PAUL BURKE

[Music] yeah I don’t tell lies and not cuz I’m a deeply honest person i’m just terrified of getting caught and in advertising that’s a really big thing you know in other walks of life you’re doing cover versions of people’s songs or a new production of Hamlet or something in advertising to rip somebody else off even though it happens is is beyond the pale you just don’t do that [Music] 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 [Music] this episode my guest is Paul Burke a copywriter producer and novelist whose route into writing began 3 days after he left school with almost no qualifications and landed a job as a runner at an ad agency working his way up he moved into copywriting and went on to create some of the UK’s most recognizable and best loved commercials his campaigns include Barclay Card with Rowan Atkinson which later inspired the Johnny English films British Gas’s Mrs Merton and Malcolm with Caroline Ahearn and Craig Cash John Smith’s Bitter with Jack D and the Widget and he’s written multiple ads for the PG Tips Chimps though he’ll be quick to tell you that that campaign was invented before he was born paul has won more awards for radio advertising than anyone else in the UK including three D&AD pencils a lifetime achievement award from the aerials and a radio advertising fellowship at the House of Lords as well as this he has published four novels and continues to contribute regularly as a pundit for mainstream media including publications such as The Spectator The Telegraph The Mail and The Critic paul Burke welcome to the Offcuts Draw hello a radio advertising fellowship at the House of Lords um does that come with a title should I be curtseying to you no i I remember going to the House of Lords for a celebration of radio advertising and a lot of us were invited and I somebody made a speech and I just remember standing there and they said “We’re going to present uh this award to somebody who’s done this and been marvelous and blah blah blah blah blah.” And I turned to my friend Nick Angel and I just said “Oh god this would be some useless timeserving fuck or something like that.” And they said “And the award goes to Paul Burke and he goes “Yeah see you’re absolutely right.” So they didn’t give you a warning did they not say “Come come.” No I had no I had no idea there was just a celebration of advertising we went to the House of Lords meant to wear proper clothes cuz you know I tend to wear I don’t know whether it’s what’s now fashionably termed ADHD but it always takes me ages to get ready um not that I’m titivating myself in front of the mirror you know at school when you’ve got to get changed after games i was always the last one sort of doing up buttons and laces and things like that so I do remember having to do up buttons and put a tie on yeah it looked absolutely fine i would just take 5 minutes longer than most people so I put me tie on for the House of Lords uh that’s what I remember about it uh I don’t Yeah just got an invitation yeah it seemed like a nice drinks party so it’s like a big surprise party for you um they they talked about other things but I think they gave someone else an award because I’m so vain and self- regarding i I I can’t matter whoever they are i don’t remember it wasn’t it wasn’t somebody I knew put it that way i think it was somebody that worked in the radio industry you know worked for one of the stations or for the BBC or something like but they didn’t make you lord of advertising or anything like that no and I think I think they should i really do i think they should too that would be hilarious um right well let’s kick off with your first offcut can you tell us please what it’s called what genre it was written for and when it was written uh it’s a radio commercial entitled Beckham David Beckham and it was written in 2008 we open on a news reader david Beckham has been killed he was hit by a car while visiting family in London this morning and died at the scene 14-year-old David was a gifted footballer and had just joined the youth academy at Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson is devastated david he said was a real talent what a terrible terrible tragedy one teenager is killed or seriously injured on London’s roads every day don’t die before you’ve lived wow could this have been made what permissions would you need to basically say that somebody who’s famous and living has died how does that work um it would have worked perfectly well it was a campaign i didn’t come up with a campaign um don’t die before you’ve lived it’s all about you know young people who who had their whole lives ahead of them who you know run out in front of a car and were killed and that’s the idea I had you know what it it was somebody famous and Beckham well Beckham’s famous now but you know I think even more famous at the time and the thing is you wouldn’t have needed permission there’s a fine line if somebody’s in uh regarded as in the public domain for instance Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage they’re definitely in the public domain so you can impersonate them but normal people you can’t impersonate you can’t use their name to promote your business or your product beckham was probably somewhere in between not the prime minister but very very famous so what happened was um this producer said “Well we’ll have to talk to Beckham’s people about that.” I said “Do not talk to Beckham’s people.” I said a he’s in the public domain and even if he’s not if it runs the worst they can do is say will you take it off air and they wouldn’t have said that and it would have looked very bad if David Beckham or his people it wasn’t a profit-making thing you know it wasn’t for a product like Vodafone or something like that it was a a a genuine road safety campaign it was very important and it would have done Beckham a lot of good to have his name associated with but this woman’s going well we have to I said “Don’t ask their permission because they’ll say no just cuz they can.” Uh she asked their permission they said no then you