JON HOLMES

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer.

Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these apparent failures paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is writer and presenter Jon Holmes, a nine-time Radio Academy Award winner, recipient of two BAFTAs and numerous other accolades. On radio, Jon has written for comedy shows including Dead Ringers, Armando Iannucci’s Charm Offensive, and The Now Show. He’s had four series of his own satire, Listen Against, and his most recent creation, The Skewer, has just finished its first series on Radio 4. His TV writing credits include Horrible Histories, Harry Hill, Top Gear and Mock The Week. As a radio presenter, Jon has made headlines for his sometimes outrageous content and currently holds the record for the largest fine ever for taste and decency offenses in British broadcasting. Despite this, he’s since sat in for Chris Evans on the Radio 2 Breakfast Show, performed at the Royal Albert Hall, and been attacked by fire ants on the Rwanda Congolese border while making a documentary about mountain gorillas. In between creating and performing, he fits in writing books, five to date, hosting podcasts, The The One Show Show, and being a travel writer for The Sunday Times. Jon Holmes, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

So what does your offcuts folder, your virtual bottom drawer, look like in real life? Are you very organized?

No, not really. I tend to write in two ways. So one, if I’m writing for radio that I’m presenting, I will hand write it and scribble it down. And it’s then, by the time I get to do it on the radio, it’s utterly unreadable to even me. And that’s just in a drawer. All of that going back years, like to when I used to do a radio station called Power FM on the South Coast. And I used to hand write all the material and I’ve still got it all in vague folders. But then if I’m writing stuff for sort of Radio 4, and if you like sort of more built stuff, then it’s typed. And most of it, the old stuff anyway, is all on floppy disks. And I have no means of getting that off the floppy disks, which is why everything we’re talking about today is sort of after they fell out of fashion and other computers came in.

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 you wrote it?

Well, this was written, I think, in 2008. And it was a treatment, sort of a pitch document with sample script bits for a TV comedy series. And it was called Real World Spies.

Real World Spies does exactly what it says on the tin. You know how in Spooks or 24 or in movies where none of the things that plague us in real life ever go wrong? So-called satellite uplinks always work first time, mobile phones always get a signal. Real World Spies is a fully realised sitcom for everyone who’s ever watched 24 and thought, why doesn’t Jack Bauer ever get a message saying Microsoft Word has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down? Example story and dialogue.

Interior office day. Spies Travis and Jennifer are deep undercover in enemy headquarters. While the suspicious and sinister boss is at lunch, they’re in his office trying to urgently download vital information onto a memory pen.

Hurry up!

It won’t recognise the stick.

Try another socket.

I have, it just won’t work. It says this stick isn’t compatible with Windows Vista. I’ll have to nip to PC World and buy the right stick.

OK, but run!

We see Jennifer in PC World. There’s a queue at the checkout. This dramatically intercuts with Travis waiting in the office, watching the clock and the boss finishing his lunch and heading back. Jennifer almost reaches the front of the queue. There is an old man in front of her buying an iPod Nano.

Would you like the gold extended warranty?

What does that mean?

An extra £60 means a no quibble money back guarantee should the item fail.

Well, it’s a present, so…

Just fill this for me.

Have you got a pen?

Look, can you hurry up?

I’m filling in the form for the warranty.

Well, don’t, it’s a rip-off.

How do you know?

Because I work for the government.

She takes his pen.

Now, fuck off!

There follows a hard-stopping intercut sequence of Jennifer paying, Travis waiting and the boss in a lift. Jennifer pays and runs out. The girl shouts… But she’s gone. We see Travis having to leave the office. The boss arriving back and Jennifer getting there nowhere near in time. Travis meets her in the corridor. Got one.

Too late.

Well, this was a waste of money then.

Did you get a receipt?

We can take it back.

She didn’t.

Oh, for God’s sake!

This is a world where the global missile defence shield won’t switch on because no-one has got the right adapter. Where uploading blueprints of a terrorist hideout to a PDA simply wouldn’t work because you just went into a tunnel. And where a car chase is blocked by traffic lights at some roadworks and Travis and Jennifer are stuck behind a learner driver. This is a sitcom about what happens when the best of the best have the worst possible day. This is Real World Spies.

I think nothing dates a sketch like the phrase iPod Nano, does it?

Or Windows Vista, or whatever. So you wrote this in 2008, who was it for?

Well, it wasn’t for any specific broadcaster. It was, you know, I had in mind that it could be, you know, just telly. So I think PBC2, I think, and Sky, and it got as far as a production company I was talking to at the time. They kind of liked it, but then, I think just sort of said, well, it feels more like a sketch, not a sitcom. So, which is fair. And I think they were worried that it wouldn’t sustain, you know, six episodes of that sort of thing going wrong. Suffice to say, though, I’ve since seen about three different versions of it on television made by other people.

Now you wrote this in 2008 with your then writing partner, Andy Hurst. How did you two first get together?

