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

But that’s the great joy of being a writer is you don’t always have to wait for somebody to say, oh, here’s some money, go and do some writing. You can write something and hope to sell it later. Hello, I’m Laura Shavin and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected or couldn’t quite find a home for.

We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this episode is Charlie Higson, who began his creative career in the early 80s as lead singer of a band named The Higsons. He then moved into comedy writing and performance, teaming up with Paul Whitehouse to write for the successful Harry Enfield sketch show before co-creating and performing in the BBC sketch series The Fast Show, which ran from 1994.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interior. Cheese Shop. Day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, no. It’s not off. It’s ripe.

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

No, no, no. It’s perfectly ripe. Mmm.

Smell the aroma. Beautiful aroma. Very pungent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(0:01) We once got a Dave Podmore show on because there was a, I think there was a new commissioner or the person who was responsible for commissioning and I knew didn’t greatly like or understand cricket and I said well we want to do an another Dave Podmore episode this year because as I’m sure you know it’ll be the anniversary exactly a thousand years since cricket began and fortunately this person believed me and commissioned it.

(0:40) Hello I’m Laura Shavin and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. On this episode my guest is Christopher Douglas, a British writer, actor and bastion of Radio 4 comedy.

(1:11) He is the co-writer and voice of the titular character in long-running radio sitcom Ed Reardon’s Week, co-written with the late Andrew Nicholds which recently reached its 16th series and groundbreaking 100th episode, having earned the Broadcasting Press Guild Award for Best Radio Programme in both 2005 and 2010. His other long-running writing credits for radio include the creation of the character Dave Podmore, the world’s most disappointing cricketer, a role he has voiced and co-written for over 30 episodes since 1997 and then there’s the writing of two radio series of Mastering the Universe starring Dawn French and the three series radio comedy Beauty of Britain. Additionally he adapted the Victorian novel New Grub Street into a two-part radio drama and wrote the radio play Tristram Shandy in Development which won the 2021 Tinniswood Award.

(2:05) His screen work includes scripting and directing the recurring on-screen persona of actor Nicholas Craig, played by Nigel Planer, for both stage and television in productions such as the Nicholas Craig Masterclass and later programmes for BBC Two and BBC Four which all originated from the spoof autobiography I, an Actor he co-wrote with Planer in 1988. Christopher Douglas welcome to the Offcuts Drawer. Thank you Laura.

(2:34) Now I have to start with I, an Actor because that was one of the most influential books I read as a drama student. I mean after all the serious po-faced navel-gazings of real thespians that we were told to read this was an absolute blast me and my friends were obsessed with it. I have to ask you was it inspired by anyone in particular?

(2:55) No it was inspired by everybody including ourselves really and we were warned against doing it by older professionals who said not that they were worried about being insulted but because they thought it was too much of an in-joke and that sort of we thought well what’s wrong with an in-joke? It’s funny, it’s funny. And there was a sort of spoof acting book that was published I think in the early 60s sometime called the Art of Course Acting and it was much broader than than Nicholas and it was sort of aimed at a wider readership.

(3:34) It was more about amdram? Yes it was really yes and so we were told oh no there’s already a book you know and we thought well that’s that’s got nothing to do with the the world that we observe which is everybody going on about how incredibly dangerous and tough acting is and we just thought it was so funny. Yes.

(3:54) And especially as the people who went on and on about how tough and dangerous it was all seemed to be so so comfortably off and very highly paid. Yes I think Simon Callow’s book had just come out at that point and I remember reading that nodding sagely at it but then when your book came out it was just oh my god it was absolute blindingly fun. Yes I think he slightly took offence and we had to reassure him that it wasn’t his book in particular.

(4:23) The whole bunch of them came out around that time but I don’t think we really we really targeted anyone in particular. As I say it was that you know it was it was sort of against ourselves as well because we’d been actors for you know we’d both been doing it for quite some time 12 years or something I think and I’d done quite a lot of the sort of lower end of the repertory career path and Nigel had done it worked at a sort of slightly more elevated level so we had the whole acting profession pretty much covered really between us. Okay well we’ll talk more about it and Nicholas Craig later in the show but in the meantime let’s get started with your first off-cut can you tell us please what it’s called what genre it was written for and when it was written?

(5:11) This is a scene from The Scarlet City which was written around the late 90s 97 I think and it was a TV pilot script. Hair and Beavis at the dining table. Mrs. Bracewell clears up. Nellie the skivvy enters. Beg pardon sir but it’s one of them girls at the door sir. One of which girls Nellie?

(5:35) You know one of them girls as is all wet and bedraggled what fetches up on the doorstep not knowing however it was they got here sir. Not again I’m sorry sir I’ll get rid of her immediately. One moment tell me Nellie does she wear a velvet trimmed cloak and beneath her hat a cascade of auburn tresses?

Speaker 2

(5:54) Yes sir.

Speaker 1

(5:55) And in her hand a pathetic strap of paper? Yes sir. Forgive me Mr. Hair but we’ve had this so many times whenever we let one in it always leads to trouble. Thank you Mrs. B I think you’ll allow my instinct in these matters is without equal. I have a suspicion that this young woman’s plight is in some way connected with a network of enemy agents. Extraordinary deduction Hair.

(6:17) Is this the same reasoning process that led you to the conclusion that Jack the Ripper is really Mrs. Beaton? It’s by no means as clear-cut as that at this stage. Show her in will you?

(6:28) Very well sir. Emily enters. Mr. Hair thank goodness I’ve found you. Well well what have we here? Proper little pre-Raphaelite wet dream. Forgive me for calling on you but I believe I am in great danger.

(6:42) That is quite all right my dear. Pray sit down and compose yourself. Oh thank you.

(6:46) Perhaps you would be good enough to tell us in your own time how we may be of assistance. An anonymous well-wisher gave me your name and address on this pathetic scrap of paper and I have this strange feeling that you’re the only man in the world who can help me. That is more than likely child.

(7:01) Oh my threadbare cloak has slipped from my shoulders. Sir isn’t this rather predictable? Mrs. Bracewell be good enough to put this pathetic scrap of paper with the others and allow me to conduct this interview in my own way. Now tell me Beavis have you ever beheld such a heart-rending picture of defenceless maidenhood? No indeed it is quite pitiful. The sodden hair, the trembling lip, the tears like mourning dew on an unopened bud.

(7:28) Mrs. Bracewell we need some towels and a change of clothes immediately. Oh for you or her? Her of course.

(7:34) My child I suspect you are in unfortunate circumstances. Give me a break. Is it by any chance the case Emily that you have become the unwitting tool of a group of foreign agents embarked on a plan to attack London with a secret weapon in all probability a large submarine with brass instruments and red velvet upholstery?

(7:56) No I was running away from home. Yeah I apologise for the somewhat devious means by which I was obliged to tease out your true story. I would have told you anyway that’s why I’m here.

(8:08) Then pray continue your narrative girl we are wasting valuable time. This script was commissioned was it? Yes it was it was a sort of intended as a sort of Holmes and Watson parody except that the two men commit crimes rather than solving them and they do things like they go around stealing things on behalf of the British Museum.

(8:37) I seem to remember that I wrote a sort of outline for some other episodes and I think he invented a time machine and there was that sort of territory and it was commissioned by the producer the late Andrei Tichinsky who produced an earlier sitcom that I’d had done on BBC2 called Tiger Road and it was well it didn’t get a second series but Andrei kept faith with me and commissioned me to do this Scarlet City script and the idea was I think we had Stephen Fry in mind for the the sort of Sherlock Holmes character and Joe Brand for the housekeeper Missy Bracewell. I can’t remember why it was turned down or indeed who turned it down but it was it was fun to do anyway.

(9:25) I bet it was were you going to play a part in it? No no I wasn’t actually I didn’t start to sort of interfere in my own scripts until some years later. All right well this was a TV script which is interesting because I suppose what you’re most known for recently probably is radio with your beloved curmudgeonly character Ed Reardon as I mentioned before having just completed his 16th 16th series on Radio 4, 100 episodes in the bag.

(9:54) That is extraordinary for a radio sitcom I mean that’s the sort of numbers you expect from like an American TV show with a room full of writers and you know 22 episodes a series, a hundred episodes. Yes it’s it is unusual. There were shows in the in the 1950s that I think did rather more episodes but that is you say they had teams of writers but I think possibly one of the reasons it’s it’s kept going is that Ed Reardon reacts to whatever’s currently in the air not so much actual events it’s it’s more fashions in the arts or TV or sport journalism politics and so there’s always something new for Ed to be annoyed about and he’s he’s certainly written more than I have and he’s probably earned more but but I think what what makes him a more interesting person than me is that he never feels sorry for himself. Most writers moan on about how hard done by we are but Ed never does that and maybe that’s what’s allowed him to keep going as a comedy character.

(11:00) Well he does bitch about other people though I mean he’s he may not say I’m doing badly but he does resent it when other people do well. Oh yes yes and he’s driven by extreme jealousy for other writers. Has he changed much over the years do you think?

(11:15) Well he sort of has to, he reacts to whatever’s in the air. But none of his attitudes have changed would you say? Well I would like to say no but I suspect they have.

(11:27) I suspect there’s stuff that he said in earlier episodes that I wouldn’t I wouldn’t allow him to say now. You know it’s not like mind your language or anything like that. You know it’s been going for 20 years and I think fashions have changed.

Speaker 2

(11:41) Yes that’s true.

Speaker 1

(11:42) The show I think has changed a little bit because in recent years the budgets everywhere you know inevitably shrank a bit and so we had a jazz band to begin with. Ed used to play in a jazz band. We had a writing class.

(11:58) Ed used to teach creative writing and they sadly have had to go for purely budgetary reasons and you know it’s just what everybody’s had to put up with. And so I think the effect that that’s had is it’s made the stories a bit tighter because there aren’t so many other characters and it takes a bit longer to construct the stories but I think on the whole it’s it’s worked quite well. I mean the latter two series which have been done in this sort of slightly new way and so these sort of recent ten or so episodes are more like plays really, farcical plays rather than topical sitcom that it was when we first started.

(12:40) But it’s hard work but I love writing plays so it suits me. Okay time for another off-cut now. What’s this one?

(12:49) Right this is a play called Oedipus at the Crossroads of Motel. It was written in the early 90s. Your parents are both other men now Martin but their accident could have been much more serious and it made me realise that you should know it was me who first brought you to them.

(13:06) I was adopted? Yes. What so are you my real father?

(13:12) No my dear. He’s entitled to know. He’s over 18.

(13:16) You are aren’t you Martin? Yes. Thank goodness for that.

(13:20) 19 years ago I was directing the Sheffield Panto, Aladdin and Felix who ran Bolton Rep had just done Chinese Bungalow so let me have the drapery in exchange for a favour. Felix Sheppard? Who ran Bolton yes.

(13:33) He’s in the cast of our programme. The Motel? No.

(13:37) He’s Gaston, the chef with a past. Well isn’t that typical of this business? It really is just one big family.

(13:44) And how often do we say that fact is so much stranger than fiction? Not very often at all on this show. We had two fires and a plane crash last week.

(13:54) Felix we need you to answer a very important question. Did you give this man my baby? Your baby?

(14:00) I remember giving him some costumes. Green satin I think. The fabric is immaterial.

(14:06) Felix you told me the baby was sent to Loveday and Latouche’s orphanage in Streatham where he subsequently died. They sent me a lock of hair. Loveday and Latouche was a firm of wig makers and parookiers.

(14:17) I used the moniker to throw everyone off the scent. I thought it was an odd name for a church orphanage. It came off the top of my head.

(14:24) The idea not the hair. So who am I exactly? You mean there was no orphanage?

(14:29) No polio epidemic? Call it a white lie for the greater good. So you two are my real parents?

Speaker 2

(14:36) No.

Speaker 1

(14:37) Your father was the actor whom you replaced as the motel’s likeable barman. He was at Bolton too. The old bloke who killed himself when he was given his notice?

(14:46) Not your fault. Not directly but I was a cause of his death. I wouldn’t go that far.

(14:52) Unknowingly perhaps but I was. This calls for an ad in the stage. You may be cheeky waiter and charming chatelaine to 18 million viewers but in real life you are mother and son.

(15:03) It’s almost like one of the motel’s own more sensational storylines. God this is terrible. It’s alright.

(15:09) No it’s not. It means I’ve killed me father and slept with me… Don’t worry about Dennis.

(15:14) He was going to be written out anyway. And as for the other thing darling I told you it doesn’t count on location. Well that’s quite the punchline.

(15:26) Oh gosh that was… Is this the end of the play? That was complicated wasn’t it?

(15:32) No I don’t think it was. I think it… It went on from there?

(15:36) Yes. I think I did finish it actually. I couldn’t get anywhere with it.

(15:42) My agent said it was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. It was rather sort of complicated how it came about because I was actually in Crossroads when I was about… I think I was 18 when I went into it and I played a cheeky waiter.

(16:01) They gave me a trial three weeks to see how… And then at the end of three weeks they said right you can stay on. We’ll make you the waiter and then they realised they couldn’t make me the barman because I was too young.

(16:17) So they gave me a birthday so that I could serve behind the bar. And I had a party but I was only 17. So then a few weeks later I had another birthday.

(16:30) No party this time and then I was able to go and serve behind the bar. And I was in it for a year and a half or something. And the other sort of inspiration for this I suppose was that I was an only child and for a while I was slightly unsure about who my father was.

(16:47) When I was very little anyway I had a stepfather. But that was a pretty standard upbringing. But I think only children often feel they’re doing things wrong all the time.

(16:59) I did especially when I started working in theatre. And then when I was surrounded by all these older more experienced people when I went into Crossroads I sort of felt I was doing something wrong the whole time. Many years later really when I read Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy I was struck by the way that Oedipus believes everything he’s told about his origins.

(17:21) And he never questions anything even though he wants this terrible history not to be true. And my instinct is to see comedy in any situation. It seemed logical to set the Oedipus story in the Crossroads motel.

(17:35) I thought it would be quite fun. Obviously having heard that I think I’d been probably reading a lot of Joe Alton when I sat down to write it. But I think what you’ve just heard was a bit too big for its boots really.

(17:49) The general idea is quite funny but then when you get right to that punchline you go oh this is potentially a little darker than we previously thought. But this is the earliest offcut that you sent and you mentioned your parents just now. They both worked in entertainment.

(18:05) But what about you? Did you know you wanted to act because you were following your parents? And all this writing, did you do writing at school?

(18:12) Were you good at it? Where’s that come from? Well yes all three of my parents worked in theatre and then in television.

(18:22) So the first paid writing job I had or the first thing I got paid for was on a game show called Huey Green’s Double Your Money. I think it was 1964. And I got half a crown for sending in a question.

(18:36) And I think the question was which of the following heavenly bodies is closest to the earth? Is it the moon, is it Mars or Brigitte Bardot? That tells you when it was.

(18:52) How old were you when you wrote that? At the age of eight or nine. I can’t imagine that was original.

(18:59) I must have got it from somewhere. But anyway I got paid two and six for it. And then I progressed to writing, helping to write questions for the TV game show Mr and Mrs, which my stepfather directed and for which my mother wrote the questions.

(19:16) So in school holidays I used to help her write the questions. Oh wow. I remember Mr and Mrs. They had a child writing the questions. Yes they did, yeah. Well I only sort of helped, I suggested things. It was actually my first experience of literary rejection, with my mother telling me that the questions weren’t good enough.

(19:34) And then I sort of followed their lead. I left school when I was 15 and sort of went to work in theatre. And one of my first acting jobs was playing a Christmas turkey in Mr and Mrs. So I had to run on the set, do something mischievous, I can’t remember what. And then as a punishment I was sent into the soundproof box. And when I went into the soundproof box in my turkey outfit, having got my laugh, I remember that, I could still hear the show’s host talking to the audience. I thought, well if I can hear that, all the people who go on Mr and Mrs must be able to hear the questions and the answers that their spouses give.

(20:13) So I thought all these years, and nobody thought to cheat. They just, well maybe some of them did. But there’s something quite moving about that.

(20:22) Yeah, well unless of course there was some kind of music or something played in there.

Speaker 2

(20:25) Ah, maybe there was.

Speaker 1

(20:26) Yeah, you see, maybe something else. But it was quite shocking to me at the time. But the writing thing, I mean, I don’t mean to in any way dis your writing at a young age.

(20:35) It’s not really the same thing as writing plays. Were you writing much at school? No, I mean, I left school with very few O-levels and I had really very little education at all.

(20:49) And I did manage to write a play when I was quite young. I’d been working as an actor for some years by then. And when I was in my early 20s, I did manage to write a script which I tried to sell as a film script and couldn’t get anybody to read it.

(21:04) And so I sent it to a radio producer. The play was about cricket. It was about a cricket tour in the 1930s called the Bodyline Tour where the English team were thought to have pushed the boundaries of sportsmanship or cheated, as the Australians saw it.

(21:18) Anyway, this script, the producer I sent it to, Jane Morgan, she was mad about cricket, I’ve been told that. And she wanted to do it. And we got it on.

(21:29) It was 1980, I think, so I was still quite young. And then after that, having tried to sell it as a film script and then it becoming a radio script, then David Putnam bought the rights to it. And I thought, oh, great, this is the ability.

(21:43) The film was never made. But I got commissioned to write the biography of the leading character who was a man very well known in cricket circles but had never had a biography written, a man called Douglas Jardine. And so writing this book became my education.

(22:02) So I hadn’t learnt very much at school, but I learnt an awful lot over the year and a half or two years to write this book. So that was my education, really. It was an odd way of going about it.

(22:13) But that was where I sort of learnt to write, really, at that time. Interesting. Well, moving on now, let’s have another off-cut.

(22:21) What’s this one? Well, this is from a radio pilot script. It’s called Nicholas and Lysander and it involves Nicholas Craig and his son, Lysander.

(22:36) Dad, have you seen my lucky scarf? Are you in for supper tonight? No, don’t worry about me.

(22:44) I’m not. I’m worried about parting with significant sums of money at Morrison’s for food which gets wasted because you don’t turn up to eat it. Yeah, that’s why I’m saying don’t worry.

(22:52) Really need my scarf. It’s got an 8 out of 10 strike rate. Right.

(22:57) But what tends to happen, Lysander, is that you say don’t worry, so I don’t, and then you appear with a pitiful countenance and I have to divide my meagre past in two, which is more than a little vexing. So are you complaining a do turn up or a don’t? Because it can’t really be both, can it?

(23:12) Maybe I left it in Chiswick. Oh, got to stop sleeping with models. They always nick your clothes.

(23:17) Where is it? Lysander. Why don’t you make one of your favourites, like kidneys, brains, then you won’t have to share it, will you?

(23:25) Or get vexed. No, I’ll have to leap to the AGA and make you a Spanish omelette while mine goes cold because that’s all there is in the house. Well, don’t.

(23:33) A house, moreover, which is falling down and whose running costs have just quadrupled. So sell it. Don’t worry, dear, it’s going on the market this morning.

(23:41) Cool. Cool? It’s too big for you.

(23:43) You fall asleep drunk on the sofa every night. You don’t even need one bedroom, never mind five. Sell it, Dad.

(23:49) You wouldn’t think it was very cool if I turned around and said we’re moving to Bounds Green. Well, I wouldn’t mind because I’m getting a place with Max. Max appears in feature films he won’t want to share with you unless he needs someone to wait in for the drug delivery man.

(24:01) Might get somewhere on my own. Depends if I get this job. Running another club night at the Hubbly Bubbly Bar is not a job.

(24:07) I told you, I’ve got an audition for a movie. That’s why I seriously do need my scarf with the silver threads running through. Corporate training movie?

(24:17) Or don’t forget to turn the gas off movie? It’s a short. Oh, the creative activity of choice for the latter day layabout.

(24:24) Has Orlando got a job yet? No, he’s making a short film. Is this the gilded youth who’s directing it?

(24:31) Dad. Lucy Bunting. Why do they always sound like characters from a nursery rhyme?

(24:36) Give it back, I need the address. 48 Hoxton Square. Who’d have thought it?

(24:40) Lysander snatches the paper. Thank you. I was in a short film once.

(24:45) I had to be a ludicrous farm labourer with lines so fatuous I spoke them precisely as written just to confront them with the evidence of their own imbecility. Good one, Dad. Can you tell me where my scarf is so I can actually do something with my life?

(24:56) Like take part in a Tosspot Trustafarian Vanity Project? Dad. Which scarf?

(25:01) It’s like Liberty’s in our understairs cupboard. The one Max got me from Turkmenistan. Darn.

(25:06) You’ve taken it to go to your Russian lesson again, haven’t you? I have not. Just because she recognised you from an old episode of Middlemarch don’t kid yourself you’re cougar prey.

(25:15) Lysander starts something about in the cupboard. What’s delusional, Lysander, is to suppose you will not be out on your arse or indeed flogging said orifice up and down the award-winningly restored Regent’s Canal towpath unless one of us gets a paid job. Where’s my scarf?

(25:31) And talking of rental, I’m charging £100 a week from now on. Good. I’m charging you for ruining my life and being a smug, self-obsessed, poisonous, gay-arsed, alcoholic, scarf-stealing, criminally inadequate father.

(25:44) So we’re quit! FX Front Door Slam. Then the sound of a drink pouring.

(25:48) Nicholas dials on his phone. Hello, Miriam Medeiro. Geriatric client here.

(25:54) You may want of a person called Lucy Bunting. Not as would be reasonable to assume a character out of Motherfucking Goose but yet another Whitechapel wanker squandering her parents’ money on a short film. I know we said never again, but it might be worth a nudgelet.

(26:14) Nicholas Craig moved on a bit there, hasn’t he? He did that very well, didn’t they? Yes.

(26:19) Yes, I remember we had a… It didn’t get anywhere, but we did have a reading of it. I think we had a reading at Attrick and it’s mentioned, isn’t it, the short film job and I think Lysander, he tries to start a festival of short films and his father’s very sort of dismissive of it, but because they live in Primrose Hill, hundreds of people come round with their short films wanting to enter the festival.

(26:46) They charge, you know, a £500 entry fee and so it ends up with Nicholas on his wonderfully large dining table with about £5 million in cash just moaning about, all I’ve got is this endless, endless admin to deal with and he’s just being given all this money and he’s still moaning about it. I thought it was quite funny, but obviously nobody else in power did. You wrote it with Nigel Planer.

(27:17) How did you meet the two of you? I’d known him for quite some while, I think, through Andrew actually, through my late writing partner who had a wonderful office just off Charlotte Street and he used to write Agony with Stan Hay and there were two cartoonists he shared the front office with and everybody just dropped in for lunch. It was one of those central London places that just became a bit of a meeting place and I met Nigel there and then, you know, we’d sort of see each other’s shows and so we’d become friendly by the time we started on Nicholas.

(27:54) And had you started with the view to let’s invent a good character for Nigel or did you just start writing something together and then go, oh, do you know what? Nigel could play that. No, it was his idea.

(28:04) He said, I think there’s an actor character. That’s all he had really at that point and then we just started reading around it and realising what sort of… He was a bit young to do it, really.

(28:14) He was still in his thirties when we did it and he should have sort of been a bit older because he was sort of on the way out, as it were, but he was terrific. And the character got richer as Nigel got older and we did a lot of shows, a lot of Nicholas shows.

Speaker 2

(28:32) Like what, theatre and TV?

Speaker 1

(28:34) Yes, yeah, we had a stage show that we did and we’d sort of get that out of its box and take it out on the road. But we began on TV by doing the Late Show unit and they wanted a sort of 20-minute piece from Nicholas and a sort of master class type thing and because BBC obviously had all the rights to the Wogan show, we did a master class on how to be on Wogan. And I remember I had two old VCR machines and just a pile of VHSs of Wogan and I’d be on my hands and knees putting these cassettes in and watching this stuff over and over again.

(29:12) Now it was just such an easy job to do but it took me weeks to do this 20-minute piece. And then we did two series and then quite a lot of single hour-long shows for BBC Four, so we did a lot of shows. Excellent.

(29:27) Well, he deserved it. He was a brilliant creation. I speak on behalf of me and my entire generation of drama school graduates.

(29:34) Oh, thank you. Loved it. Anyway, time for your next off-cut now.

(29:37) Can you tell us about this one, please? This is from an unfinished novel called Ghost Story. I wrote it in 2007 and this is the first page.

(29:49) I had been expecting this particular death for some years and given the peculiar closeness of my relationship with the dead woman, it was going to be a busy few hours.