can’t do it right and it just taught me a lesson in life that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission just do it first presumably they would have been justified because they could say something along the lines of we don’t want people to believe that David Beckham is dead because if they’re not listening properly to the commercial they might just hear that he’s died and that might scare or alarm people i suppose they’d have to hear it from a passing van out the window uh because they’d they’d hear it and if they heard the words David Beckham has been killed they would listen for the next line and the next line is a talented 14y old think oh I see right no it it would have been absolutely fine uh but you know and I think that kind of thing’s uh only got worse we’ll just run it past compliance with it you know but you’ve always had to do that or is this more of a recent thing oh no i I beg you up on what I should have said at the beginning is um every commercial you do has to be cleared by the radio advertising bureau and that’s absolutely right in case you’ve lied or or said fuck or something like that and you have to get a stamp and a number and you have to have that clearance number before we can go on air same with television quite rightly yeah that’s the bit I meant to most important bit i forgot it had it had been cleared by the radio advertising oh okay oh that’s different then i suppose they saw David Beckham in the I thought great i thought I wonder if he’s in the public and they passed it it was cleared and we’re about to record it with a real newscaster and just ran it past Beckan’s people you know and of course they said no of course they did cuz they’re they’re lawyers yeah so you have a history of writing memorable ads high-profile ones that have gone into the public consciousness um do you remember the first ad you ever wrote yeah I do i remember the first two i’d gone to this agency called Young and Rubik when I was very young and the first brief I was ever given was for Croft Original Sherry and you served your time almost like an apprentice uh like an electrician you had little jobs and and and the smallest jobs of all then were um ads in the trade press like the heating and ventilation news or something like that you know very little money at stake very little media spend and gradually if you did those quite well you’d get another one and another one uh and then you’d work your way up to radio and television and big things so the first one I ever did was the Offlicens News and it was for Croft Original Sherry cuz you always look into the background and Croft Original Sherry was the second bestselling Sherry brand in the UK the biggest was Harvey’s Bristol cream but for some reason in the West Country Croft original was number one so I put my line Bristol’s favorite cream oh I was happy with that uh for Croft and and then the next then they gave me the poster at Christmas for Croft original Sherry and I had the gift box with a little gift tag outside you know you know with a bottle of Sherry at Christmas and I put bottle in a message oh I was so happy with that bottle in a message yeah because the um the message outside said happy Christmas and the bottle was inside the gift box oh very good and I thought it was good but it wasn’t that good and it was absolutely everywhere at bus stops on billboards i mean it’s it’s not good or bad you wouldn’t go that’s rubbish but on the other hand it you know it it it’s uh it’s the artist’s early work you know and you have to be careful because I remember the first TV commercial I remember doing was for Cabri’s Whisper and I had Julie Walters and Victoria Wood and I remember sat there was cuz she knew it the media people would tell you it was on it’s on at 7:42 in the break of Coronation Street mhm and I said “There’s my commercial here.” And it was okay but it wasn’t that funny and I thought “No don’t tell anyone ever again.” Oh cuz you told everyone to listen out for it here it is here it is and I was at home going “Look at this look at this.” And it wasn’t it wasn’t that good yeah but he did have two famous people in it presumably that could be overlooked the standard of the writer yes oh am I allowed to talk about f I mean Julie Wat Julie Waters was lovely victoria Wood she wasn’t horrible don’t get me wrong she was just a bit grumpy and very often with comics they’re not quite the barrel laughs you think they’re going to they’re not horrible m and I I think the only way I can put it is their bar their humor bar is set higher than most people’s yes that makes sense so I have worked with an awful lot of comics and very few of them I think Paul White House has definitely won paul White House would have been the funny kid at school doing impressions of the teachers but most of them I mean Rowan Atkins for instance who who’s a charming and lovely man but if you’d never seen him you didn’t know who he was you would never guess that that man performed and did what he does for a living you know you’d think he was a shy academic you know yes something like that and and a lot of them are like that well you know as well as I do but whereas actors I love actors like Julie Waters and actors and actresses i mean you know they’re they’re um you know vain and self- reggarding which of course I can identify with but um I find that they’re sort of like human beings but more so you know the ups are very up and the downs are very down but I love them i love them generally I I’ve seldom met a horrible one so you’d rather write for an actor or actress than a comic yeah definitely a comics uh they can be brilliantly funny on stage but I think they feed off the audience they’re also used to writing their own things they’re also unaccustomed to having to get it into 30 seconds which is a real art as you well know so it’s other people’s material there’s no audience they’ve got to force the name of a product in and they’ve got to get it into 30 seconds so they’re not the ideal people to do it usually anyway enough about other people let’s get back to