote some of the episodes.

Well, so when I first started on the thick of it, on my very first day when I arrived, Armando said to me, right, so we’re doing this episode where there’s an inquiry and, you know, the vibe I’m going for is sort of less chill cot, more leveson. And I just sort of the color drained from my face. And I just thought I just about recognized the word leveson. But I thought chill cot was a delightful spa where you could get lovely massages. And we were filming in this abandoned office block in Walton-on-Thames with no Wi-Fi. So I couldn’t even Google, what the hell is chill cot and leveson? So I did, I literally remember looking out the window and thinking, shall I just run and keep running and never come back? But I just thought, OK, well, I understand the word inquiry. And I understand that that would be frightening for these characters. And I’m frightened, so I can channel that into it, channel the fear and terror. So what started as like living an anxiety dream actually ended as a really nice experience because I thought, well, all the characters will be scared, but also they’ll all be lying. And I think you often get to a character’s truth when you write them lying. So this is a very long way of saying, I didn’t particularly know about British politics. So the fact that I didn’t know about American politics was fine. And somehow Armando just knows everything about American politics. So he kept us on the straight now. Of course, we did have consultants. I think, you know, Armando and then the other showrunner took over, Dave Mandel, who was a politics expert. They didn’t know what they were doing, thank God. But I thought we were making it up. I thought we were exaggerating wildly. And then I had this insane experience where I had the opportunity to go to the White House when Obama was president. And what was terrifying was walking around the West Wing and everyone saying, oh, my God, it’s so accurate. It’s so accurate. You sort of think, no, but I don’t want it to be. I want it to be wildly exaggerated. This is horrifying.

I’m not surprised that they would have said that actually. I mean, it is a little bit terrifying when you think that someone like Selena could have her finger on the… well, it would have been terrifying until Donald Trump came along, obviously. There’s a whole new level of terror now.

Yeah, that’s, you know, it’s not the worst thing he did, but he did put an end to V because…

It’s not the worst thing he did. No, that’s true.

But, you know, our fictional president was sort of venal and ruthless and selfish and monstrous and horrible and a liar, but she had a sense of shame and she was punished if she did something wrong. And suddenly overnight, both those things seemed incredibly twiggy and old-fashioned and we sort of had to hang up our pens and say, well, yeah, life has trumped us. Literally, we better stop this because we seem out of date, you know, literally overnight.

A bit tamed by comparison to reality. On that depressing note. Well, let’s move on and have another off-cut. Tell us about this one.

Well, this is a piece of recorder music I wrote when I was about six or seven, which was published as George’s tune.

I want you to know that just in case you thought that was played by a professional recorder player, if there is such a thing, that was literally me on my childhood recorder, the actual one I learnt to play on when I was at primary school.

That’s excellent. Were you literally doing it just then?

Yes, well, no, I recorded it because I could have cocked it up. Or you’re basically implying that I could have put better production on it or something. It was quite loud.

I thought you just sort of casually just pulled out your recorder and just done it live in a sort of exciting MTV unplugged way.

Oh, good God, no. So tell us about George’s tune.

Well, yes, I mean, what a melancholic piece of music that was. Well, I went to this very extraordinary school, sort of hippie school in the 70s that wouldn’t be allowed to exist these days, primary school, where you only had to go in if you felt it was right for you to go in that day. And we basically sort of expressed ourselves through finger painting and rolled around and did plasticine. But we didn’t sort of do lessons or learn anything because that’s wrong. And we called all the teachers by their first name and one of them, Howard, would drive me home on the back of his motorbike.

What?

Another one, Jean, would send me out to buy her cigarettes. That was the closest I got to a maths lesson was going to buy her cigarettes and coming back with the right change. And every so often, Henry, the headmaster, would sort of gather us into a room and either teach us about the plague or triangles or more often how to write a haiku. He seemed very determined we should master the Japanese short form of poetry, if nothing else. And really, we did learn nothing else. But the music teacher was this great woman called Margot Fagan, I think, and I think she was quite sort of famous at the time. And hilariously, her son was in… This is such a 70s anecdote. Her son was in ELO. He was the one with the white cello, I think.

Oh, wow.

So at our excruciating school concerts, there’d be me on my recorder and a few people on their squeaky violins, and then her son on his white cello. So, yeah, you are in good company there with playing that tune.

So this school you were sent to, were your parents very sort of freewheeling hippie types then?

Yeah, they were really. And we lived in this square and all the sort of kids hung out all day every day, and they all went there. And it was sort of full of actors and writers and artists’ children. I think Paul McCartney’s stepdaughter maybe went there and various other RT types.

Sounds very expensive.

No, it was a state school. It just wouldn’t be allowed these days. I know it was a state school, very small school. And, you know, it was brilliant. And, I mean, I am still incredibly ignorant, but what I would say is, you know, my mind is uncluttered by facts. But I, you know, I loved writing even at that age. So all I did was write stories. And maybe that helped, or maybe that helped me realize that I had no other skills that I could rely on. So writing really was the only option. But yeah, I had a fantastic time there.

And presumably the rest of your childhood was as free and easy. Would you say you had a good and happy childhood? Sounds like you had a great childhood.

Yeah, that was great. And that sadly, the secondary school was a bit tougher because I went to, I lived in Elephant and Castle. So that great primary school was in the Barbican, which was just being built at the time. And then I went to secondary school in Deptford, and it was pretty tough. So that wasn’t so easy. And a bit of, you know, suddenly I had to like wear a uniform and have lessons and learn things. It was a real shock to the system. Call teachers by their surname and go in, even if I didn’t feel it was right for me to go in that.

So how did you do that once your actual academic skills were being challenged? Did it turn out that you were quite academic or not really?

Well, I was a little bit behind having never done any lessons. And certainly it was the type of atmosphere where it wasn’t good to be doing too well. It was good. Your best bet was to be invisible or develop a sense of humor to sort of deflect any potential problems that might come your way. So, yeah, I learned.

Which did you do?

A bit of both. I learned a different set of skills at that school. So it was sort of a big contrast between the two schools. But I continued writing. Oh, that was the… This is my sort of Angela’s Ashes moment, as if having to go to school wasn’t bad enough. You know, really, the only thing I could do was write stories. And when I did my English homework, the teacher would give me detention because he thought I was plagiarizing. No! Because I was not good at anything else. And then there was this one thing I could do. So any, that’s what I mean, any kind of spark of ability was squashed either by your fellow pupils or by your teachers. So, yeah, I sort of carried on writing as a sort of act of defiance, which I think has held me in good stead, because, as I mentioned in my book, I really have had a lot of terrible reviews for things I’ve written. And I think that sort of, well, I’m going to write in spite of you, is sort of a good way of carrying on and developing a thick skin.

Right, time for another offcut now. Can you tell us about the next one, please?

OK, well, so this is a one woman cabaret show, which I wrote around about 20 years ago, called Dead Divas.

We are in a shabby bedside full of memorabilia. There are posters of singers all over the walls, records and CDs scattered all over the floors. The fan is sitting on her bed, flicking through her scrapbooks, listening to the radio as it plays a Billie Holiday song. Various Billie Holiday songs play throughout.

I’ve always been a big, big fan of music. Really, I have. I think it was on my 16th birthday that I got my very first restraining order due to a small misunderstanding with Miss Billie Holiday. I’d worship Billie Holiday for years. I’d got all her records. I’d been to all her concerts. I had her posters all over my room. Then finally I got to meet her by a complete coincidence. She was going through her backyard at the same time as I was going through her rubbish. I didn’t stick around for long. She was a big girl, over 200 pounds by the time she was 18, and I was eight stone in my stocking feet, ten stone with my shoes on. I felt like Billie completely understood me. I’ve spent some time in institutions and so had Billie. When she was ten, she was sent away to a Catholic institution for wayward girls. Later, when working as a prostitute, she was sent to jail for refusing to have sex with a client. Then she got banged up a third time for heroin possession. It was at this point that I hatched a brilliant plan for spending more time with my idol. Commit a crime and become her cellmate. The very next morning I held up my local bank. Unfortunately, due to a series of unforeseen and tragic circumstances, I accidentally got away with $7 million. It was one of the worst days of my life. Billy and I were to remain apart for the duration of her sentence. I spent those long months pining for Billy and being treated for a minor personality disorder. I was totally devoted to Billy. I’ll never forget the day that I had Billy Holiday Forever tattooed on my arm, because that was the day she died. She was 44. I was inconsolable. No one could ever replace Billy. Nobody. Except perhaps the little girl from Little Rock.

The Marilyn Monroe song Little Girl from Little Rock runs under the next dialogue. Marilyn Monroe.

Norma Jean. The candle in the wind. Who could not love her? The whole world loved her, but not as much as I did. I loved her the most. Yes, I did. She was everything I wanted to be. Beautiful, sexy, and only on 13 different types of tranquilizer.

Was any of this based on truth, as in, obviously not the psychopathically extreme behavior, but I mean the obsession or at least the fandom? Were you that sort of a person?

I mean, I was very into Adamant as a teenager.

Not quite the same thing.

I think I just realized that seven women singers that I liked had died very young.

Right.

So I’m trying to remember my own script now. So it was Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe, Patsy Cline, Alma Cogan, Mama Cass, Janis Joplin, and Karen Carpenter. And I just had this idea that there was this sort of unfortunate stalker who kept losing her idols. And then at the end, there’s a sort of twist where it suggested that she’s unwittingly contributed to each of their deaths.

Oh, God, that’s such a good idea.

So, yeah, it just seemed like, I don’t know, I think I was perhaps had experienced a bit of unrequited love and thought that was a sort of good vehicle and also a great opportunity to have some fantastic songs in it. So, yes, so you get a sort of two or three songs of each of these incredible women. And I just thought it was an interesting way to comment on stardom and how difficult it is to be a famous anyone, but particularly, I think, a famous woman, and particularly, you know, in time gone by. And then also that sort of the kind of poignancy, I think, of when people just become besotted with someone that they will never really meet or get to know or, you know, I think that’s very sad and all too common. But yeah, it was a fun thing to write.

So did you write it for yourself at all? I know you’re not really a performer, but you weren’t 20 years ago. You had performing aspirations.

No, absolutely not. Gosh, I’ve gone hot and cold just thinking about it then. No, it did a few days at the German Street Theatre and later Tracy Almond was sort of interested in it because of course she’s a great singer. But I think there’s issues because you’re using existing music and copyright and all that. Most of these people are American. Yeah, exactly. But it was interesting because I had written some stand up then. So it was interesting to sort of do a monologue and create this character.

Sorry, you said you’d written some stand up for yourself?

No, no, no, for other stand ups.

Yeah. Oh, I see.

Yeah.

Well, so you wrote this 20 years ago. At that point, had you been to university?

Yes. Oh, yes.

So what did you study? Did you do comedy at university at all?

No, I didn’t.

Even if you weren’t performing at writing for anyone else?

No, no. I mean, I think I had been writing quite a while by the time I did this. I think I just love writing. So I do it whether someone’s asking me to or begging me not to. I just do it, you know, whether someone’s paying me or commissioning me, I just do it all the time. And I think that’s, you know, you learn so much every time you write something. So that was just something I did. No one wanted me to do it, but I enjoyed it. And, you know, I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but I also knew that I couldn’t write novels because I’m no good at prose. I don’t know enough adjectives. I hate describing things. I always feel I don’t know what the sunset looked like. You decide.

So were you writing plays at this point or did you go straight to comedy?

So I knew I couldn’t be a journalist because I don’t care about facts, you know, that’s less important these days. So it was actually my mum that pointed out that I had a very irritating habit of sort of watching lots of comedy shows and sketch shows and stand up and then memorizing sort of huge chunks and reciting them and what apparently was quite an annoying way. So that made me think, oh yeah, dialogue, maybe dialogue is the thing. So I started, as so many people did, at Weekending, which was that Radio 4 show that used to be on about the week’s news that anyone could send stuff in to. So I guess I started with comedy sketch shows. So that sort of led to Spitting Image and Smith and Jones. And then that sort of led to some stand ups like Joe Brand and Rory Bremner and Lenny Henry and the lovely Ronnie Corbett. And then that led on to narrative comedy like the sitcoms. So I did write some sort of comedy plays for radio, but yeah, I just, I’ve always enjoyed cabaret shows and musicals. So I just thought I’d have a go.

So you went to university and then you went straight into writing or did you have to have a proper jump first?

No, I just, yeah, as soon as I left, I turned up at week ending with a lot of homeless people who were wanting to get warm in this room in the BBC. And yes, I managed after a few weeks, I sold a joke for eight pounds and I never looked back. So yeah.

That’s your origin story and a very fine one. Okay, let’s have your next off cut now. What’s this one?

Well, this is possibly a terrible mistake and I certainly haven’t finished. This is called Gay for the Stay, which is a rap musical I started to write, because obviously that’s what I should be doing. I started this in about 2016 and have yet to finish it. And it’s basically, my idea was private lives, but in an all-men’s prison. So instead of it being two couples, it’s two sort of previous roommates and they’d had relationships. There’s a phrase called Gay for the Stay where you have romantic relationships with another man for as long as you’re in prison. So yeah, that was the premise of this piece.

Know what I’ve learned from spending 15 years surrounded by thousands of men? They talk about their balls a lot. He’s got balls. He hasn’t got balls. He’s got big balls. He needs to grow a pair. Balls, balls, balls, balls. They have done a great PR job on balls because you know what else I know? Balls aren’t so great. Little shriveled specimens dangling around doing nothing. And if you kick them not even that hard, you can paralyze a man for an hour. I have made a man vomit by kicking him in the balls. I have made a man faint by kicking him in the balls. Balls are ugly. They’re tiny and they’re useless. If women had balls, we would not talk about them all the time. We probably wouldn’t even mention them. We’d be too embarrassed. We try to iron the creases out. But men, they talk about them all the time with pride. When I hear a man say, grow a pair, I think, don’t bother. Grow a womb instead. Grow something useful. Grow something impressive. Grow something miraculous. You think you’re hard, man? Get birth, motherfucker. Until you can do that, shut the fuck up about your teeny-tiny-scraggy-shrunken-withered-wrinkled-balls.

I feel sorry for your husband.

Don’t waste your time.

You even got a husband?

Yeah, I got one.

Thank Music there by Jake Yapp, I must give him credit for that.

I didn’t know you were going to actually do the rap.

But thanks to Jake Yapp, we were able to do that. So the story behind this, you explained what gave the stay meant. Did you have a particular star or cast in mind for this when you started writing it?

Not really. I just had always thought that private lives was such a brilliant idea, but also quite disturbing because it’s pretty violent and some really upsetting scenes and it all seemed to make much more sense if it was set in a male prison. So that part was the only woman prison guard, and maybe subconsciously I was expressing my feelings about being the only woman in the room for 25 years.

Yes, good point. You never made a similar speech like that about testicles to your writing cohort at all.

No, I did not. I hope I don’t get in trouble for that. I think they’re excellent. I’m a big fan of them.

Balls or the writers?

Balls. Well, both. Got a lot of time for both. So yeah, it was amazing how that idea of two people who’d had a relationship sort of suddenly being thrown together again in these kind of confined circumstances and all the sort of jealousy and passion and doubt. And I just felt like it kind of worked really well.

You don’t remember the moment where you thought, do you know what, I’m going to do this. Do you remember what it was that this particular thing that inspired you? It seems very specific.

It does. I think in an odd, I don’t know what happened, but in middle age, I got very into rap music and very into Eminem. And just, I mean, maybe it’s from my haiku writing past, but I just so love the kind of rap music and the lyrics. They did this sort of survey that the two singers who use the widest vocabulary of anyone by a mile are Bob Dylan and Eminem. And so I, yeah, I don’t know what I was my sort of midlife crisis was getting into rap and maybe it was a lot of inner rage. And yeah, I keep, as you can see, I keep flirting with the sort of musical form.

Yes, this is by far and away, the most musical episode we have ever had.

And since then, I did a sort of musical adaptation of The Snow Queen that was for theatre in Southampton and then in Northampton. And I did another sort of musical thing about fairy tales.

And then did you write the lyrics, the lyrics and the music? How did that work?

Yeah, I wrote the lyrics, not the music. I’m completely unmusical, but I wrote the lyrics and the book, as we say. And at the moment, I am working with Grayson Perry and Richard Thomas, who did the music for Jerry’s Bringer, the opera, on a musical about Grayson Perry’s life. So maybe I will finally get to scratch this itch that I’ve had a long time to create a musical, be part of a musical. Right.

Well, let’s move on to the next off cut. Can you tell us about this one, please?

So this is a TV script I wrote, which is called Legs, which I wrote for a fantastic actress called Katie Sullivan.

Exterior, bus stop.

Marty is still sitting at the bus stop. A driving school car approaches with Marty’s sister Virginia in the passenger seat and a nervous teenage boy in the driving seat. Virginia is a large woman in her 30s. She’s short tempered, blunt, darkly pessimistic. The window rolls down.

Don’t call me that.

Sorry, Vag.

What is it?

How are you?

I am not an Uber.

I know that. Just wanted some quality sister time.

You look like shit.

Thank you.

Your legs are all showing.

And your personality is all showing.

I’m busy. What do you want? From life.

From me.

Marty wonders whether to lie and then decides to come clean.

I feel like a bag of smashed assholes and I’m late to work.

Get in.

Interior, driving school car. Marty is sitting in the back. The teenage driver, Sanjeev, is very nervous and the car lurches slowly along. It’s like a cat licked my eyeballs.

Hey, step on it, will you?

Sorry.

Don’t listen to her.

Sorry. How’s mom?

Dead.

You’ve got to stop saying that. One day it’ll be true.

It is true.

How’s mom?

Her dying words were, You’re my favorite child, Virginia.

How’s mom?

Annoying.

Thank you. You should really move out.

You think? But then I miss all the fun when she sues Hotpockets.

She’s suing Hotpockets?

She loves Hotpockets.

Why is she suing Hotpockets?

I don’t know. I wasn’t listening. She’s going to get 65 million dollars.

Happy for her.

Marty looks out of the window. Sorry.

What’s your name?

Sanjeev.

Can you get a wiggle on?

I could literally walk faster than this and…

She gestures to her legs. Sorry.

Ignore her.

The legs go click click.

And them.

Sanjeev, take a right here.

No, go straight.

Take a right.

Do not take a right.

Sanjeev, take a right.

Sanjeev turns right and meets several cars head on, narrowly missing them.

It’s no right turn. Sorry. Okay, get out.

Sanjeev starts to get out.

Not you.

You.

Oh, come on.

Get out.

How am I gonna get to work?

I don’t care. Get Josh to take you.

Yeah, we had a big fight.

What happened?

We flash back to 48 hours earlier.

This piece was written for a particular actress. Can you tell us about it and her?

Yes. So I saw her on stage in London and she was just absolutely fantastic. And it was one of those experiences where you see someone and think, I want to write for that person. They’re so brilliant. She’s called Katie Sullivan. I got to know her and she was born without legs. So she gets around on these super cool high tech robotic prosthetics. And so we sort of talked really about her life and what it’s like to be an American with a disability. And so I wrote this script called legs for her to be in. And a lot of it is based on her. She’s such an amazing person. And just we were sort of talking the other day, she has kind of all the disadvantages of celebrity in that wherever she goes, people stare at her or want their photo taken with her or hand her their baby, which is very unwise because as she says, walking on prosthetics is like walking on stilts. But she, you know, none of the pros because she doesn’t get lots of money or fancy tables at fancy restaurants or anything. And also it’s very difficult financially to have a disability in America. And well, I mean, there’s so many aspects to this show. And one of the sort of sweetest things, which is based on Katie, is that she has this huge collection of shoes. She absolutely loves shoes as sort of works of art. So she collects beautiful shoes and she’s trying to get prosthetic legs designed so they can cope with wearing amazing shoes. Because generally speaking, they come with a shoe attached, or you just have to wear very sort of basic shoes. And so, yeah, we wanted to write something that was kind of funny, but showed the sort of difficulties she’s experienced. And yeah, I think of all the things we’ve been discussing, this is the one that I kind of think, oh, this is the right time for this. You know, we need to see a show like this, people not seeing themselves on television. You know, there are one billion people in the world with a disability, and we certainly do not see many on our TV screens.

Yeah, it does feel like it might be a good time for this show right now. So is it a series?

Yeah, it’s a series. And we had the whole sort of season worked out. We had the wonderful Sam Miller who directed I May Destroy You on board. And so, yeah, I mean, they’re still, we’re still not getting anywhere. I think, you know, in terms of the American market, you know, she’s not famous. And this is the problem. If you have a disability, all she’s ever been able to play are soldiers who had their legs blown off. And so you don’t get famous like that. And so then people don’t trust you to be a lead in a TV show. So, yeah, we’re still trying because I think it’s it would be a great show. Her and her sister and there’s this great mum character and really taking a pretty honest look at what it’s like in the states these days with all those issues that we’ve been discussing. But, you know, funny, really funny, because she’s so funny.

Well, it’s certainly not a story that we’ve seen a sitcom cover before. But this is set in America starring a specific American actress and presumably will be cast with other American actors. So are you now working mainly in America now? Have you sort of moved over to America? Because apart from Succession, you’re also the show runner on a brand new series called The Shrink Next Door, which has a spectacularly high profile, impressive cast, including Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd.

Yes, Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd and the marvellous Katherine Hahn. And yeah, that was, I mean, I’m not, I live in London. I would love to work here more, but the work keeps coming from America. That was a really fun project. And the first time I’d been a show runner and it was written during lockdown. So I had a virtual writers room, which meant less time talking about what we were going to have for lunch, which is really the only point of being a writer. So that was a shame. But it did mean that I sort of had writers from all over the world because we were all just in our rooms on Zoom. And it was a really lovely experience. I really enjoyed it. It was scary and a learning curve, but it was it was a really positive experience.

I mean, I know you’ve written for high powered people before and worked with what I call high powered anyway, but showrunner is like you’re the boss of everybody and you have to make all the decisions from being a writer who makes certain creative decisions, but certainly doesn’t have that kind of responsibility when things go wrong. How did you find that shift?

It’s a huge jump. Yes, I think, you know, certainly in the UK, you sort of do your script and then you hand it over and they don’t necessarily want to ever see you again. So to then suddenly be showrunner, which is really sort of a fancy word for a producer, I suppose, in that you hire everyone and yeah, are in charge of everything. I mean, it’s actually, I think, a job that’s pretty impossible to do well because you need to know about costume and music and editing and lighting.

That’s you now. That’s who you are. Will you be showrunning more stuff? Is your status now shifted from writer to showrunner?

I would like to do a bit of both. I do love being a writer. I love working on succession and, you know, there’s people I love working with. But there are a couple of other things that I will showrun. I think I thought that it might involve a lot of confrontation and yelling, which is not my forte. But, you know, I discovered that it didn’t. If everyone feels appreciated and seen and respected, there’s very little yelling involved. So that was really a fantastic experience.

And working with Will Ferrell and Noel Coward.

Yeah.

But it’s not actually a comedy, is that right?

No, I have a special gift for sucking all the joy from anything I’m involved with. And so I said to them on day one, there must be no jokes or laughing or pleasure on this set. Unfortunately, they didn’t listen. So there are some jokes and a little bit of pleasure. But I think it’s, you know, Will, I mean, I’ve always been a fan of his, but I think this is the best thing he’s ever done because I don’t think I’d appreciated what an incredible actor he is. And in this, he delivers this extraordinary, subtle and nuanced performance that is utterly heartbreaking. And it really took me by surprise. And I think it will take people watching by surprise. It’s really an incredible thing. He’s amazing.

I’m really looking forward to it. Sounds brilliant. But we must move on now because we’ve come to your final off cut. What are we about to hear on this one?

Well, this is a short story, very short story that I wrote around two or three years ago. And it’s called Moon.

January 1960. Had a great idea to fake a moon landing. Think it will really raise morale and inspire hope and patriotic pride among the American people. Met with a top Hollywood writer, Jimmy Kimball. He’s on board and super excited. Explained to him that what we need is a couple of snappy lines for the astronaut to deliver as he steps onto the moon. Jimmy said he’d deliver something next week. February. No script yet, but met with Jimmy who said he had a new idea. What about if the space module crashes onto the moon and the whole moon explodes? I explained that wasn’t really what we were looking for. Jimmy looked hurt and said he was just trying to inject some drama into the story. I said I thought man landing on the moon was dramatic enough. Jimmy said it’d get me something next week. March. No script yet, but Jimmy has had another idea. What if the astronauts get out and get into a fight? I explained that wasn’t really what we were looking for. Drama needs conflict, Jimmy insisted. I explained again that this was really an exercise to raise morale, etc. and that we really just need a couple of snappy lines of dialogue. Jimmy said he’d get me something next week. April. No script yet, Jimmy is having some marital issues. May. Jimmy has produced a script. I read it with excitement. He’s written a two-page speech in which the astronaut steps onto the moon and announces he’s divorcing his wife because she’s been having an affair with the other astronaut. I explained that wasn’t really what we were looking for. Jimmy pitched that maybe the wife realizes her mistake and realizes the other guy is a total asshole and gets back with the astronaut. He said he was trying to give the astronaut a journey. I suggested that the 270,000 mile journey to the moon was enough journey and what we really wanted was a couple of lines of snappy dialogue. August. Jimmy has had some issues with his typewriter ribbon, so no script yet. December. Jimmy says the script is almost finished. He’s just waiting for more paper. January 1961. Jimmy says he’s not getting paid enough for two whole lines of snappy dialogue. He’ll deliver one line. February. Jimmy says he’s halfway through the line. He should be finished next week. March. Jimmy handed in a new script. It’s a couple of lines of snappy dialogue delivered by an alien who’s just eaten the astronaut and the space module. I explained that wasn’t really what we were looking for. April. I’ve decided to kill the project. I think it’s going to be easier to get some scientists to build an actual rocket and actually fly to the actual moon.

That was our impression of JFK. For anybody who wondered why he spoke like that.

I should have said at the top it’s JFK’s diary. So yes, a little dig at writers there. A little bit of self-loathing creeping out.

It actually reminded me of a Bob Newhart sketch. One of those. Have you heard Bob Newhart?

Yeah, yeah.

He does all those phone conversations. Now this is the only prose that you sent. I’m entirely convinced that is actually prose. I know you say it’s a short story, but to me it sounds like a comedy sketch. I mean, performed by a JFK thing, like in the style of Bob Newhart.

Drat, you’ve spotted. And my book is really not a book. It’s just a collection of scenes very badly described as a book.

Because you said at the beginning that you don’t do prose, you’re not very good at prose, you don’t like adjectives. But you have just published a book, My Mess is a Bit of a Life, with very short chapters.

They’re not really chapters.

So why did you write it? If prose isn’t your thing, what made you sit down and have to write it?

That’s an excellent question, Laura. I think it’s just a terrible lapse in judgment or lockdown madness. Yeah, it was suggested I do it, write a memoir, and I said in no uncertain terms, the one thing we can be very sure of in this life is that I will never, ever write a memoir. Oops. So yeah, I can’t quite believe it because I’m a very private person and I love the anonymity of being a scriptwriter and putting my words in other people’s mouths. So it is utterly horrifying to discover I’ve written something very personal and direct.

So if it’s something that horrifies you, revealing private bits of yourself, did you have another goal for this book?

No, I really didn’t. I think my agent, somewhere on the spectrum of encouraging, tricking, bullying, my agent did some combination of those things. And at first I sort of thought, oh yeah, you know, I write about my childhood. It was pretty eccentric and I’ll forget it soon if I don’t write it down. And then, you know, you start remembering things and one door opens another door. And before I knew it, I was just banging on about myself like a pub ball. But I also thought, you know, I think it’s easy as a comedy writer or just in life to sort of play certain roles. And I think as a comedy writer, you can often sort of feel, well, it’s my job to be happy and everything. So you don’t tend to own up to anything else. And I just thought, I’m old enough now. Maybe I should admit that I’m a neurotic mess rather than everything’s great. So, yeah, I just tried to, there’s scenes from a life really with a sort of theme running through it and hoping if it doesn’t sound too lofty and highfalutin. But, you know, maybe it might help other people because especially in these days of social media, it’s very easy to convince yourself everyone else is doing great and doing better than me. So, I hope it might help if there’s someone saying actually sometimes it’s hard and saying it in a funny way that doesn’t feel scary or threatening or preachy or self-helpy.

So, it started out as a sort of childhood memoir.

And then it does actually sort of come up pretty recent. While I was writing it, I read this really interesting thing that we only ever remember anything once. And after that, we just remember remembering it. So, in a sense, we’re all kind of writing our memoirs all the time in that we’re always kind of shaping our histories or our kind of anecdotes about our life. And I found that quite interesting. And I tried to be true to the sort of impressionistic nature of early memory where you don’t really get what’s going on. I didn’t want to imbue it with any sort of hindsight. And luckily, I’ve remained quite a confused person. So, it continues in that vein.

Well, you say that. We’ve just heard about you being a showrunner for two top Hollywood stars. I don’t think that’s going to cut it.

But it was interesting. I think it’s so easy to give ourselves a hard time. And funny enough, when you write down things that have happened, you do actually find a scrap of compassion for your younger self and think, oh, well, you know, I was doing my best. Perhaps I’m not the biggest idiot on this planet.

But do you now find that you are more comfortable with the idea of writing prose? Has it opened the door for you? Could you now become an author of novels or further memoir?

No, I definitely couldn’t, could never write a novel. I wouldn’t mind trying another.

Is it just the adjective problem?

It’s the adjective and the describing things are just too exhausting. But, you know, maybe if I can get away with this half-baked version of prose that I’ve done, that’s really just the scene in a different format. I would like to do some more of that because I did enjoy it in the end. So, yeah, it was really fun to do.

And the obvious question is, will it be televised? Will you be writing these lyrics?

Will culture eat itself?

Will the television writer who wrote her own memoir finally adapt it for television and the world will end?

Is that likely? I don’t think that’s going to happen. No, maybe Will Ferrell could play me. We have the same hair.

Okay, we have now come to the end of the show. How was it for you?

I must say this has been much less awful than I was expecting it to be.

How awful were you expecting it to be?

Just the thought of sitting down and talking about myself and my work for an hour did make me feel a bit sweaty and strange.

Well, you didn’t sound… you sounded marvellously confident and witty and erudite and all those things. So yes, we have come to the end of the show and it hasn’t been too terrible then I hope.

You can put that on your website. Not too terrible.

Not too terrible. Georgia Pritchett, showrunner. Well, thank you for sharing the contents of your off-cuts draw with us.

Thank you so much. It’s been really, really good.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Georgia Pritchett. The offcuts were performed by Beth Chalmers, Desiree Burch, Lizzie Roper, Jake Yapp, and Keith Wickham. And the theme music was by me, with additional music by Jake Yapp. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com. Thanks for listening.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity pave the way to subsequent success. My guest on today’s episode is writer, comedian, and Raconteuse Miranda Kane. She’s performed her one-woman shows around the world and has had three seasons of the audio sitcom that she writes and stars in, Slaving Away, topping the audible charts since 2018. But before I go any further with this introduction, I should warn you that it’s not an episode that you want to listen to with younger friends or family, and it’s definitely not safe for work. Because Miranda is a very honest, funny, and forthright person, and I enjoyed this interview immensely, and she shares a lot about her life and particularly about her experience in her previous career as a plus-size sex worker. She’s also an activist for sex worker rights and the decriminalization of sex work, and does a podcast called Good Sex, Bad Sex. So there is explicit content. Funny, explicit content, but explicit content nonetheless. And if you’re uncomfortable with this kind of subject matter, then you probably want to give this one a miss. But if you’re not, this is a cracking episode. Although, like every podcast episode recorded since the pandemic, we started off talking microphones and checking audio setups because that’s now the law.

It’s great. And now we’re all doing it in our pants and underwear anyway. So we might as well just be freestyling, isn’t it? Yeah.

Okay. So you sound marvellous. There’s no problems with your audio, obviously, because you do your podcast. Presumably, you’ve got a proper setup. Are you recording from your, I’ve heard this new phrase, boffice, bedroom stroke office, although… Boffice, I know.

Wow. Well, I’m in my lounge, but unfortunately, I live right opposite a playground. So if you hear screaming children, it’s not the ones in my basement, Laura!

Thanks for the reassurance. Right, then. Well, I suppose we get started with your first offcut.

Yeah.

Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

So this is a cutscene from the third series of my audio sitcom for Audible called Slaving Away, and it was written this year in the year of our Lord 2021.

Fortunately, in my work at least, I can still meet people who do know what they want, which is why I’m currently on top of hands eight inches deep.

No, no, no, no, no.

Bend my legs back and then use the strap on.

Like this?

Oh, yes, yes. No, no, no, no, no.

Maybe I spoke too soon.

It needs to be deeper.

If I bend your legs back any more, I’ll break your hips.

There is no way.

Let’s put a cushion under your arse. Get it up a bit.

What are you doing?

Trigonometry.

But I do not want this cushion.

Just trust me, I’ve done this more times than you.

Okay, I’ll let you try. Oh yes, oh yes, you know what you’re doing.

Weird that. There we go. It’s easy once you get everything in place and a nice little rhythm going. Bit like rocking a baby to sleep. If your baby was a six foot tall German with a penchant for prostate play. Oh, he might need winding. That’s it. Now we just need to bathe him and get him dressed. Almost really. Now does baby, do you want a shower?

No, I will go. This was not satisfactory for me.

Really? Well, you certainly look like you enjoyed it. Baby wipes go in the bin, by the way.

It’s your body.

My body? You mean the one I described in detail on my website along with the many pictures? OK, Hans, what seems to be the problem?

Your bum, amazing, like a shelf. This I want upon my face.

Chances of that are dwindling.

And the thighs, I love how they rub together. I want to feel them squeeze my head.

Doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon.

Your boobs, oh my god, your boobs.

Thanks, grew them myself.

But the belly, the belly I do not like.

So you like my boobs, bum and thighs, but not the thing that’s holding it all together.

Yeah.

So you basically want a Barbie doll.

No, no, no, I like the fat women.

But you do realize I have no control over where the fat goes and it was very clear in my photos where the fat is.

Yeah, I saw the photos.

But you still look surprised.

I thought you used Photoshop.

Hold the phone. You thought I used Photoshop to make myself look fatter?

Yeah, it’s a niche market, no? No.

Well, yes, but also I don’t even know where to start other than getting you two American high school teenagers a lightning storm and Kelly LeBrock.

What is this Kelly LeBrock?

Science. Look, Hans, I don’t know what to say.

No, no, no, you don’t need to apologize.

I wasn’t going to. I was in fact going to encourage you to fuck off at the earliest opportunity.

Well, I have to say, this was the most exciting scene we’ve ever recorded for this series. We’ve never had anything quite so graphic as that before. Anyway, tell us about it and why was it not used? Don’t tell me it wasn’t dirty enough.

Oh, that was so… I know it’s so bad to laugh at your own things, but that was very well played. Just the excellent right amount of anger in her voice. That’s brilliant, brilliant. So this is totally… So a lot of things in Slaving Away are based on accurate and true depictions of clients that I had when I was a sex worker. And this was exactly what happened with a guy who thought I genuinely photoshopped in more fat, and he was just really unhappy. He was like, this is not good, exactly how your man just played it. And I was writing it, and I just thought… And there was no ending. I couldn’t find a way to end it and fit it back into the script. I really love with Slaving Away, one of the things that we’ve said from the beginning was that the client scenes are like the snippet in Alan Partridge where he’s in the studio. So it’s got no bearing on the story. The real story is what’s happening in the travel lodge. And these vignettes that are happening in her bedroom have no bearing on the story. But one of the things is that I like to have it, give it a satisfactory ending. And this one, I was just writing because I was really peeved at the guy. I just remembered what he said and I was just really angry. I was just like, oh, I can’t figure out how to end it properly.

I thought you ended it quite well, actually. That sounds like a punchline to me. But before we go any further, although obviously I know the series, but just to a listener who isn’t necessarily familiar with it, we’ve rather chucked them in the deep end. And in fact, I probably should have warned them. I might have to add a postscript before we record this. Before I play this, please note there is strong language and sexual content in this right from the start. So you might want to make sure there are no young children around or indeed your boss. So yes, we probably ought to explain that we, well, you, if you don’t mind, explain what Slaving Away is.

Slaving Away is an audio sitcom that I was very honored to be able to write for Audible. And it’s based on my years as a sex worker. So I was a sex worker, I was a plus size sex worker in London for 10 years before going into comedy and being able to talk about it and laugh about it. And yes, we’ve just released our third series. It’s very not safe for work. And that is one of the joys. Like for me, one of the reasons why I wanted to write it and why I do write a lot about sex work is because I don’t feel like we get the real depictions on television and on media. Everyone either thinks that we’re victims of abuse or we’re high class escorts. And this is very much just it’s an average ordinary woman trying to do an extraordinary job, but in a very ordinary, ordinary way. And we take it to pantomime levels of, you know, stupidity and storyline. And we talk about decriminalization and sex worker rights. So it’s a bit of a wild roller coaster ride, but it is also very naughty. Yes.

It’s interesting that, well, I suppose it’s good that it’s audio only because it does mean you can describe all kinds of things without either making the audience shockingly or making them want to be a little bit ill, depending on what it is they’re seeing, or being absolutely presumably pornographic and possibly quite arousing, God forbid. So was it your idea, the audio thing? How did that come about?

So we were a friend of mine, a friend of mine, Nick Minter. So he worked with John Holmes, friend of your show, John Holmes. And they ran an audio production company. And I was I was friends with Nick for years. We used to work together in a radio station before I was even doing sex work. So we’ve just known each other for years and years and years. And I started doing sex work on the side, kept it a total secret from him. And then like 10 years later, I’m like, yes, I’m doing a show as part of the Camden Fringe, but you might want to brace yourself. And I literally came out to all my friends doing this one woman show. You’re kidding.

That’s how you told everybody.

Yeah.

On stage. Yeah.

So some of them knew. And then people like Nick, who were kind of not more work, like we were friends, but it just never comes up in conversation, Laura.

Crazy, isn’t it? Would you like another cup of coffee? By the way, that thing you’re stirring your sugar with is in fact, no, never mind. Now I can see that would be a problem.

Here’s why I had plenty of time to go to the pub and lots of disposable income.

You’re not an heiress.

Exactly.

I live with a flatmate in East Finchley.

East Finchley, it’s very, very suburban and very unglamorous a name for a place where Dominatrix lives. Dominatrix from East Finchley. Oh yes, N2.

Thank you very much. Someone once said that they were like, why is it in East Finchley? That’s not exactly the hub of sex and sexuality. And I’m like, we are everywhere.

And actually, I grew up near East Finchley and let me tell you, there was quite a lot of sex and sexuality going on in those days. I can’t vouch for it now. I’m not there now. Oh yes, there were things going on behind Twitching Net curtains in N2.

Brilliant, brilliant.

So Nick was in the audience when you went, ladies and gentlemen, I’m in fact Dominatrix.

Yes, yes. And then stood there for an hour and pretty much told everyone about it. It was a very rough cut show. It was more just like I’m just standing on stage chatting to people. And for years, like ages and ages and ages, I was like, Nick, I’ve had 10 years of working as a sex worker, you work in radio. And I’ve always loved radio. It’s always been my passion. I grew up listening to Radio 4 and, you know, I’m a massive fan of The Now Show and all of these things. And I begged him to do something surrounding sex work. And he just completely ignored me. And I still haven’t forgiven him about it. And then one day he gets a thing from Audible and they’re running a competition and they want to make six pilots. And then it goes to an audience vote of which one gets a series. And he said, right, well, let’s do something about sex work. Let’s do, you know, we sat down in the pub, had a great brainstorm about it, talked about it. And it was just something from day one that we wanted to make into a series. And we had enough, like, material talking about it, because fortunately with him, like, I could sit down and write, because I would get caught up in my own brain straight away. And Nick would just be like, I just want to know what would happen if someone turned up and they looked underage, would you ask for ID? And I was like, oh, my God, that reminds me of when someone, I did have to ask for ID. So it was all these lovely bouncing off points. And he was like, what about anyone super religious? And I was like, yeah, there was a guy who turned up in a full rabbi outfit. Yes.

Was he actually a rabbi or he just wanted to disguise himself or it was part of the fantasy?

It was the full Hasidic Jew thing. And he was, I think he was Jewish, like, you know, there was no fantasy there.

Well, you could probably half tell, couldn’t you?

They were.

But he wasn’t sort of going, call me rabbi.

No, nothing like that. And the cheek of it was like when he was phoning up for an appointment and like texting beforehand to confirm, every time he would always say, oh, you are discreet, aren’t you? Are you discreet? Is it discreet location? Is it really, is it discreet? As if like, yeah, it’s East Finch, like if I’d have a neon sign saying, sexy in the middle of East Finchley. And then that bugger turns up in full gear like that. Like, thanks. Thanks for the discretion. Yeah, brilliant.

Well, sorry, I don’t understand that. What do you think? A Hasidic Jew turning up at your flat. What message does that send to the general sort of area? I don’t want people to think I have religious men married to my house. What’s the nature of his indiscretion there?

It’s not that. It’s just that, you know, my neighbors saw me and my gay flatmate and we were in our early 20s. We used to go and get pissed down the weather spoons every Friday night. So I think they’d just be more worried about us and wondering whether we were changing our party ways. Converting to Judaism.

So he didn’t become a regular. I shouldn’t be asking these questions. I’m just curious because I’m a nice Jewish girl. And he’s finch. I might even know him.

It’s more than welcome to turn up, but just don’t be hypocritical and keep asking me whether I’m the one that’s discreet.

That’s all. Have I dug myself a hole? No, I’m not sure. No, no, no. I’m making notes here. This is very interesting. Now, I wanted to ask you anywhere. I’m not sure if this relates properly to writing, and I probably should, you know, I should probably stick to the writing thing, but I’m just too curious as a white-bred middle class sort of uptight woman. So this is all new to me. I would like to know when, how did you learn the technical aspects of the job? You know, when you get specific requests, because you’re not, it’s not just vanilla sex, from what I understand it is. And also from the scene we’ve just heard, it’s very, presumably there’s a lot of different moves and a lot of different terms. How did you learn about them and how to do them safely and hygienically?

So I was on the kink scene for a while anyway. So there was a lot of, you know, if you’re looking for equipment, there were things like the London Alternative Market and the Fetish Fair you can go to. And a lot of those places would have demonstrations. So that’s where you’d learn to use impact toys and impact play safely. Then there’s also the great internet. You know, there’s a lot you can learn. And also being a plus size woman, there were specific plus size places where I could go to, where if I had a question about using my body in certain ways, then a lot of people could help me with that. And the internet really, and also just experience. I often, you know, it’s all very Derren Brown, like what I’m about to do is a mixture of showmanship experience and…

Sorry, you didn’t say that at the time.

Sometimes.

That was your intro. Hello, what I am about to do.

That was, you know, that was a very specific kink. But it is just an experience, an intuition. That’s the other one, intuition. So you do get an idea. And also there’s a wonderful thing, kind of trick that I learnt, which was, so if I had a client who wanted a very specific fetish, I’d learn from him. So say you’re talking about foot fetishism. So some guys, they just want to kiss your feet. Some guys want to get a bit more intimate with them. And on the phone, I’d be like, okay, well, you just tell me what you want to do and that’s fine. And then I’d see what they were doing. And then the next day someone said, oh, I’d like a foot fetish. I’d do what the guy did the day before.

Do you mean something like this perhaps?

Exactly. Oh, this old trick. I just learned from someone an hour ago. So yeah, it’s kind of a mixture of just talking to people and finding out like, you know, you get the time on the phone. When they book an appointment, you get a time on the phone to ask them what they want. So it’s not just that you have to sit on a mountaintop in Thailand and study the Kama Sutra for three years. You can’t just say, right, what do you want and how do you want me to do it? And then, yeah, when there’s things like safety things at play, then there are things you can watch on YouTube and people you can ask. And like I said, like demonstrations at loads of kink events that you can watch and ask questions at.

OK, the reason I asked a question, I thought it might lead to a, well, there’s a course you can do or a handbook you can read. But no, OK, fair enough, because I mean, your answer makes more sense, to be honest. So, yeah, we’ll move on from there then. OK, well, let’s get on to your next offcut. Tell us about this one.

So this is from 2007 and it’s a clip from my diary.

Letters to Jon Snow. May 15th, 2007 at 11.39am. A few weeks ago, we placed a competition in a well-known women’s magazine. The entrants were to write their names and addresses on the back of a postcard and send them to us. However, as we were part of a larger building, we ended up getting various pieces of mail for other departments, one of which is the Channel 4 News with that bastion of English news, Jon Snow. At first, I would duly send them back to the post room to be delivered to the correct person. However, as we have since moved, I am still getting them in the forwarded post. You would have thought the post room would have been a little more careful after two weeks of getting returned mail. But no, still, I am getting strange things meant not from my eyes. So, in a fit of defiance, I began opening them. And here’s what I found. So far, Jon Snow has had an invitation of champagne and canapes at the launch of Nancy DeLullio’s new book, one which we didn’t think he’d be too interested in, so Shaq is going to go instead. He has also had the following letter, which was photocopied. The handwriting was one I’d seen on many of the envelopes I’d sent back, so presumably he gets this one every day. I’ve just saved him the bother today. I’ve replicated the grammar and use of punctuation no matter how much I want to correct it. America. It’s the way of the dragon, not return of the dragon. It’s Fist of Fury, not the Chinese connection. It’s The Big Boss, not Fists of Fury. The movies of Bruce Lee. It is like all of your heads are upside down. Put the movies of Bruce Lee as every other country is in the world and you are all sorted. John from England. But it’s not just John Snow’s getting fan mail. This was to a younger presenter named Andrea. Dear Andrea, can you send me a signed photo as I’ve taken up the pipe and I love it. Can you sign your photo to Pipe Man Steve, please? I do recommend a pipe to all including woman. Can you send me your signed photo signed to Pipe Man Steve? Thank you so much for all your time. Yours sincerely, Steve. Not entirely sure why mentalists don’t know how to use full stops and other fun bits of punctuation, but obviously they’ve had one too many pipes to bother with it.

So, when you sent this to me, there was a little note that you wrote with it. You said, this is from my penultimate day working in an office job. The next entry stroke day was basically fuck, fuck, fuck. They have the audacity to make us all redundant and not even fire me over anything exciting to write about. So explain, tell all.

This was the job where I met Nick and it was an absolutely terrible radio station. It was a terrible idea. It was terrible music. It was all very middle of the road. We had a million pounds and the joke between our little friendship group has always been that we drunk a million pounds because we were doing our best, but nothing was happening anyway. I was the marketing assistant and as you can tell, I basically spent my whole time opening other people’s letters. And yeah, it was in the basement of the ITN building and we were just ignored. I think we had just been completely forgotten about.

So were you in at the beginning of this station?

Yeah, yeah.

Until the end?

Yeah, which was about nine months. And we had a good laugh amongst ourselves and it was, you know, really nice, but yeah, we all knew the station was going nowhere and wasn’t really anything inspirational. But I think I learned a lot about marketing.

Which was to come in useful in my subsequent career.

Exactly, transferable skills, Laura, isn’t it? And yeah, we just didn’t really, we tried, like, it’s not like, oh, we just sat and did nothing, but we just couldn’t get anywhere. So in the latter weeks, we were told basically that we’d all be made redundant. And that was the last office job I ever had.

How many office jobs did you have?

I’ve been working since I was 16, but it was all like in terrible call centres. And because I grew up in a very small town, I grew up in Dorset. And so it was the only jobs there were things like call centres. Every morning you wake up thinking, oh, God, I hope the bus crashes and I get six months in hospital. That would be dandy, you know. So we got, you know, with this one, this was my first job in London. And because I’m big and bubbly and like this on the phone and like, hi, welcome. They said, would you like to be the marketing assistant for this new radio station?

So this was the last proper job, inverted commas, that you had. So what changed between the end of this and the beginning of your sex working?