And given the peculiar closeness of my relationship with the dead woman, it was going to be a busy few hours, possibly days. News of a celebrity demise often comes to people in my trade as a welcome excuse to set aside the task in hand, put the kettle on, perhaps have a hunk of low-fat mature cheddar and think about composing an apposite soundbite. Almost invariably the holiday mood sours once it becomes clear that no one is much interested in what a freelance writer has to say about the late national treasure or the time when our professional paths crossed.

But last Tuesday morning I knew it would be different. Not long after the turn of the century, I spent 15 intense months inhabiting the role of Joy Adams’ analyst, flatterer, collaborator and, somewhat resentful, servant. She, in turn, proved to be my tormentor, victim and financial saviour.

You’d have to go back to the days of Nelson’s Navy to find an enforced intimacy between two people so wholly out of sympathy with each other. Joy and I were yoked together by a publisher and set to work to money. A truckload for her and a much-needed Nissan Micra for me, Mike Green, the anonymous ghost.

When the news of Joy’s death popped up on the screen, I hardly needed to think about which would be the best stories to toss to which particular hacks. Nobody else alive has more facts at their fingertips about this woman. It’s not something I’m in any way proud of.

In fact, I would much rather not have had so much show-business trivia cluttering up my memory. As I sat at the computer, braced for the first wave of demands for information, Twitter threw up the usual inadequacies. R.I.P. Joy Adams, drivelled, a million-pound-a-year television executive, truly spelt T-R-U-L-E-Y.

An incredible comedy genius, her split-second-timing was amaze-five-ays. I know, of course, that criticising the spelling of a tweeter is widely considered to be a cheap shot and, in all probability, a criminal violation of a stupid bastard’s personal journey. So I confined myself to observing that you can always tell when someone doesn’t know what to say about an actor if they resort to commending their split-second timing.

The overpaid executive’s lame eulogy received 80,000 likes and 14,000 retweets, plus several compliments for his beautiful words. Out of the radio came the voice of a footballer remembering the day Joy paid a presidential visit to the lad’s changing room and he found himself shaking her hand while wearing no shorts. A stand-up comic said she was a game-changer.

(3:48) An actor who was the last but one Captain Birdseye said she was incredibly down-to-earth. By the time the Director-General of the BBC appeared on Newsnight to deliver his tribute, Joy’s timing was crafted to nanosecond perfection. I realised that they were probably not going to ask me for my recollections.

So instead, I’ve decided to set down for my own satisfaction the true story of what passed between Joy and myself. This is a record of 15 unpleasant months in the life of the nation’s favourite nan, who was also, although the nation is not yet aware of this, their favourite murderer. Ooh, that sounds so intriguing.

But this is based on your real-life work, isn’t it? Well, very loosely, yes. I mean, not with a murderer specifically. I spent a year and a half, I think, as June Whitfield’s ghostwriter, around 1998-99, and we actually got on pretty well.

But for the purposes of this story, it works better if the two characters are at loggerheads. Yes, of course. I say we got on pretty well, but she could be quite hard to please sometimes.

And I think it was Chapter 5 went through dozens of, literally dozens of drafts, and we had a big argument when she insisted that the height of the popularity of the Beatles was during the Second World War. So we had sort of rather circular arguments like that. And I developed a strategy.

I invented the Museum of Social History. So anything that she challenged, I said, well, no, I have actually had that fact-checked with the Museum of Social History. No.

Which she accepted without question. And the trouble was, though, that she then thought the Museum of Social History sounded so interesting that she wanted to come with me to go there. So I had to say it was a bit sharp for refurbishment or something.

But anyway, in the novel, I made the National Treasurer, I gave her a different name, made her a murderer. And of course, June didn’t murder anyone. But the idea did seem sort of good fun because she was at the peak of her National Treasure status.

And I’d say that sliding into June’s character there, because Andrew Nickolds and Nick Newman, who I also worked with, they worked with me on a proposal for a film script sort of based on this novel idea and the real experience called Killing June Whitfield, in which June murders her arch rival in order to And we took this to June, who was very keen on the idea of being a master criminal, but she didn’t want to murder anyone. So we thought, okay, so how can we make this way? She said she’d much rather be a great train robber or something like that. And then she decided that she didn’t want to be a criminal at all, because people would think she really was.

And she had a good point there, because I’d read some of the fan letters that she received. And, you know, fan mail is very odd. And she might have had to spend, she feared she might have to spend hours on chat shows and local radio explaining that she wasn’t a murderer.

So that was the end of it, unfortunately. But you actually wrote, you ghost wrote her autobiography as well. Yes, that’s right.

(7:19) They actually did get written. And it was on the whole, you know, absolutely fascinating experience. And she kept so much, I imagine he’s gone to the Theatre Museum now or something.

But this sort of vast archive of scripts, Hancock scripts, and, you know, absolute sort of milestones of comedy that she had in her sort of attic room. Yes, well, she did work with everyone, didn’t she? Oh, yes, worked with everyone. And at a time when it was quite difficult for women comedians to get work.

And she didn’t particularly see that as an achievement. But I think she was aware of how good she was, obviously. And yes, I mean, she worked with, you know, Arthur Askey, Noel Coward, Tommy Cooper, you know, just about everybody.

(8:07) So what’s with the recent fashion for cosy murder stories? I don’t know if you’ve noticed it on television casts of older actors playing detectives. And in fact, the Thursday Murder Club, the success of Richard Osman’s book now made into a film where the lead characters are pensioners. In fact, a lot of TV detectives are now middle aged, if not older women as well.

(8:32) I’m wondering, is it worth possibly reviving this? I know that she’s the criminal in this. But as a cosy character in a cosy murder story, is this something you might consider? Yeah, that’s a very good idea. It’s such an obvious connection.

Honestly, it hadn’t occurred to me that. But yeah, that’s a good idea. Okay, let’s move on to the next offcut.

What have we got now? This is a clip from my adaptation of Tristram Shandy for Radio 4. It’s an ad for a donkey charity. And I’ve chosen it because the director cut it. Graham’s slow pastoral music or melancholy piano.

(9:11) If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not save a donkey from dying senselessly? By donating just three pounds a month, you could relieve the suffering of donkeys abroad who are hungry, thirsty, and struggling with loads that are far too wide. Text SAVE to 0007 or call 0800 099 0774. Or why not adopt an ill-treated donkey? I’ve chosen the perfect donkey for my husband and two for my best friend, Linda.

(9:40) They’ll love their adoption pack with pictures of their new donkey friends. Visit donkeyaid.org and click donkeys in your inbox now. Thank you.

(9:49) The music ends. Oh, it’s lovely to hear that. Yes, the director cut it, so I was very pleased.

Thank you. Oh, excellent. Our pleasure.

Now, this was an interesting play. I heard this, Tristram Shandy in development. It wasn’t Tristram Shandy, to be fair.

It was Tristram Shandy in development. It was a play, if I remember rightly, about a production of Tristram Shandy. I can’t remember if it was a film or a play that it was being produced.

(10:14) Well, the idea was that it was a sort of rather pretentious radio drama workshop, and it was broadcast as though it was a podcast. But yes, it’s not as wide of the mark as you might think, actually, because Lawrence Stern, when he wrote Tristram Shandy, part of the joke was that he needed money to subsidise the writing. And so he peppered the text with adverts and appeals for money so that he could keep writing, rather in the way that podcasters do now.

(10:47) We don’t, by the way. Well, that’s why I hope to sneak that clip on there. So just as Stern sort of satirised the world of publishing, I put the boot into radio drama.

But, you know, you could really, it’s so malleable, this story, you could sort of set it… That’s Tristram Shandy, you mean? Yes, you could set Tristram Shandy anywhere, really. Frank Cottrell Boyce did a wonderful film version about 15 years ago. It’s set in the film world and, you know, you could set it in the world of publishing or the world of theatre.

The beats of the story work equally well, I think. Well, we’ve heard from that and earlier Off Cuts that you sort of like a bit of historical comedy because you spoofed the Conan Doyle and similar style detective yarns we heard earlier, and this is taking a well-known 18th century novel as its subject matter. Have you always had a love of historical literature? Are you particularly well-read? No, no, I’m not.

Not at all, really. But I suppose, well, there are adaptations that are out of copyright. I see, it’s a financial issue.

(11:57) No, I think actually I’ve sort of, rather than being inspired so much by English comedy or literature, I think that I probably learnt more from theatre and from American sitcoms, actually, than from British ones. I taught comedy for New York University for a few years and I thought, there’s no point in teaching American students about British sitcoms, telling them about Heidi High or Hello, Hello. So, I watched a great deal of Frasier, Seinfeld, Simpsons, Roseanne and so on.

(12:28) And I learnt a huge amount from them. The main lesson being that you can’t keep more than three plots running at the same time. You can just about get away with three.

Two is better. Best of all is one. Really? I thought best is three, isn’t it? The ABC plot system.

(12:45) I just think, if you can do without them, and if you think that. Well, it’s a way of involving all the characters, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s the thing. Sometimes you can’t do it in one because you’ve got too many characters, absolutely, as you say.

But if you think of your favourite sitcom episodes of a particular favourite sitcom, they’re often the one that just has one plot or one plot with two very slight digressions. But, you know, it’s 28 minutes or in the States, 22, 24 minutes. You know, it’s not that long.

(13:16) You have to keep the narrative quite simple. Right. But you’ve never been tempted to write a sitcom in the way that Americans do.

Your style seems very British, whatever American influences you may have picked up. Is that true? Yes. I’m very envious of the American system.

I’d love to be involved with it, the writing team, I think, because, you know, they take it so seriously. There’s a lot of money in it, so they take it very seriously. And so there’s a show I particularly admire at the moment called Hacks, which has a team of writers and, as do all the great American sitcoms, but they’re also in it, some of them.

And I think that’s a very good system. I’d love to work in that. But I think it’s that we can’t afford to do it in this country.

I’m pretty sure it’s that. But when you talk about the technicalities of plotting, particularly, to execs in this country, they often just cover their ears and hum. They just really don’t want to know about it.

(14:19) They just want you to get on with it and finish it as soon as possible. And maybe they know that they can’t afford a writing team, so don’t even think about it. Right.

Time for your final offcut now. Can you tell us what it is?

Yes, this is called Rum Bum and Biscuit, and it’s a radio sitcom pilot written by Nick Newman and myself in 2003.

Interior. War-room of HMS Indubitable, 1804. Captain Francis Peckham scratches out his ship’s log as the ship rolls and creaks.

I, Francis Fairfax Peckham, captain of His Majesty’s ship Indubitable, do hereby commence the log of today’s action upon the island of Rhodes on this first day of June in the year of our Lord, 1804.

(15:06) The engagement cannot, in the strictest sense, be termed a naval battle, being more of an argument in a restaurant. It is nonetheless another valiant chapter in the career of HMS Indubitable. Exterior.

The main deck. FX distant battle. Another famous victory, Francis.

Thank you, Septimus. I’ll wager that Taverna will think twice before trying again to seat a captain of His Majesty’s navy at a wobbly table. The waitress was doing her best with a folded-up napkin, and it was the poor girl’s first day.

And her last, I fancy. But what of my wound, Septimus? Is there any hope that your medical skills might staunch the blood and save my arm? It’s only a paper cut from the menu. Septimus, my old friend, I bleed.

(15:51) Oh! Oh! Have you removed the limb? No, just drawn a smiley face on your sticking plaster. Ah, then once again I appear to have cheated death. Well, you certainly cheated the restaurant.

You didn’t even pay for the retsina that we had at the bar. Ah, Mr. Runkle. Um, aye aye, sir.

Captain, matey, whatever. You appeared to relish your first taste of combat. Yeah, it was a really good laugh.

(16:17) It’s like being back in the sixth form at Stowe, basically. Perhaps that explains why you went into battle flicking a wet towel rather than a cutlet. Quite so, Septimus.

I see nothing escapes the keen eye of the scientist. Mr. Runkle, how many enemy diners did we dispatch? Yeah, so I reckon we slotted, like, about seven of them. Does that include the German tourists whom I ran through with a kebab skewer? Oh, for sure, yeah.

And the guy with the guitar? I de-bagged him first. That was quite a laugh, too, actually. And our own losses? Probably about a hundred, sadly.

Our guys got so tanked up waiting for a table, they just, like, fell off the quayside and, like, drowned, basically. Oh, that is, I suppose, the terrible price of war. Give those impertinent Greeks a broadside of grape for their trouble, Mr. Runkle.

(17:10) Right. Okay, so you want me to throw some grapes at them? Oh, damn it, man, I’ll do it myself. FX fires a big cannon.

(17:20) Excellent shot, Francis. You flattened most of that ancient Venetian fortress. Let us not waste time on the idle exchange of compliments, Septimus.

(17:27) We must set sail for mainland Greece with all dispatch. Excellent. Are we going to, like, nick some more archaeological treasures? Francis, we haven’t got room for any more temples and statues.

(17:38) I desire some assorted marbles which will look exceedingly well in my dear wife’s new bathroom. Way anchor, Mr. Runkle. Raise the gallant yards and set a course for the Argolid.

(17:50) Okay, for sure. Yeah. So it’s probably going to be quicker if I write to my mum and get her to do what you said, yeah? Uh, right.

So this, according to the notes that came with it, is based on the novels of Patrick O’Brien and is about Nelson’s navy. Where was this going to go story-wise? Um, well, I think we hoped we could involve an audience, actually. A bit like doing Mrs. Brown’s Voice, because it would be very difficult to build a convincing early 19th century man of war.

And if you film it, it’s just ruinously expensive. So we thought it’d be quite fun to do it in a sort of slightly Heath Robinson way in a studio. As a TV pilot, we intended it.

(18:37) So it’s going to be an audience show? Yeah, an audience show, yeah. And we had for many years, both the shows that I’ve done and done with Nick and various other people, we’ve had a very good sound effects technician called Alison, who arrives when you’re going to record with all these strange bits and pieces that make the noise of something else. And when we have done live shows or audience shows, when Alison sets up her table, the audience just becomes absolutely transfixed by it.

(19:10) And we thought, well, actually, it’s Alison who’s the star of the show. So we made Alison a character in this nautical yarn so that she would actually make the noises of the battles as they were going on in the studio and you would see her in vision. It’s an idea that I noticed becoming adopted everywhere.

I sort of nicked it from myself in my Tristram Shandy adaptation because it was the sound effects technician who ends up having to play Tristram Shandy. And when Nick Newman and Ian Hislop wrote a stage play about Spike Milligan, there’s a sound effects technician in that as well. So I think if we did it now, we’d have to sort of find a slightly different way of serving it.

But you asked me earlier if I’d read a lot of historical novels and stuff. And I thought, well, no, I haven’t. But then I thought, well, actually, Ed Reardon is based on the anti-hero of George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, which Andrew introduced me to years and years ago, 40 years ago or something, a novel that we both loved.

And the leading character, he’s actually called Edwin Reardon. And we were going to call him that Edwin. But right at the start, Sally Hawkins, who plays Ping, Ed’s agent, she improvised a line down the phone calling me Edward.

We didn’t have time to re-record it. So I’ve had to sort of avoid the issue of what his name is for 96 episodes or something. But there was a serious purpose to basing Ed Reardon on Edwin Reardon because Edwin is sort of the archetypal ill-used writer.

He lives in a garret, he gets very badly paid and very badly treated, and he’s a terrible failure. But in recent times, he’s become to seem less so because I’ve written a bit about George Gissing who based the novel largely on his own experience. When he wrote this novel, he got 150 quid for it.

And in today’s money, that would be enough to build yourself a house. I mean, you’d be lucky to get a fraction of that for a novel. I think you sometimes don’t even get any money at all until a novel starts to sell.

So Ed Reardon started out as being a reflection of Edwin Reardon, the Victorian ill-used writer. But yeah, but now it’s sort of, it should be the other way around. And Ed is quite unusual in that he actually earns his living from writing.

And very few jobbing writers, jobbing hacks of his level, managed to do that. The same with jobbing actors, they mostly have a side hustle of some kind. Although Ed was doing teaching, which is what a lot of writers and actors do as well.

(21:52) That’s right. Yes, we had to do away with that. But yes, yes.

(21:56) So that’s the thing. Now you mentioned when you sensed the rum, bum and biscuit, but I must ask why rum, bum and biscuit? I get rum, possibly could get biscuit, but what’s bum? It’s an old saying about the Navy and I can’t remember who first used it, but it’s just what life in the Navy is. It might have originally been rum, buggery and the lash.

(22:23) I think it’s Winston Churchill actually. Oh, I see. And then it got sort of shortened to rum, bum and biscuit for some reason.

(22:30) Oh, okay. Well, that’s an education. Yeah.

When you sent it to me, you mentioned that you had had a project on a similar subject turned down by the BBC last year. What was that about? I get so many, I have so many offcuts. I’m reminded of them every time I wake up the computer and there’s a folder saying, it’s like a sort of writing necropolis saying, BBC drama proposals.

This vast collection of rejected stuff. So I can’t actually remember, there’s so many of them. Oh, I know.

There is a similarity. The crew of this Man of War, they go around stealing stuff. Again, more thieves.

(23:13) Like the Elgin Marbles. And so I wrote that sort of Holmes and Watson parody where that’s exactly what they do. And in fact, I got another one turned down just a few months ago about the man who was accused and sort of convicted of defacing the Elgin Marbles in the 1930s.

You know, the British Museum over-cleaned the Elgin Marbles and this man took the rap for it. He’s completely innocent. And I thought there was an interesting subject for a radio play, but no, it’s not to me.

But yes, you’re quite right. That thing keeps popping up. Hmm.

Interesting theme to have. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show. How was it for you, Christopher Douglas? Yes, it was nice to hear those things that I thought were dead and buried come back to life.

(24:00) So that was lovely. But I suppose it’s a bit shaming in a way just for the sheer, vast quantity of rejection. But I don’t think they’re terrible.

But yes, I have to acknowledge that they didn’t hit the spot with the commissioners. Are there any that surprise you? Anything you might wish to go back and perhaps redevelop? Yes, I think that the sitcoms, there were a few in there, weren’t there? I think some of those could work still. Yeah.

(24:31) Yeah, because obviously there’s a turnover of staff at the BBC, just like anywhere. So somebody who turned you down once may have come. Yes, we once got a Dave Podmore show on because there was a, I think there was a new commissioner or the person who was responsible for commissioning.

And I knew, didn’t greatly like or understand cricket. And I said, well, we want to do another Dave Podmore episode this year, because as I’m sure you know, it will be the anniversary of exactly a thousand years since cricket began. And fortunately, this person believed me and commissioned it.

So you can get round it sometimes. Excellent. Well, it has been lovely to talk to you, Christopher Douglas.

(25:18) Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcut straw with us. Thanks very much. The Offcut straw was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Christopher Douglas.

(25:35) The Offcuts were performed by Nigel Pilkington, Jake Yapp, Beth Chalmers, Christopher Kent, Emma Clarke and Helen Goldwyn. And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us.

Thanks for listening.

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 the bestselling author, TV writer, actress and presenter, Emma Kennedy. You’ll know her from the numerous TV comedies she’s appeared in, which include Goodness Gracious Me, The Smoking Room and Miranda, or possibly from her work with fellow comedian Richard Herring in his various podcasts. As a writer, she adapted her autobiographical book, The Tent, The Bucket and Me, to become BBC TV series, The Kennedys, and has published another 10 books, including four for children, with a further book, The Time of Our Lives, out later this year. Emma is also a well-known face in the presenting world, having done a lot of work with Comic Relief, including organising the Guinness World Record-breaking Largest Kazoo Ensemble Ever at the Royal Albert Hall in 2011. In 2012, she won the coveted title of Celebrity Masterchef. She’s also won Celebrity Mastermind and Pointless, and nearly won the World Conquer Championship, but a soft nut let her down. Emma Kennedy, what a rollercoaster ride. Welcome to the off-cuts drawer. Masterchef, Mastermind. It feels like there should be a third master prize in there you’ve won.

I do believe I am the only person in the world to have won Masterchef and Mastermind.

Is there a lot of competition?

Well, there’s not, no. But the point is, at this moment in time, I am the only person in the world who has achieved a double.

So, maybe another Guinness Book of Records record?

I mean, if only. I do recall when I won Mastermind, I did say that I’m just interested in doing competitions that have Master at the front. So, if someone brings one out, I’m all for it.

You don’t have a Master’s degree by any chance. That would complete the set.

No, but I, well, technically I do. Technically I do because I went to one of the universities that allows you to just have one without actually having to do anything. So, technically I have, yeah.

Okay, so you’ve won the triple then. You have MasterChef, Mastermind, Master’s degree.

I’ve done the triple.

Okay, well, let’s start with the basics, writing-wise. What do you need around you when you write?

Gosh, no, I’m a very quick writer. What I tend to do is, it’s the thinking bit that takes the time. But ideas come to me very, very quickly, and I have ideas all the time, which is, I think, a lucky thing. Because I know that some writers will just have like one brilliant idea, but it will be the most brilliant idea that anyone ever had, whereas I have lots and lots and lots of idea that might not necessarily be brilliant, which is why I’m here today. But I think it’s important when you’re a writer to just give everything that you think might have legs a go. Because I always think that nothing is ever wasted, even if things don’t actually happen or get commissioned or whatever. Nothing is ever, ever wasted. And it may well be that that’s something that you had an idea for and maybe you got commissioned to write a script and it then didn’t happen. You know, down the line, a seed from that script or a character from that script might come back to you and you can turn that into something else. And also, commissioning editors come and go. And I always sort of keep things in the back of a drawer. I never give up on something, even though something might have not got through first time round. You never know, like in 10 years or even five years, that you can just go, oh, look, here’s a script. Have a go at that. But in terms of things I need to have around me on my desk, I’ve got two laptops on my desk and a screen.

And another screen as well. So three screens all together.

Yes. So I’ve got three screens and one laptop is just entirely for making my Lego films on. I have my central laptop, which is for where I have my script. And then on my screen, I have notes, because I hate the one thing I hate once you get notes back on a script or something, is having to constantly click back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. So I have a double screen situation going on. So I never have to do that. It’s very good. It’s a super situation. Yes. So I have that and I’ve got my mobile phone and I’ve got my to do list that I write every morning. But other than that, I know I don’t. That’s it.

Oh, fair enough. Not everyone has a lucky gong or whatever it is you think you need.

I haven’t got a lucky gong. I’ve got a BB8. Oh, I’ve got the ashes of my dog on my desk next to my laptop. My dead beagle.

Right.

She sits on the desk with me.

Oh, that’s touching and slightly macabre. But anyway, let’s kick off with your first off cut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it’s written for and when it was written, please?

This is from People To Stay, and it’s a TV sitcom I wrote last year in 2019.

Exterior, house, day. Emily, George and Katz are standing in a classic goodbye huddle. They’re all waving and shouting.

Bye, thanks for coming.

We see the tail end of a car, one arm out of the window waving. It disappears. Emily, George and Katz pause for a nanosecond and then erupt into wild cheering, jumping. It’s like they’ve won the World Cup.

Yes, yes, yes!

Thank God!

I can’t believe they’ve gone.

Oh, two weeks! They were only supposed to stay for the weekend. Like everyone else has every single weekend ever since we moved here.

We’ve got a free weekend.

Nobody’s coming to stay. This must be what Nelson Mandela felt like when he got out.

Please, Mum, that’s it. That’s enough people to stay up begging you.

It’s fine. Diary is clear. Everyone that was coming has come. It’s over. We’ve done it. We’re out the other end. I can do what I like. I don’t have to make a cake or fold origami napkins.

Can I have a tin with a spoon?

Yes.

I am going to go fishing. Where am I way, does Em?

I don’t know. Where did you put them when we moved?

I haven’t got a clue. That was six months ago.

There’s still loads of boxes in the garage, Dad.

Yes, try the boxes.

Right.

I’m going to strip the bed and wash the guest towels. And then I’m going to do nothing. Nothing.

Nothing. We can do anything we want.

I’m going to wander around the house in pants and read terrible magazines.

I’m going fishing. No one coming to stay. Can you even believe it?

Interior day. Emily’s in the kitchen, ironing board up behind her. She’s folding the last of the precious, now laundered guest towels. George comes in through the back door, wearing waders and holding a fishing rod.

Ta-da! Found them!

George’s hand is covered in oil.

Oh, look, can you pass me a…

He looks around for something to wipe his hands clean.

No, not the guest towels.

Well, we haven’t got any guests.

I don’t care. They’re for guests.

But I live here.

Right. So you’re not a guest.

Emily hands him some kitchen roll.

Do you think we should rethink the whole guest towel thing, Em?

The back door opens. It’s Biscuits, your typical teenage cosplay gamer.

Alright, Biscuits.

