SIMON EVANS – Comedian Writing From A Different Perspective

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer. Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is stand up comedian and writer, Simon Evans, a well known and highly acclaimed figure on the UK comedy circuit. Amongst a host of TV appearances, Simon has been a guest on Michael McIntyre’s comedy Roadshow, Live at the Apollo twice, Mock the Week and Celebrity Mastermind, which he won. He’s also been a writer on Lee Mack’s sitcom Not Going Out, Eight Out of Ten Cats, and many others. And he is a regular on Radio 4 panel shows, as well as presenting five series of his own economics comedy hybrid, Simon Evans Goes to Market. Prior to comedy, his previous skills included juggling the law and writing erotic fiction, of which more later. Simon Evans, welcome to Offcuts.

Thank you very much, Laura. That is a comprehensive overview of my career, and I’m always pleased to hear those.

Excellent, good. Tick that one off the list then. What kind of writer are you? Are you the sort of writer who’s happiest writing to order with clear instructions and a deadline, or are you the sort of writer who prefers to create on the spur of the moment when inspiration strikes?

I think if those were the two options, I would say the former. I think you definitely need deadlines to get anything done at all, although equally, of course, they do, as Douglas Adams said, make that wonderful whooshing sound as they go overhead as well. But I’m definitely the kind of writer who can only really write in his own voice and with his own set of opinions. I find it quite difficult to inhabit other characters and I think I’ve always shied away from the idea of writing a novel, for instance, in which more than one character have to sound plausible rather than just sort of avatars and archetypes that the main character is responding to. But equally, it’s good if somebody else has given you some sort of idea of what they want. And of course, you can artificially set those for yourself, but to just write in thin air is almost impossible, I think, for me.

Right, well, let’s get started with your first off-cut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when you wrote it?

Yes, this is a piece I wrote, which was for a debate that was going to take place on the Radio 4 Now Show’s Brexit special in 2016.

Many think that leavers yearn for merry England or Morris dancing and drinking mead. Well, funnily enough, I don’t have any particular nostalgia for that time, or even for Larkin’s Farthings and Sovereigns and dark-clothed children at play. If I wanted to paint a picture of the England I would like to return to, it would probably be Leslie Howard as RJ. Mitchell in The First of the Few, reclining on the South Downs in a striped blazer, observing seagulls wheeling and arcing through the skies and being inspired, not to heave a rock at them as I am when I observe one of the buggers taking a dump on my bonnet, or setting up shop on a chimney-pot, but instead to invent the Spitfire and thus ultimately guarantee our liberty from the soon-to-be-impertinent Hun. The hugely important aeronautical innovations that have been made in this country over the years have rarely been capitalised on, for various usually political or macroeconomic reasons, and their potential has instead been exploited elsewhere. The rare occasion on which our focus and commitment to seeing a project through has survived budgetary assaults has been in the build-up to and execution of war, and not just any old war, but war with Germany. Such a thing is unthinkable during our membership of the EU, and consequently our engineering sector languishes, uninspired, but if we had just the tantalising prospect that such a thing could happen, and should at least be armed against in readiness, then I really believe we would once again see the kind of technological ill-land for which our boffins were once the envy of the world.

Now that was part of a bigger piece of writing, most of which got used on the show. Can you tell us more about the programme and your part in it?

Yes, they put together this Brexit special for The Now Show, which typically for Radio 4’s comedy output leaned heavily in the sort of educated stroke liberal remain factor. And I think it had been felt that I might be the only plausible Brexit voter who might come along and explain and defend those views on a Radio 4 satirical show, which was a little bit ironic, given that even I wasn’t actually in support of Brexit at the time. No, I wasn’t keen on Brexit. I wasn’t keen on remain either, really. I felt rather indifferent and unmotivated about the whole thing. I could certainly see that there were many things to be angry about within the EU. But I didn’t think it would be to our benefit to jump ship at that precise moment. But I had at least sort of retweeted, I suppose, a few Brexit-friendly accounts. And also my father was a Brexit voter, and so I sort of channeled him really. And that passage that you heard in which I discussed the history of aeronautical innovation going overseas due to lack of funding, and the only exception being during the build-up to World War II, was essentially one of his big talking points and had been for long before the Brexit vote came along. He’s a massive aeronautics enthusiast, and he has over 1,172 scale aeroplanes that he built from airfix kits. And he knows a great deal about it in depth, not just the engineering, but the politics behind all the various collaborations. And so I just sort of channeled all of that really and decided that he should have his day in court, as it were, via me.

So as a result of that or those circumstances, you’ve made a name for yourself now as one of the few pro-Brexit comedians. And how do you feel about that?