It was a sheer frustration. So I didn’t know what else I could do. So I’d gotten into this job because I’d started at the station doing work experience and I worked my bum off. I, you know, I made it really clear that I wanted a job and got to, got interviewed for the, the marketing assistant role because of that, but I get very stereotyped sometimes. I think as a larger woman, I think it’s very easy for people to think that, you know, just because you’re fat, you’re therefore lazy and stupid. So maybe that’s just my paranoia, but that always kind of works against me. And then I was living in a really terrible little, like one of those tiny shoebox flats in a HMO kind of deal and it was horrible. I wanted out and I also didn’t really have that many friends. So I started looking online, like to find a boyfriend, you know, someone I could go out with or, you know, someone I could just go out to the cinema with. I was at that stage. And that was when I kind of found this whole scene, like this whole sort of fetish scene of BBW, big, beautiful women, they called it, and plus size women. And it was all very fetishized and everything. And I was like a kid in a candy shop at first, like, I’m not going to lie, I went straight in there. I was like, this is the first time someone has said they found my body attractive. I am on it, like a carb on it. But after a while, I found that nothing was happening. There was no relationships being built. I wasn’t getting any satisfactory kind of even a friendship. And I realized that it just came down to sex. And one night I was just like, when we were being told that we were being made redundant, my redundancy package was absolutely abysmal, and I didn’t know what else I was going to do. And it was just sheer desperation of looking online to see whether there was such a thing as plus size escorts. And there was! And they were getting paid a fortune. And I was like, these women are getting paid for something that I’ve been doing for free for the past six months. And that was it. It was just like the knowledge that was going to be fired, the hatred of where I was living, the hatred of being used and knowing that I could have sex with men and I could have a great time and they could really enjoy my body and I could really enjoy having time with them. And I could get paid, I could get my rent paid, I could move out, I could use this money to do something else with my life. And yeah, it started from there. I put up a listing, like there’s different listing sites. And at the time when I started working, there was only about 12 plus size women in the whole of the UK who were working as escorts.

Wow, good odds. Exactly.

Oh my god, like it was an absolute dream. It was brilliant. And as soon as I put my details up, I got an appointment basically, someone asked me to go to an appointment and I did and I got paid. And I was over the moon.

Sorry, are they called appointments?

Yes.

That’s the official terminology.

Yeah.

That sounds like a doctor’s.

I know. Well, that’s where the psychology works there, you see, Laura, because I call it a booking or an appointment because it makes them know that they can’t turn up early and they can’t turn up late. They’ve got a one hour, two hour slot and it is like a doctor’s, you know, loads of guys are like, oh, why do I have to turn up? And it’s like, because you’ve got this time, I might be seeing someone before you or I might just be in my pants playing Super Mario Brothers. But, you know.

Yes, you’re a working woman and your time is valuable like everybody else’s.

Exactly. So, and I started doing out calls and I do it at hotels. So, I wasn’t having to go to someone’s house. I knew that I was safe in a hotel because I could call them and make sure that they were in the room that they specified. And I knew that there were people around and I have got a voice on me, you know. And also, I’ve got the type of body that it takes a big effort to cut up into little bin bags. So, they have to be really determined, you know. So, I just took advantage of that and I just started booking out calls and seeing guys and having a great time. I was 22 in London, I was going out to SoHo every night, I was making new friends, I was really, really enjoying myself.

Let’s move on to the next Offcut. So, tell us about this one, please.

So, this is a writing sample that became Crossbones and that’s a show that I wrote for Edinburgh in 2017.

The parish of St. Marie-Auverie in the year of our Lord 1163 is delighted to announce that Mrs. Crabapple of Dewsbury Lane has won this month’s Tombola and will be receiving a hamper of turnips just as soon as a hamper is invented. Regular parishioners will be aware that last weekend was our first inaugural Family Fun Day on the banks of the Thames. What a joy to see the children of Southwark making the most of poverty, their faces lit up as they made mud men, mud angels, played mud and ladders, and the classic pin the mud on the mud. However, sad to say this did not raise as much funds for the church roof as we were hoping and the parish committee have decided we take the situation firmly by the hands and shake it up until the good burghers of Southwark have discharged enough to fill a hoard. And after a lifetime of chastity, the nuns of St. Mary’s could not have been more keen to get on their knees in the service of the Lord and receive his great succor. As you all know, our newer novices have made vows to relinquish their sinful past, but we would like to assure all parishioners that we will be encouraging them to revive it again forthwith. For our more ardent sinners, Sister Mary Angela is doing great work in the vestry and guarantees all a fitful punishment at a very reasonable rate. And whilst the abbess herself has been as busy as ever, she has assured me that she will be continuing to spread herself around the missionary. However, we have found it very difficult to cater towards some requests, particularly when it involved someone going up the aisle. But we found a willing volunteer who will be available at extremely competitive rates, and so we thank Mr. Harrison for his service. As the verger of St. Mary’s, Mr. Harrison has proven time and again he knows his way around a big organ. And now let us raise our voices as we sing, Arise all ye unto the hands of the Lord.

So Crossbones, was this your first show that you did at Edinburgh?

No, this was just sort of like a brain fart writing sample. So the first show that I did for Edinburgh was The Coin Operated Girl. And that was just me, again, standing in a room talking about sex work, my life, how I started, the weird appointments. I did a top 10 at the end of what the most asked for appointments were. And it was just fun. And I did a Q&A and it was really good fun. And it was my first experience of going up to Edinburgh. It was my first experience of writing a show. And that was where I learnt more about what I wanted to do. And because I get sex workers who would come up to me afterwards and say, this is it, this is my story. I’m so tired of seeing us like either bedraggled victims or as these high class escorts. And it was like, this is it. This is what I want to do when it comes to writing about sex work. I want to talk about the average person just trying to make a living who’s not high class. They’re living with a flatmate or they’re living in a one bedroom flat. They’re just trying to get by and that’s what their money’s going towards. Because a few years into it, a friend of mine who is a sex worker activist, unfortunately, she passed away. That’s where I learned about this place called Crossbones and it’s a graveyard in Southwark. That was where the women who were prostitutes for the Bishop of Winchester were buried. They were buried in this unconsecrated scrap of ground that was laid undiscovered for years and years and years until it was discovered quite recently in the 80s. That was when I learned about the Winchester geese. They were these women that worked for the Bishop of Winchester and he prostituted them out in the stews of London on the banks of the Thames. They had these really insane laws and what a lot of sex workers would do when one of us passed away, like you get a lot of sex workers where you don’t know their real names, you don’t know where they live or anything like that. So vigils are held at crossbones at the cemetery for them. And it’s so beautiful. There’s this gate with all these ribbons flying on it and all these totems and all these names and when you hear about a sex worker dying, a lot of people will have a vigil there and they do a vigil on the 23rd of the month, every month, just for the women who were buried there. And this seemed like such a beautiful story and I wanted to write about it, but obviously I didn’t know anything about it. So the sort of parish notices is a bit of a hack. It’s a bit of a trite thing to do, but it was just a way to start with this very black adder idea of mud on the mud on the mud and then just work in the women that are being prostituted by the church. So it was just like a brain fart. And then, you know, it just made me laugh. It made me giggle a bit. And it made me realize that I did want to write about it. And I did think that I could do it in a funny, but touching way. And in a way that held significance. I always feel when I talk about sex work and when I get to write a show about sex work and I get to be funny about it, I feel like there’s a price to pay. I feel like I want to honor the women who have done it before. And for me, Crossbones was a way to do that. And so I wrote this small show. It’s only supposed to be just, I did it in a room full of 15 people every day. And that was perfect. That was all I wanted. I wanted people to come because they wanted to know the story and they wanted to know about these women. And they wanted to know about the weird laws and how that still reflects in sex work today. And just to keep it very respectful, yeah.

OK, let’s move on to your next offcut. What’s this one then?

This is a pitch document for a TV series, which I wrote in 2018 called The Archers.

The Archers, the lives, loves and melodramas in the war zone of competitive field archery. The Archers is an original comedy drama written by Miranda Kane, starring some of the UK’s best up and coming comedic talents and featuring the finest rural countryside England has to offer. It’s a deadly detectorists with murder, deadly weapons and the ongoing battle of socialism versus capitalism at its heart, but with a slight detour into live action role play. Synopsis. Charlie Saunders is the southwest area representative for the Great British Archery Association, a title she barely remembers she has after taking the mantle up years before, simply because no one else was at the meeting. However, she is woken in the middle of the night with the news that the Toll Puddle Bowman’s team Clubhouse has been set ablaze and a body has been found inside with an arrow through its heart. This starts her journey into meeting the Toll Puddle Bowman and their possibly deadly enemies, the City Compounds, in the hopes of clearing the name of the grand sport of archery. The Toll Puddles are a ragtag bunch of village oddballs headed up by the earnest Atticus Pendragon, who flies his red flag high. He is joined by Fiona, a socially awkward geek who continually tries to excuse her existence, unless she’s wearing elf ears and fighting imaginary dragons with dice. There is also Spencer, the most eccentric of the bunch, who would be happy to paint his body blue and cry havoc just to get milk from Tesco. In complete contrast, the Compounds are aloof and hard-hearted, haughty in their dislike of the village and its idiots. They’re from a nearby city and believe their fancy and expensive equipment is what archery needs to keep the riffraff out. Their leader is the impeccable Liza, meticulous, refined, and has definitely shot humans at Bilderberg group meetings. Whilst Atticus is fighting for freedom and democracy for all, Liza is subtly marking her territory and hoping this turn of events will be what she needs to take over the toll puddle shooting range for herself. In the meantime, Charlie has to keep both teams under control as well as ease the fears of the GBA, the press, the village Bobby and the community at large. Can she hit her targets or will she be left a quivering wreck?

Well done on the puns there. Excellent punnery in the last couple of lines. I have to ask why archery?

I love it. I love it. I’ve done archery for you.

You’re an archer.

I’m a secret archer.

Wow, that’s unexpected. You’re an archer.

I’m an archer. I’ve got a 40 pound recurve bow. Sightless. I’ll have you know.

I don’t know what that means.

Don’t worry. It is one of those sports where you can get so geeky about it. Yeah, no, I’ve done it ever since. Like I said, I grew up in Dorset. So I was one of the Lichit Bowmen. There was an archery team in Lichit McTravers that I used to go to every Tuesday, shoots arrows. And it was just, it’s just gorgeous. It’s just such a lovely sport.

How old were you when you started arching?

I was 18, I think. Oh, right.

So you’re an adult.

No, I’ve done those same kind of things, you know, when you’re a kid or even when you’re an adult and you go to those away days and there’s always archery involved, like, can you shoot one of the balloons on a target and you feel like, yes, I’m Robin Hood. I can do this. And so, yeah, so I did that as like a kid and I always wanted to do it. And then I think a friend of mine, she could drive. So we just wanted to do something to get out in the open. And we found that there was this little little archery team in Lichwood Metravers that we joined and they were really nice. And this is the thing about archery, it’s a very solo sport, but everyone is really helpful. Everyone’s really connected. Everyone really wants you to do your best.

And you’re archery, you’re archery, you’re shooting arrows. What is the verb for archery?

I think it’s just, I just say I’m just doing a bit of archery. I still haven’t figured out the language. I always just say I’m going off shooting arrows, you know, which makes it sound cool.

It’s pretty cool anyway. You could actually kill a man. That’s always a cool thing.

It is. I like to think so. I’m ready for the zombie apocalypse. That’s one of the many reasons. Oh yeah.

Oh my God, you’d be the best person.

Yeah, yeah, I’m ready. I’m ready.

But this particular TV series that you were pitching, I presume you were going to play the lead of the middle man, middle woman?

No, I hadn’t really like put myself in there. If anything, at the time I was going to, I wanted to do Fiona, the one that was a LARPA and running around.

The one who’s the assistant, the second in command.

Yes. Yeah, the one that was, you know, a bit shy and everything. So I, it wasn’t one where I’d put myself in there, really. It was one that I’d put, I’d put all my friends in there, like I could totally give you the cast. It was all these people that I knew, that I was thinking of anyway, but yeah, it was just supposed to be something fun. Is that, it’s, that’s the one that I’ve got on my desktop that pops out between May to July when I’m looking out the window and it’s lovely and sunny outside. And I’ve just got these ideas of being back in the Dorset countryside and in the middle of a field watching people shooting arrows and being able to like, you know, play archery whilst you’re filming. Oh, beautiful. Love that.

Could you not, speaking from the writing point of view, could you not write, I don’t know, either an audio drama about it or audio comedy about it or even a novel about it seeing as you know so much about it and you have ideas?

Yeah, I’d loved it like that’s a that is a really good idea but I think for me it was always sort of about the countryside like again there’s also the Detectorist like that. Oh god, I love that series so much and seeing all the beautiful countryside. But you know, I’ve got so many bits of scripts that I’ve written just, you know, bits of random script, you just think of a scene and I’ve got so many bits like that on my computer and on various hard drives, I might just try and squish it together and put it in an audio thing and see if anyone’s interested.

It’s just a means to an end, isn’t it? You know, if it turns out to be successful, people go, oh, we can make a TV series out of that.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

But if that’s your, because I just have a vision of a novel or an audio series where an ex-sex worker retires to run an archery school in Dorset or something, or having created this some kind of archery business, a massive sort of conglomerate of archery related products, I don’t know, but two particularly odd bedfellows, so to speak, archery and sex work, but it just seems that way you could live your dream.

Well, they both, yeah, I mean, they both involve a lot of pricks, so absolutely.

Have you said that before? No, have you not?

No, you’re the only one that’s put the sex work and the archery together.

I think we’re moving on to something.

I think this is it.

The pricks connection.

Anyway, let’s move on.

Let’s move away from the archery and the pricks. And we’ve come to your final offcut. So tell us about this one, please.

This is called I Won’t Do That and is an audio comedy I wrote near the beginning of the pandemic in April 2020.

Hello and welcome to But I Won’t Do That, a new podcast where I, Miranda Kane, will use my entrepreneurial skills to try and earn a fiver off you, the public, by any means necessary.

Yeah, socially distanced. Remember to say you’ll do it like that.

Quite right. Hello and welcome to But I Won’t Do That, a new podcast where I, Miranda Kane, will try and earn a responsibly socially distanced fiver by any means necessary. And say why. What do you mean why?

Why do you want a fiver for doing stuff?

Because I’m skint.

But why a fiver?

Because we’re all skint. Well, unless you’re a tall one.

But why you?

Because I used to be a, you know, and frankly in a world where we can’t touch each other up, I need to use other ways of making a quick bit of cash. Is that OK? Can we just get on with it now?

Go from the top.

Hello and welcome to…

Have you not considered just getting a job?

Yes, thank you. Just press record.

Or getting up before ten o’clock?

Hello and welcome to…

I will give you a fiver right now if you get up tomorrow at eight.

Anyone is welcome to hire me for whatever they wish, be it going shopping for them, reading a bedtime story…

What about eight hours stacking shelves? You could do that for more than a fiver.

Presenting podcasts, writing jokes.

Is this because you got rejected from Cameo?

I did not get rejected from Cameo.

I’m just trying to help you out here.

Thank you very much. I’m very grateful. Thanks.

This was very interesting because the thing that struck me was that bit of conversation where he says, have you ever thought of getting a job? And I got the feeling that that’s probably a conversation you’ve had quite a lot of times against your will. A lot of people say to you, yeah, but have you ever thought about getting a job? Because you do actually earn quite a decent money. And I get the feeling that you’re just so sick of people saying that to you. Is that true? Am I correct in my assumption?

Yeah, I think that’s fair. Yeah, now I’ve looked back at my life and realised that the last time I did have a proper job was in 2007. Yeah, it is weird because my, like I said, like this kind of small town mentality, being able to have your own job and being able to work from home, like before pandemic, being able to be self-employed and sort of living hand to mouth and in these really creative ways where you’re the person who’s making the job. My family just don’t really understand it, I think. And also like friends of mine, when I’m trying to tell them that actually doing the work, if I stand on stage, that bit is the easy part. If I’m standing on stage or if I’m doing some writing, that’s great. The hard part is doing the pitching, is convincing someone that I should be on their stage, is doing the work with the admin that goes round it. That’s what I’m earning the money for, you know. And that is where I also panic and think, God, do you know what? What if I just got a job? What if I just work nine to five and I could leave everything at five o’clock and I wouldn’t have to keep checking my emails over the weekend?

Run an archery field.

I can run an archery field.

That’s what I think you should do. That would be the best of both worlds.

I didn’t think I’d be able to mix archery with my weird kind of self-employment. But now, I think that’s perfect. Absolutely.

Well, you could run an archery field and look out from your office desk where you’re writing your next script. You’ll be writing that. You’ll be watching everybody shooting their arrows in your field. So you’d sort of be self-employed, but you’d also have the security. Sorry, I sounded like your mother now. A mother. Darling, darling, just buy yourself a little bit of security. No, I didn’t mean it either. But I got the feeling, because when, as a fellow creative, you get people going, why don’t you get a proper job? To be honest, they don’t do that for very long, because I’m quite aggressive and unpleasant. So I think they just walk away eventually. But in your case, I would have thought that the sex work, rather than the writer-performer, I wondered if that was the thing that people went, yeah, but wouldn’t it be better if you had a proper job? Be safer or no?

The sex work, because people just didn’t ask me, because people had an inkling, but they just didn’t want to know. Do you know what I mean? It wasn’t those things where it’s like, so are you actually a dominatrix? What is going on there? Because I know you said it at the pub a couple of times, but I just thought you were joking. You are joking, though. They don’t really delve into it. But saying that I write about being a sex worker, or I write about how I used to be, people are still convinced that I’m still a sex worker. So they’ll be like, are you still doing it? And I’m like, no, I’m 40. No.

That must be really annoying, especially when you’re so established now as a writer or performer. But actually, surely age isn’t a barrier if you did want to go back to doing it, though.

Honestly, you can do it anytime. I mean, if anything, it’s my retirement plan. There is a niche market out there for everyone and everything. But also things have changed in the field. Nowadays, you’ve got OnlyFans. I can’t be bothered with all that. I want to be able to put up an advert back in the day. You used to be able to put up your website, say, this is what I do, this is what I don’t do, this is how much I charge, here’s my telephone number, take it or leave it. Nowadays, it’s all, oh, here’s my 30 seconds on OnlyFans, here’s my bit of free content, here’s my Twitter feed, which could get taken down at any moment. That’s what it takes to be a sex worker these days.

Really? Oh my goodness, that’s so interesting. That’s the most difficult part of being a creative or whatever, having a podcast, as I’m sure you know, just the Twitter feeds and the Facebook pages and the Instagrams. It’s difficult enough coming up with this and editing it and putting it out, and then I’ve got to spend even more time marketing it. So I would have thought the sex thing, people surely don’t need that publicising. Surely the actual act itself is enough. People, in fact, don’t want it advertised, do they?

No, yeah, it’s still exactly the same. You’ve got to put your content out there. You’ve got to be known. And also, like, we’ve had the pandemic, so people flooded onto things like OnlyFans thinking, oh, if I just put a picture of my feet up, then people are going to love it and give me loads of money. But you’ve got to advertise. You’ve got to market. It’s always been the same. It’s still in sex work. You’ve still got to advertise yourself, and you’ve still got to market yourself. That’s how I learnt about it. I started off with this marketing assistant job where I got an inkling, and I learnt how to make press releases and what content to use and da, and how to do search engine optimisation.

You didn’t. You search engine optimised your sex worker site. Keywords and things like that. You did keywords.

Yeah. I did meta tags. I did everything. I was in there like swimwear, Laura. I was on it.

I am so impressed. If I had a hat, I would be doffing it right now. High five virtually. Virtual high five there.

But nowadays it’s so different. Like that, that would have been, that was great like 10 years ago. But nowadays, you know, to get on top score of Google, like people aren’t even looking at Google anymore. They’re just going on to Instagram and OnlyFans and Twitter and using all these sites. And the problem with these sites is that any day, you could be earning like a million pounds a day. You put in your picture of your fee or whatever on there and you’re earning a million pounds a day. And then one day, someone in Silicon Valley says, oh, we’ve had enough of this. Let’s clean up shop and we’ll get rid of all these naughty people and make sure that it’s only for the celebrities. And boom, you’ve lost your whole income stream because they’ve just made one little change to their terms of service.

But don’t you have, sorry, is this not, of all businesses, a business where you can get word of mouth or repeat customers?

It is. If you’re, if you’re, if you’re.

I’m sorry, I’m getting out of becoming your mother.

If you are, there are some people who are very good with their customers. I was not, as you may have heard in the first clip.

But I thought that was for comedy purposes. There was actually a bit of documentary evidence, wasn’t it?

I had very, I had a few regulars and they were very nice, but I wasn’t putting all my eggs in their basket, shall we say. I’m very clinical with people. But some women, that’s how they work. Like I used to know someone who, she never had a website or anything. She just had a separate mobile phone to the one she used. And it was just all word of mouth and repeat customers. But for me, nah.

So in that case, there is a need to keep advertising, I suppose, that’s a shame. Fascinating stuff. Absolutely fascinating. All right, well, we’ve come to the end of the show. How was it for you?

Oh, this has been, honestly, I’ve really enjoyed hearing all the work, because sometimes you just don’t know whether it will work out loud. Like I can see it on paper, but to hear it being played, and also because a couple of them were bits that I’ve written for myself, so I know how I want it to be said, but to hear it being played back has been a real joy. And also just to get the inspiration, like there were some things when I was digging around, and I was like, God, I really do want to get back to this. I really do think there is an idea here. And like you said about doing it in a different way, you know, maybe there’s a novels, maybe there’s an audio thing. So it’s been a real joy to talk about it and just to put those things out there and to know they won’t die on my laptop and never see the light of day.

Did you hear anything that surprised you at all about your writing or your creativity or any of your ideas?

Yeah, I…

You can say no, by the way. You can say no, I knew exactly what I was doing when I got with you and I heard exactly what I expected to hear.

Yeah, I think I’m surprised that I heard what I heard in my head, if that makes sense. And that’s why I think I rely on writing for myself to do things, because I think, well, I know what I’m trying to say. I know how I’m supposed to say it here. And so it has really surprised me that the wonderful actors have interpreted that and have seen what I was trying to say and said it in the way that I was trying to say it. And I know you can say, well, that’s because like italics and all this, but it’s there’s just something in it like, you know, the pauses and the gaps and getting it is such a wonderful thing to hear. Yeah, maybe I can start writing for other people rather than trying to get my own fucking face on television all the time. So I might try that in the future.

And then you can sit in your archery field and shoot people from afar and make lots of money.

Yes.

Well, well, that’s it really. Thank you very much for doing that. And thank you for sharing your offcuts and your life story with me and the listener.

Oh, thank you. I’m so honestly, this has been such an honour. And, you know, to have anyone read and perform your work is always such an honor anyway. So, you know, but for it to be bits that have just sort of been lost in time and forgotten about has been so nice and really inspirational as well. So thank you so much.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Miranda Kane. The Offcuts were performed by Chris Pavlo, Bhavnisha Parmar and Emma Clarke, and the music was by me. For more details, visit offcutsdrawer.com, and please do subscribe, rate and review us, and recommend us to friends. Thanks for listening.

11 or 12, I used to be commissioned to write love songs.

By whom?

By my friends, and I started this service called Isy and Joe’s Dating Agency with my best friend, Jo, and girls would come to us and say, I fancy this guy, he’s got brown hair, he’s got blue eyes, and he likes Port Valel football team. And then I’d write a song about this boy, and then we’d somehow get him a cassette tape recording of the song or perform it to him in an attempt to make him go out with the girl. But unfortunately, we were 100% unsuccessful.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity pave the way to subsequent success. On today’s show, comedian, actor, and writer Isy Suttie shares the contents of her Offcuts Draw. And it’s an interesting mix that includes some teenage angst, a bit of stand-up comedy drama, and an outtake from her recent first novel, Jane Is Trying. Isy originally trained as an actor and started performing stand-up in 2002. She’s won three comedy awards, written and starred in her own BBC radio serieses, but she’s probably best known for one of her many TV acting roles, in this case playing Dobby in Channel 4’s hit series, Peep Show. Her stand-up involved performing comedy songs, which she’d been writing since she was 12. And when I chatted to her, we compared notes about our respective musical educations.

Weirdly, I went to a school where there was quite a lot of emphasis on performance. And I was in choir and everything, but I didn’t do music at GCSE or A-level. I don’t really know. I think I was just so into playing the guitar and writing music. I sort of didn’t care so much about theory or kind of more structural side of it, I suppose.

I learned the piano and I loved it. And then I got to about 12, 13 and thought, I don’t need this. I’m going to write my own songs. And I never want to look at another piece of music ever again. Yes. So constantly I was stuck at grade five. That’s as far as I ever got.

That’s interesting. So I got to grade four piano, sort of for that reason as well. I think I was just like, right, I’ve done it now. I want to move on. I don’t want to fight to get to kind of grade seven or eight. Like, yeah.

I want to express myself.

That’s the important thing.

Not these old dead people. That’s what I want to be a play. Okay, well, let’s get started with your first off-cut. Can you tell us what it’s called, when it was written and what genre it was written for?

So this is from April, 2016. And it’s a radio script for a show called Annie’s Hall.

All right. I’m Annie. You’re inside my head here in my every thought. Usually thoughts like, biscuit, biscuit, biscuit, pint, biscuit, biscuit, wee, bed. Oh, go on then. One more biscuit. Oh, go on then. One more wee, bed. It’s nice and warm here in my head. Go on, nestle between my squidgy old brain and me right ear drum while I walk to work. Actually don’t, that’s a bit gross. Oh, hang on. What’s the umbrella etiquette these days, over or under? Monocled crustacean approaching fast with ridiculously oversized umbrella, probably free from his golf club. Me, wimpy little thing from boots, more like a dopey baby bat. Don’t think I’m going under just because I’m a girl, sir. In fact, I’ll go over just to prove a point.

There we go.

Just took approximately 40 leaves off that hedge.

Worth it.

Don’t let the idiots grind you down, like me dad used to say, amongst other things like eat your greens and now leave me alone, I’m grouting. We died two years ago, which is why I came back to Derwent from the bright lights of Derby. Oh, don’t worry, you weren’t to know. I’m out of that stage where I can use dad going as an excuse to slop around in tracky bottoms, scoffing angel delight and watching terrible TV. I’ve never needed an excuse for that. In case you’re wondering, this is what dad sounded like.

Annie, do not go down that slide without supervision. You’re so stubborn. I hope that’s peanut butter in your hair and not…

Ah, that memory’s from when I was 10. Here’s another from the archives.

You’re the greatest daughter anyone could wish for. No one should ever have any more children because they’ll never be as good as you. I cannot vouch for the truthfulness of this memory. It might have been made up by Annie.

Dad left me with two things, asthma and an old hole. The asthma’s a walk in the park, a slow walk, mind, compared to the hole. The hole’s been in our family for generations. Mum and dad got married in it. They even spent their retirement sealing up mouse holes and trying to persuade the local WI group not to do seances in the men’s loos.

When I pop off, I’m going to leave you the hole, dad said. It’s not much to look at, but nor’s its new owner, he quipped.

That’s you, he helpfully elaborated.

Your mum’d only mess it up. She tries to put cassette tapes into the DVD player. But you, Annie, you’re sturdy. Not in a bad way. You’re like a beech tree or a fish slice. Just there. Dependable. You’re not going anywhere. Now, leave me alone. I’m grouting.

I really like this piece. Tell me about it. What was the plan with it?

Thanks. It’s so nice to hear it done. Because when I wrote it, I imagined that I might play Annie. And it wasn’t actually that long after my dad had died. It was what was sort of five years afterwards, but it doesn’t actually seem that long. And it’s absolutely lovely to hear other people do it. I wrote it after I went away for a kind of residential with some other women to a beautiful kind of hall.

When you say residential, you’re talking, what does that mean? Like a residential course or just for on a holiday?

No, it was organized by Radio 4 or the comedy department. And it was a kind of, basically people came in and talked to us about who’d had very successful series on radio and talked to us about how they wrote it. And there were lots of different workshops and things like that. And at the end, we all had to pitch our ideas, which we thought of, I think it was a few days that we were away at least a couple of nights. And I thought of the title Annie’s Hall, which was a pun on Annie Hall. Yeah. So yes, I think I might have thought of the title before the premise, which sometimes isn’t brilliant. I remember doing that with bands at school, sort of thinking of the title of the band and what our album would be called and what the art work would be like and all having big arguments about it before we’d even written a single song. So I sort of had to think about what is it about? And then I like with radio the fact that it’s different from something visual in this way, isn’t it? That you can have the dad just coming in and talking. And because at those points, you’re in Annie’s head and this script goes on to her in scenes, doesn’t it, interacting with people like a normal sitcom, I suppose. But you have got these monologues and you can hear her dad talking. And I really liked the freedom that it gave me to be able to do that. Whereas obviously with telly, it’s a little bit more tricky to do something like that. Do you have this disembodied head of the father appearing, talking or? Yeah, so, yeah, I learned an awful lot from writing it. I was very nervous pitching it and they did commission this pilot. Oh wow, did you get made then? Didn’t get made. So they commissioned me to write the pilot and then I have it in and then it didn’t get made. It didn’t, you know, it was so many things do you get rejected. I don’t know, I don’t remember what the reason was, but it would have been lovely. Was it already, had you, in my head I cast myself as Annie. I think I, yeah, I think I’d, without asking him, had cast Chris Addison as Ben, who’s Annie’s love interest. And then I wanted, then there’s Meg. I think I could have played Meg as well, who’s a bit ditzy as she works with Annie in the hall. I would have been happy for someone else to play Annie. I would have stood aside. Would you? Yeah, I think I would actually. I think in my earlier days, I sort of couldn’t imagine writing stuff for the people, not because I wanted to star in everything necessarily, but that I wrote, but because I just was kind of stretching. It felt too much of a stretch or too much of a jump. And I think as time’s gone on, I feel more able to, and that I would like to write stuff for the people that I wouldn’t be in. But I think at that point, it was, yeah, it was too much of a jump to.

So was all the early writing that you did, was it all to be performed by yourself, would you say? Or did you ever write anything before this that might have been for other people?

I think it was all to be performed by me because something that we’re gonna have a bit later, I would have been into, because it was based on my Edinburgh show. A lot of things came off the back of Edinburgh shows, which were standup and character stuff that I’d written and performed. So, but the only time that when I worked on skins, that wasn’t for me. So I used to be kind of in the comedy team on skins. So looking at, didn’t write any scripts.

So you punch it up, so to speak. They showed you the scripts and you went, here’s a funny line you could put in here.

Yeah, and then sometimes it was, I mean, skins is an interesting one, because sometimes they had very serious storylines and quite harrowing stuff that you didn’t feel, you felt like it would be kind of bursting the bubble if someone slipped on a banana skin in the middle of this scene. So it was just completely inappropriate. It would kind of take all the heat out of this moment. And then at other times it was quite cartoon-like and there were kind of very silly bits and that was what I really liked about it. You never really knew.

Well, I noticed they did seem to employ mainly comedians for the adult parts. So I was thinking there’s Harry Enfield and there’s Chris Addison.

Yes, that’s true. I think I had Arabella Weir was in it. Yeah, you’re right.

More Wenner Banks and yeah. So I figured you could sort of spot the comedy potential there, but they actually brought you and you were, what was your title?

My title was comedy consultant, which sounds so grand. And the other thing is that there were proper writing rooms like in America and I haven’t really seen that much over here, but then I don’t really write very much on telly shows and that might have changed now, but it felt like a new thing. And the writer of that episode would get up and talk about their idea and we’d go into such detail. And yeah, it was learnt so much. Couldn’t believe the amount of prep that went in before they put pen to paper.

Well, it was a very good series. I must admit, I very much enjoyed it once I got over the shock of going, Harry Enfield playing a serious part. I don’t believe that for a second, but okay. Well, let’s move on to your next off-cut. What is that one, please?

These are poems that I wrote when I was a teenager.

A friend, you want to be everything, and I want to be something. You want to be everybody, and I just want to be somebody. The bright lights, the music, the adrenaline rush. We all experience it, but only some can feel it. That to me is a flashback of my life. That to you is yesterday’s dinner. Someone successful gives it their all. You’re just thinking about some lad that you met in Regent House yesterday. He had long hair and liked pulp. And what’s the bet that so did you? Or the other one from Sheffield Station who was in the Army and into Bobby Brown. What’s the bet that so were you? Or the sexists, the racists, and the fascist jerks that you twisted your views to accommodate. You want to be liked by everybody, and I want to be liked by somebody. You.

Energy. If trees were made of plastic, if grass from elastic, I could never stop liking you. If poison blocked the way, if clothes began to fray, I could never stop liking you. If beautiful people were a lie, if someone found the top of the sky, if centuries passed by, we were unable to cry. If hyenas could laugh no more, if everybody was poor, if there was no law, I could never like you more. If books made no sense, if barriers were too dense, if people stopped talking our language, if they pledged to ban the sandwich, if everyone was a thug, if electricity was unplugged, I could never ever like you more. If the world stopped turning, if the world started burning, if you were crying, if you were dying, I could never ever love you.

Thank you A misdirection there, in typical comedian fashion. That’s a surprise punchline.

I think you’re very generous. I think that’s so badly written on the whole.

How old were you when you wrote them?

Not badly written, that’s a bit hard on myself. I just think they’re so affected in places. I was probably about 14 or 15, and I know that, because around that age, I became obsessed with people being false and fake. I think that’s reflected in, especially the first one.

Yeah, your friend who was a bit of a goer.

Yes, yes.

Who in my eyes kind of changed herself to accommodate fascists’ views. I didn’t even know what the word fascist meant. I think looking at early poetry, probably from other people as well, is often funny because it’s like a reflection of often the anger that you feel as a teenager. I felt that especially being in a small town that I deemed to be quite boring and now know to be very beautiful, but I didn’t appreciate it at the time. And sort of the writer that you want to be, that you desperately want to be, but that you can’t be yet because you haven’t really experienced life. So it becomes this sort of amalgamation of this frustration and then this affectation that I find actually sort of quite endearing to look back on and they weren’t nice to hear in a way, but I have to say I am glad that my writing has moved on from that stage.

So would you say that you wanted to be a writer at that point? Were you trying to be a writer?

I was definitely trying. What I wanted to do, I always said I wanted to act. Ever since I could speak, I think there was absolutely never any other plan apart from there were about two weeks where I got into Wimbledon and decided to be a tennis champion, then played tennis. Really got so cross with my parents for the fact they hadn’t recognised this talent in me, despite the fact that I’d never played tennis. Decided to go every day at 6am to catch up on miss time. And that was at age 13. And then I went once and hated it and was awful. And then said, okay, well, I’ll be an actress then. That’ll be easier. So yeah, I always wanted to go to drama school, always wanted to go to London. And then as I got older and when I started to write songs, which was when I was about 11 or 12 and play the guitar, then it kind of expanded into, I want to write things as well as perform. So it was initially just acting. And then I used to write kind of little sketches and things with my sister when I was little. So yeah, I think it was kind of-

Was it a family thing though? I mean, I know your mother was a musical person and also you quote her sometimes in your act, you read funny letters that she’s written. Although does she know she’s being funny?

It’s half and half. So she’s got a great sense of humor. And my dad had a great sense of humor as well. And they were very funny together in different ways. He was quite dry and had quite a sort of warped sense of humor, whereas she’s a bit more naive and odd. They went very well together. So there’s a naivety there. She doesn’t know that she’s being funny. And then at times I’ve had to say to her, can you write me? When I used to put her letters in my Edinburgh shows and things, I used to sometimes say, you need to write me another 10 minutes. I’ve only got 50 minutes and it’s August in two days. So then she can quite quickly produce them as well. But I always think they’re a bit funnier when she doesn’t write them with a view to them being performed. Yeah. My sister isn’t a performer. She’s got a kind of proper job, as they say, but she’s still a very creative person and she’s also funny. And my mum played a lot of instruments when we were growing up. So there was definitely a freedom in the house, I suppose, too. There was often a lot of laughter. That was the main thing, yeah.

And there was no condemnation or discouragement about being a performer or a creator.

No, not at all. And actually, mum had got into East 15 drama school when she was about 20 and then for various reasons, didn’t go and became a nurse, which she enjoyed. But I think it wasn’t like she was like, you go and pursue the dream that I had. But she definitely had it in her blood. My dad’s auntie, who was very dear to me, who passed away recently, she was in her 90s when she passed away and she wrote comic songs as well and performed them with her friend. I think on both sides, there’s been this, and yes, it was not discouraged at all. We used to put on a lot of plays. We used to charge them to watch, had no choice.

Very clever. Good. That’s unusually sensible.

Yes, exactly. Yes, I was starting my own business at eight. That registered.

And starring you and your sister, anyone else, did you have family, friends or kids of?

Yes, family, friends, often people would come and stay and they’d be roped in. And I was often in charge. I remember doing one called Mrs. Morello’s Hat Shop.

Mrs. Morello’s Hat Shop, did you?

Yes, and I think it was a kind of rip off of Mr. Ben, you know? Yes, I think it was a hat shop and we had a dressing up box with lots of hats in it. And people would come into the hat shop and put, I haven’t thought about this for years. Yeah, they’d put a hat on, they’d be transported back to an era that the hat represented and have to kind of solve some sort of problem, then come back to the present. And I remember being really bossy with telling my sister to color in a piece of scenery. It was a dragon for some reason, and I’d written, I’d drawn a few scales. This is on a piece of paper, I’d drawn what I wanted, how I wanted her to decorate it. And I’d drawn a few scales on the dragon’s body, then I’d written the word scales, as in do scales all over it. And she copied it exactly. She copied the scales I’d done and then copied the word scales. She was probably only about four. And then I went absolutely ballistic.

No, I didn’t mean the word scales.

Why would you do that? Obviously, the dragon’s got scales on its body. So I think it’s probably quite good that I didn’t go into stage management.

Or directing, or producing.

Just like the worst kind of directing.

Artistic temperament. No, I didn’t mean it like that.

Do it better, be funnier.

And from there, a diva was born. Right, well, let’s move on to the next one. What have you got for your next off-cut, please?

So actually, this ties in with us just talking about my mum. These are diary extracts and stand-up material from 2007.

Original diary extract. Today, I did rock climbing and pond dipping. When we had to write our names down for the activities, I saw the name Terry Tooth. I said to Ruth really loudly, Terry Tooth, what kind of name is that? And then I heard, That’s me in a booming voice. Terry Tooth was standing there. It was the most embarrassing moment of my life.

The same passage translated to and from Maltese. Today did rock climbing and pond pond. When we had to write our names for activities, seen the name Terry Tooth. I said to Ruth really strong, Terry Tooth, what kind of name is that? And then I heard, that’s me, strong, common voice. Dental Terry was there. It was the most embarrassing moment of my life.

In Kurdish, today I am going to experience emotions and puzzles. While we write for our names, I found the name Terry Tooth. I really told Russia very much, Terry Tooth, what kind of name is his? And then I heard that my voice is a voice. Stop, Terry Tooth. This was the most disgusting life.

In Sindhi, today I climbed and set a pool. When we names the names for our names, I saw the name Tory Toth. I really told Root, what is the triangle? What kind of name? And then I have heard that he is in a loud voice. Terry Towne was standing there. This was the most shameful moment of my life.

Crikey. That was a bit of your stand-up material from around 2017.

Yeah.

Using a diary extract when you were about 11. And then as I understand it, you Google translated it into the languages mentioned and then you Googled that language back into English and that’s what the result was, is that right?

Yes. So actually it’s probably from 2007 rather than 2017.

Oh, right, because I was going to say, I remember you as a stand-up from longer ago than 2017.

Yeah, and I’m actually thinking that I, I remember maybe I did try that out in 2017. I think that idea has been floating around for a while. So it might be that I tried it a couple of times and then it didn’t work on stage actually. But I think I’ve had the diary extracts. I sort of go through them reasonably regularly and go, is there anything I can use for this Edinburgh show? And we used to go on these Christian holiday camps. That’s where this came from with my friend Ruth. And they were sort of amazing actually. So we’d go and camp and sing and have a service in a marquee in the mornings. And I loved it because I was so interested in boys from such a young age. And there were always really, really hot Christian boys there from different towns. And then you could, you went to this hut and you signed up to do loads of things that I loved, like rock climbing and pond dipping and things like that.

So this was something you tried at Stand Up but didn’t do. So when did you actually start doing Stand Up? Because you went to drama school. I know you went to drama school.

Yeah, I went to Guildford School of Acting, graduated in 2000. And at that point I was performing comedy songs, which I’d written on guitar.

You did that while you were still at drama school?

Yes. So I started writing songs when I was about 11 or 12, but they were always very serious and fair. I mean, like the poetry, kind of very angsty and nothing is real and things like that.

What, when you were 11 or 12, that’s the sort of thing you were worried about?

Yes. Well, not perhaps 11 or 12, but definitely at 13 or 14, I think I was quite early to get seized with that kind of adolescent type angst. 11 or 12, I used to write straight love songs. I used to be commissioned to write love songs. It’s again, this is very enterprising, isn’t it? It’s like charging my parents to watch the plays. I used to be commissioned to write love songs.

By whom?

By my friends and I started this service called Isy and Joe’s Dating Agency with my best friend, Joe, and girls would come to us and say, I fancy this guy, he’s got brown hair, he’s got blue eyes, and he likes Port Vale football team. And then I’d write a song only using three chords, because I’d hardly been playing the guitar for very long, about this boy. And then we’d somehow get him a cassette tape recording of the song or perform it to him in an attempt to make him go out with the girls. So I was a kind of, yeah, as a-

A yenta and also a musical yenta.

Yes, but unfortunately we were 100% unsuccessful.

It doesn’t surprise me really, I mean, boys at that age anyway are not getting to be that interested in girls or music, but the idea of being performed to in front of other people.

I know.

And yet you did it once, it didn’t work, and you continue to do it and make money.

I continue to do it. I don’t know if I made money. I think I made things like lip balm and erasers, you know, those smelly-

Like being in prison.

Yes, exactly, yes.

Fantastic.

So that’s what I did at the beginning. And then-

Graduated to-

Graduated into kind of writing for a serious period. And then when I was about 18 or 19, I was still writing love songs throughout this, or songs about relationships. And then when I was at college in my first year, there was a songwriting competition, and I’d written this song called A Million Faces about the perfect guy, and things like he doesn’t like Star Wars and stuff. It was like my version of the perfect guy. And I was living with a French guy called Laurent. And I think I performed it to him the night before the competition, and he said, it sort of needs something else. And I said, shall I just do it in a foreign accent? And I’m so bad at a lot of accents that the only foreign accent I could do is foreign, which is a kind of cross between French and Russian, I suppose. So he tried to get me to do it in a French accent. I couldn’t really copy him. So I did this song that I suppose had amusing lines in it, but was not written as a comedy song in this odd accent. And the audience found it funny. And that was the first time that I performed something that I’d written and an audience had laughed. And it was just the best feeling. And it kind of happened by accident. And then when I graduated, I had a few, then I started to write with a mind, you know, wanting to make the audience laugh. And then, but it was still a couple of years before I did comedy clubs and did. So it was 2002, I started doing sorts of comedy clubs, yeah.

When you started doing comedy clubs, was that a means to an end to be more recognised as an actor, because obviously that’s what you trained as, or was the standup itself the end that you were trying to achieve?

I never really thought that far ahead. I think I did really love doing, so I didn’t do the songs at first. Oddly, what would happen is I did the gay circuit for two years, from 2000 to 2002. I’m straight, but I had a lot of gay friends and we used to go and watch these gay nights and they were such a laugh. And I just fell into performing at those. And then I thought, I’m going to try and do the gong show at the comedy store, I’m going to do, I’m going to look in time out and go and do one of the pubs, you know, Rooms Above a Pub. And when I did that, I didn’t do the songs for a couple of years because I was kind of, I don’t know why, I thought I’ve got to learn how to be a standup, I can’t just do these songs because I wouldn’t speak between the songs. And when I did the gay clubs, I’d do the songs and they’d often go well, they sometimes wouldn’t, but they often did, which was great. But then between the songs, I’d just look at the floor, I wouldn’t say anything, I’d just go on to the next song. So I think it was probably quite good in a way that for about a year, I didn’t do, no one knew that I played the guitar and no one knew, of course you’re doing those Ape and Mike nights, there’s sometimes no one turns up to watch whatever. And then after about a year, I did songs and everyone was like, oh, this is what you should have been doing all along. I was like, oh, I’ve been doing this since I was 12. But I just, yeah, but was it? No, I didn’t think, it didn’t feel like it was a means to an end, but at the same time, I was a drama school graduate with, you know, was really struggling for money and wondering if I was gonna be doing theatre and education when I was 40. And so I was not blind to the fact that-

It was easier than getting a proper job.

It was easier than getting a proper job. It was far more enjoyable. It was still performing and I felt really in control. I could go and gig. I wasn’t making any money from it at first, but it was a lot of fun. I just got addicted to it really. But I hoped that in the end, everything would come together and I would get more acting work. And luckily that is what happened. I would get more writing work. But it took a good few years.

Yes, overnight success over seven years. Yes, exactly. Right, moving on. We’ve got another off cut now. Can you tell us what it’s called and what it is please?

Yes, I’d actually forgotten about this until you contacted me to do this podcast. It will be very interesting to hear it again. And I think out of anything, it will probably feel the most juvenile in terms of the writing if we discount the angsty poems. So this is called The Function Room and it’s a pilot written in around 2008 based on my Edinburgh show of 2007, Love Lost in the British Retail Industry.

Interior, ladies’ toilet cubicle. Louise, Kate and Ruth are all crammed into one cubicle. Louise and Kate are applying lipstick on each other over the head of Ruth, who is reading a science book. Louise is wearing a lilt ring pull on her engagement finger.

Girls, I am so excited. I can’t believe he’s going to give me the proper ring tonight.

And I can’t believe you’ve been doing it for six months wearing a ring pull. You put a lot of trust in that lad.

You live in the Stone Ages, you do. There’s plenty of girls who do it without even the ring pull. Louise is classy.

I’ve done it more in one night than you have in your entire life.

Which one night?

Last night.

But you went to women only yoga last night.

Exactly.

It’s not my fault I was born with a brain that likes to probe the universe before it probes a man.

That explains it all if you’ve been trying to probe the man, alien girl. You might get some action tonight though, Nick’s here.

No man’s doing any probing until I’ve learnt the whole periodic table backwards.

By the time you’ve done that, there’ll only be one man left on earth.

Yeah, Stephen Hawking.

Louise licks the ring pool.

I’m getting a bit sick of this totally tropical taste.

That’s not what you’ll be saying later.

Do you start to like the taste after a while?

She means summit between the sheets.

Or between Argos and the leisure centre.

Oi!

That’s more like you and Kirkby, that is.

Interior, urinals, cut to Tom, Nick and Kirkby, standing at the urinals. Kirkby is slowly and ceremoniously downing a pint whilst weeing.

Congratulations and all that, mate. Better not lose the bloody ring or get a riot roasting. Look at that, Kirkby. Under the thumb already. You’ll be under the thumb if you’re not careful. No! Took me mum ages to do me hair. Maybe she’s hoping you’ll finally get your end away. I have done it, actually. I just never felt the need to tell you. Five years ago, Scout Camp, Sheffield. I awayed my end in a field of sheep. Ha ha! Yeah, the ones who couldn’t run fast enough. As if you’re not a chuffing virgin, you chuffing virgin. Reckon Ruth might be up for it tonight, though, if your mum hasn’t superglued your pants on.

Interior, ladies’ toilet cubicle. Cut back to Louise, Kate and Ruth, still all crammed into the cubicle. Louise looks very dreamy.

Aw, you two are so right for each other. You even piss at the same time.

Kate knocks on wall of cubicle, which connects to urinals.

Oi, Tom, don’t go for number two.

You’re brave, a love spell.

So which part were you gonna be? Were you gonna be Ruth?

Honestly, this is what this podcast is for, isn’t it? I mean, my God, I cannot believe I wrote that. I think it’s so interesting to listen to now. Yeah, which part would I be? I mean, the geek.

Ruth.

They’re all such archetypes. Yeah, it would have had to have been Ruth.

When we were studying the periodic table.

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really, really necessary to pull this apart as an example of me feeling this pressure to be a writer and not knowing my voice at all. Because when I hear that, it’s just a mess. It doesn’t feel like anything. I mean, thankfully, it doesn’t feel like anything that would ever be commissioned. It’s really derivative. It’s a really base. The jokes, if you can even call them jokes, are bad. It’s coarse in a way that I wouldn’t find funny or right now. I think what happened was I’d done my Edinburgh show, which wasn’t like that. It had pathos. And I think one of the things that is so terrible about that script is the fact that you don’t feel that any of them got any personality. It’s like you’ve got the geeky one who just has got her nose in a science book. Well, that would never happen in a nightclub toilet. That’s true. So what is it tonally? What’s happening? Someone’s wearing a ring pull on their finger. Well, actually, I don’t think a ring pull would really hurt. You couldn’t wear it on your finger for six months.