you let’s have another offcut now tell us about this one uh this one is called it’s a newspaper article for the Times Educational Supplement called St dominic’s and I wrote it in 2009 this story should have been told 30 years ago and it very nearly was dave Redmond Brendan Harris Joe Canalan and I convened in a wimpy bar consumed with teenage fury this can’t be right we rage people ought to know and somebody spluttered something about going to the papers in the end we didn’t at 17 we weren’t quite as media savvy as 17-year-olds are today back then there were no mobile phones to take pictures and no social media Facebook to tell the world what was going on so we accepted our fate and tried to forget about it and the email arrived as part of the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of St dominic’s Catholic Six form College it said there will be an open day on Saturday the 4th of October to which all past staff and students are invited and from the bottom of a 30-year ocean of memories the shipwreck of our education was dredged up to the surface dave Joe and I three veterans of the Wimpy Bar Convention and pupils from that very first intake journeyed over to Harrow to see what on earth there was to celebrate on the surface there was plenty st dominic had been transformed into a successful and well-resourced college missions and values were boldly stated pictures of happy smiling students including the obligatory girl in hijab were all present and correct the college had now attained beacon status and Patrick Harty the affable principal who welcomed us in was justifiably proud when John Lipkcom his predecessor as affable principal welcomed us in 30 years ago it was all very different st dominic six form college was created to merge and accommodate the six forms of the Sacred Heart girls and the Salvatorian boys schools whose own six forms had been abolished for reasons never satisfactorily explained we were halfway through our A levels having had the lower six at Salvatoran salvo as it was always known was an old-fashioned Catholic grammar school which even in the 1970s was a fairly brutal place great emphasis was placed on academic excellence religious fervor and iron discipline at Salvo they believe very much in the carrot and the stick only without the carrot it was far from perfect but as a grammar school it offered working-class children their only chance to compete on level terms with those from more privileged backgrounds it was in a tough predominantly Irish suburb of North London surrounded by factories where many of the boys parents worked securing the knowledge that their sons would have any unruly behavior beaten out of them and a good education beaten in every year around 40 or 50 salvo boys would metriculate at the finest universities in the country many at Oxford or Cambridge it now beggars belief that anyone particularly those who claim to be socialists would want to downgrade this school into a comprehensive and close the one door that could have opened so many others but this door to opportunity was slammed in our faces and the doors to St dominic’s were flung open when we walked through them we could not believe what we saw so your school days there apparently you left school with uh little to no qualifications so what were you like actually at school academically were you clever um I was clever and I was thick i am one of the thickest people you will ever meet i really am worse than most people at most things uh so I was bottom of the class at all sciences and I was the only one who didn’t have to do physics chemistry or biology in the year because they knew it was a waste of time uh I was also bottom of the class at art bottom of the class at um woodwork and metal work so the O levels I took were the only ones left uh I was fine at things like history geography you know French i was I was okay i was fine but the thing I was good at was English language i wasn’t even good at English literature i could always write stories and make them up top of the class at that but what happens and this has been discussed many times is that English language the writing of stories storytelling as people now like to call it you’re not allowed to do that after your GCSE or your O level that’s it when you do English A level it’s Chaucer it’s Shakespeare it’s Thomas Hardy it’s literature it’s literature it’s not creative writing that’s true it’s not creative writing and to me that’s as mad as you’re doing an artto level and you’re not allowed to do any painting or drawing a music A level and you’re not allowed to play a musical instrument so the one thing I was good at didn’t exist anymore was your family fairly uh academic or creative or anything like that i I’ll take that as a no no they were quite clever i mean my dad was a I hesitate to say builder he was an I just a laborer and that’s when he was well enough to work i mean this whole you don’t know a whole other podcast on uh the poverty like the financial poverty of my background cuz he didn’t work for like three or four years so we lived on benefits we had free school meals um yes but money doesn’t necessarily equal academically starved no uh and my mom was my mom in later life became the nan from the Katherine Tate show uh so that was Hy Liberty come up here and so her family uh she was one and nine and they were all you know that sort of my uncles were a bit like Revani bit like Max Pear one for the younger listeners Max Bike they were those old school Londoners um they weren’t they weren’t rough they were but well they were criminals uh in in so far as it was always knocked off stuff from the back of a lorry i don’t mean serious criminals so there wasn’t it wasn’t academic my older sister Susan was the first person from my family uh and that includes all my cousins i mean I’ve got 43 first cousins uh I don’t know most of them and and I remember someone saying something about your grandparents and I said um my dad’s parents died before I was born and my mom’s parents obviously I do remember them but I worked it out i was their 27th