We were at uni together initially, and we started off, I think he slept with my girlfriend. I think that was the first thing that happened, or vice versa, I can’t really remember. And, you know, we became firm friends. So I was starting to write stuff for the BBC, still while holding down a day job. I worked in a theatre doing sound and lighting, and I was sending in jokes to the BBC and eventually got a vague callback from someone going, we quite like this sort of cassette you’ve made on an iPod Nano, and we’d like to talk to you about it. You know, who have you kind of written with? It was a sort of spoof of Radio 4. That was the gist of it. It was called Grievous Bodily Radio, and it was a sort of piss-take of all the things that were on Radio 4 and telly and stuff like that. And I sort of thought, well, writing on your own is quite dull. And Andy had a similar sense of humour, and I said, did you fancy coming in and helping me write this? And he did, and then we just sort of carried on.

The rest is history. Yeah. So time for your next off-cut. Tell us about that.

Well, I wrote a book. So this was a memoir, which I was asked to do by a publisher. He sort of said, can you write a sort of memoir book, but sort of funny? And I called it A Portrait of an Idiot as a Young Man. And it came out in 2016, initially. This was sort of the first chapter, I think. First draft, first chapter.

As any parent knows, naming a child is something not to be undertaken lightly. You are bestowing upon this sensitive human creature something with which it will be saddled forever, something which will be used to address it, cajole it, admonish it, call it, and mercilessly taunt it if you pick the wrong name. There’s a girl at my school called Gay Wally. And among pupils and staff alike, she came to epitomize the whole what were your parents thinking debate. Everyone got a nickname at school and as a parent, it’s very easy to accidentally give your offspring’s peers an open goal. My nickname was simply Homesy, which was part of the time on a tradition of simply adding the letter Y to any given surname. It was simple and quick, if not especially satisfying, and thus worked along much the same lines as Pot Noodle. These were easy nicknames formed in a hurry. Among my peers, I could also count Woody, Granty, and Stouty. But the best and most rewarding nicknames were reserved for people who had something wrong with them or had a stupid name bestowed on them by their unthinking parents. Kev, who was fat, was thus known as Fat Kev. Jon Thomas was known as Cock. And despite everyday run-of-the-mill, eminently sensible first names, Wayne Grucock and Lisa Wankling never stood a chance.

That was a particularly interesting off-cut for me, because when I looked at the text that you sent me, every other word was misspelt. It was like you were typing so fast, you didn’t have time to read back what you’d written. Is that what happened? Was it a big brain dump? Did you have to get it all out?

Yeah, it was. I think I tend to write like that, hence the handwriting that I mentioned earlier, because if you’re writing, as I was with this book, so this book’s essentially, the way I got round to it was I had my first child, right, who’s now 10. If you’ve had kids, you go along and they say, all right, so what illnesses might you have hereditary in your family that you might eventually pass on to these children? We need to write that on a form. And I don’t know. I had no answer to the question, what might you have in your background, because I was adopted, and I don’t have any access to any of those records. And I sort of thought, well, I can’t give my children, my daughters, any kind of medical background of who I am, but what I can do is write down how I got to be who I am. And that’s sort of how the book developed. And because it was that sort of pour it all out sort of book, when you write first drafty, you know, and ignore spell check, it’s literally, you know, you’re just writing, writing, writing, writing. But then obviously you go back and you refine it, but to get it all out there, because it was such a sort of from the heart kind of thing. I mean, the caveat with the book is, my daughters will never be allowed to read it. I mean, I overshared to the end, as you can, yeah. I mean, you know, there are chapters in there about being a teenage boy that really give you an insight.

There are too many chapters in there about being a teenage boy.

Yeah, but I, you know, I immediately urge you to go and buy it on Amazon.

Now you come from a very normal, non showbiz family. Your dad was a builder, your mom a nurse. So where did the writing, performing come from then?

Well, I don’t know. You see, that’s interesting because I, that’s part of what I talked about in the book was the whole nature nurture debate is quite fascinating to me because, you know, I had this idea that, you know, because I was technically picked out from a line of babies, right? The next couple through the door may not have been my parents, if you like, so I could have been brought up somewhere else by another couple entirely. And so my question to myself, and I actually still don’t really know the answer is, would I have ended up doing this through nature rather than nurture? Would I have always been destined to write and do stuff like that? Or was that, you know, kind of part of my upbringing? Because my dad, while they certainly weren’t from any kind of show-busy family, my dad was very into comedy and from a very young age used to play me albums from the goodies. And my mum was a nurse, as you mentioned. She used to do night shifts. And she’d put me to bed before she went off to do night shifts. And then she’d go and catch the bus at the end of the row. And so about nine o’clock at night, then my dad would come upstairs and bring me downstairs and sit me in front of repeats of Monty Python. And so I associated comedy with being a bit sort of naughty. He’s like, don’t tell your mum, but come and watch a man being hit with a fish. And I didn’t understand what was going on at all. But I loved it. And it was kind of bonding with dad sort of thing. So that’s kind of where I guess my interest started. And he had these albums. And then my first albums were music albums. They were comedy albums. The first album I bought was probably not 9 o’clock news or something from when they used to do those albums. So I was always kind of into it.

Let’s have your next off cut, please.

