Piers: I was like many people at the time, turning way too much time on Facebook. It was the beginning of the great sort of distractor crisis. But I posted these little things on Facebook and people, I think they were just like, oh God. Piers is obviously having a nervous breakdown. I’ll post some nice comments and maybe he’ll step off the ledge. So I kept on posting them and gradually the comments got less and less. They were like, yeah, we didn’t need to carry on. And a loose narrative kind of formed and I just enjoyed doing them, but they’re completely mad. I dunno what was going through my head.

Laura: Hello, I’m Laura Shavin and this is the Offcut Drawer that 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.

Today’s guest is Piers Torday. After working as a producer and writer in theater and television, he turned to children’s fiction. His debut, the Last Wild, published in 2013 was shortlisted for the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He followed it with the dark wild winner of the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Wild Beyond, and the Prequel the Wild before he also published

There may be a Castle and more recently launched a fantasy geology with midnight treasure being named Children’s Book of the Year by New Statesman among Others, and the Sequel Wolf Crown Due late 2025. Earlier this year, he released letters to a dog, a title published with dyslexia, friendly accessibility in mind.

In 2016, piers completed the death of an owl finishing his late father’s final unfinished novel on stage. He adapted the box of delights for a premier at Wilton’s Music Hall in 2017 with further revivals up through 2023 at the Royal Shakespeare Company. His theater credits also include a Christmas Carol, the Wind in the Willows, a child in the Snow and Plum, a Homage to Happiness, staged earlier this year.

Pi Tour Day. Welcome to the Offcut Straw.

Piers: Thank you very much for having me. I’m excited and nervous and equal measure. Excellent.

Laura: Right. Um, well you’ve written for both stage and page. How does your creative process differ between the two? Do you, do you start with the format in mind or do you have the idea first and then decide what format it best suits?

Piers: Well, I’ve been incredibly lucky in the sense that everything I’ve done for stage has more or less been someone else’s idea. At least initially in the sense I was approached to adapt John Mayfield’s box of Delights by Wilton’s musical. And it very different to writing a book of your own. You’re beginning with someone else’s, uh, story.

Mm. And I’ve, after that, I then suggested books I’d like to adapt. And we’ve, we’ve done them, but it’s so different because you not only have someone else’s story. But you are collaborating with other people from, from the start. And everything I’ve done has begun conversations with the director who’s also read and loved the book, and a producer and a designer, all of who’ve got, uh, sort of ideas and visions and things they want to bring to it.

And. I’ve loved doing them because when you’re writing a novel, you are a total opposite. You’re a complete control freak. Uh, but the, the flip side to that is you get everything you want, but you have to do everything yourself. So you are director, script writer, designer, actor, lighting designer. And it’s lovely, but quite intense.

Laura: Yes.

Piers: And so I’ve, in the last few years, I’ve doing more. Just put work at the moment, but I’ve, I’ve enjoyed that switch between intensely solitary in your head, creativity and then the sort of freedom of collaboration where your job is literally with a, you know, you are telling the story and you’re putting the word, the dialogue down on the page, but so much else is.

Up to other people.

Laura: Right. And you’re not tempted to translate one of your books into a stage production? Is that double the work?

Piers: No, it’s really interesting. L Little Angel Theater did a book of mine called Thou, maybe a Castle. They did it as a musical with puppets, which was joyful. Oh. And I really trusted the people doing it, and it was.

Lovely. And now the National Theater and the Unicorn Theater are doing the, my first book, the Last Wild. And again, a lot of people assume that I’m going to be, uh, uh, adapting. It’s not, it’s being adapted by a wonderful writer called Jude Christian. And the, honestly, the feeling is relief. ’cause I took me four years to write Last Wild, and I angsted and.

Agonized over every word of that book, and I’m really proud of it. But I’ve absolutely stated my need to tell that story. Ah, and I’m now really excited by hopefully someone else, another team of people gonna tell in a different way. And so far I’m loving what they’re doing and I’m sure it’ll be great.

And I’m sure there’ll be things about it that I, choices I wouldn’t have made. But I think you have to sort of. You have to sort of accept that and when you hand something over for ad adaptation. So yeah, I like adapting other people’s stuff. I think adapting on my own is just too inside your head.

Laura: Yeah, too intense.

Yeah. Makes sense. Mm-hmm. Okay, then well let’s kick off 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?

Piers: So, uh, this is from Dead Animals and this is a sick pom pilot. I wrote in 2005,

Actor 1: scene one, exterior Country Church, yard Day, Dartmore rain, a small family funeral.

Actor 2: We have entrusted our brother Harry Thick, and our sister, his wife, Margaret, to God’s mercy, and we now commit their bodies to the ground.

Actor 1: We focus in on Paul and hear his voice over the following scenes. As I watched my parents’ bodies finally going into the ground, I asked myself the question, how did I get here again?

Cut to scene two. Interior classroom day. Close up on Paul reading aloud, there is a book poster behind his head and piles of novels in front of him. I was a writer living

Actor 3: in London. He had never made love in an intensive care unit before it felt wrong and good fucking Bridget in there next to some dying people.