And also it wouldn’t taste of totally tropical taste after a while. It would go rather rancid pretty quickly.

Absolutely. So what’s happening? Is it slightly surreal? And if so, why is it so almost trying to be a bit like two pipes of log and a packet of crisps? But that had real characters in it who had real needs. And yeah, I just I think it’s brilliant to listen to now because it makes me feel that I have moved on from that. And I think what happened was I did my Edinburgh show.

Which was about this subject, was it?

It was about two people who worked in a supermarket who fell in love and were very shy with each other. And yeah, they were both from a small town, and I suppose didn’t have great lofty ambitions, but had a lot of vulnerability and nearly missed each other in terms of getting together because they weren’t honest about how they felt. And then this, for this to have come off the back of it, it’s like I sort of lost all confidence in the voice that I was in the process of finding still in 2007.

Well, you tried to fit what you believed people wanted to read or commission, I imagine. I think there’s certainly a very interesting clip. I mean, not everything we hear is likely to be brilliant because that’s why they were in the office.

No, that’s the point of this, isn’t it? Otherwise it would do it. And I think I’m glad I put it in because it’s so dire.

It’s not that bad. You’re being very harsh, I think. We’ve had a lot worse than that on the show. I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets here, much, much worse than that. That was quite entertaining. I believe the actors quite enjoyed doing it. That’s good.

But I think this is one that I would consign, keep in the off-cut draw.

Okay, well, we’ll move swiftly on then. No more need to be said about that. Yes, can you give us the information on your next off-cut, please?

Yes, these are various programme ideas from between 2013 and 2017.

Clonk, Welsh for to chat, a radio idea. Her partner’s first language is Welsh. Her baby is growing up bilingual, so Isy, who failed A-level French, has decided to learn Welsh. In this show, she explores the obscure pockets of other Welsh learners in England, attempts to take her daughter to a London Welsh-speaking playgroup, and travels across the border to meet Welsh-speaking musicians and artists, all culminating in her performing five minutes of stand-up in Welsh in front of a completely Welsh-speaking audience.

Mole-man, Radio 4 proposal. Recently, a couple of British contemporary artists, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, purchased the house of William Little, Mole-man of Hackney, an eccentric millionaire who used his time and a myriad of equipment to dig a maze of 20-metre tunnels beneath said property until his airless death in 2010. Over 20 years, Little caused £400,000 worth of damage and created multiple theories as to why. In total, 33 tonnes of debris, including three cars and a boat, were removed from the house. Comedian Isy Suttie, who used to live on the next street, talks to new buyers Tim and Sue about their plans to convert the currently unsafe building into a home whilst preserving the tunnels. Isy seeks to unearth, pun intended, the myth and magic surrounding the inimitable Little while asking if the council are right to try and erase the tunnels forever, or if art has a responsibility to treasure the whims of our willful eccentrics. Lucky Charm, Proposal Lucky Charm is a series of six 15-minute radio programmes put together and presented by Isy Suttie on the subject of Lucky Charms and the impact they’ve had on different people. Each week, Isy talks to a couple of different members of the public who have a special relationship with Lucky Charms, whether they hold one dear to their hearts or don’t believe in them because of a bad experience with one. With a sit down drinking a cuppa feel, Isy and the guests unearth stories related to the Lucky Charm which might bring back joy, pain or hope. At the end of each segment, Isy sings a short song she’s composed in relation to the story she’s heard and asks her guests to join in as much as they feel comfortable. Each show has a loose theme, like superstition or travel, and is tied up at the end with Isy drawing conclusions from what she’s heard.

Is one of the conclusions that lots of people don’t like joining in with songs by any chance?

I think if this had gone to series then yes, that conclusion would very much have been drawn week after week.

It’s such a sweet idea, then just going to have a little song thing on the end, and the image of you sitting there going, join in everybody.

No, you’re right, yes.

Well, clonk, is that how you pronounce it? Is that right? The Welsh thing?

Yes, yes.

That was from 2013. Now, you apparently, according to the great Wikipedia, did appear in a Welsh learners programme, HUB? Yes, HUB, yes. So, was that connected at all? The HUB, what have you just said, sorry, and clonk.

Yeah, and clonk. Only in the sense that when I met Ellis, I started learning Welsh. And Welsh is quite a big part of my life. We don’t speak it to the kids as much as we should and would like to, but they do speak some Welsh, and we do speak a kind of pigeon Welsh in the house. So, I think I was thinking of programme ideas, and yeah, I kind of wanted to involve Welsh, the Welsh language and Wales and Welsh speaking Wales in something. I feel like it’s a little bit vague.

It looks very much like a first draft because it doesn’t go into specifics.

It does. It’s like, why? That’s what you’ve always got to think, isn’t it? It looks like it could be quite a nice half hour, but it’s got to have something propelling it forwards. Would I be trying to find out if I could become fluent in X amount of time or would I?

Yeah, reality TV type challenge.

Yes, exactly.

By the end of the programme, will she be able to convince these people who otherwise would not fall for it that she is the thing she’s pretending to be? Yes, exactly. So that never got submitted anywhere, I’m guessing just by the length of it, because it didn’t look like it had been written out properly.

No, I don’t think it did. So I would have sent it to a producer and they would have said, possibly no, or we’re not submitting it, or do a draft to it, and then I never did.

Whatever no is in Welsh.

Yes, exactly, which is no.

Oh, is it? How disappointing.

Well, yes, I think it’s just a bit, it kind of, to me, stinks of going, oh, I’ve been to these Welsh classes at City Lit. Is there any way I could claim it back on my tax?

Oh, gosh, again, you’re a million chumps ahead. Because I wouldn’t have gone for, is there any way I could pay off my taxes? Genius, that’s brilliant. I was just thinking from the things that we have just listened to, you’re clearly somebody who goes, oh, this opportunity has occurred to me. I can turn that into a TV series or a radio series or whatever. The fact that you lived near where the Mole-man lived and you hear the information, can I make it into something? It’s very impressive that you are able to spot opportunities when they occur. I hadn’t thought of the financial opportunities. That’s even better.

It would only be a bonus. I wouldn’t be doing it just to…

But just the fact that you got panned.

And plus, if I’ve got my city lit receipts.

Oh, jeez, I see you’re cleverer than I even thought you were. Because obviously the Mole-man, you lived nearby. I imagine that’s why it occurred to you. Although there is a 15-minute documentary on YouTube now. I think it was only posted last year.

Oh, is there? I must watch that.

Yes, it’s only 15 minutes. It’s quite a sweet little documentary. But you got there first. So how do you have submitted it?

You could have got your tax back on the other things, not him. On my travel to the Mole-man’s house. We were really obsessed with this house. I used to live a few roads away. We used to go and join hands outside it and call his name. Who’s we? Me and my best friend from home, Caroline, our housemates and her boyfriend. We were in our late 20s. It sounds like we were about 16. I’ve always been a bit obsessed with Ouija boards and seances and things like that and always wanted to write about it in some way, not quite managed to yet. But we used to go outside and kind of, we were very intrigued by this guy and we thought there was a kind of spooky element to it and who was he and why had he done this? And I love stories like this. I absolutely love, especially rich people who get locked away.

Who don’t have to pay as much tax as everyone else.

Yes, exactly. They’re not trying to claim that they’re city-lit classes. They don’t care. They can write them off.

So while you and your friends were standing outside doing the weird, holding handsy stuff, this poor man in his house had these weird late 20 year old women outside behaving strangely.

Yeah, he died in 2010 and I lived there before that. And you could see from the outside, it was amazing. There was a sort of car in the garden on its side and just so much stuff in the garden all leaning against the house, I suppose, propping it up because it caused so much annoyance to the neighbors because I think it affected the electrics and the water because he dug under the foundations and gone. I mean, yeah.

Sorry, at my age, I’m sympathizing with the neighbors. I’m sorry. The property prices.

I think now I’m a bit older. Now I’m a homeowner. I wasn’t there. It was all a bit of a joke. We’d all join hands outside and now I’m like, oh, gosh, you know.

Call the council, get this sorted out.

Yes, exactly.

So that didn’t come of anything and nor did your lucky charms, presumably.

No, no. And I was a bit gutted about Mole-man, actually, because I thought that was quite… But I think visiting it again, it feels a little bit like the is art more important than digging under a house thing? It feels a little bit tacked on. I think it was basically me looking for an opportunity to go in the house and see the tunnels. So I think again, I’ve kind of used my desire because I’ve got to think about abandoned houses as well. I just love going in derelict houses. And again, as I get older, I’m now more nervous of things like asbestos, but in my younger days, I would just go in and kind of. So I think there’s a bit of me that was kind of going, I know this area, I’d love to go in there. Shall I pitch a radio documentary where we could get permission? I love it.

Always thinking ahead. Nothing is ever as it seems. There’s always an extra level with Isy Suttie. But 2013 was the clonk one, and you had two series of your radio show, Isy Suttie’s Love Letters, and your show, the Sony Gold winning, Pearl And Dave. So you must have been pretty busy.

Yes, I was actually. And I was also, I think that year, was that the year of the Olympics?

No, 2012 was the Olympics.

2012 was unbelievably busy. I did Peepshow and I did Shameless, and I lived in Manchester for months. And I remember feeling then, I’m actually doing too much. I’m in danger of, I’d have these periods would actually feel a bit faint. I think my body was kind of going, please, please don’t do this much. And then when I had kids, I just did kind of almost get burnout, because I carried on just, I think I am someone who was a bit of a workaholic before I had kids and actually having kids.

Well, when you have kids, of course, you have no sleep and then it’s almost impossible to continue a workaholic lifestyle.

Yeah, I think actually you’re, exactly. I think you just get stopped. Some people don’t, but I thankfully do.

Those who can afford care. Those that can carry on. Those of us that can’t afford care.

Exactly. Yeah, those people who get night nannies. It was really about someone who’s got a, with a newborn, had a night nanny that finished at six in the morning, then morning nanny, then a day nanny. I was like, must cost about 30 grand a week.

Yes, but what heaven that would have been. Oh my goodness.

But I could have written all my proposals. My Mole-man drafts 723.

And the songs that would go at the end of Lucky Charms, which people may or may not sing along. Anyway, let’s get on to the last off-cut. Would you like to introduce that for us, please, Isy?

Yes, this is an outtake from my new novel, Jane Is Trying, which was written last year in 2020.

Our marriage is like a jumper, which you can wash at 60 degrees, asterisk without it shrinking. Our marriage is like autumn, when we dance under falling leaves. Our marriage is like Christmas, it gives and takes and gives. Our marriage is like a jewelry box, in which true happiness lives. When I first met you, Red Alice, and we danced to Sister Sledge, I couldn’t believe your kindness, as you fished me out of that hedge. Your knitting is exemplary, and so is your… Hand on my heart, I love you, and will untill… even after my dying day. But that was what they wanted, wasn’t it? These Etsy customers. If I was going to make any money at all, I had to cater for their needs. It had been Megan’s idea, and she’d even set up my page for me. The plan was that soon I’d be able to whip up these poems in half an hour, working off a generic one I used as a template. Was it OK for a silver wedding anniversary poem to have an asterisk? I was most pleased with the last line, which could be changed depending on whether or not they believed in an afterlife. Bill was my first customer, and he’d requested the poem for his wedding anniversary, but hadn’t given me very many facts about his wife Alice. A long anecdote about him drunkenly falling into a bush the night they met at a nightclub I’d shed good light on, I thought. He called her Red Alice because of her hair, and they loved Sister Sledge. She was nice and kind, and loved knitting and cooking. What an epitaph. I looked up at Stuart. It was raining sheets outside, so relentlessly that it was like everyone in the bookshop was hiding, suffocating our time away in a hollowed out husk behind a waterfall. An old woman had been looking at the same origami book for 20 minutes, smiling and nodding to herself as she looked at the pictures as if recognising a bunch of old friends. Can you think of a generic food dish that rhymes with day? I said to Stuart next to me, my eyes still on my notepad. Special K, he replied. Your knitting is exemplary and so is your special K. Hand on my heart, I love you and will until forward slash even after my dying day. Hi Bill, I typed on the bookshop computer. Nearly finished the poem, it’s going well. Two questions, are you religious and does Alice by any chance make cereal well? Put exactly the right amount of milk on etc. Get back to me soonest Jane. A reply pinged back from Bill. Don’t like cereal much, sorry. More of a toaster marmalade man.

Another very lovely clip, I thought. I suppose it was cut out because there’s too many other lovelinesses in it. Too much loveliness. We haven’t got space for all this loveliness.

Actually, I was thinking the first draft which that was in was 88,000 words and then the second one was 71,000. So I cut 17,000 words.

Do you do your cutting or do editors come in and go?

My editor advised me and I thought she was great. She did exactly the right amount of when she felt strongly about something, it was obvious which bits she didn’t mind so much about. And then I think sometimes you need a bit of gentle nudging to see the wood for the trees. But I always agreed with her, thankfully. So I think it must be a bit tricky if you come to loggerheads. But I really loved my editor. And we both felt basically the main character Jane, who you just heard is struggling for money. And she works for an ad agency writing copy. So she’s trying to think of a get rich quick scheme, really. And the reason this was caught, I quite liked this bit. And I thought there were some funny lines in it, but it just didn’t really go anywhere. There was this bit. And then I’d find that in later scenes, I was sort of remembering, oh, she’s supposed to be doing the Etsy poems. So then I’d sort of tack on a bit where she’d be staying at her friend’s house, kind of going, oh, I need to go and write my Etsy poem about a newborn baby. And it just in the end felt like this isn’t necessary. I can show that she’s worried about money without her doing this. But I do like the idea of someone, my partner and I, and some of my friends are, I’m obsessed with those sort of terrible signs you get saying like, live, laugh, love, or it’s Prosecco o’clock. And I even ordered my friends, Anne and Zoe, to magnets from Etsy that were personalised saying, Anne, you got this, and Zoe, you got this. Because we sort of, we always say, you got this to each other and this one got it. So cheesy to us, it doesn’t mean anything. To other people it does, of course, but to me, I don’t like those kind of generic kind of, hey, everyone’s here.

And people actually paint them on the walls of their houses. They don’t just hang them, you go into other people’s houses and they’re actually painted onto the walls.

That’s amazing. I mean, that’s the kind of thing I do to an ex-boyfriend who the equivalent of sewing prawns into someone’s curtains is writing, live, laugh, love on a wall, then drawing a curtain across it. It’s like, ha ha, you’ll find that. And also, if I look at an Airbnb, I really like looking at Airbnbs even if I don’t, even if I’m not really thinking, go on holiday, I sort of think, oh, look at Airbnbs in Folkestone. And if they’ve got anything like that, it’s an immediate, no pile. I hate it when an Airbnb will have a close up of taps or a close up of those signs. It’s just like, what are you doing? We need to see the room.

Or piles of towels.

Or white towel, who cares? But for me, there’s something in someone quite cynically writing these poems that contain similar sentiments to these messages that I find so repulsive. So I think there’s something quite funny about someone having a generic poem that they can just change a few lines and then go, here you go, that’s 20 quid.

But then it does actually mean something to someone. I used to, when I was in a singing group, we used to have to write songs at events. We’d do corporate events and we’d write a funny song and we’d include the name of the MD or whatever. And we’d put in some facts like, oh, you’re always getting off to play squash. And it’s not hilarious in any way, shape or form. But when people hear it, it means so much to them because it is specific to them.

Oh, absolutely, completely. And actually, those people who like those signs mean good. If it genuinely helps people, that’s great.

Yeah, if it inspires them.

I’m not casting judgment on them. I’m just saying for me. And also, I agree. I think the few times that I’ve done corporate gigs and I’ve always just died horribly at them, the only bits that have gone well is when I’ve either tweaked the lyrics to a song or perhaps just said a few jokes about the boss and kind of, as you say, it doesn’t even necessarily have to be that complicated, does it? Even if you say, oh, he used to live in Margate. They sort of be, yeah, but I suppose it’s about it being a performance and them being featured in it. And yeah, so no, absolutely.

They feel seen or heard of that horrible phrase. I feel seen, I feel heard. I feel seen.

Yeah, I feel seen in a good way.

Yeah, yeah.

So Jane Is Trying, your novel, is a novel, but it wasn’t your first book. The first book you wrote was a memoir, wasn’t it? It was called The Actual One. Was it a true book? Was it true?

It is a true book, but I actually preferred writing the novel because I, something about writing things down. So it’s about a lot about relationships I’ve had and kind of, you know, disastrous dates and things like that. And what I found was that I was very worried about people. I knew reading it and recognising themselves. And so I would change names and then, you know, you have to sort of think, gosh, should I put that bit in? And I really yearned to be able to be, to put everything in that I wanted to put in. I couldn’t really, I think maybe someone else would have done, but I just would have worried about it too much. So when it came to write the novel Jane Is Trying, the recent book, in some ways it was harder because there were no constraints. But once I got going, it was a very freeing feeling to be able to put in real people and it not be a problem because you either change their gender or you amalgamate them with someone else or you kind of go, I’ve taken that bit from mum and I’ve taken that. And you know, hopefully they’ll never know, although the mum in it is reasonably similar to my mum, so I’ve told her not to read it, but also it’s got quite a lot of sex in it. She gets very nervous though in that way that, you know, if you go and see someone you know perform and you just think, oh, please let this be good, because that awful feeling where you meet them afterwards in the bar and you don’t want to say, how did you learn all those lines type thing? I don’t know what the equivalent is with how did you write all those words, you know, if you don’t like it or trying to make…

How did you spell them all?

Yes, exactly. Gosh, it must have been so hard. Did your arms get tired when you were typing?

Let’s watch out for those comments.

You know that they didn’t like the book much. Or even like, how does it get typeset? Did you get to go to the factory?

What font did you use? I’ve never even thought about that because I have not enough of my friends have written books that, well, they’ve written books, but even if they had, if they’ve written books that I didn’t like, I’ve never had to think…

Well, but the good thing about books is you don’t get… With performances, it’s a definite event, isn’t it? And then you see them afterwards and you’re there. And even with someone’s on telly or on radio, they’re sort of going to go, it’s on at this time, you know. Whereas with a book, you can always say, sorry, I haven’t been able to read it yet. And that’s the weird thing about it coming out is, well, I remember this from publication day with the actual one. You sort of build up to this publication day and then nothing happens. And, you know, you just sort of go, oh, it’s a bit like having a birthday when no one turns up. Because obviously, if anyone’s pre-ordered it, that’s the day they’ve received it, unless they’re going to read it in about six hours. And then it’s… So, yes, it’s a bit of an odd feeling, really.

Although, presumably now you’ve got enough sort of celebrity chums who can read advance copies of Jane Is Trying and then give you a nice review and stuff. And you could stagger that, couldn’t you?

Yeah, I have had some nice quotes, which has really helped, actually. Yes, and I’ve only paid them all. A hundred million pounds! That’s why I need to claim back all my…

Yes, exactly. It’s tax-deductible. Right, then we have come to the end of the show. How was it for you, Isy Suttie?

I really, really enjoyed it. It’s been brilliant.

Thank you for sharing the contents of your off-cut straw with us. The Offcut Straw was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Isy Suttie. The offcuts were performed by Beth Chalmers, Emma Clarke, Toby Longworth, Lynsey Murrell, Darrell Maclaine and Shash Hira, and the music was by me. If you’d like to support the series, please visit offcutstraw.com and subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

My then-girlfriend read a lot of those books as well, and thought that this was how we were going to get rich, that we should harness my talent. Because I wasn’t at that point making very much money. I was barely making a living. I was going to write this massive door stopper of a book, and it was going to earn us millions in a six-way auction.

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. My guest this week is one of the biggest names in crime fiction, Val McDermid, a number one bestselling author, her books have been translated into 40 languages and sold over 60 million copies worldwide. She’s written six novels featuring private investigator Kate Brannigan, and six about freelance journalist Lindsay Gordon, and a series of so far 11 thrillers featuring clinical psychologist Tony Hill spawned six series of the ITV drama, Wire in the Blood. Her latest novel, Still Life, the sixth in a series about DCI Karen Pirie, has just come out in paperback, and she co-created the BBC drama series, Traces, currently running on iPlayer. Dubbed Scotland’s Queen of Crime by, well, everyone, Val McDermid, welcome to the off-cut straw.

Thank you, it’s really nice to be here and do a deep dive into my past.

It sounds quite sinister. I can’t help noticing that in the introduction, I did say an awful lot of number sixes just then, six Kate Brannigan, six Lindsay Gordon, six Karen Piries. At the risk of sounding completely superficial, is six your lucky number by any chance?

It’s entirely accidental. The reason why there are six Brannigans and six Lindsay Gordon is because they kind of stopped speaking to me. I stopped having the ideas that worked for them. And the reason why we’re on six Karen Pirie is that’s just what the last one was and there will be more Karen Pirie. I’m absolutely sure of that.

Right, well, let’s kick off with your first off-cut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Yeah, this is a pitch document with some sample dialogue for a TV series idea I had. It was going to be called WDC 2 and I wrote it in 2001 when I was living in Manchester.

Manchester, in the new millennium. Gunchester, Gaychester, Madchester. Schizophrenia City, a music scene that throws up talent like Morrissey, M People and Noel Gallagher with monotonous regularity. Drug and Club Capital of the UK, Centre of Academic Excellence, a year away from hosting the Commonwealth Games, light years away from Coronation Street. Against this dark, fragmented background, two women police officers try to hold back the night. Lee Kane and Maggie Peters move to the beat of the city centre. A pair of mavericks unwillingly yoke together to do the job in a way no-one has ever seen before.

Exterior, car park, night. Maggie and Lee are standing by the boot of a saloon car. The body language of the women is ambiguous. There is some kind of negotiation taking place, some jockeying for position. It could almost be the off-key prelude to a sexual encounter.

So what do we do now?

What do you want to do now?

I’ve never done this before.

You want me to show you? Take you by the hand?

You want me to do it right?

Maggie moves towards Lee. Just when a collision seems inevitable, she swerves and walks round to the driver’s door.

I’ll drive.

That’s a start.

As the car doors open, the interior lights up and we see a police radio and an interior that looks like a skip on wheels. Interior, moving car, moss side, night. Lee is driving. Maggie is leaning back in her seat, smoking. Through the car windows, we catch glimpses of tactical aid group vehicles and tag officers with their Kevlar vests. The streets are otherwise empty.

Testosterone City.

Ah, you’ve got to pity them. It’s all they’ve got left.

I don’t mind so much if it worked, but the crap. I’ve seen rookies with better arrest records. Soon as they show up at one end of the estate, everything moody funnels out the other end. Every bit of hooky gear, every packet of smack, every dodgy tow rag with a warrant outstanding. Only villains they catch are the ones other villains want them to catch.

You reckon we should just leave it alone then? Let the bad lads get on with it.

Have you listened to a word I’ve said all these weeks?

Only the important bits, white, no sugar.

We don’t just leave it alone. We go for something that works, not something that looks good.

Like what?

Like you and me, softly, softly, putting the word out and doing the business without any assistance from Mr. Heckler or Mr. Cock.

I’m glad you said that, because there’s something niggling at the back of my mind.

What kind of something?

Maggie lowers the window and flicks her cigarette into the night.

Now, when you sent this in, you described this as my idea for a minimalist cop series that nobody showed the slightest interest in making. Had you submitted it to people then?

Yeah, we tried it out on various television companies. Back in 2001, there wasn’t the great range of things like Netflix and Amazon. You were kind of stuck with the mainstream of BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, I think was around there. I’m not quite remember. And I’ve been doing quite a bit of work trying to get a series away with a friend of mine who was a television producer who had some track record. And I had this idea of a late night, half hour cop show that never goes into a police station. It’s these two women working the streets at night with a very different approach. And I thought it was a really good idea. I did a treatment that outlined 10 episodes. And even looking at it now, I still think, this is a good idea. Somebody should have made this. But probably the fact that they had a lesbian as one of the two lead roles didn’t help. We once pitched Lindsay Gordon, to ITV’s head of drama, must have been sometime in the 90s. And he sent the snotty-est letter back to the producer I was working with saying, are you stupid sending me this?

What?

The notion of having a lesbian in the lead role of a television drama that wasn’t all about angst and grief and pain and coming out was absolute anathema at that point. So that was probably part of the problem.

You’d already published some of the novels that became the Wire in the Blood TV series. Did you know the TV series for that was in the works when you wrote this?

It was sort of on the horizon. We’d had various interest in the books over the few years before that, but 2001 we’d just started talking to Coastal Productions, which is Robson Green’s production company who went on to make Wire in the Blood. So we were at the very early stages of negotiation and I was quietly confident that we might get something away this time after lots and lots of frustrations. When you start off in your career as a writer of novels, people come along and option your books for television or for film, and the first couple of times it happens, you get incredibly excited because you think, my book’s going to be on the telly, I’m going to be a film. And after this has happened a few times, you become quite sort of, oh yeah, it’s another option. So you don’t get overexcited about it, but yeah, by 2001 I was pretty sure something was going to happen.

Okay, time for another offcut now. Tell us about this one.

Oh, this is probably my first attempt at a crime story. I think I wrote it round about 1976, looking at the paper it’s typed on, and it’s called Birdman.

At the street door, the girl with blood on her hands forced some of the tautness out of her body and casually walked out into the street. Her caution was unnecessary. There was no one in sight. This was not after all where people were on the streets that hour of the night. And she walked easier in that assurance. Her eyes opened to catch any glimpse of a police car. Her steps rang out on the concrete as she walked on, not too slowly, but not quickly enough to catch attention should someone chance upon her. When she reached the main street, the girl with blood on her hands walked more slowly, letting the feeling of release flow through her bones, being sure that no one could or would suspect her. She had no motive known to anyone but herself and the murdered body lying on the rug. A crime of passion, yes, but not a passion anyone would guess at or believe in if it should cross their minds momentarily. She had loved that face that lay grinning in rage on the bloody rug. She had loved those fine bones that lay crushed under the weight of her death. They would never have comprehended, but most of all, she had loved herself. As the night fog began to thicken around her, she turned into her hallway and climbed her stairs till she stood before the door of her flat. The girl with blood on her hands dug the Yale key out of her trouser pocket and fumbled it into the lock. As she turned it, her mind was flooded with a vision of the room she had left and her relief flowed into the new shape of horror. She saw the picture she had created, an out of focus background and vivid against a stark white goatskin rug before the gas fire, a sprawled corpse with a skull like grin and a red stain slowly turning brown on a Navy and white striped sweater. The girl with blood on her hands pushed open the door to her flat with some violence. She walked down her hallway and into her bathroom. The girl with blood on her hands washed them under a gush of steaming water. She glanced once in the mirror. My face smiled back at me with a new look in the eyes.

21, you wrote this, you had been to school and university. So where were you at this point in your life and career?

I was a trainee journalist in Devon. And I was determined, I had been determined since I was about nine years old, that I was going to be a writer when I grew up. Ever since I’d read a book where one of the characters who was a writer opened a letter from her publisher and there was a check in it. And I realized she actually got paid for doing this. I thought, I could do that, I can tell lies. I spent most of my teens writing the kind of bad poetry and song lyrics that people do at that age. And occasionally trying to write bits of prose. I think the very first attempt at writing a crime story was when I was about 12 or 13 and we were looking at the Sherlock Holmes stories and our homework assignment was to write a detective story. And the only thing I remember about it was it was about a diamond robbery, but it hasn’t survived and probably just as well. But this was written at a time when I was trying to write literary fiction. I’d finished at Oxford and I thought that people like me should be writing the great English novel. But I’d read crime fiction all through my life, since I was about nine or 10. And I guess at that point I was trying on different forms and different styles of writing to see where I might land. And I wrote this because somebody had really, really annoyed me. She treated me really badly and I was very fed up. And so I wrote this story.

Where you were the murderer and she was presumably the victim, was she?

Yes, yes.

Did she ever get to see this?

No. So she never knew.

So this was the start of your writing of crime stories. Did you write more before you moved into writing a novel? Was it sort of one of a series or was it just a one-off random attempt?

It was a one-off. I was trying to, I think, understand the shape of short stories at the time and really struggling with how they work. And I’ve still, to this day, I don’t think I really understand how short stories work, even though, I mean, I’ve now published slightly fewer than I have published novels, oddly enough. But I still, I’m never quite sure that something’s the idea for a short story or if it’s actually the subplot of a novel.

Having written this short story, did you find yourself going, yes, this is what I need to do? Or did you then go and explore a load of other areas before you eventually came back to the crime novel?

The short story didn’t really open the door into crime for me as a fledgling writer. I think because I didn’t see the kind of work I wanted to do in the crime novels that were around at the time. Back in the 1970s, most of what was available in the UK certainly was village mysteries and police procedurals. And I reckon I didn’t know enough about the police to write about them in that fictitious way. And certainly, having grown up in Scottish mining communities, I didn’t understand English villages either. So, and they were very middle-class worlds that I didn’t really feel that I had the kind of understanding about that means you can write about them with authenticity. So it was, I suppose, it was a start of exploring that sort of psychological response that I didn’t feel there was anywhere I could go with it at that point. Ruth Rendell was doing a bit of this sort of psychological stuff. And of course, there was the work of Patricia Highsmith in the background, but I didn’t see myself writing those kind of books. And what really made it happen for me was two things really. William McElvaney’s book, Laidlaw, which is a Scottish, the start of the Scottish crime fiction boom really in the late 1970s. And that had a working class setting in Glasgow. But as well as very real feeling dialogue, what it also had was beautiful poetic language. The description was extraordinary. And so that was one strand. And the other was the arrival on these shores of the American New Wave feminist private eyes, like Sarah Paretsky. And I thought, oh yeah, this is the real thing. Here’s somebody who’s got a brain and a sense of humor and she doesn’t have to get the guys in every time it gets difficult. And it was kind of site specific. There was a sense that this story could only happen in Chicago because of the structure of the city and the kind of jobs people did and the kind of lives they led. So it felt organic. And I thought, this is what I want to write. And that was a good seven or eight years later, 82, Indemnity only came out. So it was a bit of time between me writing a first attempt at a crime story and actually finding something approximating to a voice.

Moving on now, let’s have your next off-cut.

Yeah, this is a poem called Pilot, as in Pontius Pilot. And I wrote it for my school magazine in 1972. And it was subsequently picked up by the Scotsman newspaper who did an annual review of school magazines and chose it as the best poem of the year in school magazine.

I thought you were a miracle or a saint when you first approached with your fingers poised. But no, you performed a surgical operation so clean that no blood remained on your ebony fingers, an appendectomy on the vague sunshiny happiness which I brought along with me in my universal gift. Then you handed me the do-it-yourself disposable two-piece balsa wood kit, rusty nails supplied at no extra cost. Now, on this spring hillside, it has grown dark and already the vultures are dicing for the entrails of my happiness which lie at my feet. As I look on, detached somehow, I cannot even make you the excuse of knowing not what you do. We both know about ghosts and resurrection and that sort of thing, but I am still not sure whether it is you or me who is the sun.

This is a very interesting poem. I noticed that you’d said that they thought it was about religion, but it wasn’t. Can you tell us the story behind this very sophisticated poem for, how old were you, 16, 17?

Yeah, 16, 17, yeah, that sort of age. Yeah, because I used religious imagery and religious metaphor, people assumed it was some sort of Christian sort of poem. And it wasn’t at all, it was a love poem. When in doubt, always go back to the notion that I’m probably writing something about love. So again, I suppose that the notion of love and death comes into play here. And it’s a poem that was inspired by someone who I was in love with and clearly was not in love with me, but was interested in the idea of me trying to become a writer. And so gave me a lot of support in that area, but didn’t understand what I was trying to say half the time. So I guess it’s a poem born of frustration and miscommunication and not always having the courage to say directly what was in my heart, because it was kind of difficult when I was like 16, 17 in the late 60s, early 70s in small town in Scotland where I was growing up. And there was no concept of gay life, gay culture. There were no lesbians. I’ve often said you’d be more likely to find a unicorn in Fife when I was growing up than an out lesbian. So I suppose there’s an element of willful obscurity going on that I’m kind of trying to hide. I was trying to say what I want to say, but also trying to hide myself at the same time.

Do you think the subject of the poem knew what you were trying to say, or did they think it was religious as well?

No, she knew, she understood that, but she didn’t want to acknowledge it.

Because it’s quite an angry poem, full of the kind of angst that those sort of poems should be.

Well, you know, that’s what you’re 16, you’re supposed to be full of angst. You’re supposed to say nobody understands me.

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. Now I read that you had an unusual schooling that you were put up a year. Did the moving up affect your writing, the subjects you chose, do you think?

I don’t know, I think this was an experiment that Fife Council did for a while in 1960s, where they took the brightest two or three kids from each primary school class and sent us off to high school a year early. And it might have been easier on us if they’d just mixed us through the year, but they put us in a separate class, and we were called 1E, which was supposed to be E for early, but everybody would go, oh, it’s E for experiment. You’re just an experiment. And so by the time we became part of the school general population, we were already marked as outsiders. And that sense of expectation had been laid upon us. And your teachers would say, you should be doing better than that. You were in the E class. So I think what it did provoke in me was that sense of, I suppose defensiveness of being an outsider and not being part of the group in quite the same way as other people were. And that’s a good thing for a writer. That sort of that detachment, that sense of being on the outside and observing is a very useful facility.

And it presumably also spurred you on. Were you slightly competitive as a consequence?

I don’t know. It’s hard to say because you’ve only got the life you lived, but certainly I always had a sort of strong determination to do well. I think I was brought up in a household where the works of Robert Burns were as powerful as Holy Writ, really. My dad was a great Burns man, and I was brought up with the idea as the poem, A Man’s A Man For All That, that external things are not how you judge yourself. The rank is but the guinea stamp. The man is the gowd for all that. And that I should be the best I could be. And the only thing standing between me and being the best I could be was me. So I had that sense of not letting myself down. And I’ve always had that sort of terrible sort of sense of, you know, if you’ve got a talent and you don’t maximize it, then somehow it’s a sin against nature. Terrible Scottish Presbyterianism.

Well, it hasn’t served you too badly. Okay, next off cut, please. What’s this one?

This is a play that I wrote in the late 1970s. It started as one of my great English novels, which I wrote around about 1975, 76. Then it became a play and a radio play, and it’s called Like a Happy Ending.

Scene 12.

I told Olivia that you did not want to speak to her.

You did what? How dare you? Have you gone mad?

I have not. I have done the right thing at last. I have done what I should have done a long time ago. This so-called love that you and Olivia have been deluding yourselves about must stop. It can’t go on. I won’t have you see her again.

Don’t be ridiculous. We’re going on a holiday together tomorrow.

You’re not going anywhere. Can’t you see this thing is wrong?

What the hell are you saying? You must be out of your mind, right and wrong. What has that to do with anything? I love her. I love her. Can’t you understand that?

You don’t know what love means.

To you? You with all your bloody love, what have you done? You drove my father from me. You killed him, damn you. And now you dare to tell me what is right and what is wrong? You try to own me, that’s what it is. You pretend it’s because Liv’s a woman that you hate it, but you really don’t want me to have anyone but you. That’s why you forced my father to go.

Will you calm down and behave like a normal human being? You don’t know what you’re talking about. You worship your father without knowing the first thing about him or the way he treated people. Your father leaving us was the best thing that ever happened to us. That’s not true. It’s not. You put him on a pedestal. You’re doing the same thing with your precious Olivia, and there’s nothing for you either. Nothing. Nothing except a perverted way of life masquerading under the name of love. A life that means lies, that means losing your family, your church, all that you have held important in your life. Will you wake up to reality?

If that’s reality, you can stop it. What do you know about it? You never gave love in your life. You just demand it. All the time you demand it. You insist in your mind that I’m your mirror image. I’m not. I’m me. I love Olivia. I chose it. Our love is good and strong, and nothing you ever gave me has been anything like it. And I’m going to stick with her.

You can’t stop me. Can’t I? She won’t stay with you. She’ll get tired and go. Or you’ll get tired like your bloody father, too weak to carry the burden of loving.

No bloody wonder he got tired of it with you. I bloody hate you. Oh, God, how I’ve grown to hate you.

Put that phone down.

Fuck you, mother.

Get out.

Get out of here.

Get out of this house.

Janet holds her head high, stares at Elizabeth, then turns on her heel and walks out.

Oh, God, what have I done? I didn’t mean it to be like this. I only wanted to make it clear for her.

Goodness me.

Storm and Drang.

Tell me the story of this.

I wrote this novel, and it’s about this tortured human relationship. It’s kind of based around my first great love affair in my final year at Oxford, where I fell in love with someone who fell in love with me. But she had lots of conflicted history about her own family who were devout Catholics. There was all sorts of difficult stuff going on in the background, and it all imploded in a very dramatic way. And she tried to kill herself in the great lesbian tradition, unsuccessfully, thank goodness. But it was pretty traumatic, and it all blew up just before my finals, which I can’t help feeling didn’t entirely help. But I somehow got myself through all that, and with the general principle of everything is material, I decided that I was going to write this great English novel about this relationship. And it’s a novel that has three different voices, and it’s terrible. It’s really, truly terrible.

Can I ask, are you the voice in the scene that we just heard? Was that you or your girlfriend talking to her mother?

She was much posher than me.

So that was the relationship that existed between the girlfriend and the mother, not between you and your mother.

Yes, not between me and my mother. Obviously, I wasn’t present for these interactions, but they were reported back to me in some graphic detail. And also, my imagination let rip as well, because as usual, I was quite annoyed. And I wrote this novel. One thing I will say about it is that I actually finished it, and I started sending it off to publishers who sent it back pretty promptly, mostly my return of post. I’d say by the end, I was getting letters from people I hadn’t even sent it to. I’ve heard about this book, don’t send it to us. But I had a good friend who was an actor, and I showed it to her, and to this day, she will not tell me whether she was being diplomatic or if she really meant it, but she said, I don’t know much about novels, but I think this would make a great play. And I didn’t really know how to write a play, so I thought, well, just cross out the descriptions and leave in the dialogue and it will be a play. And so that was essentially what I did. I went through the manuscript and I kept the dialogue in that I thought worked, then wrote some extra scenes to cover the bits that crossed out. I went off to a local theatre. I was working in Plymouth at the time as a trainee journalist down there, and the local theatre company were doing a series of studio plays, new plays in the small space, and the director said, I’d love to do this. It’s perfect for what I have in mind. And so entirely by accident, at the age of 23, I was a professionally performed playwright.

That’s fantastic.

And I had no idea what I’d done right. On the back of it, I got an agent. We sold it to BBC Radio and it ended up, it was initially supposed to be for Radio 4, and they got cold feet because of the subject matter, and then it was going to go for Radio 3, and they got cold feet because of the subject matter, and it ended up on Radio Scotland. I think it was just because the producer was based in Edinburgh and he made it and he was determined it was going to go out somewhere. But I was working in Manchester by that time and I actually remember driving up the M6, halfway up the M6 to try and get reception to listen to it on the night it went out on air. It was ridiculous. Then I was sitting in the car park of the services at Fortin Services listening to the car radio for my magnum opus. And so that was where I suppose my paid writing life got started.

With that play. So nothing came of the book. It didn’t go on later to be published.

Oh, thank God. I’d have no career now, I think, if it had been.

Can I just ask what happens in the end? What is the like a happy ending?

Olivia, the other character, moves on with her life.

So the mother was right?

Yes, essentially. Well, she’s right because she’s not given a choice. The other one has basically a breakdown. And that’s what happened. This was also back in the nearer when, you know, like all lesbian novels had to end miserably. And the nearest you could get to a happy ending was somebody not killing themselves.

And they didn’t kill themselves in this?

No.

So it was like a happy ending.

Yeah.

Good title. Well done. OK, time for another off cut now. What have we got?

This is called Revenge. And in 1991, it was my attempt at writing a sort of Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins style bonkbuster novel.

Tears blurred the contessa’s vision as she hastily opened the paper to shut out the hateful print. A family funeral. Was that all they could find to say about the worst event of her whole life? While her eyes drifted over the pages, taking nothing in, she let her mind run free again over the hell of the last few days. As she flicked over another page on automatic pilot, she was shocked into awareness by the realization that her own face was staring back at her. Startled, she read the headline on the gossip page. Heart of Stone. Has Mickey got what it takes? The smart money says that David Stone’s vast personal fortune, as well as his holdings in the multinational Swordstone Corporation, will now pass into the hands of his born-again bimbo daughter Morgan, La Contessa di Fior Diligi. La Contessa, Mickey to her friends, used to be a serious young lady who won a scholarship to New College Oxford after a clutch of brilliant A-level results at St Margaret’s Lyme Regis. In her student days, Mickey, 24, boasted to anyone who’d listen that one day she’d be running Swordstone. But she never completed her economics degree, dropping out after her second year to marry the eligible Giancarlo, Conto di Fior Diligi, in a spectacular love match that took Italian high society by storm. After their secret wedding ceremony, held in private because Mickey’s mother was dying of cancer, Giancarlo whisked her away to the family palazzo in Trendi Fiorioli, where she became little more than a hostess and clothes horse, particularly after the birth of their daughter, Lisanne. They soon became the toast of the Florentine farcette, with Mickey appearing in fashion spreads in half the magazines on the continent and not just the ones owned by Swordstone, described as one of the loveliest women in Europe. The big question now is whether Mickey has the nerve or the nouse to take over her father’s business and whether the tough guys at Swordstone will just sit back and let her try. I used to read these books when I was growing up. When I looked at this, I thought, that’s spot on. Why didn’t it get published?

Because it was awful.

But they’re all awful. This is no worse than anything else. I thought it was exactly right.

Well, thank you. What it probably should have been was like much more media empire stuff. And it ended up being on a much more parochial scale. It was a mad, mad idea. My then girlfriend read a lot of those books as well and thought that this was how we were going to get rich, that we should harness my talent, because I wasn’t at that point making very much money.

Were you still a journalist or were you now a writer at this point?

I had just quit the day job. So I had jumped out of the mink lined cage into writing as a tax loss, which was for the first couple of years. I mean, everyone thought I was crazy when I gave up my job. I was the Northern Bureau Chief of a National Sunday newspaper. I had an expense account. I had a company car. I still had a pension because Robert Maxwell had jumped off his yacht at that point. And I threw it all up because I thought I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to take this chance. And so, as I said, my then girlfriend decided that this was what was going to make us rich. I was going to write this massive door stopper of a book, and it was going to earn us millions in a six-way auction.

That’s very precise.

Yeah, and so I wrote it. I was writing it side by side with writing the crime novel I was writing at the time, which would have been a Kate Brannigan novel. So it was almost like in the mornings I wrote this, and in the afternoon I was writing Kate Brannigan. And I finished it. I’ve got a tendency to finish things even when I should throw them in the bin. And it just didn’t sell. My agent, God bless her, tried so hard to sell it. And I think it just wasn’t quite bad enough in some ways.

I did like the little mention of her very good A-level results. I thought that was a really nice touch. The sort of thing that somebody like me who would have been reading it at 16, 17, would have gone, oh right, yes, yes, that’s important, that is, yes.

You’ve got to get good A-levels if you’re going to marry a rich Italian count.

Yeah, that’s the way to success. Do you reckon there’d be any chance to resurrect it? I mean, now that you are Val McDermid, would you be able to do anything with it, do you think? I mean, at the time you were just AN other writer, but now you have a bit of heft behind you, so to speak, do you think?

Oh, but it’s terrible. It’s really terrible. It’s that tabloid prose, you know, which I could write back then and to some degree still can write now with great facility, but there’s no depth to it. There’s no dare there, you know, and my heart would not be in it. I’m in the very privileged position of writing books that I’m passionate about and excited about, and I don’t need to go back and sort of retread things that even at the time that I was writing, it felt more like a job of work than something that had a hold on my heart.

No, fair enough. But speaking of something you used to love those books, I think I’d love to read a Val McDermid version of something like that. That would be brilliant. There would be the odd corpse in it, I suspect.

Absolutely, yes.

All right, let’s move on to the next offcut now. What is this one?

This is much more recent. It’s from December 2019, and it’s an idea that I had for a TV series called Skeletons.

Two heads are better than one, right? Especially at the dark intersection between love and death, that dangerous corner where sex and blood collide with the unthinkable and the unspeakable. When two smart people discover the excitement of the ultimate transgression, anything can happen. And it does. Chloe Summers is an artist working in mixed media, photography, collage, graphics, on the cusp of commercial success thanks to her last two exhibitions, Love and Food, Love and Marriage. Now she’s working on her third, the one that promises to break her out into the big time, Love and Death. But she’s stuck and struggling, trying to escape cliché and tried images. Her partner Colin Stevens, a senior crime scene investigator, is upset to see her so stressed. Bound together in a heady cocktail of heightened eroticism and emotional co-dependency, neither can be happy unless the other is too. Skeletons opens at a private view. Chloe and Colin are drinking champagne and mixing with the patrons and critics who can make or break a career. Chloe is depressed at her own lack of inspiration. Colin reads her despondency and feels helpless. Intercut with the sophisticated party, we see somewhere a killer is engaged in a stylized ballet of violence, creating a tableau of horror with the body of a young man at its heart. As Chloe and Colin arrive home, he gets a call out to a crime scene. It’s the end product of the killing we’ve already seen. It’s a scene so terrible, it’s beyond the experience of all the officers there, but it holds its own awful fascination. And as he works collecting trace evidence, Colin also obsessively takes photos on his phone. When he returns home, Chloe wakes up and he offers to show her the crime scene photos. Perhaps they will break her creative logjam, but the effect is one neither of them expects. The photos plug into the dark side of their relationship and fuel an erotic response neither expected, but both welcome in spite of themselves. Nothing has ever turned them on so much as this.

So this is the most recent off-cut you’ve given us and you said that the more you looked at it, the more ridiculous it seemed. Why was it ridiculous to you?

Because it just seemed to me to be the improbability of it really, that an artist and a crime scene technician would turn into a pair of crazed serial killers making artworks out of people’s bodies and end up confronting a real serial killer. I think it just got, it was ridiculously grungy. And it was a point where I thought, maybe I should stop writing this kind of book because I’m actually going to a point where this is just crazy. And I guess I just thought I could see this being made and I could see myself spending months of my life explaining why I’d written something so violent and turning horrible violence into such artistic beauty. And I thought, I just don’t want to go there.

Why was it called Skeletons?

I can’t remember now.

I was looking at that going, the answer’s in here somewhere and I can’t work out why is it called Skeletons?

Skeletons in your cupboard, I don’t know now. I mean, it’s one of those things where you knock it out and write lines like, a stylised ballet of violence. And you look at it and you think, I hate myself. Yeah, it just seemed to me to be a misstep, a misstep of the imagination. And that’s what happens, you know, one of the things about being a writer, well, one of the things I find, is ideas are everywhere. Ideas are cheap. Every day something occurs to me and I think, oh, maybe we could do something with that. And you chuck them away in the back of your head and some of them just disappear forever and some of them resurface and you’ll knock out two or three pages and see how that looks on the page. Does it make sense? Do I still like this? Am I interested in this? And a lot of it ends up in the bin. But these days, because we save everything to our hard drive or save everything to the cloud, it still sort of sits there. And, you know, maybe 15, 20 years ago, I would just have typed that up and then thought, nah, just bin it.

Right, it just survived because of modern technology.

Yeah, I suppose it’s an example of the things that, you know, that you play with and you think maybe this will go somewhere and maybe this will be something. And then once you actually look at it in the cold light of day, you realise for all sorts of reasons that it’s not something you want to write.

When you say you write out a couple of pages, do you mean you write out a couple of the pages of the book or is it like a treatment you write out, a description of what the project’s going to be?

It’s usually, I’ll write out something like a little bit of, a couple of pages of treatment and maybe a little bit of the opening or perhaps some dialogue between characters to see if it feels like a head I want to be inside or people whose company I want to be in for a while.

So it’s a document for you, it’s not a sales document to convince a publisher?

No, it’s for my reference. I think I drive my publisher slightly crazy because like I’m not ever really in a position to give her anything until I’m pretty much done with the first draft. You know, I’ll say well, it’s another Karen Puri and she goes to the Highlands.