OK, well, this is a scene that never got used for the sitcom Miranda. So Miranda Hart’s very successful sitcom, of which this was no successful part.

Miranda and her date are in the cinema watching a film we do not see. We hear the soundtrack.

Who’s that? Shh! No, seriously, I don’t know who that is. That man. Who’s he supposed to be? What?

He’s the bloke whose daughter’s been kidnapped.

Right. Well, is he a goodie or a baddie?

What?

Goodie or baddie, him?

Goodie.

Miranda eats more popcorn.

So is he the bloke that was shot?

No.

Who was shot then?

The bloke with the wife.

What wife? Who’s that?

The cop who’s been in the film from the start. Do you always do this when you watch a film? No, not always.

I watched a film last week and there wasn’t even a cop in it.

What was it?

I don’t know.

It was on TV.

Beverly Hills Cop.

So, do you know why this scene didn’t get you?

No, I mean, it was one of, I wasn’t part of the writing, it was what I was. I ended up working with Miranda on a couple of Radio 4 things years ago, before she was famous. And then, Egtra and I sort of met her again, and then we ended up doing some stuff on Radio 2 together. And as part of that, she was sort of developing the next series of the sitcom and everything else. And she just said, oh, can you come up with some stuff and some writing and some bits? But I was never kind of part of the actual team she had. I was just sort of the, you know, I know this bloke. And so it was about just developing storylines and everything else. And that was just a sample bit of script from a cinema storyline that was kind of floating around. But that happens a lot. I think if you’re a writer and you get asked to do those things, it’s about sort of, she was entirely free to take a cinema scene and you’ve won line from it if you wanted to, you know, and build it into what she was writing, which is kind of the point. She just wanted ideas bounced around, I think.

Now, Miranda’s not the only celebrity you’ve been teamed with, you’ve written for. You also work with Stephen Fry.

Yes, so Stephen Fry used to present The BAFTAs. You may know that, Graham Norton does it now, but Stephen Fry used to present it, and I would write, co-write the script for The BAFTAs, which is, it sounds very glamorous, which it sort of is on one level, but at, you know, two in the morning when you’re being rung up from Hollywood by, I don’t know, Leonardo’s people who want to change a joke. It’s not so much fun when you’ve got to wait up for those calls. But you find that actors, so Stephen, Stephen’s job, you know, is to sort of introduce them, as you know, if you’ve watched the BAFTAs, you know, his job is to do the monologue at the beginning and then some sort of pithy introduction to whoever’s coming on to do the, to hand out the award for best hair or whatever it is. But your job as a writer on that is to write those lines as well for the people who are giving out the award for best hair. So you’ve got that really kind of awkward thing where you’re giving jokes you’ve written to Hollywood A-list actors who are shit at acting, right? Because they, what they are, they’re good at acting characters, but they can’t be themselves and they really struggle with it, right? That’s why when you’ve ever watched these things, if there’s an actor that you think, oh, they’re great and they come out and they just sort of stare blindly ahead, vaguely trying to read an autocue and it’s terrible. That’s why, because they’re trying to be themselves and they can’t. And it was really interesting insight into how that world works behind the scenes. You know, one of those surreal moments of your life. So my job is to stand off stage next to the, where it’s being typed into the autocue, the thing they have to read on the stage, to change anything at the last minute, right? That might just crop up. No, they were in there, but the example I’ll give you, right? So what happened was, we were just doing the run through to the blank room, and what they do is they put cutouts of the celebrities’ faces and stick them to the backs of all the chairs before they arrive. So the camera crew and the director can know where to cut. So if someone’s going, cut to Gwyneth Paltrow smiling or looking grumpy, they know where she’s sitting. So in the rehearsal, they’ll cut to these chairs. Anyway, so we’re going through all of this, and then all the scripts are being, sort of Stephens running through the jokes. And at the back of the room, the door opens and Keanu Reeves walks in with his entourage of people. And he’s just sort of standing there. And just at the point where we got to a joke about Keanu Reeves’ acting, right? And I thought, well, this isn’t going to go well, is it? And it was some sort of joke matrix. If he’d taken the blue pill, he might have been a better actor. I can’t remember. Anyway, the next thing we know is there’s a note from his people that says, Mr. Reeves isn’t very happy with that, that joke. Can you change it? So we came up with some other joke. That’s fine. That went into the script. Stephen then read it out as it’s happening. Now Keanu Reeves is then standing, waiting to go on, of course, cause he’s being introduced. Stephen does his intro. Keanu Reeves goes on stage, does his presentation, comes off stage, looks at me and said, what happened to the acting joke? And I went, and he went, cause he was really funny. Like he was really, what happened to that? And I was like, you said we had to cut it out? And he went, no, I didn’t. And it turned out, of course, these people that were with him had just done it on his behalf. And even though he had no interest in, he was up for it, you know? And I think that happens a lot with these people. And that was at the point where Richard Gere was about to go on stage, okay? And this was all going on. So he’s going, what happened to my joke? Richard Gere’s about to go on stage. The floor manager’s going, 20 seconds, Mr. Gere. And the wardrobe assistant comes up and adjusts his bow tie, which falls apart, cause it’s a proper bow tie. Right, so either surreal moments. I’m then watching Keanu Reeves talking to me about jokes while helping Richard Gere tie his bow tie. And I was thinking, this is the weirdest night of my life.