Cool, cool.

It is very, very clear that Biscuits is madly in love with Cats and that it is utterly unrequited.

I thought you worked on Saturday’s Biscuits. Got the day off?

No. Salman’s nicked the weights off the strawberry scales, so I can’t weigh nothing.

I’m starving. It’s always exciting when I’m not having guests.

I’m a guest.

Biscuits, you’re here so often, your middle name is Deja Vu.

No, it’s not. It’s Ian.

He means you’re here every day, Biscuits, like family.

I was wondering if cats wanted to come up to the bus stop.

Yeah, right.

Cool, cool.

Where are you going?

Bus stop.

No, where are you going?

Bus stop.

No, Biscuits, where are you going when you get to the bus stop?

Nowhere. You just sit at a bus stop. Standard.

Right then, I’m off.

So with people to stay, what was the plan with this?

So the plan with this was I was contacted by the person who had been the executive producer on the Kennedys. And she had gone to Tiger Aspect and was doing company development over there. And she contacted me and she said, have you got any ideas for sitcoms? And I’ve been rattling this thought sort of around because I had left London and I had moved to a very nice village in leafy Surrey. And something that doesn’t happen to you when you’re in London is that all of a sudden people started coming to stay. And it was constant. It was like pretty much every weekend for about three months. And it was lovely. But I started thinking about what it would be like, because I really like I’m very sociable creature. But I started thinking, what would it be like if you couldn’t bear people coming to stay, but you were constantly having people coming to stay? And so that was the sort of the seed of it. And I really enjoyed the characters of George and Emily. And I think in the script, the characters are all right. We got those correct in terms of I think all the characters in the scripts, you know who they are immediately, you know what their needs are, you know what their wants are. But I think where it didn’t quite go right was the actual central premise. And we sort of umdenarred about it for quite a while. And I think if I ever resurrect this, it would work better if it was a couple who have finally been able to buy their own house. Maybe they can’t afford to live in the city or whatever, but they can’t quite afford it. So they have to supplement it with having people to stay on a rental basis or maybe it’s an Airbnb. So that it’s crystal clear that they have to have people to stay in order to survive. I’m also thinking about turning this into a book rather than a sitcom. I’m actually in discussion with a publisher about it at the moment, but it’s again going back to Nothing’s Ever Wasted. This one is a classic example of Nothing’s Ever Wasted, because I think the characters that are in this script have got legs for something else.

So it would be like a novel or would it be short stories per…

No, it would be a novel. It would be a novel about a family who moved to the countryside and then he loses his job and then they can’t afford the mortgage so they have to turn the house into an Airbnb.

So this project may well rise to live again. Anyway, let’s have another off cut now. Tell us what this one is please.

Yeah, so this is a young adult novel that I wrote in 2010 and it’s called My Disastrous Life.

It’s not true, is it? asked Paula Merriman, her forehead knitting into a frown. You’re not really going to Fletchley. It is true. My mum and dad are going to work there so I have to go too. There was another sharp intake of breath. Jane Shaw, a thin girl I sat next to in French, raised her hand to her mouth and started crying. Her parents are teachers, I heard someone whisper. Oh, God, no, someone else replied. Not that, anything but that. Look, I said, stepping up onto the bench next to Cress. I know it’s all a bit sudden and I haven’t quite worked out what I’m going to do, but I do know one thing. I’m a ludder and I always will be. A cheer went up. Never stop fighting, Jessica, shouted Jane, rallying. Yeah, said Paula, her mouth twisting sideways, but after the holidays, you’ll be a Fletcher. Mutters rumbled through the crowd. Cress, arms folded, started nodding. I shot her a sharp look and cleared my throat. I know what you mean. Can’t hear you, shouted someone at the back. Sorry, I’ll just… I lifted the loud haler and pressed the button. A sharp whine pierced the air. Everyone winced. Sorry, so I know what you mean, but I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to be a Fletcher. It’s going to be like being sent to prison for a crime I didn’t commit. I may be there in body, but they can never take my Luddah soul. I closed my eyes and punched a fist into the air. Silence. Awkward, I heard Cress mumble. How many times have I told you not to take the loud haler from my office? A voice sounded behind us. It was Miss Nettles, our PE teacher. Miss Nettles is on the wheel of good and bad. So bad, she’s good again. She once went on a school trip to Russia with the A-level history group from year 12 and told them there was no electricity in Moscow, so everyone had to take a torch. She also sent round an email banning thigh-length leather boots on school premises, which nobody could make head nor tail of, seeing as our school uniform is blue skirt, white shirt, blue jumper and sensible shoes with no heels allowed. Cress wondered whether Miss Nettles has one of those weird phobias, but I said I’d never heard of anyone having a morbid fear of thigh-length leather boots before. I knew a woman who couldn’t look at spoons, but that’s it. Perhaps something terribly traumatic happened to her during a panto, Cress had whispered, to which we all nodded and then passed that round the school as if it were fact. Anyway, Miss Nettles marched over and snatched the loud halo back and then blew her whistle and told everyone in the first and second elevens that they needed to get their bibs on and get warmed up.

So, My Disastrous Life, did you write the whole thing?

No, I only wrote the first two chapters. And I was mad, mad, mad, mad for hockey when I was at school.

Right.

And I remembered that those deeply passionate feelings that you would have, number one, when you’re part of a team, where you will literally do anything for your team, but also the absolutely visceral hatred that you have for a rival school.

Right.

And that’s the basis of this book, is a girl who is a passionate, passionate, passionate ludder. She’s at that one school. And she discovers in the first chapter that she’s being sent to her rival school. And so she’s now going to be at her rival school. And what that would do to you. But I particularly, the thing I really enjoyed writing is in the second chapter of this book was the hockey match. I just really wanted to write a book about a hockey team. I think that’s what it was.

You’ve written some young adult novels. Was this written before, during or after the Wilma Tenderfoot ones?

It was after I’d written the Wilma Tenderfoots.

She wasn’t a hockey player, I take it.

She wasn’t a hockey player, no. She was a little girl who wants to be a detective. And I was a great fan of the Louise Renison books. And I was sort of thinking, I would probably find it quite straightforward to write a book in that genre. So this first two chapters was me sort of thinking, oh, well, let’s see if I can, and let’s see if the characters start sort of singing. And then I don’t know why, I think other things just came along at that time.

So you didn’t submit it to anybody?

No, no.

You just started it and stopped yourself?

Yeah.

Are they based at all on any elements of your own childhood?

Well, the Russian story is true. That actually happened.

To you or someone you know?

No, to me. We asked our history teacher, this is when we were in the lower six, we said, please, can we go on a school trip? And my history teacher, who was a really sort of grumpy old man, he said, there is absolutely no way I’m taking you on a school trip. And anyway, the only school trip I would ever go on is to Russia. And bear in mind, this was in 1984 before the wall had come down. So he was presenting it as a complete impossibility. And a couple of the girls in my history group, they went off and organized it. They organized the entire thing and then went to him and said, well, we’ve organized it now, so you’ve got to take us. And so we did. We went to Moscow and was then Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. And his wife was the school librarian. And she had this amazing voice. And she’d always, she’d come in and she’d go, Emma, there would be a gasp after every sort of word she said.

She said, and she crept up to me in the library and said, now, there’s no electricity in Moscow, so you’re going to have to bring a torch. And then she said, and don’t wear any, any, any, so high boots.

And then she crept off again. It was like, what, who’s got silent boots?

You didn’t find a load of people in Russia walking around in silent boots.

No, although it was amazing, it was absolutely incredible because, as I say, it was before the Berlin Wall came down. So it was still USSR when we went to it. And people, every single time we went out in the streets, someone would come up and say, please, can I have your jeans? Please, can I have your trainers?

I’ve heard stories like that before.

And people would be really properly staring at us because we looked so different to everyone there. And we weren’t allowed to go anywhere without this minder. And at the end of the trip, we gave her as a present, and we’d brought them from England, a pack of 10 tights, because my other history teacher had heard that a pair of tights would cost a month’s worth of wages. So they were just complete luxury. And I’ve never seen someone cry like it.

Really?

Yeah, because we’ve given her 10 pairs of tights. She couldn’t believe it.

It’s about like GIs did in the war.

It was quite extraordinary. I’m really glad actually that I got to sort of go there and see what it was like before communism ended. It was fascinating.

Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a podcast like this. And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. So, did you start writing young adult novels? Was that your first attempt? Or was that something you developed later?

No. My very first book was How to Bring Up Your Parents. And I don’t really count that as my first book, because what that was, was just sort of an amalgamation of the blog that I had been writing. I started writing a blog. I was an early adopter of the blog. And I had started writing that blog simply as an exercise in learning firstly how to write prose, because I was pretty confident writing dialogue. That’s never been difficult for me, but I’d never written prose. So I wanted to have a go at that. And I just set myself a task of every day I would spend 15 minutes on it, and I wouldn’t look back at it, and I wouldn’t edit it, and I wouldn’t do anything to it. It was just, see what you can write in 15 minutes every day. But it was also an exercise in working out what I was good at writing about. And what became clear after I’d been writing it for about 18 months or whatever, a publisher then approached me and said, can we turn your book into a blog?

Your blog into a book.

My blog into a book, sorry. And I said, yes. And then I sort of did that. And then another publisher came to me and said, can I turn your blog into a book? And I said, no, you can’t, so it’s just been done. And he said, well, is there anything else that you’ve got ideas for? And I went away and I was having lunch with my parents that weekend. And something that had been very obvious was that everybody really loved the blog entries that were about my mum and dad. And we just started remembering our family holidays and how disastrous they were. And we were crying, laughing, just crying, laughing. And I thought, maybe there’s something here. Maybe this might work as a book. And that was what became the bucket to me. And that was sort of the beginning really, because that just went ballistic, that book. And it was a weird thing. It’s like, I didn’t think for a single second that anybody would be particularly interested in somebody else’s childhood holidays. But how wrong was I?

Okay, let’s have another offcut now. Tell us what this one is, please.

This is from the opening of a television drama I wrote in 2018 called Love Again.

Streets, various, exterior, day, grams, something thumping, exciting, energized. Suzy cycles her way through side streets, dodging the major traffic. She knows her way around. She’s confident, enjoying herself. She glides into the inner circle at Regent’s Park. This is the part of her ride that she loves. It starts to rain, but sunlight is still dappling through the trees. She sticks her tongue out, catches it, upturns her face into the fresh, cool rain. She comes to a corner, bends round it, and picks up Daniel, another cyclist. He’s very handsome, chiseled, a James Cracknell type in the cycling gear he wears to go to work. We see him clock her ahead of him. He’s watching her ass. Nice. He pushes down. He wants to catch her up. He pulls level, stays there. Susie clocks him. He’s nice looking. Nice bike, too. The rain starts to come down harder. There’s something sexy about it. Daniel turns and grins at her. She grins back. Well, this is a fun start to the day. He pulls away. He looks back over his shoulder. Gestures with his head. He wants to play. He slows down, lets her catch up, and then off he goes again. Races on. He looks back over his shoulder. He slows down, lets her catch up, and then off he goes again. Races on. She’s not having that, she pulls back and they come to a red light and they have to stop. They’re both on their toes on their bikes, poised, ready. They both know what’s going on. Sideways glances. Grins. The lights turn to amber and they’re off. And they’re racing, not in a reckless way. They’re having fun. Some more lights are coming up. Susie pushes hard, but Daniel beats her to it. They stop. He flashes her another grin. She takes out an earphone. She puts her earphone back in. She’s cocky. He likes it. And he’s missed the light change. She’s off. And she’s got ahead of him. He pulls level. They’re close. This is sexy. Physical contact. A sense of playful jostling. Elbows being used. Jockeying for position. Susie gives Daniel a more forceful shove and she edges ahead. He comes back. He’s almost caught her, but suddenly a woman with an umbrella walks out into the road without looking. He has to swerve and Susie is away. Susie is laughing. She casts a look back over her shoulder. She smiles at him. She had him. Daniel’s not having that. He chases hard. He pulls level. Parked car ahead. They’re racing and Daniel weaves inside her and as they come to the parked car, Daniel jostles her sideways and the lorry hits her.

Well, I chose this clip of the script because it was very intriguing, especially with the title Love Again. That was obviously one of the opening scenes, which leads you to believe these two characters are the ones who find each other, but obviously that’s a red herring. So tell us about this one.

This is interesting. I actually sent you an earlier draft of this and that entire sequence was cut out. And I’m really glad you picked that opening sequence because I think this is one of the big lessons that you learn when you’re a professional writer is that when you have a script that’s in development, and this script, Love Again, was in development for the best part of two years at the BBC. And it’s probably the closest I’ve come to getting a series commissioned since The Kennedys. It came really, really, really close. And it was a really good example of a script that, though I had the basic idea in the first early drafts, it became something quite different towards the end. And the original idea was that Daniel had been responsible for the death of somebody, and that that was what made him who he was. But actually, we completely got rid of that idea as we moved through. But the idea of Love Again was, it’s basically about whether or not you can fall in love with the same person twice. And what that initial, that first script became was, instead of Susie being knocked off the bike, it becomes Daniel who is knocked off his bike. And what you sort of discover in the first five minutes of the show is that Daniel is having an affair. And three courses of the way through the first script, he is then knocked off his bike, and he can’t remember having the affair. So, it’s about what does she do? And she, the female character, has just told her husband that she’s leaving him, because she doesn’t know that he’s had the accident yet. And then it’s about whether or not she tries to get him to fall in love with her again, whether she can fall back in love with her husband again, whether his wife can fall back in love with Daniel again. So it’s all this sort of tangled web of people trying to make their relationships work.

That sounds fascinating.

Yeah, well, it really came super, super close. And I think that it was so frustrating, because when we were working on it, and it was in-house at the BBC, and everyone was very excited about it. And you should never let this happen. But I got a real sense of, oh, this actually might happen. And then I lost my producer, who left? She left the BBC. So I then had to wait for another producer to come in and be assigned to it. So we lost six months on it. And then it got past the first, oh, that’s right, sorry, that’s what happened. The head commissioner left. So it was one of those things that it had been, the script had been commissioned under the commissioner that was the head of the drama department. And then she left. And then we had to wait a year until the new guy was in place. And so we lost that time. And the momentum of it was sort of, and then it starts feeling like, oh, this is a script that’s been hanging around the department for 12 months. It was that. But then we got through again. So we were like, it was all looking good and it was all about to happen. And then it went up to the head guy and he had just commissioned Wanderlust, which it was very like. And so that was the end of it.

Oh, no. How frustrating.

But you know, that’s the game we’re in, so I mean, you’ll know this. This is the thing is you can start something off and then you go into development hell. And then when people start leaving, you have to wait for new people to come in and on it goes and on it goes.

Yeah. Oh, that’s such a shame. That sounded very promising.

Well, that’s another one that might end up as a novel.

Oh, right, of course, because with a novel, you don’t need anybody to commission it as such, especially if you’ve got a reputation already.

But that’s another one that I sort of think, hmm, that could be a book. So that one might come back to life. But it was my first go at a drama.

Right.

And that was an eye opener.

Why?

Because it’s so much easier to write.

Than comedy?

Yeah. You don’t have to write jokes. You only have to tell the story. It was like, what? This is, this is super easy.

Although quite a few writers listening to this going, no it isn’t.

I’m sure there are. But you know what? I’m going to throw that back. So I’ll tell you what. You write what you write. Now make it funny.

OK, let’s have another off cut now. Tell us about number four, please.

This is from Just For Kicks, which was a TV comedy drama I wrote in 2016.

Interior, kitchen, day. Clemmie is finishing pulling out a load of washing from the machine. Through the window we see a car pull up. We see Trevor get out of the car. He’s clearly having an argument with whoever’s sitting in the passenger seat. Clemmie notices the car outside. She narrows her eyes, but she hasn’t got her glasses on. Trevor comes into the kitchen.

Clem, can we have a chat?

Who’s that in the car?

It doesn’t matter. Look, I’ve got something to tell you.

Does he want a coffee or something?

It’s not a he, and no, she doesn’t want a coffee. You don’t know her.

Who goes to someone’s house and sits in the car, tell her to come in.

She doesn’t want to come in, Clem. That’s what I’ve got to talk to you about.

Clemmie stops what she’s doing, looks again out of the window towards the car. We see a woman, darkly reflected, big sunglasses on.

What’s going on?

When you have to pull off a plaster, it’s best to do it quick. Right, I’m just going to blurt this out and that’ll be that. So we’re separated.

That’s a bit dramatic. You told me you needed a holiday. I thought you were off fishing.

Just let me get this out, Clem. I’ve met someone else. I want a divorce and Patsy wants you out of the house.

Is this a joke?

No, it’s not a bloody joke. Patsy’s furious.

Sorry, you’ve got someone sitting in the car who wants to steal my husband and my house and she’s furious. I can’t fathom what you’re telling me, Trevor. Have you lost your mind?

Look, I know this looks bad.

Looks bad, Trevor? You haven’t walked out of a supermarket and forgotten to pay for a packet of mints. I’d say it’s worse than bad. It’s beyond belief. You’ve done all this in 48 hours. You only left on Monday.

No, no, it’s been going on for ages. How long? Five months.

Five months? While I had cancer?

Don’t rub it in, Clem. It just happened and that’s all there is to it.

No, Trevor. Having an affair while your wife is being treated for cancer isn’t something that just happens. It’s virgin on evil. I wish you’d told me sooner. I could have saved myself the bother of washing your shirts.

Are they ironed?

No, they’re not bloody ironed. What the hell is the matter with you? Dear God, I can’t take this in.

She slumps into a chair, head in hands.

I just… Look, I know it’s terrible, but me and Patsy are making a go of it and she says it’s not right you’re in the house I bought and paid for, so you’re going to have to leave.

You bloody shit! You bloody bastard in thunder shit! How could you do this? After all that’s happened? Does Sam know?

No. I was wondering if you could tell him?

Can you actually hear what’s coming out of your mouth? I feel like I’m going mad. No, Trevor, I am not going to tell our son that you’re leaving me for a woman in big sunglasses who refuses to get out of the car. No, I’m not. You can do that all by yourself. Where’s she from?

Trevor looks down and shakes his head.

Come on, where’s she from?

Preston.

Oh, Trevor. How could you?

Well, for somebody who says you don’t normally write drama, that is fairly dramatic. I mean, there are comedy moments.

So this is what I often refer to as a bespoke request. And this was, I’d been asked to go and meet a production company and they had an idea and they wanted to do a comedy drama about some middle-aged women who used to be in a dance troupe, not like pants people, but something sort of like the blue bells or something like that. And they wanted it to be based up in Blackpool and they wanted it to sort of be a lovely, sort of warm menopausal comedy. That’s what they wanted.

How delightful.

A lovely warm menopausal comedy. And again, I didn’t write a whole script, just did some sample scenes. And this was one of those things where the production company sort of had got a bite from a broadcaster and the commissioner would have gone, oh, can you come up with something for, you know, women who are in their 50s? And then they come to me and this is what they do. They find a writer, then they go, right, this is the do this, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you go off and you think about it and then you write a couple of scenes and flesh up a treatment, et cetera. And then they go back to the commissioner and they go, oh, well, no, that film’s coming out now about the women in their 50s who once had cancer, you know, one’s got a prolapse womb. Um, and they’ve all discovered, they’ve all discovered happiness again through the power of dance. Anyway, again, it was just bad luck that that film came out that was about menopausal women who all found themselves again through dance. So that was the end of that.

Oh, and that’s what put the kibosh on this, then?

That put the kibosh on that, yeah. But that was one of those ones that didn’t get beyond just the treatment.

Right, so not too much energy had gone into it. It was interesting because the title, Just for Kicks, I thought you had come up with that because you are a big hobbyist.

Oh, I did come up with Just for Kicks, yes.

Because you are a big hobbyist and quite public about your hobbies and your interests. And obviously you won Masterchef cooking and all that. Have you written a cookbook, by the way? Why not?

I was asked to and I couldn’t be bothered.

You write jokes and everything.

Well, I know, but it’s, I didn’t do Masterchef to change what I do. And the problem is when you write a cookbook, it’s not just you write a cookbook and forget about it. You’ve then got to go and spend a year going around doing all the food shows, doing, you know, it’s a different game. And I genuinely didn’t want to become sort of a food celebrity. I just, I did Masterchef because I genuinely love Masterchef. And it was a thrill and I’ve been given an amazing life skill from it. And that’s perfectly enough for me. Thank you.

But your other big hobby, you do make a fairly big deal out of. You’ve got a YouTube channel for it. Yes, I have. Building Lego.

Yeah.

How many videos have you done so far? I went to the page, I scrolled down and then refilled again and refilled. I thought there’s like four to start off with, but obviously there are thousands.

Yeah. I made a promise when lockdown started that I would do one every single day. So I have been making an hour long film every single day of lockdown.

Is there enough Lego in the world?

And I do, and I don’t just make the Lego, I do stop frame animations for the half time show. I have a thing called the half time show. So there’ll be, it’ll either be like a vision on thing where I show pictures that people have sent in of Lego they’re making, or it will be stop frame animations, which are normally of Dawn French punching Sigourney Weaver’s minifigure. It is quite complex. There’s a whole backstory about Dawn French in Relax With Bricks, but there’s a whole backstory which I’m not even sure I can be bothered to go into.

No, no, please don’t. There are too many other questions we have to address first. So you started the YouTube channel before lockdown.

Yeah, I started it a year ago.

It wasn’t a professional thing, was it? It was just for relaxation.

What happened was, it wasn’t last Christmas, it was the Christmas before, I was with my nephew and he said, can you please help me make this Lego kit because no one else will help me. And I said, yes, of course I will. And I sat down and I hadn’t done Lego ever. And my brain goes about a hundred miles an hour all the time and I started doing this Lego and it was like this Zen-like piece just enveloped me. And I thought, oh, that was lovely. And I got home and I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d felt when I was doing the Lego. And so I went on Twitter and sort of slightly admitted to it. And another writer, Lissa Evans, she said to me, just try the camper van. And it was like, it’s like a gateway drug. The Lego camper van, I’m telling you now, it is a gateway drug, the Lego. And so I bought myself the Lego camper van and I made it. And it was so delicious that I thought, well, okay, this is me now. And my birthday came along and I was given the Ghostbusters Firehouse. And it was so epic that I started doing little shows and little two minute films of it of what I had built that day and posting them on Twitter. And that was the start of it because people started saying, this is the most relaxing thing I’ve ever seen. And then people started saying, please, will you film yourself doing the builds? Oh gosh. And that is how it began.

Well, I will, I’m going to go and watch.

You’ll get sucked. I’m warning you now, Laura, you’ll be sucked in. Dawn just happened to watch one and she’s, I think she’s watched every single episode since. You’ve been sucked in, Laura. I’m just warning you.

Okay, thanks for the warning. I will take full responsibility for anything that happens subsequently. Okay, time for your final off-cut. Can you tell us what this one is, please?

This is, I think, my favorite. This is from 2015 and it’s an animation I wrote called Utterly Brilliant.

Scene one, meadow farm, yard. Qualified dairy cows are clocking in to work. Brenda is standing with a register underneath a sign that says, proper qualified cows. Cows are queuing, waiting to be ticked off. There is another queue under a sign that says, trainee cows. There is no one in it. Brenda looks at her list. We see the name Utterly Brilliant written down.

Where is that cow?

Brenda looks around. She sees Utterly sauntering along, whistling.

You’re late, Utterly. Farmer Lee wants to see you.

Utterly holds up an oversized watch.

Me o’clock, work o’clock.

She taps the Me o’clock section on the watch face. It looks like it’s all Me o’clock.

Hang on.

There is no work o’clock on that watch.

She gets out a magnifying glass and sees a tiny section with work o’clock written on it.

Utterly, this won’t do. You’re going to be a trainee cow forever at this rate. You need to show Farmer Lee you can work as a proper cow and be a valued member of the farm.

Farmer Lee looms in.

That’s right, brilliant. You do. And to that end, I’m sending you on a team building weekend with Brenda, Brian and Mr Tomlin. If you want to be a dairy cow, you need to be made of strong stuff. And I told you a thousand times, you’re not going to be made a proper dairy cow till you got all your stars on that board.

He points to the trainee cow board. There are various names on it with lots of stars. We see Uderley’s name. There are no stars. Apart from one strange looking thing stuck on with sellotape. She points towards it.

I’ve got that star, Farmer Lee.

That is not a star, Uderley. That is a biscuit that you have chewed and sellotape to the star board. Take it down and then get into the shed and get packed. No buts, Uderley. Team building is for your own good.

But what is team building?