Yes, it’s interesting. I mean, I used to sit on the news quiz and sort of make the case for Brexit and indeed defend Donald Trump from some of the more egregious claims made against him, I thought. And it was partly as much as anything, again, a sort of devil’s advocate kind of position. But you sort of grow into these things. And it’s quite nice to have a bit of a unique selling point. And then I went on Question Time and David Dimbleby introduced me as a comedian who supports Brexit. And I thought, I should really say I don’t support Brexit and campaign for it or vote for it. I’ve just sort of accepted that it’s happening now. And I don’t think you should paint over half the population as Nazis or fascists or xenophobes or whatever it is. I don’t think that’s a very healthy way to to move forward. You know, whereas it just seemed that the whole of the arts and entertainment community were utterly stuck in this rut of just being completely in denial about what had been decided when where we were going. But I thought if I actually sort of say, well, hang on, David, I’m not actually, you know, I don’t think people are that interested in where you’re going. It’s kind of your own question time on suffrage anyway, as a comedian, without wanting to fine tune the nuances of your own personal position. So I just sort of tried to make the case as best I could. I ended up using the word spunk to mean sort of courage rather than, you know, in its more obvious sense on that show. And it went out. That was the thing I was mainly remembered for, I think. So I mean, I do endlessly seem to grift back to, you know, RAF jargon and sensibilities. But it is all tongue in cheek, really. But obviously something comes out which perhaps is more deeply rooted in me than I might want to admit.

Well, moving on, let’s have your next offcut now. Can you tell us about this one, please?

This next one is called Abbey Mills, to the extent that it had a title at all. It was an essay I wrote for a correspondence course in creative writing, which I took in 1993, about three years before I started stand up when I was still trying to find my way, as it were. I signed up for this course, I think I’d read about it, in The Guardian.

Tall and slightly stooping in the thin mid-morning sun, a man in a worn gabardine overcoat walks his fingers down the aisle of spines on the second-hand bookstall. Unconsciously they keep time with the Haydn symphony drifting out from the shop. Occasionally they pause and pluck. The hand meets another, slimmer, silver-ringed and neatly manicured. Its owner looks up, a trim young woman, elegant in navy blue wool, a small clutch of books already under her other arm. The two browsers smile, fall gently into murmured conversation, of the kind enjoyed by old friends and complete strangers at Sunday markets. Is there any better way for the non-devout to observe the Sabbath? There is, in fact, something vaguely devotional in the pursuit of book browsing, the stillness, the opportunity for quiet reflection, and the latent power books have to remind us of the infinite wealth of creation. But unlike most places of worship, this little market, settled into Liberty’s old silk mills alongside the River Wandal at Colliers Wood, is also home to half a dozen varieties of world cuisine. It has the gentle revolutions of an antique water wheel to gaze at contemplatively. And it has stalls selling everything from pre-war comics and hand-carved pigs to Mayan music balls and Turkish kilims. That’s right, kilims. No, you don’t smoke them. Kilims are a kind of prayer mat. See, a woman is choosing one now, running the coarse weave between her soft fingers, pursing her mouth, wondering, what, how will it look with her Aztec sofa throw, her Javanese wall hangings? How will it look once the kids have spilt Ribena all over it? How will it look when she tries to explain this purchase to her landlord owed three months rent? She has it in both hands now. She likes it, this one, likes its ancient colors of dried blood and moss. But the old Turk knows he is showing her the matching cushion covers, offering payment options, explaining washing precautions, carefully, carefully reeling her in.

Well, this was very well received. The teacher wrote on it. This is a most attractive piece of evocative writing. So congratulations.

Thank you very much.

Were you teachers pet?

I don’t know. I suspect they were probably quite encouraging early on. I don’t think I got any further with the course after that. I think that was the only piece I ever sent in. I’m sure that’s pretty much how the business model works. I’m sure it’s very much like joining a gym in January. But it’s funny listening back to that. I feel I was definitely channeling some kind of mode of writing that I’d encountered somewhere else and sort of almost stylistically plagiarized. And yet I can’t think what it is or where I’ve read that sort of thing.

I wonder if it doesn’t speak to you immediately because we used a female voice on it. And therefore that’s sort of one step removed from the Simon Evans voice.

Possibly although it was very suited to the female voice, actually. And I think possibly I might have been pastishing a female voice when I wrote it. I don’t know. I can’t think who else I might have been pastishing. It’s got a touch of Julian Barnes to it, possibly, although it’s not as good. I wouldn’t claim that for one moment.

But it was a pastiche, you think?

I think not like a kind of, not a mockery, but I think I was in a different mode. I think I was attempting a certain mode, thinking, is this the kind of thing Sunday Supplements like because I was trying to find a way into making some sort of money out of writing and I really hadn’t worked out what that would be just yet.

So you went to university first and did a law degree. You didn’t fancy doing creative writing of any sort there or an English degree or something like that.

Well, I would have loved to have done an English degree, but I think I was the first one in my family to go to university and I think there was definitely a feeling that since I had the capacity to get a degree, I should get one that would set me up with some kind of living. There’s always that kind of sense, I think, with English that it’s a bit of an indulgence or luxury or something. I’m not sure whether that’s true.

So at what point did you decide you wanted to write instead of law?