Okay, time for your next off-cut. Tell us what this is, please.

Um, guys, write travel, as you mentioned earlier for the Sunday Times, but they used to do a com called Motormouth, which is where writers were just allowed to spout off about anything that annoyed them in particular. And I had a bit of an issue with car parks.

When the director general of the BBC claimed back the 23p it cost him to park recently, you may have wondered, as I did, not what the hell he thought he was doing with license payers money, but how on earth he managed to park anything anywhere for just 23p. The minimum spend at the cheapest car park I can think of is 70p an hour, or part thereof. And if you try to fob it off with anything else on the grounds that you’re just picking up some dry cleaning, we’ll be back in 15 minutes at most, the machine simply gobs your money back at you with the force of a cat yacking up a coin furball. Yet, if you’ve only got a pound and wood, not unreasonably like 30p back, it’ll merely sit there and refer you to the sign that says it’s unable to give change. And if you leave the car park for a moment to try and get the right change from the shop 20 yards away, a git in a hattel come along and fine you 60 pounds. Car parking is stupidly expensive. Comedian Simon Evans observed that at six pounds an hour, the parking meters outside of Central London McDonald’s were better paid than the people working inside. Where I live, after seven p.m., even if you only want to park for five minutes, it costs one pound fifty. Why? What exactly am I getting in return? For that money, I want a bit more than just a boring old car parking space, thank you. I want entertainment. Clowns, perhaps. All right, not clowns. Everyone hates clowns. And they’re not entertaining unless they’re on fire. But show dogs, perhaps. Or a motorcycle display team. Or a motorcycle display team comprised of show dogs jumping through hoops of burning clowns. As far as I can tell, your money is actually just spent on more signs telling you that you now have to pay more money in order to pay for more signs. I’ve checked on their website, and it turns out all the extra cash from the recent price hike in my car park, Canterbury City Council, in case you were wondering, is being used to take a technological leaf out of the new Transformers film. And so, should you miss your tickets expiry time by just one second, the seemingly innocuous truck parked in the next bay will turn into a massive robot that will loom over the town centre, pluck you bodily out of debilums, smash you back into your car, and then hurl you and it out of the county. Park that thought.

That was a very heartfelt piece. What year was that again?

2006.

What happened to that?

Well, it was a bit of a writing for the newspaper learning curve, so I submitted that, and then when I read it, they don’t tell you this, then I read it back on the Sunday or whenever it was coming out, and it was about two paragraphs, the beginning paragraph, and then a bit of the middle, and then the rest had sort of disappeared, and had been rewritten by the editor. And I was so, well, what’s that about? And he went, well, I just didn’t like it.

In that piece, you named and shamed your local council, because you’re not afraid to antagonise, which has got you into trouble before, hasn’t it?

Well, yes. I mean, at which time would you like to talk about this?

Well, let’s, in the introduction, I mentioned the largest ever find in British broadcasting history. Maybe you’d like to tell us about that.

Well, I was young and Ofcom needed the money. So, well, okay. So I was doing this show on Virgin Radio. This was around 1999, I would say. And I was doing late nights, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights from 10 till 2. And it was a bit of a Wild West situation. There was no one in the building apart from me, the guy who I was doing the show with and a security guard. So there’s no producers or anything like that. So the boss was sort of like, yeah, do what you like. Just, it’s gonna be fine. It’s gonna be funny. Just do what you like. I’ve hired you because you’re a bit edgy, and you’re gonna push the boundaries a bit, and it’s gonna get people talking, which it did, but in all the wrong ways. And so one of the things we did, well, I’ll get onto the big fine, but just as a lead up to that, I’d already been fired from one radio station because we used to do a game on Sundays on Sunday evening, just after Dr. Fox’s chart.

This was you and your writing partner, Andy Hurst.

This was Andy Hurst, yeah. And we used to do this two hour show on a Sunday night. And it became cult listening amongst the kids, really, the school kids and the teenagers. This was down in Hampshire. And one of the games we had was that you had to phone the show and live on air, you had to put an object of your choosing through a neighbor’s letter box, all right? And then the object of the game, okay, which is when we started the clock, was to knock on the door, right? And that’s when we started the clock, the knock. And then we timed how long it took for you to get that object back. So people would be like, put things through the letter box, knock on the door, clock’s started. And someone asked me, yeah, I guess, I’m really sorry. You know, I accidentally put my hammer with some soil cellar taped to it through your letter box. Can I have it back? And then this weird conversation that you’d hear on air would carry on. Anyway, it was just fine, people with carrots, it’s just crest or something. And it all went wrong when someone put a live squirrel through someone’s letter box. I mean, it was very funny, but it destroyed their hallway. And I got fired.

But you know, it was.