It’s where I send you into a hostile environment and you have to survive against all the odds.

Big brother house! I’m gonna be famous!

She gets herself into a variety of poses. A small rat steps forward and takes her picture.

This is a lovely little piece, I have to say.

She’s a terrible cow. That’s what utterly brilliant is. It’s just utterly brilliant. She’s a terrible cow.

Yeah, it’s not a very child-friendly phrase though. You don’t want to have a little kid repeating that.

No, but she just is really bad at being a cow. What happened here was the head of CBBC came to see me and wanted me to come up with something that could replace another animation that they thought was about to end. And this again was one of those things that I thought, oh, okay, this might actually be happening. And we went through a few sort of drafts of the script and nailed down exactly what it was. We had a, it started off as for much younger viewers and then sort of we pitched it up a little bit higher for eight to 12 year olds, which is why we upped the comedic content of it. But it was always in my head, a sort of like Heidi High and that utterly is, it’s basically Peggy from Heidi High and that she is at the greatest, most prestigious dairy farm in Britain. And she’s a trainee, but she will never get to be a proper dairy cow because she’s just really badly behaved, which is a terrible, terrible cow. And again, I had the terrible thing happen of the woman left the BBC. And then she went to Channel 5 and then she contacted me again about it and said, oh, can you pitch it down to younger again because I might be looking for younger stuff. And I thought about it and I thought about it and I thought, no, I don’t want it to be for, that isn’t what it is.

There’s a lot of very good jokes in it that you’d have to lose.

So again, this is one of those scripts that I am sitting on and I think at some point, I might try and get this one away again. But animations are very, very, very expensive. But I do write lots of children’s animation for series that are already on running. And I really love it. I think it’s probably the thing I love doing the most, actually.

Writing animation or writing for kids?

Writing animation for children.

You’re not tempted to ever write an animation for adults? More knowing, perhaps?

I could do, but trying to get an animation for adults away is probably even more impossible. I mean, I can’t, you might be able to do it in America, but when was the last animation for adults you saw here? They are so expensive to do.

But you would have thought things like The Simpsons and Family Guy and all that wouldn’t herald a new dawn.

We just haven’t got that here. We just haven’t got it as a genre, really.

What about a children’s book?

I did think about doing Utterly Brilliant as a book, but again, it would have to be pitched younger. That’s the only thing, because it would have to be a pitch book.

Right, yes it would.

This is the one I’m not giving up on Utterly Brilliant. This is the one that I still think there’s a spark of life in it yet.

My final question was going to be, are there anything that surprised you, or anything you want to go back and redevelop perhaps? And obviously, Utterly Brilliant is the leading one in that pile.

I think Utterly Brilliant is the one that’s got the most commercial potential. There’s no doubt about that. And I think People to Stay has probably got legs, possibly as a book, and possibly Love Again as a book.

So there’s hope for most of them, in fact.

Yes, probably. I always say that nothing is ever wasted, and just because something gets rejected in any given year, it doesn’t mean that you can’t rethink it five years later.

Well, we’ve come to the end of the show. Emma Kennedy, it’s been absolutely fantastic to talk to you. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your Offcuts drawer with us. 

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Emma Kennedy. The Offcuts were performed by Beth Chalmers, Emma Clarke, Toby Longworth, Leah Marks and Keith Wickham, 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.

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 pave the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is author Mark Billingham. Mark worked as an actor, a TV writer, and a stand-up comedian before his first crime novel, Sleepyhead, was published in 2001, becoming an instant bestseller in the UK. His subsequent series of novels featuring London-based detective Tom Thorne now totals 16 books with the 17th Cry Baby due out imminently. Mark is also the author of the standalone thrillers In The Dark, Rush Of Blood, and Die Of Shame. His television writing includes several children’s series that he also starred in, Harry’s Mad, What’s That Noise, Made Marion and Her Merry Men, and Night School, and a series based on the Thorne novels in 2010 starring David Morrissey as Tom Thorne. Words like master and masterpiece are regularly flung about in his reviews, although possibly not quite as many times as the word grizzly. Mark Billingham, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

Hello, thank you for having me.

Are you happy with grizzly as an adjective? Was that what you were going for when you started?

I don’t think it applies as much now as it did when I started. I certainly think the books were a lot more grizzly, a lot more violent, you know, 10 or 15 years ago than they are now. And I think that’s because I hope it’s because I’m a better writer than I was then. And I think I’ve learned that less is more and you don’t have to throw the kitchen sink at everything. And a reader’s imagination is a far more powerful weapon than anything a writer can come up with. So, yeah, I think grizzly would have been fair enough when I started, certainly.

Well, let’s start with the basics. What do you need to have around you when you write?

Oh, God, I am one of those people who can only really write in my office at home. I’m terrible at writing on the go. I can’t write in hotel rooms or on trains. And I suppose the things I need around me are the terrible things I’m looking at as I look around me right now. Far more Beatles toys than any grown man should have. Yeah, you know, like yellow submarine figures and any bit of memorabilia, that kind of stuff. I’m looking right now at a stuffed woodpecker and an old ventriloquist doll and oh my god, some old figures from Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and a huge standee of Elvis Costello. No. Well, I don’t know until you take them away from me. All I know is that I can’t sit and write in a sort of soulless hotel room. I can scribble a few notes in a notebook. You know, I can go, oh, must do that in Chapter 12 or whatever. But I can’t actually sit and put a book together anywhere but here.

Well, let’s kick off with your first off-cut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Well, this is a clip from a novel I eventually abandoned in favour of what actually became my first published novel. This is called The Mechanic and it was written in around 1999.

He was a stone cold mechanic out of Miami with a job to do. Just a regular killing, just some punk who was going to get what was coming to him. It would be a snip. The train now standing at Platform 2 is the 1237 to Coventry calling at Adderley Park, Stetchford, Lee Hall, Marston Green. He downed two fingers of beam and checked the glock strapped beneath his left arm. The weight of it felt good, like an old friend. Hampton in Arden, Barkswell, Tile Hill and Coventry. He slapped a five on a ten for the bartender and slid off the bar stool. It was time for work. Travellers are reminded that there is no buffet service available on this train. We apologize again. The man was late. He might have to slap him around a little later on, once the job was done. The man had lousy timekeeping habits, but he had a bag of money. And he had the name of the poor sap who had an appointment with the Glock. Nobody ever beat the Glock. He smiled. Beat the Glock. Good one. Andy! Maybe he’d do the beat the Glock routine for the guy he was going to ice. Give the poor mutter belly laugh before he bought the farm. Andy! Oh, sorry, Keith. I was— Yeah, course you were. Where the fuck have you been? I said half twelve under the clock. It’s nearly twenty-two. Christ, what have you come as? Andy Bagnell self-consciously pulled his shirt down over his beer-gut and adjusted his ponytail. We’re supposed to be inconspicuous, you dozy prat. I am inconspicuous. In a Hawaiian shirt? You look like you’ve puked up on it. This is from Florida. Trevor got it when he took our Karen and the kids to Disney World. Doody wasn’t listening. He was staring across the busy station concourse towards the public toilets. Bagnell watched him and, for want of anything better to do, he stared as well.

So tell us about this mechanic then. What was it about?

Well, it was a comedy caper set on the Birmingham Canal system. I’m from Birmingham. I thought I should write about the city I grew up in. So it was this sort of comedy caper where this guy imagines himself as some noirish character and talks in this ludicrous way all the time. Actually gets involved in this horrible caper where he robbed somebody in the toilets at New Street Station. I wrote about probably five or six thousand words of it at the same time as I was writing five or six thousand words of what became that first novel Sleepyhead. I sent them both off to the one person I knew in publishing who said ditch the funny one. Now, well, it may well be because it wasn’t remotely funny. I do not know, but what I since learned, what I subsequently learned was that publishers are quite scared of humorous books, which is a bit sad really. I mean, later that year, I actually went to a crime writing convention where one of the sessions was called, Does Humor Hurt Your Sales Figures? I’ve never forgotten that. I suppose it’s because it’s such a subjective thing. And an editor might read a book and think, well, I think that’s hilarious, but will anybody else? Or I don’t find it funny, but maybe that’s just me. And so the safest thing is to just reject it. And when you think about the incredible history of brilliant humorous writing we’ve got in this country, it’s really, really sad that that should be the case. But, you know, you can count the number of bestselling, humorous writers on the fingers of one hand. It does seem to be something people are a bit afraid of. So I went with The Grizzly One and The Mechanic never saw the light of day. I did look at it again, obviously, when I dug it out for your show and thought, you know what, one day I might finish this. I should have done that during lockdown. That’s what I should have done.

But why were you starting two books at once? I mean, you’ve not published any before, and most people have enough trouble coming up with the first book. So how come two?

Well, it’s certainly something I’ve never done since. I wish I could tell you. I don’t know. I mean, I definitely had had the idea for what became Sleepyhead, the grizzly serial killer novel. But because I was still working as a stand up at that time, and I love crime fiction, so it seemed natural to at least try a comedy crime novel. And they’re incredibly hard. They’re incredibly hard. It’s like the comedy horror film. I kind of think you can’t be both. You can certainly put humour into a crime novel, into anything. I would not want to read a book that doesn’t have some humour in it because it would just be irredeemably bleak. But a book that just sets out to make you laugh is a very tough ask, I think.

Absolutely. But it’s just the fact that you decided to start them both at the same time, or pretty much the same time. What were you thinking? I’m going to write two books.

I’ll send two books off to publishers to see what they think.

You must be incredibly dedicated and disciplined to be able to sit down and go, I’ve never written before, I’m going to do two.

It was a discipline that I maybe had 20 years ago, but I certainly don’t have it now. I mean, I don’t have more than one idea at one time. I was doing a thing the other day when somebody said, what do you do with all the ideas you reject? And I went, I’ve never rejected an idea. You know, I just kind of go, that’ll do. Let’s write that, you know.

So this one just disappeared. You didn’t look at it again.

No, I didn’t. I didn’t look at it again until really, really recently. And actually I’m really quite happy with it because there’s way more of it than was read out. And I kind of think one of these days I’ll get around to finishing it. And even if my editor went, well, it’s not really what you’re known for, I’m sure I could find somebody who put it out somewhere. Also the idea of any kind of crime fiction set in Birmingham, I started to feel was problematic because by that time I wasn’t living there anymore. And I think it’s easier to write about the streets you walk down. And that accent, I did have a problem with that accent.

But nowadays you’ve got more Peaky Blinders, of course.

Yeah, nowadays it’s become trendy. My name’s Tom Thorne, mate, you’re nicked. It just felt easier to make him a Londoner.

Let’s move on to your second offcut. Can you tell us about this, please?

Oh, well, this is a treatment, in inverted commas, for a spoof TV magazine show called It’s Bizarre. And I think I wrote this sometime in the mid 1990s.

Presenters, Valentine and Cordelia Trevelyan, married. He, overweight, flamboyant, effete. She, skinny, blonde, distant, both very gothic. It’s Bizarre is a 30-minute magazine programme dealing with all aspects of the paranormal, with features on everything from telekinesis to yetis, and articles ranging from the spiritual to the downright eccentric. It has a regular cast of slightly off-the-wall presenters who are actors and play all this completely straight. Features include Coincidence Corner. The Trevelyan sit in wing-backed leather chairs and regale the viewers with tales of coincidence to boggle the mind. On June 17, 1972, 14-year-old Colin Hoxton was appearing on the BBC quiz show, Ask The Family. One question involved the identification of an object photographed from a strange angle. Colin correctly identified the object, Cheesecake. At precisely that moment, 3,000 miles away in Houston, Texas, a man was struck and killed by a slice of cheesecake dropped from the 14th floor of a skyscraper, the dead man’s name, Robert Robinson. Bizarre but true, a series of astonishing facts. All the ties worn by film 93 presenter Barry Norman are made from the wool of a single sheep. It’s Bizarre obviously has its tongue firmly in its cheek, but although the format is preordained and many of the initial articles and features are scripted, the great strength of the show is that much of the content would be viewer driven. It’s Bizarre is in many ways a That’s Life of the paranormal, although of course unlike That’s Life, it is interesting and funny.

Ooh, that’s a bit snarky.

Oh dear.

Not a fan of That’s Life, hey?

No, well, I certainly was when Cyril Fletcher was doing his odd odes and humorous vegetables and all that kind of stuff. Jake Thackeray used to perform on That’s Life and, you know, Jake Thackeray is a huge idol of mine. So that was, yeah, that was a bit pointlessly nasty. And, you know, yes, I think I introduced it as a treatment. That’s probably overstating the case. I think this was a few pages scribbled in a notebook.

They were very tidily scribbled. It wasn’t, you’d obviously thought it out. There were no spelling mistakes or ink blocks or anything like that.

I’m very neat. I’m very neat and organized. Well, I think this was definitely a period in my writing life. So this is, you know, five years before I started trying to write a novel. So I’m writing a bit for television and largely hating it, doing kids’ shows and, you know, collaborate lots and lots of in inverted commas collaborating, which just means writing by committee quite often. So there’s a lot of that going on. And I was just in that period of which, which every freelance writer is in of just throwing as much shit at the wall as you can until something sticks. And, you know, this is, this is from the notebook of shit to throw at walls. And God knows, maybe I’d eaten a bit too much cheese one night and just sort of woke up and thought, God, I quite like some of it.

Yes.

I quite like some of it. I quite like that coincidence corner story.

Yeah, I like the wool of Barry, Barry Norman’s ties.

I’d watch it.

Yeah.

Or maybe I wouldn’t. I think it was, do you know what? It was also in that period of television where, you know, the kind of late night shows that seem to be very much designed for people coming home from the pub. And you just turn them on and watch any old nonsense, you know, with the kebab and you know, three cheese to the wind. And I think I thought, yeah, I can come up with something like that. Clearly, I couldn’t and can’t. That was my best attempt. I don’t think it never got submitted. I mean, I didn’t ever show it to anybody, I don’t think.

Oh, oh, I see. Oh, that’s quite disappointing. I’d be very interested in their feedback. What they would say about why it wouldn’t work. So what kind of television and reading and culture basically were you a fan of when you were growing up?

Oh, lots of crime stuff. I always drawn to anything with violence and car chases and, you know, the Sweeney, all the American stuff, Kojak and Columbo, of which I remain. You know, it is the greatest cop show ever made. And you can argue with me. I’m curious.

Why is it the best?

Oh, my God. Well, you just have to look at the people that worked on it. You know, far from anything else. I mean, Spielberg directed the pilot. You had people like Steven Bochco, who went on to great Hill Street Blues. Jonathan Demme, who directed Silence Of The Lambs. Incredible people behind the scenes. And the people that created it, Levinson and Lincoln, actually based it on Crime And Punishment. And they wanted their detective to be like the detective in Crime And Punishment, the constable or whatever it is. And it’s actually a show about class. You know, when you think about it, it’s about this working stiff, who the villain always underestimates. And the villain is always an architect, a classical musician, you know, a TV chef. They’re always somebody from the sort of upper classes.

And he’s just this working stiff.

Yeah, very high status. And they underestimate him and they don’t imagine that he’s got a mind like Steel Trap. And what it did, of course, most famously, was to completely invert the classic format of a crime drama where you knew exactly who the killer was and exactly how they’d done it in the first five minutes. And the rest of the show is this sort of dance of death between Columbo and this villain. How is he going to catch him? What’s the mistake the villain’s going to make? It’s a show I’ve always loved. And of course, Peter Falk. Peter Falk. And I got to do a… I made a documentary about the show a few years ago on radio and got to interview him, not long before he died. So somewhere on tape, I do have that man saying, one more thing, Mr. Billingham. And that, you know, I can go to my grave a happy man.

So what kind of family were you from? Do you have a history in your family of performers or creators, or were you the first?

No, God. No, absolutely not. Yeah, I was the first. Just big show off. And it has just been what’s lawfully called a career is just an attempt to show off and avoid a proper job. You know, I’m now showing off writing books. It’s still a performance. I’ve always been a performer of one sort or another. And it just, you know, from that first moment, I was at the kind of school where it was easy to be a bit anonymous if you weren’t a brilliant sportsman or a brilliant scholar. And I was neither of those things. And then the school play came along. And from the moment I got cast as the artful Dodger in Oliver, that was it. That was me sorted. That’s all I ever wanted to do, really.

Well, time for your next off-cut. Can you tell us what this is, please?

Well, I mentioned stand up. This is a piece of stand up material that I wrote in around 2001. I’m not sure I ever performed it, but it’s about complaining.

Are you having a good time? Okay, by and large. But would you say so if you weren’t? There’s certain things that British do very well. Obviously, there’s queuing, talking about the weather, and choking at major sporting events. But one thing we cannot do is complain. We’re shit at it. Some clumsy twat sends me sprawling in the street. I stand up and say sorry. Sorry? It’s at its worst in restaurants. Not only are we shit at complaining, we’re hugely embarrassed if somebody else does. Now, I happen to be married to one of this country’s few truly great complainers. She bloody loves it. I’m easily pleased in restaurants. You can slap a plate of food in front of me that’s cold or burned or bears no resemblance whatsoever to the thing I actually ordered. Basically, something the third chef has vomited onto the plate. The waiter says, is everything all right, sir? And I’m like, lovely. Couldn’t be better. Thank you so much. My wife is slightly different. If we go out for a meal, she’s not had a good night unless she’s changed tables three times, sent back the starter and called the head waiter a cunt. I mean, I do complain, but for some reason, it’s inversely proportional to the amount of money I’m spending. If I’m out celebrating in a flash restaurant, I’m Mr. Weedy. I’m Monsieur Iselie Pleased. If I’ve spent £35 on a Chateaubriand, you can stick a turd on a plate in front of me and I’m like, oh yum, that’s perfect. Put me in a greasy spoon on the other hand. I mean, get me in McDonald’s and suddenly I’m cocky fucking dick. Excuse me, my good man, but my sesame seed bun is a tad undercooked and these chicken McNuggets are an absolute mcfucking disgrace. Talking of which, posh people should not be allowed in McDonald’s. They just open one in Hampstead and eating in there is a fucking nightmare. Posh people and fast food is not a good mix. They just don’t understand the concept. You stand there in the queue behind Jeremy and Amanda with little Georgina and Freddie in tow, but do they decide like the rest of us what to order in advance? Do they bother to consult the huge fuck off menu above the counter? No, you’re stuck behind these fuckers. You’re in a hurry. They get to the front, the 14 year old serving says, can I help you? And they’re like, yeah, what’s good today? Nothing’s good. It’s McDonald’s for Christ’s sake. Now order something quick and fuck off. But no, they stand there discussing the menu and then the kid with the stars on his badge makes the fatal mistake of asking them if there’s anything they’d like to drink. No, McDonald’s does not have a fucking wine waiter.

Goodness me. So you didn’t perform much in front of children, I’m guessing.

No, and it’s weird the way, again, that was dug up from an old notebook, that you actually write the swear words in. It’s really bizarre. Like you think, well, you know, that will just come when I perform it. You know, I’ll be riffing and improvising and that stuff will sort itself out. No, I actually wrote in every fucking and I was hoping when, you know, because I kind of knew you’d play that. I was hoping you’d have sort of dubbed in some audience laughter.

No, that would sound awful.

Yeah, it would, wouldn’t it? I mean, any stand-up routine written down is a bit odd, isn’t it? But no, I think I either never did it or I did it once and it died and I never did it again.

I thought it was pretty basic, not basic, but you know.

It was basic. No, completely basic.

No, but basic in as much as it should do fine. It may not be blindingly brilliant, but there are some good jokes in there. I could see audiences laughing at that.

Late night, very drunk at the comedy store. They’d have to be. I think by the time I wrote that, I was already falling out of love with stand-up or either the books had started to do better because there was a few years when they overlapped.

There was a crossover.

There was definitely a crossover and it actually became a practical thing as much as anything in that I was starting to have to travel quite a lot to promote the books. And you can’t work as a stand-up without an awful lot of traveling up and down the motorway, two nights in Leicester, three nights in Nottingham, whatever it might be. So I had a young family and I just wasn’t seeing them. And by that time, I’d already been doing stand-up for at least 20 years. And I just thought, really? Well, in 1987. No, no, not by the time I wrote… When did I write that? When was that? That was about 2001. 1997? Okay, I’d been doing it 15 years by then. And I just kind of had enough. It’s a very good job for a single person. I always think that. And if you’re perfectly happy to… Especially if you’ve got an agent and you’re happy for them to say, here’s your schedule for March, here’s your schedule for April, you’re doing these clubs. You can’t do that when you’ve got a family and you’ve got to sit down with diaries. It’s like a military operation trying to figure out what you’re doing. And I’d had enough of sitting in grotty dressing rooms at 3 o’clock in the morning. I mean, I still miss that 20 minutes on stage. I do. I still miss that buzz you get from that, which is a buzz you can’t get anywhere else. And I get some jollies from doing similar things at book festivals and trying to sneak in as many knob jokes as I can into a discussion about literature. But I don’t really miss the rest. I still hang out with comics all the time. I play poker every week with a bunch of comics who keep me up with what’s happening on the circuit. But that was the most embarrassing bit of old stuff I dug out for you, I think.

No, there’s nothing embarrassing about it.

Oh, there’s worse to come, is there? Yes, much, much worse.

Yes. Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a podcast like this. And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. I was going to say that Stand Up influenced your novel writing because I read somewhere, well, obviously, Tom Thorne is named after fellow Stand Up, Paul Thorne, apparently. Does he know that?

Yes, he does. And there are also characters in the books called Brigstock, Kitson, Holland. It’s certainly in all the early books. I mean, Thorne’s lasted 20 years, but in all the early books, lots of the characters are named after Stand Ups I was working with.

Do they know that?

Yeah, they do. And I would regularly just get asked, can you put me in this? Can you put… The only time I’ve ever asked was when, now, who was it I made? Who was it I made into a hideous paedophile? It will come to me. It will come to me.

I know plenty of comics who would jump at the chance.

Yeah, but that’s the only time I actually asked permission. I thought, you do need to know what I’m gonna do with your character’s name. Yeah, no, I did a lot of that by then. But it did, if I’m guessing where you’re going with this question, Stand Up did really influence the writing later on, because, you know, as you know, you can’t walk out on stage at the comedy store and go, stick with me, I’ll get funny in about 10 minutes. You’ve got to be funny straight away. And I knew I had to engage the reader straight away and keep them engaged and build towards climax and all that sort of stuff. But also, crime writing uses a lot of the same techniques, you know, in terms of the reveal, the pullback and reveal. When you reveal certain bits of information, the timing is very important. Crime novels are full of punchlines. They’re just really dark ones.

And also, I imagine the maverick, hard drinking, hard living rule breaker, the cliche of the stand-up comedian has quite a lot in common with the cliche of the hard-bitten thriller detective. So, probably not a huge leap to make.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. But one of the things you realize quite quickly about that cliche is that it’s an archetype that you can throw away if you want, but you might be in danger. You can decide you want to write a western, in which you have a cowboy who doesn’t have a hat or a horse or a gun, but he’s probably not a cowboy. You know, there are certain boxes you do have to tick. And there are certainly a lot of things you can do within the genre, and there’s no limits to it. You can, you know, write crime novels, set in space. You can do whatever you want. But there are certain boxes you’ve got to tick, I think.

Right, well, let’s have another off-cut. Tell us about this one, please.

Well, it’s another treatment for a TV show, for a TV panel show from the Throwing Shits At The Wall Notebook of the mid-90s, and this one’s called Hot Air.

Chairman Dickie Branston, DB, overseas crew selection and flight. Flight always, ultimately doomed, crew doomed, DB always survives to fly again next week. Only one celeb will survive the fated balloon journey, different route every week. Panel, four celebs, round one, crew selection. Each panelist given two celebs, broadly speaking, a goodie, much loved public figure, and a baddie, a figure the public love to hate. Up to panelist which one they want to promote and which one they want to ground. One minute to vigorously defend the one they want to see grounded and attack the celeb they want to see stepping into the basket. So Stephen Fry gets Saddam Hussein and Glenn Hoddle. Tony Banks gets Naomi Campbell and Tim Henman. Francis Edmonds gets Chris Evans and Frank Bruno. Panelist gets Tony Blair and Silla Black. At end of round one, DB awards points for originality, wit and good questions and selects the four members of the crew. Now each panellist for the duration of the flight becomes that celeb, vigorously defending their alter ego in the face of an assortment of on-board crises. Round two, altitude. The balloon is losing altitude and we need to lose a crew member. Rather like an old-fashioned balloon debate, it’s strictly every person for themselves and while each in theory has a chance to speak on why they shouldn’t be callously thrown overboard, swiftly degenerates into a free-for-all with DB trying to keep peace as we descend into vicious insult, scurrilous rumour, lying and blatant self-interest. Political figures tend to thrive in this round. At end of round, DB decides which crew member to sacrifice and four becomes three. Round three, dinner time. Crew are starving. One has to become the on-board meal, but which? Each celeb has to actively pursue one another describing how they like them cooked and eaten, with points for originality, recipe-wise and imagination. Ultimate decision, as always, is DB’s. At end of round, one crew member becomes dinner, down to two. Final round, hot air. Each of final two compete to lift balloon. How much hot air can they generate by waffling about their lives, loves, careers, while being shamelessly heckled and sidetracked by other panellists? Losing celeb is yoiked overboard. The celeb-winning panellist is announced, end of flight, with losers to nominate future flight crews for future flights. According to the notes on your script, there were three possible titles for this. Hot Air, which is the one you’ve gone with, Flight To Nowhere or Celebrity Plane Crash. Now that’s the one I like the best. That’s such a bad taste title. I love it.