That’s all you need to know.

Although that might change, she might end up going to the Borders.

Right, another offcut now. What’s this one?

This is a little note really. It’s called The Incense Thief. And it’s a sort of anecdote that I heard. And then I wrote a note that turned that again into more narrative form. And I think it’s a short story. And this happened in 2015.

Every three months, he steals the incense from the church, both sticks and cones. He tells himself he would buy it, except that he doesn’t know where the incense comes from. It’s in polythene bags with no identifying features. The truth is he doesn’t actually want to know where the incense comes from. Part of the pleasure of the incense is that it’s stolen. It smells of stealth. The incense is kept in the same room as the vestments. The vestry, he supposes, it’s called. It’s generally locked, except when there’s a service going on. It’s safe to leave it unlocked, then, because anyone walking round, from the nave to the vestry, would be visible to the whole congregation, as well as all the celebrants. What he’s figured out is that if he lurks behind a pillar in the Lady Chapel next to the vestry, he can get in and out without being seen. He can slip in and help himself loading his man bag with enough incense to see him through for another quarter. He never takes more than he needs. He’s not a common thief. He discovered it by chance. This isn’t his religion. He’d gone into the church because they have a not very good painting by John Duncan, Scottish symbolist painter whose work he’s grown interested in because Duncan married a woman he thought had found the Holy Grail. He smelled the incense and fell in love with it. He’s never smelt anything like it anywhere and he has to have it. It took weeks of plotting to work it out. What’s the story? Where does it go?

So is this going to be a mystery or crime thriller short story or would it have gone in a completely different direction?

I don’t know. I still don’t have the story. I’ve got the sort of starting point and I’ve got a sense of who this person is. But I don’t know where it goes from there and every now and again I pick it up and I take a look at it and I think it’s far too good to waste. It’s such a great jumping off point. And there are much stronger short story writers than I who could make a really special thing from it. But I’m not sure that I’m the person who can do it. But I kind of hold it to myself as a little jewel, as a little warming thing that I can take out and fondle. And I think that the opening is really strong. The first paragraph in particular, I think, really works as it is. So I don’t know where it’s going to go yet, but I’m not willing to let it go.

And you definitely think it’s a short story, not the beginning of a novel, because The Incense Thief is a really good title for a novel.

It is a really good title for a novel, but I’m not sure there’s enough… I certainly haven’t found enough to make a novel out of it. It’s really just an example of the way things will capture my attention and will sit there. And I live with the hope that one day they will take shape in my head and there will be a story or there will be a novel. And I think one of the great things about writing that you learn is to be patient, to be persistent, but to be patient with an idea, to let it sit, not to try and push it faster than it can go. I made a mistake of falling in love with an idea for a story. I had a great idea for a story. I thought this was a tremendous story. And I knew right from very early on what the story was about, who the characters were, where it took place, what the various beats in the story were. And so I just dived straight into it. And of course, I hadn’t let it percolate. I hadn’t let it settle. And I just couldn’t get anywhere with it. I couldn’t find the voice. I couldn’t find the tone.

You couldn’t force it or brainstorm it with someone. You don’t work that way at all.

No, it just… There was one element of it I couldn’t get to work. I couldn’t find a reason why one of the characters was behaving in a particular way. And I wrote the first 10,000 words of that book five times over the years, waiting somehow for me to make sense of it. And eventually it was 12 years, 12 years from me first sitting in an Oxford garden, having this brilliant idea for a thriller and actually finishing it and seeing it published.

Which one is it?

Trick of the Dark.

How many ideas do you have brewing at any one time?

Well, there’s always the book I’m writing now, which is, if you like, at the front. If you imagine my brain as a series of windows, that’s the window that’s at the front. And then sort of behind that will be the book I’m thinking about writing next. And that’s always the more exciting book. That’s always going to be the absolutely brilliant book. That’s going to be the one where it all comes together. It’s going to be a pure joy to write from start to finish. The next book’s always the best one. So the one I’m writing now, the next one is starting to take more concrete form behind that. And then in the hinterland of that, there will be three or four moderately well-formed ideas that I’m thinking, yeah, I could maybe work on that. Maybe think about that some more. I need to go for a walk and think about that or think about those characters. And then beyond that, if you like, in the far hinterland, there are vague shadows of ideas that might come to something or not.

Okay, we’ve now come to your final off-cut. Can you tell us about this one, please?

Yeah, this is an idea I had for a TV drama series. I started working on it in the early 2000s and it got to this form around about 2002 and it’s called Vertical Sheep.

Dr Anna Wild makes babies. She’s a medical scientist dedicated to her calling. It’s what she does day in, day out. A successfully implanted embryo is what she’s after. The Randolph Fertility Clinic is one of the best, but there are still many more would-be parents going home with empty arms and a sore heart than there are success stories. For Anna, it’s a vocation. Intelligent, sensitive, but driven, she’s willingly sacrificed an emotional life on the altar of saving and making lives. Tom, the clinic director, is her boss and mentor. He’s built himself a reputation for steady, unspectacular reliability in a world where conservatism is still regarded as one of the cardinal virtues. For 20 years, Anna has been his lieutenant, but she’s never really understood that while she’s driven by the desire to make women’s lives better, Tom has primarily seen fertility medicine as a clever career choice. And when his eye for the main chance leads him down avenues Anna wouldn’t even notice, it has a seismic effect for her, both personally and professionally. Since the days when Tom was a young doctor and Anna his most gifted student, her personal life has centered round her friendship with him and his artist wife Claire and with her brilliant fellow student Daisy, now working miles away in London. Not a big social circle, but all she wants or needs. As for men, she hasn’t had the time, or frankly the inclination for more than the occasional mild flirtation. The temptation of medicine was always stronger, and what you’ve never had, you don’t miss. Behind her competent, worldly-wise facade, she’s an emotional virgin. So when she finally does collide head-on with love, she doesn’t have the experience to know what’s happening to her. As Anna nears her 39th birthday, her world is busy, calm and ordered, and she expects it to stay that way. What she doesn’t know is that she’s about to be ambushed by three very different things, a flask of frozen tissue, the ambitions of a pharmaceutical giant, and love.

Where is this going to go? Is this science fiction?

It’s a drama set in a fertility clinic. It seemed to me that this was an area that hadn’t been covered by a recurring drama series, and it was absolutely ripe to be explored in that way. I have a friend who runs a fertility clinic, and over the years she’s talked to me a lot about her work and the pressures of the science and the pressures of the ethics, and I learned quite a lot about it over the years also from my own experiences in that area. I have a friend who is a television producer, and the two of us started working on this, putting a drama together. The title, Vertical Sheep, came from a lecture that my friend was telling me that she’d attended where one of the speakers said, well, we could do this with sheep now, and ultimately women are just vertical sheep. And that was a great title, great title for a drama. And we worked on it for quite a while. We worked up as a six-part drama, and I thought it was really strong, and we got it into development with an independent production company. And then what sometimes happens with this kind of development is you get a clash of personalities. And we were set to work with a particular script executive, and he was a nightmare. He just wanted to write the script that he wanted. He didn’t understand much of what we were trying to do. He didn’t understand much of the scientific basis for what we were writing about, and he didn’t want to understand. And every script meeting we had was a nightmare. Every time, there was stupid, pointless arguments. And in the end, I just reached the point where I thought, I never want to talk about this again. I never want to hear the words fertility clinic and drama in the same sentence. And so we walked away from it. And it just died because it had become toxic in my head because he had been so impossible to work with.

But you could redo it again now with another production company.

Probably, yeah. I mean, I would have to go right back to First Principles because it was 20 years ago and fertility medicine has been revolutionized in so many respects since then. I’d have to go back and look at the science again. But I still think there’s a great possibility for a series set in a fertility clinic. All human life is here. All sorts of people come through the door. And then you’ve got your medical staff who are pulled in various directions by what’s possible and what’s permissible. So, yeah, I think it’s still got great potential for somebody else to pick it up and run with. But one of the things I’ve always said about adaptation and about having adaptations of my work is that I would not work with people I didn’t like and I didn’t trust. And this completely bore out that determination that it destroyed the project for me because one person was just so impossible to work with.

We’ve come to the end of the show now of one final question. Having listened to these offcuts, is there anything you’ve noticed, anything that has surprised you at all about your own writing?

Yeah, there have been one or two moments where I’ve thought, you know, actually that’s not bad at all. I’d kind of probably dismissed that over the years. But that very first story, the Birdman story, I was really surprised by how well that worked, how chilling it was in places. It’s been interesting. There have been toe-curling moments, no doubt about that. But maybe what I need to do is go back and look in the offcut store and see if there’s something there that needs to be resurrected.

Are you somebody who does like to look back and check through stuff?

I like to go back and think about things that have interested me. There’s a reason why something is in the ideas folder or I tore something out of a magazine and stuck it in a file. So I need to go back and revisit things to see if they set another idea stirring, set another hair running for me. You need to take in, you need to suck in a lot of stuff for the good stuff to rise to the surface. You know, I think where a whale just sort of like sucks in great quantities of stuff through its rows of teeth to find the little gems that sustain it. It’s a bit like that. You have to take in a vast amount and wade through an awful lot of shit before you get to the good stuff.

Well, Val McDermid, it’s been fabulous to talk to you. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your offcuts drawer with us.

It’s been a delight. Thank you.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Val McDermid. The offcuts were performed by Emma Clarke, Rachel Atkins, Christopher Kent, Kenny Blyth, Leah Marks and Beth Chalmers, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com, and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

But just when I was starting out and writing picture books, that was absolutely the next question, was when are you gonna write for adults? You know, you’ve got your training wheels on, and when are you gonna take those wheels off and get going on a big girl bike?

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. My guest this week is Francesca Simon, a name that will be familiar around the world to parents, children, and anyone who’s spent any time with children in the past 25 years. Since 1994, when her most famous creation, Horrid Henry, first saw the light of day, over 22 million books about him have been sold and read by or to children in 29 countries and counting. Yet the 25 story books about Henry, younger brother, Perfect Peter, and their friends and family make up less than half of her output. She’s written picture books and early readers for younger children, including her latest book, Two Terrible Vikings, which was published earlier this year. And The Monstrous Child, the third book in her Mortal God series for young adults has been turned into an opera that was recently performed at the Royal Opera House in London. And there is talk of yet more musical collaborations in the pipeline. Intriguing. Francesca Simon, welcome to the Offcuts Drawer.

Thank you. Thank you. I’m looking forward to opening that drawer.

Now, before we start, you and Henry, Horrid Henry, have, I think it’s fair to say, kind of superstar status within the world of children’s literature. Is it sort of like the cliche of Hollywood and reality TV celebrity? People may not recognize your face, but when they find out who you are, are you a little bit mobbed and nagged for selfies and chased down the street?

Not exactly chased down the street, but it’s always very unexpected who gets very, very, very excited.

Oh, really?

Well, it depends. If you have children of the right age, you get very excited. I’ve had BBC Foreign Correspondents start shaking with excitement and saying, can I just call my children? And I remember meeting Anne Enright after she just won the Booker Prize and being kind of in awe. And Anne Enright went, oh, Francesca Simon, we have to have a selfie. My children just aren’t going to believe this. Oh my God, it’s Francesca Simon. So that was a little unexpected. I believe Jeanette Winterson once fell to the floor. That I wasn’t expecting either.

Was she genuflecting?

No, she was just doing a full on the floor bow. So that was a little unexpected. I didn’t think Jeanette Winterson would be doing that. But no, I mean, it’s kind of wonderful that children get very excited about a book and about meeting an author. It’s not because they’ve seen me on TV, it’s because they’ve loved the stories. And I always enjoy talking to kids about that. But authors are really lucky in that our faces aren’t generally well known. So you can walk around very anonymously.

Okay, well, let’s get started with your first off-cut. Can you tell us please what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Well, this is an outtake from one of the Horrid Henry books and I wrote it around 2011.

Horrid Henry’s Allergies.

Achoo, achoo!

Perfect Peter’s nose was runny. His eyes were itchy. Mum put down her fork. Peter, are you all right? She asked. I’m fine, mumbled Peter. He scooped up another fork full of tomato and swallowed. Dad put down his glass. You know, I think Peter might be allergic to tomatoes, said Dad. Oh no, said Peter. I love tomatoes. Peter, no more tomatoes for you, I’m afraid, said Mum. Perfect Peter looked upset.

Dad, I’m not allergic to all vegetables, am I?

He asked.

I can still have Brussels sprouts and spinach, can’t I?

Of course, Peter, just tomatoes. Perfect Peter beamed.

That’s good, because vegetables are my very best food. I was really worried I wouldn’t be able to eat all my favourites again.

Horrid Henry was outraged. It was so unfair. Why should Peter have all the luck and be allergic to tomatoes? Just think, to be allergic to vegetables. Horrid Henry pretended to sneeze. I’m allergic to, said Henry, to all vegetables.

Ah, lovely stuff. I remember this sort of thing from reading to my kids. So why was this not included? Do you have a word limit when you write Horrid Henry books?

Well, you know, listening to this, I’m thinking, why didn’t I include this? I think that I just couldn’t think of a story. It seemed like a funny idea because I know people who are allergic to tomatoes. But I couldn’t really see the story going anywhere.

Not without someone going to hospital or dying of anaphylactic shock.

You know, I wrote it and then I thought, well, this story is Horrid Henry’s allergy. You know, I have probably, I still have a notebook with probably 50 stories that I never wrote. I mean, they’re just titles or ideas. And this was one of them. So sometimes, you know, I try something out.

And so that wasn’t a clip from anything that was no speculative idea.

It was a speculative idea. That’s a good way of putting it for a story that kind of never went anywhere because it never seemed to develop beyond, oh, I’m allergic to vegetables. I always like the stories to have a bit more depth than that, you know, to work on more than one level. So, you know, it’s funny stuff. I mean, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

So 25 books. But you finished now, haven’t you? Your 25th Horrid Henry book Up, Up and Away. Is that the actual last Horrid Henry story?

Well, that’s 25 books and 100 stories. And I was going to stop at 24, but there was something quite unsatisfactory about 96 stories. Something very pleasing about 25 books, 100 stories. It was also the 25th anniversary of Horrid Henry.

Oh, gosh, yes.

In fact, I really enjoyed writing that last book because a few years had passed and it just felt so kind of lovely to jump back in the water and-

A little bit of a reunion.

Yeah, it was just, it felt like a very nice way to complete it because I’ve always been very concerned that the stories continue to get better and not worse. I think sometimes when people keep writing things, you can really see a difference between the newer stories and the older stories. And I very much wanted to stop at a point where I still thought the stories were excellent and that you couldn’t think, ooh, what happened here? They used to be so good. And now, oh, I see, yes. Because it’s easy to just pretend to write them. You can just have any situation, something awful happens, goodbye. And I like working a bit harder than that. But yes, that is going to be it.

That’s interesting you say that you came back after a gap. Obviously, you’ve grown a year or so. But Horrid Henry conceivably hasn’t. He’s exactly the same age, I presume. Have you ever thought about making him slightly older? How old is he, by the way? How old is Horrid Henry?

Well, I never say because the readership of Horrid Henry is everything from like age four to 18. And so I never say, I mean, in my head, he’s about eight. He’s a kind of a perpetual eight, but like William Brown. No, I’ve never wanted to age him. I think he and Peter exist in this kind of special plane where they will forever be fighting over who has the remote and who gets to sit in the good side of the car. And if they were older, they wouldn’t have the same battles.

Right, well, time for another off cut now. Tell us about this one.

This is a story I wrote in 1965 called The Enchanted Panther.

Once upon a time, there lived a huntsman who lived in the forest with his wife and his only daughter, Angela. Angela was unusually fair with merry blue eyes and golden hair as sparkling as the sun. One day, this huntsman was going out for his usual daily hunting. His daughter ran up to him and said, Father, please bring me the first thing you catch. But child, her father protested, it may be a timid hare or a fierce lion for all we know. But her father loved her dearly and soon gave in to her desires, but asked what had imposed upon her to ask such a thing. Angela replied, last night, I dreamt that a prince came to me and said that I alone could break his enchantment. Then he asked me to ask you what I have just asked you.

I love that ending. That is, if ever an ending spoke of mom’s calling, time for tea, all right, whatever. It’s just, and he asked me to ask you what I have just asked you. I can’t even be bothered to repeat it. That’s hilarious.

It makes me laugh a lot. I was only 10. But the reason I chose this, well, there’s many reasons. First of all, I love fairy tales. I had the idea that I would write my own fairy tales, even though I can see exactly what has inspired this, which is obviously Beauty and the Beast. There’s many stories that have this setup, bring me a rose or bring me something dreadful. But what I particularly like about it is that I had, well, I used to start these stories and I never finished them. I’m always on it, people, to finish things. It’s really important to finish stories. Of course, I never did. I would do this setup and then that would be like, where’s the Panther?

I was going to ask, that was my next question. Where is this enchanted Panther who never gets a look in?

He does not get a look in. The other thing I particularly like is I had no idea what a huntsman did. So I like the idea of a huntsman just doing his daily hunting, like whatever that is. But I just like the ask, ask, ask because you think, okay, you mustn’t repeat. But I did choose this, I think, because fairy tales have had a massive impact on me. I mean, fairy tale and myth is something that I’ve been part of my writing for my entire life. So I’ve always been drawn to these stories. I’m very drawn to myth and they were my favorite books as a child, the Andrew Lang fairy tale books. So I think what I was doing, because I’ve seen a couple of the others, is that I would combine two or three different ones. But it is maddening that I didn’t write anymore. Because when I saw this, I thought, oh, I can’t wait to see what happens. You turn the page, nothing. And we never see the panther that he’s enchanted.

No, how he’s enchanted, very disappointing.

It’s extremely disappointing. Angela has let us down.

But still, it does say quite a lot. It does show quite a lot about you as a child possibly. Presumably, you were quite a reader yourself.

A massive, massive reader. We didn’t have a television till I was 10. In fact, I was 10 years old when I wrote this. I spent most of my time reading. I would read five or six hours a day because I really didn’t want to do anything else. So I would usually read two books a day. I was a member of three libraries. I read at lunchtime. I read whenever I possibly could. So yes, books were a huge part of my childhood.

Your father was a writer, wasn’t he?

Yeah. My dad writes plays and he was writing film at the time. He became a playwright later, but he was writing film scripts, which is why we lived in Malibu in California. I was certainly not a very typical California child. I think possibly maybe one of the reasons I gave her this sort of hair was because I was surrounded by blonde girls.

California girls, yes.

Blonde California girls and I have curly dark hair. But I’ve looked at the other stories I wrote and everybody seems to have golden hair. Nobody has curly brown hair. Possibly the Enchanted Panther does, but since we-

We’ll never know. Well, moving on now, let’s have your next off-cut.

Now, this is an article I wrote on spec in 1980 for the LA. Herald Examiner and the Guardian called Transition.

As Scrooge observed, the spirits did it all in one night. When Jim Callahan’s government was defeated, Maggie Thatcher, complete with cabinet, Dennis and pots and pans, was installed at 10 Downing Street the following morning. But in America, it takes a bit longer. Though the presidential election is held in early November, the new government isn’t sworn in until the 20th of January A superficial analysis might conclude that a 10-week transition period is necessary because there is no shadow government in the US and the president-elect needs time to assemble his cabinet, meet with congressional leaders, appoint ambassadors and reassure rival interest groups. Actually, the changes at the top are cosmetic. One set of democratic professionals move out, while a group of Republican pros move back. Henry Kissinger, Caspar Weinberger and Al Haig, like many of the Reagan team, are old faces from the Nixon Ford years, while the rest are well-known Republican establishment figures. Assembling a new government is a snap. It’s getting a new house and household together, which takes time. The significant changes aren’t taking place in the West Wing offices, but in the master bedroom. And the name on everyone’s lips is Ted Graber. Ted Graber is Nancy Reagan’s interior designer, known in London for refurbishing the American Embassy in 1969. And together they are struggling over the real decisions in Washington. Whereas Reagan has already chosen his entire cabinet, Ted Graber points out that he and Nancy haven’t made our first decision as to colour and fabric. With the largest transition team in history to help him reshuffle the top jobs, Reagan had time to personally select the first family to be’s holiday meat from a deep freeze and thousand oaks. Nancy couldn’t do it. She was much too busy pouring over designs and pondering those critical decisions she and she alone must make. It’s a lonely job. No wonder the president-elect looks so relaxed and the first lady to be looks so harried. She’s got 14 rooms and seven and a half baths to redecorate. Can she do it all before the 20th of January?

Now this seems quite apposite for some reason. I mean, obviously the recent election was quite a while ago now, but I suppose because the eyes of the world were particularly on the White House this time, it feels like, oh gosh, that’s really, really topical.

Oddly enough, yeah.

So you went to university and then you went on to be a journalist. So this was written when you were actually working as a journalist or were you trying to get into journalism?

I was trying to get into journalism and I was just very struck by how totally hilarious it was that, you know, I think Margaret Thatcher came in in 79. Am I right? Yeah, just that the speed with which the British government changes over. And also Nancy Reagan was just being so outrageous, you know, wishing out loud that the Carters would move out sooner so she could redecorate. You know, couldn’t you just clear your offices so we can get in there? I just thought there was something very, very funny about these people coming in. And yes, it was interesting to read it. Essentially, yeah, it’s 40 years later. Because of course, this is a funny transition about can you get out so I can match some wallpaper?

Yes, if only that had been the case this time.

If only that had been the case this time around, exactly. So it was an interesting time to reread this article. But I wrote this on spec because I was trying to get commissions. I was living in London and I thought it would be just fantastic if the LA. Herald, which in fact no longer exists, would let me write some arts pieces from London. So I gave this to them as a sample of my work. I didn’t really expect them to publish it and they really did like it. And I did in fact get commissions off it. But when I tried to get it published in England, that’s when I learned about things having to be topical. I think that it was too late that I think because the election had happened or Reagan was already installed. But again, they liked the piece. So it in fact was a good calling card. And I just remember how much fun I had writing it. Yeah. I mean, the other thing is that journalism changed. And I think it’s why I did very well as a freelance journalist because newspapers were just starting to get interested in having pieces that were both kind of had meat on them but were written in a very easy, breezy style. You know, before there was a much bigger divide, you know, low brow and high brow. And I was able to kind of combine the two.

But what brought you to London in the first place? Why were you writing in the UK?

Well, I’d been at Oxford where I’d done a second BA and it was really more that I didn’t know what to do. I was interested in writing but I didn’t know what. And what happened was that I decided I’d just spend a year in London. I was teaching English as a foreign language. And while I tried to decide what to do, and my flatmate at the time who was a friend from Oxford had a piece published in The Guardian. And I read it and I thought, oh, I write better than this.

I know it’s true.

I don’t really shine brightly in this anecdote. I just thought, I write better than this. And I started trying to get pieces published but I’d never written any. The first piece I ever had published was in The Sunday Times. I’d never written for a school paper. I’d never done anything. But it was just more reading my flatmate’s article and thinking, well, you know, I can do this better. Why don’t I try? And I did. But I really loved being a journalist. A journalist friend said to me once as a critic, John Lahr, that being a journalist was great because it was about getting your education in public. Essentially, you got paid to find things out. And I did really enjoy being a journalist.

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. Interestingly, as you stayed in Britain to write for British papers, and you’ve written Horrid Henry, for example, sorry to keep bringing him back, but Horrid Henry is a British character. And he’s written very much in the British vernacular. Yes. So was that a difficult decision to make? Or did it just happen? Was it just coincidence that that’s how it turned out?

I mean, I was writing for American papers. I wrote for American Vogue. I wrote some things for the New York Times. And I wrote a lot for the LA Herald, as well as writing for British papers. With Henry, I made a definite decision to sound British. It was really because I was living here. The year kind of stretched out. And by the time I decided that I thought I was gonna stay in England, I met my husband in 1983. We got married in 1986. So I’ve lived here much longer than I ever lived in America. And it wasn’t that hard. I still make mistakes. I still call pharmacies, drugstores. And I do get confused about pavements and sidewalks and boots and trunks. I do make those mistakes. But my friend Miranda Richardson, who recorded all the Horrid Henrys, has got a brilliant ear for things. And she would just pick me up on stuff. No, it’s in there. It’s not on, it’s in. So I would make corrections, you know, kind of, I always let her read them before we recorded. So I could change them.

So it wasn’t that you’ve gone, I’ve decided I want to represent British children rather than American children or international children.

Not at all. Though, you know, I think Henry is read all over the world. And one of the things I’ve learned is that actually, if you want something universal, it’s quite a good thing to make it very particular and specific. I mean, I always loved reading about British children when I was growing up in America. I liked E. Nesbitt and I loved the Mary Poppins books. I didn’t really think about it that much. Henry is written in a very natural way for me. And people would correct the odd Americanism. But he’s definitely British, very specifically, middle class and British.

And you think that’s contributed to his great success? If he’d been more generic, it wouldn’t have worked so well, perhaps?

Well, I’m not sure.

I mean, he’s obviously an archetype. But I mean, Henry and Peter are like Cain and Abel. I mean, what I’m writing about is universal things, families and sibling rivalry and parental favouritism. Those things occur all over the world in all cultures, all backgrounds, because Henry’s fans include everybody, boys, girls and children from a huge and diverse backgrounds. And they all very much identify with him.

OK, next offcut, please. What’s this one?

This is called The Wind Blue. And it’s an unpublished picture book I wrote, I wrote in 2002.

Heat up, my darling, or the wind will blow you away, said the mother.

Mother and baby absorbed in each other.

Ella went to the window and opened it. A great gusting wind blew through the house, swept up the baby and whirled him away. I’ll be happy now, thought Ella. It’ll be like before he came. But sadness seeped into the house. The mother stared out the window, shut up tight. The father cried. Winter scene. Ella tugged on her mother’s skirt. Mother, I’m here, she said. The mother stared at the window and said nothing. She’s angry, thought Ella. She’s angry with me, and she wished that the baby had never ever come. The snow melted, and the little girl wandered through the silent house. What had it been like before? Ella could hardly remember, but the house felt cold and empty without him. Maybe he’ll come back, said Ella. The father hugged her. Maybe, he said. That night, Ella had a dream. She saw the baby laughing as he bounced on the billowing wind. The wind carried him through lands of burning heat, then over mountains covered with ice, across oceans which sprayed his face with salt. At last, the wind blew him to the palace of the wind guards, where he stayed asleep and dreaming in a cool white bed, while around him the breezes whispered and murmured. The wind blew. Ella ran to the window and flunk it open. Come back, she cried.

Come back.

Come back.

And in the morning, when she woke, he was home.

The end. Note the style of illustration should be fairy tale, not realistic.

So what happened to this? Did you submit it for publication?

This is an interesting one because a lot of publishers were interested in this. But I think people were scared of it as well.

Why?

Well, it’s kind of a disturbing story. I mean, it works on one level, which is about basically there’s a new baby. The older child wishes the baby was gone. The child, I think is in hospital, has got sick and the girl blames herself for this. But it also works on a fairy tale level of, you know, like those almost those Russian fairy tale drawings is how I imagined it. And the child is just go away and the child literally vanishes. So there were a number of people interested, but ultimately, I think they didn’t quite know what to do with it. It’s an unusual picture book. I mean, it does resolve itself. I’ve always really liked it. And I’m sorry that it hasn’t been published, because I think it’s a very interesting way of acknowledging how awful it is when a new baby comes. And just the idea that you could just wish the baby away. But of course, the parents are so devastated. And there is something very sad about it, you know, just hearing it again, it is quite powerful.

Yes, yes, it’s slightly bleak.

It is bleak. And so maybe it’s too bleak. But I really like it.

Now, I have friends who often say they like to write for children. And what I think they mean is they want to write this sort of picture book, a simple 50 words or less story that will become a bestseller. And do you encounter this attitude a lot from the civilians, shall we say?

Well, it was something that worried me when I first started writing for children, because I had never thought about writing for children. And then my son was born in 1989. And I instantly was flooded with ideas. I mean, just like overwhelmed with ideas. And I thought, gosh, am I one of those people who just imagines they can write for children? Sometimes, I think that people really get confused between the stories that they tell their children that their children love, you know, about their child’s adventure with a dear little squirrel. And what an actual because quite frankly, your child will like any story that you tell them. And if you have if you name the main character after them, you’re done. But picture books are actually very, very sophisticated. If you think about them, they’re like films, and you have to decide what story do the pictures tell, what story do the words tell, and what space are you allowing for the audience. And you’re balancing all of these things.

And presumably, the success of a picture book depends just as much, if not more in some cases on the illustrator.

Oh, yes. I mean, that’s the other thing is that picture books are led. The best picture book should always be led by the pictures, not the words. I mean, your job is really to be under the pictures. There’s nothing more boring than the little girl wore red dress, cue picture of little girl in red dress. The story needs to be told on two levels. I mean, the best ones are when the words say something and then the pictures say something else like Rosie’s walk. Do you remember Rosie’s walk about the hen going for a walk outside her hen house and completely oblivious to the chaos and the danger? So the story is, you know, Rosie did this and Rosie did that and then behind her, she’s knocked over a beehive and the bees are coming and she just doesn’t notice. Probably because they’re short, people can sort of imagine themselves writing it, but they are hard to write really well.

Yes, that’s what I would have thought. I hear it all the time, various people who go, I’m going to give up my day job. Do you know, I’ve always fancied writing for children, I can do this.

Yeah, I mean, when I first started out, the question when people had asked what I did and I said I write children’s books, the next one was, oh, when are you going to write for adults? Like I was sort of in the, I was in the paddling pool and when would I get to the big girl pond? And after Harry Potter and of course the massive success of those books in 97 plus, and then all these adult writers started trying to write for children, that question just vanished.

I’m surprised they asked you, frankly, for Horrid Henry, though.

Well, this was before, you know, Horrid Henry didn’t, I wrote the first one in 1994 and it didn’t become really popular in bookshops until book five. People always imagined book four, Horrid Henry’s Knits, people always imagined it was this overnight success. It was a very, very slow success that depended on teachers and independent booksellers. But just when I was starting out and writing picture books, that was absolutely the next question was, when are you going to write for adults? You’ve got your training wheels on and when are you going to take those wheels off and get going on a proper book?

Well, time for another off cut now. What have we got?

This is an article that Cosmopolitan magazine bought from me in 1984, but ended up not publishing. And it’s called The Tyranny of Chic.

Those shoes go very well with what you’re wearing, encourages the salesgirl. Chic in the identikit calf-length trousers and wrinkled cotton blouse all Paris is sporting that week. Which bit? The stain pink and grey pastel skirt that I suddenly notice is three inches too long. The ruffled white blouse favoured by Lady Diana before the earth’s crust cooled. My tatty handbag whose every defect Francoise’s x-ray eyes detect the moment I creep into the boutique. I buy the shoes, I buy the two pairs of pink pop socks Francoise presses upon me. Then I flee back to my hotel room and lock the door where I can be dowdy in peace. You want to feel a frump? Go to Paris. You want to feel really frumpy? Stay near Saint-Germain. You’ve never truly suffered until you’ve strolled down that boulevard wearing your favourite Laura Ashley grey smock with white petticoat peeping through, you remember, the fashionable look about four and a half years ago and endured thousands of beady female eyes looking at you and hastily averting their gaze lest frumpiness be contagious. Paris is the frump’s nightmare. Heads may not swivel when I walk by at home, but at least maitre d’s don’t always sit me at the back behind a pillar lest my two narrow trousers give their brasserie a bad name. Worse, French women have nothing better to do all day than to sit in sidewalk cafes watching every other woman who walks by. But they don’t just look, they scrutinise, they inspect and they evaluate as they are scrutinised, inspected and evaluated. In Paris, le look is everything, and if you don’t have it, forget it. Learn from my experience, frumps. If you’re not to the man-a-born, do not go to Paris. So this article was written for Cosmopolitan, but they didn’t publish it. Do you know why?

I think because I think it’s possibly because of their advertising.

Goes against the whole ethos of the magazine, I imagine.

Yes, so it was funny, but it does kind of go against the ethos of the magazine. There was also, they thought I sounded a bit too knowledgeable about fashion to be a frump. But I think it was that sort of tension about the advertising and the clothes.

So did they set to you the subject or did you go and get it? I’ve come up with a great idea.

No, I came up with the idea. They liked it. They bought the article. But, you know, magazines like Cosmo buy massive amounts of articles that they have, like, in stock and they just never used it.

But if having your son hadn’t kickstarted your children’s writing career, where do you think you might be today as a writer?

That’s an excellent question because I think as a writer, you have to discover what it is that you’re good at writing. And if I hadn’t had Josh, I wouldn’t have discovered I was good at writing children’s books. I would never have written a children’s book. I’m absolutely convinced of that. I would never have written a children’s book.

Would you have written books though, do you think? Would you have gone on from journalism to novels?

Yes, possibly. But I was still kind of in the process of discovering what it is that I was good at writing because that was something that surprised me as well. I always assumed that if you were a writer, it meant you could write anything. It’s absolutely not true. Even people who write for kids, there’s certain age groups that really appeal to them. I really like writing for that Horrid Henry age group, six to eight, even though Henry’s audiences is much broader, but I fall into that really comfortably. It’s not that I necessarily try to, but there’s people who write for children who can’t write picture books. They just can’t get their words down enough because it’s hard to write for the Horrid Henry age group because you’ve got to have a modified vocabulary, but a sophisticated story. It’s quite hard to do. You find your natural place. My favorite novels to read are Victorian novels, but I’ve never tried to write a Victorian type novel, even though I love them. Big sprawling sagas across continents and multigenerations and continents. They’re just what I like to read. I can’t necessarily write.

Right. Well, let’s move on to your next Offcut Now. This one is?

This is The Scaries, which is an unpublished picture book from 2012.

Alice’s mum told her there were no scareys. Alice’s dad told her there were no scareys. But Alice knew perfectly well there were scareys. The scareys were horrible monsters who lived under Alice’s bed. They had long pointy tongues, black nails instead of teeth and hairy scary claws. Every night, the scareys got ready to sneak out and snatch her. But Alice knew that if she switched out her light and leapt into bed before 10 seconds were up, the scareys couldn’t hurt her. But this wasn’t enough to keep her safe. Snarled the scareys. So Alice chanted a magic spell. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, three times. Maw! Snarled the scareys. Alice lined up all her shoes in her wardrobe. Maw! Snarled the scareys. Alice made sure her duvet cover touched the floor evenly all round her bed. Maw! Or we’ll come and get you! Alice jumped from her chair into the middle of the bed. hissed the scareys. One night a terrible thing happened. Alice forgot to do her special jump into bed and just climbed in. Oh no!

How dare you forget the special jump!

Snarled the scareys. Don’t you ever forget to do it again, or we’ll come and get you! I won’t, said Alice. But the next night Alice tidied her books, lined up her shoes, chanted a magic spell, flicked the light switch and jumped from the chair, but didn’t arrange her duvet. The scareys started to shrink. You horrid little beast! Shrieked the scareys. We’re shrinking! Why didn’t you arrange the duvet? Because I didn’t, said Alice. The next night Alice didn’t tidy her books, line up her shoes, chant her magic spell, flick the light switch or do her special leap. Help us, Alice! Begged the scareys.

Please, just tidy the books.

We’re shrinking! No, said Alice. The scareys got smaller.

Please, chant the magic spell. Please, please, pretty please.

No.

Arrange the duvet. Just a teensy weeny little bit for all time’s sake. We’re shrinking!

No. The scareys got smaller and smaller and smaller. Just the special leap, they squeaked. No. Then Alice heard strange crying noises. Oh, stop that snivelling, said Alice. We thought you liked having us here, Alice, sobbed the scareys.

Why are you driving us away?

Poor scareys, said Alice.

That makes me laugh, although it’s a book about obsessive compulsive disorder, isn’t it?

It is.

It’s not just, I mean, I think all children have rituals. It’s actually more common than you might expect. If you get scared, you sort of want things in a certain way. So it’s more like a sort of propitiation to the gods. But a lot of children do this.

It’s a superstition, isn’t it?

A superstition and magic. If you get scared, the problem is that once you start these rituals, it’s very, very difficult to break it.

So was this book, did you submit it? It says unpublished.

Yeah, no, I did submit it. And you know, various publishers looked at it and they just said no.

Oh, did they say why?

They don’t always give a reason.

Because when I read this, I thought, I think it’s quite good.

I think it’s quite good, too.

Especially these days when everyone’s talking about mental health and children’s mental health.

You know, I was thinking, you know, I might try again to resubmit this somewhere, you know, to different editors, just I do think it’s, as far as I know, no one has done anything like this. No, I was thinking that the same, but you know, when I wrote this, I don’t know that mental health was really way up there.

No, well, it’s nearly 10 years ago, isn’t it now?

But I’ve always been interested in monsters and kind of, I’m very in touch with the emotions of children. I mean, I don’t have a particularly great memory for things that I said or were said to me, but I have a really good memory for the emotions. I think maybe some people thought it was too scary. Sometimes people don’t accept how frightened children are and that pretending it’s not there doesn’t actually help. But I just like the way it resolves itself too.

She’s quite heartless in the end, it turns out. Yeah.

Well, children are heartless. They’re definitely heartless. And just the scariest, they can only exist. They can only have power if she gives them power. So she gets more powerful and they get less powerful.

But she doesn’t take her power gracefully. She doesn’t use her power for good.

It wouldn’t be a book by me if she did.

Right. Well, we’ve come to your final offcut now. Tell us about this one.

Ah, now this is a scene that was cut from my opera, The Monstrous Child, for which I wrote the libretto, which was based on my book of the same name. And this was written in 2019.

Hell has landed in a dark howling wasteland by a glowing bridge which marks the boundary between the living and the dead. Hell sees Modgud standing by the glowing bridge. Modgud raises her arm to stop an unseen dead man.

Who’s that? A bridge? A way out? I could cross back to the world of the living.

Hell tries to cross the bridge and she can’t. She weeps in frustration and fury.

How did you sneak past me? You’re alive. Only the dead can cross my bridge. Why are you crying? Go away! Don’t touch me! Your name, your lineage. I’m Queen, by Odin’s decree. I am Hell, Queen of the Dead. Are you dead? Do I look dead? My name is Modgud. I guard the bridge. Once here, you can never leave. Your days and deeds are done. Let me go back. Let me go back! You can’t. You’ll get used to it, Queen. Everyone does. What do I do? Where do I go? What do I do? Where do I go? Where do I go? Who’s that? Embla, the first woman. Odin made a man and a woman from driftwood. He gave them life, but now her days and deeds are done. Can you believe it, corpses? I’m forced to rule you, Odin’s driftwood.

A dead man approaches barefoot, holding a bucket and axe. Grave goods clank behind him. Shadows slowly fill the theatre. Your name? Your lineage?

I was Helgi, son of son of Sigurd. Pass by, pass by. My days and deeds are done.

A dead woman approaches barefoot.

Your name?

Your lineage?

I was Thor, daughter of Magnus.

Pass by, pass by.

What a job, welcoming the ungrateful dead. At least they bring gifts. Gifts? What kind of gifts? Grave goods.

All for you.

My days and deeds are done.

My days and deeds are done.

My days and deeds are done. Where do we go?

What do we do?

What do we do?

Listen and learn, maggots. Where’s my tribute? I’m hosting you for eternity. I require payment. I have a pot.

I have a spindle. I have a jug. I have an axe.

Junk. I want gold. I want jewels. I have a bracelet.

I have a pot.

She kept my ring. The greedy cow.

My ivory comb. My bracelet. My arm ring. Where is it?

He kept my spear. I was a hero.

I shouldn’t be here. Why am I here?

Where do we go?

Where do we go?

What will you do now, Queen? I don’t know.

Goodness, where to start? Why opera of all the performance genres that your book could take? Why did you choose opera?

Well, as I was writing it, I became aware that this was a very operatic subject because it’s about love and hate and death and jealousy and revenge. And I just thought I seemed to be writing an opera, even though I knew almost nothing about opera and had barely seen one.

I was about to say, are you a fan or something?

I wasn’t at all, but I couldn’t escape from what I was writing. And a friend of mine, Gavin Higgins, is a fantastic composer. And I just gave him the manuscript and said, do you think this is an opera? And he said, yes. And I would love to do it. So of course, we just approached the Royal Opera House as you do. And what had happened was about two years previous, I had been introduced to John Ful James who was the Associate Artistic Director of the Opera House. He turned out to be a big Horrid Henry fan. And he said, oh, if you ever have an idea for an opera, get in touch. And I remember thinking, yeah, right, like I’m going to come up with an idea for an opera, an art form that I have no interest in and know nothing about. But yeah, sure, John. But I wrote to him and I said, you know, I hope you remember me, but I actually think I have a good idea. And he got back to me within, I think, 30 minutes and said, I’ve been hoping you’d be in touch. You could come in, and it all happened really quickly and kind of magically. The head of the opera house said he’d like to direct it. And they both kept saying to us, you do realize this doesn’t happen. You know, people approach us all the time and we always say no. You know, 99 times out of 100, we say no. So I had to write a libretto. And I just thought, well, okay, the worst thing that’s going to happen is that it’ll be terrible and I’ll be fired. So can I cope with that? And I thought, yes. And I was very lucky to be working with Gavin, who’s very, very theatrical and had a big input into the libretto. And it was just the best experience ever. The kind of thrill of being in the opera house, just seeing your work on stage, I just loved it. It was also an incredibly happy production. So many people within that production are working together now. Gavin and I have gone on to write other things. We’re hoping to work with our director again and come up with another opera. I’m close friends with the lead. It was just the conductor’s a friend. It was just a fantastic experience because one of the things I discovered, which I didn’t know if I would, but I discovered I really enjoyed collaborating, which I wasn’t sure that I would because I’m used to writing on my own and I’ve never wanted to write with somebody else. And, you know, one of the keys to writing a good libretto is to work really closely with your composer. And that doesn’t happen very often, but it makes a big difference. And it was absolutely thrilling and wonderful. And it turns out that I can write this, which I didn’t know if I could, but I can.

Is it an opera for, because it’s based on a children’s book that you wrote. Is it an opera for children?

No, not children. It’s for teenagers and adults. Again, my work tends to be pretty broad. It’s sort of all encompassing, I suppose. Adults enjoy Horrid Henry too.

But it’s not targeted from the opera point of view. Was it targeted as this is a young person’s opera?

Yeah, it was. It was aimed at young people, but a lot more adults came to see it. But we did get kids in.

When you say you’ve got plans for collaboration and more projects, is it again aimed at the younger audience?

No, no. Gavin and I have written a cantata for Two Singers, which was meant to be performed last year, but will be performed next year. It’ll have various premieres around the UK. And Monstrous is going to get another production, but it hasn’t been announced yet, but again, in Europe. We’re always hoping the Opera House will bring it back. But in terms of this scene, there was a chunk of this that we cut very late, which is one of the things you absolutely cannot do in opera, which I had to learn the hard way.

Were there tears?

Well, it was one of those things where it’s the point, you know, when Hel says, what a job welcoming the ungrateful dead. And then the dead, she says she wants gifts. And the dead say, I have a pot, I have a spindle, I have a jug, I have an axe. I loved this. This is my favorite scene in the opera. And Gavin had said, you know, I think it’s going on for too long. Nonsense, nonsense. It’s great. You know, how touching that these people are dead and this is what they have to offer. They have a pot, they have a spindle. This is all that’s left of their life. It’s so touching. And in rehearsal, you know, the producer came up to me and said, you know, Francesca, this scene is going on for too long. And the director said, you know, Francesca, the scene goes on for too long. So you know, when three people I respect say the scene’s going on for too long, so I cut it. But normally with opera, because the music is so interwoven, Gavin always says it’s like cutting a hole in a sock and the whole thing unravels. And in this case, with this scene, he went snip, snip, and just took it out. And I said to him, I guess that says something, doesn’t it? He said, Yep. He just felt it was unnecessary. But I do I do still love it. I mean, I understand that you wanted the scene to move on. But I just think it’s very touching. I was what gave me the idea was, was, I think it was I was at the British Museum. And, you know, you see these graves that are uncovered and the objects that people have in those graves. And this is what their life is reduced down to is a few broken pots. And that, you know, these are precious to these people. And of course, she rejects it because it’s not gold or silver. So I do still like it. But I, you know, if you’re working with other people, you occasionally have to give in. I once described how Gavin and I work together. And Gavin will say, you know, I think this scene needs to be cut. That’s our working relationship.

Yes, that’s quite how it should be.

Oh, it should. No, absolutely. Gavin has great instincts.

Right. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show. One final question. You’ve written now for various formats and the Horrid Henry has appeared not just in book form, but TV, film, theatre, radio. And of course, we’ve just heard about the opera. So knowing what you know now, would you have done anything differently at any point in your career?

Yes, I would have held on to the Horrid Henry rights with every bit of strength in my palsied grasp. Yes, I would never, you know, early on publishers put pressure on you to sign over rights to them.

Oh, you sign it over to your actual publishers?

Yeah, and then they can sell it on. Yes, and you should only give publishers book rights. So I kept all rights for the opera Monstrous Child. I have to say it was an absolute pleasure dealing with the rights holder, me. So yes, I would definitely, that is the one big mistake I made not to hold on to my Horrid Henry rights. But apart from that, no, I mean, I’ve been hugely fortunate in my career. I’m so lucky that I’ve been writing at a time when children’s books are given huge respect. And I’m just so fortunate that my books have done well and that they found readers all over the world, for which I’m immensely grateful.

Well, it’s been an absolute treat to talk to you, Francesca Simon. And we’re very grateful that you came and shared the contents of your off-cut straw with us.

Thank you so much for having me on the show.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Francesca Simon. The offcuts were performed by Emma Clarke, Keith Wickham, Rachel Atkins, Leah Marks, David Holt and Beth Chalmers, 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.

The best one me and Ian ever got was, like, we still couldn’t work out it was like a document. I think it was creation or something, but it was, you open it and it says, in memory of my father, blah, blah, blah. Which is weird, having a TV proposal in memory. It seemed to be a cross between a television program, but mainly a manual for how to operate a remote control car.

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. My guest this week, Robert Popper, is responsible for many of the greatest television comedy moments of the past 20 years. Possibly best known as the writer and producer of six series of the multi-award winning sitcom Friday Night Dinner on Channel 4, and two series of the cult science spoof Look Around You with fellow writer performer Peter Serafinowicz, he has also written, script edited, and or produced such series as Peep Show, The Inbetweeners, The IT Crowd, Him and Her, and he even wrote on four episodes of the hit US comedy South Park. More recently, he co-wrote some of the award-winning sitcom Stathletes Flat, and in the literary world, he is known for his alter ego Robin Cooper, author of three best-selling books based around the time waster letters, an audio compendium of which has just been released on Audible, read by Popper himself, and featuring the voices of Serafinowicz and Dawn French. Robert Popper, welcome to the show.

Hello, what a welcome.

How many long sub clauses were in that?

The sub clauses were excellent. You are on fire.

The back of my throat is slightly on fire, as a matter of fact.

Have a mint, have a mint.

I wanted to ask you, actually, you’re reading these letters out yourself. Does your alter ego Robin Cooper have a different voice to your own?

Yes, he does. Yes, he speaks like this, and he sort of speaks like this. I do lots of phone calls as him, but then they’re on the Audible thing as well. I’ve been doing lots of prank phone calls since I was about seven. Robin Cooper kind of emerged while I was writing the letters, really, and then… Yes, he sort of… I beg your pardon. He talks a bit like this.

Oh, right. I see. How old is he just out of interest, would you say?

You know why? He must be 60 now, 62.

If he’s a day. Right, let’s kick off with your first off-cut. Can you tell me what it’s called, what genre it was written for, and when it was written?

This was… I guess it was for school. Actually, you know what? This was in a little book of poems I found. Sound pretentious, written by me. So actually, I think it was just for me. And it’s a poem called My Brother that I wrote when I was eight in 1975. Jesus.