But the big fine. The big fine, the big fine. The big fine was for a game, and I’m not proud of this now, just as a caveat. Not really. And it was a game, it was called Swearing Radio Hangman for the under 12s. So what happened was that we were playing this every Friday night at midnight, and the idea was, as a listen to parents, you would ring up, go, Mike, get your kid out of bed, and they’re gonna play Hangman with swear words to win a CD. So it was all fine until one week, nine-year-old Katie came on, and it was five letters, three letters, four letters. And she was guessing, and her parents were helping her. That was the thing, her parents were going, yeah, go on, it’s an, ask for a P, ask for a, is it a P? Yeah, it’s the P is the fourth letter of the first word, right? And her parents go, T, T, yeah, T. It’s the first and last letter of the middle three-letter word. And eventually, what happened was, she sped…

Everybody’s slowly getting what it is.

But this is why it worked on the radio, because if you’re listening, you’re way ahead of the kid, right? And so in the end, she did spell out the phrase, soapy tit wank, which, you know, looking back now, I can see why that might have been a problem.

Were there complaints, Jon Holmes?

One, one complaint from an old lady who tuned in by accident, by her own admission. So she complained, Ofcom got involved, decided that had really had stepped over several broadcasting rules, which it probably had. But what’s great, if you do get a complaint made against you and Ofcom get involved, you get a transcript of it. And in the cold light of day, right, it reads really badly.

On air, it was like, ha ha ha, she said, funny thing.

And her parents are laughing. So it then said, and the presenter then encouraged the nine-year-old child to shout the phrase, soapy tit wank, into the next song, which happened to be Deacon Blue.

Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha.

Ha ha ha ha. Well, so the Ofcom said, well, that’s 150,000 pounds, please. I know. Which Virgin then had to pay, but then the boss who, by the way, had encouraged me, thought this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard anyway, suddenly went, oh shit, I didn’t know he was doing it. I had no idea he was doing this. I had no idea. He’s fired, we fire him. And they fired me and that got the fine halved down to 75K because they took action. But that was a good learning curving too. All bosses are bastards, aren’t they? Sell you down the river, they will. Right, so this was called So Solid News. So it was a spoof showbiz news show. And it was a pilot for Capital Radio. This was written in 2003.

Headlines.

Holly Vallance arrested for horse ripping. Blurry footage shows neighbor star coring the genitals of a mare in an Essex field.

Sorcerer David Blaine disintegrates upon reentry into society after hanging in a glass box.

And Radiohead’s next album will be a live musical version of the Hutton Inquiry.

Boy 14 finds perv pop star in Pringles.

14 year old Kyle Cooper from Leighton Buzzard got a shock this week when he opened a tube of Pringles only to find that one was the spitting image of the child-bothering, stroke-faced former pop star Jonathan King. The sour, cream and chive flavored snack had been accidentally baked in the shape of the infamous presenter right down to the baseball cap and Under 18’s disco-induced erection. I was quite frightened, said Miles, whose father is a policeman. I immediately gave it to my dad because I thought that Jonathan King-Crisp might try to buy me a panda pop and then bugger me in the arse. Pringles, the manufacturer of Pringles, have vowed to look into the matter, as they say it’s a matter of policy not to include snack-style effigies of kiddie-fiddlers in their packs. The incident comes at a particularly bad time for crisps in general, as only two months ago a child found a dead hawk in a packet of frazzles and one of the missing bodies from the Moore’s murders turned up in some watsits.

Children’s organ theft scandal continues.

Following the recent investigation into the theft of children’s organs at Alderhay Hospital, details are emerging of a similar scandal at a children’s clinic in Kent. For years, doctors in Fabersham have been taking organs and putting them into other children without permission. Police were alerted last week and have since carried out a number of spot checks during which a number of children were broken open and found to have stolen organs inside. Six medical staff have been arrested following the discovery of a Bon Tempe Hit 406, a Casio Step Lighter and a Hammond XP1, all wired into the inside of a 10-year-old. The scandal follows a previous incident in 1998 when detectives found a glockenspiel growing on the side of a boy at the home of a former nurse.

Nice.

Well, I can’t think why that wasn’t broadcast.

That sort of precludes my next question, yes. Topical comedy, that news-based comedy style is something you’ve done a lot of. You started there, in fact, didn’t you?

Yeah, yes.

What was the first programme you worked on?

Well, the first joke I ever sold was The Week Ending, which was a radio for Open Door Policy comedy show, which was, anybody could send sketches in there, do a thing called News Jack now, which is a kind of similar idea, but it was a good way of just getting people who were interested in comedy writing an access point into this ivory tower of getting comedy onto the radio. And my first joke, I got about 13 pounds for it. And that was while I was working at the theatre that I mentioned. And I, but I was always very into the news. And the reason for that, my first, I think the first two things that I suddenly realised what topical comedy was and could be. So I mentioned Not The Nine O’Clock News. And I remember my dad, again, we were watching Not The Nine O’Clock News together. So this would have been what, 1982, I think or something. And there was a joke where they, there was an advert that was for the coal board and their slogan was come home to a real fire. Okay, and I was aware as a kid of that being a TV ad or a billboard ad or something, just to promote coal at the time. And Not The Nine O’Clock News did that as an advert. And I was also aware of the news story, because we used to go on holiday to Wales, that Welsh nationalists were burning holiday cottages. Okay, and I knew that was in the news. And then suddenly I saw this, come home to a real fire by a cottage in Wales, right? Was this, and I suddenly thought, oh my God, that’s amazing. They’ve taken an advert and a news story and done that. And I was fascinated by that. And then my dad sort of said, yeah, yeah, that’s kind of how news comedy works. You know, that was my eye-opening view. And Spitting Image was the same. When I first saw Spitting Image, I saw a news story in the morning and then saw a joke about it, about Spitting Image that night and just thought, God, how did they do that? That suddenly just happened. And then I suddenly realized you could write jokes about the news and also that way you never run out of material.