grandchild jeez and their 25th and 26th that’s my cousin Peter and my cousin Wendy we were all born in the same week just knocking them out i’d love to say it was so sad and I was so poor it was great and also uh I see this I’ve seen this in later life with uh North London Jewish people and Sloan Rangers they have a readym made social life uh almost from the day they were born and I actually think I did as well the Catholic church that was like like I didn’t have enough already all the people from around our way the Catholics and went went to the Catholic schools it was like having another someone put it very well it’s like having another 200 cousins so it was it was great i I cannot um I had a very happy childhood very very happy a lot of people involved not much education yeah four sisters uh no brothers so all girls at home all boys at school uh and I I now realized that was a really ideal balance uh but no no no i mean my my ambition when I I was just waiting till I was 21 I was going to be a black cab driver really that’s what I was Yeah that’s what I was going to do i can see you as a black cab driver actually i mean just you know the way you talk you you’ve got something of the uh old school black cab driver about you no I have and and what you never see is if ever I’m in a black cab by myself you know with with a cabby I become like them yeah new term hang them hang them all yeah my boy had trials for West Ham and all i I behave exactly like that so no in answer to your question the one thing that my friend Brian Jones pointed out what my dad used to do was every Sunday he after mass would buy the Sunday Times and he would read it and Brian goes “There you go then there you go uh you’ve got your football results from the Sunday Times i got mine from the Sunday Mirror.” So I don’t remember it being an influence on my life but the only newspaper there was in the house to read was the Sunday Times so that’s all I used to read i was immediately exposed to you know well-written football results and the art of the Sunday Times magazine which was a huge thing but I mean maybe I’m just trying to postrationalize how I ended up typing for a living but um I think I think that’s all I can think of really right let’s move on next off cut please what is this one okay um this is called The Saved and it’s a radio play I wrote for uh BBC in 2019 [Music] do you come here often actually I already know the answer to that four times in the last 6 weeks how did you know I was here i’m a psychic all right I had you followed don’t look at me like that you’re lucky I didn’t have your phone and your bank details hacked could have done you could not of course I could i’m a multi-millionaire i can do or rather I can get other people to do whatever I like wow I’d forgotten how much I love the English coastline i I don’t know what to say well what about I love it too or how wonderful to see you a nice house by the way what did you say i said nice house if you like large semis in the suburbs which I’m not convinced you do you’ve seen my house not personally i’ve never been to Rickmanworth and I’m not about to start now no the surveillance guy emailed me the video so I could see it all the way from LA all perfectly legal this guy Trevor his name is XC well you may have noticed him sitting outside your house in a blue BMW no actually you probably didn’t he’s very discreet and blue BMWs aren’t exactly rare in Rickmanworth but he explained it to me as long as he keeps a certain distance from the property and doesn’t bother the suspect in any way it’s fine all very proper and above board suspect sorry his turn not mine proper and above board you think it’s proper and above board to spy on someone why on earth would you do that love concern call it what you like i was like a ghost no no make that an angel invisible but watching over you i just wanted to check you were happy i am very happy no you’re not yes I am no you’re not you’re content but you’re not happy big difference i don’t believe this yes you do and now the initial outrage is starting to wear off you’re actually quite flattered as well you might be a man of Trevor’s caliber and experience does not come cheap so what do you want just to talk you could have phoned we changed your number i’m sure your mate Trevor could have found it for you yeah I suppose he could well he did there you go not the same though is it i wanted to see you face to face just to see if you still have that beautiful skin dazzling smile and eyes ablaze with mischief and curiosity skin still lovely eyes as described as for the smile I’ll have to get back to you on that so what’s with the easel what’s with the painting therapy you’re in therapy i was after mom and dad died complete breakdown i was in a place called Fenton House how do you know that i phoned and this was pre- Trevor when I didn’t have a pot to piss in i phoned quite a few times all the way from America whichever state I was in and yes you can take that either way no one told me no well they said you were in a bad place i said “That’s no way to describe your own hospital,” which probably didn’t endear you to them it didn’t but the gag reflex kicked in couldn’t help it they said you were doing well but it was going to take a long time and that any cause of past trauma like you like me might set you back but I did phone next thing I hear you’ve met the man of your dreams and you’re really happy best if I just stay out of the way forever a lovely man apparently Simon isn’t it you know damn well it is have you had him followed too only by proxy when he happens to be with you which is quite a lot isn’t it why did you choose to write a radio play rather than say a TV script or a theater show or why radio uh because it’s in many ways my favorite mediums and all the cliches are true the pictures are better on radio you you fill it in yourself and I’ve done so many radio commercials and I do love actors and just the also I had no I was bottom of the class at art you know uh I had the visual sense of you know Blind Lemon Jefferson so I I I