It is. I still quite like it. Yeah, no, I still like it. Again, I think that would be, you know, one of those programs on Channel 4 or Channel 5 now that you came in after the pub and stuck on. And it’s fatally flawed. Even listening to it, you can see it because when it started, I thought, oh, that’s quite interesting. But then the idea that these panelists have to pretend to be Chris Evans or Cilla Black or boy, those names, all those people that were big celebs back then.

Half of the people are dead.

Yes, I know.

You see, it really does date it. You’ve got names like Tony Banks.

Tony Banks.

On the back of…

And I presume, I mean, Tony Banks, the MP and not Tony Banks, the keyboard player at Genesis.

Presumably, he’s the political figure who would thrive in all that lying.

But I think I looked at it in the cold light of day and went, you cannot be serious. You really think somebody’s going to make that?

Well, they would make it nowadays.

Well, that’s the thing. I do look at some of the stuff that’s on now. I mean, the way panel games have kind of gone with that degree of sort of craziness and bad taste and yeah.

Well, now you’re Mark Billingham, bestselling novelist.

Yeah, I might have more of a chance now.

Obviously, you’ve done a lot of television writing. This was a panel show. I couldn’t find any reference to any panel shows that you’ve written for. You’re mainly children’s television, weren’t you?

I was doing the air. I was doing a lot of kids’ TV drama and animation. I mean, some of which was quite good. But when you’re writing animation, the money for these shows comes from all over the world, from a dozen different countries. So you would get a dozen different sets of notes. You’d put a script in and then you get, here’s a note from France. Here are the notes from Lithuania. Here are the notes from Eurovision. And eventually, you’d go, can you put that stuff back in to the eighth draft that you took out two drafts ago? And you’d start going, life is too short. It really was tremendously hard work just to write a half hour episode of an animated kids show. And some were more fun than others, but eventually I just got heartily sick of it.

But it was while you were writing Night School in 1997 that I believe you and your writing partner had the personal experience of crime violence. I wondered, was that what made you shift from the television children’s writing to crime novels?

I don’t know whether it was quite as clinical as that. What I can certainly say is that when I did start writing the novels, which was only two years later or 18 months later, that fed directly into it.

So what exactly happened?

Definitely. We were attacked and held hostage in our hotel room. We were in Manchester working on this show, Night School, and we’d gone out the first couple of nights, gone out on the town. On the third night, we said, right, let’s stay in and we’ve got to do some work on the script. So you come over to my room. We’ll watch, I remember it was on the telly, we’ll watch ER and we’ll watch University Challenge and we’ll have food delivered to the room. We had pizza and a beer for a fiver each. We were sitting in my room watching telly, talking about the filming we were due to do tomorrow, and there’s a knock on the door. I went, oh, that’s going to be room service, come for the trays. I opened the door just without thinking, and it was three guys in balaclavas who just burst in and beat the shit out of us and put bags over our heads and tied us up and ran around Manchester with our debit cards and took whatever they could take, cash and phones and watches and just threatened to kill us for three hours, held us in there for three hours because this happened at about nine o’clock and they needed to use the cash point cards either side of midnight so they could get two days worth of money. And yeah, it was truly, truly horrible and when I started writing, I thought I want to write about victims and I want to write about what it’s like to be properly afraid, you know, not sitting on a roller coaster afraid, but am I going to see my wife and kids again afraid? So yeah, it definitely, it fed into becoming a crime rights.

Did they ever get caught?

Oh, God, no. No, no, no, no. You know, there was all the police were there sealing all the rooms off and CID were there going and actually they’d never heard of anything like it happening. But it was quite a serious crime. You know, they had gone down for some hard time, these lads. And about one really interesting little detail that I think I put in a book somewhere, quite a few things that happened. I used it as a direct plot point in my second book, but they wouldn’t let us into the room. Obviously, we were put up somewhere else and the room was sealed off. But afterwards, we needed to go back into the room to get a few things. I needed to get some clothes or whatever and I said, can I go back into the room? And I went back into the bathroom and there’s no way to put this delicately, but the people that were holding us hostage had made rather a mess in the bathroom. Just in a way that made it very obvious to me they were as terrified as we were.

Oh, really?

It was a strange little detail, but they had…

So many questions. I can’t actually formulate one of them.

I know. I know. And they got nothing out of it. I mean, what did they get? A few hundred quid and a couple of phones and risking… And why you?

And also, why two people? Surely there’s more of a risk. Surely choose one person.

Well, I think what the police did conclude was that it was some kind of inside job in that they got them on CCTV coming into the hotel and it wasn’t like they wandered around randomly knocking on doors. They came straight up to whatever floor I was on and came straight to my room because I’d ordered room service. But I just think they just knocked on the door thinking that if I get… Because there were no spy holes in the door. And if I’d gone, who is it? They’d just have said room service. And as it is, I just opened the door without… And this was the time I was still working as a standup. I was staying in a lot of hotels. To this day, I don’t feel particularly safe in a hotel. Somebody says, hello, come to change your bed or whatever. I’m like, yeah, I want ID. I want you to sit. I’m not letting you in. You just don’t expect something like that to happen in a hotel room, do you? That was one of the reasons it was so shocking. And weird, little weird details that… I was the one that answered the door. So I answered the door and the guy smacked me in the face and I kind of ran back into the room and these three guys burst in balaclavas. And my mate, Pete, who was sitting in the chair in the corner, literally jumped out of his chair. You know that expression, he jumped out of his chair. I saw him. There was no part of it making contact with the floor or the chair, but it was bonkers. And I think they thought we were a couple, which is the other kind of interesting little detail because at one point they said, give us your pin number or we’ll hurt you. And I was going, oh, oh, oh, oh, I don’t know. And they went, no, give us your pin number or we’ll hurt your mate. And all I was thinking was, hurt my mate. Just fine. We’re not we’re not an item. Yeah, there we are.

God, how dramatic and interesting.

As brushes with violent crime go, it wasn’t too bad.

No. And you lived to tell the tale quite a few times.

I did live to tell the tale and get a few books out of it.

Right. So let’s have one more off-cut. Tell us about this one now.

Well, talking about violence, this is an article I wrote about the notorious murderer Ian Brady in 2017.

It was, of course, the terrible suffering inflicted on their victims by Brady and Hindley that led to their notoriety as the very personification of evil. And while I find it easy to understand the celebration, first of Hindley’s death in 1992 and now her partners, there is one word which has cropped up repeatedly in much of the coverage that, I must confess, makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Monster. For me, it is a word that is too easily trotted out, too convenient. It implies a creature that is somehow otherworldly or supernatural, and sadly Ian Brady was anything but that. It’s a categorisation that allows us to put the likes of Brady and Hindley in a box marked Not Us to point and shudder and say, that’s what monsters look like. I do not have the slightest doubt that Ian Brady was clinically insane. He saw visions and heard voices. That in no way excuses his heinous crimes or diminishes the unimaginable suffering endured by his victims or their loved ones, but elevating these incomprehensible acts to almost mythic levels of evil, while perhaps making them easier to process, is not helpful to any of us in the long run. There have been others who have committed crimes as dreadful as Ian Brady’s. Robert Black, four young girls, raped and murdered. Mohammed Bijay, 16 young boys, raped and murdered. Javed Iqbal, over a hundred boys, aged 6 to 16, raped and murdered. And it would be naive to believe that there won’t be more. It must be at least arguable that defining such criminals quite as simply as we often do, could hinder attempts to prevent such atrocities in the future. In researching the Moors murders, it was actually the actions of Myra Hindley, rather than those of Brady that disturbed me the most. Not because she was a woman, which seems to me the reason she attracted so much opprobrium until her death. That was not, after all, how women were supposed to behave. It went against the laws of nature. It was rather because while Brady’s murderous perversions were rooted in psychopathy, I could find no evidence whatsoever that the same applied to Hindley. Put simply, she did what she did because she loved Ian Brady, because she wanted to please him, which is something I will never understand.

So tell us about this article, then.

Well, this was, again, an article commissioned just after Ian Brady had died, and an article that never ran because I don’t think it was quite what the paper wanted. I think they wanted a kind of response to Brady’s death, similar to the ones I’d seen in an awful lot of the coverage, which was, you know, good riddance to an evil monster. And I wanted to write something a bit more thoughtful than that. I’d already made a documentary about Brady and Hindley some years before that. And I started formulating the kind of stuff that was in that article. I mean, bizarrely, during the making of that program, Brady wrote to me. He wrote me a letter while he was still alive, which is very disturbing. I remember my wife wanted me to destroy it, didn’t want it in the house.

What did it say?

Well, he first of all, he wanted me to know what a terrible time he was having. Well, you know, boo hoo, Ian. But he also wanted to let me know in a kind of real Hannibal Lecter kind of way, how clever he was, literally how clever he was, telling me what his IQ was. It was really important to him that I realized what a smart bloke he was. It was very, very weird. But yeah, in researching that program, I came to the conclusion that Brady was properly bonkers, properly, properly bonkers, but that she wasn’t. And it was all rather odd, also great, wonderful little things emerged. You know, he was apparently on this hunger strike for years before he died. Various people that had personal connections with him, you know, prison guards and so on, were happy to tell me that he secretly hid cream eggs and would stuff his face with cream eggs when nobody was looking. Who would have thought that? But now I stand by it. He lied even about the hunger strike. I mean, I stand by every word of that article, actually. I did think it was a little unseemly, the coverage. And not remotely useful. We do the same thing with any one of these, you know, whether it’s Shipman or Fred and Rose West, we go, they’re monsters and put them in that box over there. That’s what they look like. They’re not us. They’re not. Yes, they are. You know, they’re the bloke next door and the friendly doctor and the neighborhood builder. And, you know, you can’t see them coming. And people always pop up at the woodwork whenever something like this happens. They go, yeah, I always knew they were a wrong one, that bloke next door. No, you didn’t. Of course you didn’t. You know, that’s the whole reason they were able to get away with it for so long. And I just, the word monster, the word evil, I don’t think those words are helpful.

So you never met him then when you were doing the menu making the documentary?

He, I think the program makers approached him. God, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been in plenty of prisons in the course of, you know, 20 years writing about crime fiction, done stuff with prisoners and whatever. But that, I’m not sure I could have done that. I’m not sure I could sit and talk to him.

Have you ever interviewed people who have committed the sort of crimes that your villains do?

Yeah.

You’ve managed to actually interview these people.

Yes, I have. Yes, I have. And it’s very, very odd. Very, very odd. The best example is a man called Christian Bala, who was a Polish killer.

He was Polish or the people he killed were Polish?

No, he was Polish. Yeah, these serial killers, they all have these weird little quirks with him.

He didn’t like Poles.

He didn’t like people from Poland. No, he was a Polish killer and it was a very notorious case that had been unsolved for many years. Horrible, brutal, brutal murder. And he then wrote a book. He wrote like a novel in which it became clear that it was him. And he was like, again, had this vastly overestimating his own intelligence and his own skill and whatever. And eventually some cops went, hang on a minute, the stuff that happens in this book is awfully familiar. And he ended up getting caught and whatever. And he became a sort of big, cool celeb. But yeah, so I did a documentary about him and I got to go and interview him in prison in Poland. And it was horrible. I mean, he was just, he did have a kind of, you know, much as I’ve said, I don’t like the words monster and evil. He wasn’t like sitting and talking to a normal person. I mean, yeah, it was like sitting to somebody who’s been in prison for a few years. And so that’s always, you know, people become institutionalized. But because this was the BBC, we were making this, he seemed to think that I could help him in some way. You know, I want you to tell my story. I want you to get this out there so that, you know, the truth will be known. Not the truth that I’m not a killer, because everybody, including him, you know, acknowledged it by that point, but that the world will see my genius.

Oh, gosh. Because that was his angle, was it?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, he’s quite convinced that this book, which is called A Mock, it’s called A Mock.

Should we be publicising this?

No, it’s just, trust me, you know, it’s garbage. But he’s convinced it’s a great work of philosophic literature. But yeah, whenever I’ve been into prisons, for whatever reason it is, you never come out particularly cheery. But I don’t think that’s the point.

Right. Time for your final offcut. Tell us about this one.

Yes. Well, I’ve always fancied myself as a songwriter, God forbid. These are the lyrics for a song, I don’t know what you’ve done with this. These are the lyrics for a song which I wrote only last year in 2019. One of many attempts at writing a country standard. This is called The Taste.

When the bottle is laid down upon the table, as I pull across the glass and start to pour, everything I need is right there on the label. Every flavor that a drinker has in store, dark and smoky, honey sweet, it just don’t matter. Not the grain, the malt, the barley or the blend. I can drink it neat, I can drink it down with water. It always tastes the same way in the end. It tastes of the woman I lost and the pain that cost a life I don’t deserve to see. A nice shot of shame and a kick of blame and the man I was supposed to be. The friends I knew and it tastes of you and the money I blew when I was betting. Whatever it says on the bottle, it tastes of forgetting. Around me I see love and I hear laughter. The workings of the whiskey and the beer. But I will never taste a sweet hereafter, so I’ll keep drinking till the memories disappear. It tastes of the woman I lost and the pain that cost and lies that came so easily. Blood, sweat and tears and wasted years with a hint of all the misery. The friends I knew and it tastes of you and now I’m through with the ways I was set in. Whatever it says on the bottle, it tastes of forgetting. Whatever it says on the bottle, it tastes of forgetting.

So what do you say to that?

Well, they’re very, very nicely read. Obviously it needs a pedal steel and a bass.

I thought it worked quite well as a poem.

It has been made into a demo with some music and stuff. Yeah, this has always been a dream. It used to be a songwriter and I’m a huge fan of country music as is my detective. Couple of years ago, I did a put a show together with a brilliant country Americana act called My Darling Clementine, where I wrote a story based around some of their songs and we toured it. We toured around the country and so I was reading the story, they were playing the songs and it was a whole thing.

Did you join in with being a musician or were you just the narrator?

Yeah, I read the story and then at the very end, I came on and did a song with them. Yeah, I’m getting those kicks now as part of a band called The Fun Lovin Crime Writers.

Great name. Great name.

Yeah, isn’t it? There’s six of us and we are of course, crime writers. Three of us, and I’m not one of them, are brilliant, brilliant, proper musicians. The other three of us are just clinging on. Stuart Neville, Irish crime writer, Stuart Neville on guitar, who’s a guitar god. I mean, he’s probably brilliant. Doug Johnston, similarly on drums and Luca Vesta on bass. Then there’s me, Val McDermid and Chris Brookmire up front, and me and Chris thrashed at our guitars and Val sings. And we started this off as a bit of fun two years ago, just to do at festivals and stuff. And then last summer we played Glastonbury. Last summer we were on the acoustic stage at Glastonbury. So it’s all got a bit silly, got a bit out of hand. And we had a big tour. We had a big spring tour that the pandemic managed to put the kibosh on. But yeah, we just do cover versions. We’re a party band. We do cover versions of songs about murder. That’s the gimmick. So songs about crime and murder, you know, I Fought The Law, Falsom Prison Blues, Psycho Killer, you know, that kind of stuff. But-

What about original material?

No, we couldn’t, no, no, no, no. That’s absolutely off the table because if six of us, we’re all writers, can you imagine six of us going, I’ve written a song. No, I’ve written a song. Your song’s shit. I’ve written, you know, it would never work. So we just stick to those cover versions. But secretly I harbor this desire that, you know, I can one day write a country standard and that somebody, I’m going to get a call going, X wants to record one of your songs. I mean, most of the people I’d like to record them are long dead, of course, you know, George Jones and Johnny Cash and all those kind of people. But yeah, it’s something I just do in my spare time is write songs that never see the light of day.

Well, you’ve got to have a hobby, I suppose.

Yeah, I mean, you know, well, recently, I’ve discovered jigsaws thanks to the pandemic. But they’re all music based jigsaws, album covers and stuff. But but no, songwriting is a major passion of mine. I mean, I love the perfect pop song or country song, just two minutes, 45 seconds that can tell you a brilliant story. You know, I love songs that tell stories owed to Billy Joe by Bobby Gentry. You know what I mean? The end of which you just go, what? Hey, what was he throwing off the bridge? Oh, my God. Yeah. Any song that tells a brilliant story, I love.

Do you think that’s what you’re going to be aiming for in the future? I mean, you’ve got 20 books now. Is it not time to make another change, perhaps?

I only if I don’t want to make a living anymore. It’s quite a bold move, Laura. Quite a big step.

The thing is, you’ve been quite dramatic and you went from you wrote two books when you’ve never written a book before. You’re somebody clearly who can make things happen when it needs to be done. You’re not someone who sits around and waits for someone to come to them. So I’m just imagining you’re probably…

Yeah.

All right. Don’t give up the day job as such.

Again, it’s such a weird thing to think that writing these stories has become the day job. I mean, it is the best job in the world and you’ve got to treat it like a job, but it’s not, you know, it’s just telling stories. When my kids are annoyed at me, I’ll just go, oh, shut up, get up to your office and write another one of your stupid stories. And it doesn’t matter how many times I tell them that those little stories have put shoes on their feet, pay for their phones in case they’re listening. You know, no, I do love it. I absolutely love it. Well, I don’t necessarily love the writing, I always love the sitting down and doing the writing. But I love all the perks. I love the, I love standing up at stage on a book festival and gobbling off about it. Events in bookshops and book festivals and, and the stuff with The Fun Lovin Crime Writers. It’s just been a joy. It’s showing off. It’s a showing off bit. You know, the writing has become the job. And you can’t always enjoy your job, can you? Especially when people dig out all the old shit that was never deemed good enough.

Well, to be fair, you were the one who sent it to me because my final question would be, are there any off cuts that you’ve still got that you didn’t share with us today?

There are some bits of old stand up, I think, scribbled in that stand up notebook that, oh boy, no, I couldn’t bear to see the light of day.

That bad?

That bad. Because even when I looked at that one that you did, the one about complaining, I thought, yeah, I know, like you said, probably could get away with that if the audience were drunk enough. But there were bits when I just, what were you thinking? Why did you think anybody would find that remotely funny? I suppose you’ve always got to think you get better at stuff, haven’t you? So I mean, I know that when we first spoke about it, you were like, oh, stuff you wrote when you were a kid or whatever. And I remember the first thing I ever wrote. And if it had been written down, if I could have found it, I would have sent it in. It was a Sherlock Holmes pastiche play that I wrote at school when I was about 12, called The Case Of Sherlock Houses. See what I did there? Genius, genius. The Case Of Sherlock Houses and The Golden Goosberry. I can still remember all of it. That was it. And I put it up in front of the class. Well, me too, but I couldn’t find it. I don’t think I’m not sure. It must have been written down in a school exercise book.

That sounds wonderful. Nervous laughter there.

Yeah, very nervous.

Well, Mark Billingham, it’s been absolutely fabulous to talk to you today. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thank you very much. It’s been a hoot.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Mark Billingham. The Offcuts were performed by Emma Clarke, Chris Pavlo, Keith Wickham and Chris 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.

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 writer, comedian, and actress, Katherine Jakeways. As a writer, she rose to prominence with her first radio series, North by Northamptonshire, a gentle award nominated comedy drama with an all-star cast that ran for three series on Radio 4. She went on to create and write three series of All Those Women for Radio 4, one series of Guilt Trip, various other single works, and her radio play, Where This Service Will Terminate, was so popular, it was extended to include another four installments of the story. If you recognize her voice, it could be from her appearance in countless TV comedies, including Outnumbered, Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge, and Tracey Ullman’s Show, which she also wrote on, or from the recent Horrible Histories film where she played the lead character’s mum. Katherine Jakeways, welcome to the Offcuts Drawer.

Hello, thank you for having me. Thank you very much, that’s a nice intro. I was relieved that you kept going because it sounded a bit like you were going to say that you were looking inside a writer’s bottom. I was glad it was the writer’s bottom, I was relieved.

No, no, no, that’s not this kind of program, no, no, no.

Good, well, thanks for having me.

Now, do you need to have anything around you when you write?

It might be more about what I don’t have around me, which is mainly my children. If they’re in the house, it’s much harder to write. So yeah, an empty house is ideal. And I can’t have any, much of my husband’s annoyance often actually, I can’t write at all if there’s a radio on or if there’s even any music on. I know I think some writers quite like to have a bit of music on, but I quite like it to be silent because I very often speak lines aloud to myself or sort of under my breath and talk to myself. And I think even having music on, I think does interrupt the rhythm of speech actually. Yeah.

Okay, let’s kick off with your first off-cut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Sure, it’s an excerpt from the first draft of my radio series, North by Northamptonshire. And we did the first series in 2007. So it’s around then.

Thanks, Martin. Gosh, it looks lovely and warm in that studio. Well, that’s right. I’m out and about as usual, continuing my mission to bring you the very best in entertainment around the region this weekend. Now, I spent last Sunday at my favorite of the region’s tourist attractions, India Alive. I don’t know if you’ve been to India Alive, is where you can experience the sights, sounds and smells of the subcontinent, five minutes south of Lowestoft on the A12. You can generally sum up India Alive in three words, needs a gift shop. However, I spent a wonderful afternoon there on Saturday with my friend Maxine and they really looked after us. I didn’t realize you could put chicken nuggets into a chapati, but with ketchup, it really works. And it takes your mind off the stench of goats and chopsticks. But this weekend, I’m suggesting you take a trip to Waddenhoe, where behind me, rehearsals are already well underway for their annual show and tell night. Local people are invited to come along and show their friends and neighbors something and then tell them what it’s all about. So it should be a lot of fun. Already I’m hearing rumors of some doggy dancing, a collection of autographs from some of the region’s best love radio DJs and a very unusual birthmark. But I came along to this event last year and it was an absolute hoot. I for one will struggle to forget local man Alf Raymond’s country and western body popping, I can tell you. But a good time is guaranteed for all. And you know me, I really like having a good time. I’m a bit funny like that. I also really like nice people and kind people. Not so keen on pedophiles. Back to you in the studio, Martin.

This character was called Penny, according to the script you sent us. Tell us about this character. Did she stay in the series? Did she change much?

I think she was from a very early version of the script because North Byron Northamptonshire started as a show that I’d done, as a stage show, a one-woman show that I did in Soho Theatre in London, which was just me playing lots of different characters in a village hall. So I think it was called the village hall, not very originally. And yeah, I played various characters, women, men, children, but it was just me on stage. And one of them was this character who was a local news reporter. So she was slightly based, I mean, actually, she was based on every local news reporter ever. And actually, when it came to it, we ended up cutting it because I think it started out with North Byron Northamptonshire being a bit of a sketch show. We were sort of working it out. It was the first thing that I’d ever written in terms of a radio thing. So I’d only ever done monologues on stage. And so when it was suggested that I turn it into something for the radio, I was very much sort of making it as I went along and feeling my way into whether it was gonna be a sketch show or a narrative thing or sort of sitcom. So it ended up being none of those really. It was a comedy drama, I suppose. It was certainly narrative, but it wasn’t really a sitcom. But to begin with, I think I wasn’t sure whether it might end up being a bit more sketchy. And if it had have been, then I think this character, Penny Bundock, would have been much more part of it. I think that in the fourth episode, the final episode of the first series, I believe that I did actually do this character, but only once as a one-off thing. But I had, yeah, I’d sort of assumed that I would play more parts in Northburner Time Show than I ended up playing the poor producer.

How many did you end up playing in the end?