You were at the beginning of Dead Ringers, weren’t you? Because that’s a news based comedy show.

Yeah, yeah, Dead Ringers. So you’re familiar with Dead Ringers. So Radio 4 went to telly and then went back to, limped back to Radio 4 with his tail between his legs. And it came about because Radio 4 were looking, again, career long story short, I ended up as a contract writer for BBC Radio Comedy in around 98, I suppose, sort of time. And I was sitting in an office with Andy, who we’ve been talking about, and a producer, Bill Dare, who still produces it, stuck his head around the door and said, oh, you two are paid to be here for some reason. I’ve got some impressionists. I want to do a spinning image on the radio program to do something. And so it left us to it. And so we sort of started writing what became the pilot of Dead Ringers. But what we’ve done, the thing we’d made for Radio 4 before that, which sort of got us in there, was a thing called Grievous Bodily Radio, which was this thing that spoofed Radio 4. And it got, for career pattern, loads of complaints, right? Because we’d made it for Radio 1. Radio 1 then chucked out all their DJs, you probably remember that in the late 90s, and indeed all their comedy. So Radio 4 bought this Radio 1 series that we made and just put it on Radio 4, which confused the hell out of Radio 4 listeners, who all complained about it. And then we got this writing gig, but we kind of then rewrote Grievous Bodily Radio, but with impressions in it. And then everyone suddenly loved it instead of hating it. And we were completely puzzled. If you just put funny voices in it, get away with anything, it turns out. And so we made a pilot and everyone loved it, it went to series. And yes, all that early Radio 4 spoof stuff in there that was topical all came from that sort of background.

And it’s been running for 20 years.

I know, yeah.

Are you a naturally very political person?

I’ve become more so, I think. I think as a kid, well, as I said, that eye opening Welsh nationalist burning cottages joke made me realize there was a whole seam to mine, if that’s not too, if a terrible coal based, anyway it is, but gloss over it. And I suddenly realized that there was all this stuff going on and then like any teenager, I sort of got quite interested in politics and joined Youth CND, even though I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I did get to have a meeting in Youth CND, I was meeting above a pub and I was too young to drink, but the guy who was running it was old enough to buy the drinks, so that’s kind of why I got into politics.

Right, so not really very political then?

Not really, no, just alcoholic.

Right, let’s have another off cut now. What’s this one?

This, oh yeah, so I got asked to write travel for the Sunday Times. So the travel editor just said, look, you know, I quite like what you do. Have you thought about doing travel writing? Would you like to? To which my immediate answer was yes, I would like to do that. So in the last 10 years or so, I’ve done some very odd things, including the fire ants you mentioned in the beginning and hospitalized by Sia Atkins in Puerto Rico and all manner of terrible stories. But this is a piece that never made it, it was a commission, I wrote it, this was 2013. It was about to be published, but then a breaking news story stopped them publishing it.

Think of the enormous hotels of Dubai and you probably think they’re full of oversized Russians gorging themselves on oversized buffets before waddling out into the heat and beaching themselves by the pool. And you’d probably be right. Dubai is much like Liberace. You’ve heard of it, you know it’s glamorous, but you probably don’t want to go there. It’s also younger than Liberace. He was 67 when he died, yet Dubai, as we know it, is just over 50 years old. Founded in 1966 on the discovery of oil when it was a declining port, and is now a shimmering oasis of sand, steel and football as holiday homes on a manmade island that’s been built in the shape of a plant. Yet for a garish city with little history, there’s a corner of this conurbation that’s working hard for our ecological future. The monorail that snakes out across the palm leads to the Atlantis, a five-star luxury hotel that’s themed around the mythological lost underworld city of Plato’s time and dates all the way back to 2008. But it’s here, in this unlikely location, that a successful conservation program is thriving. These are strobulating polyps, Marine Manager Dennis Blom tells me, as he guides me around the pipes, incubation tanks and filtration systems, and is home to more than 65,000 species of fish. Are they, I say, pretending to know what he’s just said. In front of me, a dozen pinhead-sized things are drifting happily around a tiny tank. They look like drops of snot. They’ll grow into a fully-sized jellyfish, he says, saving me from my ignorance.

And over here is where we encourage sea roses to release sperm directly into seawater.

Of course it is. Nearby, eight different race species are being born and nurtured. Not since I lived in student halls have I been surrounded by so much attempted breeding.