couldn’t really And if you look at the TV commercials I’ve done uh they’re largely just radio commercials that you can see uh so I just thought I’d create that story and the story just Oh you probably got the gist of it is there a boyfriend and girlfriend in their their 30s turns out he’s a stand-up comedian and they split up he goes off to make it in America and um he works there for a while and then he becomes absolutely huge like Ricky Jves levels of fame but he’s still in love with her and she’s done what I always beg any unmarried younger especially girls not to do is take the stable option she marries the dullard uh and he becomes her rock and um the dullards get lucky and I’ve seen it happen quite a few times and you think “Oh god if only she’d have waited for him.” And he he begs and begs her to come back and to leave this and the dull odds are never I’m not saying they’re not that they’re unkind i mean it transpires that he’s just uh you know she’s the little wifey at home and she’s so smart and so funny used to run the comedy clubs and all it is is their dialogue on the beach where he’s come and you know you just reveal bits of the stories you know like I’ve revealed already that her parents have been killed in a car crash and it goes on he begs her and you’d have to know the ending to tell you what happened i’ve read the ending but I shan tell anyone in case anything comes of it what did happen with it by the way did you submit it yeah I couldn’t believe it this sounds really arrogant but um because radio commercials Yeah yeah I mean that Beckham one got blown out and they do but I thought this is good this would make a great afternoon play i still think it would and a producer got me to sort of record about as much as you had no bit less than that and submit it to something called the offers round or something with the BBC and and they took forever you think if you like it great i don’t mean I want a decision this afternoon but honestly it was like you know all this i can’t even see you and I know you’re nodding months and months they came back no it’s And what they said apparently was it’s not really comedy or drama it sort of straddles both what yeah like real life there’s nothing in the course of a day usually that doesn’t either make you slightly angry or make you laugh but they have plays that are supposedly humorous especially the romantic ones that’s rubbish sorry carry on uh yeah no um that’s what I was told and I could always submit it again you could i could um I had no idea because advertising for all its faults and sometimes the ads don’t turn out as well as you wanted them to but somebody has put the money up already you know and and they’ve booked the air time on ITV or on Channel 4 or you know on the radio and so they tend to exist they tend to run and I was horrified at how um I don’t know maybe the person who read it and everything in life is purely subjective just didn’t like it and there’s also the possibility that when you submitted it someone had submitted a similar tone of play or a similar subject which is why you could keep submitting it like once a year endlessly yes yeah I could because this there’s a change over staff as well so and someone might just think this is great and and so what um the girl who I called Laura in that um marvelous name marvelous name she’d taken the stable option and she’d married the prissy controlling husband and as the play goes on he doesn’t do anything wrong he doesn’t beat her up or anything but he’s very controlling and she’s the little wifey and I’ve seen this more times I count so that’s what that was about right so it had a message so you had a not a message i had a message yeah yeah i mean I I just had a what I would regard as a true life observation exaggerated for comic effect okay well let’s move on to your next offcut please um this is from 2022 and it’s part of a screenplay based on my published first published novel Father Frank interior Day St joseph’s Church it is the 11:00 mass and the church is packed the congregation are keen to see their new parish priest deliver his first sermon frank is up on the altar about to do just that he gazes out into the congregation in silence he surveys them he remains silent for a few more moments then a few more finally he speaks i want money your money together we’re going to build a parish center your parish center your money i know these were not the first words you expected from your new parish priest i would of course apologize for taking such a direct approach but asking for cash in this way is nothing new read St paul’s letters to the Corinthians full of appeals begging letters whatever you want to call them he wanted money and wasn’t shy about saying so matthew in his gospel takes a similar line ask and thou shalt receive i do hope he’s right we’re very lucky next door have that enormous church hall yes it’s in a pretty sorry state left to rot left to die but the life of our parish center is a life that can be saved and its life will become our life the life of this parish the life of this community and that’s where we’re even luckier when I look at the skills of the people I see in front of me right here right now I can see that we’re truly blessed our Lord did the world in six days so surely we can do a church hall in 6 weeks so stand up any brick layers one man stands up a bit tentatively a few more join him plumbers a few more stand plasterers roofers chippies sparks lots more stand any useless people who can’t be trusted to do anything practical oh well as you can see I’m already standing so I’m nominating myself as general laborer father Linham can bake the tea this was your first published novel Father Frank that it’s based on so it’s written about your London Irish Catholic upbringing uh yeah obviously that’s a huge inspiration to you i think it’s just write about what you know and all fiction is autobiography and all autobiography is fiction so I just wrote about what I knew and when I was a child at mass I just remember thinking I’m about nine and I’m thinking “This isn’t