You know, yearnings in that direction while at university. I was involved in a few sketch shows and reviews and so on. Even at school, I’d written for the school magazine and so on, including a pub guide to St. Albans in which I accused the landlord of the… I wrote that at school, yes. I was in the sixth form, but we managed to get into the pubs and I referred to the landlord of the Robin Hood as a punch-drunk ex-boxer and word got to him. He threatened legal action against the school, Michael Morgan called me into his office. That was the first time I was hauled up for transgressing the libel laws. But an apology was enough in the end. But I definitely was thinking people like Alan Corran were my hero at that time, maybe Keith Waterhouse and I thought that that kind of job would be wonderful. But the truth is, of course, there were probably half a dozen people in England who were really making a living just writing humorous columns. So you had to sort of try and work out what might be the sort of aggregate of monetised pursuits that would include something of that sort.

Right, time for another off cut. Can you tell us what this one is, please?

This next one is a section from a pilot episode of a TV sitcom I wrote in 2003. It was called Lab Rats.

Interior Lab. Flanagan enters the laboratory carrying a tray with cups, a milk carton and a sugar bowl.

What? Two sugars?

We see Blini. In front of Blini are two chess boards, all the pieces linked to their counterparts by various Heath Robinson-esque levers.

Flanagan, keep the door shut!

Really, Blini, the CCTV cameras were installed for your personal safety and to prevent theft. I hardly think Professor Reynolds is likely to be interested in your bizarre extracurricular board game activities.

That’s what they said about Hitler, is it?

Skating enters.

Morning, snails!

Flanagan sees a rather gruesome rabbit skull attached to her lapel.

It’s National Vivisection Day. I’m supporting the rights of animals.

Really? To do what, exactly?

To die that others might shampoo. Oh, yes please, white no sugar.

Any biscuits?

Blini, what are you doing?

Playing chess.

With yourself?

My right brain is playing my left.

I see.

And mate! It’s perfectly fair, they have a hand each.

Why can’t you just get a chess computer like everyone else?

This is much more interesting. Following some basic surgery, I’m able to separate the two hemispheres of my brain at will.

Blini, what is the point of all this?

It’s very simple. The two hemispheres of the brain have different ways of dealing with the world. For instance, the left brain, which controls the right hand, being more logical, usually wins. However, the right brain, with its grasp of the gestalt, accepts this without rancour and furthermore makes beautiful patterns with its knights.

They haven’t been listening.

Oh, I’ve borrowed your milk, by the way.

I have no milk.

Well, not any more you haven’t. I’ll get some more at lunchtime.

My gerbils!

Blinney rushes over to the tray and peers inside the milk carton. He pulls out an inert gerbil by the tail. Flanagan and Scaling spit tea everywhere.

Ah, Jesus!

Blinney, if you must keep dead animals…

They’re not dead! They’re in suspended animation! This is part of my research into non-cryogenic suspended animation.

Oh, whatever, if you must keep them in the fridge, then please at least mark them clearly.

Blinney indicates his name, written on the container.

Hello? Blinney’s!

Well, yes, obviously, as an indication of ownership, that’s fine. As an indication that there are festering rodents swimming about in it, they’re simply not adequate. Laboratory rules quite clearly stipulate that…

Caveat emptia! Let the poora beware!

Besides which, Dr Blinney was supposed to be doing valuable clinical research here, not extending the lifespan of gerbils.

Well, it’s interesting you should say that, Flanagan. The possibilities of metabolic hiatus have very direct implications for our current project. Allow me to explain. It’s really quite fascinating. As you may know, I’ve been doing a lot of research into chemical…

While he is speaking, Scaling and Flanagan get up and leave.

So tell us more about this project. Did you have a plan for this series?

Well, I did, although I never wrote any other episodes. And I think the plan was slightly overreaching in hindsight, and it might have been part of the problem. But I was fascinated at that time by what was still quite kind of current and new theory of chaos dynamics, the sort of butterfly’s wing that flaps and creates a hurricane. And I thought it would be interesting to explore that notion within the context of a scientific laboratory in which every episode basically starts the same and then some small triggering event, for instance, Flanagan, in that case, drinking some sort of life-preserving fluid in his tea, would lead to different events, you know, and everything would escalate dramatically. And it had to always, rather than the usual thing with a sitcom, of course, which is that it comes back to zero again at the end of every episode and nothing ever changes. In this one, it would always lead basically to Armageddon. You would always have a full-scale meltdown. The laboratory would be destroyed, and then it would come back. And it was a sort of multiple universe type version of a sitcom. So you would come back to the same point in time again the next week. And the previous week’s episode had never happened. So it was quite complex from that point of view. And listening to it there, even though I love listening to my old stuff and I do find myself terribly funny when I go back to it, but I can also see problems with a lot of it. It isn’t exactly classic sitcom dialogue. I think I was trying to channel, you know, Douglas Adams, who’s obviously the doyen of humorous sci-fi or scientific comedy, but it comes out as a little bit clever, clever and sort of geeky and nerdy, I think. But it was still, I think it was quite an interesting idea.

But science seems to be a theme for you, a special interest, is that right?

Well, I’m just curious about, I suppose I like to feel intellectually engaged. I like ideas. I like interesting ideas. And a lot of those are found in science, but there’s also some in economics and some in history and some in politics and so on.

But hence your series, Simon Evans Goes to Market, about economics, which you’ve done five series of.