My brother has four names. They are Jonathan Howard Lee Popper. He has fairish hair and blue eyes, not to mention his heavy hand he takes after my dad. Jonathan can be very mean. If someone would ask for a crisp, he would put his hand in the bag and pull out a very small one. He is always getting told off and then he would start crying, which is very unusual. Jonathan is a very tough kid. He’s very good at pinching, kicking and punching. Unlike most four year old children, Jonathan is very good at football. For instance, Jonathan and my dad were playing football against me and they won 10-9 and Jonathan scored six goals. I was very surprised. He can tackle me and spends most of his time fouling me. It’s horrible when he wears his red sandals. He is a very fast runner. He came fourth at Sports Day in the running race and the beanbag race. In the night, we nearly always get out of bed and start playing. It’s great fun. My mum and dad don’t think so. And to tell the truth, we don’t think so when they come up. It’s great fun to have Jonathan as a brother. And I wouldn’t like another.

Oh, quite a bleak ending. Actually, sorry. I should have introduced that as not a poem. It wasn’t a poem.

But you know what? That’s exactly what I was going to say. That’s not a poem. It doesn’t rhyme. It doesn’t scan.

I got it wrong. It’s not a poem. It’s actually quite depressing and quite dull about it. Actually, I just found this book and I thought, you know, what is all this stuff? Yeah, there was books of writing and poems. And it’s something quite bleak about the end. I think sort of lovely and also bleak.

The bleak bit.

I wouldn’t have any other. Just an it, just end. I like things that do that. They just end.

Well, I presumably at the age of eight, you sort of got tired. Your little wrist had got tired.

Yeah, my little wrist. I’m listening again. It’s quite a dull bit of work, but that’s I think is a good way to start.

Well, I mean, considering you are the writer and producer of the great sitcom about a Jewish family, which is two brothers, it does.

That is why I thought it might resonate.

Yes, that’s the obvious place to start, really, isn’t it?

Carry you over the board and threshold.

Well, no, I mean, this was the little Robert Popper sitting at home writing about his brother then and then do that wiggly screen thing, fade in 20, 30 years later, and was writing Friday Night Dinner about his brother and him.

But I do remember his sandals. He would give a good kick. I remember that.

It did have an element of Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, the comment about the red sandals.

I know, I know. It makes him sort of sound like a little prince as well, which I quite like.

And presumably it’s all based on truth that you have a younger brother.

It’s all based on no lies. I have a younger brother called Johnny, which I named after Friday Night Dinner, same character, I called him Johnny. I couldn’t be bothered to change it. And we have spent since we were, you know, well, since he was born and I was alive, we have fought, as in playful. To this day, it just doesn’t ever end. We still fight. That is just like our bonding, just jumping on each other and he wins. He’s younger than me, but he’s stronger than me, so he always wins, but I don’t care. That’s just what we do. It’s what we do. My wife, when she first came around, she actually went to a Friday Night Dinner at my mum’s and she just couldn’t believe, I mean, number one, she’s not Jewish, number two, she just couldn’t believe the level of violence, physical violence that was occurring in front of her. It’s sort of calmed down a bit now, but, you know, at any minute, something could occur.

Is it a good example to set your children?

It’s too late to change now. That’s what they know. That’s just all they know.

Dad fights with Uncle Johnny.

And loses.

But then dad did write Friday Night Dinner, so he wins in the end.

He wins. He wins.

So Friday Night Dinner was very much based, obviously. Is there a lot of truth in the whole family relationship? How do your mum and dad feel about the characters that are supposedly based on them?

Yeah, it’s kind of loosely based on it. I mean, originally the idea was just about the fact that when you go home, when you’re like an adult, you just revert to being a kid again. And everything, all those old relationships and power structure, you just fall into the thing you had when you were young, when you were little. And I thought that was just, number one, a universality. I can’t say that word, but I’m going to say that. And I thought it was just funny. And I thought the fact that we went home generally on Friday night was like a Sunday lunch. And it was the same every week. It just could kind of encapsulate that. And there was a lot of silly stuff I could do in that. Yes, but in answer, they all, yeah. I mean, my mom is funny and smart. And my dad didn’t use to wear a top in the house, like in the show. And it was pretty grubby and irritable when he could be. And to say just the weirdest, oddest thing. I mean, I didn’t put this in the show, but I remember years ago, before Sky TV and stuff, on their TV he used to have a little post-it note. And in pencil, because he only writes in pencil for some reason, there were five channels, you know, Bbc 1, Bbc 2, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5. And somehow he had managed to tune the TV so that he needed a reminder what channels what. I’ve got a picture of it. It’s like, one, ITV, two, Channel 4, three, Channel 5. What do you think one or two would be? None of them were right. And that was stuck on the TV for fucking years. It’s like my favourite. I’ve got that somewhere. It’s like my favourite possession. My dad’s TV guide. How my mum puts up with that, I just don’t know.

But no doubt they’re very proud of being featured in a…

They’re very ashamed. No, they were fine. They were great about it. They were really good.

Right. Well, time for another off cut now. Tell us about this one.

Try and get this right. These are some short poems. These are poems.

These are poems, are they?

Yeah, these are more disappointing ones. I wrote when I was 10, but all about the seasons.

And you wrote them at 10. What year was that?

Bloody hell, 77. Just after punk.

As you will be able to tell from these poems.

Yeah, they’re quite punky. Yeah, the influence of punk. I don’t know if it was punk going into New Wave is kind of beginning. So you’ll see it.

Winter. Winter is cold. Down comes the snow. Freezing wet weather and just listen to the wind blow. The rain is falling as hard as can be. The leaves are now falling off the pinewood tree. Umbrellas go up. Put your coats on. Don’t go outside for the thunder’s begun.

Spring. Spring is warm.

Out comes the sun.

People in happiness having such fun. Birds are singing in the trees. Leaves are blowing in the breeze. Gazing, just gazing down by the wall. The sun is now like a red-hot ball. The scenery now is just beautiful. Mountains, lakes and hills are now like a square that is practically full.

Summer. Birds are singing in the trees. Leaves are blowing in the breeze. The sun is shining through the trees. Hear the humming of the bees. In the nests, the birds are tweeting. Worms are the food they are receiving. People lying in the sun. Now is the time not to run. School has ended once and for all. People swimming in a pool.

Autumn. The leaves are falling onto the ground. Rusty red leaves are now found. The wind is blowing against the trees. That is the sign of autumn. The trees are swaying. The wind is blowing. Flowers are dying. Leaves are falling. But you better watch out, because winter is near.

Autumn’s the dark one. I don’t know why autumn is not winter. It just doesn’t…

Oh, they were all pretty dark.

Worms are the food they are receiving is brilliant. Also, I mean, brought with beautiful and like a swear that is practically full, that was our favourite line.

Like a square that is practically full.

They’re good. I love the way they were read.

Thank you very much. Were you very obsessed with trees, leaves and wind when you were a 10 year old? That’s the basic overriding theme.

I must have been. Yeah, clearly. I can’t really remember. I remember I was obsessed with, I’ve learnt the word incandescent and that was in every essay, incandescent. So much so that if I ever had to read out my essay, say it at school, if I said incandescent, everyone would shout incandescent, meaning we know you always use that fucking word. So then I just always use that word to sort of annoy everyone. That was my word.

Incandescent. And yet it didn’t have, and it could have, it would have been perfect.

It predated the incandescent phase.

I see.

Haven’t used it since. I don’t think in anything. I don’t think I could.

What, incandescent? Well, if you say it enough times, it ceases to mean anything. So you were a bit of a writer at school then, were you? We don’t really know.

No, I think I used to write with my best friend at school, Gideon, and we used to do projects on our own, and we had a teacher we liked, who we nicknamed Mr. Bigger Bagger, I have no idea why. And he was cool, and we used to just do projects. So we used to do, just for ourselves, the theory of triangles, where we would prove a triangle is a circle or something, but do quite a lot of work on it. It was just crap, and give it to him, and he would mark it. It was just like, it wasn’t even homework. It was just the thing we used to like doing. So we did some of that stuff.

How old were you when you did that?

I probably about 12 or 13. No, what I used to do was, I remember this one, I must have been about 11, and a teacher asked us to write an essay about our favorite TV shows, and then we had to mount it on a board and decorate the board with the names of the programs. But I, it’s quite young when I started doing all this crap. I just, I had like a few programs that people would know, and then I made up all the other ones, and then I decorated the thing with like the news at 10, and then it would have, I don’t know, Sampson and the Ape or something, the Mysterious Keys or just things like that. And then it would have another news round, and then it would have Billy Brunson and his dilemma, things like that. And it got like, I got a really good market. It was part of the display, like on parents’ evening, and it was up there on the wall. And yeah, I was so proud of that. I think I told my parents and they were like, oh, Robert.

Well, doesn’t that foreshadow your, certainly some of the work in Look Around You and all that?

Yeah, I think I’d always done that. And yeah, I would sometimes put like in my essays, like a few times I put the word shit in and stuff.

What, school essays?

Yeah, I did. We had a history teacher. He just thought, he doesn’t read this. So I got like twice managed to put the word shit in the middle of it. Actually didn’t notice it, stuff like that. Or just a word that doesn’t mean anything and it’s just not noticed. So I would do that.

What an incredible child you were.

No, I was an idiot.

No.

I was a bit old. I was probably like 16 when you’re doing that stuff.

But still, to have that kind of creative spirit, I mean, sorry to bring it down to being too sincere here, but that sounds like you were quite an interesting kid to be around.

The best thing I did was, I was 15, but it was the year where you could give up. I know it’s all different now, but you’re doing subjects and you’re not gonna do them anymore. You’re not gonna do them for your GCSEs or O levels or whatever. And biology, I was giving up. So you still had to do your end of year exam, but then you knew you were never gonna do it again. So you would just write crap, it didn’t matter. But I remember we had like an exam room there’s about 150 kids in there, all doing biology, of which two thirds were going to give it up. So I remember coming up with the idea that, and this is before like mobile phones and people would have watches and often on the hour, you’d hear one go beep beep like that. It was like when the first watch goes beep beep at three o’clock, everyone just put up your hand and ask for four extra pieces of plain paper please. So it was great. So it started at two and when it was three, like 75 hands just went up suddenly. It’s like a bit of conceptual art and there’s two invigilators. Like a flash mob. A flash mob. Flash mob, that’s it. And it was like, oh, hello, hello, can I have four pieces of paper please? Okay, the next person, can I have four pieces of paper please? And it’s like, they can’t say what the fuck’s going on because people are actually doing the exam. That was great. That was what the best bits of school that, all that stuff.

Okay, moving on now. Let’s have your next off cut.

So this is a fake CV I wrote in 1993 when I tried to get a job in comedy and TV, didn’t know anyone, so I thought I would do this.

Name Robert Shaku Popper, marital status, single, nationality, British. Background, November, 1970, I was the sole survivor of an air crash in the forests of British Columbia, Canada. Reared by wolves, I lived for 12 years in the Canadian forests, hunting, gathering and learning the ways of the wild. In 1982, I was rescued by English missionaries and taken to start a new life in edgeware middle sex. Education, I have little formal education, save what I learned in the forests of British Columbia. I can read and write English, am numerate and can dress myself. Employment, January, 1984 to January, 1986, Nesbit Pencils Limited, Nesbit House, Mahogany Road, Perry Vale. Having lived among forests, I’ve always felt a natural affinity towards trees and wood. Thus, a position with a pencil manufacturer seemed appropriate. I worked in the factory, moving from the blunting department through to sharpening. Reason for leaving. I found the nature of the work personally upsetting. March, 1986 to February, 1990, Glossop Syrups UK, Smedley Way, North Harrow, Middlesex. On leaving Nesbit, I believed it was a natural progression for me to move from pencils to syrup. I worked as part of a team developing new flavours and in addition to increasing sugar content in all of Glossop’s syrups and treacles, I helped introduce a further range of products. Glossop’s Industrial Syrup, for the aeronautical industry. I produced the in-house bi-monthly magazine, Success with Syrups. January to February, 1990, Health and Safety Officer, Reason for Leaving, Boiled. Made a full and miraculous recovery after slipping and falling into a vat of boiling syrup, industrial range. Please see reference. Interests and hobbies, personal hygiene, collector of Velcro garments, regular contributor to Colostomy Weekly. I am a keen huntsman and a more than provisioned with a rifle, curtain making, baying.

Now there was a further addendum to that CV, but we didn’t have time to get that recorded, unfortunately. So tell us about this very strange CV.

Well, I decided I wanted to go find work in TV and comedy. I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t know how to get in.

What were you doing at the time? Where were you?

I was playing guitar in a band that was just a band that wasn’t a famous band. And we used to just argue the whole time. Because I played guitar since I was like seven and that’s all I ever wanted to do. And I realized I don’t want to do this anymore. And I remember Alan Partridge was on the radio, knowing me, knowing you. And Today Today was on the radio. And I was thinking, oh, this is so good. I really want to do something like this. So I didn’t know anyone. And I remember my parents knew someone, a friend of a friend whose son worked on Esther Ransom. And I think that was useful. But he gave me some advice. You need to write to producers of shows you like. So I then found out some names and I wrote to them. And I thought, well, they don’t know me. Everyone sort of wants to work in TV, don’t they? So then I suddenly thought, well, I’ll just make up a CV that looks completely normal. So at the beginning of that CV, it has my name and address. And then it just, it’s suddenly, oh, I survived an air crash.

Although Robert Shapley Popper was a bit of a giveaway.

Well, that was one like tiny hint there. And it also had another job of me working for a company called Purine, that was it. Which is basically, you realize it’s just their re-bottling piss. And the references from the guy, it’s just printed on prison paper, Pentonville prison. And it basically says, I’d like to also add the I too. I’m available from work as from like 20 years in the future. I was so proud of that. To this day, it’s like maybe my favorite thing I’ve ever written because it got me like through so many doors and it got me to the comic strip Presents, which was Peter Richardson, who’s a genius. And he said he wanted to meet me and I came in and I just heard him shout, bring me the wolf man. And so yeah, it got me into like, that was my way of getting to meet people. Basically writing stupid made up things has what early on got me into places.

So you sent him your CV, you got an interview with him and you started working at the comic strip.

Well, it wasn’t really an interview, it was weird, because I walked into the comic strip and I remember it was like, sort of slightly stepping into Sesame Street, it was like all higgledy-piggledy, or like quite grotty and dirty and rundown.

Like the young ones.

Yeah, kind of, yeah, it was a bit. And I went upstairs and he was there with like some young comedy people, all older than me. And he said, oh, sit in, we’re just doing some ideas and script things. I went, okay. And they were smoking dope. And I thought, wow, this is fucking great. I want to work here. This is just so, this is a job. And there was no mention of a job. He said, oh, we loved your CV. And then they were being funny. And then-

Did you join in? Were you asked for your opinions?

I think I did a bit. Yeah, I think I did a bit. I think he liked me because he was looking at me a lot for like, oh, is this funny? And at the end of it, you’re all thanks for coming in there. Thank you. Because he’s so vain, Peter. He’s lovely. By then I’m like, okay, right. So what should I do? He said, well, maybe like just come tomorrow or something. So I thought, okay. So we’ll just turn up the more. And I remember like someone was working and I said, well, you have said, oh, I’m starting today and my job starts today, I’m working with Peter. I went, oh, because I hadn’t been given a job. So I sort of bullied my way into getting a job. And I got a job as like a runner and his assistant quite early on and with like crap money. But I sort of just kept turning up. I think he couldn’t even remember that. He said, definitely come. But then, and then I worked there for two, three years. And yeah.

Did you ever get to do any writing, any creative stuff?

I did a bit of writing with him on a film that we didn’t make. And, you know, mainly like assisting him on the writing, but also kind of chipping in and just learn loads watching him write. So yeah, that was, it was really cool because it was quite punky and it’s quite rock and rolly. Just because like you be there and then someone would walk in, your daughter, you buzz and it would go, it’s Jeff. And you go, who’s Jeff? And like, it’s Jeff Beck, the guitarist, who’s Peter’s best friend. Like, I recognize you, Jeff Beck. And it’s Pete there. He’s upstairs. And then the phone would go, hi, it’s Kate Bush here. It’s Peter. So, you know, when you’re like young and it’s like, fucking it was Kate Bush on the phone, it was…

That sounds like the best job in the world.

It was really intense because you worked really long. And yeah, it was fun. It was like, you know, I remember like living in his family house for a while while we were writing and stuff like that. So it’s all like intense and mad, but it was great. Yeah, it was great.

Okay then, next off cut, please. What’s this one?

This is from Mein Kampf. No, this is from… This is from 1993. It’s a letter I wrote to the fictional character, Alan Partridge.

Dear Mr. Partridge, I am writing to tell you that up until recently, driving on the A41 had never been so much fun. Every Tuesday night between 6.30 and 7:00 PM, this perfectly ordinary Honda quintet owner would be transformed into a sniggering, incoherent idiot, oblivious to the outside world or indeed the outside lane. From the moment your AHA signal 30 minutes of guaranteed stupidity, my body would begin to display the classic symptoms of rigor mirthis. My grinning face screened in numerous car mirrors seemed to drive us to suggest that I was either in sheer awe of the Brent Cross flyover or merely enjoying the company of a very funny yet invisible passenger. In a sense, these motorists would be half right. With so much free parking, Brent Cross is the ideal place for family shopping. What I’m trying to say in roundabout manner is that I found your show, Knowing Me, Knowing You, extremely funny. Now, you may have gathered, possibly from the eye-catching golden envelope, courtesy of the Eric Morley stationery collection, that I have been trying to grab your attention. The reason is simple. I would like to work with you and your team of writers on any of your forthcoming projects in any capacity. I cannot offer years and years of experience of writing for radio. What I can offer you, however, is an enthusiastic love of comedy, a sharp original mind, an ability to make people laugh and a vivid and surreal tortoise imagination. I’m 25 years old and have a degree in languages from Manchester University. For the last year, I have been playing guitar in a jazz rock band and have performed live in London and in Manchester, although unfortunately, we have never quite broken into the Norwich music scene. I have in my time produced several comic magazines, written sketches for school and university reviews, acted in an Oscar-winning short film and I was once Cecil from Watford King of Trivia, Hertfordshire’s most boring host on a local radio station. You will find that I have an eye and an ear for the ridiculous and another eye and another ear for the ludicrous. I can also offer a lift home to anyone who lives off the A41. Your sincerely, Robert Popper. PS. I understand that you are no doubt a very busy man and I have therefore enclosed a stamped addressed envelope. PPS. In case you find yourself totally tied up at the moment, I have also taken the liberty to write myself a reply letter on your behalf. You will find this inside the enclosed envelope.

Now we couldn’t fit-

That is so embarrassing. It sounds like something written by Noel Edmonds.

Well, we chose to read it in that way.

No, it’s good. I’m glad. I know it’s embarrassing. Sorry.

We didn’t want to do an Alan Partridge impression, obviously, and we just wanted the energy in the letter and the enthusiasm.

It’s so overly written and, oh my God. No, I knew it was embarrassing, so I thought, well, I want to put that in.

I haven’t been humiliated enough in my life.

No, it’s just, I mean, the cute moment is probably I have a very torturous imagination. I thought, okay, that’s all right, that one. But the rest of it is like, oh God.

My favorite one was the outside lane reference, the outside world, that was a good one. And also I can offer anyone a lift. All the car jokes got me basically.

Yeah, this is the same time when I broke my CV, I think, I wrote to him by his agent, or whatever, but I put them in gold envelopes. I bought gold card or something and covered the envelopes in gold because he’d remember me. And then I broke like a letter from Alan Partridge back to me in there. So he would go, oh, he can write Alan Partridge. And then I just kept doing it. I know Steve now, not good buddies, but I work with him. I know, but he often says, oh, I found another one of your gold envelopes in the loft the other day.

How many letters did you actually write to him then?

I don’t know, quite a few.

So this was just one of many?

Yeah, there was a few I wrote to him. Yeah, and then they phoned me, I think, and said-

Stop writing to us.

Left a message, stop writing to us, please. And they said, well, we’re doing a TV show. I don’t think we’re gonna look for new writers, but if you want to write a script, write a script. So I never written a script. So I spent two weeks writing a script for like an interview thing, and I sent it to them. And I think they phoned me or they wrote back and said, we actually, we got lots and we thought it was great. It was really good and we really liked it. But we’re not using other writers. We got a writing bug, just so you know. So that gave me like massive confidence. So I’m like, okay, well, maybe then I can do a bit of this. I remember bumping into Patrick Marber, who used to write up with-

Yeah, Patrick Hanrahan-

I saw him in the street.

Hanrahan, one of his-

Exactly. In Soho, I saw that’s Patrick Marber. So I went up to him and said, Patrick Marber, yeah, I’m Robert Popper. Oh, we thought you’d have curly hair.

How brilliantly surreal. So it wasn’t directly successful as such, it didn’t actually get you a job like your CV did.

Oh no, I didn’t get a job, no. But it gave me a bit of confidence, like, okay.

So they’re both from 1993, so in what order?

Doesn’t mean trying to break in.

So what happened? You sent them both off at the same time, and then you got the job at Comic Strip?

I think I probably sent them at the same time, same, yeah, something like that.

So you were actually fine, because you were working at the Comic Strip at that point?

Or that was before, I think that might have been before the Comic Strip. I think this was probably just before the CV went out, but yeah, it’s kind of around the same sort of time.

And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. So you presumably, having mastered the art of attracting employers’ attention, the boot was on the other foot, tables were turned, et cetera, and you were on the receiving end. Did you get a lot of similar stuff yourself? People sending gold envelopes, et cetera?

Yeah, people did send some cool things like food, biscuits and chocolate, which would go in the bin because they obviously might be injected with acid. But I used to get what I instigated, the nutters file, which was the worst. So obviously, when you were there, I never thought I wanted to be a commissioning editor or anything like that, but at Channel 4, I liked the comedy on there and I got asked in for a meeting. I didn’t know what it was about and then I realized, I said, what is this meeting about? I said, oh, we’re looking for a comedy commissioner. Are you interested at all? I’ve never ever thought about that. Then the more he spoke, this is Kevin Ligo who used to run it and he runs ITV now. I suddenly thought, I really like this guy and I really liked Channel 4. It seemed like a good place when you walked in compared to walking into the BBC, which feels like a cross between, I don’t know, a hospital and a prison. You just think someone’s going to say, don’t run. Channel 4 was funky then, particularly then it’s quite funky. So we’re always looking for new interesting things. I thought, it sounds like this might be fun. It seemed like you could be creative. I remember I thought, you know what, I want this job now. I kept thinking, how am I going to get this job? He said, we’ve seen so many people, by the way. I said, really, who have you seen? He said, the list, it’s in the bin there. I said, can I see it? Okay, gave me the list and I knew those people. I thought, you know what, I want this job. I went, him, I don’t think they’re right. Not that right. Yeah, I’m not sure about any of these really. And anyway, I had a second interview and I somehow got that job. But the best bit of the job was getting like terrible, terrible scripts, just like for random people. Occasionally, you know, once every six months you will get like an absolute zinger. And then I instigated the nutter file, which is where we would collect all these. And the worst one I ever got, it jumped out at me because the front cover was just covered in hand-drawn swastikas. So I was like, okay, right. But it wasn’t like he wasn’t a Nazi because it was, well, it was about the war and Hitler. And if I can summarize it, I’ve got to work it out. So it was something to do with, this is his made up story, it was in the war. So Britain are losing the war and it’s like early 1941 and the Germans are doing very well and it looks bleak for Britain. And then a dog, I don’t know if Winston Churchill finds this dog like an Alsatian, which has a birthmark on it like it’s fur, which is shaped exactly like a swastika. And they think, hmm, Hitler loves dogs. If we could train this dog, this is at the time when Hitler is deciding whether he should invade Britain or the Soviet Union. So if we could train the dog to salute, to give a Nazi salute when Hitler mentions, shall I invade, in German, of course, somehow, Britain or Russia, and the dog salutes the Russia bear, then he’ll do that. So they send the dog over somehow into Germany and let it run near where Hitler is. He finds it, and it’s like, Gott und Himmel. It’s just a sign. And the dog salutes him. So that’s his dog. I’ve got this in my fucking loft, definitely, because I saw it the other day, and I don’t know why I haven’t got it in front of me. It’s covered in swastikas. Anyway, so we got the scene. I remember the scene so well, because I read it loads of years. Now gentlemen, this is when we decide if we should invade Britain or Soviet Union, as if anyone has ever said that. So he has on his table, the map of the world, and shall we invade here, Britain or Soviet Union? And the dog jumps up and salutes over the Soviet Union. That is it. This is Providence. We invade Soviet Union tomorrow. And from that day, Britain was saved, and nevermind Soviet Union, blah, blah, blah. And I think it ends with there is a statue now of him saluting, like the Nazi salutes, yeah.

Of the dog, is the statue of the dog saluting?

In the story, I think at the end, it says, and to this day, a statue was erected to the dog.

So was this a comedy pitch just out of interest, or was it? Because it was sent to you, your comedy commissioner.

Maybe it was, it didn’t seem like a comedy. The other baffling one, which was brilliant, I used to work there with Ian Morris, who went on to write, co-write The Inbetweeners. And the best one me and Ian ever got was, like we still couldn’t work out, it was like a document. I think it was Croatian or something, but it was, you open it and it says, in memory of my father, blah, blah, blah, which is weird having a TV proposal in memory. It seemed to be a cross between a television program, but mainly a manual for how to operate a remote controlled car and how he built it with his father and it had a full diagram and how you operate it. And somehow that was a TV program and we couldn’t work out if this is just a manual that he’s made himself, but somehow this is at the front, it said like a eight part, 45 minute television entertainment show. But it was mainly about the history of him and his father designing this and then diagrams of the unit and how it’s operated. We read that so many times, and we couldn’t figure that one out.

And this was before or after you did Look Around You. I just wondered if these pitches in any way influenced Look Around You because they sound the sort of thing that almost Look Around You would be.

I mean, maybe, but I’ve always been attuned to like stuff that’s brilliantly badly written. I love that, just things that’s so misguidedly wrong, but you know, earnestly done. I mean, we used to get some unbelievable things, game shows as well, that were just absolutely awful with like prizes that were like 30 million pounds. Things like that. The moon, yeah. Yeah, a weekly prize of 30 million and things like that, a weekly prize.

Time for another off cut now. What have we got?

Okay, this is from about 2003 and it is a TV pitch document. I don’t even know if it’s completely finished or not, but it was for an American version of Look Around You for like a series two type thing, for HBO to be called the incredible world of everything.

Imagine you could pack a whole week of school learning into one weekly TV program. Now imagine that TV program was made by some very silly people, very silly people. In fact, everything you were meant to be learning from American history to sex education was absolute nonsense, but it was all presented dead straight. Now imagine it is all set in the 1970s and 1980s, the glory days of schools television. You’ve got The Incredible World of Everything, the silliest and also most serious comedy program on TV. The Incredible World of Everything is written and produced by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz and takes as its starting point their hit UK series Look Around You, series one. But wait, what is Look Around You? Look Around You celebrates everything kitsch and cliché about science education, complete with synthesized music, bushy hairdos and outlandish experiments. Throughout the series we observe a colony of ants build an igloo, receive a telephone call from a brain, discover why ghosts can’t whistle and reveal the largest number in the world. Science has never been so silly. So now you know about Look Around You. What exactly is the incredible world of everything? The incredible world of everything is a spoof school’s magazine show set in the 1970s and 80s. It shot through with the surreal and wildly silly humor that made Look Around You such a success. Each show is divided into mini filmstrip style programs, which we call modules. Each module, complete with its own title page and distinct style, covers a different topic, from fashion to music, science to sex education. Some modules will be regular, others will pop up now and then. Here are some of the modules stroke mini programs we might feature. 50% Fit, Physical Education Lessons presented by Quentin Sampson, a man who only exercises one side of his body. One half is incredibly muscular, the other limp and weak. Before the Teletubbies, babies had to make their own entertainment, literally. is a program for babies, presented and made by babies. Teething issues, rattle reviews, and hard-hitting interviews with adult politicians. Presented by Simon Crofton, won and Felicity Virtue, 7 months. It’s your decision. Issues for school leavers. Leaving home, opening a bank account, choosing a career, planning your own funeral. It’s about time. With the science of time travel still in its infancy, you can encounter quite a few problems. We show you what to do if you unearth a time capsule from the future, or what to say if you receive a phone call from yourself. Wet paint, arts and crafts, practical instruction and viewers’ paintings. Presented by Salvador Dali’s grandson, Peter Dali. In the nutty, sex education. Eggy time. The stakes are high in this entertaining educational quiz where the contestants have to eat a hard-boiled egg for every incorrect answer. The incredible world of everything. It’s Monty Python at school.

That’s quite well written, I thought. I’d watch that. I’d make that now. See, when we did Look Around You 1, which was our spoof science 10-minute show for BBC 2, we got Series 2, like two years later, which was the, like, Tomorrow’s World spoof, with me, Peter, Josie Derby and Olivia Coleman. And before we came up with that idea, originally, this was our idea that we wanted to do, but I think BBC said, no, we want more of a, like, with regular people in it, but I would have liked to have done this.

Did you pitch it to anyone in America, or was it just written on spec?

I think that was for, like, I don’t even know if we did send it in, but I know, when I found the document, it said for HBO.

At the top of the document, you referred to Matt Groening and Jack Black. Presumably you had an in there anyway.

Yeah, it was quite a big cult thing in America. And people seemed to like it because it was stupid and weird. So, yeah. But we pitched kind of this to BBC 2 as well, like straight after we did series one, they said, like, can we do a 30 minute thing? And they didn’t go for that. And they went for the tomorrow as well thing. But I would have loved to have made this. I think it would have been such fun, yeah.

So you wrote that with Peter, your writing partner on many projects. How did you two meet?

We met on a thing I wrote with Mark Freeland, who is a comedy producer now, and Matt, Lucas and David Walliams. The first thing we did was about 1998. For Channel 4 we were going to do a series, but it turned into a 45 minute special. And it was called You Are Here, and it wasn’t very good. It was just before the League of Gentlemen. It was kind of set in a village. But then the League of Gentlemen, same time, did it properly. And we didn’t do it properly. And Peter was in it, and we bonded over Pot Club, as we used to call it, at night. And we became instant, instant super great friends. And then we used to just hang out all the time. And then we just used to talk about, you know, weird, stupid things. And then we one day came up with Look Around You.

Was this your first project that you wrote together?

Yeah, it was. Yeah. And it just started as a, let’s write a short film for fun. And then it was like, no, you know what? Let’s just make it. So within sort of five weeks of talking about it, coming up with the idea, we had made it. And we shot it all with, like, buddies, illegally. We used to go turn up at a place at six in the morning and film outside their premises. And then as they turn up for work, we would leave.

And that’s the first episode?

No, that was called Calcium. And that’s just on the DVD. That was a 20 minute version of Look Around You. Ended up for Bbc 2 as, like, first series as 10 minutes. Eight of them, I suppose. This was just for fun. It wasn’t for TV. It was just for, like, us. And we had a big screening and we invited lots of people we really admired and people sort of seemed to really like it. And we hadn’t thought of it as a TV show at all. And then people started saying, well, you should try and do that for TV. We go, well, it’s so weird. Who would do that? And then eventually Talk Back, the production company who did The Day Today and Chris Morris and Alan Partridge, they got in touch and we loved them. And they said, we’re going to take this to Bbc. We’ll have a go. And we’re like, OK. Then we had a meeting with them and they said we’d like to commission a series. And we’re like, really? And we’d like to do six. And then I went, how about 10? And they went, all right, eight. So it’s like kind of different then. I mean, if you don’t ask. So, yeah, it was great fun. It was like the most fun I’ve ever had in my life ever doing that with Peter.

OK, let’s move on to the next offcut now. This one is right.

This is called Peter and the Wasp. And it’s a bit of a script written by me and Peter Serafinowicz in 2004.

Interior, Piggy’s Cafe, Day. Peter is sitting at a window table with his best friend Wasp, who is a Wasp. Peter is absentmindedly doing the crossword puzzle. The Wasp is crawling over a menu.

So have you decided?

Not yet. Don’t rush me.

I’m not rushing you. I’m just hungry. Look, could you do me a favour and see what the specials are?

All right.

The Wasp flies up from his spot on the table and over to a blackboard with the specials of the day written on it. He hovers in front of the board, slowly getting lower as he reads the information, then buzzes back to the table.

They’ve got Thai beef curry. A vegetable bake.

And a chicken and mushroom pie with…

Oh, hang on. The Wasp flies over to the board again, has a quick look and returns to the table, passing a woman who gently swats him out of the way.

Garlic mash.

Oh, thanks, man.

A confident bubbly waitress walks over. This is Elaine. Peter and the Wasp both secretly fancy her.

So, are you two going to eat anything today?

Yeah, sorry, Elaine. I think I’ll just add some toast and another coffee, please.

No problem.

And you, my dear. Do you do…

Your hair looks nice.

Oh, thanks. It’s in a nice style.

Come on.

Do you do ant’s eggs?

No, I’m afraid we don’t do ant’s eggs.

Do you do beetle grubs?

Elaine shakes her head.

Do you do baby nymph flies?

Look, you know they don’t do that sort of food in here. This is a human restaurant.

Elaine smiles at Peter.

All right, then.

I’ll just have a bowl of chips.

Matt, you’re not getting a bowl of chips. You only ever eat a tiny little bit of one chip.

But I’m hungry.

I’m really sorry. It’s because you’re here, you see. It’s just showing off.

Don’t worry.

It’s fine.

I’ll just have a nut.

OK.

Thank you.

Elaine leaves. A moment later, another waitress, Jenny, places a mug of coffee in front of Peter.

Thank you.

Peter goes back to his crossword.

You made me look a right idiot then. What? With Elaine.

Well, it’s your own fault.

Peter fills in a short answer. Suddenly, the wasp, buzzing loudly, flies onto Peter’s arm and stings him.

Ow, shit, man!

What are you doing?

Ow!

That really hurts, man, you little bastard!

Well, it’s your own fault.

I would never do anything like that to you, never. You know what? You can be really nasty sometimes.

Big deal.

Oh, big deal. Right. Well, tomorrow I’m going to take you to Dr. Simon and have your sting removed.

You won’t.

I will.

Well, I’ll sting him.

You won’t.

I’ll sting him and everyone else.

If you sting anyone again, then that’s you and me finished. I mean it. I mean it. End of friendship.

Really?

None of my friends treat me like that.

Well, none of them have got stings.

This isn’t funny. I’m sick of it. You can move out of the flat and we’ll never see each other again. Right?

Peter goes back to his puzzle.

I’m sorry. Sometimes I can’t help it.

You can help it.

It’s my enzymes.

It’s not your enzymes. You always say that.

Jenny comes over with some toast and a nut.

OK, guys, who’s having what?

I loved this, I have to say. It made me laugh all the way through the recording of this.

You know what? I really love that too. That was Alex Lowe, isn’t it?

It is Alex Lowe.

I love Alex. Thanks for doing that. That was brilliant. I really enjoyed that as well. I was going to play the wasp.

He’s short of it.

That was going to be my first question. What did the wasp sound like?

Oh, they don’t have stings, do they?

Yeah, that was sweet. That was fun. I remember we went and pitched that and we did a read in the office of the BBC and I did the voice. The insult just looked at us like, okay. That would have been funny, man.

So what happened in the rest of the episode? Because that’s obviously just a little…

I don’t even know if we wrote the rest of the episode. It was just that scene. Maybe. Who knows? Maybe that was like a sample scene and we went and pitched it. It would have been funny. I don’t know how we’d have made it, but it would have been funny. Peter and the Wasp.

Yeah. It’s a great title. I thought it sort of had a normal yet surreal feel like you can have in certain animations. I can imagine it would obviously be a lot easier to animate than it would to be.

Yes, it would be.

To get a Wasp co-star.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s train a Wasp up. But I like the fact that the Wasp is sort of irritable sometimes. You know what I mean? But they were really close. Yeah.

They were best friends.

Yeah. It was sort of sweet as well.

But have you written for much animation? I mean, apart from South Park.

No.

So South Park was your only animation that you did?

Yeah. Yeah. No, I don’t think I have. No.

So how did you get South Park then?

I worked a bit in LA and I got to know Matt Stone from South Park as a buddy. And he used to tell me, oh, sometimes we go on like a little retreat like me and Trey Parker and the producer and I think there’s like three writers generally on South Park. And we like sometimes bring a buddy along and we go away somewhere like really nice in California for like three days and we just talk crap. And I used to think, please ask me one day. And then one day he sent me an email, hey, man, you know, I mentioned blah, blah, blah. Would you like to come? So we went to like somewhere really nice in Los Angeles and I rewatched all of South Park. And he said, don’t do any work. And it was just, I think, like an hour or day of talking crap. I think what it is because South Park, they make in six days and they don’t really know what they’re going to do. So I think it was like, if we happen to have any funny ideas that could be used as backups, that’s useful. But I think it’s just fun and it was great. And then they asked me to come on, join the series, but you don’t write on the series. And I could only go for like four, by the time my visa was done, four episodes. But it was, it’s Trey writes it, it’s Matt and Trey. And Trey is the one that then goes and writes it. So you’re in a room from 10 in the morning to one in the afternoon, three hours, that’s all you do. They carry on working and the night before the show goes up, they work the whole night, so a whole day and night. But the other writers, they’re there just for literally three hours a day, it’s brilliant. And no one has a pen, there’s no computer, you never see a script. And it’s Trey going, okay, what are we going to do? I had an idea, maybe this, and he just walks around the table pacing. And I realize you just have to like facilitate Trey’s genius brain, because he is the most impressive person I think I’ve ever met in comedy. And when he has three scene ideas, he will then write on the board, like in five words, you know, Cartman, Bunk School, 2, The Police, Look for Cartman, 3, he has like three scenes. And then he goes, okay, you go now. And you go at like one o’clock, back to your hotel, whatever. And I remember the first day, the writer is saying, oh, you wait till you come in tomorrow. I go, what did you say? So you come in the morning. Okay, oh, yeah, so I did a bit of work on those scenes. And you think you’re going to see a script, follow me. And you follow them into like the edit suite. And they’ve done it. They’ve made those scenes, which often don’t bear any relation to what was discussed. They’ve voiced them, done the music, and they’re ready, they’re done. So you’re just in a room, basically facilitating his enormous brain.

So you’re being amused.

Yeah, I mean, it’s difficult being British a little bit, because as much as you know American culture, it’s about childhood, really. So some of the things you said, we’re going to talk about summer camp, you think, oh, what is summer camp? I think I know what that is. You know what I mean? There’s all that. There’s a whole like divided by language. But also part of the buzz is, oh my god, because I’m such a fan, Trey is doing Cartman now. And Matt is doing Butters. So I’m like dying inside. I’m sitting here and they’re doing the actual voices.

Oh, wow. Did you get to do any voices? They let you do a two second. Oh, the wash.

But Peter Serafinowicz, he worked on it as well. He did some voices on it. Yeah.

Right. Well, we’ve come to your final off cut now. Can you tell us about this one?

Yes. It’s also insane. This is called Sneeples. And it’s from a, well, I suppose a document that I posted up in the nature hut in the woods near my house in 2014.

Sneeples, sometimes known as Snimmsnims, are small furry mammals that walk on two legs and use their hands to forage for food, berries, nuts, grubs, etc. They live mainly in northwest Europe, although there are colonies of Sneeples as far afield as China. Sneeples can be found in Highgate Woods, but are quite difficult to spot. They live in underground dens and usually only come out when it is dark. The female Sneeple just dates for about four months and usually produces four or five baby Sneeples, known as Tibbies. Tibbies are only about three inches in size when born and are also quite blind, although they gain their sight in a couple of weeks. Sneeples are quite harmless to man and can sometimes be quite friendly. There have even been reports of Sneeples nuzzling up to dogs and small children. If you do see one, please let us know. Happy Sneeple watching R. Cooper, September 2012.

Poem. Market Day Sneeples by R. Cooper, 2009. Oh, where are you going, brave lady of old?

I’m going to the market for wares that are sold.

If you see there a Sneeple, brave lady of mine, will ye bring him back homewards, should there one you find?

Oh, that I will do, for my darling, my dear, a Sneeple I shall bring ye, oh, that I do swear. And here is the Sneeple from the market I bring.

Oh, thank ye, my darling, I give you this ring. And so we were married the day after that, and the Sneeple, our Sneeple, wore a flower in his hat.

Notice, Caution, Sneeple breeding ground. We are currently undertaking an intense breeding program with our Sneeples. While this takes place, we ask all visitors kindly, do not touch the Sneeples. Sneeples are naturally shy mammals, and may also be shunned by their peers if they come into contact with humans. Do not feed the Sneeples. Please note, potatoes can be lethal to Sneeples. Do not disturb Sneeple nests or warrens. Please refrain from playing loud music near nesting sites. Throwing frisbees, hoops. If you see a baby Sneeple or Tibby that is away from its parents, please report the matter to a Woodland official. No balloons. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your cooperation. Be S-A. Be Sneeple aware.

Yeah. So, explanation, I think.

In the Highgate woods near where I live, there is a hut, sort of grotty nature hut. And it’s got like a permanent display where you go in and there’ll be like a thing from like 1993 and paper that’s been laminated and stuck on the board with drawing pins. And it might be like bat population and there’ll be a graph, which is impenetrable. And then next to it would be the children from the school had drawn some leaves that’s on there. Then there’ll be like centipede colony information. So it’s quite dull and grotty. And I remember there, I was there with my wife, I thought, you know what? I could just make up an animal, print it up, make it look old so it’s been there for ages and just stick it up here and see how long it will stay here. So I had these creatures I invented when I was little called Sneeples, which are just these sort of flubby, flobby little blobby things.

They look like Mr. Men, don’t they? Because you should like the illustration with it as well.

Of course, yeah. And then I made like, yeah, the first two things you heard. So I made them and I went to Ryman’s got it laminated, they just printed it up, looked at it like it was normal. And then my wife was on lookout. She was scared because she’s not as sort of naughty as me. And I pinned them up in there and they were there for about eight months up in there. And then one day they were gone. Just love the idea that the committee that run that, you know, nature reserve thing would be like one day, okay, this is a sneeple. Sorry, who put these up a sneeple? What are these? And it’s, I just love the idea that would have been a thing anyway. Then I, you know, a year later, I did the one which was the sneeple colony, which I put onto a piece of wood and hammered into the ground. That was also there for months.

The sneeple warning one?

Yeah, the one with the breeding ground, yeah.

When was the poem? I noticed that was written by Robin Cooper.

Yes, I just decided to put it by R. Cooper, as in Robin Cooper. So I just put R. Cooper.

Love that poem.

Yes, that took me about 45 seconds to write. It’s absolute crap. But it kept me very happy. We would go to the woods and go, come on, let’s look in. And then one day it’s like, oh, it’s not there anymore. But yeah, those are the sneak whores.

But this Robin Cooper, we didn’t really talk about him. We mentioned it earlier. He is the character that writes the Time Waster letters that you’ve had three books.

Yeah, they were stupid letters. Generally, the stuff I do starts as a, as you can tell, sort of hobby. And 1999 started, I got a brochure from this garden furniture catalogue. And I had a small flat, I didn’t have a garden. And it was, I kept getting it. So you know what, I’m gonna write back to them. And I said that I was a garden furniture signer and I have an entire range of scarecrows made from beef. Would you be interested in seeing them? And I just signed it Robin Cooper on a whim. And they wrote that we would be very interested in seeing your scarecrows made from beef, question mark. So I wrote back and said, thank you. Oh, I noticed I wrote beef. It must be a spelling mistake. They should of course be scarecrows made from Beal, B-double-E-L, no such word. And then I did my diagrams of these like ridiculous scarecrows that were apparently based on Roman themes. And then they wrote back and I thought, oh, this is great. And then I just started writing more and more. And I found this book called the Directory of British Trade Associations and Hobby Groups. So it would have like the British Marble Collectors side of the British Lizards Association, the British Mustard Society, blah, blah, blah. And I just started writing to them and they’d write back because they didn’t get letters. And it was just a hobby. And then I used to just print them out and show them to my friends. And I did more and more and more. And then eventually, after trying and failing, they became books, yeah.

Well, we’ve almost come to the end of the show now. Final question, are there any offcuts that you’ve still got that you haven’t shared with us today?

You know what, I have got quite a lot of other scripts with Peter that we wrote. There’s some other episodes of Look Around You that were never made. There’s animation about hexagons. There’s an animation, which I love to do, which is about a piece of carbon, a piece of litmus paper and some iron filings called the Three Friends. And they go on to like a Tudor medieval mystery, which is great. That is fun. And then there’s, yeah, we wrote some scripts for our fake religion, Tavuism. We wrote a full fake Tavu church service. I could have actually done that one actually. And yeah, there was quite a few actually, but I was just being picky and fussy and not wanting to give too much away. I don’t know.

Well, fair enough, did you? But you may decide to redevelop them.

But you had the Sneepers, you got Sneepers.

We’ve got the Sneepers and we’ve got Peter and the Wasp. And also the Look Around You, the incredible world of everything. There were some really good ideas in that.

And also the poems about the seasons, which are going to probably become like part of the English syllabus, I imagine.

Yes, I would think so. A level, not even GCSE.

Worms are the food they are receiving.

Yes, that’s, what was that thing about square? Like a square that is practically full.

What was it talking about though? What was the bit before?

I imagine it will either be leaves, trees or wind.

Trees or, yeah.

It’s mainly trees and trees featured very heavily in those poems.

Yes. Yeah.

Well, Robert Popper, it’s been fabulous to talk to you. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your off-cut straw with us.

Likewise, and thank you too.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Robert Popper. The offcuts were performed by Alex Lowe, Lizzie Roper, Toby Longworth and David Holt, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com, and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

I know quite a few screenwriters who tried to get their ideas away as screenplays, and nobody was biting. And they went away and wrote their screenplays as novels, and then there was bidding wars for the screenplay of their novels. There’s a story.

Let’s go.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom draw to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity pave the way to subsequent success.

My guest this week is Andrea Gibb, a film and TV writer whose work includes Elizabeth is Missing for the BBC, starring Glenda Jackson, for which she has three BAFTA nominations, the double award-winning 2016 film of Swallows and Amazons with Rafe Spall and Andrew Scott, the BAFTA nominated Afterlife, and Dear Frankie, winner of Best Script in the Women in Film and Television Awards. As well as creating projects based on original ideas, she’s also adapted several works by other writers for the screen, and has written and indeed still writes for popular TV series, including 2019’s Sanditon and Call the Midwife, which is now on its tenth series. She has two feature films in active development for BBC films and for Fox Searchlight, and six, count them, six current TV script commissions for the BBC and STV, among others. Obviously a plate-spinner extraordinaire, Andrea Gibb, welcome to The Offcut Straw.

Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.

In between all the writing that you’re doing, have you literally got eight things going on at once?

I try not to think about it, but I think you might be right. You’ve just put me into a big old panic there when you actually said that. But yes, I do spin a lot of plates, but they’re all at different stages. So it’s not like I’m, all the scripts are at different development stages. So it’s much more manageable than I actually just sounded.

So does that mean you’ve got different folders and files and things open on your desk and your desktop?

Yes, my desktop is a nightmare. Do you know, it’s really interesting. I’ve just moved flat and I was sort of packing up my study and I found so many notebooks of old projects and I swear I could have made an art installation out of all of them. And in fact, I kept thinking, maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll pile them all up and make an art installation out of the things that got rejected. I mean, Elizabeth is missing, for example, which did get made, but I had about 10 notebooks over the course of that development project.

When you say notebooks, are they things where you made notes on the project or are they actual writing for the project?

No, making notes on the project. Like every time you go to a development meeting and the executives or your producers give you notes, you write them down and I just managed to fill 10 really large notebooks on Elizabeth is missing because the whole thing was in development for three years plus. So I think if you multiply everything over the course of my career, there are a lot of notebooks.

Right, well, let’s kick off with your first off-cut. Can you tell us please what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Yeah, so this is from Lucky Bag which started out as part of a trilogy but became a stand-alone 30-minute drama, and it was 1999.

We hear the front door open and a female voice singing We’re in the Money. Rosalie’s face lights up. It’s Betty. Betty’s black shoes come into view, and a co-op carrier bag is put down beside the table leg. Rosalie has a sly look in. Betty’s face appears catching her.

Out here!

She hands her a roll of bus tickets. Rosalie takes them, delighted.

See that bald-headed idiot that keeps coming on my bus? The one that works in Scots? He stays on right to the very last stop. I can’t get rid of him. And see tonight, he had the bare-faced cheek to ask me out. Are you going? Of course I am. Are you mad?

It’s to my brothers’ worse.