I was two, and then the news reporter in the last episode, but I did less and less as time went on, actually. It started out as a sort of, I sort of had done it on stage as a vehicle for me as an actor. And then the poor producer had to have an awkward conversation with me where she said, you know, you’re on radio, you can’t really play every single character, including the men and the children, because it just won’t come across. I guess if it was a bit more sketchy, then I could have done that a little bit more. But as it turned out, we had such brilliant people in it anyway. And I sort of created this wish list of people, actors that I would have liked to have played the parts, you know, in an ideal world. And then we got, I think every single person that we asked said yes to it extraordinarily. And I didn’t realize at the time how unusual that was or how lucky we were to get people. It must have just caught people on a good day, I guess. But it was, yeah. So Penny was a character that I’d done on stage and had been pleased with. And it was interesting. It’s funny now when I listen back to the first series of Ev North by Northamptonshire because it’s really obvious to me that there are, particularly in the first episode, the pilot that we did, there are whole sections which really only exist in the radio version because they were versions of a monologue that I’d done on stage that I had struggled to sort of mold into being scenes. And I wasn’t really very good at writing scenes with more than one person in them. I just didn’t have any experience with that because all the writing I’d done had been monologues of myself on stage. So I hadn’t done any sort of two-handers or more than that. And although, I’m really proud of the first series, but it does get better as it goes along. And I had a lot of help with sort of how you structure a radio series and how you sort of develop characters. And so by the time it gets to the third series, and then there was a finale that we did at the end, but particularly the third series actually, I am really proud of it when I look back on it. I think it’s one of the best, it’s a bit hard when something you’ve done early is one of your things that you’re proudest of. And actually, I do think one of the keys to it, and this was entirely accidental, was that I’m not a big listener to Radio 4. I wasn’t before and I don’t listen to loads of Radio 4 comedy now, which is terrible, isn’t it? Maybe I don’t know whether I’m happy to have that said in public, but it’s true. And so I don’t think I sort of knew what Radio 4 comedies sounded like. So what I wrote was sort of a version of something that I thought I’d like to hear. And actually, as time’s gone on, it’s very hard not to sort of fall into doing, oh, this is how Radio 4 comedy sounds and this is the rhythms of the way a scene works. And often that’s brilliant, but there can be times where it feels a little bit like you’re copying the way other people have done it. And I think if there was a success to North Point Northamptonshire, it was slightly accidentally that I had written something that didn’t sound like other stuff on Radio 4 necessarily at the time.

Right, time for another off-cut. What might this one be?

Oh, this, I’m slightly embarrassed about this. This is a short poem that I wrote. You’ll be glad that it’s short when you hear it, when I was a teenager.

Is it worth the pain and sorrow? The thinking, well, he’ll call tomorrow. The listening to my friends insist that he does know I exist. He never writes, he never calls. He never thinks of me at all. Why is it then that as before, with every day I love him more?

So how old were you when you wrote this?

Dear. I think I would have been about 14. Probably.

Was it Love’s Young Dream?

It wasn’t. I think I thought it was. It was entirely unrequited, as the poem suggests. I’d been on a summer, it was a week-long residential sort of thing, which was like a PGL holiday, you know, when you go and do sort of orienteering and canoeing and stuff like that, except it wasn’t. It was a slightly sort of lesser version of that, which was sort of supposed to be sports. And I went just for a week and we did sort of like tennis and netball and dicking about and got given meals and had a disco and you know, it was just a way of, your parents get rid of you for a week probably, but now I realize now I’m a parent myself. And there was a group of boys who, I went to a normal, completely normal comprehensive school in Northamptonshire, but there was a group. Yeah, so I wasn’t hugely excited about seeing boys, but it was the fact that these boys were from a boarding school and they seemed like the kind of boys that you’d see on telly, that they were sort of big. There was this one in particular, how I wrote this poem about, whose name, but let’s call him Tim.

So coy, let’s call him Tim.

Yeah, let’s call him Tim. He was tall and sort of broad-shouldered. It was sort of like a slow motion scene, like they just sort of appeared in this sports hall and they all walked in and they were all quite sort of, you know, high and floppy-haired and a bit sort of Hugh Grant, but bigger and rugby shirts. I mean, it actually sounds horrific now and I’m actually quite embarrassed. Embarrassed by my 14 year old self for having any interest in that, but they weren’t like boys that I’d ever met before. Anyway, we had a week of this sort of, you know, chatting and flirting and in a 14 year old awful way, nothing happened at all, but we did exchange addresses because of course it was long before, thank God, long before mobile phones or social media or anything like that. So there was no, I’ll text you or I’ll WhatsApp you or whatever you would do now, Snapchat, listen to me like some gran. So thank God. Don’t you always think, thank God I wasn’t a teenager and that wasn’t an option to me that I could have tweeted somebody or done something publicly because, oh my God, I just would have been the most horrific. As that poem demonstrates, I would, you know, the stuff that when you’re a teenager that you, you know, I remember having some boy’s phone number and just so thrilled to even have his landline number. But the idea that you could actually just, you know, send people messages and put things publicly and on their walls or whatever.

No, you had to just tell your best friend about it over the phone for about five hours.

Exactly, so my poor friend Ruth would have heard endlessly about this guy. Anyway, so I came back from the holiday with the addresses at boarding school of all these boys. And this one in particular, I wrote to several times. I’d like to think I didn’t bombard him with letters, but certainly I wrote him enough letters that I expected to get a reply and just never got a reply. And I remember there being weeks and weeks where every day when I got back from school, I’d be checking for the post to see if there was a letter from him and there wasn’t. And so that poem, which I never actually, I believe, wrote down. So this is now 30 years on, I have remembered that poem in my head. And very much my heart. And I never considered myself to be, and that poem demonstrates why. I never did much writing at all really until I was much older.

I was gonna ask you about your school performance. Were you academic? Were you somebody always very creative in English lessons?

I was quite, I did okay at school. Yeah, like I say, it was just a normal comprehensive school, but no, I did well. I did quite, you know, I worked reasonably hard and I always liked English and I always sort of liked drama and I wanted to be an actor and I never considered being a writer. Although my granny did say to me when I was younger and I remember this specifically that she said she thought I would end up being a writer and it was baffling to me because it never occurred to me that I would write. But, and I never, I didn’t have any interest in it for another 20 years really, but she had obviously thought that that might be something I’d be, I’d be good at. And I think-

Obviously your thank you letters for the money you were sent to your birthday must be particularly interesting. Well, let’s have your next offcut now, which is this. What’s this one called?

Right, so this is a monologue. I think it may be pretty much the first monologue I ever wrote or certainly one of the first. She was called Janet, the character, and I wrote it for, it ultimately ended up being in my first Edinburgh show in 2003.

The first time me and Graham had sex with each other, he told me me pubes were unruly. He said to me, what do you call that down there, Leo Sayer? And I said, no, not really. He’s been me by friend for about 18 months, but to be honest, he’s a complete bastard. I did think at one stage that he might not be a bastard, but he was a bastard. It got to the stage when I’d say we were rowing between 23 and 24-7, and he was phoning me up specifically to have a go at me. And then we had this weekend about a month ago when we had a right laugh and shagged along. He sang to me. Yeah, he did. He’s quite good, actually. Karaoke he does, and he was singing Wake Up Maggie, which I really like because my mum’s name was Amanda and it reminds me of her. Anyway, this holiday was planned that weekend. It was a package out of Manchester and our flight was packed full. By the time we got on the plane, me and Graham weren’t speaking and me kids, Carl and Haley, were hitting each other with the free coloring books and stuffing the paper sick bags down each other’s underpants. Graham’s useless in that sort of situation. On the last night of the hotel, they had a talent contest for the kids. You know, the stupid entertainment team organized it and all these fucking kids were belting out like a virgin and doing all the dance routines for Hit Me Baby One More Time. You can imagine. Some of them have been practicing all week. They knew all the moves, you know. So when my Haley got proudly onto the stage and announced she was going to do her impression of a camel.

This one ends rather abruptly. What happens at the end of this? Or is there a piece missing? Is it some-

I wonder if I sent you the wrong bit of it or something or didn’t include the end when I sent it to you. But anyway, it’s probably no bad thing. You get the gist anyway. Basically it was a, when I left drama school, I did some acting jobs, not massively successfully for several years. And one of the acting jobs I did about three years after I left drama school was a production, oddly, of Hamlet. And the director at the time, as a rehearsal exercise, encouraged us to write some monologues based on newspaper articles. So he came in to the rehearsal room with a big pile of newspapers, different newspapers from that day and sort of chucked them on the table and said, pick a newspaper and find a story that’s interesting to you and write in the first person a monologue as if you are one of the characters in that newspaper article. I think it was an Indian rehearsal technique, an acting Indian rehearsal technique. And the guy was called John Russell Brown, he was a really lovely man. I think he was probably in his, certainly late 70s, if not 80s at the time. And I’m afraid to say he’s no longer with us, but he was, I didn’t know at the time what a massive change in my life he was going to bring about. But he did, accidentally, by encouraging us to write these monologues. And this was a story that was in the newspaper at the time about this woman who had been on holiday, and you didn’t get much detail about actually what had happened on the holiday, but the article was about the fact that she’d come back on the plane from wherever it was she’d been to Manchester Airport, and she’d got pissed on the plane, and had ended up shouting like a big, sort of, tirade at all these passengers, and the police had been there to meet her when she got back to Manchester Airport and she’d been arrested. And so, I had written this monologue as if I was this woman, Janet, who I’ve got no idea if that was actually a real name. It may have been. So I tried to make it slightly more sympathetic that she’d been on this holiday, and she’d had this terrible time on holiday, and her kids had had the piss taken out of them, and she’d been away with this boyfriend who wasn’t very nice to her, and there’d been a sort of sequence of events which had made her angry and got her, you know, hit up and the whole sort of holiday thing of being hot anyway, and just the sort of pressure cooker of it all, and then on the plane on the way home, she’d had a few drinks. And so as part of the monologue, she got angrier and angrier and angrier, and then the last sort of minute of the monologue was her just doing this big tirade at the audience. I mean, in retrospect, I don’t know how this must have gone down in the comedy clubs of South London, which is where I did end up performing it. It was, I used to really enjoy doing it, and it was, it started out as this rehearsal exercise, and then a group of us, because we had written these monologues, that we all really enjoyed doing.

From the same production, from the Hamlet.

From the same production of Hamlet, yeah. We were all friends who’d been at Lambda together, actually. So several of them are really good friends of mine to this day, and we enjoyed doing it, and several people had said, oh, you know what, you should see if you could do that as a sort of comedy show. So we put together this, I think it was called Beyond the News, and it was five or six of us doing these monologues. And the idea was that each week, we would come up with something that had been in the news that week, and so it was vaguely topical, although they were all sort of small stories like this.

They were character exercises, though, character monologues.

Exactly that, yeah. And then we did them in various comedy clubs in Finsbury Park or in Crouch End or I think there was a Brixton one, and we did it in various places. And as a result of that, some of them didn’t enjoy doing it as much as I did, but it was something that I really liked. And I got seen by an agent, a really brilliant and lovely comedy agent called Lisa White, who took me on the basis of that and then encouraged me to do more comedy, which I hadn’t done any of that kind of thing up till that stage, and I hadn’t done any writing. So it was sort of the beginning of me doing any writing or comedy, which led to me going to Edinburgh in 2003, which was my first Edinburgh show. And that character, Janet, ended up being the sort of finale of the Edinburgh show. And it’s, when I look back on it now, because I don’t do any live performance stuff now, really, and I haven’t for years, I’m sort of baffled by how fearless I was at the time, because I was sort of mid-20s, and I used to go off in my car and drive to wherever these places were in London, which I didn’t even particularly know London that well, and I’d just turn up, and it would be mainly, almost entirely blokes, obviously, on the comedy club bill, and there would be a bill of stand-ups, there would be women as well, obviously, but it was, you know, fewer. And then I was often the only character act, I don’t know, I would hate now to see a short video of me doing it, but actually I’m quite proud of my 25-year-old self for having the balls to do it, really, and to, you know, sometimes it went down really well. There was certainly nights, and I remember one particular night where it didn’t go down well at all, and I tried to climb out of the toilet window afterwards because I couldn’t face going back through the pub to leave through the audience. And so, yeah, so I did that for a couple of years before I went to Edinburgh. Then in Edinburgh, actually, when my first Edinburgh show was, I think, successful by, yeah, most standards. You know, I had really good, nice reviews, and we sold some tickets. And it was the beginning of everything then that sort of came after, and I got all the acting work, the telly stuff that I did around then was all based on Edinburgh. It went well, and it felt like the start of something new, because, you know, it’s sort of the end of me being an unsuccessful actress, and just the start of me being able to think of myself as a writer, I suppose, and things started to change.

Right, time for another Off Cut. What might this one be?

Okay, this is skipping later in time, actually, and this is from a TV pilot script that I wrote only a couple of years ago, sort of 2018, 19, and it’s called You Never Know.

Interior, Heathrow Airport arrivals area. Joe arrives through the arrivals door, wheeling a large suitcase and carrying a suit carrier. Mary offers up her sign, eyebrows raised. Joe smiles and changes course towards her.

Well, will you look at that, like I’m some kind of dignitary.

Sorry about the exclamation, Mark.

It suddenly felt a bit…

I’m Mary.

She goes to shake hands. Joe kisses her on the cheek.

Laura’s mom.

That’s it.

Do we do both, or is that the French?

The French do all sorts of kissing. You’re here.

Yeah, I’m all set.

And Mary, it’s a pleasure.

Likewise. Well, we’ll be, won’t we?

Very soon, family.

Now, he must be exhausted. Let me…

She tries to take his suitcase.

No, no, you know what?

Look at those wheels. She just glides like a swan, and the two of us have got a little thing going.

There’s eye contact, and Mary’s flustered all over again.

So now what? We…

I take you home, and we can… wedding.

Oh, yeah, how about that? Let’s go have a wedding.

Mary gestures to the exit, and they head towards it. Cut to Interior Heathrow Airport Arrivals Area. Mary is leading Joe through the airport.

And it’s your first time in England?

Very first.

Well, it must all seem very…

No queen.

Where is she?

She’ll be along to say hello any minute, I bet.

Oh, she’ll be here for sure. Plus, Judi Dench.

David Beckham.

And, oh, struggling to think of someone else you’d know. Trevor McDonald?

No idea. David Attenborough.

Of course.

With his little monkeys and his nature.

So is your car…?

Oh, I don’t drive. I mean, I’m learning. I’ve been learning for a decade. Long story. But no, I’ve come on the train. I’m no expert on the tube, but I looked it all up and it’s quite straightforward. Just dark blue line all the way to St Pancras. So easy peasy and not crowded.

Cut to Interior Tube Carriage Piccadilly Line in Rush Hour. Mary and Jo are sitting crushed together on a crowded commuter tube.

I mean, obviously now it’s quite crowded, although compared to New York, I expect it’s nothing.

No, no, this is kind of something. Upholstered seats.

Well, the Queen insists on it.

I bet she does.

I bet she does.

Anyway, your B&B is very nice, I hope. It’s got four stars. So you’ll be able to, before everything kicks off, the full calendar of events.

I saw the agenda.

I like it. We know where we stand.

Oh, good. Because Laura thought I was being… But I wanted to.

Jo puts a reassuring hand on Mary’s hand.

You plan. You’re a planner.

Mary’s taken aback by the hand, but she’s grateful for it.

So where did you get the idea from for this project?

I think it was based on the idea that wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a young couple who were getting married? I think I started out as being a film idea, actually, it did. A sort of rom-com about a young couple who were getting married and you were slightly wrong-footed into believing that the story was going to be about this young couple. And actually, wouldn’t it be interesting if it turned out that the story was about the bride’s mother and the groom’s father? So it’s originally a film idea which grew into an idea for a television series and actually potentially could still be either. I’ve sort of got versions of it in my head which could go either way. But it’s, yeah, so it’s a story about an American boy and an English girl who are sort of late 20s and they are getting married. And the scene that you just heard was the mother of the bride and the father of the groom and she’s picked him up at the airport in order to take him for the wedding. I mean, it’s the first time they’ve met. And so then they start having this sort of connection and they’re both single and that’s, you know, obviously it’s a little bit weird because her daughter is marrying his son, but that’s, you know, they’ve met for the first time.

The stuff sitcoms are made of, I believe. Well, potentially. Wasn’t there one with Lizette Antony, Two Up, Three Down or something like that?

Oh, yeah, that was good, wasn’t it? With Michael Elphick.

That’s right. I don’t remember if it was good. I just remember it being there.

Well, I liked it at the time, but all of my memories of sitcoms around that time was that I really liked them because I think I just liked comedies. So whenever anybody mentions a sitcom from the 80s, I go, oh, that was brilliant. And then you rewatch it and go, it wasn’t necessarily, but I loved it at the time. But then the idea with This Is What Happens is that the two of them have this couple of days in the run up to the wedding where they form this connection and nothing happens, but they clearly sort of like each other and feel romantically involved with each other in a sort of fearful way. But then on the day before the wedding, her daughter announces that she doesn’t actually want to marry the son. So the wedding is called off in a very dramatic way. And there’s a big sort of row and big fallout and lots of people say things that they can’t take back. And of course, it’s very sad for the young couple who were supposed to be getting married. But what we really care about is it’s also really sad for Mary and Joe, who are the parents who have, you know, their children now hate each other and have ruined each other’s lives. So it’s a sort of classic starting point for me really, which is of a slightly lonely woman of a certain age, which seems to be who I’ve written about since I was certainly not a lonely woman of a certain age. And now I’m approaching that, although less lonely, hopefully, but certainly approaching that age a bit more now. But it always seems to be my safe area is sort of women in their 50s and 60s. I don’t know. I mean, I honestly don’t know. And I’ve wondered. I mean, I guess my mum is the obvious sort of benchmark for her, although she’s not really like these women. She’s certainly not lonely. She’s been married to my dad for 52 years or something, and they’re still very happily married. But she’s, I don’t know, I’m an only child. And it’s only fairly recently that it occurred to me that that might be quite relevant to the fact that I have ended up being a writer because I do think that as an only child in a house, when you’re growing up, you listen much more to what your parents are saying just inevitably because they’re the ones talking more than you are. So I think I quite often as a child used to sort of be involved in grown up conversations in a way that I don’t think my children are always because there’s two of them. And so when we’re sitting around a dinner table, it’s mainly about the kids and they’ll be chatting about school or whatever and we’ll be asking them questions. And of course we talk, but if we’re talking, me and my husband, then the kids are probably not really listening because they’re talking to each other. So I think there’s less listening that goes on in a family when there’s more than one child. And so I sort of have always slightly assumed that maybe I have got that from my mum.

Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a podcast like this. And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview.

My mum’s also, she’s brilliant, my mum, she’s very funny and she’s very bright, and she’s great, but she’s all, she does that classic thing, which I know I do it, which is slightly apologize for myself all the time. And it’s such a sort of English thing and such a generational, I like to think, I hope the girls do it less now actually. I think they do as, you know, younger girls probably are less likely to do it. But certainly that generation of my mum’s generation, probably my generation, do have that sort of apologetic, slightly come into a room expecting people to criticize them. Do you know what I mean? And I think that that’s-

Well, it’s politeness, isn’t it?

Yeah, the good version of that is that it’s politeness and it’s just an English way of-

Yes, God forbid you should be seen to be boastful or-

Yeah, worst case scenario that somebody would think you were showing off.

Yes, it’s a very unfeminine, unattractive British thing.

Absolutely. And I mean, men do it all the time. And Americans do, you know, stereotypically, I’m sure this isn’t the case for all Americans and it’s not the case for all English people, but the stereotype of Americans, and you always hear that when people are pitching TV shows in America, they go in and go, this is gonna be the best goddamn show you’ve ever seen. And, you know, they will immediately just say, I am great and this is why I’m funny. And this is why you should think this is brilliant. And of course it’s a great quality to have. Because when someone says that to you, if they’re saying it the right way, then you do sort of believe them. Whereas the sort of stereotype of an English, particularly woman, is to go, I’m so sorry. Well, this will probably be rubbish, but anyway, I’ll tell you anyway, and then we’ll go off and forget about it and do something else. And I’m so sorry to waste your time. We’re all a bit like that. I mean, I’m never going to iron that out entirely, but I think my mom is like that. And I do think that’s something that I guess influenced me or that I noticed the way that she is and the way that a lot of women of her age are. And so I think that’s my default character is that kind of person. So the Mary in the clip that we just heard is like that, but also, I mean, you can point to a lot of characters in the stuff that I’ve done who are like that. And the Where the Service Will Terminate, which you mentioned in your introduction, is the sort of purest version of my other big theme that I always come back to, which is slightly longing to escape and longing to sort of slightly break out of your life, which I guess is something that happens at that age as well. And in Where This Service Will Terminate, it’s a woman who is in a reasonably sort of normal marriage, not a particularly unhappy marriage, but just a slightly dull marriage. And she meets somebody on a train journey who she forms a connection with. And I’m really interested in that kind of moment of meeting and that sort of… I don’t think I necessarily buy into love at first sight, but certainly there’s a connection that you can feel with somebody, whether it’s a romantic connection or a completely platonic connection that sometimes you just meet somebody and you just go, oh God, I really like you. And there’s something about you that’s really interesting and you’re interested in me and you’re making me feel a certain way about myself that I haven’t noticed before. And like I said, I don’t think that necessarily has to be a romantic link. You can quite often, it’s really thrilling when you meet somebody you think, oh, I really think we’re gonna end up being good mates. And it doesn’t happen very often, does it? But there’s, you know, sometimes you do think that. So I think that with Wear This Service, that was what was the starting point of that very much, that they were sitting next to each other on this endless train journey from London to Penzance and they felt like that about each other. But also with this, with You Never Know, I wanted there to be that immediate spark and sort of connection between Mary and Joe when she picks him up at the airport. And then it can go anywhere from that. And actually it could end up that you’re disappointed and you were wrong, but it’s just an interesting thought as a starting point. But it’s one that I’ve used quite a lot.

Let’s move on to your next off-cut. And this one is?

Oh, no, this is, oh, this is terrible. This is a proposal for, no, but this really is. I mean, some of the things are quite good. The last one, You Never Know, I was very proud of that. Let’s just be upfront about that. I’m not gonna apologize for that because I am very proud of that and I think it’s great. This is less great, but it’s a proposal for a 13 part sitcom for CBBC.

Children’s TV channel.

Yeah, children’s show, which I wrote in 2013 and it’s called The Magical Mirror of Magic.

In Pryorwood Park School, just near the caretakers’ cupboard, on the corridor where you queue up for lunch and try not to get told off for mucking about, there’s a cloakroom. And just off the cloakroom, there are children’s toilets. And in the toilets, as well as the three cubicles containing oddly low loos and the basins with soap dispensers which usually don’t work, there’s a mirror. It’s the end mirror. The one above the basin in the corner that you wouldn’t normally go to. And the mirror has got a crack in it, which as far as anyone knows has been there since the school was built. Nobody knows, but it’s a magic mirror. When anyone looks into it and makes a wish, and you’d be surprised how often that happens, the wish comes true. Nobody knows why, but there are often strange goings on at Priorwood Park. When Josh Leesons was told off twice in one morning by two different teachers, he happened to wish, while washing his hands, that just for one day, his whole class could be teachers and his teachers could be pupils. See how they like it. And they did see. And they didn’t like it. When Stacey Maloney noticed that Miss Cohen, the PE teacher, was looking a bit lonely, she couldn’t help but wish that Mr. Friedman, the art teacher, might notice too and ask her to marry him. Much to Miss Cohen’s surprise, during afternoon break, he did. Sophie Hernandez wished to be a princess. Claire Rowell wished her brother would get lost. Fergus Green wished he was a caveman when he found out that they didn’t eat vegetables. George Bradbury’s mum wished that while she was at parents’ evening, Miss Harewood would tell her George was better behaved than the son of her next door neighbour. Mrs. Fisham, the head teacher, wished that the school wasn’t so scruffy and simply couldn’t believe how much less scruffy it became. Ben Irving wished that he could get his own back on Spencer Norman and his gang. Evie and Maggie wished that they didn’t have to do their maths test, even if it meant aliens landing in the playground. When the bell rings for the end of school, all the weird goings on at Priorwood are over and everything goes back to normal, but often lessons have been learned. And if not, often someone had fallen over and landed head first in a bucket.

So this was written for Children’s TV. Now you’ve worked a lot with the Horrible Histories team. You were in the movie, as I mentioned, playing quite a big part.

Yes, thanks.

Did you ever write on Horrible Histories or were you just actress?

