NEIL FORSYTH – The Powerful Luck of Being Prepared

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.