Yes. I mean, again, we tried to make that as entertaining and interesting as possible by engaging, I suppose, with things that people were aware of. For instance, like the second series, we just looked at the economics of alcohol and caffeine and tobacco and sugar. Just looking at, you know, how advantageous it is to be in the business of selling something that people are addicted to. But it’s about finding that sweet spot where it’s still concrete enough that people know what you’re talking about. They can picture a packet of fags, and they remember having an uncle who died of lung cancer very often. And you can kind of, you know, those are quite concrete ideas. In the fifth series, which turned out to be the last one, and perhaps not coincidentally, where we did look at just pure economics, we looked at Karl Marx and Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes and their theories of how macroeconomics works. Then I think we lost the audience. So yeah, it’s about balance in that respect.

OK, moving on, let’s have your next offcut.

Well, this next piece is a letter I had published in Time Out magazine after Princess Diana’s death in 1997.

I’m writing to profess my profound and growing irritation at the presumption of grief being made on my part by the media over the death of Diana. I feel as sorry about Diana’s death as I would about any divorced mother of two aristocrat who died with her playboy lover in the early hours of the morning while speeding through a built-up area at twice the national speed limit with a drunken driver at the wheel being being pursued by a swarm of paparazzi. How I would have felt if that employment of a criminally intoxicated chauffeur had led to other innocent road users dying instead of just those in the car itself is obviously a matter of speculation and hence not an appropriate topic for consideration in the press. Most infuriating of all is the fanning of the resentment supposedly felt towards the royal family for not expressing publicly enough their grief. But those few people who actually knew her, who had lived with her in reality instead of just their media-inflamed imaginations, do not feel the necessity to join the whole drunk and giddy carnival of public mourning is something for which, if I were Diana, I would feel deeply grateful. If anyone ever tells me I am not mourning in an appropriate way the death of a member of my own family, they can expect a damn sharp poke in the eye. The death of a doomed blonde is always a moving experience. Personally, I was more upset by the death of Kurt Cobain than that of Diana, but that’s just a question of taste. This remorseless indulgence of cheap emotion by the media is dangerous and unhealthy, however, and our willingness to buy it profoundly concerning. A few hard questions need to be asked, not just about media hypocrisy but about the terrifying hollowness at the heart of public life which gives this nonsense room to grow. Simon Evans, SE15.

It sounds incredibly pompous to me that now. I think, again, I wonder if that was sort of pastiche of what I thought was like of a sort of letter that would appear in the Times or something. But I got into the habit of writing to Time Out and they got into the habit of publishing me as well. I had about a dozen pieces published in their letters page. Yeah, that was actually in a way, that was a significant part of my getting a taste for seeing my name in print and enjoying a little bit of an audience. So, yes, it was actually quite a significant sort of part of my warming up to the idea of being, of having some sort of voice in London, actually. Time Out in hard copy was an important part of the comedy scene as well at that time. That was 97 and I’d only just, I’d done about a year of stand up and other stand ups did notice that. They would always see it and go, oh, I saw your letter in Time Out. It was a nice kind of like side column to have as well as being a stand up and you open open spot because Time Out’s comedy section was, you know, the only kind of media acknowledgement of the of the London comedy scene. Also I was, it was a pretty sincere emotion. I was utterly nauseated by the endless wailing cheap emotion expressed at Diana’s death. I mean, it was sad, but you know.

I think that was the beginning of the end. If you view what’s happened now as the end, which many of us do. So we can probably tell from listening to that reading, you can take the trace of flippancy in your comment about Kurt Cobain and stuff. You can sort of hear the possible stand up tinges there.

That’s true.

It was, yes, I guess it was kind of flippant. I wanted the whole thing to be, the thing with tone is it’s quite tricky. Obviously it worked well enough for them to print it. But the whole thing of that was supposed to be sort of like a tongue in cheek, like old fashioned letter to the editor. I find this profoundly despairing of the British, you know, whereas at the same time it was supposed to be a bit flippant.

Well, like you say, you’re almost getting your own byline there. Yes, that’s right.

That was how I saw it. Yes. Yeah.

Hi, this is Laura, sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer wherever you get your podcasts. 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 you can visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and the actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview.

Thank you.

But stand up comedy, which you had started, as you said, when did you first decide you wanted to do that? Was that always in the background?

Well, I did it as an exercise in sort of improving my writing chops as much as anything else initially. I’d been doing improv for a couple of years, and I’d started improv via what they call workshops, like night classes, essentially.

They are workshops, I think.

Not just what they call workshops, they are workshops.

I still think that word has been co-opted from where you make shoes or have a lathe or something. But anyway, it’s not really work, is it? And it’s not really a shop. But yes, they have this kind of, a room is rented and some experienced practitioners tell you how to do it. So improv was brilliant fun. I loved it, and I would still do that if there was any money in it, but it was obviously just for the fun of the thing. And so I thought it might be fun to try and do a bit of stand up, where you would just have your own thing that you controlled. But it never occurred to me I’d make any money out of it. I thought of it as a sort of workout really, you know. I still think of it really almost more like a sport than an art form. I think of it as like a really good exercise.

Is it a means to an end?