There’s two of them! Dear God!

From under the table, Rosalie watches Betty sit down, kick her shoe off and put it on Mary’s knee.

Mary, can you rub it for me?

Sure thing.

She nips it, hard. Betty lets out a piercing scream. Uncle Peter hands Rosalie a couple of chips under the table. Rosalie stuffs them in her mouth.

Betty?

What is it, darling? Rosalie climbs out from under the table.

Judy Garland’s not very well. She’s away back into the hospital to get the colour put back in her face.

We see Betty in all her glory for the first time. She’s a beauty with a shock of platinum blonde hair.

Have you got chips, pet?

I’m fish.

Fish suppers and it’s not even Friday. God bless Aunt Hannah.

Is mine in the oven, Mammy?

There’s a pie for you. I didn’t know what time you’d be in. I only got the three between four.

Oh, that’s not fair. You know I hate a pie.

Rosalie holds out the remains of her chips.

Oh, no, darling. Hey, pass me out my bag.

Rosalie rushes to hand to the co-op bag. Betty takes a shoe box out of the bag and puts it on the table. She opens it and takes out a pair of red shoes.

Take those shoes off my table, Betty McBurney. Is it any wonder I’ve never got any luck in this house?

Oh, now you’ve done it. Well, at least we’ll know who to blame.

Betty quickly takes the shoes off the table.

Can I try them on, Betty?

Not on your Nellie.

How did you pay for them?

Over time.

Aunt Annie looks her in the eye. Betty looks away, just as Mary gets up from the table and disappears.

Peggy, fancy come to the dancing to celebrate. This shape?

I don’t think so.

Suddenly, Mary bursts back into the room. She bangs a shoebox down on the table. It has America written in lipstick on the side.

You lying thieving cow!

Over time, my arse. Give me back my money or I’ll get the police on you.

I mean it.

Mary picks up one of the red shoes and starts hitting Betty with it.

I didn’t touch your money. Mummy, tell her.

She’s hurting me.

Get her off me.

But Mary won’t be stopped and Rosalie bursts into tears. Uncle Peter just carries on eating his tea. Rosalie looks at the picture of Jesus, but just as she’s about to speak, she catches Aunt Annie’s eye.

That’s enough, Rosalie. This is none of your business. It’s a bonnet. Jesus will tell my mummy on you and then she’ll come down and get me.

A bit later, she’s running out of the room.

So tell us about this. Tell us about the Lucky Bag project.

Well, this was actually one of the first things that I ever wrote. And I was an actor for quite a long time before I started writing. And I had got to that stage where I thought, oh, there must be. I mean, I loved being an actor. I love actors. I love hanging out with them. But I was beginning to think, well, I should get older. There aren’t so many parts, shall we say, for women as they’re reaching their late 30s, whatever. So I thought, oh, I wonder what else is there. So I was doing a play in Glasgow and I was working. I’d come up to Scotland. I was living in London at the time. And I was hanging out with actors up here who were writing and directing and making their own short films. And that seemed more possible in Scotland than it did in London, weirdly. So I went back to London and I thought, I wonder if I could write a short film. I’d never thought about writing before. I thought writers were magicians. But I thought, well, maybe I’ll have a wee go. And the only thing I knew about it, obviously I knew what scripts looked like. I knew what a bad line sounded like because I said quite a few of them. But I thought, right, OK, maybe I should write something that I know. And my mother had seven sisters and she told me loads and loads of stories of what it was like when she was growing up. And this particular story was about Aunt Hannah, who was mentioned in that clip, who won money on the pools. And they all thought they were going to get their share. And as it turned out, Aunt Hannah, she doesn’t obviously give them any money, but they’re planning what they’re going to buy and they’re all together. And it was really fertile ground for me to start practising being a writer with. And I gave Rosalie, I did it from the child’s point of view. So Rosalie was really the central character and her mother was dead. So I gave her Jesus as an imaginary friend. And that’s kind of how I told the story. But there’s a wee kind of coda to that in the sense that I took it to my mum. Now, I come from west of Scotland where praise is not doled out lavishly, shall we say. And you’re sort of encouraged to not to get above your station or to get too big for your bits because it’s not the done thing, shall we say, in Scotland. But I took the script down to my mum and I said to her, Oh, I’ve written about you. Do you fancy having a wee read? And she was like, Oh, yes, I’ll have a wee read of that. That’d be lovely. And I watched her read it all the way through because obviously it was about her and her sisters. And she turned to me at the end when it was finished and she said, Oh, that’s fantastic. And I thought, Oh, my God, praise at last. And then she said to me, I didn’t know you could type. And that was my mother in a nutshell.

Which character was she? Was she the…

She was the Busken Duchess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was actually a Busken Duchess. She was a clippy. And she was a kind of combination of the Busken Duchess and one of her other sisters. But yeah, she was kind of like the sensible one. So really, that’s not Betty’s character. But I amalgamated them.

Right.

But what I’ve really realised now all these years on, my mother is in everything I write in some form or other, in some manifestation, she always is there. So I think I’ve just been working out my relationship with my mother via my writing. Right.

Well, time for another off cut now. Can you tell us about this one?

Yeah. This is the opening of my 2017 drama called More Than This.

Interior, Meg’s bedroom early morning. A woman is in bed fully dressed. She opens her eyes and slowly adjusts to her surroundings. A giant gold balloon emblazoned with the number 50 comes into relief. This is Meg. Yesterday was her 50th birthday. Meg’s husband Danny is asleep beside her. She moves to him and puts her hands down beneath the covers. He stirs.

Are you still drunk?

I wasn’t drunk.

Sure you’re up to this?

Sure you are.

Have a go and see.

Danny is a decent looking man. Not George Clooney, but decent. He’s got a kind face and kind eyes. Meg hauls herself on top of him. It’s an effort.

Jesus, I’m like a slug on a leaf.

He pushes her knee out of the way.

Kidney. Sorry. It’s OK. I’ve got another one.

They kiss and kiss again. He tries to pull her pants off.

What the hell are these?

Spanx. I’ll do it.

Spanx? As in, let me spanx you.

Meg writhes on the bed helplessly trying to get them off.

I’m sweating like a pig now.

One last push and pull and the pants are off. Meg chucks them across the room. The sex resumes. It’s not elegant, but it’s passionate and sweaty. Very sweaty. Oh no! No!

What is it? Did I hurt you?

Her hair is wringing, her skin wet to the touch. Sheets damp.

I’m having a flush.

You’re sticking to me. You’ll have to get off.

He rolls off her. Sorry.

I was really enjoying that. I’ll put the kettle on. It won’t suit you.

He kisses her on the shoulder, grabs his clothes and goes. She drags the sheets off the bed, then collapses on the bed in a sweaty, hungover heap. A phone rings. Meg is frantically searching for her mobile. It’s in among the chaos on the floor next to a bucket. She must have been sick. She reels in disgust and focuses on the name, Mum. She considers not answering but thinks better of it.

No, I’ve been up for ages. No, I wasn’t drunk.

Yes, I’m still coming.

Yes, I’m leaving soon. No, no, no, I won’t be late.

Yes, I’ll get it. No, I won’t forget.

No, I won’t drive too fast.

Bye. Meg drops the phone and slumps back on the bed. Danny appears with a mug of tea and a packet of painkillers. I don’t feel very well. He hands her the mug.

Was I very drunk?

Do you remember the bouncy castle?

The memory comes flooding back. She grimaces.

I used to be able to do a backflip.

When you were ten.

Once a rhythmic gymnast, always a rhythmic gymnast.

He hands her two tablets. And there was your mum again.

Yeah, there she was. That’s my menopause drama.

Capital M, capital M, capital D.

Yes. Yeah, that was something I really wanted to explore about what it felt like to be menopausal and to be 50. And I don’t know, I think sometimes it’s important that we don’t just see one version of menopause or, you know, the things that women go through. You sometimes find in development situations that commissioners only think you need to have one drama about women in their 50s. And actually, we are also unique and also different. And menopause hits all of us so differently and the same thing, you know, that you think, well, actually, no, no, no, no, no. You can have as many dramas as there are women, really.

Was this specifically about the menopause then?

This was about a woman on tilt. It was triggered by her menopause, but she was also, that’s the reason for the title more than this, that she was looking around and thinking, is this it? Is this me? I’ve got here and I’m 50, and I’ve got a grown-up daughter. And in actual fact, her mother dies quite early on. It was a six-part series I was writing, and her mother dies quite early on in episode one. But then her mother doesn’t go. She stays. The ghost is there all the time. She can’t get rid of her. So every time she goes, she thinks, oh, she’s dead, and I’m very upset and all that. But actually she’s not going anywhere because my mother is still with me. So I was exploring all that about what happens when you get to being that age and you’re suddenly orphaned. Do you become grown up? Can you do things that you wouldn’t have done because you didn’t want your mother to know what you were up to or any of those things? But actually you’re carrying the guilt and all of that with you, so you don’t. Or do you stop yourself or you put obstacles in? So I was exploring a kind of a lot of stuff, a lot of very personal stuff in this story, I think. I really wanted to write about being 50 and being faced with choice or lack of choice. And that notion that we become invisible, I think that is something that we all have to kind of come to terms with, isn’t it? We become invisible.

I think 50 is probably quite optimistic. I would say probably at least 10 years earlier than that, depending on who you are.

Yeah, I think you’re probably right. It’s true. I think from 40 on, you know, you’re starting to think about your place in the world and ageing for women is so much pressure. And I think I was exploring a lot of that stuff in that script.

So do you face a lot of your writing on yourself?

It’s interesting. I was thinking about this question the other day. And even when I do an adaptation of a book, you know, that is not related or connected to my actual life, I always ask myself, where am I in the story? And that can be a feeling or a psychology or an experience. It doesn’t mean me physically or me as a person. It means, where do I connect with this story? How is it speaking to me? So I always try to find that in everything I do. You know, Elizabeth is Missing was classic because my father had dementia. And when that book was sent to me, it just spoke to me because I knew the experience. I knew Helen in the book who is caring for her mother with dementia. I knew Helen. Helen was me and so many other Hellens who were in that position. So I like to try and find things that I can find a connection with, I think.

All right. Moving on now, let’s have your next off cut.

Right. These are three pitches for program ideas. I was punting around in 1998.

Sisters of Mercy, single drama, 90 minutes. Bridie’s story. First generation Irish Catholic living and working as a waitress in Glasgow. Bridie’s health is deteriorating. She’s told she could die if she doesn’t give up work and rest. She shocks her family by announcing that she was adopted and she’s going back to Ireland to find out who she is. The family insist her daughter Anna goes with her, and together they travel to Dublin, where Bridie uncovers the harsh, painful truth of her story. She learns about her mother, Chrissie, young and pregnant and thrown to the mercy of the nuns running the Magdalen Asylum on the outskirts of the city. The women who were kept there became the property of the church and were forced to work long hours in the laundry. Then, while Bridie and Anna are still in Dublin, the old asylum building and its adjacent land are put up for sale. The church issues a public statement denying the validity of the Magdalen Penitence buried in the grounds. Bridie’s search for the truth opens out into a fight for justice as she joins forces with the other bereaved families to have the women’s bodies exhumed and moved to consecrated ground.

Mother’s Day, Single Drama, 90 Minutes Mother’s Day is the story of a single day in the life of three women, the day they all become a mother. Set in a maternity ward in Liverpool, we follow Rachel, Cheryl and Helen throughout their first overwhelming 24 hours as they adjust to their new reality. Rachel is a 30-something career woman who’s planned the birth of her child like a military campaign, but on the morning of the big day down, her partner throws a spanner in the works by announcing he’s leaving her, a bombshell that catapults Rachel into a spontaneous and traumatic labour. Cheryl is a 16-year-old who loves cowboy boots and cherry coke. She also has an needle phobia. Sean, her squaddy boyfriend, watches in disgust as Cheryl kicks and screams her way through the early stages of labour, until, to his visible relief, his mother phones the hospital and orders him home for his tea. And then there’s Helen, happily married to Jimmy, and they’re both eagerly looking forward to the birth of their much-wanted child. But everything is thrown into chaos when Helen goes into labour 12 weeks early. Three women from different backgrounds thrown together in the same ward after the birth of their babies. They struggle to find common ground and finally bond through the shared and overwhelming experience of becoming a mother. Defrost, a four-part comedy-drama. Ruby and Daniela are at a crossroads. If you’re twenty-something, single, working shifts in the local electronics factory, life in a small town on the rainy west coast of Scotland has extremely limited charms. And Ruby and Daniela have exhausted all of them, several times. Now they’re on the hunt for a fresh challenge, and they think they’ve found it when Ruby reads an article in a women’s magazine about a small settlement in the frozen north of Scotland, populated almost entirely by men and fish. We follow them as they decide to burn their boats and head north in search of love and adventure. Well, three very strong women-led dramas.

That is one of the things about my work, I would say, if you’re thinking about trying to look for some kind of theme or ideas. I am very concerned with the experience of being a woman, if you like. So a lot of my stuff is women-led and it kind of always has been. And that is, of course, because I’m putting myself in the position. I mean, Mother’s Day, my son was born in Liverpool. So Mother’s Day is entirely, I mean, the characters are made up. I’m not one of them, but they are based on women that were in the ward with me at the time. Obviously, I’ve changed things. I don’t plagiarise everything. Of course. People will start talking to me from now on. I’m going to be ostracised. So I used that experience of my time in Liverpool in that maternity hospital with all the different kinds of amazing women that were in the ward with me at the time. Because when he was born, you stayed in hospital for four days and they pulled the curtains around you on day three automatically because that was the day when you cried. That was how it was. And interestingly enough, the Magdalene one, I came up with that as an idea when all those other ideas for the Magdalene stories must have been percolating at the same time, because they say that thing, that ideas are in the air, they’re in the ether. And that’s why sometimes we think we all have the same idea at the same time because of the zeitgeist or whatever it is. So it interests me that I had a Magdalene story when Peter Mullen made his film and Aisling Walsh, who directed Elizabeth, is missing. She did a beautiful film about the Magdalene sisters. And also the one with Julie Walters when she went to find her daughter with Steve Coogan. I can’t remember what that was called.

Oh, no, Judy Dench, wasn’t it?

Oh, Judy Dench, yes. Is it Philomena? I think so. So it’s really interesting, isn’t it, that ideas are in the air. Even though those ideas all feel now, you think, yeah, yeah, I might pitch defrost. I’m thinking, oh, that’s quite interesting. You know, might try and take that somewhere now or whatever. So what has been very interesting listening to that is that I think a lot of the stuff that a lot of writers like me write about is very universal because it’s based on kind of human experience and small stories that actually reach out and become bigger because of what they matter to everybody who’s experienced something like that, by empathy and universality, I think.

OK, next off cut, please. What’s this one?

This is from Highland Gathering, which was actually the first feature I ever wrote. And again, we’re back in 1998. I seem to be a little factory in 1998. I don’t know when I did anything else, actually.

Interior. A unisex hairdressing salon, Glasgow. The camera moves through the window of the salon and finds Myra, a tall, leggy redhead, taking small perm rollers out of an elderly woman’s hair. This particular salon is a long way from Vidal Sassoon. Not successful, not stylish, but very brightly lit. Sandra, Myra’s skinny junior, is over at the single sink, washing another woman’s hair. A couple of other women sit, ready for Myra, backs against the window, hair dripping wet. Passing a half bottle of Bells between them. Their Hogmanay celebrations well underway. Here, Mrs McClure’s cup’s empty.

Myra, no more for me, my head’s turned. You’ll be boring me out that door.

Oldest trick in the book. Then you don’t see the mess she’s made of your hair.

Oh, come on, it’s Hogmanay.

Go mad, everybody else does.

Are you going anywhere special for the Bells, Myra?

I just stay in on my own. I hate Hogmanay.

Oh, that’s all very well at my age, when you’re fed up looking back and afraid to look forward, but you’ve got your whole life in front of you. You should be out there enjoying it.

Aye, so I will.

Next year. Right, you’re beautiful. Do you want to see the back?

No, I’m sure it’s lovely. It’s always lovely. So, how much is that?

Mrs McClure tries to take money out of her purse. Put that away. I’ve told you I’m ten times to keep your money. Sandra, get Mrs McClure her coat. Right, ladies, who’s next? Interior, Myra’s front room, Glasgow. Drew, Myra’s brother, is standing in front of a mirror in a small, cramped living room, preparations for a big night out in full swing. Eddie, their younger brother, perches impatiently on the edge of the settee, littered with newspapers. The headline on the Herald screams, We’re on the road to Rio. Stv Brown, Myra’s ex-boyfriend, has arrived, dressed to the nines and clearly in a hurry.

Right, you two ready? We can’t hang about here. We’re running to a very tight schedule.

Eddie’s scrutinising the front page of the Herald. He doesn’t look up.

Jesus, Stv, you reek.

Christmas present from my mother. Not a word.

Drew holds up his hand to his mouth, breathes into it and sniffs.

Comrades, I’ve got a monumental feeling about tonight. Our luck’s definitely in.

Stv doesn’t respond, more concerned about the possibility that Myra might appear at any minute.

Is she in?

Relax, she’s still at her work. What did I say, Stv boy? Your luck’s in, because if she’d been here, she’d have chewed your balls.

Rio’s not the capital of Argentina, is it?

So this is set in Scotland, but it doesn’t end up in Scotland, does it?

No. The reason this is a feature film and not telly, if you like, is because this is Myra’s story. Myra wants out of Scotland, she just wants out of Glasgow. She’s a bit stuck. And in the course of the story, this guy comes into her salon and he wants a haircut and they get talking and everything like that. And it transpires that he lives and works in Indonesia, in Jakarta. And Myra basically sees this as her way out. So she manufactures a romance with him and he falls head over heels. And before you know where you are, she’s on her way to Indonesia, away from Scotland. And I’ve set it against the backdrop of the World Cup in Argentina, when Scotland, can I just say that Scotland had their victory celebration at Hamden before they went. I mean, that is so Scottish. They did our kind of tour around Hamden on an open top bus because Ali McLeod was absolutely convinced we were going to Argentina and we were going to win the World Cup. So basically I used the games in Argentina to chart Myra’s progress in Indonesia. You know, so when she gets to Jakarta, she thinks she’s left Glasgow behind for good. And the first place he takes her to, her new husband, is to the meeting of the Caledonian Society. And what she discovers is that she’s gone from Glasgow to Glasgow, that she’s stuck with all these Scottish people who are more Scottish than the Scottish because they’re expatriates. And they are planning a Highland gathering in Jakarta to coincide with Scotland’s victory in the World Cup in Argentina. And they’re bringing, I mean, it’s mayhem. And it actually did happen because my parents, they lived in Jakarta for a while.

Yes, because your father, didn’t your father work all around the world basically?

He did. He was an electrician, a wee spark from Greenock in Scotland. And he was, you know, there just wasn’t work. And he was a bit of an adventurer. And he just decided he was going to travel abroad. And so for the first eight years of my life, I think, my father was abroad and we stayed in Scotland until my mother just said, right, we’re coming with you. So we were all packed up and taken abroad. So I was abroad then from when I was that age until I went to university. You know, I came back to go to school, but I basically I traveled with them. So a Highland gathering in Jakarta actually happened.

And you were there in Jakarta at this time?

Yeah, I was one of the I was in the Scottish country dancing team. I have to say we didn’t win. I suspect a team from Singapore might have won that. But it was incredible. Really, they brought capers over, you know, people tossing capers and pipe bands. They did quite something. But that’s what the Caledonian Society in Jakarta did. And it coincided with the debacle in Argentina.

Thank 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. Now, your feature film Dear Frankie is about letters from a father abroad. Was that based at all on you were saying that your father went away for the first years of your life?

Yeah, totally. That was where that came from. I used to write to him and he wrote back. And like in that film, again, my mother is in that film. We lived in a tenement in Greenock, you know, like a tenement flat. My dad was abroad. He was writing to us. But my mother was frightened to stay on her own. So my granny used to come and stay with us every single night, just sleep in our flat. And so when I was thinking about a story for Dear Frankie, I thought, right, I’m going to centre it with this boy who has no father, but he lives with his mother and his granny because I knew that world. I could relate to that because that was how we were brought up for so long. Right.

Time for another off cut now. What’s this one? Right.

This is from 2011, so we’ve moved forward a wee bit. And it’s part of an opening sequence to an original screenplay of mine called Sex Tet that I actually wrote for the Scottish actor, Kevin McKidd.

Interior, Beth and Dan’s apartment, New York, later. Beth is sifting through the chaos of her loft apartment. There’s been a break-in.

Why didn’t you phone me?

Because you never answer?

His eyes fall on a sculpture, or at least it could be a sculpture. It could also be roadkill.

They left the roadkill. They had some taste then.

They might have had taste, but not a lot of sense. That’s worth more than everything else put together.

He doesn’t answer. He opens the fridge and stares in.

That tuna needs to be eaten.

I don’t want tuna.

I’m not throwing it out.

He closes the fridge, opens a cupboard, closes it, opens another one, and just stares in. Beth picks up a photo frame. The glass is cracked, but the photo is undamaged. It’s of five young people, two women and three men. Two of them are a younger Beth and Dan. They’re huddled close together, laughing on a remote and windswept beach.

What did the cops say?

The usual. They’ll file a report. There’s no point in claiming the insurance. The excess is a joke.

Flog the roadkill, then. That should cover it.

He lifts out a packet of cornflakes, puts his hand in and eats them.

There is milk and bowls. They didn’t take those.

I like it this way. Is that all right?

She doesn’t rise to this.

I lost my job. Sorry.

Oh God, what did you do?

Why do you always assume everything is my fault?

You’ll just have to find another one. We should be OK for a couple of months. Once his exhibition’s up, there’s another one in the diary, and Marina will always recommend me.

The arse has dropped out of the global money markets. The only thing that’s up is debt and misery. But hey, the rich and famous have still got a boner for Jeff Koons. Let them eat cake.

I’m not going to have a row. That’s what you want, and I’m not going to do it tonight. I’ve got your party invites to finish.

I’ve told you, I don’t want a fucking party. I can’t live like this anymore. I want to go home.

Are you leaving me?

Not if you come to.

So you wrote this for Kevin McKidd.

Yeah, I didn’t actually write that part for Kevin. There’s a character called Gus, because Kevin had just done my film Afterlife, and I just absolutely loved working with him. And I was thinking about another original idea, and the idea of these six friends all together, you know, up in the north of Scotland, and like a reunion, really. So it was like I wanted to bring the past together and into the present. And Dan and Gus were best friends. Gus was the character I wrote for Kevin. And then something happened when they all got together, and yeah, there was a crisis of friendship and of, I suppose Dan was having, he was having his midlife crisis, I guess. And that’s kind of what that was about. It was about getting these 40 year olds together and to see what would happen if something explosive happened amongst them.

When you write, do you write to specific actors when you’re picturing the characters?

I do quite like to, I mean, I wrote for David Tennant quite a bit, you know, when I first started writing, because I knew him and he did one of my first short films and he was fantastic and he was in one of my radio plays. So I tend to kind of, if I form a relationship with an actor, I really like to try and keep that going, because they sort of get to know your work and they sort of just understand it instinctively. So yes, and Sharon Small was in that same short film with David and then she was in Dear Frankie. So I think that’s sort of, I really like the fact that there are certain actors who just get it. And that just makes for a shorthand and it makes things easier. I think a lot of writers do that, actually. A lot of the writers that are successful on telly, you’ll find the same actors cropping up time and time again, because it’s just a shorthand. With More Than This, actually, the one, we’ve heard an excerpt from that. The BBC allowed me, gave me the ability to go into a workshop situation, to workshop the script. I mean, it still didn’t get made, but we had this amazing week where I was able to get Sharon and a really good friend, Katie Murphy and Kate Dickey and Siobhan Redmond, amazing Scottish actors, and we got them together and we workshopped it. It was one of the best kind of writing experiences, weirdly, of my entire career so far, even though it never got made. Just being with those actors and seeing how brilliant they are and what they bring to characterisation just so instinctively, I think it’s really inspiring.

So have you ever thought of writing for theatre? Because often theatre shows evolve alongside the actors, especially if it’s a new play, things can change and develop a lot more in a workshop situation than say a television or film where there’s crew around and there’s a lot more expense at risk.

A, I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me is the truth of it.

Do you need to be asked to write a play?

Well, I don’t know.

I suppose, I think, do you know what, it’s a weird thing. I think it’s coming back to that Scottish thing where you don’t quite, a bit of the imposter syndrome, if I can say it like that, that you’re not quite sure that you really are what you think you are. You know, when I first started writing, it took me, oh my goodness, so long before I would call myself a writer. I still called myself an actor for a long time even. I was still acting when I first started writing, but when the acting had kind of become less and the writing more, it still took me a very long time to actually say, I am a writer, because that felt like, Andrea, how dare you? You know, what do you mean you are a writer?

How presumptuous, yes.

Yeah, be quiet, for goodness sake. My mum on my shoulder there. So I think I thought that plays was real writing. I don’t think that now, by the way. I don’t think that at all now, but I think when I first started out, I thought, no, that’s real writing, and Andrea, you’re not doing that yet. You’re not good enough to do real writing. And then I wrote a couple of radio plays. Yeah, but I’ve never made it onto the stage.

Yet. Maybe that’s a project to be considered for the future.

Maybe.

OK, let’s move on to the next offcut now. This one is what?

This is a pitch document from 2014 that I wrote for a two-part psychological drama, and it was based on a novel called The White Lie by Andrea Gillis.

One hot summer’s afternoon, Ursula Salter runs hysterical from the lock on her parents’ Highland estate and bursts into the drawing room with devastating news. Michael, I’ve killed him. I’ve killed him. But has she? Michael’s body is nowhere to be found, and the only witness, the estate handyman Alan, has his own particular axe to grind. Ursula is 29, but in many ways still a child. She has trouble separating fact from fiction. Were her and her 19-year-old nephew Michael really lovers? And what was the devastating secret she told him in the boat before he disappeared? Ursula’s story is full of strange and unsettling contradictions. It’s impossible to make sense of what actually happened. So the Salter family come together to protect her and create their own version of the truth. They present this official story to the world. Michael has run away, leaving a note, and they have no idea where he is. The only real truth is the last one. Ostensibly, this is where our story starts, with the death of Michael Salter, or his disappearance, as the Salter family agree to name it. This is the terrible, shocking incident that results in a web of lies and deceit. A web which finally unravels 13 years later at Edith Salter’s 70th birthday party. But the whole truth lies before Michael Salter’s death, before his birth even. The truth lies in the 70s with the death of another young Salter boy, Sebastian. This is a story about a white lie, about one small deceit, told to prevent unhappiness. But above all, it is a story about memory, how we humans rewrite history into a version that we can live with.

When you wrote this, had they come to you and said, could you please pitch us this, or did you find it yourself and offer it?

I found this particular one myself because Andrea Gillis, she’s a friend of mine, and she had written a book called Keeper before she wrote White Lie, which was a memoir based on her looking after her mother-in-law who had Alzheimer’s. And I had taken that book, Keeper, to the BBC and said, look, I want to write about dementia. Read this book. And they had absolutely loved it. They commissioned me to write a script of that. So that was already happening. And then this other company came to me and said, Andrea, have you got any ideas? And I said, well, weirdly enough, my friend has this amazing book, which I think would make a really fantastic thriller, stroke psychological stroke mystery drama. And so they said to me, write it up. They read the book. They love the book. And they asked me to write the pitch. And then they would try and sell it in the market, I suppose. So that’s how that happened. They came and approached me and asked me to do it. But I had the book in my head. I’d fallen in love with the book already.

Now you sent me various pitch documents that we haven’t had time to feature here, unfortunately. But one thing that was noticeable was you seem to very much enjoy telling the story. It’s not just a case of getting the plot points over and the character descriptions. Do you never fancy writing narrative, you know, short stories or novels?

I’ve never thought about it. It’s never occurred to me. I mean, it’s interesting because even listening back to those very early screenplays that you’ve featured, I would say that, you know, there’s a lot of ways of writing screenplays. And some writers use very little description, very little descriptive passages or, you know, they tell the story through a different way because it’s visual and because the camera is your storyteller, if you like, whereas when you’re writing a novel or a short story, it’s an internalised storytelling that’s happening. It’s not external in the same way. And actually, I am very much a writer who writes in the room. The way I write is, it is very descriptive. It’s just my style. It’s just the voice that’s sort of developed over the course of my career. And now listening back, I think, well, maybe there is a novelist in me somewhere. I don’t know.

I would say there definitely is a novelist in you somewhere. I mean, having read through the stuff and having listened to them being performed as well, I’m very surprised that we didn’t receive any narrative prose or short stories at least. But novels, definitely. And also the thing about novels, which I keep hearing from other writers, the wonderful thing about novels is nobody has to commission you to write it. You can go wherever you want with it. You don’t have to not set it somewhere because it costs too much to travel there. And you have much greater freedom.

Yeah, I think you also have, weirdly enough, more control. And particularly for a screenplay writer, you know, someone who writes for the screen, one of the things that can be the most frustrating or the most demoralizing or the most upsetting is the fact that sometimes you are taken away from your own work. You’re not always given the opportunity to see the projects all the way through to the end because once you hand over your script and say a director and producers and financiers take it all, your role sort of diminishes. Now, I can honestly say I have been very lucky in the directors and the producers that I work with. They are so collaborative and collegiate and respectful, but that isn’t always the case for people who do what I do. I think a lot of people have war stories of how you get excluded once you’ve handed it over or you get rewritten or you get taken off a job. I suppose you write a novel and that doesn’t happen.

No, exactly. It’s yours unless you’re ghostwriting for somebody famous.

Exactly. Yeah, I know quite a few screenwriters who tried to get their ideas away as screenplays and nobody was biting and they went away and wrote their screenplays as novels and then there was bidding wars for the screenplay of their novels. There you are. There’s a story.

Right, we’ve come to your final offcut now. Can you tell us about this one?

Yeah, this is the opening sequence of a TV drama I wrote in 2014 called GI Brides.

Exterior, a passenger ship. Dawn. New York Harbour, 1st January 1945. Four young British women stand together on deck, the sun coming up behind them, watching as their ship sails into New York. They are Bea Massino, Evie Hopkins, Bea’s sister, Rita Stevens and Maureen Johnson. Maureen has her one-year-old daughter, Rosina, perched on her hip. There’s a sense of something momentous unfolding. The Statue of Liberty comes into view, a sharp intake of breath. Bea’s eyes widen in amazement.

It’s green!

What colour did you think it was?

Silver. It’s silver in all the films.

That’s because they’re in black and white, Bea.

Evie’s eyes fill up.

We’re here.

We made it.

Can you believe it? We made it!

Overcome. Rita and Bea link arms with Evie. Maureen keeps a slight distance, her expression harder to read. Exterior. New York Harbour Key. We close in on the key ahead. It’s crowded, rammed with people. They seem to be waving and shouting. Exterior. A passenger ship. Back on the ship with our women, amazed at the sight of the crowds.

There’s hundreds of them. Are they all here for us?

Rita grins at Bea, teasing.

Looks like you’re famous already, Bea.

As long as my Frank’s there. That’s all I care about.

Their ship edges closer to the harbour. Exterior. New York Harbour Key. We pan across the crowds, waiting on the key. They are shouting, but not in welcome. They’re shouting in anger and carrying protest banners. We close in on one of the banners. It has the words, British Whores Go Home, written in huge letters. Exterior. A passenger ship. Back on the ship, Bea, Evie, Rita and Maureen stand together as their ship glides into New York Harbour. We pull back to reveal hundreds of women and children behind them. Some weep with joy and relief. Others cheer and clap and laugh. But all have their eyes fixed on the promised land ahead. America. Titles end.

You see, now that is as novelish, novelistic, as you could possibly want.

Yeah, like I say, I’m there. I’m on that ship with those women, writing it from the inside out, I think. I mean, that’s based on a book by Duncan Barrett and Nula Calvi called GI. Brides. And it’s basically, I think Nula wrote it about her granny. It’s her granny’s story. Duncan and Nula went around and they interviewed lots of women who had been GI. Brides and who had gone to America, some who had stayed, some who arrived in America. You know, the G.I.s didn’t even turn up to meet them. So a lot of the women were just got there and were abandoned. So it’s such a fantastic premise for a drama. It’s so rich. And World Productions, who are a very kind of well known and established and really successful production company, one of their executives came to me and said, I’ve got this book and I think this would make the most fantastic TV series.

Can I just stop you? The book that is based on, it was documentary for you to write the story of GI. Brides. It wasn’t based on an existing story.

No, I was given the book and then I was asked to then go away and take the book as my inspiration, but some of the stuff, then you have to make it up. You have to make the women’s stories dramatic. So for the purposes of Duncan and Noorla’s book, it’s fantastic. You’re reading it and these women have got amazing tales to tell, but structuring it as a drama, you have to find different ways of making the drama work. And so some of the characters were made into composites, some of their stories were changed, and the BBC had optioned the script. But it’s yet another one of those things that happens so often. You go into development, you fall in love, you get passionate about a project. By the time you’ve got a script that’s potentially ready and your financiers can see what potential there is, the world’s moved on. And there isn’t a slot or we’ve got something that’s quite similar or we’re not really doing. That’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way the TV industry works. And unfortunately, GI Brides, which is a project I love with my whole heart, was one of those projects that just fell by the wayside because of the timing.

What a shame, because I thought it had great promise. I would love to see that. Please write that.

I mean, it was just, yeah, timing. And it’s just one of those things, you know. I’ve got quite a few of those projects that I’ve invested my whole heart and soul in. And by the time they’re ready, timing’s gone or what have you. So you have to learn to just like you call this, your off-cuts drawer. You have to learn to put them in there and to not dwell and to move on to the next thing and hope that something will click with that next thing. Which is why being lucky enough to be on Call the Midwife was really great for me because it meant that I could see something through all the way from taking Heidi’s storyline that you’re given, writing up your treatment, writing your scripts, working with the team there who are incredible. And then actually seeing it being made, that was so incredible for me. It was a real turning point when I got that job because there it was, you know, on the screen. TV credits. I mean, I had film credits, but TV credits. And I think it really was hugely important being on that show.

Right. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show. One final question. Having listened to these offcuts, is there anything you’ve noticed or anything that particularly surprises you in what you’ve heard?

I think that I can see how I’ve changed and developed as a writer really quite starkly now listening back.

How have you changed, would you say?

I think probably when I was first beginning, when I was first starting out, I was more rigid about not being quite so imaginative or jumping off enough from the characters that I was, you know, the real characters. And now what I do a lot more is I keep the nub of that. I keep the essence and the truth of the people that I love and that I know who are going to form the basis. But I’m much bolder with how I present them. I think I’ve become more bolder, less…

Your horizons have broadened?

Yeah, that is exactly what it is. It’s kind of… I also was writing a lot more original stuff then. I don’t really do that. I adapt books or write on episodes of TV series now. I don’t really do my own original work.

Do you miss that?

Maybe I need to think about that. Maybe I need to go back to that and do something from me that is properly from me. That’s what I think I’m listening to and hearing and taking away from this. So it’s been… I mean, I’m really grateful to you for letting me be part of this. It’s a lovely thing.

Well, thank you. It’s been really fascinating talking to you and thank you very much for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Draw with us.

Thank you.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Andrea Gibb. The Offcuts were performed by Kate O’Sulivan, Emma Clarke, Rachel Atkins, Beth Chalmers, Kenny Blyth, Lizzie Roper, Shash Hira and David Monteath. And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdraw.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

Jeremy: [00:00:00] It is a funny one that, ’cause I do like collaborating and I guess I could one day if I wanted to write the music and the lyrics in the book and for musical and direct it, but it would be such a lonely, to be honest, it’s not what I came into the theater for. Right. I go to the theater to, to sit in Roman and have a good time and work with people.

Laura: Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is the Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity pave the way to subsequent success.

My guest this week is Jeremy Sams, who’s been described as the ultimate polymath. Not just a writer of plays and musicals. He’s also a theater director, [00:01:00] lyricist composer, and translator orchestrator and musical director, and a name you’ll be all too familiar with. If you enjoy visits to the West End, Broadway, the Opera, or indeed most theaters and cinemas.

He wrote the musical of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which starred Michael Ball and in New York he wrote the Libretto of Enchanted Island at the Met Opera. He directed the International Tour of Sound of Music, last year’s production of Oklahoma of the Chichester Festival Theater, and the King and I at the Royal Albert Hall.

He’s written narration for deflate amount with the London Philharmonic translated Lao M, the Force of Destiny and Figueroa’s Wedding for the English National Opera. And his translation of a More, which ran on Broadway, won him two Tony nominations. Musically, he scored numerous films and television productions including Tiger Basketball for Channel four, enduring Love for Pathe, which netted him an Ivan Novello Award and the BBC production of Persuasion for which he won a bafta.

Jeremy Sams, welcome to the off cut straw. Hi

Jeremy: there.

Laura: Now, do you create your different [00:02:00] projects in different rooms? Do you like have a music studio for your musical creations and an office for written translations sort of thing?

Jeremy: Well, when I’m working on music, I have a piano, and the piano is, for example, writing movie scores.

Very often what I’m doing is I’m looking at the movie over and over and over again, and playing the piano. And instantly I’m reminded of something I have never shared, which is that I had to do the music for a telly once. And one of the scenes was Kate GaN taking her clothes off and I had to write music for this scene.

And what it meant was watching it over and over again on my telly and. Sitting at the piano and trying to find the right music for it. And it occurred to me in the middle of all this, that a passerby may be looking into my front room and see someone looking over and over again as a movie of a woman taking her clothes off.

But strangely, I. Playing the piano. So that’s how it’s often and done writing stuff. Obviously I’m on a computer, on the computer I’m looking at now, but when I’m writing [00:03:00] music, I like to have sound in the background, so radio and so on. And when I’m writing words, I like to have music in the background, so I have various places to work, but when I’m writing music, it is mostly at a piano, although increasingly I’m using machines to create music nowadays.

Laura: All right. Let’s get started with your first off cut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Jeremy: Yeah. This is a scene from Mary Stewart, a film script that never got produced, and it was written about 1997

Toby (Actor): Palace Interior Night, Elizabeth at prayer.

Lizzie (Actor): Dear God in heaven, when will you let me rain as I want to rain and not be forced to pay lip service to the people?

Who are they anyway, A screaming mob who’d rather see a punch? And Judy show all howling for her blood.

Toby (Actor): She sees the warrant,

Lizzie (Actor): but I can put an end to her just like that with a twitch of the quill will. Dear God, father in heaven, in that respect, I have more power than [00:04:00] you. Sorry if that sounds shocking, but it’s true.

But you are merciful, and maybe I should be too, but did you see how she looked at me? She steals my sweetheart tears my treaties into shreds and dares to look at me with scorn. Do you think it’s right that she should seek to humble me? Do you? Nor do I.

Toby (Actor): She signs the paper casually.

Lizzie (Actor): Oh, look, and she’s gone.

Toby (Actor): She rings a tiny bell and calls softly.

Lizzie (Actor): Davidson

Toby (Actor): Westminster Interior. Elizabeth has handed Davidson the warrant, which he holds in his hand.

Alex (Actor): Thank you. Your majesty for this. Oh, I see it signed.

Lizzie (Actor): Is it? Well, a warrant is a thing to be signed, so I signed it, but a piece of paper decides nothing. A name cannot kill.

N

Alex (Actor): no indeed. But [00:05:00] this name on this paper kills as surely as a bullet. I mean, when it leaves my hands, she’s dead.

Lizzie (Actor): Yes. So it would seem what a big responsibility God has placed in your hands. I’ll leave you to your duty.

Alex (Actor): I have but one desire to obey my queen. Of course. So let me get this right. You wish to see this warrant be enforced?

That is for your prudence to decide. I’m just a servant. I, I cannot take decisions. Please be clear, this is a death warrant and that surely says it all to be carried out at once.

Lizzie (Actor): I do not say that indeed. I shudder to think it

Alex (Actor): very well, so you wish me to keep it until some later time on your head, be it.

Oh God in heaven, please

Lizzie (Actor): Majesty, tell me what you want. What I want [00:06:00] is an end to this whole wretched, bloody business and not to have to think about it anymore, ever. Is that clear enough? Yes, absolutely.

Alex (Actor): Now about the warrant. Really, this is unbearable. Be patient with me. I, I haven’t been here long. I’ve yet to learn the language of the court.

I’m a simple man, so please tell me simply if not, then take it back. Take it, give it to someone else. Davison your majesty.

Laura: Just do your duty.

Toby (Actor): She exits.

Laura: So tell us about the Mary Stewart film that didn’t get produced.

Jeremy: It was based actually on the play by Schiller, an amazing play, and I did a translation of that play for the National theater, which Isabel EO starred.

Do you remember that? Yes. And it had Anna Massey, didn’t it? Anna Massey and Isabel eo. Together at last. And she, Isabel was, was amazing ’cause her English was, was a bit dodgy. But that’s fine. ’cause [00:07:00] Mary Stewart, as you know, was brought up in France and that was her first language. Mm-hmm. But she would say wonderful things like, uh, you put me on a Peter style and someone says to me, could you please stop her saying, Peter said, I’m not going to stop her saying Peter.

And then a guy called Paul Barrow and Paul Barrow, this is the weirdness. Of, of, as it were, the writer’s life. He was the manager, I think still is the manager of Duran Duran. Oh. And that was, that was a surprising end of a sentence. The whole thing was very surprising. And, and Paul, who I got to know rather well, said, you know, I, I like this.

I saw the show. I’m very interested in Mary’s Stewart, can you turn this Sheila play into a screenplay? So I did, and actually that is one of the scenes which is pretty much intact from, from Sheer, I mean, Schiller’s amazing. And what he does this mixture of, it’s what you dream of in all plays, actually, sex and politics, and you really get that in sheer and in Shakespeare and then not many other writers.

Mm. So I turned into a [00:08:00] screenplay. At the time, I was writing quite a few screenplays, and that one was huge fun. But like many screenplays, and I’m sure you know, from doing this show, it never got made. Mm-hmm. And then there was a movie on Mary Stewart. In fact, there were several, but one came out quite recently.

Yeah. And it’ll never be. Done now. But it was really fun to do and to move this, move the Shiller play all around London and into this scene and that scene and Well, on location you mean? Location? Location, yeah. Yeah, yeah. London evening, you know, palace exterior stuff.

Laura: And who did you have in mind for the lead?

Were you going to go with Anna and

Jeremy: No, um, funnily enough we did a reading and I think Juliet Stevenson did it. And actually when I first did the translation, in my mind it was Fiona Shaw and, and Juliet Stevenson. Fiona was Mary and Juliet is Elizabeth, or even vice versa. And there was talk about them doing it and that didn’t happen.

But I was commissioned, actually originally from Duncan Weldon who was a, a western producer in the maybe late eighties. [00:09:00] So these things go through various iterations.

Laura: Well, is this your first

Jeremy: film script? I’ve written quite a few and I went through a phase of knocking on doors in Hollywood a bit and got some commissions, but only one ever got made.

This might have been my first, I. I really can’t remember. No, there may be a couple before that, but as you know, it’s quite possible for a writer to have a career writing movie scripts and literally not one ever get made. I know people who’ve actually got writing careers and have never had a movie made.

I’ve had one made, which we might talk about later on. Mm-hmm. But again, even that is a strange thing Now working in theater, which I mostly do, the good thing is shows do get on. You know, plays and things are translated or directed, whatever, you know, there’s quite a few a year they happen.

Mm-hmm.

Jeremy: Movies, however happen really quite rarely, and getting one made is a, is a real coup sometimes, particularly when you look around and you know, if full-time movie writers have this perpetual plane that they look [00:10:00] at the stuff that does get made and think how on earth.

But things have to fall out into all sorts of ways to do with money, to do with stars, to do with budgets, to do with availabilities and just, you know, weather. And it so often happens that if a movie is connected with the studio, then the next time the studio changes hands as it were, they will automatically get rid of everything on their books.

And you must have heard that Plained a few times as well. Yeah.

Laura: Yeah. Or something similar has been broadcast or commissioned by another company, and so that’s, oh, no, that’s another, we’ve already got something about a woman or, yeah.

Jeremy: Yeah. We’ve got a story with people in it, so,

yes, exactly.

Jeremy: But I mean, that’s sometimes called site geist.

I call it theft. I mean, I think the fact of matter is that a lot of time people who, you know, chat in, in clubs or in London or in whatever it is, someone picks it up and say, well, I’ll do that so very often, but site geist is the polite word for it.

Laura: Right time for another off cut. Now tell us about this one.

Jeremy: Yes, this is another abandoned thing. [00:11:00] This is from 2003 and it’s the lyrics of a song called The Master of Disguise, and it was written for a show called Toys the Musical.

Lizzie (Actor): I. Mr. Potatohead is talking to action man and

David (Actor): doll. Maybe you can fly and maybe you can scuba, but when it comes to versatility, no one can touch the tuber.

Lizzie (Actor): Mr. Potatohead shows his various body accessories, removing and adding bits, hurling some into the air.

David (Actor): I’ve got an ear for music and an eye for the girls. And if a Vikings to your liking, I have a mustache that curls for every occasion. I can supply the gear. And if you want to talk, then I can lend you an ear because I’m changeable Rearrangable.

If you take me back to Hamley’s, I’m exchangeable. And if you look closely, you can see me with new eyes because I am the master of disguise. I’ve got 20 different feet [00:12:00] so I know where I stand and if anyone needs help, then I can give them a hand. When I’m at home, I like to keep an eye on the door, and when it comes to Christmas, I give arms to the poor ’cause I’m transmutable reconstituting the force of my charismas irrefutable.

You may wonder why I’m impossible to recognize. Well, I am the master of disguise. I’m such a smart potato. I ought to spy. I am the master of disguise.

Laura: I can hear those lyrics to music. I, it’s such a shame. We didn’t have the music for them. Were you writing the music for that as well, or just the lyrics?

Jeremy: Do you know what, Laura? There isn’t any music for it. We never got as far as that. The reason was we always hoped that Andrew Lloyd Weber would write the music ’cause Andrew’s company commissioned it.

But that never happened, and therefore no one else did. I can sort of hear the music for that as well. The idea for that, [00:13:00] it was in the days when people wanted to link up musicals with, with products basically, and there’s an American company called Hasbro who make toys and they make action, man. They make potato head and various other things.

So the idea was to try and write a, a musical that they would co-produce using their characters. Oh, and I know it is fantastic. I, this predates Toy Story, by

Laura: the way. I was about to say, I thought it was from Toy Story, that’s why. No,

Jeremy: no, no.

Laura: I thought, oh, we’re gonna have problems with this. We’re gonna have problems with the copyright on this, this,

Jeremy: this predates Toy story.

Laura: Wow. And

Jeremy: so Mr. Potato Head is a Hasbro artist, as it were. And what always amused me about Mr. Potato Head is that. You can put whatever you like on him, but he still very much looks, looks like a potato, albeit with different hats and noses and mustaches. So the idea of the song called the Master of Disguise Rather appealed to me, and it’s just a series of jokes, just a series of body part jokes.

Laura: They’re very good. [00:14:00] Although I was wondering how you would actually stage that. ’cause I mean, how can you take off arms and put them back on again? If you, I can understand you can have a false arm, but it’s gonna be complicated, isn’t it? I have

Jeremy: no idea. Again, I was just writing the lyrics on this show. The book is written by the wonderful Francesca Simon, who wrote Horrid Henry Books.

Arlene Phillips was going to be the director as in Arlene as in hot gossip and all that. Yeah. So the three of us worked on it for quite a long time, and we even got to go get this to the Hasbro Toy Factory in Rhode Island. They flew us out. We pitched our various ideas and that I was like a kid in a toy factory.

It was remarkable. And we got taken to the rooms where behind the one way mirror, kids play with toys and people take notes. And all the, the mail delivery was done by, uh, an automaton. There are robots everywhere. It was, it was a toy factory, the Hasbro toy factory, and it was fantastic.

Yeah.

Jeremy: So the show never got made, although we wrote it and did a few rewrites, wrote it a few times.

Then I [00:15:00] think for some reason the impetus came out of it. Or Andrew, I think wasn’t, maybe it wasn’t time for him to write the score. Mm-hmm. And other composers were pitched, but my job was just to write the lyrics. I was very happy. But

Laura: you’re a composer. Why didn’t you do composing as well?