true i’m not sure this is true i’ve never known anyone rise from the dead.” And I understood you know that when the priest makes the sign of the cross and blesses the wine according to the Catholic Church and transubstantiation it doesn’t just represent the wine it becomes the wine and even I as a child could think but you take that down to a lab and they go “That’s wine it’s not the blood of somebody who died 2,000 years ago.” So I thought if I think this and I’m nine what’s the priest think so I did a a book about a priest who doesn’t believe in God he’s a brilliant priest and as you can hear from that thing he builds a parish center that actually happened we had a priest at school called Father Raymond who uh in the end of course got defrocked for having an affair with a girl in my class but um no he did but he was fantastic and he did that sermon how old was the girl sorry um 18 okay six form all right he was um he he was just really cool and really intelligent he just was and he started his sermon as I want money your money we’re going to build a parish center your parish center your money so that that was the basis of of that and honestly that book is still being optioned i mean so many people have had it the worst one was um option for film or TV you mean film or TV um uh BBC had it and they wanted and I think a it’s too long ago he’s too old but there was a moment if if I could describe what Father Frank the London Irish priest looked like he looked like Shane Richie in East Enders that’s what he looked like and they and they wanted Shane for the part but the trouble was they got Oh my god it makes makes me cringe thinking about it they got an East Enders staff writer to do that and he’s Frank’s in the street this would never happen it didn’t happen in the book and uh he he talks to the camera like Alfie and he’s wearing shades and he’s putting his shades on it and he looks to the camera sees this girl and goes “Yeah go she’s a bit of a salt ain’t she?” You’re going “No no no.” But I’d already handed it was the worst piece of writing you know just horrible because Eastend I mean you might see me as some kind of class warrior but the reason East Enders is so absurd is um it’s written by middle-class people and they just get it wrong they just get it wrong and this girl this East Enders staff writer couldn’t have got Father Frank and the Irish community of Kilburn wronger if she tried but I was in a terrible bind because the BBC owned it they they’ve got it and it was their big BBC 1 Sunday night series and it went to a woman called Jane Tranta who was the head of the BBC comedy and she went “No no we’re not green lighting this.” And she saved me from just being embarrassed for the rest of my life on the other hand it would have been nice to have it made and what happened is uh a lot of um advertising TV commercials companies have taken my books and gone “Yeah we’ll make this we’ll do this.” and they don’t realize and I’m sure you do that um getting a film or it’s like a full-time job uh if you gave them all the money they’d make a brilliant job of it they got the directors they got the crew they got you know get the actors but you have to raise the money and none of them including me realized how difficult that is so that remains um and someone’s got it at the moment so it’s for film or TV tv presumably is yeah but it’s written as film but you cut out for TV and what I meant to say in the end was um then someone else had a go at it and you’re just going no that wouldn’t happen and I just thought do it yourself you’ve made loads of TV commercials and it wasn’t as easy as you think i thought I tell you what I’ll just take this book of mine and write it as a I know it backwards and of course it’s a wholly different thing so so the TV um the TV or film screenplay is very different from the book uh because it sort of had to be uh because you could make all those remember um Peter Male um a year in Provence uh that was very lovely to read he was a superb copywriter and the way he described the food and the French people uh the way he described them bit like Woodhouse was really really funny when it went on the screen there was just you know uh a table laid with lovely French food but his funny descriptions weren’t there so it didn’t quite work and I always had that in mind that I can say all the funny things I like about God and about the Catholic Church um yes how do you get it into the mouths of the people yeah exactly and sometimes you just didn’t so uh and yeah there there’s so many little things you can do it had to do with the characters uh so it was it was a learning curve but that’s still out there um if anyone wants it right so it’s an ongoing thing yes it’s an ongoing thing someone’s looking at the moment but they haven’t got an exclusive right on it and they just Yeah i mean you know the curse of life don’t you it’s people not getting back to you it’s what I call FTJS full-time job syndrome if they’ve got full-time jobs they get their salary anyway and when like most of us who’ve appeared on this program and you and people we know we work freelance we’re not saying or or they approach you don’t they hey do you fancy doing this you go yeah that’s great well we’ll call you on Tuesday and Tuc comes around you think well you started it and that happens a lot and so it’s very hard to get people to get back to you but you got to believe in it um it took me a long time and um and I had some help from some proper screenwriters and it’s good better than the book it it comes from your first novel what made you decide to go into sort of long form pros rather than short 30-cond ads what was the leap like there um I just wondered if I could do it and it was the time when borrowing a laptop from work was quite a quite a cool thing to do so I’m on holiday and I had a go at I had a proper run at it and I actually thought “Oh this is quite good.” And I just kept going at it and kept going at it i mean I always had an ending i think when you’re writing anything you need to have an ending you can change the