I mean, there were two things I thought really. Initially, I thought it would improve my writing, because if you write a piece for a magazine or newspaper, you can tell yourself these are good jokes. And if the editor doesn’t see that, then it’s his failure. And we can argue the toss back and forth. But if you do jokes in front of an audience, you find out very quickly if they’re funny or not. And there is no way that you can start making excuses. If it’s not working, it’s not working. So I thought that would be a good discipline. And then also, I suppose I wanted to kind of get a few things off my chest. And I just wanted to experience that kind of rant energy a little bit, which you cannot do an improv because that would be really disrespectful to the other people in the scene. And I wanted to experience that a little bit, which is not really, I think, ultimately how my stand up developed. It became much more clipped and restrained than that. But that was kind of what appealed to me initially, that kind of George Carlin kind of renegade outsider type of stuff, which it turned out not to be the sort of thing I did at all. So somebody said, there’s this course. And I went there on Saturday afternoons for about three hours every afternoon. And mainly we would sort of sit around and discuss comedy a bit. And then people take it in terms and stand up and do a couple of minutes that they’d written. And it was really good.

When you first started, was your comedy persona very different from what it is today, would you say?

Yes, it was, definitely.

What was it like?

Initially, I was trying to be a lot more kind of like angry young man-ish, I think. And I don’t know whether it’s so much the material, but for instance, for the first few gigs I ever did, I used to wear black jeans, a black t-shirt and a black leather jacket, like a kind of Elvis sort of comeback special look.

That’s so not what you’re like today. I know.

And I mean, that gives you some idea. And then there were a few other kind of incorporations, I suppose. Yeah, I suppose so. I don’t know if there was as much change in the material, which was already, the material was always quite wordy. It already had that sort of slightly superior attitude, you know, that sort of slightly sneering thing, which wasn’t intentional, but just seemed to be what came out. But quite early on, I found a sort of crushed red velvet double breasted jacket, almost like a smoking jacket. I remember that. Yeah, and that actually was the moment when it clicked. I think when I started wearing that, I had this slightly louche what sort of gentleman’s club has this person sort of emerged from, you know. So anyway, that was when it clicked into place. And that was only a few months in, you know, so it wasn’t a terribly long wait. And then the other thing I suppose it defined, it was when I had that opening line, you may be struggling to place my accent, it is in fact educated.

I love that line. I love that line.

It was genuinely quite a throwaway line. I think it was John Mann, who was the comparer the night that I first sort of used it. And he said, that’s a great line. He said, you should open with that. And so I did, I started opening with that. And immediately that gave the audience, you know, a very tightly defined idea of who I was. And then everything you can play off that. And I realised that really is actually what audiences want most of the time. They want to know exactly what the proposition is.

Time for another off cut. Tell us what this one is, please.

This is a draft of an article I wrote for The Independent in 1995, when I was still thinking that journalism was going to be my thing. And this is about the Guild of Erotic Writers, who had a meeting that I attended.

A popular way to overcome the initial creative block is to nick someone else’s idea. The Guild offers advice on this, too. If you’re going to borrow, or indeed steal outright from the literary canon, then be sure your chosen work is out of copyright, i.e. 70 years have elapsed since the author’s death. Then you can go right ahead and write Sherlock Holmes and the Harem of the Baskervilles, or Robinson Crusoe and have only assassination attempts by Cranks to worry about. The use of an established persona will certainly save you a good deal of tiresome character development, enabling you to get right on with the sex. Whether or not anyone will believe in a Sherlock Holmes gripped by heterosexual lust is another issue, but it’s as well to leave yourself some challenges. If the character you want to explore is still protected by copyright, then parody may be more appropriate and legally safer than outright theft. And it can be a lot of fun. How about the sex files with Mully and Scolder getting fresh with a UFO? You can spoof characters in books, films, comics and guarantee a built-in audience. Once you’ve decided on your characters, the guild’s main advice, unsurprisingly, is to make sure they have lots of sex. Don’t be embarrassed. Don’t shut bedroom doors. Readers of erotic fiction want to know what it looks like and what they’re feeling. This is not to say that building sexual tension and using creative metaphor are not on. They are, but there comes a time when you have to plunge in and enjoy. Assuming you’ve got what it takes, the guild will also help you find a publisher. They’ll tell you which are in the market for beefed up romance and which won’t get out of bed for anything less than handcuffs and whips. And should you start to get fed up with rejection letters, they’ll even take a look at your manuscripts and give comments and advice. For a small fee. There’s certainly a lot of fun to be had from it all. I know, I’ve been dining out on limousine lust ever since it was published in Erotic Stories in 1993. And even if your efforts are in vain, all that typing is good for the wrist.

Oh, fnafna, very good. So, porn writer, how did that come about?