Jeremy: I could have done that, I guess.

I mean, there are, it’s a funny one that, ’cause I do like collaborating. And I guess I could one day if I wanted to write the music and the lyrics in the book and for a musical and direct it, but it would be such a lonely, to be honest, it’s not what I came into the theater for. Right. The theater to, to sit in Roman and have a good time and work with people.

Mm-hmm. And being a writer’s lonely enough, God knows. Yeah. So I remember Francesca and Arlene and I having a lot of laughs, particularly ha having a nice trip to Rhode Island, to Providence, Rhode Island. To meet the guys from the toy company who were fantastic and they were up for it.

Laura: Were they? Oh my

Jeremy: God.

They were so up for it and they had ideas and the characters called Dole there because they don’t have Barbie.

Laura: Right, okay.

Jeremy: Barbie’s with another management.

Laura: Right.

Jeremy: [00:16:00] Um, so we had to sort of make a sort of Barbie style character action, man. They do have, and I had a great song for action, man, who falls in love with dol.

And the song is called, it’s Not On My Box. ’cause he has, he discovers he has various feelings and which he doesn’t quite understand.

Laura: Right.

Jeremy: And she sings saying, oh, it’s not on my box either, but I’ve got these feelings. So, um, you know, fun to be had, don’t you think?

Laura: Definitely. Or can it not be done now?

Although, what about the toy story? Would there be a problem with the Pixar

Jeremy: business yet again? Toy Story, you know, you can’t, there’s no point in even thinking about doing anything with toys ever ’cause of Toy Story ’cause it’s the Na plus Ultra as, as they used to say in Ancient Rome. What does that mean for, um, it’s the, it’s, it’s the limits.

You can’t get better than that. So if you can’t get better than that, then maybe not to do it. Well, could you possibly

Laura: go to Pixar and say, you know, I’m an established Western producer, writer, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Let’s do the toy story version of it.

Jeremy: Sorry. Musical. I bet [00:17:00] there is a toy story of the musical coming up somewhere.

Laura: Well, they haven’t, they taken their time over itt. It’s been, they’ve had four films out and there’s done it yet, so I

Jeremy: know. Nowadays. Interestingly, when I started out on this luck, you know, you would try to convince a movie company to you maybe musicalize their products. Now they realize that the musical, the stage musical, the Broadway West End Show will probably make them more than the film

really.

Jeremy: I mean, yes, absolutely stage money. The money from successful stage shows, blows movies out the water.

Laura: Wow. This is an absolute revelation to me. I didn’t know this at

Jeremy: all. Well, I’ll give you an example. The prophets from the Phantom of the Opera vastly exceed those of all of the Star Wars films put together.

And you can throw in Matrix, you can throw in a few No.

Laura: Yeah. No, not more than nothing. No.

Jeremy: Absolutely. If you think about it, not now plainly, but Phantom will be running in a theater in capital Cities making a couple of million a week and touring, [00:18:00] making pretty much the same all around the world and has been for 25 years.

Really?

Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. You there’s got blown my mind, Jeremy,

I didn’t realize. And

Jeremy: that’s, that’s why people want to write new musicals and will take a risk on it. ’cause the profits when you get there, I believe crack cocaine is rather similar in terms of profit versus investment. But it, the difference is it doesn’t always work out that way.

And for all the. Phantoms and the LA Misses and the Wickeds and the Lion Kings. There’s no shortage of, of shows that haven’t made money. But you know, when a, when a stage show works, the money’s really remarkable. Wow. I mean, mama Mia, for example, will make, oh, 50 million a year. A hundred million a year, something like that.

But it’s also got the films as well. Isn it, the stage show. The Stage show. Wow. Wow. But I have friends who move in those astronauts, but, uh, I don’t yet. But, uh, it’s, it’s,

Laura: well with lyrics like that, Jeremy, it’s only a matter of time with lyrics

Jeremy: like Master of [00:19:00] Disguise, sometimes the

Laura: musical. I really liked it.

I just could really see that as one of those what with film number, like in Beauty and the Beast, you know, be our guest. It’s that sort of Exactly. Right. Yeah. I was very impressed with that. Anyway, let’s move on now and have your next off cut.

Jeremy: Yeah, this is a scene that didn’t get filmed from the movie school for Lovers about 2005

Beth (Actor): interior billard Room night.

Adam, Tom, and Martin are trying their hands at Billards. They have plainly been drinking heavily. Adam is wearing a smoking jacket and a rather absurd velvet hat. The boys are in t-shirts and jeans. Tom and Adam are smoking cigars,

Toby (Actor): so I thought Sodded, why not try and do the place up and, oh, um, Mrs. H we are about to send out a search party.

Beth (Actor): Mrs. Hammond has entered and prepares rather stiffly to pour coffee, brandy, et cetera.

Toby (Actor): Oh, we’ll take care of that. You just,

Beth (Actor): good night, sir.

Emma (Actor): Gentlemen.

Beth (Actor): Goodnight, Mrs. H. Mrs. Hammond raises an imperceptible eyebrow. Yes. [00:20:00] Uh, goodnight, Mrs. Hammond. And, and thank you and goodnight to you, sir. She leaves the room, Tom staring after her.

Adam makes for the brandy opposite round.

David (Actor): Oops, second bottle. I seem to be losing my touch here first. Nicola. Now her. I thought I was good with gals. You can forget Nicola. I feel like the elephant man. He makes his elephant man face. I mean, I can normally get round them somehow. What do you mean? You know, with most women, I, I can normally get my leg over.

Well, if you wanna put it that way. Yes.

Toby (Actor): Was I that cocky at your age? I can’t remember. This brand is awesome. It should be. It came with a house. You can’t even buy it now.

Beth (Actor): Tom looks at the dusty label. Jesus Christ. It’s almost a hundred years old

Toby (Actor): then. Cheers.

Alex (Actor): They drink. You know about Nicola. Deeply wounded.

Fucked over. They say Simon Featherstone. What the, uh, he mimes conductor? Yeah. No, him. Oh. Obviously the [00:21:00] name obviously big powerful conductor, nasty piece of work, used to be quite handsome. Fucks his singers.

Toby (Actor): Oh, one of those conductors.

Alex (Actor): Anyway, dumped her for a company manager, apparently kids. Now Nicola didn’t see the funny side, so maybe she’s still a bit, uh, you know.

Beth (Actor): Yeah.

Alex (Actor): But even

Beth (Actor): so, Adam Puffs at his cigar, we see that he is very drunk.

Toby (Actor): Shouldn’t be doing this. Not great for the old vache, but do you really think you could uh,

Alex (Actor): sure.

Toby (Actor): Have her

Alex (Actor): Sure get in. No woman can resist his amazing powers.

David (Actor): Well, I don’t wanna sound arrogant, but heaven forbid, but there’s always a way in, isn’t there?

He’s there.

Beth (Actor): Well,

David (Actor): I find

Beth (Actor): we see Adam

Laura: considering this. School for Lovers. This was a film that did get made.

Jeremy: It did get made, and it got made under a different title, which was First [00:22:00] night.

Laura: First

Jeremy: night as in N-I-G-H-T, or K-N-I-G-H-T, I think N-N-I-H-H-T, I think it’s called that. What happened was this was a.

Again, a commission from a producer an an English producer. And I was gonna direct it and I wrote the script. And the idea was there’s a company putting on an opera sort of guy, Baldy, so, so the guy you heard with the brandy, he’s very, very wealthy and he owns a big house. And there are a few people in England, or there were at the time who had country houses and they’d put on operas and they’d be in them sometimes or something like that.

And the opera they’re putting on is Cozy Vanti by mo. Sort. And in this opera, there’s a wager for an older man with two young friends that they can’t seduce each other’s girlfriends. And they say, no, no, my girlfriend is very faithful to me. And the cynical older man says, well, here’s a hundred pounds, whatever.

And the idea in this one is that they’re putting on this musical, and it spills over into the action. You get the [00:23:00] idea into the action of the play. So a wager is made that this man can’t succe this girl. Yeah, and of course she discovers that the wage has been made and it becomes actually a romcom in a sense.

So then the producer said to me, I’d like to direct this, but you have to remain available for a year, basically. So whenever we get the money together, and I couldn’t do that because I’d gotta live. So I just said, no, I can’t do that. So eventually someone else made it, but that person said, we need to rewrite the script.

And at that point I sort of left them to it.

Oh.

Jeremy: Uh, but it got made and the script got considerably rewritten. And characters who were complicated became less complicated. Endings that were, let’s say ambiguous became less ambiguous. Sexuality, which was very fluid, became less fluid. It became a bit more mainstream, shall we say.

Mm-hmm. And here’s a funny thing, Laura, I’ve never seen it. No.

Laura: No. Did it get proper release? [00:24:00]

Jeremy: It got a proper release, but it went so quiet and my fear was all my cynical friends would see it on flights and get back in touch with me. But it never even, was it on flights?

Laura: Well, your name presumably wouldn’t be on it, would it?

Jeremy: My name was on it. Yes. It’s a sort of co ’cause you in the movie world, you have to be co. CO accredited as it were,

Laura: even if you haven’t written the script, well, I suppose you created it

Jeremy: even if you haven’t written the script. I mean, there are some quite famous examples of that. I had a friend who shall remain nameless, who won lots of big prizes for a movie script, heroes, and this person he’d never met, turned up and came and took the.

Prize with him. And that was the person who had actually the original idea who was then billed as co-writer. So it’s interesting. I mean that, I have to say, it does sound very much of its time. Men plotting to seduce a girl, you think, oh.

Laura: It sounds like it ought to be a Shakespeare comedy or a Yeah.

Restoration comedy that’s been updated. That was the,

Jeremy: well, the opera, if you know it is from 1790 Mozart, and it [00:25:00] was his deponte, his his idea. So it is a marvo. It’s a bomar. She. Love neighbors lost, I guess is the model being updated? What’s funny is the man I wrote to sound like an absolute fucking tosser all the way through was so convincingly done by your act.

He sounds rather nice, but he’s written to be an absolute tosser,

Laura: which is the tosser, the bloke

Jeremy: who says that no one can resist me.

Laura: Oh, right.

Jeremy: So that was a rom-com that got made.

Laura: Hi, this is Laura. Sorry to interrupt, but if you are enjoying the show, please do subscribe to the Offcut Draw. 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 offcuts draw.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.[00:26:00]

Jeremy: What was interesting, and I dunno if you’ve ever tried this, is writing a romcom is keeping the protagonists apart. That’s the really hardest thing in the world, and I got rather obsessed with watching other romcoms. Mm-hmm. Which is how you can keep the people who are gonna get together at the end to not like each other throughout.

And in that movie, what happened was that she discovers that the reason he’s been wooing her is for a bit, and that really makes a big reverse in in their relationship as he might expect.

Laura: Yes. But presumably she then forgives him. He does something. Yeah. He will sacrifice himself in some way, and she goes, oh, well, maybe he’s all right then.

I’m guessing that’s. The sort of,

Jeremy: there’s a, there’s a final scene at the first night of the opera and the one line I think I do remember, and I dunno if this isn’t a film, is they kiss each other surrounded by lots of people and she turns to the people watching and saying, if this was a movie, you’d all be clapping and people do, so I’m as proud of that.

Laura: Yeah. Very good. Right. Next off cut please. What’s this one? [00:27:00]

Jeremy: This is an extract from a play called the Schumann Variations Unproduced as yet, and I wrote it in 2018.

Emma (Actor): Schumann and Johannes Brahms, his young protege, are having a late night boozy conversation about life and art.

Toby (Actor): Alright, let me try for another angle.

What’s your sonata about?

David (Actor): My Sonata. What’s it about? I dunno. It’s about half an hour. It’s about to make me famous. I dunno what you mean. It’s about. Beethoven. It’s about folk song. It’s about counterpoint. It’s about melody and harmony and notes and shapes. That’s what music is. All right? It can be emotional, which I suspect is where you’re trying to lead me, but if it has emotions, it’s as a rose, as a scent.

It smells sweet by any other name, but the rose [00:28:00] isn’t the scent.

Toby (Actor): No, I like that. It’s bollocks, but I like it. No, no. The rose is the scent.

David (Actor): Alright, so what’s Mozart about or, or Schubert or Bark or any music written in the last 150 years? Listen.

Toby (Actor): We all have two things. A, what we know, and B, what we don’t know, but we feel.

We know. Two concentric circles around us and the gap between A and B, be it tiny or vast, is everything. Art lives there and emotion and religion and God, and war and revolution. The wine merchant who wants a better shop, and Napoleon who wants a bigger empire and dreams live there and hopes and love lives there, and that’s what we write and paint that gap and.

Granted, a fresco has to fit the wall and an opera has to have intermission so the ladies can pee and a a piece for rank. Amateurs has to be playable by rank amateurs, and we may get paid when we deliver or not depending, but those are [00:29:00] all details. They are not the thing that makes the thing. And when they are, the thing is worthless as it so often is.

David (Actor): Well, there at least we agree. I’ll drink to that.

Laura: So this was Unproduced. What’s the story behind this one? Why Schumann, particularly

Jeremy: another late night drinking scene. This is about, a theme is emerging here. Um, yeah, so this is a play, it was actually the first play full length play I wrote, and it was a commission and a producer said they were writing.

Commissioning clay’s about music, and this is so close to my heart. Laura, my father, was an expert on Schumann, wrote lots of books on Schumann. Mm-hmm. And one of the things that he discovered was that the connections between Schumann and Brams, Schumann taught Brams many things, including c ciphers and codes that he put into his music.

And we know this because they turn [00:30:00] up in later Brahms music. And what happened was that Brahms undoubtedly fell in love with Truman’s wife. So what we have here is a three handed rom-com, if you like, but it’s not very wrong. It’s certainly not very calm because ’cause Schumann dies quite soon. Oh. Um, leaving Brahms and, and Clara living together effectively, Brahms moved in and basically became a father to the children.

Run around with the Schumann children of whom there are many, we have, for example, the, the account books about how much. How many cigars and how much wine we buy every and, and like many 19th century figures, they all kept account books saying how much they spent on candles and things like that. So Brahms now takes those over and lives with Clara and is in love with Clara.

And what we don’t know is basically. What happened between the three of them? It’s quite clear that Browns was in love with Clara and that bras is the most [00:31:00] remarkable, beautiful young man who either Clara or her husband Robert had ever seen. Robert also had a gay past, I think, and he makes that quite clear.

So he also fell in love with Browns in some. Different way I think. So it really is an interesting triangle. So we did a reading of it and one day it’ll be done somewhere. It was a commission and it worked out very nicely. The other thing is it’s got lots of music in it. So there has to be

Laura: played

Jeremy: on stage.

Yes. Played on stage. And I’d like it ideally that everyone who’s in it can play the piano at some level.

Laura: I’d say that that piece that we just heard did remind me of a Tom Stoppard type play. Yeah. You a play about the definition of art. It’s, it’s very Stop Ian.

Jeremy: It is. It’s gotta stop our joke in it, which is, has it, um, at least the beginning.

Someone said to me years ago, what’s Rosen Krants? And Golden Stone about. He said, it’s about to make me very rich and it also has got you right. [00:32:00] So years ago I wrote the music for Arcadia, which was the very first production of that, which Trevor Nun did at the national This

David (Actor): a

Jeremy: stop up. Uh, yeah. Stop up.

And there are, of course, now you say it, you’re absolutely right. People who aren’t necessarily eloquent trying to describe how they feel about things deeply. And that’s quite interesting to write. Of course, you’re right. Valentine in that play talks about iterative calculus and that sort of thing, and he can’t put it into words ’cause he knows it so well.

And Schumann similarly ’cause I, I have a feeling about this, this is what it means and I can’t quite, ’cause he’s a composer, he can sit down at the piano and show you. But it’s fun to write people who have to speak because they have to speak but can’t really speak.

Laura: And the complicated intertwined relationships.

Also another layer on top, very against a Ian.

Jeremy: Yes. And it’s also a love scene because of the love between a mentor and a mentee. Mm-hmm. As it were. Something I’m really, really massively important part of my [00:33:00] life with various people who’ve helped me. It’s a real love story and that love is a real part of.

Someone’s love life, I think, and you don’t see it written very often, and I wanted to write about that as well.

Laura: Alright, well we’ve now come to your final Offcut. Tell us about this one.

Jeremy: So this is up to date. This is a scene from The Good Life and as yet, unproduced Theater Comedy based on the Economist TV series.

So it’s from 2019 to 20. Soap.

Alex (Actor): There must be a way of making soap. What did people do before soap?

Beth (Actor): I think they stank. Do we?

Lizzie (Actor): Barbara tries to sniff herself while finishing the churning. This is a challenge. She decides to concentrate on finishing the churning.

Beth (Actor): Okie dokie. Here we go. Voila. Butter of goat.

Lizzie (Actor): They reveal the goat’s butter. They looked dubious. Ah, should we try it?

Beth (Actor): Here it goes. Excuse fingers.

Lizzie (Actor): They take a [00:34:00] handful of sludge each about to eat it.

Beth (Actor): Oh wait, did we wash our. Ah,

Lizzie (Actor): we didn’t, I forgot. They put the goats butter onto a plate.

Beth (Actor): We have been up since five.

Lizzie (Actor): Jerry pops his head round the door.

Toby (Actor): Hello peasants.

Beth (Actor): Hello, Jerry.

Alex (Actor): Hello, Jerry. How’s the linens workers Collective coming along? Fine. Jerry, are you rehearsing a dance drama about a combine harvester?

Very good. Jerry,

Toby (Actor): eh, there’s a touch of Julie Christie to you, Barbara.

Beth (Actor): Oh, do you like the look?

Toby (Actor): Is Omar Sharif popping around later? Fray Nots.

Just Harry the pig man. Harry, the pig. Oh, for heaven’s sake.

Beth (Actor): Yes. Pinky and perky are coming back all primed and ready. Have you missed them?

Toby (Actor): We thought you got rid of the pigs. Jesus Margo’s only just getting over the goat attack. She even talked to Mr. Pearson about putting out barbed wire. I managed to dissuade her.

It won’t happen again. We promise. The chickens in the greenhouse were one thing. Now the pigs Margot draws the line at pigs. You won’t hear a squeal out of them. Actually, we’ve got guests this evening. I promise. I’ll mute the [00:35:00] pigs. Jerry, you, you’ve been very patient. No, it’s not that. We wondered if you’d join us.

I’m doing golf with Sir, and then he and Felicity are coming round for supper. So we wondered if you’d, you know, like to,

Beth (Actor): oh, we can’t really, we wouldn’t want to. You know,

Toby (Actor): Margo’s got one of her mysterious campaigns afoot. She says she needs your help. So she’s planning a feast. Thanks. But

Alex (Actor): it’s just that we don’t really eat from tins.

Toby (Actor): How? Dare you. It’s not from tins, it’s from the new freezer.

Alex (Actor): Well, we’re more into eating our own produce. The bounty of the land and all that. Whatever the bloody

Toby (Actor): starlings have in snaffle, look, Tom Margo’s machinations to one side. I’ve been working like Bill to get Sir to come round to the idea of you getting back to JJM.

But Jerry, not full time. Just some freelancing just to help out. And it also would help me. We need you. The marsupials are an endangered species, really. But maybe if you added

Alex (Actor): [00:36:00] Tom, I mean there might be a way to Tom. Of course. Look, I tell you what, we’ll pop round later. We’ve got some presents for you anyway.

Some of our produce, righto.

Toby (Actor): Looking forward to sampling it. What’s this? Looks good. It’s.

Alex (Actor): It’s,

Lizzie (Actor): yeah, before anyone can stop him, he takes a spoonful of goats butter. Ah,

Beth (Actor): it’s work in progress.

Laura: The good life, the well-known and very popular British TV sitcom is going to be staged. Is that right?

Jeremy: It is. It’s, it’s, it’s ready to go.

We would be now in the West end and yeah, we were gonna start rehearsals in, you must’ve had this story so often from people, but we were gonna start rehearsals in April and we’re all cast up and we are designed and there it is. Oh. Um, and it’ll happen. It’ll happen at some point when, when people can get back into theaters and mm-hmm.

In numbers enough to pay for actors and, you know.

Laura: Can I ask who you [00:37:00] cast

Jeremy: at the moment? Funnily enough, the people we cast are now not free because of, because of telly and, and movies. And so you can if you like, but in fact the people who were cast, Catherine Parkinson was cast as, as Barbara. Do you know Catherine?

Laura: Yep, yep, yep.

Jeremy: But she’s now not available, so we’re now talking to other actors, but it’s rather hard to talk to actors right now because I don’t know when we’ll be able to do it, but I’m directing it and that was, uh, an extract and I haven’t heard that bit. And I mean, we did one reading, but it’s nice to hear.

It made me laugh. Did you like it?

Laura: Yes, absolutely. Yes. And did you

Jeremy: giggle?

Laura: Did you laugh? Yes. Yes, I did. I mean, it’s very pressurizing for the actors who have to, um, perform as Richard Bry and Felicity Campbell. Well, of

Jeremy: course they don’t, you know, that’s the funny thing there. We have talked about that a lot.

Is that. When the script comes and when I work with actors, I’ll be giving them people who won’t be playing Richard Bryers and Sophist Kendall. They’ll be playing Tom and Barbara. And the nice thing about the original, it was written [00:38:00] for actors, you know? And so the people involved, uh, when it was first done in the seventies, were the character, actually there were egg born actors.

That’s the reason they all got together. ’cause lots of ’em were in the Norman Conquest and the sales productions. Oh yeah. So Ty Candle, uh, Paul Reddington, uh, Richard Bryars were, as it were stage actors, and they were given the scripts and they would said, what do you make of this? And they gave it a go. So similarly when I do it, I think it’ll be hard enough to play Tom, let alone playing Richard Bryars, as it were.

But of course, that’s the challenge to play a play. With characters saying what they want and what they need and why they’re doing what they’re doing, rather than reflecting anything else. So that is the challenge.

Laura: It would depend on your audience. There’ll be loads of people who are too young for the original, and so they’ll just come and see an enjoyable aborn esque type play.

And then there’ll be a much more mature audience who’ll be sitting there. There will be comparisons made, and of course there may be favorable comparisons. There’s no reason why not.

Jeremy: Funnily enough, we did a reading and a few people under the age of 30 came. [00:39:00] And they were delighted by it. Had no idea who these people were, what was going on.

They thought it was a piece about people making an allotment in their back garden, which is exactly what it’s about.

It is, yes,

Jeremy: and about, you know, the vegans next door and so on. Then everyone said, oh, it’s just like now. I was aroused with my flatmates all the time. They said. And at one point I really thought, I know what I’m going to do to adapt.

’cause I, again, it was a commission. The people who, the, the heirs as it were, the estate of the original authors commissioned me to write the stage version of it. And one of the thoughts I had was, which should be quite fun. I’ll do it now. I’ll set it in 2020 or 2019 as it was. And play it like completely modern.

And what would it be now? So that the goods would have an illegal immigrant living with them, as it were. And they’d have to pretend he was the French teacher when the, when the lead bets came.

Oh, right.

Jeremy: All that stuff. And that was quite fun because it suddenly realized that how much of it could be now.

Really could be now. But in fact [00:40:00] I was guided away from that by, by the rights holders who said no. But I think what we want is something that will remind people of the world. It inhabits and a lot of it, in fact, it’s all pretty much original. There are little hints at various, I mean, good life Completists will recognize a line here, a line there.

Mm-hmm. And I, I’m sort of bilingual in good life now ’cause I’m having immersed myself in the, in the TV shows, which is a delight. A delight. They’re so neatly written and the nice thing is actually looking at the writing as opposed to performances. You know, it’s interesting, it’s like what happened was just like friends, is that having casted in later series, the writers were actually writing into the mouths of the actors who were playing the parts.

But originally in trends, you know, someone wrote all these. Characters and then people had to find what they could from them. And again, like friends, what really impressed me with the Good Life was the flossing, the beautiful flossing [00:41:00] within the sitcom form within your half hour, and the settings and how cleverly a problem came up.

But the real challenge as a writer and as a playwright, I guess, is that. They like each other. They all adore each other.

Laura: So conflict is difficult to simulate.

Jeremy: Conflict is really hard because they’re actually all middle class people. It’s not like the os, as it were in seventies terms, move in next door or indeed the black family.

Do you remember there was, you know that would be yes. Love

Laura: our neighbor. Yeah, exactly. Shame. I know that.

Jeremy: I know, but it’s not like that. There isn’t a a class difference. There isn’t. The only difference is one group is letting the side down, but actually they all adore each other. And the other thing, which is nice, and I hadn’t really spotted, they all fancy each other.

So when I was a kid watching it, I just thought these jolly people. But in fact, Barbara is always flirting with Jerry, who’s looking down up front. And Margo is always delightfully flirting with Tom. And [00:42:00] there’s a just a hint of, not of wife swapping, but there’s a touch of Suburban, well,

Laura: there is a Christmas episode, if I remember rightly, where Margo gets a bit drunk and Tom makes a sort of pass at her.

Yeah, yeah. And Jerry’s always making comments about Barbara.

Jeremy: Yeah. But the reason for that is it’s. Just there all the time. And here’s the other weird thing, they didn’t have kids.

That’s true. Yeah. They didn’t have

Jeremy: kids. And the reason for that is that they live in a sitcom. So that’s something I really had to address.

The kids thing and the sex thing and writing people who live in a sitcom like they’re real people was really interesting. So I guess it’s an off cut because it’s hasn’t yet to be done. So you want, you ask for stuff that hasn’t been done yet. So there we are.

Laura: Well, yes. Well, thank you very much. That was a, that was an absolute treat that think the good life, the good life’s being made.

Yes. Fingers crossed. It will be made. I’m sure it will be. Yeah.

Jeremy: I mean, yeah. The nice thing about it, Laura, is it doesn’t date,

Laura: no.

Jeremy: So it’ll happen next year or the year after. And we are now [00:43:00] recasting and, um. We’re having meetings about it now.

Laura: Right. Final question. So you’ve written and directed plays, you’ve done musicals, opera, you’ve translated some of the great classics.

What would you say is your favorite job of all of those?

Jeremy: Gosh, there’s a lot to be said for scoring a movie.

Laura: Oh, you get to watch a lot of naked women, legitimately lots of naked women, men, and

Jeremy: play the piano while you’re doing so. But also it’s a very, really quick process and fun. You mention off cuts because.

I’ve had complete scores for movies that have been removed, and likewise, I’ve been the beneficiary of other composers who’ve had scores removed, and I’ve come in and that happens a huge amount in the movie world for very simple reasons. If a movie is not working, or a producer thinks this movie isn’t working, there’s not a lot they can fix, they can’t reshoot it, they can’t re cast it.

The one thing they can do is put a new score on it. Right, and even the [00:44:00] composers who write full-time movie score composers have had scores removed and replaced by someone else. Sometimes me, and similarly, it’s happened to me. It’s just sort of part of it, but actually the process of receiving a finished and edited movie to then being in a studio with the Royal Fundamental Orchestra is about four weeks of your life.

Very often that quick. Wow. And that means that in that time you have to not only write the music and orchestrate the music and get it past your producers and so on. So it’s a very exhausting and very often an all night process. Mm-hmm. But it’s a wonderful thing. And at the end of it, if it works out, you’ve got your score.

It’s only a movie. Very often they make a CD of it as well, and that’s a very satisfying. Event, and it’s much more quick than, for example, directing a musical, which could take you four or five years.

Laura: Yes. Well, it’s been enlightening and [00:45:00] very entertaining to talk to you, Jeremy Sams. Thank you for sharing the contents of your with us.

Jeremy: Pleasure and really took rich places. I never thought I’d revisit.

Laura: The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin with special thanks to this week’s guest, Jeremy Sams The Offcuts were performed by Lizzie Roper, David Holt, Alex Lowe, Emma Clarke, Toby Longworth, and Beth Chalmers, 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.

She said, Oh, yeah, I love it. I don’t like the wife character. Could you lose that? So, and this makes me so full of self-hatred. You know, I blame only myself for the situation that jet lagged in LA. I went, yeah, fine, okay. So I stayed up all night and rewrote this pitch, called the ambassador’s wife, excising the ambassador’s wife character from the pitch.

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. Success. My guest this week is multi-award-winning writer and novelist, Neil Forsyth, who began his writing career as a freelance journalist covering football matches for the Scotsman. He went on to write three novels, Other People’s Money, Let Them Come Through, and San Carlos, and four humour books based on the character of Bob Servant, a burger van entrepreneur, which were adapted for radio and then two TV series starring the mighty Brian Cox as the eponymous Bob. He’s also written a series of urban myth playhouses for Sky, the 2017 BBC drama Eric, Ernie & Me, and most recently, he is the creator of Guilt, the BBC drama series which has won a number of awards and is currently filming a second series. Neil Forsyth, welcome to the Offcuts Draw.

Thank you very much for having me.

So how did you find getting all these bits together for the show? Was it an easy job or did it involve a lot of hunting?

No, I must be slightly masochistic that I keep all these old failures around. So yeah, I kind of went back through my files and a lot of wincing and chose the ones where there was slightly less wincing, I suppose. But it’s great. I think it’s important to go back and see the ones that didn’t work and take out the reasons why really.

Right, well, let’s get started with your first offcut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

This is from The Gallery, which was a sitcom script I wrote in 2016 that did not get made.

Exterior.

Various streets.

Glasgow.

Morning.

Copel drives his red convertible 1987 Mercedes-Benz 560SL through Grand Merchant City streets.

He has not a care in the world.

Title card. The gallery. Cut back to…

Exterior.

Street.

Minutes later. Copel parks outside his gallery.

Interior.

Copel’s gallery. The gallery is cosy, dusty, and a little gloomy.

Copel switches on the radio.

Sits and leaps through mail. A man enters, who doesn’t look like an art fan.

He half-heartedly studies the paintings as Copel watches suspiciously.

The man reaches out to touch a painting.

The man’s confused.

Let me guess. It’s her birthday. And you thought, how about a wee painting? Something for over the mantelpiece. Not too big, obviously, or nothing too mental, or, you know, gay, but a bit of colour for the sitting room wall.

Copel stands and approaches the man.

And it’s not like you don’t know art. You like that one where all the stairs go up the way, or the one where the clock’s melting, or the dogs playing fucking cards. I don’t mean to be rude, and I appreciate you having a crack at it, but we both know you’re not really serious about this.

You’re right. I’m from Hercules Recovery Solutions.

Copel’s confused.

The bailiffs and old money.

Copel’s not confused.

You owe us £12,462.06, which is secured against a red 1987 Mercedes.

Cut to exterior later. Outside, Copel’s car has gone.

Interior, Copel’s gallery.

Continuous.

Inside, Copel cleans a painting using bread, a gallery method.

The phone rings. He answers.

Copel’s gallery?

I’ve got a few paintings and he’s rid of.

Don’t we all?

Ellie enters and goes and turns on the kettle.

I’m in a flat round the corner if you wanted to have a wee look.

What floor? Is there a lift?

No.

Copel hangs up. I get sacked.

Good. That job was beneath you.

Ellie looks out the window.

Dad, where’s your car? Interior. Copel’s gallery, minutes later. A bewildered Ellie reads paperwork while Copel works on. This interest rate is insane.

The advert had a talking rabbit. I quite understandably thought I was in safe hands.

Why didn’t you go to the bank?

The bank and I are having a little time apart.

You know, I could always take a break from my glorious temping career.

No.

Ellie Posty tries again.

When’s the last time you sold a painting?

I don’t sell paintings. People take refuge in here from rain, from life, from reality. They come in as lost souls looking for salvation, their eyes dancing from painting to painting. And then every so often, the eyes lock and in I go. I tell them about the painting. I tell them why it belongs in their life. I tell them why they should shell out 10 grand on a piece of canvas. One in a hundred will buy it. I don’t sell paintings. I sell miracles.

How is the miracle business?

Fucking awful.

Copel, the main character in that piece, was written for Robbie Coltrane, is that right?

That’s right, yeah. So I can’t quite remember how it all came about. Robbie Coltrane was interested in doing a half-hour comedy again and I got kind of blindated up with him and I think I tried to, he’s very interested in art and I flew up to Glasgow and had lunch with him and it felt like a rich world and something that could be in his voice and I think we got probably quite close with this one but didn’t go over the line for various reasons. I liked it though, I enjoyed listening to it there.

It reminds me of a sort of Scottish love joy, has a slightly dramatic feel, that’s how I anticipated it might go on but that presumably wasn’t what you were going for if it was a sitcom as such.

Well, I mean, I think it was a fairly, I don’t think it was a too sitcom-y sitcom if that makes sense. I think it was probably, I was trying at this point a one foot in drama really and I think probably I was trying to write a show that would reflect that and it’s funny, I think probably now you’d have a much better chance of getting that show away, I think that half our comedy-drama genre is quite prevalent just now and something that could be presented as being a great passion of the central performer and everything else. So yeah, I think probably I would have a better chance now with that.

This script is set in Glasgow and reading it, there’s obviously a very strong sense of place and equally with Bob’s servant in Broughty Ferry, is location very important to you when you write?

Increasingly so. I think there was a period which was when I was kind of getting sitcom scripts relatively easily commissioned from kind of British networks after I’d done Bob’s servant. Still had to go through the hoops, but I would kind of get interest in things I was coming up with. And at that point, when I was doing largely comedy, I kind of often thought location was sort of changeable. I remember there was this whole thing for a period of everyone trying to set everything in Bristol. You know, the BBC were making this big regional push. And with comedy, I used to sometimes think, oh, location is not massively important. I think that’s probably wrong, but it’s certainly wrong in drama. And increasingly, I’ve realized just the importance of location to a story and to the voice of a show. And I’ve kind of gone full circle in terms of, I did quite a lot of American work and set stuff down here in England, but I increasingly just returning more and more to Scotland. And the vast majority of the things that I’m developing just now, and obviously Guild I’m writing are Scottish based because it is the voice that I know the best and I enjoy the most.

Right, well time for another off cut now. Tell us about this one.

So these are some notes that I found, slightly disjointed. They’re about a project called Octuplets, which was an idea I had in 2011.

My notes. Mum. conniving, selfish, always trying to make a few quid and promote herself as an embattled matriarch. Very prone to attention seeking. I’m thinking of things like Gillian McKeith’s magnificent faked feint on I’m a Celebrity. That’s the kind of stunt mum would pull if she wasn’t getting the requisite attention. Bobby. I think Bobby should have just come back from one country, probably America, with a ridiculous accent, though it transpires he’s only been there eight years. He should ask about local customs and slang. Jeremy. Posh on a fall from grace. Yes, good to see him struggle to come back to reality. Last episode he could lose it. Perhaps bowling in the local accent. Maybe shag’s a local barmaid. Ashley. I think he should have a dark secret that’s picked up by the documentary makers, but perhaps not by the others. Perhaps he’s killing neighborhood pets. Grace. I think they should have a memorial for Grace, but none of them particularly liked her. Or her mum tells the documentary makers that she was an angel, but the others clearly didn’t like her. Producer notes. We’re thinking sextuplets rather than octuplets, still with one dead one. So it’s really about five characters, three boys, two girls. And we’re pushing the mum a bit more as a strong main character beside them, for each to bounce off. Again, I think sticking to one other recurring character is right, or it’s definitely too crowded at first glance. Other option is to have one other sibling who’s not a twin, bit left out. Might be fun. Character wise, we’ve tried to stake it out as six broad directions for the twins. They’re not fully fledged characters by any means, just jumping off points. More like archetypes or slots that give each one a different dynamic with the mum and with the siblings. Each one suggests a way to distinguish them in voice, performance and a different role in the family hierarchy.

This sounds like a really good idea. Why did this not go anywhere?

Well, I think the answers in the notes, I mean, it really made me laugh to be honest. It’s people losing confidence in their idea as they’re discussing it. This was a development for the toplets and within the first session, you’ve lost two of them. I think on maybe six toplets and then maybe another sibling and it’s…

Then you mentioned twins later.

I know, and then twins pop up from nowhere and then just another stray sibling who doesn’t seem to be connected. I mean, the idea that anyone would have six toplets and then get pregnant again for a start. Anyway, but I just find it funny. This is how shows die before they’re even born, you know, it’s this overthinking it in the development stage. It’s the writer being inexperienced and not really taking ownership of the idea and everyone very well intentioned here, but this is not how to make a television show. You have an idea and you stick to it and you find the good version of that vision. You don’t abandon fundamental aspects, which I’ve done several times, particularly at the end of my career. And you’ve got to, you’ve just got to bash it about and not react to little issues you find by abandoning your main premise and throwing it under the bus. But this would probably be in between the Bob Servant series, maybe, or maybe I just got the…

Well, this is 2011. This is the earliest piece actually of yours that we have.

Yeah. So this is probably around the time of Bob Servant and I probably had enough cash to start getting meetings with comedy producers, but I just didn’t know what I was doing. I was very inexperienced and it was all very exciting. And even people meeting you at that point, I found kind of really exciting and I was just open to learning everything. And it’s funny, there’s no real way to miss that stage of a writing career. I think that’s the problem. There’s no way to get to the confident stage and not necessarily always right in any way, but at least have a bit of confidence in your voice that you think, well, here’s my idea and here’s why I think it’s good. And absolutely no problem if you don’t think it’s for your company and I’ll respectfully go on to the next company rather than getting these sort of circular firing squads with your own premise.

Did you actually show this to anyone in the end?

I can’t remember, I’d be surprised.

That’s a shame because there were some nice little touches in there. I quite like the idea of the extra sibling.

Yeah, I know some of the things made me laugh, like the sibling that turns out he’s murdering the neighbour. But it was great fun, I mean, I found that first period where people would actually meet me to discuss possible television shows was so kind of impossibly exciting at that point. These aren’t experiences I would have taken anything negative from. It was just a great fun thing to start using those parts of my imagination, I suppose.

Now, as I said, this was the earliest piece of your writing that we have in the show. Were you creative as a child? Were you a writer at school?

Yes, very much so. It was definitely my favourite subject and the one that I was best at. I loved the creativity of it. I loved it. I went to school, which I’ve been back to recently, and it’s completely transformed. It’s a really progressive place now. But when I went there, and it was more a generational thing than the school itself, it was quite a grey, Presbyterian, sort of Scottish school and quite austere classrooms. So when you find yourself in one of these classrooms, but getting taken on an exciting kind of mental journey, it was really uplifting. It was certainly in English that I found that through a couple of fantastic teachers.

And does it run in the family? Do you have creative parents or siblings?

I mean, they’ve always been well read, my kind of family, and my granddad having a kind of great library in Dundee that he gave through my mother into our house. They’ve always been big readers, but no one’s worked in that kind of creative setting.

So you were the first. How do they react to it? Are they very proud or have they always been telling you, you’ve got to get a proper job?

No, I think they probably had lots of fears that they’ve admirably hidden from view, sometimes more convincingly than other times. But I think they’ve been very supportive and, you know, my mum and dad, when I made Bob Servant, for example, we shot that in Broughty Ferry, where I’m from. I stayed at my mum and dad’s house and walked around the corner to Bob Servant’s house and they’re in the opening title credits. You know, I think I understand parents’ hesitation when a child wants to go off in these routes because it’s such a precarious career, and all of us will be. But I think they’ve been very, very supportive with it. And to be fair to them, it took me a long time to kind of overtly say this is what I wanted to do.

OK, moving on now, let’s have your next off-cut, please.

This is a pilot I wrote for an American sitcom in 2014, and it’s called Every Other Saturday.

Cold open, fade in, exterior Jake’s apartment, morning. Sally, late thirties, smart, dry, a little over cautious. Henry, fifties, affable, fit, silver fox-type. And Sam, fourteen, socially awkward, are outside an apartment. Sally knocks, nervous. The door’s flung open by a delighted Jake, late thirties, smart, but childlike, which can be both charming and deeply objectionable. Sammy!

Hi, Jake. How are you?

Jake bends down, gives Sam a firm hug, and stares into his eyes.

You’re safe now.

Oh, come on. Unbelievable. So…

While Sally looks in her bag and produces a document, Jake peeks at Henry, then leans into Sally.

There’s an old man standing right behind you.

This is Henry.

Oh, you’re Henry. Sorry. I thought you might be Henry’s dad. No.

The new boyfriend, I’m afraid.

Boyfriend’s a bit of a stretch.

Great to finally meet you. As described.

Sam, why don’t you wait inside?

In you go, champ.

Sam goes inside. Jake looks for an unreturned high five.

He didn’t see it. It’s cool. We’ll be throwing skin all day.

Sally hands Jake a document.

I thought you’d need a copy of the agreement. Have you read it?

Every other Saturday, I give my son the best time of his life.

You haven’t read it.

You’re a magician?

Henry’s wearing a tuxedo under his jacket.

Ballroom dancing.

Jake shoots Sally in a mused look.

We thought we’d try a hobby, seeing as we finally have some free time now that you’re back.

The elevator door opens and Gabriella, 30’s Puerto Rican attractive, exits.

Speaking of hobbies. Good to see you again.

She walks away down the corridor.

You can probably read between the lines there. Things are good.

In response, Henry peeks around at the departing Gabriella.

Come on, buddy. She could be your granddaughter.

Not sure about your math there.

And it’s Hispanic. Before you use any of your 1950’s terms.

50’s?

Jake, it’s good that you’re back. For Sam. But he’s only just got used to the situation. And we’ve concentrated on giving him a safe, secure environment.

That’s exactly what I’m worried about. Sounds like I’ve got some extreme fathering to deliver.

I find that phrase somewhat terrifying.

Jake excited, gestures with the document.

Every other Saturday.

He closes the door, Sally sighs, fade out, end of cold open.

This was written for an American audience in 2014. So when did you go over, first of all?

Well, my wife and I got married and went on Honeymoon in 2012. And at the time I was pretty skint and I’d done a little bit of travel journalism. So what I had taken to doing when we were going on holiday was emailing nicer tells and perhaps lightly suggesting I might be considering reviewing them and getting a reduced rate. So when we were there, I did this in Italy, in Tuscany, and this one five star hotel came back and said, listen, if you stay on a Monday night, we’ll give you for whatever it was. So we said, that’s fine with us. So we went there for one night and we checked in and we went down to the pool and there was a little restaurant beside it for lunch and all the tables were taken and the waiters said, well, hang on. And there was an American couple at a table for four and they were just there themselves. And I went and spoke to them and they said, oh yeah, join us. So we sat and had lunch with them, had a drink and things and we started chatting. And that was the head of television at DreamWorks, a guy called Daryl Frank, who worked for Spielberg at DreamWorks. And we just had a kind of fun day and I said I was a writer and I could see his heart kind of sink a little bit. But I tried to play it relatively cool. But he did say, and the next day I was chatting to him beside the pool, he said, do you have any ideas you thought could work over here? And I said, well, I’ve got this thing I’d worked up and I’d worked up this treatment on this idea called Every Other Saturday. And in that very American way, he said, oh, I love it, send it over. And then we moved on, they moved on and then he messaged me about a week later when he was back in America, he said, yeah, I like it and the team likes it, do you think you could come over and pitch it? And we kind of worked it up a bit more. He partnered me with a kind of supervising American producer who was a great guy called John Pollock had written on 30 Rock and now writes The Modern Family and he kind of guided me through the process, flew over and we sold it to NBC. It was an astonishing little run of luck.

Is sold to NBC?

We sold, well, they ordered the pilot script, so we sold the show. Over there, the pilot season, as you might know, you go over in August and you go around the networks and you have about 20 minutes to pitch your idea and you try and sell the idea and they order up the pilot script. So it’s all very exciting. I absolutely loved it, you know, going around all the studios and this very intense little 15 minute chance to get this big pilot sitcom order from one of the famous American networks and that was it. Yeah, we sold it. No, no. I mean, it’s kind of crazy, the system. In August, each major American network, the four, NBC, CBS, Fox, and who am I forgetting? ABC is the other one. So the four of them order about between 90 and 100 pilot scripts in August.

They order?

Yeah. They pay you generously to write these pilot scripts. They order between 90 and 100, and you write them over the autumn, you get them in. In January, they will pick maybe 10 to physically make the pilot. And of those 10 pilots they make, they will perhaps take two to series. So from 90 to 100 down to two is the maths.

Is that 90 to 100 per station, or is it 90 to 100 per series?

No, no, per network, per genre. So that’s just comedy. I mean, I think they’ve probably trimmed it a bit in the last few years, but that was when I was doing it, and I think I’ve sold half a dozen over there and never got even to making the pilot stage. But that’s the statistics. It’s a crazy system, and I do not understand how it makes any economic sense whatsoever.

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. And it all happened because you happened to be sitting at a table in Italy with someone. So had you had any plans to go to America? Had you not met this fellow?

I mean, you know, in a distant dream, maybe. But I mean, maybe I’d have got there a few years later. Maybe not. I mean, it certainly sort of catapulted me into a position because because they liked the idea, they got WME to sign to represent me over in America as a kind of big agency. And then we got in the door at these networks. So it was incredibly fortuitous. But I think it also reflects the things about luck. Yes, it’s lucky, but it only worked out because I’d been diligently working up show ideas off my own back for a year or two at that point. And I did have all these things that I had desperately to show people.

But had you written it for an American audience or was this for a British sitcom?

No, I wouldn’t even have dreamed to dream that was a possibility. So I very much fashioned it for pitching here and just reworked it for over there.

Oh, fascinating. All right, next off cut, please. What is this one?

These are some notes I made for a possible Rob Brydon project in 2012 about a jockey.

The opening should be his last race, but it’s the worst ever. Evening meeting, tiny track, handful of punters. He looks like he’s going to win. He falls, stretchered off. One geeky horse fan signed the programme. Presentation, get across the successes of the past. Has a beer, has a few more, leaves. Nice old man opens the gate. That you finished now? Beat, fuck off. The wrestler, eastbound and down, partridge. Get some quotes from jockeys on their retirements, etc. Stick that at the top.

Very much note form there. Quite a challenge for the actor, I think.

He’s done very well.

So, this was a project for or with Rob Brydon?

Well, this just really made me laugh when I saw this in the folder because this happened quite a lot in that kind of stage in my career, where people would come and say, oh, so and so is interested in a project in this sort of area. Maybe you’d meet them, maybe you wouldn’t, and you’d sort of have to pitch it and they might be interested. Comedy back then was just all about big talents. Find out which big talents are interesting to the networks. Find out what they might be thinking of doing and kind of pitch something in that area. I find it a bit depressing, really, what I like about dramas, it really does tend to start with a script before you worry about things like this. But this just made me laugh because what happened was a producer came to me and said, oh, Rob Brydon is really interested in doing a sitcom, but he’s a jockey. Because it was something to his brother. His brother was also a writer and he was sort of involved in the idea, but this was a possibility that could have a real chance sort of thing. And I said to the producer, well, surely if his brother’s a writer, he’ll want to write it. He went, no, no, no, he’s just helped come up with the idea and all this stuff. So anyway, I was going on holiday to India at the time and I thought, well, I better buy some jockey books. So I looked online and I ended up buying half a dozen jockey autobiographies. And there were a lot of them were out of print and they ended up getting these massive hard backs and they all came just in time and I bundled them into my bag and we got to the airport and I was over the limit for the weights. I had to pay an extra 30 quid to take these bloody jockey boots. So I got to India and I’m reading these books, these turgid, just utterly bland by British jockeys talking about their career and I’m thinking, what am I doing? And I’m reading these by the pool, plough through them and I get, I think it was the last day of holiday, I get an email from the producer saying, oh yeah, no, his brother does want to write it. So I was in India having paid 30 quid and read these, so I left them in the hotel. So there’s a hotel in rural India that’s got half a dozen hardbacks in their small library. If anyone looks at that library, it’s so confusing. It’s dominated by mid-level British jockeys from the 90s. But that just made me laugh and that kind of thing happened all the time. People came to you with something. I remember Kim Cattrall was in London wanting to hear ideas and I went to meet her with other writers and she was really nice and she sat in state in this hotel suite and we all went in and pitched her ideas. And I had this idea about doing something around the ambassador’s wife, so the American ambassador to the UK, his wife. So you’re getting away from the politics and it’s about what does a woman do in London when she lives in this, you know, the biggest private house in London and doesn’t really have a job. And I thought that could be quite interesting. And she was quite interested in it and I remember that actually became this ludicrous thing when I ended up pitching that in America and selling it. But working with, I think, the politest way, maybe not the strongest set of people that I’ve worked with to the extent that the, I remember the night before the pitch. So the show was called The Ambassador’s Wife and the night before the pitch I got a call and finally the sort of big, big boss at this place had read it. And she said, Oh, yeah, I love it. I don’t like the wife character. Could you lose that? So and this makes me so full of self-hatred. You know, I blame only myself for the situation that jet lagged in LA. I went, yeah, fine. Okay. So I stayed up all night and rewrote this pitch, called The Ambassador’s Wife, excising the Ambassador’s Wife character for the pitch. And we sold it. And we sold that to one of the American Nips as well. I better not say it because they’d probably be embarrassed about even being involved with it. But yeah, we sold that the next day. And again, it turned into an absolute disaster, painful experience. And it always would. And I blame myself for it. Because if you as the writer are willing to kill your protagonist in order to get your show away, it’s very hard to then write that show with confidence in your vision. Yeah, so that jokey thing is there would have been one of them every two weeks at that point. So and so is interested in something and you frantically buy some books and pretend you have any knowledge on it and try and get the gig.