ending but you need to have a sense of going somewhere so I had a beginning I had an ending and I filled in the bit in the middle well what happened was to raise funds it’s no secret to raise funds for his church father Frank drives a black cab you see right there and um I was in New York doing some commercials for Budweiser and I just saw this thing where all the New York City yellow cab drivers they had a day Thursday the 14th or whatever it was where they were giving 50% of their takings to um children’s charities i thought I got it got the middle bit now once I had him it literally had a vehicle for him it just made it so much more interesting then yeah it’s things like that and I just kept going it and and then my agent said I was away in a shoot she goes “Oh darling darling I’ve got you a two book deal.” I remember thinking “Two two i I don’t know any more things cuz I put them all in there.” And she goes “Oh you must do.” And so I said “I don’t.” I said “I was born in London i still live here um I went to work in advertising 3 days after I left school i still do i’m not a Holocaust survivor i wasn’t brought up by wolves um I’ve got I’ve got nothing ah get out of here you got an imagination well no no but she said she said “What about your school?” I said “My school told her about the beatings at Salvo and going to St dominic’s.” I told her how we used to work in a cinema and steal loads of money and oh that was the basis of the sec and she goes “Hello that’s more experience than most people have got.” So I think once you’ve done two you can do more than two and I ended up doing four have you stopped now or do you think you might write more yeah I’m doing a I’m doing a a non-fiction thing at the moment which is actually harder it’s half memoir and half music journalism because the other thing I used to do uh when I was a kid is I used to work as a DJ and so I’ve got a lot of DJ stories and just taking music and attaching it to things that happened and there’s been a lot of things about music that people don’t realize i mean punk was always oh punk was amazing punk was so insignificant because I was there people at the time most people didn’t notice punk they might have noticed it because it was in use a bit but there was only one punk record has ever made the top 10 that was God Save the Queen by the Pistols at the time it was Stevie Wonder ABBA Saturday Night Fever Rumors Fleetwood Mac uh these are all huge and yet for one of a better word the nerds who were into punk then went off to work for the BBC or the Observer or whatever so it’s 20 years of punk 30 years of punk and you go “This is nonsense.” And so I just thought a firsthand account of music and how it affected and that again that Irish childhood that’s coming along really well but it’s coming along slowly because I have to make it interest i have to make it read like a story uh but I can’t tell any lies so that’s what I’m doing at the moment oh exciting but fiction as you know it’s I’ve got any more fiction stories i don’t think I have not for the moment well again if you’re on a salary and say um this is your job be working in this office and your job is to write novels and fiction like it is with advertising i could do it it was much easier when I wrote those books i had a full-time job and it was much easier because uh not that you wrote the books while you’re supposed to be doing your real work but you thought “Right I get four weeks holiday i’m going to have Tuesday Wednesday Thursday off and I’m going to sit down and no one will bother me because I’m on holiday and I’d sit at home and do them.” Yeah whereas when you work freelance you know what it’s like you’re supposed to be concentrating on something and it’s those people don’t phone me back i’m supposed to be doing and and you you haven’t got that stability that bedrock that allows you to write i mean you can do it and it’s a pathetic excuse if you don’t because you can always make excuses i’m just saying it’s far easier if you have a full-time job from which you can take legitimate holiday and get into your work which is what I used to do good point right we’ve come to your final offcut now can you tell us about this one uh this is quite recent it’s an ad from a TV campaign for guide dogs written in 2023 open on Guy an animated dog in the hallway of a small house just inside the front door he addresses the camera hello I’m a guide dog my name’s Guy i know Guy i’m not a guy i’m more a bloke can’t really call a dog bloke can you so it’s Guy guy dog get it he thinks he’s funny my owner actually he is quite funny at Guide Dogs we do a lot more than just guide we do everything we can to help people who are blind or partially cighted live normal and independent lives like my owner oh he’s independent all right don’t about normal we see the legs of his owner approaching and hear whispers the owner’s hands then fasten onto Guy’s harness and open the front door cut to Guy and his owner’s legs leaving the house and walking outside in the sunshine here we go then who knows where he’s going to take me and vice versa to find out more or to make a donation go to guideog.co co.uk guide dogs looking ahead you mentioned when you sent me this that working with a charity can be problematic what happened with this one they’re called guide dogs for the blind that’s the name of the charity we don’t want to concentrate on dogs we just do so much more your name’s guide dogs yeah but we don’t want to feature any guide dogs and you just think what and I was proud of this because he was a distinctive dog and you could see the opportunities the merchandising you know he was called Guy you’d get little toy guy dogs or you could have um say he was a Labrador um and you’d just get one that looked exactly like him in Manchester and there’d be a fundraising thing in Manchester and they’d be shaking a tin with Guy in Manchester there’d be another Guy the dog in London had it all worked out i’m not saying you must do as I as you’re told and do my guide dogs act but surely if you’re called guide dogs and you