Well, I was, again, all of these pieces come from that same sort of era, mid-90s, when I was trying to work out what might pay the rent. But I’d been reading a book called England’s Dreaming, which was written by John Savage, and it was about the sex pistols. And in that, I read that Malcolm McLaren, the obviously the sort of Zvengali figure who created the sex pistols, had been writing readers’ letters for porn mags. That was how he was making his living. And I remember thinking, God, that’s an interesting idea. It never even occurred to me that somebody wrote these things. I thought they were, unlikely as it seems, you know, written in by readers. And I thought I might have a go at that, because that sounds like quite fun. And I bet there aren’t that many people, you know, with any kind of literary talent at all, who are attempting to do that. So it might be quite a, you know, there might be a bit of room in the market there. And I’ve been turning that idea over in my mind. I was living in Leather Lane, just in Clark and one in London. I was walking down Hoban Circus, just past my own flat. There was a WH. Smiths and outside there was somebody had set up a table and they were handing out free copies of a new porn mag called Risque. And the idea was with Risque that men and women could both enjoy it together, that partners would read it together and use it as part of their sort of foreplay. And so I grabbed one of this copy and I thought, this is a new magazine. They will be looking for writers. And sure enough, they were like, if you send in your confession, we will pay £50. So I wrote one, a confession supposedly. And I sent it in and they said, yes, thank you. We’ll print that. Please send your invoice to the following address. And I sent my invoice along with a second letter and already becoming quite canny. And eventually they got in touch with a guy called Leonard Holdsworth, who was the commissioning editor for that magazine. And it turned out for several others. He lived in a very nice townhouse just off Cheney Walk in Chelsea. He had obviously made a bit of money in some more legitimate publishing as well, I think, at some point. And we set up quite a fruitful relationship for the next 18 months or so. I was writing, I suppose, about half a dozen letters a week. I mean, the money was a pittance, you know, obviously, but it was quite good discipline. It did mean, as I say, you did actually have to type. At the very least, you had to turn out the copy. And I think in total I was probably producing two or three thousand words a week and getting paid about £125 for a batch. I think I would usually produce about half a dozen letters, some short, some long, in all various personas, you know, obviously, some from women as well as from men. And it was that was quite an interesting exercise. But I did find that the thing he would always get most frustrated about with me was that I didn’t get on with the sex. I would spend ages kind of establishing the sexual tension and the mise en scene, you know, and the character and the surroundings and everything. And he was like, come on, get on with this. They don’t want all this stuff. But to me, it doesn’t feel erotic if two people you don’t know and you can’t visualize why they shouldn’t be doing this just start banging. That’s, you know, why is that erotic? It doesn’t mean anything, does it? You have to establish a degree of transgression, I think, before it becomes erotic, personally.

Although you said that you wrote long ones and short ones.

Yes, some of the shorter ones I did get.

I suppose if it’s obviously transgressive, you know, like, I was 14 and I’d just come out of school when my physics teacher pulled over.

I see, right, right.

And also, well, writing that kind of volume to order every week is a pretty good discipline.

And I did start to repeat myself a bit. No, it’s very, very hard. I mean, the actual sexual congress, you know, is quite, is repetitive, definitely. So that’s why I think, you know, you try and create the sense of variety by creating different scenarios. But of course, if they are readers’ letters, then they have to some extent be believable, you know.

You can’t write about an alien, for example.

Well, or indeed, you know, this happened to me in the cabinet office or something.

You know, it’s kind of…

In quite a few of the magazines, they seem to be mainly aimed towards squatters. There was one called Parade, which had like a Union Jack. So they wanted to constantly hear stories about this happened when we were going house to house in Ulster, you know.

Right, yeah.

So, yeah, there was always a little bit of a steer on that front, yeah.

Right. Well, let’s get on to our next offcut, please. What’s this one called?

This is a sketch I wrote for a radio show called The Odd Half Hour, which went out on Radio 4 in 2009. And this was a sketch which was a topic at the time, which was called The Small Hadron Collider.

Woman arrives home from work. Husband is watching telly.

What’s that thing in the hallway, that box?

Oh, that’s something I ordered.

Not off the telly? Not again?

Yes, yes, I think it was, yes. It wasn’t much. It could be interesting and useful.

What? What is it?

It’s a small hadron collider.

What?

A particle accelerator, you know, like the one they have in Switzerland. Only smaller, domestic, so we can do it all at home. Brilliant, eh? We’ll save a fortune.

What are you talking about? What does it do?

It’s a hadron collider. What do you think it does? It collides padrons, hurtles them round and round at very high speeds, much faster than you can do by hand, way faster.

Send it back.

I will not send it back. Look, I’ll show you. There. Isn’t she a beauty?

We already have a walk.

It’s not a walk, it’s a small hadron collider. Look, you take the lid off there, you put the hadrons in there, you put the lid back on and pow! Subatomic popcorn. Here, let me plug it in.

That plug doesn’t look normal.

Well, it’s probably heavy duty. Yeah, look, 15 million amps.

That’s like your fan heater, isn’t it? Or does it do poached eggs?

It doesn’t do any kind of eggs. It does cutting edge nuclear research. It enables us to be part of the search for the great unifying theory, the universal law of everything, the god particle, the Higgs boson.

I thought they were extinct.

What?

The Higgs bison.

Not bison, boson.

What’s the difference?

The difference between a bison and a boson? The difference is almost, and I mean very, very nearly, the entire bison. OK, right, here goes.

Nothing.