I did the odd sketch for Horrible Histories. I’m very much not one of their regular writing team and I was never one of their regular performing team. I was sort of part of it because I knew the people involved quite well and all of the actors in it were people that I’d started out with, like we were saying, sort of at the Hen and Chickens and Jim Howick and Ben Wilbond and people that I’d known for years really and we’d done a lot of sort of live stuff. There used to be a thing called Ealing Live, which was an early character comedy night that they did at Ealing Film Studios in West London. It was so exciting at the time and so much fun and so sort of important actually in retrospect for the people who came out of it. So I’m in a handful of the sketches and I wrote on a handful of them. I’m thrilled to be even any part of it now because particularly when you have kids, you suddenly realize what an amazing God I am.

I was going to ask you, have you ever written anything with a view to your kids being able to either read it or watch it on television to get extra kudos points for Mummy Being Cool?

Well, they’ve got no interest at all in me being cool. In fact, they’re now of an age where me being cool is the worst case scenario. You know, they would hate the thought of me trying to be cool. But yeah, when you have young kids, you do get a bit more interested in children’s television because, of course, you have a period in your life where it’s the main thing that you’re watching. And you see the CBBC’s years and then you grow into the sort of CBBC stuff. And some of it’s brilliant, like Horrible Histories, and some of it’s less good. And yeah, if you’re a writer, if you’re involved in that world in any way, inevitably you’re going to go, oh, I reckon I could have a go at that. And I did do some writing actually. In the early days of me trying to get into telly, I did a couple of episodes of some children’s TV shows. I did, there’s a show called Go Jetters. Your kids are older than mine.

Yes, I’ve heard of Go Jetters.

It was quite a big deal. I think maybe it is still quite a big deal. My kids are too old for that now, but I gather I think it is still quite a big deal. I had a couple of episodes of that. Oh, and there was a thing that was, if I’m going to call it the Furchester Hotel, which was a lot of the Muppets characters and stuff. So no, not actually the Muppets, the Sesame Street. Oh God, isn’t it awful? I’m not quite sure of the difference and I would have known at the time, but anyway, it was puppets. So I did.

You wrote them or you were in them?

I wrote them, so I had a couple of years where I was on a list of names that people would come to for doing children’s TV and when you get on one of those lists, particularly if you’re a woman actually, because a lot of them are blokes, you do get asked to do other stuff. So I quite often got asked to do for a while episodes of kids TV shows and in the end I had to sort of start saying no to it because like I say, it’s snowballs and once you’ve been asked to do that kind of thing, you just become one of the people that gets asked to do all the new ones. So I could have gone on and done a lot more of that, but it wasn’t quite where I wanted my career to.

No middle aged women who could apologise all the time.

No, or there would have been.

If I had ever got my own children’s series, we would have ended up being about a lonely middle aged woman on an island somewhere logging to get off the island and a load of kids and puppets and stuff around them, which actually, I might write that down, it’s quite a good idea. But the proposal that you just heard, I included that partly because it was an amusing thing that I had woken up in the middle of the night once years ago. And you know, sometimes when you’re a writer or anybody, I think, you sort of wake up in the night and go, I’ve just had a brilliant idea and I’ve got to write it down. And you write it down and then in the morning, you look back at it and think, God, what the hell was that? Well, I had done this and thought I’ve really nailed it. I’ve had a really brilliant idea. And I woke up and all it said on my notes, bit of my phone was the magical mirror of magic. And that was all in my head. This was a fully formed sort of brilliant series. You’re accepting the awards. Yeah, I was absolutely picking the frog. And then later on, I was asked by a children’s producer to come up with a proposal for a children’s show. So this, the magical mirror of magic, the proposal never went anywhere beyond it being sent back and forth between me and a producer once or twice, I think, I don’t think it ever even got shown to a commissioner or anything like that. But it’s a useful example, I thought, of just how many of these things that as a writer, you end up writing and it almost becomes an art form in itself. It’s like a whole different skill in some ways from writing a TV show or writing a script, is writing these bloody proposals, which you end up doing so many of, and you sort of write them in your sleep. And it’s funny when you hit them back at it, it’s things like, and then something really interesting happens because clearly you haven’t thought of what the interesting thing is gonna be, but you have to sort of tease the fact that you’ve got lots of other good ideas and then there might be some learning that goes on and then they really learn a few things about themselves or then something really surprising happens and you don’t actually know what these things are, but you’re having to tease to the commissioner that there will be some good ideas that you’ll have at some time in the future if they give you some money for it. But like I said, I don’t think a commissioner ever even laid eyes on it, but maybe one day they will see it and go, hang on. Really after some kind of magical mirror type show, ideally with some extra magic thrown in. Yeah, maybe that will make my fortune one day, but so far not yet.

What time’s your final off cut now? Can you tell us what it is?

So this is from a pilot for a TV show that I made for the BBC in, I think, about 2018, and it was called Carol and Vinnie.

Interior, Carol’s house. Carol, her dad Derek and his girlfriend Jackie are whispering in the kitchen. Through the door, we can see Carol’s nephew Vinnie watching telly in the living room. Carol’s anxious, wiping surfaces and putting her coat on.

We wonder why Bevert turned up when nobody had died.

You’re a soft touch, Carol. You’ve always been the same.

I’m gonna get a few bits. I need to think what to give him. Do you think he’s into petty fallu?

He’s into petty crime.

He’s just a normal teenager, isn’t he? What are teenagers into?

Wanking. Jackie. I’m sorry, but they are, aren’t they?

Right, well, I think that sort of thing’s his own business.

How long’s he staying with you?

I don’t know yet.

Well, those sheets will be your business.

He needs a job, that’s a thing. In the absence of national service, keep him out of your hair.

Because you’re not good with mess, are you, Carol?

She’s OCDC.

You’re no good when you’re anxious.

I’m learning to be.

Brian Hadman takes on casual stuff. He may have a woman’s arse, but he knows how to run a business.

Yes, maybe you could mention it to him, Dad.

He just bangs on about his bloody charity.

You ask him. Bebbel, he won’t believe her luck offloading one of those kids onto you.

It’s not offloading. He just needs to be out of town, away from bad influences and…

Sponging off you for a bit.

He won’t be sponging if he gets a job, Dad. I’m going to keep an eye on him. I’m not very up on what teenagers like.

Drinking.

Music. Girls. Trainers. Burgers. Computer games. Parties. And wanking.

Carol leaves. This is one of your more recent projects. Can you tell us about it? It got filmed, didn’t it?

It did, yeah. We actually made a pilot of this. It was a script that was commissioned for the BBC, and we made a pilot of it with Rebecca Front and Kayode Yawoomi playing Carol and Vinnie, the title characters. And we had a really brilliant cast and Frances Barber and David Bradley and Amanda Barry, and it was really brilliant people. It was an amazing experience, actually, because it was the first time that something I’d written for telly was actually made in real life and put on the screen with proper budget and made in a proper way. And when you’re used to having done Edinburgh shows and even radio shows where the budgets are tiny and the team is very small and it’s you and a producer mainly, or it’s you entirely if it’s Edinburgh shows and handing out bloody leaflets yourself on the Royal Mile, to go from that, admittedly, over the course of 20 years, so it wasn’t like it was an overnight thing, but to suddenly be on a TV set where everybody there is asking you questions. So there’s a costume department who are showing you photos of costumes that you have to make a decision on, and there’s an art department coming up with props and sets and stuff that you’ve just scribbled on a bit of paper in your bedroom late at night, and then suddenly they’re all there, and they’re bringing you eight different versions of that that you have to make a decision on. It’s like a sort of chocolate box of excitement, and I don’t think you would ever get over that excitement, actually. The sort of thrill of something you’ve written, and suddenly there it is in front of you with really brilliant actors doing it properly and taking it seriously and doing it for a job. So, yeah, so we made it, and we were really proud of it, actually, and it didn’t get picked up by the BBC, which was obviously very disappointing. There’s still a chance that, you know, it’s still elsewhere, and it may go on to become something else, but the BBC didn’t want it at the time, which was very… It was sad, and it was disappointing. I can sort of see the reasons why now, actually, in retrospect, but there were things I would do differently about it, and that’s a learning process, and I think it’s a real luxury to be able to sort of make those mistakes and move on from them. And I think, like I was saying about the radio series that I’ve done, you learn as you go, and there’s sort of experience now. For radio, for me, I sort of vaguely know what I’m doing. But telly, I am still learning, and I’m doing several other telly scripts now, which I know will be much better as a result of having made the mistakes on that first thing. But yeah, it’s really lovely to sort of hear a bit of it again, and I hope it may have another life in future.

Well, a final question. Are there any offcuts that you’ve still got that you didn’t want us to hear today?

Oh, that’s a good question, isn’t it? Oh, there are hundreds. My laptop’s absolutely filled with bits and pieces. I did toy with the idea. I’ve never really written a diary. I did briefly as a teenager, but only sort of in a sort of note-y way. When I was pregnant with my daughter the first time I was pregnant, I did write a diary. And I’ve never properly read it back, actually, but I did toy with the idea of sending you a bit of that. But I’ve never even shown that to my husband, I don’t think. That would have been a scoop. I know, it would have been a scoop, wouldn’t it? And it’s probably massively tedious in that way that you are when you’re pregnant, and you think every tiny detail is fascinating to other people. And then as soon as you’re out of that world, you’re like, what the fuck are you on about that? I mean, far less interesting for other people than it is for you at the time, which is absolutely as it should be. So I did wonder about that. And I’ve got a million sort of early bits of monologues and stuff. And I tell you what I did try and find actually, and I couldn’t find, is the first time I did any kind of sort of comedy writing accidentally was when I was at university. I went to Sheffield University and we had a, I did English, but it was a sort of drama module that I always chose. And we had a guest lecturer who came for a term and talked to us, and it was Jack Rosenthal, who, yeah, which was really amazing. Actually, I didn’t realize quite what a big deal that was at the time. But he came and did two or three workshops with us and sort of encouraged us to write little sort of scenes and stuff. And he singled mine out, which was thrilling at the time, because I’d never thought of myself as being able to write at that stage. And he actually was really lovely to me and sort of talked to me afterwards. And I had a very brief sort of couple of phone conversations with him about it subsequently, where he gave me some advice and stuff. And then he died, of course, really sadly. And I always slightly wished that I’d got in touch with him. And in fact, you know what? I saw Maureen Lippman on the telly the other day and I said to my husband, God, I really ought to get in touch with Maureen Lippman, because I’d never met her, but because obviously she was married to him. And I would love to get in touch with her and maybe I will actually. Maybe this will be the impetus that I need, because now I’ve said it out loud to you. I should get in touch with her and say to her what a lovely man he was and how my memories of him are that he was so supportive. And he said, oh, I think you’ve really got something, you’ve really got an ear for dialogue. I may have paraphrased what he said there, but in my head that’s what he said. And so when I ended up doing comedy, I remembered, I thought back to that and thought, I remember Jack Rosenthal said some nice things about my writing. But it took me another at least 10 years after that to actually do it in any sort of serious way.

That was the turning point or that was the seed that was planted.

And somewhere in my parents’ house, somewhere on some ancient computer, there’ll be a version of that script which I’d like to have found and didn’t. But that would be another one that I would like to unearth one of these days.

Well, Katherine Jakeways, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you.

Oh, I’ve really enjoyed it.

Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thanks so much for having me. Thank you.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with thanks to this week’s special guest, Katherine Jakeways. The Offcuts were performed by Rachel Atkins, Beth Chalmers, Emma Clarke, Toby Longworth and Leah Marks, 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.

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 writer and producer Bill Dare. If you’ve been a regular listener to BBC Radio Comedy over the last 20 years, or you’re a fan of topical, sketch and satire shows on TV, you will doubtless have heard his name on a regular basis. He was the brains behind the 90s comedy sensation, The Mary Whitehouse Experience, the show that introduced the concept Comedy is the New Rock and Roll to the UK when it stars Rob Newman and David Baddiel were the first comedians to fill a gig at the Wembley Arena. He produced eight series of spitting image and created Dead Ringers and The Now Show. With numerous entertainment shows like I’ve Never Seen Star Wars under his belt and comedies he’s written like Brian Gulliver’s Travels and The Secret World, he’s also turned his hand to plays and fiction. And his third novel, The Billion Pound Lie, was published last year. The Standard called his work superb. The Times, quite brilliant. Bill Dare, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

I think it’s good to be here. I am actually quite terrified.

What are you terrified of?

I’m terrified of all this work that I’m exposing, most of which should probably never see the light of day. I mean, it’s either been rejected by me or rejected by someone else. So, you know, my knees are shaking.

Well, the first question I always ask is where do you keep your offcuts? What is your virtual bottom draw look like?

Well, I’m old enough to have actually, you know, the old-fashioned kind of bottom draw. I’ve got a big plastic box or even two, really, that I’ve kept a lot of the stuff I wrote on, you know, typewriters. And then I do also have the various stages of bottom draw. I’ve also got stuff on my computer. I’ve got things on DVD or CD or various forms. But I don’t really like kind of delving into the past very much. I don’t often go into to look at old photographs.

Well, this show may not be much fun for you then, as that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Well, it’s going to be very informative. And you never know, there might be something in it where I think, actually, you know, maybe that wasn’t too bad.

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?

This is called We Could Be Heroes. It’s a sitcom pilot script for either radio or TV, and it was written in around 2012.

Hello? Are you a superhero? No, no superheroes here, none at all. Who is this?

I’ll give you a clue.

Nothing.

I was the school keepy-uppy champion.

Not placing you.

Could lick my own elbows?

Still nothing.

Smell the sour milk.

Tony Morphitus. What was that smell?

The sour milk smell?

Yes. That was sour milk.

My mum thought it was full of friendly bacteria. They only seemed friendly.

I heard you’ve become a superhero. No.

Ben said you had. He messaged me on Facebook.

Well, he was lying.

You can’t fly.

Supposing I could fly, it does not make me a superhero. Do you know why? Because a hero makes some sort of personal sacrifice and faces danger on behalf of someone else. I don’t do good deeds. I don’t even recycle, which in Muswell Hill is worse than murder. You sound a bit annoyed. Because I am quite annoyed.

But you can fly. Actually fly just by waving your hands.

Tony, I’ve only been able to fly or ascend for two days and now I’m supposed to be a superhero.

But you can fly.

If you say that again, You’ll vaporize me? I can’t vaporize. Oh. Oh, that’s disappointed you, has it? Oh, I am so sorry, I can’t vaporize.

I can’t pretend I’m not a little disappointed.

This is so typical of Britain. I have a unique talent but you focus on the negative. I now know how Adele must feel.

Will you rescue me? I’m in peril.

How?

Um, hanging from a tall building.

Location?

Not sure yet.

Right, I’m going.

Morning, Fenton.

Oh, Izzy, I would prefer it if you didn’t come into the kitchen wearing only your underwear.

Why? I’m in non-visible mode.

Yes, but seeing a bra and knickers putting the kettle on is, well, it’s disconcerting and, if you must know, a little provocative.

A pair of empty knickers.

Well, they’re not empty, are they? They just look empty. Your bra, you know, it sort of shifts around in a manner that tells me that there’s something inside it. Two things, actually. Two, it’s a reminder that you are a woman, something that most of the time I’m completely oblivious to.

So, tell us more about this particular project. What was the original plan for this script?

Well, it was meant to be a sitcom for radio or TV, but I think I was going to start it on radio. And it was sort of asking the question, what would really happen if people actually got superpowers? You know, they wouldn’t necessarily go around helping people.

Did you actually send the script to anyone? How far did it get in the production process?

It got, I think it was actually commissioned, to my shame, as a script only. And I think in those days, and probably still now, you sort of get a first half fee. And I took the first half fee. And then I don’t think I ever sent the script in or I might have sent various versions. But in the end, I think it was me who wasn’t very happy with it. Couldn’t quite, I just didn’t quite believe in it enough.

Right.

To really want to commit to six episodes.

So it just sort of faded away.

Faded away, yes. But I did read it again recently because of this show. And I thought, actually, there is something in it. There is something in it. It kind of reminded me a little bit of the Big Bang Theory in its tone. And there were some good jokes. So, you know, it might be one of those that I look at again.

Right. Now, comedy is your specialty. It’s the genre you’re most known for. How did that come about? Were you always a big comedy fan?

I’ve never been a comedy fan, actually. I probably watched and listened to less comedy than probably the average person. I enjoy it, but I’m not a nerd about it. And there’s probably not a single series that I’ve watched all of. And I can’t quote you from my favorite shows at all.

So you’re never a fan of Monty Python or The Goons?

I liked Monty Python. I really liked it. Especially as a teenager, definitely. I suppose that was the one that I really, really did want to watch. But I’m not nerdy about comedy at all. I think quite a lot of people who work in comedy don’t watch that much of it.

But what about listening to it, considering you do an awful lot of work on the radio? Did you listen to The Goons?

I’m not quite that old, Laura. I’ve never heard The Goons. I tell you what did have a big effect on me is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. When that came on, and I do have a connection to that, I did think, wow, that’s the sort of thing I’d like to write one day.

Your connection obviously is your father was the voice of the book. Your father was Peter Jones. But when you first heard Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it was the comedy itself that you appreciated, was it?

The fact that my father did the voice gave it a personal connection, but I think I would have loved it anyway. And just the way radio can create pictures in the mind was a revelation to me.

Did you ever want to be a comedian yourself?

I think I sort of fantasized about it now and again, but it was the writing of it that drew me more than the performance aspect. The performance aspect absolutely terrified me. So I think given the choice, I think I’d rather have written for a comedian than be one myself. And when I do audience shows, like most producers, I go and do a little warm up. And yeah, I’ve got a sort of half a dozen jokes, but I don’t even enjoy that. I find that quite nerve wracking. And it’s probably the thing I least like about producing radio shows actually.

Well, time for your next off cut. Can you tell us what it is?

I can. This is a letter I wrote to the Evening Standard newspaper in 1972 when I was 12.

Dear Evening Standard, A friend of mine at summer camp said this to me. I like being at boarding school because at day school, once you’ve done your homework and watched TV, there’s not time to play. I thought this would be a good idea for your cartoonist. Please send check to William Jones, aged 12.

Now, that’s quite an unusual piece of writing. We don’t normally have something that’s quite that old in the show. But this wasn’t quite the earliest piece of writing that we could find. There was a poem you wrote when you were nine. Can you tell us about that?

This is just something that I found and probably claimed to have written. There was an old lady from Kent whose nose was remarkably bent. One day, they suppose, she followed her nose and nobody knows where she went. That was something I plagiarized and sent to, I think it was either Wizard or Chopper comic. And they published it and they sent me a Spirograph as a reward. Spirograph was a drawing game. I don’t know if you know what Spirograph is.

I remember, tragically, I do remember what Spirograph is.

Which I was quite pleased with.

Great toy.

That was my first sort of published work, albeit plagiarized.

And that was the first time you submitted your writing and got paid for it. Do you think that was what first gave you the idea of writing being a way to earn money for the future?

Yes. I think the Letter to the Evening Standard did because I got £2 for it.

Really?

And I actually looked up how much that would be worth now. It’s about £25. And my dad said that I should invest it in premium bonds. So, yes, I had a kind of the connection between writing and money was probably laid in those early days.

So what was your home life like? Were your parents very big personalities?

My father, despite being quite famous, was quite reserved. He didn’t have a lot of showbiz friends coming around. And it was kind of tricky because one year he’d be on television and be quite famous and people would go, oh, your dad’s on the telly. Then the next year, perhaps he wouldn’t be. And people say, well, why isn’t your dad on the telly anymore? He used to be famous. Sometimes he was in shows that I thought were kind of quite embarrassing because, as you know, as an actor, you don’t always get to choose what you’re in. You have to sort of do what pays the rent. So it would be in things that were a little bit embarrassing. In fact, there was one occasion, it was 1975. I was 15, and my dad took a role in a film called Confessions of a Pop Performer. Yeah, it’s a sort of X-rated carry-on. You imagine carry-on, but with bare naked bodies.

Yeah, was Robin Asquith in it by any chance?

Robin Asquith was in it, and my dad, I remember my dad got the script and said, Oh, this is terrible, but you know, it’s money. And he was so naive that he decided to take the whole family to the premiere. Bearing in mind, I was 15, my brother was 16, 17, my sister was about 19, my mother, very strong feminist, and we all sat there absolutely cringing at all these sex scenes. And my dad, and I completely believe him, just never realized how explicit it was going to be because in the script it says something like, and now a sexy romp or something like that, it didn’t go into any detail. So he never got the idea that it was going to be anything much more than a slightly cheekier carry on.

So what happened, what was it like when your dad got the job of the book in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? That must have been huge.

Well, that did change things a bit because I think I was about 16, 17 by that time. And I’d moved school and had a slightly more sophisticated friends. And we all listened to it. And that I really remember thinking, yeah, I’m really proud of that.

And then, of course, it went on to be a cult. So it sort of stuck around forever, really. It’s still very much.

Yeah, it went to TV. And the strange thing is that I think probably there were two series on radio and one on TV. And I think probably the whole thing for my dad was probably a day and a half’s work because it was just reading. But all the voiceover work that came off the back of it meant that we could live reasonably well for the next 10 years or so.

Let’s move on. Let’s hear about your next offcut, please. What is it?

This is the first chapter of The World’s Longest Suicide Note, an unpublished novel I wrote in 1996.

To the uncommitted browser in Smiths, you could do worse than buy this book. Someone has laid down their life so that you may read. And while you’re there, why don’t you ask them why they never know anything about the books? Ask them about this one. Have they even heard of it? Not a chance. Go to the Hove branch and ask them about Simone de Beauvoir, and they’ll tell you he doesn’t work there anymore. While you’re deciding, I have to contemplate two gargantuan tasks. First, achieving about 70,000 words of honest prose. That’s equivalent to 340 essays for Miss Fraser. And, I’ll be frank, I want to settle a few old scores. And this is the only way I know to do it. But I won’t gabble, I’ll be strictly chronological. I want this to be good. Or, at least, be minus. It’s the last thing I’ll ever do. If it stinks, then my whole life will have been for nothing. The other task ahead is self-imposed death. Not that it frightens me. At best, it’s a return to the state of pre-existence, and I don’t recall that period being particularly arduous. How to do it? I’ve dreamt that I phone a removal service, and then slip both wrists. I drain a little blood onto mum’s hand-made-in-eth-Nikistan rug, then climb into a large wooden crate. The removal man delivers it to the door of my headmaster, who was sometimes called Sod Simmons, but more often God. God hopes it’s a gift from a grateful ex-pupil who’s now a millionaire. Instead, he finds my naked body with some paper stuck to my genitals. A message is scrawled in blood. Ex-spell me now, you bastard! You did this! God collapses. Oh, how terrible I’ve been! Music swells. The end. Sadly, the dream never does end there. After some confusion, I’m sitting in a corner writing I must not commit suicide ten million times.

So, that was written in the voice of a 15-year-old, although you weren’t a teenager when you wrote it.

No.

What kind of a teenager were you? Were you very academic, for example?

Nothing could be further from the truth. There are sort of two phases, really, in my teenage life. Before I was 16, I lived in Hove because my mother decided to go to university when she was 50 and took me off to Sussex, because she went to Sussex University. And I was considered to be the thickest kid in the school. And people used to use the word bill or billish to mean stupid. So other kids would be insulted. If they said something stupid, people would say, oh, that’s so billish, you’re such a bill. I mean, it was part because I was sort of an undiagnosed dyslexic. They hadn’t really invented dyslexia then. But my story about my maths teacher, who was also my form teacher and also my careers advisor. So he knew me quite well. And we all had to go and see our careers advisor when we were 15. And I went along and he said, so Bill, what do you want to do with your life? And I said, well, I’d like to be a psychologist. And he said, you know that to be a psychologist, you have to go to university. And I said, yes, I would like to do that. He said, to do that, you will need to get A levels. And I said, well, I hope to get some A levels. He said, to get A levels, you need to stay on in sixth form. And to do that, you need to get at least three O levels. And I said, well, I’m going to really work hard and try and get three O levels. He said, OK, well, just wait there a minute. And he went to, he sorted through some index cards and he pulled out an index card and he gave it to me. And he said, that is the name of an address of a hairdressing salon in Brighton. And they are looking for a trainee hair washer. So I went from being possibly a psychologist to being a trainee hair washer in about 20 minutes. So yes, I wasn’t academic, I think, to answer your question.

You weren’t considered academic by the school, but obviously they were proved massively wrong because you did go to university, didn’t you?

I did. I went to Smiths and I found all these little books about how to pass O levels. And I just studied them for three weeks. And in fact, I got the best O level results in my form. And then I went to London and went to a different school, different group of people. And then it all changed. I mean, I had friends for the first time, really. And I was in a band and I met a girl and all that sort of thing. And that was all quite fun. And in fact, our band was quite successful. Madness supported us once.