would raise a lot of money because people like dogs and if the dog was there it was all so well worked out and I wrote them really easily and you always know you’re on to something when the the gags sort of come that’s if you I mean you know yourself if you create characters properly you get to a point I do with my books this sounds so pretentious but might break the habit of a lifetime you get to a point where you’re not thinking what funny gag can I put in here you’re almost like a court reporter and you just write down what they say if you’ve created the characters properly he would say that she would say that like that radio play just wasn’t very difficult to do because I knew I knew that not that particular woman I knew that kind of woman and I knew that kind of comic and and so they almost write themselves and and Guy the dog almost wrote his own script right so yeah advertising is full of um things like that so I I just always think that that campaign again might be been a bit pompous uh might have been quite famous and guy the guide dog might have been quite famous too bit like the mircat bit like you know the pudsy bear or things in fact my inspiration for him was Nookie Bear you know yeah that that’s what I wanted him sounding like and your man did quite a good job uh so that that’s never going to do again somebody could just um whoever said that I I wasn’t in the meeting uh could leave somebody else could join and they might have it so who knows well it was fairly recent as you said so it still exists perhaps they’ve been sacked yeah so they were one of the less good clients to work for who Who’s been your best your favorite client or favorite campaign um I used to like Volkswagen because Volkswagen had a network of dealers and we would go in and as long as it had been passed by the it went to the client and they looked at them and as long as they got passed by the radio advertising bureau we just used to do what we liked just make sort of pretty much any commercial we wanted and then they go on a CD and the CD would be sent to all the dealers and they go “Oh we like that one.” Yeah can you put our name on the on the end of that one oh yeah we’ve got bit too many Volkswagen Golfs to shift we have the one that does the golf and so that was nice um and and some people really understood it barkley car were very good they they really understood they bought into Rowan Atkinson and the spy thing and and that ran for years didn’t it years then it became Johnny well it didn’t become Johnny English because in the Barkley Card ads he was actually very very suave and smart and we’d sometimes have him doing something quite smart but then he’d be just a little bit pompous for his own good and it would all go wrong because he didn’t take Bof’s advice and use the Barkley card whereas Johnny English was Mr beam with a gun wasn’t it it was just it was just very different um is there a lesser known campaign or tagline that you’re particularly proud of one that maybe isn’t as famous as uh the Barkley i’ve got one I got one that’s really famous uh though it wasn’t um I came up with a line have your five a day did you you invented the five a day thing i invented it but the brief was uh make sure you have five portions of fruit and vegetables a day and you think well it’s not a huge leap to make sure you get your five a day it took about Yeah it was pretty much done for me yes so I mean mo most of the ads I’ve ever done aren’t famous and most of them aren’t particularly good and I think that’s true of anyone yeah you tend to keep the the ones that are good you tend to talk about the ones that are good but they they’re a minority like any other work you do um right well we’ve come to the end of the show how was it for you um cathartic are there any unexplored formats or genres writing wise you haven’t explored that you’d still like to try no no um it’s all I can do i’m a useless human being no but I mean is that you don’t think I want to try writing well you’re going into non-fiction so you’re working on that now yeah I’m doing that i suppose that that’s um that’s come out of doing so many magazine pieces or or poetry or something that you haven’t there’s nothing you I’ve still got that left to do as a writer no no i judge poetry by how well it rhymes uh just like like I judge I mean I really honestly uh I remember we said this before i mean a lot of your guests have had a lot of early stuff they wrote as teenagers i didn’t do anything like that my favorite book was The Argus Catalog i didn’t I didn’t write really i I didn’t really start writing till I was getting paid for it right i I I was very good at writing stories at school i did win a nationwide story writing prize when I was about 10 but um secondary school education and English literature sort of bums it out of you doesn’t it you know and I didn’t really I was lucky enough to work in an advertising agency and admire the way the copywriters sort of wrote so succinctly and so persuasively i thought I that’s more like it i think and gradually I’ll just say that there was a mechanism in my head for writing it was it was seized up but gradually there were little sprays of WD40 that got it going again and I’m glad it did otherwise I’d be going where two gov yeah my boy cuz that’s that was it you know i couldn’t do anything so I’m very very fortunate very very fortunate well we come to the end now and that was uh great fun and very informative and all I need to say now is Paul Burke thanks for sharing the contents of your offcut straw with us thank you for letting the contents of my mind spill out as well it was lovely it was a real honor to be on it among such brilliant people thank you [Music] the offcut straw was devised and presented by me Laura Shavin with special thanks to this week’s guest Paul Burke the offcuts were performed by Helen Goldwin Chris Pavlo David Laney Marcus Hutton and Christopher Kent and the music was by me for more details about this episode visit offcutsdrawer.com and please do subscribe rate and review us thanks for listening [Music]