So what was the story that meant that Sunday Times didn’t publish this?

What’s interesting about travel writing is you get to do some amazing things, okay? You get to go around the world, and this was one, I thought, quite an interesting story, because Dubai had a very bad reputation, still does, because of the money that gets spent and the oil and just the way, human rights, not least, and also keeping dolphins and so forth in captivity, which the big hotels have their own dolphin pools, which is very frowned upon now, but they’re also running this ecology conservation program, which is very well funded, which not many people knew about, and that’s quite a good angle for a story, and the editor, indeed, agreed with me, said actually, no, not enough people know about the conservation work. Anyway, the moment it was about to be published, a big story broke about the dolphins in captivity, in Dubai specifically, and how they were in quite a lot of trouble for it, and were getting loads of criticism, so the editor rightly just said, that’s just not gonna chime, is it, with the current news? So, no, we’re gonna spike that one, and the annoying thing is about being a travel writer is you only get paid on publication, right? So you don’t get paid to do the job, you only get paid when it’s published.

But you do get paid to go on a trip, don’t you?

Well, you don’t get paid to go on a trip.

They pay for your trip.

So you get a free trip, yeah, but that is true. I’m not complaining, but it’s annoying when you do write something and then you just don’t get paid any money. A free trip’s already gone, but you won’t pay the mortgage. That’s the annoying part of it. But I’m certainly not gonna, I got to do some incredible things in travel terms. Crocodile hunting in Papua New Guinea and that kind of thing.

You’re the obvious choice.

I am the obvious choice for that, which you never get a chance to do ordinarily.

Well, that’s a very cushy job. Right, time for your final off-cut, Jon. Tell us what we are about to hear.

So this is from Horrible Histories. So Horrible Histories range of books, as I’m sure you know, that got turned into a live action TV series in the sort of mid to late noughties. And I was part of the original writing team and this was a sketch I think I wrote. The thing about Horrible Histories was that the sketches had to be absolutely factually accurate. You couldn’t, it has to have jokes, but it also has to be absolutely true as to what happened in history. And they were very, very keen on that. And we had advisors on board to go, that would never happen, you can’t use that in the basis of a joke. So all of it’s true and exactly what happened. But for some reason, just in the pile of scripts, this one never got used.

Exterior day, we hear a battle raging. A Viking lies on the ground, clutching a very obvious arrow in his stomach. Another Viking comes over.

Oh no, what is it? What’s the matter?

What do you mean what’s the matter?

I’ve been shot with an arrow. What, that?

Then it’s just a splinter.

A splinter?

Yeah, it’ll probably pop out on its own eventually.

It’s not a splinter, it’s an arrow in the stomach, so help me!

Well, I’m not really sure what to do.

Well, do what Vikings are supposed to do and call on the gods for advice. Then hurry up, because it’s starting to smart a bit.

All right, all right, hold on then.

He drops to his knees to pray.

Oh, Odin, Chief God of the Vikings, are you there?

Split screen, Odin answers.

Viking, Medical Direct Helpline, Odin, Chief God of the Vikings speaking. How may I help you today?

Hello, yes, I’ve got a fellow Viking here with an arrow in the gut, any advice?

Hmm, an arrow, you say?

I think so.

Hmm, are you sure it’s not a splinter?

He says, are you sure it’s not a splinter?

It’s not a splinter. It’s not a splinter.

Yes, I was gonna say, because if it was, it’ll probably just pop out on its own eventually.

That’s what I said. It’s an arrow in the stomach.

Oh, well, then there are certain Viking medical procedures that we have to follow. First, you have to feed him a meal of oats, onions and herbs.

I’m not sure he’s very hungry.

It’s a special meal. Just feed him.

Viking Two opens his Viking bag. As luck would have it, there’s a bowl of yuck in there. He tries to spoon some into Viking One’s mouth, who moves his face away like a child.

Come on, open wide. Odin says it’s good for you.

Come on.

Don’t want to.

Longboat.

It does that flying the spoon like an aeroplane into the mouth trick and Viking One eats it.

Okay, now what? You want me to what?

Stick your nose into the hole in his tummy. Get it right in there. Right in the guts and the bits of intestine. Have a good ol smell.

What’s he saying to do next?

Nothing.

He says we’re done.

Oh, come on. You’re a Viking. You’re not scared of a few smelly guts, are you?

He sticks his nose near Viking One’s tummy.

Get away. Odin says I’ve got to smell your guts.

What?

Good point.

Hang on.

Why? Simple. If it smells of onions and herbs, then his intestines have been pierced and he’ll die. If you can’t smell onions and herbs, he’ll live. So just patch him up.

Righto.

He smells the wound again.

Smells of onions? What?

No, it doesn’t.

Definitely getting something herby. Onions and herby.

You’ve had it, mate. No, I haven’t. Actually, it doesn’t hurt anymore. I’m as right as rain.

Ah, you smell like soup.

It’s probably just a splinter.

It’s actually making me feel quite peckish.

If it is a splinter, I’ll probably just pop myself out eventually.

Anything?

Onions and herbs.