Hang on, it’s on standby. There we go.

Doctor Who noises. These escalate and get more intense for a few seconds.

OK, now I’ll just put a few of these hadrons in here. They supply you with a starter pack.

They’re like sprouts. And this is going to detect…

Bosons, yes, hopefully. Look, look, it’s got a little boson counter on the top. Watch it.

The noises go crazy.

There, look, one boson. It found one. Let’s get it out.

What are you going to do with it?

I don’t know. Send it to the Royal Society or something, I suppose. Maybe we should contact Knowles HQ.

They open it.

Where is it then?

I think it gets stuck in this bit here.

I can’t see anything.

They’re very, very small, aren’t they?

I’ll get my glasses.

Get me a Jiffy bag too, will you?

Well, this sketch didn’t make the show. Any particular reason why?

I have no idea. It’s a work of genius, isn’t it? It may be that it didn’t come to a satisfactory conclusion. I thought I had thought of an ending for it, but clearly that was a little bit of an anticlimax. But the line I liked, I don’t know, do you want to guess what line I liked? I always liked it.

Well, the line I liked, I wonder if it’s the same one, is that the difference is almost the entire…

Yes, that’s right. I did like it and I think that was a good example of the sort of thing I did like, which was it was playing with intellectually curious ideas. But I think there was actually a lot of excitement about the Hadron Collider at that time and there were photographs of it on the front page of newspapers and so on and we all got very positive about what it would mean. And then they found the Higgs boson almost immediately and they went, yup, there it is. And then we heard no more about it. Again, you know, there’s been no explanation as to whether or not this has changed our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality. I mean, apparently the Higgs boson is something to do with our understanding of how gravity works. Anyway, it was all part of the excitement at the time and I like the idea of being able to get one out of an innovations catalogue.

Now, talking about this show at the odd half hour, it was a sketch show that you were a writer on but not a performer.

Yes, I was a bit miffed about that but they did have good performers. They got Justin Edwards on who was clearly fulfilling the role that I would have fulfilled if I’d been on it. And Justin is a brilliant sketch actor and writes in quite a similar sort of mode to myself actually. And I tried to write all my sketches for Justin basically because Justin was my kind of avatar in the sketch show and that is very much my weakness. I have to acknowledge that as a sketch writer, I will write basically what I would do if I would think so. I was kind of planning to write to him.

But you’ve written on quite a few shows that you’ve not been the performing voice that you’re writing for.

I wrote for 8 out of 10 Cats a little bit. But again, now I was writing for Jimmy Carr, who’s kind of similar to me. Supercilious, middle class, sneering. That’s what I can do. And then I wrote a little bit for Sean Lock on that. And I would sit with Sean. And actually, I think Sean mainly wanted somebody to sort of sounding board. If you’re writing with somebody, I’ve got writers who I write with like this, it’s as much that they want to hear themselves saying something to the other writer and seeing your reaction and you build with it. Do you want to mean like you share a joke with them, but you’re not creating stuff from scratch. And I could do that. Yeah, I did find at some point, you know, I felt I am earning enough now, and there’s enough viability in my own stand up career. I should really sort of try and put everything that I have creatively behind writing my own stuff. Because if you’re writing like I would write with Dara O’Brien sometimes, and Dara would say, oh, I want to talk about, you know, what it’s like to be a stay at home dad and going to the toddler groups with your young kid and everyone else there as a mum. And I was thinking, ah, that’s kind of something I am doing myself. And I had kind of thought of some material about. Now, do I give him the material I’ve already sort of half thought about? Or do I put that to one side and try and think of new stuff? Or do I say, I’m sorry, I can’t do that because anything good I think of, I won’t be able to give? Do you know what I mean? So you feel conflicted. And I could conceivably have written for somebody whose life was so different from mine that it wouldn’t work, you know, anything I thought of would only be for them. But then it wouldn’t, I probably wouldn’t be able to think of it, you know what I mean? So it wouldn’t be very good material. I’m happier writing my own stuff and then anything that doesn’t work for me as stand up now, I sort of put on to my Patreon, which is a website kind of thing where people can sign up to subscribe to my kind of musings and thinkings and so on. And on Twitter and things like that, you know, and I’d rather just own everything that I write.

Right, time for the final offcut. Can you tell us what it is and what it’s called?

Yes, this was poetry, and this was a poem I wrote called Wanted, and this is from 1996.

Wanted. Men to fill positions. A glove for the hand of the royal physician. A swab for the sweat of the minister’s brow. Grease for the cunt of the sacred cow. Excuses abandon you now. Vacant. Space to be uptaken. A leg, arm, or tit to be sliced up for bacon. Unmurdered siblings, untested babies. New heads for migraines. Skin grafts for scabies. Your answers are murmured by maybes. Gone now. These opportunities missed. The pure prepubescent, the unbroken wrist. Televoidulent mindscapes, unverbular thought. Deaf eyes and blind ears, uncorrupted, untaught. Unaware of the concept of ought.

Ooh, that sounds very impressive, but I have no idea what it’s about.