So Rob Brydon hasn’t actually seen these notes or heard your pitch.

I really, really hope not.

Anyway, time for another off cut now. What have we got?

This is the first half page of a pitch I wrote in 2017 for the project that eventually became Eric, Ernie and Me.

In 1969, Ken Dodd’s gag writer Eddie Braben was invited by the BBC to come down from Liverpool to meet Morecambe and Wise in London. Eddie wasn’t keen. Morecambe and Wise were an unremarkable double act, their material consisting of Abbot and Costello influenced sniping and mutual dislike. Eddie spent an hour in their company and said, You clearly love each other. Why don’t you show that? In that comment, and over the next ten years, Eddie turned Morecambe and Wise into Eric and Ernie. In Eric, Ernie and Me, we go along for the ride. Narratively, the show is structured around preparations for Morecambe and Wise’s 1977 Christmas special. It would be their greatest triumph, Penelope Keith, Angela Rippon, 28 million viewers. But the buildup was chaotic. Eric and Ernie fretted over every line, and Eddie worked 16-hour days and suffered hallucinations. Against the tense 1977 rehearsals, we cut away to tell the story of Eric, Ernie and Eddie from that first meeting in 1969. Essentially, we use Eddie Braben as our vehicle to watch Eric and Ernie in an intimate setting and see them at their most vulnerable. We have a ringside seat to watch their evolvement into Britain’s most loved comedians, the technical mastery and the backstory to some of their most famous creative moments, the often ruinous self-doubt, the love they had for each other, and the personal dramatic journeys that each of them took over that time.

So was this the actual pitch document, then?

I don’t know if I’ll have done much more than that, to be honest, because the BBC, for television, that was something that moved very quickly. And I probably would have done about that. And then possibly got a treat… Yeah, that’s what happened. I did that. And then I got a treatment commission for the BBC, which I then wrote. And I remember with the treatment, there’s such unloved documents, and quite rightly so. They’re kind of sales documents, and they’re pretty painful to write. And I think often you’ll kind of do a little bit on the characters and some of the story and the tone of the show and the outlook if it’s a series and so on. But I remember when I got that treatment commission, I thought, well, this is a drama, and I really want to write drama. I’ve not written a drama that’s been made. I want to show that I can write this story and show that it will be driven by the dramatic elements of it. So I wrote essentially an outline of the hour script. I wrote a very detailed outline to show that this is a smart version of this story, and it’s very much driven by drama with humor in there and everything else. But I’m not just going to be telling a sort of easy paint by numbers Mark and the Wise thing, which I knew they’d have been pitched a hundred times. So that was the process. And then it was the script commission. And then very quickly, because it was something they really had to tie in for Christmas television. So those conversations start to happen quite early in the year. So I think I probably pitched it to the BBC in March and we shot it in the autumn and it went out in December.

Wow, that is fast.

Yeah, that was very fast.

And writing about a writer, how much of the experiences that you chronicled, the stresses and the deadlines and all that, are similar, were similar to your own?

This was a period where I’d been kind of scarred by a few kind of comedy developments I’d had, including that America one I just told you about actually. And I felt a little bit creatively lost in that kind of 2016 period. And I’d done a lot of these American scripts that were sort of commercially very attractive, but not necessarily creatively what I wanted to do. And I remember I did a development over there with Sharon Horgan, who was just doing catastrophe at the time. And I just, she would tell me about catastrophe and about her approach to storytelling and her approach to character. And it was just really inspirational. And I thought, I want to be doing something that feels real like that, that feels real to my life. And it just feels a story when I’m just thinking about character and I’m just telling a smart version of something that I want to do. So I kind of went back to the drawing board slightly and I started reading a lot of books and a lot of books about script writing, but then a lot of books about writers. And I just stumbled across Eddie Braben’s Memoirs, which is a fantastic book. The book what I wrote, I recommend. And it was just so clear. I mean, it was clear largely because he’s a great writer and obviously he’s a script writer. So he was within the book that were just scenes. You could just see them as scenes and he had sort of humorous side on all these events, as well as being quite honest about the stresses he was under. So I just immediately thought it would appeal and I thought it was something I really wanted to tell and it was a real turning point for me, I think, because getting to write something that was dramatically driven like that.

And won loads of awards.

Well, it just got a lot of… People really liked it. I remember people in the kind of business saying what they really liked about it was that it showed the rewriting process. It showed him working with the producer, John Abbins and Markham & Wise to change things and polish things and trying things that didn’t work and working out why they didn’t work. I think it hopefully just showed that whole world of creativity. It wasn’t showing like a flash of inspiration and they had the finished article. It showed this kind of ugly journey to it. I remember I wrote the first draft when we were maybe gonna get it on BBC One. And then very late on they said, look, this is BBC Four and you’ve got half the budget and you’ll have to rewrite it. And it’s the best thing that could have happened to it because I just stripped out all the, sometimes literally the singing and dancing and it just became this back corridors and back rooms and dressing rooms and became much more stripped down. And the rehearsal room, we really used this rehearsal room set and it became much more powerful, I think, as a result of that.

Okay, let’s have another off cut now. This one is?

This is from yet another field American pilot sitcom I wrote. This one’s called Good People and I wrote it in 2015.

Exterior Street, Boston, rough part of town. Cynthia, Mike, Kim and Tyler get out of the A Little Help minivan. Homeless people, various, mill about a vaccination tent and food truck. A Little Help Foundation branding all around.

Medical outreach program, flu vaccinations for the homeless. They get jabbed, we get coverage.

Theoretically.

Classic localized social pathfinder enablement.

It looks like the world’s most depressing fun fair.

Mike walks on, Cynthia turns to Kim and Tyler.

Great turnout.

Free pizza.

Hey, is he right?

Are we really that screwed?

No, he’s just trying to get all gecko on us.

I like him, which is surprising. We’re both major league alphas. You’d expect tension.

Okay, Tyler, clips for the website.

All over it.

Kim, round up the media. I’ll try.

Cynthia catches up with Mike, leads him to the homeless.

Watch, learn, don’t touch anything.

Show me one thing I’d want to touch.

I thought you were here to help.

Sure, your dad’s not giving you any more money. You’re going to go bust, and he’s sent me to help you do it with a minute amount of respect.

They’re near the homeless.

Well, we’re not bust yet, buddy, so back the fuck off. Hello, welcome. Lovely to see you.

Nice jacket, man.

You pay taxes, you get nice things.

Tyler prepares to take a photo of a group of homeless men and women. They smile. He sighs, lowers phone.

I want to help you guys. Living cribless is a tough break, but work with me here. If we want the public to care, this has to go viral. Do you know what goes viral?

They don’t know what goes viral.

Clean two-step narratives. Our two steps are, let’s be honest, you’re fucked and we’re saving your lives, so let’s lose the smiles and start pulling heartstrings, okay? Just think about the fact you don’t have a house.

He notices his phone.

Shit, sorry, guys, no juice. Hold the sad face.

Exterior food truck, street. A few bored staff wearing a little help t-shirts conveyor belt pizzas from freezer to ovens to plates. Long line of homeless. Cynthia serves them pizza. Mike lurks nearby.

Every day is a struggle, you know?

I do know, sir. I grew up a few miles from the most appalling poverty.

Mike frowns. Next homeless guy arrives.

You got any proscudo?

Buddy, the days when you were in a position to request pizza toppings have long passed. Long passed.

You’re a despicable human being. Sorry, sir, we don’t. And it’s proscudo. Proscudo. Nailed it.

Homeless guy leaves.

Little bit of targeted self-improvement there.

Yeah, that should turn things around for him.

Kim returns.

Another, as you call it, failed American sitcom. How many sitcom ideas and scripts do you reckon you have written or pitched? Or pitched in the States?

Oh, maybe a dozen and then probably twice that here, maybe in the last 10 years or so. It probably feels about right. 30 to 40, maybe. Yeah, I think, but you know, there’s different levels of pitching. Sometimes it’s like that Eric, Ernie and Me, there’s a half page that you’ve sent to a producer. As long as you write a script and you pitch that and spend a couple of months doing that. So there’s different levels of commitment you’ve made. But I was a freelance journalist for a long time. So I think that really helps me with that pitching world in terms of generating ideas and feeling that you can sort of work up the bones of it and then not getting too psychologically destroyed when it doesn’t go anywhere. Cause you sort of trust yourself that you’ve come up with another idea. I mean, I think worlds and premises are kind of the easy part. I think characters is the hard part. So if you pitch 30 shows, you’re not coming up with 30 characters. You’ve probably got three or four characters in you and whatever show gets away, they’re gonna go in there whether they like it or not.

That’s an interesting idea.

But that was for a cable network over there. So I think that was a bit smarter and a bit more closer to my voice probably.

Did it get commissioned?

Yes, we sold it in the commission of script and then the commission of, I think I wrote at least two episodes for that actually. In fact, that was a cable network. These are the whims of the American system. And to be fair, it’s probably reflected here in terms of people have these new ideas of what they should be doing all the time. And that got very close to production, American cable network. And we were waiting for that decision when Trump won the election in 2016. And this cable network, they’d be making these kind of quite edgy, interesting single camera comedy. Sonny decided, you know, we need to appeal to Trump America as well. So we need to make stuff that’s more catch all. I mean, God knows, I don’t think that worked out for them very well. The idea that you could somehow cross the American political divide through half our comedy, it seems a little bit ambitious.

And you weren’t tempted to join them.

Well, I don’t think I was invited on that journey. But so anyway, at least that was a slightly different death for that project, tying it into global affairs.

Well, we’ve now come to your final off-cut. Tell us about this one.

So this is from 2015. And this is a pitch I wrote for an American project called The Brothers Murder.

Two brothers, Gary and Louis, they’re polar opposites. Louis, 20s, manages a failing record store, spending his days cursing the Antichrist Spotify. Gary, 30s, is a young lawyer, spending his days devising tax dodges for the city’s elite. Together in Gary’s car after a funeral, Louis driving because he’s a little less drunk than Gary. They argue bitterly, right up to the point when Gary grabs the wheel and they run over an old man. They stop, the street is quiet. They need to call the cops. Gary, eh, yeah, okay. Gary’s phone has no signal, Louis’s phone’s dead. They’ll drive the man to the hospital. They put him in the car, they drive to the hospital. Gary explains what’s going to happen next. They’re going to get arrested, his career is over. Louis could be charged with an array of crimes or maybe a civil suit, that would be millions. How’s the record store doing? Louis checks on the old man, he’s dead. Do they still go to the hospital? Louis thinks yes, Gary suggests no. They’re pulling up at the hospital. Louis finds the guy’s wallet. He lives nearby. They’ll go to his house. If he has family, then they have to know. They’ll let fate decide. They get to his house, no answer. They open the door with his keys. No family photos anywhere. He lives alone. His name was Archibald. He played the trumpet. He wrote bad poetry. They find pills, letters from a hospital. Archibald had terminal cancer. The brothers lay him on his bed. There’s not a mark on his body. Louis, he looks peaceful. Gary, he looks happy. They leave the house. They drive away in silence. With the panic and the stakes and the alcohol, which of those decisions would you have made differently? That question is what this show is from that night onwards. Because it’s only the beginning. Louis is mentally tortured by what happened. Gary is pragmatically tortured. Louis insists they go to Archibald’s funeral. They’re the only people there. Louis reads some of Archibald’s poetry. The funeral is ending when a taxi pulls up and enter the niece from out of town. The brothers tell her that they’re friends of Archibald’s. They used to blow a little trumpet together. She tells them that she’s heartbroken over Archibald’s loss, her favourite uncle. Amongst the grief, she asks the first of her questions.

Now, if the story of this sounds familiar to the listener, that’s because it became the British series Guilt. Interestingly, was this written first then for an American production and then made Scottish? I mean, I noticed the names of the characters are different, but the story sounds remarkably the same.

I think I probably wrote it for here, and then I got approached by an American company, asking if I wanted to pitch anything with them, and sent them basically that, and they were quite keen, and so I reworked it and went over and tried to sell it there. And I’m very, very glad I didn’t, because it would have got lost in that pilot script system that I described earlier. If we’d got a script order, I’d have written it, and they wouldn’t have made it. And then it’s very, very hard to extricate the ideas back from these companies. They usually have it tied in for at least a few years, and they very rarely give them up. So it would have died a death if that happened. So what was great was I went over there to do a few things, including go round and speak to people. This actually got pretty close to HBO, but I think it just let me work out the show a bit more. I had to, to kind of give that proper 20-minute description of it. So by the time I came back, I had a much clearer idea of what it was. I kind of repositioned it back in Scotland where it had originally been, and we started to get it into development here.

Now the actor, Mark Bonnar, Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives, apparently used to go to school together. Is that right? Did you know that when you cast them?

I didn’t. So I think it’d probably, the BBC had commissioned the episode one script, maybe episode two, when I did Eric, Ernie & Me.

Because Mark Bonner was in that.

He played Eric Morgan. Eric Morgan, yeah. So I said to Mark, I’ve got this thing in development and I sent it over to him. And he was very keen to play the older brother, Max. And he said, if you had any ideas for the younger brother, now I was very eager to try and find two actors that were from Edinburgh, just to get that accent and voice right. And I met Jamie once socially and I knew he was from Edinburgh. And I said, well, Jamie Sives. And he said, I can’t believe you just said that. Not only do I think that’s who to go for, I went to school with them. And yeah, they went to primary school together in Leith in Edinburgh where the show’s set. So that was a fantastic bit of serendipity. And yeah, it worked out brilliantly.

Presumably they kept in touch so they had the familiarity that brothers often have. Or is that just coincidence?

Well, yeah, they kept in touch. I mean, not massively closely, but there was enough there. I mean, I remember it being very funny when we got the show commissioned and I was finishing the scripts and I met up with the two of them just to kind of just read through some scenes and just so I could really hear the voices and everything else. So they hadn’t seen each other for a few years and it really made me laugh. They turned up and Mark was just pumped. He’d been frantically working out for a few weeks I think in advance of seeing Jamie because he knew Jamie was very fit. And they’re both sort of sitting there with their rippling little biceps. And I just thought, this is great. This is what you want. You want this sibling type rivalry between them. And then they were just funny together as well. They were just immediately funny and that kind of shorthand really between the two of them, which is just so valuable.

So final question. We’re coming to the end of the show. We’ve not really heard any prose. I mean, no short story or novel or anything like that. I mean, you started out in prose and you wrote three novels. Is that door now shut? Are you not tempted to return to it at all?

You never know, but I would say it’s not, it’s just not something that, yeah, I love writing scripts. I really love it. I’ve written two novels. I’m very, very proud of them. I think they’re perfectly solid books. I think I’ll never write, I’ll never go through a writing process that’s harder in terms of just getting the thing done. And I also think pragmatically, it’s a tough game that, it’s a really tough game because if I write, if I get a show commissioned and they put it into production, then it’s great. You know it’s gonna go out. You know roughly the audience it’s gonna get. You know roughly the level of coverage and interest it’s gonna get. And that’s kind of locked in. And of course that could be positive or negative, but it’s gonna, you know, you’re gonna feel your works made an impact. But writing a novel, I mean, you just send it out into the kind of, into the ether. And it’s incredibly unlikely that it’s gonna make any form of kind of societal impact. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a big publisher because it’s quick silver. Nobody knows why a novel works. And it’s so hard to get that coverage. Review pages have been shot back. Marketing budgets have been shot back. Distributions harder. Bookshops are closing. And I just think it’s that thing of spending a year or two writing a book with the knowledge that’s a very good chance that it’ll be blinkin. You miss it when this will come out. And people will say to you six months later, did you not write a book? I find that quite dispiriting, if I’m honest.

So your heart is with drama and comedy.

Yeah, and script writing. I love working with other people. And I think that I like writing by and large. I like locking myself away in writing. But I love the idea that at the other end, this is work that you’re going to share. And you’re going to shape with other people. Other people are going to come aboard and make this better. And that’s so exciting.

Right. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show. How’s it been for you?

I’ve loved it. I’ve really loved it. I loved hearing the brilliant performances of these long forgotten works of various quality. And no, I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

Well, it’s been lovely to talk to you. Neil Forsyth, thank you for sharing the contents of your offcuts drawer with us.

Thank you, Proudly.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Neil Forsyth. The offcuts were performed by Lynsey Murrell, Kenny Blyth, Kate O’Sullivan, Nigel Pilkington, Beth Chalmers, and David Monteath, 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.

From time to time, people ask me, oh, when are you going to do Karen Carpenter again? Normally older, gay gentlemen, who were my sort of main clientele back in the day.

Audience, not clientele, I think.

Yeah, yeah, sorry, yeah. So yeah, I think maybe I will finish it. I mean, it’s awful when you laugh at your own jokes, but that did make me chuckle at the end.

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.

My guest this week is Jackie Clune. On her Twitter profile, she describes herself as actress, writer, activist, mum of four, including triplets, vice president of equity, and vice president of Eaton Manor Rugby Football Club. Having started her working life as a university drama lecturer, she created a one-woman show about the singer Karen Carpenter, which was a hit at the 1995 Edinburgh Festival, and her career as a writer-performer took off. She’s written another six Edinburgh shows, material for TV sketch programs, Smack the Pony and BBC’s Comedy Nation, and countless articles for news outlets such as The Guardian, The Daily Mail, Red, and Top Sante, where she has a regular column. She’s been a stand-up comedian, and as an actress has worked extensively in high-profile, critically acclaimed theatre productions in both drama and musicals, which include Mamma Mia, 9 To 5, and Candide. And on TV, you may recognize her from performances in shows such as Eastenders, or comedies like Borderline, Motherland, and Mandy. And she’s also an author. She’s written two books, Extreme Motherhood and Man of the Month Club, and her third book, the novel, I’m Just a Teenage Punchbag, has just been published this year. Jackie Clune, I’ll take a breath now. Welcome to the off-cut draw.

I sound like a bit of a git, don’t I?

You sound like a very busy person. And I haven’t even mentioned half the stuff on your CV.

Yes, I like to keep busy. I’ve always liked to keep busy. I’m not very good at holidays. I’m not very good at sitting still. But it’s quite a new thing for me to talk about myself as a writer. And weirdly, a lot of the stuff I sent you is all from the same sort of two-year period, not that long ago, because I think it was only really then that I thought, yeah, I am a writer and I do love that aspect of what I do. I think most women my age, if you’re still knocking about the theatre and entertainment industry, you’ve got to start making your own work because there are no roles for us. So, I do embrace that side of what I do now a lot more.

Are you a planner, because you do have quite an extraordinary body of work with the acting and the musicals and the performance. How easy is it for you to make a decision to sit down and commit to writing a full-length project, like a play or a book, when you’ve got all these other things going on?

I have to make it a discipline. I’m very sort of workaday about it. There’s no muse that strikes in the middle of the night when I get up and have some lordnum and write a wonderful poem or something. I make sure that once the kids are at school, I’ve got a shed in my garden, and I go down the garden, which takes about four steps, into the shed, and I write a thousand words, and I’m not allowed out until I’ve done it. And that is the only way I finish anything, because otherwise I just, I’m here, there and everywhere, and I think that’s really liberated me as a writer, when I’ve heard other people describe it as a job. And the inspiration, the enjoyable part of it, is probably about five percent, and the other 95 percent is just work. And initially, I thought that meant I was rubbish, and that I shouldn’t write because I never had that kind of burning need. You know, maybe the burning need is there, sublimated somewhere, but most of it is just dedication and bloody mindedness.

Well, let’s get started with your first off-cut. Can you tell us please what it’s called, what genre it was written for, and when it was written?

Yes. So this is a young adult fiction book called Queen of the Mall, which was never published or has not been published yet, and I wrote it in 2016.

Right, girls, point shoes, please. Lucy, you can do some more stretching. Paula doesn’t know what to do with me because I refuse to do the torture shoes. But it’s what the big girls do, Mum cried when I bare-faced rejected them. Oh, great, every teenage girl’s right to have bleeding stumps for feet, Mum. Why don’t you go the whole hog and cut my toes off? So when the other girls are trying to stand on their toes, the hard wooden blocks strapped to their feet with pretty pink satin ribbon, I am, once again, lying on the floor trying to reach my toes over the top of my belly. I stare at the little rolls of blubber encased in the baby pink cotton leotard. This is so humiliating. I am not ballet. I was not built for ballet. I do not like pretending to be wafty. I am not wafty. I have no desire to be wafty. Even when I tried, once, Paula laughed and said something about a baby elephant. Now it’s time for jetties. Oh, God. We huddle in the corner waiting for our turn to step jump across the floor in a diagonal line. I try to hide, but Paula always singles me out. I stare at the spindly, awkward girls desperately trying to land lightly, keep their heads up, hold their non-existent bellies in. They all look like Bambi on ice, twiggy legs flying all over the place, big scared eyes, hoof feet crashing down on the wooden floor. All too soon it’s my turn. I step third a couple of steps and just when I reach the middle, I hear a terrible ripping sound. The whole room stops. There’s a dreadful moment when I try to work out without looking at or touching my bum, if it’s my tights, not too bad, or my leotard that is split. End of life. I don’t have to tell you that it’s my leotard AND my tights, do I? I don’t have to tell you that a dozen 13 year old girls can now see my bum crack because we’re not allowed to wear knickers under our leotards. I also don’t have to tell you, I’m sure, that the same 13 year old girls are now helpless with laughter, clutching at each other and falling all over the floor. I don’t blame them. Anything to lighten the atmosphere in that prison. I cover my bum with my hands and shuffle to the corner. I grab my sweatshirt and tie it around my waist. Somebody needs a bigger leotard, says Paula, and the girls double up again. Something inside me cracks. I get up, walk to the door. No toilet breaks until half past, Lucy, yells Paula, the ballet Nazi. I’m not going to the toilet, I say. What’s wrong, says Mum as I push past her at the door. I quit, I say over my shoulder as I walk towards the exit. I notice some of the horrible Nazi ballet mums smirking as I storm past them. I accidentally kick one of them in the shin. Ouch, she says angrily. Lucy, come back, shouts Mum. I make it out into the car park. The prisoners, still in the class, have all rushed to the window. They are staring silently out at me as if to say, it’s too late for us, save yourself. I raise my hand in salute and head to the car.

So, Queen of the Mall, Mall spelt M-A-U-L. Mall as in you’re being mauled by somebody. Is that what that spelling means?

Well, it actually is a rugby term. Some years ago when my kids were quite small, they started playing rugby and up until the age of 11, girls can play with boys. And then once they hit 12, they have to separate into single sex teams. And there was no girls team at the club for Eaton Manor that I’m one of the vice presidents of now. So me and a friend Caroline started a girls team and I’ve just taken it on from there. And it’s become one of my biggest passions. And I always say to people, you know, I’ve sung at the Albert Hall and I’ve done films and telly and whatever and glamorous showbiz life, you know, now and again. Most of it’s not like that. But the thing that gives me the biggest buzz, the thing that really excites me is watching my girls teams playing rugby. I grew up with it because my dad was a rugby referee in Harlow, an Irish family, and rugby was big in our house. But I always hated it because it was cold, wet afternoons, waiting for it to finish. It’s a game that has a lot of stop starts. So there are an awful lot of long girls where nothing much happens. And I didn’t really get it at the time. But having watched my kids learn the game and seen how empowering it is for girls, especially, to do all of the things that we’re told never to do, like be loud, be aggressive, knock people over, enjoy your physicality, enjoy your strength. If you get knocked down, get up and start again. Don’t give up. Be there for each other. You know, all these wonderful sort of metaphors for life seems to me a really sort of feminist sport. And I just am really, really passionate about it. So I wanted to write a book for young women to try and counter a little bit of that narrative that you have to be a ballet girl, you know. So the heroine of this book, Queen of the Mall, is a girl who doesn’t fit that ballet mold and who doesn’t quite know where she fits in. And in her discovery, a sort of accidental discovery of a girl’s rugby team, she finds her squad. And I really love it. When I wrote it, I thought, God, I’d love to have this published and give it to all the girls that I have met through the years at various festivals all over the country playing rugby. Because it’s a really interesting community with incredible characters. You know, you’ve got the pushy rugby mums and dads and the coaches who are kind of living vicariously through the girls. And then all the sort of normal arena of teen drama that goes on between girls. So, yeah, I’m still hopeful that maybe one day when Women and Girls Rugby has a higher profile that someone will pick it up and publish it. Because I think it’s a cracking story about finding your tribe.

Sounds like it’d make a good TV series for CBBC or something.

Well, yes. Thank you for saying that, Laura. I think so too.

So your childhood as you weren’t a rugby player, even though you grew up around it, were you quite a bookish, swatty type? Or were you more of a performer? Or did all that come later, performing and creative stuff?

I basically do anything as long as somebody applauds me. I’ve always said to people that I’ve made whatever talent I have go a long way. I’m kind of shameless. You know, there’s a character in Mike Lee’s Abigail’s Party. She called…

Beverly?

It’s not Beverly. It’s the very timid one.

Ah, yes, played by Janine Davidsky. I can’t remember.

That’s the one. I can’t remember the character’s name right now. Anyway, there’s a bit where she relates an anecdote where she says, somebody asked, could anyone play the piano at a party? So she sits down and plays by a broom, by a broom, over and over again. And I’ve always related to that because I will stick my hand up and say, yeah, I can do that, even though I probably can’t. But I sort of think that just saying yes and turning up is a really good start with anything. And I’ve really enjoyed pushing the little talents that I have. I mean, I went to normal comprehensive school in the 70s, and we weren’t bookish in my house. We really were that family that had the Bible, and that was it. Maybe the odd readers digest. My parents are both Irish, didn’t have any further education, came to the country after the war. And we weren’t academically ambitious. But then my sister, who’s a few years older than me, she was really clever, and she went to university. And I thought, oh, maybe that’s something I could do. That looks like a laugh. And then I discovered the Youth Theatre, and it was really through that, through sort of watching my sister read and think, well, maybe that’s something you can do in the world, and being involved in theatre, that I started to get more interested in the arts and literature. And yeah, it was just, we were sort of anomalies in our family, really. But I’m grateful that, you know, I got those opportunities to go to Harlow Youth Theatre and experience a little bit what it’s like to be given a voice in a community where you’re sort of told to sit down, shut up most of the time.

Right, time for another offcut now. Can you tell us about this one?

Yes, this is the start of a one woman show that I wrote in 2018 about a cruise ship singer who does a Karen Carpenter tribute act. Heaven knows where the inspiration for that one came from.

I am much too old and much too fat to be doing this shit. I said I’d give it up when I hit 32. That was almost 20 years ago.

Give or take a couple of stone.

But they like it. Look at them.

All gooey with nostalgia.

Swaying along. The ones that aren’t eating. Inappropriate. I hate doing these dinner gigs. It’s not so bad in the showroom, but when they make me do it at dinner, ugh! These songs are not meant to be accompanied by the clank of cutlery. She’ll be turning in her grave.

Oh, hang on.

First one asleep in her soup. What’s the average age on this ship? 78, 80? It’s gotta be. Seventies night tonight. India’s seventies more like. We had one drop dead yesterday. Went to get on the train at Flom and keeled over. Massive heart attack. We had to leave him there. Repatriation. His wife got back on.

Well, shame to waste the trip of a lifetime.

Oh, yeah, there she is in the share wig. Good for you, love. He’ll be waiting for you back in Blighty when we dock. No one will be waiting for me, dead or alive. Back to the flat and the count on us. None of the catering, just as well. I can whack on half a stone in a week on one of these gigs. Food is so good. Three meals a day, plus afternoon tea if you want it, and supper after the show. I had lasagna last night at 11. Fuck’s sake.

So I really like this. That was a really nice piece. So was this going to be a theatre show?

Yes, I think now and again when unemployment hits, I think I need to write myself another show. I used to do one-woman shows. I’ve done two one-woman plays that were written for me. And I’ve always wanted to do another one. And now and again, I think about reviving Karen Carpenter stuff, because I used to make a living basically tonguing my hair and wearing 70s dresses and singing Carpenter songs.

Was there a play element to it, a narrative element, or was it just you singing her songs?

Yeah, it was just a cabaret act, but I’ve always sort of felt fascinated by people like Jane McDonald. And a few years back, probably about seven or eight years ago now, I did sign up with a cruise ship agent, and I did a few cruises. And it was just absolutely brilliant. I absolutely loved it. And the first gig I did, I got on board the ship. I was flown to Barbados. I spent the night in Barbados. And then I got taken on to this ship, and we sailed for five days across to West Africa. And in that time, you just got passenger status, so you need just sort of swanning around on deck, drinking Bacardi and stuff. And it’s quite lonely, and it’s a weird lifestyle. And there are people that live on those cruise ships and just hop from contract to contract, and they’re quite bizarre people. But I just thought that that’s a great character, you know, a woman who’s past her prime, still banging out the Carpenters classics and, you know, trying to make the best of it. And I still may finish this because from time to time, people ask me, oh, when are you going to do Karen Carpenter again? Normally older gay gentlemen, who were my sort of main clientele back in the day.

Audience, not clientele, I think.

Yeah, sorry. So, yeah, I think maybe I will finish it. I mean, it’s awful when you laugh at your own jokes, but that did make me chuckle at the end.

I laughed at your own jokes as well. They were definitely good jokes. OK, let’s move on now and have your next off-cut. What’s this?

This is a sketch for ERA, which stands for the Equal Representation for Actresses. ERA 5050 was a big campaign, and I wrote it in 2017.

How did it go?

I fucking smashed it. Just waiting now. My agent says there are only about 600 actresses up for it, so, you know, fingers crossed.

Absolutely.

It would just mean so much.

It’s been a while since I did the telly.

Oh, and you were so good in that crime watch reconstruction.

Thanks, darling.

What’s the part?

Well, it’s a new drama about Cleopatra. It’s going to be huge.

Oh, yes, I read about that. Big Netflix thingy, isn’t it? Who’s playing Cleopatra again?

Eddie Redmayne.

Seriously?

Yeah.

That’s amazing. God, you’d be so lucky to get a role in that. What are we up for?

It’s a smallish role, but you know.

There is no such thing as a small role. Just small actors or something.

Exactly. So the director said it would be really heavily featured.

Which part is it, then? Is it good?

It’s really good. So hopefully I’ll be playing Hatchet-faced old Crone 3rd from the left.

Oh, I love Hatchet-faced old Crone 3rd from the left. I played her in that torse thing and that police drama. Oh, and that film set in Nazi Germany.

Yes, you were brilliant. You’re always brilliant as Hatchet-faced old Crone 3rd from the left. But let’s not forget your biggest triumph in the last few years.

Oh, stop it. You’ll make me blush.

Come on. You mustn’t hide your light under a bushel.

Stop being silly.

You were absolutely magnificent in that episode of Poldark where you played Hatchet-faced old Crone 2nd from the left.

Well, tell that to Bafta. Thank you, darling. Then what days? Yes, indeed. Oh, no news?

Not yet.

You’re probably still seeing people.

Yes, the queue was round the block when I arrived. Most people camped overnight.

Anyone interesting in the queue?

Mirren was in before me.

I bet she didn’t camp.

No way.

Dench, naturally.

She didn’t camp either, did she?

Blethin, Walters, Staunton.

Oh, God, good luck, darling. But I expect they were up for other parts, weren’t they?

Yes, they were up for Hatchetface the Crone Number One.

Dialogue?

Yes, I believe so.

She has two lines.

Two lines? Lucky bitch. I haven’t spoken on camera since 1992.

Well, I say dialogue. The first line was, Oooooooog.

What was the second? Why wasn’t I out for it? Hang on, darling. Hello, darling, it’s Harriet. Walter. Harriet Walter. Yes, hello. I was just wondering if you knew anything about a great role going in the Cleopatra Netflix thing. Yes, I know you are, darling. I don’t mean to bother you. Yes, it’s great about all those young Italians you represent. Super. Must be so busy. No, I’m not doubting your… OK, yes, please. I can do any time. I wouldn’t normally push it, darling, but she has lines. Two.

What did he say?

He’s going to see if he can get me in. He knows people. Oh, that’s good.

Yes, I’m fine. Yes, not too bad. It’s all fine.

Just bloody tell me. Yeah. Thanks.

Don’t tell me. They went younger.

I so enjoyed recording that, I can’t tell you.

We did it very well.

What a very excellent sketch, that is. And very, very heartfelt from all of us.

Yeah. This is another bugbear of mine. I started a Twitter campaign over the summer, actually, called Owe It, Older Women in Theatre, because you owe us it. It just strikes me as absurd that, you know, men can age and grow into all these fabulous parts, but women are just kind of consigned to the metaphorical green room, you know, over the age of about 45. And it’s not just that it’s unfair. It’s just really boring. It’s like, you know, all white casts or all male casts. It’s just boring, you know. There are so many more stories out there to tell, and so many different people with different perspectives. And really that’s what the arts should be about. I think that, you know, everyone’s got different stories to tell. Let’s hear them all. Let’s have a bit of diversity, a bit of, you know, interest. And it’s really sad that I know so many brilliant actresses who are, you know, late 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, scrabbling around for these kind of scraps from the table. And it just strikes me as really lame and disappointing. So I’m kind of always happy to beat the drum for older actresses because there’s so many brilliant ones around and too few parts.

And you wrote this for the name Harriet Walter was very much in evidence there, who is, she’s a real actress. You wrote this for her.

Yes, me and her. I wanted me and her to record it. I mean, there’s a brilliant sketch, like it’s a short film called Leading Lady Parts by my good friend Jessica Swale. And she wrote it as a response to Me Too and oh, the other American campaign, Menopause Brain. Oh, it’s the one about equality for women in the film industry.

The one that you dig, Gina Davis.

Yeah, what’s it called? Anyway, that one, she wrote it for that and it’s absolutely brilliant. It’s this awful panel of people auditioning women for this role. And I just thought, what a great idea. I know it’s kind of inward facing and industry facing, but I’m sure most punters would get it too.

Well, they’re audiences, so they will have noticed what they’re watching.

Yeah, and noticed that they’re not represented, noticed that there’s all these dramas where it’s all blokes and noticed that the only women on screen are generally sort of young and glamorous. So I asked Harriet if she would do it and she was like, yeah, because she’s hilarious. Like I’ve worked with her three times now on the all female Shakespeare trilogy. And she’s really, really funny, really good comedian and doesn’t get to do a lot of comedy. And I just thought the idea of people like Helen, this is like a dystopia, which is, you know, an extreme version of what’s happening now, where even the likes of Helen Mirren and Judy Dench are scrabbling around to play Hatchet-Faced Old Bag, Third from the Left. I just think, you know, we’re not that far off that really, are we? And when you ever talk to anyone in film development and you’ve got a female older woman in your script, they always have to go to this list, and there’s only about six or seven actresses on it, and you’ll need one of those names on the film to get the film funded. But the list is so small.

Right, time for another off-cut now. What have we got?

This is the opening scene of a play that I wrote in 2017 called As Much As Any Star.

250 miles above NASA, 1992. May Jemisin 1 dances into the space a la Alvin Ailey. Finally, May Jemisin 2 jumps up onto the tree.

Whoa! It’s OK.

It’s OK. It’s OK. Don’t look down. Just don’t look down. You got this.

Jemisin risks a look down.

Oh God, oh God, oh God. It’s so high. I’m so high up. I can’t do this. What was I thinking? What was I thinking? Breathe. Hailing frequencies open. Frequencies open. Keep your frequencies open, May. Just don’t open your eyes.

Jemisin 2 looks at the audience.

Hey, ironic, huh? An astronaut afraid of heights? You couldn’t write it. Well, thank you all for being here. I am the first African American woman in space. Actually, that’s not true. The first African American woman in space was Commander Nyota Uhura in 1966, but she was a fictional character in Star Trek, so I guess I’m taking this one. I loved her in Star Trek. Nichelle Nichols, the first African American woman on TV, not playing a maid. She wanted to leave to go to Broadway, but a fan of the show persuaded her to stay. Kind of hard to say no to Dr. Martin Luther King, I guess. It’s important, he said. You’re making history. And now so am I. Thankfully, Endeavor is a little more solid than USS Enterprise, and I don’t have to wear a short skirt. Oh, I can see Chicago. Look, I swear that’s where I grew up. Hi, Mama. Hi, Dad. Hi, Mrs. Wilson, who in fourth grade told me a black girl had no place up in the sky. Woohoo!

She loses her footing and starts floating again.

This is incredible. But I always knew I was going to be up here. I knew. When I was a little girl, I got a splinter stuck in my thumb, and it got infected. Huss came out of it. My mother told me to go look it up, and then I found out it has all these really cool things in it. I told my teacher and she said, Ma, you got to be a nurse. A nurse? I didn’t want to learn how to use band-aids. I wanted to learn about what it was oozing out of my thumb. Back then, I just said, Uh-huh, miss. Yes, miss. A nurse. I learned right then and there never to be limited by other people’s limited imagination.

So this was a play and as was noted in the stage directions, there are two characters, Jemisin 1 and Jemisin 2. Tell us about that.

Yeah, this was something that I wrote for a good friend of mine, Jade Anuka, and it started from the sort of silliest premise. I can’t remember why, but I was reading about Mae Jemisin, who was the first black woman in space, and she looked exactly like Jade Anuka. So I showed Jade the picture and she was like, oh my God, yeah, we really do look alike. So I said, I’m going to write you a one-woman play about her. So I started writing it and then quickly realized that it needed the younger voice too. But as you can probably tell from listening to that, it’s very much a first draft. I couldn’t find a way into it to make it not just sound like a Wikipedia entry, you know, that’s just like, and then I did this and then I did this. And that is a bit of a problem, I think, with monologues. So I was trying to introduce this other aspect of her, which she actually trained as a dancer. And I wanted this sort of interplay between the scientist and the dancer and how both the arts and the sciences can feed each other because they both involve kind of leaps of faith and imagination. So it was going to be this sort of extemporizing on that theme with some modern dance and some science. But I never quite found the way into it and then got distracted and started something else.

So you didn’t finish writing it?

No, and I suppose there was a sort of squeamishness about a white woman writing this story. I suppose I felt maybe this is not my story to tell, or if it is, maybe I haven’t got the best perspective to do it justice. So I’m very interested in allyship and trying to be a good ally to the black cause. And I think having worked with a lot of black actors over the years, I sort of can try to see from their perspective what things look like. And yeah, I think maybe I just thought maybe this is not my story to tell. I think there’s a good idea in there somewhere. I just couldn’t find it.

Right. I see. So it never got to the stage of you’d booked a theatre or you’d planned an Edinburgh with it or anything like that.

No, but it was performed once. Just that section. And it was performed in Phyllida Lloyd’s back garden for her 60th birthday in typical Phyllida Lloyd style. She threw this massive… Yeah, she’s a theatre and film director. She directed the all female Shakespeare trilogy. She also directed the original production of Mamma Mia and the first film, as well as the film Iron Lady about Margaret Thatcher. And she’s a good friend of mine now having worked with her a lot. And yeah, she threw this party and everyone she invited, writers, actors, singers, dancers, musicians, and we were all invited to contribute something. It was kind of a festival over a weekend and we all camped and it was really, really jolly. So Jade actually performed this monologue on top of a tree in Phyllida Lloyd’s back garden.

What did you perform?

I did some songs. I think I did Dancing Queen because I was in Mamma Mia on the international tour for about three years. So I did Dancing Queen and then she was just about to start work on the Tina Turner musical, which is now in the West End, and I did a Tina Turner number as well. I think I did Simply the Best or something like that because there was a band and everything. It was really, really cool.

What a fun party.

I know.

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. In 2003, you played writer Julie Burchill. In Tim Fountain’s play, Julie Burchill Is Away. And that is a piece of writing that’s based on a real live person who is still alive, very much like Mae Jemison is.

How did you find that?

Did you know Julie Burchill? Was it a challenge? Did you actually meet her, confer with her at all about it?

Yes, I didn’t know her, but I’d always been a huge fan of her writing. I was a lifelong Guardian reader on a Saturday, and she used to have the most outrageous column, which used to stink out the liberal values of that paper at the time every week. I found it really glorious and funny and irreverent, and I really related to her working class, made good trajectory. When we first came up with the idea to do a play about her, because Tim had previously written a one-man show about Quentin Crisp called Resident Alien. He wanted to do a similar treatment. It was kind of like a hagiography, really, because we were huge fans. But she’s obviously a problematic person for lots of people, and she has quite controversial views, shall we say, sometimes. So we had a bit of drama in there as well, and it was basically me sitting in my Brighton mansion, as she was doing at the time, just sort of opining about things and being really scurrilous and really hilarious. So we got to know her through the process of researching and writing the piece, when Tim wrote the piece, and she was just such brilliant fun. We’d be summoned down to Brighton, and we’d go out for these elaborate lunches that she always paid for with one of her two black American Express cards, and she would just order champagne for everyone, and it was like being in the presence of a real old school kind of grand dame. It was brilliant fun, and I remember that time very fondly, and I absolutely loved playing her because it was great to be a woman with so little regard for how she was perceived. It was really liberating.

I wish I’d seen that, and it did very well. It went to the West End and everything, didn’t it?

Yes, it did. Yeah, yeah. And then we took it up to Edinburgh, and then we took it to Brighton Festival too. It was really good fun.

Right, we’ve come to your final off-cut. Can you tell us about this one, please?

Yes. This is a sketch called Trump’s Women, and it was written to be performed on the night of Trump’s inauguration in 2016.

We love Trump! We love Trump! Donald, I love you! I love you!

You’re going to make America great again!

Build the wall! Burn the bitch! Build the wall!

Well, hey there. We heard there was a group of nasty women here who needed a little reeducation on why Donald Trump is the greatest man on God’s earth.

That’s right, darling.

He’s got spunk.

Sure as hell has, Mary Beth Lucille. He’d tell it like it is.

We need a strong man.

He’s strong!

We need a man who speaks his mind.

Whatever is in it.

No bull as bastards.

He doesn’t wear mom jeans.

He’s a man of the people.

Sure is. He’s anti-establishment.

God’s sake, he’s on Twitter.

Now, we know there are some British women here tonight.

God bless you with your funny accents and your funny little gray teeth.

And your funny little no-gun ways.

No guns.

And we know that y’all don’t get Erdonald. You think he’s anti-women.

You crazy bitches, he loves women. Else why would he be grabbing us by the hoo-har every goddamn second?

So we’d like to say to you, don’t believe all you hear over the pond. Think of Erdonald as like your British guy. What’s his name?

Hugh Grant?

No, the other one, Mary Beth Lucille. Sherlock Holmes. He’s fictional, Mary Beth Lucille.

Oh, the poor guy, that’s too bad.

No, the Brexit guy. Drinks beer, tells it like it is, speaks his mind.

Neil Garage.

Yeah, Neil Garage. Think of Trump as our Neil Garage.

There you go. Now, doesn’t that feel better already?

So anyways, we ain’t too good at expressing ourselves in highfalutin words and all.

Not like your liberal, inter, extraterrestrial, inter-processes.

So, we’re gonna give you our message in a good old fashioned song. Please feel free to join in if you know it.

God bless America!

And this was supposed to be performed on the night of Trump’s inauguration, but it wasn’t. What happened?

Well, I was in New York. We went over there to do our Don Moir production of Henry IV, the all-female Shakespeare. And we were performing at St. Anne’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, which is an incredible theatre, just on the river, on the underside of Brooklyn Bridge. And I just absolutely loved New York and loved being there. But it was a very weird time because obviously we landed like about three weeks before Trump’s inauguration, and the play was going really well. And the theatre wanted us to put on a little, almost like a wake for Trump’s inauguration that night after the show. So we were invited to put a programme of songs and music and so on together. And I came up with this sketch, and I got my friend Karen Dunbar, who’s a brilliant Scottish comedian who was also in the play, to do it with me. And we were going to rehearse and everything, and then we gave it to the artistic director of the theatre, and they were like, we’re really sorry, but we just can’t find this funny yet. It’s like, they were just like, it’s not funny for us. They were just so heartbroken that they had Trump, that they just couldn’t stomach it. And I was like, yeah, I think I may have misjudged the tone a little bit, because of course in England, you know, we would, I think we’re just much more comfortable with satire. And for them, it was just too close to the bone, and they were too feeling things too earnestly.

I can imagine the artistic community in America must have been absolutely shell shocked when that happened. That was so far from what anybody expected, but particularly for those of a more liberal persuasion.

Yes. And, you know, I was just gobsmacked by watching American news while we were there and watching all these Trump’s women and thinking, what the hell? What are you seeing that I’m not seeing? Why do you love him? He’s a misogynist. He’s a sexual abuser. He’s allegedly, you know, he’s not a good guy. So what is it that you’re seeing that I’m not? And actually, the sketch ends with one of the women saying, because I went on one of the pussy marches or something, the all women marches where we wore these pink pussy hats. And we had to rush back to get there for the matinee in the afternoon. And we were really terrified we weren’t going to make it. But we did make it. And one of the things that the Trump’s women said on CNN that night was, Oh, well, at least you got some fat women out walking. That was their only response to the women’s march in New York and Washington. Wow. So yeah, that intrigues me. Women who support misogynists. What’s that about?

Yes.

And I couldn’t offer a really considered discussion of that, but I could just send them up in a really pantomime way. So that’s what I did.

Have you ever had to turn down jobs because of your political beliefs?

No, I don’t think so. I have gone to castings and talked myself out of the job in the room because I’ve interrogated the material so much that it’s sort of fallen apart. And that’s a bit of an issue, but I don’t mind that. Like I went in for a meeting about a very well-known play that was being revived. And I basically said, but you know, this female character is really two-dimensional. So are you like obviously planning to say something about that, to do something with it that shows that? And the look of horror on this director’s face when he was like, no, I just think that, you know, it’s of its time, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh, right, okay. And then I did my monologue and he had some things to say about it. And then I said, well, I can do it again if you want. And it was the only time in a meeting I’ve had a director put their hands up, hold their hands up, say, no, no, I’ve heard enough. And so I just sort of scuttled out thinking, don’t think that was a good fit. Don’t think there’d be anyone happy in that rehearsal room.

It’s probably for the best, as you say.

Yeah, definitely.

Right. Well, final question. Are there any offcuts that you’ve still got that you haven’t shared with us today?

Oh, yes, lots. My book that came out in July, I’m Just a Teenage Punchbag, it took me a long time to settle on what it was going to be because I kept starting novels that, after 3000 words, disappeared up their own fundaments and I couldn’t finish them. So I’ve probably got a few of those knocking about, but I couldn’t find them, which is probably for the best.

It’s a shame. I’d quite like to have seen some of those or listened to some of those.

I don’t know. And I’m almost finished the next novel now, which, who knows, may end up in a draw somewhere soon. And lots of sketches.

Do you have a contract for that novel?

I do, yes, I do.

So we probably will be seeing it then.

I hope so. I hope so. Next year.

Well, Jackie Clune has been an eye-opener and quite a blast. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your offcuts drawer with us.

Thank you.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Jackie Clune. The offcuts were performed by Beth Chalmers, Lizzie Roper and Lynsey Murrell, 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.

Mom and dad both have fairly well-developed and much-voiced sense of humour, so even though they will be sort of ranting about politics or whatever, as soon as there’s a sense that things are getting too serious, somebody, usually my dad, will inject humour into it. And I think I grew up with a view that there’s very few things that really ought to be taken that seriously, and also that more seriously, someone or something takes itself, the less seriously I’m prepared to take it.