Oh, here’s a goner. I’ll prepare a space in the Viking heaven of Valhalla. I’ll finish him off if I were you. It’s the only humane thing to do.

I’ll probably just need a plaster.

Sorry, mate. Doctor’s orders.

Viking 2 draws his axe and there’s an out of vision, squelchy thump of an axe killing Viking 1.

Anything else I can help you with today?

No, that’s it. Thanks.

Thank you for calling Viking Medical Direct. I’ve been Odin, Chief God of the Vikings.

The split screen slides off. Viking 2 picks up the bowl of yuck and eats a spoonful himself.

That sounds like a very horrible history sketch. Why wasn’t it used?

Well, I think it was just one in a, there were a lot of sketches going in and around Horrible Histories, and I think it was just probably one that just fell off the end somewhere. There’s probably a much better one somebody wrote about Vikings. But it’s interesting, because the success of Horrible Histories, I think, came down to partly that kind of thing, in that it was chock full of facts with jokes attached, which is what kids then sort of latched onto.

Yeah, putting the comedy into disguise as facts, like when you put vegetables and mush it up and because you’re born and raised.

Precisely that, yeah. And that’s why I think kids latched onto it. We got a note between series one and series two. I remember this when we were called in and they sort of said, yeah, absolutely, everyone loves it. Of course, you’re gonna commission series two, but can there be fewer decapitations this time? And can you not throw as much shit around?

Were you responsible for the decapitations and the shit?

And the shit, mostly, yeah. Mostly the shit, which is why it didn’t get broadcast.

So writing for children, you fancy doing some more of that?

Well, you know, I mean, probably not the soapy tit wank thing. I think that was probably not going to follow that one up.

Right, so it’s not a natural progression for you?

Well, I think kids, I wouldn’t rule anything out, really. I think kids are a great audience to entertain. It’s horrible. I went around schools talking about the writing of Horrible Histories, just have that first series into primary schools. And what was funny about it was, A, the way kids engage with it, but then I get them to write sketches and then I’d go back the week after and then nick them all. And record their sketches, so they’d done acting and writing and stuff as well as little workshops. But it was great because it just got them interested in comedy and in writing. And notoriously, boys and literacy don’t go well together in school, but what I learned from the teachers it was doing, it was bringing kids into more reading and more literacy. So actually it’s funny that this stuff can sort of cut through. Even when it’s filth, it turns out it can engage kids, which I think is great.

So what’s next? Any writing ambitions still to be realised? Unless you haven’t written a novel, for example.

I haven’t written a novel, no. I’d like to write a film. I’ve got a couple of ideas for a, well, one specific idea for a film that I’ve sort of started developing, but haven’t done anything about it yet. It takes so long to write, doesn’t it? You sit down and you go, I’ve got to write a film. It might take 17 months, this. I haven’t got time for this nonsense. So you’ve got to block yourself out with chunks of time. When I wrote the book, I took myself away for a week initially, wrote 25,000 words. And I went away from my family and I just sat in a, what essentially was a holiday home. I just hired on my own and just sat there 12 hours a day writing for seven days. And then I wrote the next 25,000 words over the summer while doing everything else I was doing, which was presenting a breakfast show, which was a bit of a thing. And then I did the same with the end of the book. I went away and locked myself and did the whole, so you’ve got to kind of focus on it. And something like a film, I think you’ve just got to focus on it solidly, but you’ve got to get the time and space to do it. And also, of course, you’re not being paid necessarily to write it. So once again, you’ve got to find yourself a financial cushion, which is not that easy to find.

True. Well, final question. Having revisited these old bits of writing, how do you feel about them? Were you surprised by anything you heard?

It was rubbish, wasn’t it? No wonder they were rejected.

Nothing gets you actors, obviously.

No, no, not at all. I know it’s really good to hear. I mean, it’s quite interesting to hear two different things, actually. One, it’s brilliant to hear that sketch, because I’ve not obviously heard the Horrible Histories sketch before. So it’s great to hear that with some proper actors doing it. But also interesting in stuff that I’ve only heard in my head, you know, like the column or something, which aren’t joke-fueled, they’re travel stuff. So to hear them actually read out loud is quite an interesting, because that’s not the medium they were designed for. So I think that’s sort of an interesting way of approaching it. But yeah, it’s quite interesting. All writers have that thing of stuff they’ve written down that may lead to nothing. And I mean, as writers, we’ve all got either notes that used to be by our bed, but now it’s phone notes. And occasionally look back through them, thinking, oh, there’s some great ideas in here. And I wake up in the middle of the night and still write these ideas down. And then the next morning, I’d looked at this only this morning because we were talking about this, and I had an idea in the night. And then I woke up and in the dark, I found my glasses because I’m old. And then wrote something down, thinking, well, that’s just gonna be the best sitcom ever. I mean, I can’t wait to share this with the world. Woke up this morning, looked at it, it just said, milky arm.

Thank you very much indeed for letting us rummage around in your Offcuts Drawer. Ladies and gentlemen, Jon Holmes.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Jon Holmes. 

Hi this is Laura again.

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