No, it’s kind of brooding and meaningless, isn’t it? It’s very teenage, given that I was 31 when I wrote that. I should really have grown out of that nonsense. Well, I don’t know. I think there’s kind of some value perhaps in prodding that kind of stuff. I used to enjoy writing it and creating images that triggered something in my head, but quite possibly wouldn’t in anybody else’s. I think what I was possibly thinking about was one thing which I had done for money, which was to make myself available for drug testing. People did this quite a bit. I actually did it even while I had a job at one point. I would take mornings off to go and supplement the majors with it. There was one where you took either a painkiller or a placebo. Then half an hour later, they would put an electric shock against your teeth. Then you had to say at what point you could no longer stand the pain. Then they would test whether it had gone up or down. There was another one, again, with the painkiller, where they would put like a… You know when they do blood pressure, like a sort of inflated sleeve around your upper arm. Then you had to open and flex your fist until you could no longer again bear the pain. They would test that. It was quite humiliating and degrading in a way. It was 150 quid, which was quite a lot of money, it seemed to me then. And there were some more scary ones which I tried to get onto and couldn’t get onto where people, I can’t remember what they were testing for. But I remember thinking that is really not what you would call like a situation’s vacant. You know, there’s something quite kind of unsavoury about this, which I’m letting myself in for. But at the same time, I had somehow lost a sense of self-esteem or something that might have protected me from it. But I wouldn’t want to overstretch the degree to which there’s any coherent, you know, the thought going on, let alone a successful manifestation of it. But the great thing with poetry and with writing generally, I think, I mean, if I had to say one thing about writing and why it’s quite pleasant actually listening to some of this stuff, I think, I mean, to read other people’s books is great. Obviously, there are some great novels that have been written and some great poetry and so on. But I still think really almost all writing that exists, you know, other people’s writing should be thought of as worm castes. And the thing to do is to be burrowing your own hole, you know, there’s nothing that compares with the satisfaction of writing yourself and of having written and when you revisit your old worm castes, as third rate as they might well appear to other people, I get enormous satisfaction from just remembering the experience and the feeling of having done them. And I don’t think I’ve ever read anything which gave me as much enjoyment and satisfaction as the sense of things coming together unexpectedly when you’re actually writing them. But you know, it’s a great way of just drawing the thread out from your brain and seeing what’s in there and what might be causing congestion of one kind or another. You know, it’s a good mental health practice, I think.

Now, you’re going to be collating all your writing, comedy, presumably the poetry in the articles. If you mentioned it before, you’re creating sort of a Simon Evans archive in Patreon, is that right?

I am, that’s right, I’m putting up a Patreon, I’m going to incorporate it or migrate it hopefully over to my website soon as well. But yes, you realize you accrue quite a lot of stuff over the years. So I am putting that on online and sort of annotating it a little bit. And also, there are a few other full length scripts I’ve written as well. And yeah, gradually, one by one, pretty much everything will go on there. And then I can burn down the actual house.

Will any of the porn be going in?

I’ve got a few of the early letters, but I do still have limousine lust, which was the the story mentioned in there, which was published in Erotic Stories. And that’s about 3000 words. And I might reprint that. Yeah, a short answer is yes, I think it will. Credited to VS. Vasanthi, I wrote that was my pen name for that VS. Vasanthi. And I’ll tell you where that name came from. VS. I just took as quite promising initials because there was VS. Pritchett and VS. Naipaul, who I thought, so that sounds quite literary. Vasanthi was the name of a child whom I was sponsoring through a thing called Plan International. She was, she lived in Madras, I think, and I paid £12 a month. And I thought, well, she’s going to get paid for by the money that I earned from this.

It’s not, you know, it’s coming slightly seedy about this, young girl.

It’s quite disgusting, isn’t it? Yes. I don’t, I never even saw her, but I just like the name Vasanthi. It has, it almost sounds like a sort of goddess of love, like you might find her on a temple type thing. So anyway, that was the name I took. It is absolutely disgraceful, though, you’re right, incredibly disrespectful. But nevertheless, she did get her years’ pay out of it, so that pretty much covered her for that year. So I guess she would probably have taken that bargain.

Absolutely. Final question. Having listened to clips of all your different bits of writing over the years, is there anything you’ve learned or anything you’re surprised by?

I don’t think I’ve changed that much, really. I think, in terms of learning stuff, you might learn from one moment to the next, but I don’t think a huge amount of wisdom or experience has accumulated. I could easily have made those same mistakes this morning. And there’s some lines in there from 10, 20 years ago that I’d be quite happy to come out with again.

No, I don’t think so.

The only thing I’ve become aware of is, as you do as a stand up, is how you’re perceived on stage and what you can get away with in terms of what you might be pretending to as an audience in terms of your persona. You have to listen to the audience and what they see you as in terms of what you can get away with on stage. But when you’re a writer, you can be anyone, you know. And so, you know, as that cartoon goes, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Right, well, Simon Evans, thank you for opening your virtual bottom drawer and sharing your offcuts with us.

Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Simon Evans. The Offcuts were performed by Beth Chalmers, Toby Longworth, Nigel Pilkington and Keith Wickham. The music was by me and this was a Speakable production.