Really?

Absolutely. About three times, I think. And it was, yeah, I would say that was a time that was, you know, what being a teenager should be, really.

Were you doing a lot of creating when you were at university? Had you started writing your comedies or bits of novels?

At uni, no, I think I just thought one day I’ll be a writer. It’s one of those things I now advise people to, you know, don’t think about doing it one day, just actually start. I wrote one play while I was at uni that never got on. I’m glad I couldn’t find that because I suspect it would have been really, really bad. And, yeah, I was into Ben Elton’s plays. He was quite an inspiration.

You were actually cast in his plays, you performed next to him. What was that like?

It was odd because, I mean, Ben Elton was an absolute force of nature at uni. He really was, I mean, everyone knew who he was and he was very prolific. He wrote about three or four plays a year and put them all on.

Did that intimidate you at all, comparing yourself to such a prolific writer?

No, because I think he was writing in such a different style. He was writing in that very, very broad, sort of almost Panto-esque style that I had no interest in writing, really.

Time for your next offcut. Tell us about this one.

This is a sketch I wrote for the TV series Alas, Smith and Jones in 1986.

In just a few moments, you will see, for the first time on any television set anywhere in the world, a talking giraffe. A giraffe who can converse, recite poetry and even sing popular tunes. At least, that is what he told us. So without more ado, please welcome Victor the Talking Giraffe. Victor?

Hello?

Ah, there you are.

When you’re ready.

Just a sec.

Any moment now, Victor will walk up this walkway here and take a seat. Great moment in the history of, well, the history of this kind of thing.

Won’t be long.

Well, you can hear it for yourselves. The uncannily human sound of Victor the Talking Giraffe.

Mel walks on dressed normally. Griff is flummoxed.

I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say it’s all done with hidden tape recorders.

What is?

The old vocalisations. Look, nothing hidden in the mouth. No wires attached or completely genuine. Go on, ask me anything you like. Surprise me, make it really hard.

I’m ready.

You throw it, I’ll catch it. All right.

Where’s the giraffe?

How many giraffes do you want?

One.

And one you have got. Tell you what, I’ll do a bit of Shakespeare.

You aren’t a giraffe.

How do you know?

Where’s the long neck, the four legs, the brown spots?

All right, all right, keep your tights on.

The big ears, the tail.

Those are all very conventional attitudes. Times are changing. Look, you’re not completely convinced.

Well, you did say talking giraffe.

And singing. The singing is important. I know. I’ll sing Bar Bar Black Sheep blindfolded. No joke. Cover my eyes and I’ll do the whole thing, start to finish. Can I give you a bit of advice? Go with it. This could make us.

You singing Bar Bar Black Sheep?

I’m the first giraffe to do it.

But you’re not.

I know. But they’re lapping it up. They are totally taken in. Powers of suggestion.

You mean they think you can sing?

They think I’m a…

He indicates the height for a giraffe.

Television is a very powerful medium. But you’ve got to believe.

But if they’ve all come to see a talking…

He also indicates the height for a giraffe.

They’re all going to be a bit disappointed with you.

All right. What do you suggest?

Well, I could just go and say, Ladies and gentlemen, we present the talking… The talking… Baldi.

No, no, no. That’s not the same. I mean, that is not going to make history.

The all talking, all singing. Baldi.

Let’s try it.

Ladies and gentlemen, the all talking, all singing. Baldi.

Medium shot to include a baby giraffe where Mel stood. It is silent.

So that was from the TV sketch show, Alas, Smith and Jones. Were you actually part of the writing team?

I wish I was, but no, that was a sketch I wrote and sent in to the producer, Jamie Ricks. And I’ve no idea whether I even got a response. But I sort of think it sort of almost works. I could do with a trim. I’d love to rewrite it now. But no, it never got on. I used to write a lot of sketches and send them in. I sent in sketches to Fry and Laurie as well. I got a very nice letter back from Stephen Fry himself saying, it’s awfully funny, but we tend to write our own material. And it was a very personal letter.

This is before you did loads of sketch writing, or is this the same time?

This is in my 20s when I spent most of my 20s as a reluctant actor. I got a job sort of by mistake. And I did a bit of acting, hoping to sort of land a big advert that would pay me a lot of money so that I could just write. And I was really trying to be a sort of playwright. I was trying to create shows, formats, anything I could really to get some kind of foothold in the world of television or entertainment. I kind of did anything I could, including writing a lot of sketches and sending them off to no avail.

Boom.

Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a brand new podcast like this. And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. But sketch writing is the genre that you’re possibly the most known for, with The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Spitting Image, Dead Ringers. How did you actually make that shift into being a sketch writer and producer from being an actor?

Well, I did, I suppose, have a lot of practice writing sketches that never got on. And eventually I got a job as a radio comedy producer. That was the start of my actual sort of career, as opposed to just doing bits and pieces. And after doing a show called Weekending, which was the topical show of the time.

As the producer?

As the producer. I still felt that I would prefer to be writing. And I created my own sketch show actually called Life, Death and Sex with Mike and Sue. Oh, yeah. In the sort of mid 90s, I think that was.

When The Mary Whitehouse Experience was early 90s, wasn’t it?

Yeah.

So that was, was that the big break for you?

The Mary Whitehouse Experience was the big break because I was actually asked to do it. I was asked just to create a show for Radio One and I could do anything I wanted. So I looked around at the kind of people who were writing, weekending and doing stand up. And I’d worked a bit with David Baddiel and Rob Newman. So I got Punts and Dennis. Also, I asked Joe Brand and I remember after we’d done a few shows, and we did really push our luck quite a few times with the sort of consent. I was summoned to the, I think it was like the board of directors or something at the BBC. I mean, really senior people, head of radio was there, David Hatch. And he was fuming.

Do you remember why? Do you remember what the sketch was about?

Yeah, it was, the game Shag or Die, and they referred to all kinds of religious figures and so on and…

Offense was caused?

Offense was caused. But only in the BBC, because I went along to this big meeting and David Hatch was furious. He said he’d never been more angry in his career. And all I can say in my defense is that we have had no complaints from the public. And it was true, because it was Radio 1, it was late night Radio 1. Young people were listening, they lapped it up.

Right next, off-cut please, Bill. What is this one?

This is an extract from something called Yes, Neenakanti Really Is On The Radio. It’s a pilot written for the radio in about 2012. Yeah, and you have to imagine that it’s a ventriloquist, I guess. Yes, and her monkey puppet.

Hello, I’m Neena. And I’m Monkey. Welcome to Yes, Neenakanti Really Is On The Radio. Not for long, though. Why would you say that? You have only got a show because the mime artist cancelled. Not true. Well, they know I’m not real. I should think so. They’re not stupid. Oh, not Radio 2, then. It’s Radio 4, the station for intelligent conversation. It’s never on in your house. Mind you, I suppose it’s quite fitting. What is? Ventriloquism and radio. Both dying arts. This is a kind of suicide pact. We’re both going down together. Actually, Monk, radio is going strong. I wish it was ITV. Why? Because I can say ITV. Why can’t you say BBC? Because you’re not a good enough ventriloquist. How dare you? Radio is for people who are too ugly for television. Wandering round Broadcasting House is like a horror show. I’m the sexiest one around and I’m made of polyester. That’s so rude. Can I still swear? No, definitely not. In fact, I’ve had you fitted with a bleeper. It’ll squeak if you try and swear. You did f**king what? You stupid f**k! Can I still say f**k? No, fiddlesticks. Now that we’re on radio, we should try to be more intellectual. An intellectual ventriloquist? That’s an oxymoron. What’s an oxymoron? Well, if you don’t know what it means, why did I say it? Let’s talk about the show. We’ve got lots to look forward to tonight. I’m going to hit the bar later. Can I get me some sweet broadcasting house totty? You’re a monkey. They’re not fussy. Later, Monkey and I will be joined by some other puppets, none of whom are as good as me.

So what happened to this project then?

This was a pilot script and then a pilot program. And Nina Conti, I thought, was brilliant. And Monkey was fantastic. But Radio 4 had never heard of Nina Conti. And they said, oh, we don’t think ventriloquism should be on the radio. I tried to explain that it had been on the radio very successfully in America, very successfully in Britain. And it doesn’t really matter that you can’t see the lips not moving. It’s about two characters.

And so never got commissioned.

It was actually broadcast as a pilot, but it never got a series.

Shame.

Yeah.

Now you like to work in close collaboration with certain individuals like Nina Conti. Also, you’ve done a lot of work with Marcus Brigstocke, who you worked with on The Late Show and I’ve Never Seen Star Wars. What’s the appeal of working with one person?

You can get your shows made. That is the main appeal. If you’ve got a star, it sort of helps to get the show on. But actually, I really enjoyed working with Marcus and Nina because they’re quite collaborative. And they’ll sort of take notes or they’ll take on board ideas. But that’s a little bit unusual. I think a lot of comedians are used to working on their own and they’re used to calling all the shots. It’s not surprising. You know, they’re on their own on stage. So they can be quite difficult to work with. So I haven’t worked with that many.

So how does the arrangement work? Do you sit and write in a room together or do you bring the ideas to them or do they bring them to you?

Well, with Nina, I remember when I first started working with her, I produced a show, a live show that she did and she took to Melbourne Comedy Festival in Edinburgh. And I think it was around that time that I said to her, have you ever tried improvising with Monkey? And she never had said I’ve never improvised anything. And I said, well, let’s try it. Let’s let’s just try it. So we went down to a local comedy club and she just started talking to the audience with Monkey and it really, really worked. And then I practiced with her sort of writing stories, improvising stories. So, you know, that was really, really collaborative. And with Marcus, yeah, I mean, you know, Marcus writes a lot himself. I mean, most of what Marcus performs, he kind of writes himself. And we had a team of writers as well. And I suppose it was more editing that I was doing.

Time for your next offcut. Can you tell us about this one, please?

This is a format document for a radio game show called Unforgettable. And I wrote it in 2015.

Unforgettable Memory Meets Mirth Unforgettable ostensibly tests memory and comprehension, but really it’s a chance to revel in amazing facts and to enjoy people trying to explain things they don’t quite understand, says the host.

What you’re about to witness is Unforgettable, the show that tests how much the brain can absorb and comprehend in just one day. My fellow Swats have had just 24 hours to learn about four fascinating topics completely new to them and to me. How much do they understand? How much can they recall? Who are the goldfish and who the elephants?

Unforgettable ostensibly tests memory and comprehension. The panellists will have been provided before the show with some really unforgettable stuff about four topics, say circus performers, human infancy, nanotechnology and viruses. And their memory and comprehension will be tested. It’s like Have I Got News For You, except instead of reading newspapers, they’ve read a few sheets of A4 and done some of their own probing and thinking. The panel don’t have to be geeks and the subjects aren’t all highbrow. Self-confessed ignoramus Kathy Burke trying to explain string theory will be funny, as will Miles Jupp trying to talk knowledgeably about the work of Coco Chanel or Ian Hislop on Eminem. Funny people with newly acquired knowledge or inspiring concepts or pop culture they aren’t down with, all trying to elucidate them, bluffing where necessary will be the engine of the show. There are bonus points for extra unforgettable facts or flights of fancy. There’s a geeky adjudicator who has really, really swatted up who can be brought in to clarify and assess. Is it a bit like QI? It’s similar territory. Just as Mock the Week, Have I Got News for You, News Quiz, etc. cover the same territory. Luckily that didn’t stop all those shows happening. Unforgettable will be tonally unique. The joy will come from people really excited about having just learnt some amazing, weird or shocking stuff. The excitement will be infectious. The facts will be astonishing. The comedy will be unforgettable.

So this got made as a pilot, didn’t it?

We made it. A very esteemed producer, David Tyler, produced it, and he also hosted it. And Marcus Brigstocke actually was one of the guests. And we all thought it went pretty well, but Radio 4 said they didn’t really understand it.

Oh.

So it never got a series.

Oh.

But it was broadcast.

Right. Right. I see. Now you’ve created a lot of different show formats that you have gone on to produce rather than just write the script for. Yeah. What is the appeal of creating a format rather than writing as such?

Well, I think I probably was influenced by the fact that my dad was in Just a Minute for, you know, since I was about six years old, I think. And he explained to me that the man, Ian Mester, who created Just a Minute, would always get his name on the end of the show and he would always get paid, even though the work he’d done, he’d done many, many years ago. So, this really stuck in my mind. So I thought, well, the thing to do surely is to think of an idea for a show and then it can run and run and run and you’ll still get paid. And it’s almost as if you’re working, but you’re not actually having to do the work. So yeah, that was part of the appeal. And I’ve always tried to think of ideas for shows.

Is the thinking up of the ideas easier or harder than writing, would you say? Is it more fun?

It’s not more fun. No, I think it’s quite hard. But I think what it is, is that it’s rare. You have to think of a lot of ideas before you think of one that actually works. I think that’s what it is. Most just aren’t even worth sending off, I think. But I have created, I suppose, I think it’s 11 or 12 shows that I’ve created one way or another.

Let’s move on to your next offcut. Can you tell us what this is, what it’s called?

This is from a novel I wrote in 2018. It’s called Sexless.

The train comes into King’s Cross, where she changes to the Metropolitan Line to Hammersmith. She takes the escalator to the main hall, and she looks to see if anyone is at the new hug hub. Two pairs in a clinch, two young men, and a young man with his arms wrapped tightly round a middle-aged woman. All have their eyes closed, their bodies firmly attached. The two men sway slightly. A smart woman of about forty sits alone on the bench. Laura approaches, aware that her intentions might be mistaken. The woman smiles and gets to her feet, her arms beginning to part. Actually, I only wanted to ask you something. The woman looks a little deeper into Laura’s eyes. I know you, don’t I? You may have seen me on Sarah Dean. Laura Dean. Oh, I’m so sorry. Don’t worry a bit. Laura is recognized a few times most days. Would it be okay if I asked you a couple of questions? I won’t attribute. Is this an interview? It’s just a little research, if that’s okay. Could I get a hug afterwards? said the woman with a chuckle. Why not? First question. Is this something you just enjoy or do you think you need it? The woman looked around the station as if the answer might be scrawled on a wall. I don’t know. There was something in her eyes that Laura had seen in crime victims. The sick, the bereaved, the abused. She would not press the point. Do you have a gender preference? Not at all. It’s not about sex, I know. And this isn’t something you would have contemplated before. Oh, no way, the woman laughed. It was an obvious point, really. Now that sex was no longer on anyone’s agenda, affection could be exchanged, mutually enjoyed, without the possibility of being groped or meeting with an unwelcome erection. It wasn’t that affection was more in demand, per se. It was just that the risks had been greatly lowered. A few more questions, and then Laura senses her interviewee is getting anxious about time. She thanks her and held out her arms. The woman steps forward. As they gently squeeze, Laura tries to monitor her feelings. Hairs from the woman’s head tickled her nose. She looked to see if commuters would glance at them, and they did, but only with casual interest. A balloon of anxiety expanded with each breath. Why couldn’t she just relax and enjoy? She felt for signs that it might be over. What was the etiquette here? One hugger gently taps the other’s back. Ah, she felt a light tap on her shoulder. Thank you, said Laura once they decoupled. Thank you. The woman bent to collect her bag, smiled and went on her way. Laura had no idea if the embrace had been successful.

So did you finish this novel?

No, I didn’t. I wrote about probably about 20,000 words of it. And, yeah, it’s about a world where all sexual desire, for some reason, disappears. And I don’t think I ever worked out quite why it’s disappeared. And I gave it to an editor friend and she referred to it as dystopian. I kind of thought, why has she assumed that it’s dystopian? Because I wanted to explore the positives of a world without sex. I think there could be a lot of great things about a world without sex. I mean, women could feel a lot safer for one thing. But one, it would be a novel without any sex, which possibly isn’t necessarily a seller. And I think people just expect if they get a book set sort of in the future where something has tampered with nature, that it’s got to be disastrous, hasn’t it?

Yeah, I suppose that is the received opinion.

You can’t say, well, we’ve tampered with nature and guess what? It’s all worked.

That’s true.

So that is the problem for the book. I mean, the one thing I could do, and if I do ever revisit it, I think I might do it as a series of short stories where for some people, the sexless world actually works and for some people, it doesn’t.

Why did you choose to write it as a novel rather than say a drama?

I think by that time, I’d written three novels and I just felt more comfortable writing a novel. The thing about a novel is that it is whatever happens, if you write a novel, it’s a complete work of art, whereas a script is not really a thing unless it’s actually made.

Obviously, writing a novel, for example, the whole process is a much less sociable affair. I understand that you obviously have complete control over it in one sense, but it is quite a lonely process, isn’t it? You have nobody else contributing to it until an editor comes along and says, change this, change that. But do you not miss the working with other people?

I do a little. I mean, when I have been writing novels, whenever I’m writing alone, I sort of want to sort of turn to a team of writers and say, well, what do you think? Is this working? And of course, they aren’t there. So in that sense, you know, it is. I also really like feedback. I’m not particularly confident about writing, so I always like to get, you know, get someone to give me an opinion.

So you show people your work as you’re writing it. You don’t wait till the end.

Yeah. In fact, I pay people to tell me it’s rubbish.

Right. So we’ve come to your final offcut. Can you tell us a little bit about that one, please?

This is called Support. It’s a pilot script for a TV series and it’s from 2014.

Scene 1. Interior. A meeting room in a church. Evening. Close up on David, a man who finds it hard to assert himself.

Hello. My name is David Bowie. No, not that one. Though I do sometimes think that planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do. Pause for titter.

Widen to reveal David is alone in the room. David has arranged some chairs in a semicircle.

Wish I was that David Bowie. Not that I want to be anyone else. Quite happy with who I am. Quite happy in my own skin. Thank you. Don’t ever state it, David, you’re here for them. Not you. Right, start again. Hello. My name is David Bowie. No, not that one. Although I do…

Tittle sequence. A group of mostly nervous looking people on the semicircle of chairs. David is trying to look in control.

Well, I think we’re all here. Mark, you don’t have a chair. There’s a fold up one there.

Is your name really David Bowie?

Yeah, I’m coming to that. No, it folds the other way. Mind your finger.

Ow!

I bought some fold up chairs at a car boot sale. I love a car boot.

I use them to sell retreads and alloys. Need any?

I think I’m all right, thanks. Cairn, isn’t it?

Anyone need any retreads or alloys?

Or the snide?

Who’s asking?

Or the knockoffs?

They’re at a knockdown price.

I could use some.

See me after. I’ll sort you out.

Right. Well, if we’re all…

I bought a lovely set of cushion covers as a car boots. Two quid.

Oh, you did well there.

Right. Is everyone settled, Mark?

Do you mind if I squeeze my chair in here?

Why don’t you sit there?

Got to think about odd numbers.

Well, don’t be daft. Sit there.

But if he doesn’t want to sit there…

He might have a syndrome.

I’d just rather sit on an even seat.

If you count round the other way, that’s seat number four.

He might have a thing about counting clockwise.

I don’t have a thing about counting clockwise.

Well sit there and have done with it.

Fine, I’ll stand.

Debbie.

I’m Sally. I’m Debbie.

Sorry, could you bring your chair in a bit?

What are the tissues for?

Oh, therefore if anyone gets a bit tearful, that can happen. It does with my other ones.

You’ve got other groups?

Divorced women, women with depression, single mothers, larger women and… women. I seem to enjoy them.

Well, we might as well start. My name is David Bowie. No, not that one.

Now this project looked like it might get made, didn’t it?

Well, we’ve got some names attached. We sent it to David Mitchell, who agreed to play the kind of main character, Mark, or no, David Bowie. I’m surprised I couldn’t remember that. And it was all set in one room. It’s really cheap. So I thought, you know, it might be in with a shout. But no, it was never made.

But it was written for television, though, wasn’t it? Not radio.

It was originally written for TV and then I did a radio version. I’m always sort of flitting between sort of radio and TV versions of things. So I never really know. Sometimes I write something and don’t even really know whether it’s a radio or TV.

Which do you prefer writing for? Which would you prefer it came out on, apart from obviously the money side?

I think my ideal is to write for radio first and then for it to move to TV, which quite a few of my shows have. That’s the ideal because you can you can really get things right on radio. And, you know, hopefully by the time it moves to TV, it’s sort of matured. What I really like is the process of radio because it’s so much quicker. I find producing particularly in TV really pretty boring. It’s very, very slow.

Right. Final question. Having revisited these old bits of writing, how do you feel about them? Are you surprised by anything you’ve heard?

I’m surprised not to have cringed more. I was expecting, I think I said at the beginning, to really hate everything that I heard. I found them not too difficult to listen to and in some cases I quite enjoyed them actually. That’s good. And the extract from Sexless, I thought sounded sort of quite cast, I thought, oh, I can just hear that on Radio 4.

Maybe that’s something you should be doing next. Finish that for Book of the Week.

Yes, we’d love to.

Oh, that’s good. So do you think you might have another stab at any of them?

I think I would possibly, I think I might look at Sexless again, the novel, and I might look at Support, the last two in fact. I might just consider whether I could give them another shot.

Well, we’re very glad to have helped. Bill Dare, thank you for opening your virtual bottom drawer and sharing your offcuts with us.

It has been enlightening. Thank you.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with thanks to this week’s special guest, Bill Dare. The offcuts were performed by Rachel Atkins, Beth Chalmers, Toby Longworth, Chris Pavlo and Nigel Pilkington. And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com, and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

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

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

Thank you very much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hurry up!

It won’t recognise the stick.

Try another socket.

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

OK, but run!

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

Would you like the gold extended warranty?

What does that mean?

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

Well, it’s a present, so…

Just fill this for me.

Have you got a pen?

Look, can you hurry up?

I’m filling in the form for the warranty.

Well, don’t, it’s a rip-off.

How do you know?

Because I work for the government.

She takes his pen.

Now, fuck off!

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

Too late.

Well, this was a waste of money then.

Did you get a receipt?

We can take it back.

She didn’t.

Oh, for God’s sake!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s have your next off cut, please.

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

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

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

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

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

What?

Goodie or baddie, him?

Goodie.

Miranda eats more popcorn.

So is he the bloke that was shot?

No.

Who was shot then?

The bloke with the wife.

What wife? Who’s that?

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

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

What was it?

I don’t know.

It was on TV.

Beverly Hills Cop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2006.

What happened to that?

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

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

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

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

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

This was you and your writing partner, Andy Hurst.

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

But you know, it was.

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

Everybody’s slowly getting what it is.

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

Were there complaints, Jon Holmes?

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

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

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

Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha.

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

Headlines.

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

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

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

Boy 14 finds perv pop star in Pringles.

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

Children’s organ theft scandal continues.

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

Nice.

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

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

Yeah, yes.

What was the first programme you worked on?

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

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

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

And it’s been running for 20 years.

I know, yeah.

Are you a naturally very political person?

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

Right, so not really very political then?

Not really, no, just alcoholic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They pay for your trip.

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

You’re the obvious choice.

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

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

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

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

Oh no, what is it? What’s the matter?

What do you mean what’s the matter?

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

Then it’s just a splinter.

A splinter?

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

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

Well, I’m not really sure what to do.

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

All right, all right, hold on then.

He drops to his knees to pray.

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

Split screen, Odin answers.

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

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

Hmm, an arrow, you say?

I think so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m not sure he’s very hungry.

It’s a special meal. Just feed him.

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

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

Come on.

Don’t want to.

Longboat.

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

Okay, now what? You want me to what?

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

What’s he saying to do next?

Nothing.

He says we’re done.

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

He sticks his nose near Viking One’s tummy.

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

What?

Good point.

Hang on.

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

Righto.

He smells the wound again.

Smells of onions? What?

No, it doesn’t.

Definitely getting something herby. Onions and herby.

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

Ah, you smell like soup.

It’s probably just a splinter.

It’s actually making me feel quite peckish.

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

Anything?

Onions and herbs.

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

I’ll probably just need a plaster.

Sorry, mate. Doctor’s orders.

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

Anything else I can help you with today?

No, that’s it. Thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Were you responsible for the decapitations and the shit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing gets you actors, obviously.

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

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

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

Hi this is Laura again.

Thanks for listening to The Offcuts Drawer. If you enjoyed this episode, there are others on our website at offcutsdrawer.com. You can also find out more about the writers and actors on the show and there are links to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Please do subscribe, it’s free. And give us a five-star review if you can. Also share it on social media, tell your friends about it. All that sort of stuff helps the show to grow, find more listeners and ultimately enables us to make more episodes. Thanks for your support.