As they both climaxed noisily together. He heard the alarm on a nearby heart monitor Sound. Beep. How ironic he whispered in her ear. Um, that’s, uh, that’s about as far as I’ve got. But you, but you get the idea.

Actor 1: Pull back to reveal that he is in fact reading to a creative writing class of old ladies.

Actor 4: Okay, thanks Paul.

That just about wraps up our brief encounter session everybody next week. I’d like your interpretation of my strangest Christmas ever

Actor 1: cut to scene three, exterior bus stop later. I was from the country, but I hadn’t been home for 10 years. I just loved London. Paul with several large supermarket shopping bags, tries to get on a packed bus, but some kids barge past him outta white gimp.

They push him over to get on and he falls into a puddle. They jeer as the bus recedes. Cut to scene four. Interior vegetarian cafe bar. Later establishing shot the wet lettuce cafe I

Actor 3: had arising and active love life.

Actor 1: Paul struggles into the cafe with shopping bags. A stunning blonde by the bar smiles and then moves past to greet someone else.

She reveals Paul’s blind date ugly in bifocals and a cable knit jersey. Reading how to Talk Yourself Thin. Paul fleas. Cut to scene five, interior apartment block stairway night. I had a room of my own. You could say I had everything I’d ever wanted. Paul struggles up to his door with his shopping as he tries to get his key out.

A fat neighbor comes barreling past,

Actor 3: excuse me.

Actor 1: He sends Paul shopping, tumbling down the stairs, and then tragedy struck. Cut to scene six, interior barn night. My parents both suddenly died in a freak farming accident. Harry and Margaret sick are bending over a bailing machine, poking about, are

Actor(s): you sure this is safe?

Harry, of course is, as long as nobody comes and

Actor 2: suddenly

Actor(s): turns

Actor 2: it

Actor(s): on, you mean I shouldn’t press this switch?

Actor 2: Exactly.

Actor(s): Oh, silly me. I didn’t mean to do that.

Actor 2: Didn’t mean to do what?

Actor 1: There’s a horrific mangling noise. Blackout.

Laura: So did you write the whole thing? Was this a, a whole script or just like a few scenes?

Piers: I, I did, I think write a whole pilot. I mean, yeah, roughly about 30 odd pages, but that was as far as it got. I, I had a look when I was looking in my offcut draw and I think there were maybe some different versions or other episodes, but this was the kind of only fully completed. Episode. Right.

Laura: What was gonna be the premise of this sitcom?

’cause I mean, the title Dead Animals is quite intriguing for a sitcom, but, uh, from those scenes we just heard, I, I don’t think I would be able to understand why it was called that. What, what was No, I’m

Piers: not sure I can remember, understand why it was called Dead Animals. I think it was, I was trying to do that thing of, as you should do when you start writing, is trying to write about what you know and.

I had been working for a TV company a few years previously, and, um, we’d been talking about some various ideas for sort of family. Family television involving animals in the kind of doctor who slot. But it became clear that wasn’t gonna happen and I certainly wouldn’t be the person to write it. But one of my colleagues said, well, look, if you want to write something, you should start.

Don’t try and write something real expensive that no one’s gonna make. Why don’t you try writing something that’s based on your own experience? And I, I did grow up on farms and I did move to London and I was trying to be a writer. I wasn’t, obviously not called Paul. And this. Sitcom was an attempt to sort of, not at all really be truthfully about my family, but take lots of some of the funnier, more extreme anecdotes of my childhood and country life and try and turn it into a sitcom about the difference between.

Country life and the idea of someone with artistic pretensions coming from a very agricultural background and the jumping off point for dead animals, which is alluded to in the script, was the foot and mouth. Virus in 2001, whenever it was. Um, because that was a time when actually the countryside felt pretty dark because certainly in the farm I grew up on, there were sort of Paso animals being burnt, and the army were called in and there was, you know, the first lockdown way before COVID, it was the first lockdown.

So that was the kind of, that was going to be the backdrop,

(music): right,

Piers: uh, to this. To the sitcom ideal subject for sitcom, but in my pandemic, what fun, I can’t imagine why this wasn’t made, but, um, but it was, it was an attempt to try and, and some of that I, I, I, I wince at hearing, but it was an attempt to, to try and sort of at least go back to my own life and experience, which I do think is always a good place.

To begin, even if some of this execution leaves a bit to be desired.

Laura: But in the note that accompanied this, it said that this script inspired the last Wild, which was the first of your wild series of children’s books. That that’s quite a leap. How did, how exactly did that happen?

Piers: It is, it is certainly quite a leap from someone reading out that story that begin withing Jill’s books, but, and do you mind me thinking what on earth.

But in a way, that’s why I chose this, because I think it is so weird and unpredictable how the creative process works. And when I wrote this, I was working for Tiger Aspect TV back then, a TV production company. Did a lot of comedy and stuff and I was. My, my day job was to come up with entertainment formats, so sort of game shows and entertainment shows, but I was, uh, enjoyed it, but I was feeling a bit creatively frustrated, and so I was working on this in the evenings and the weekends, and when I’d written this draft episode, I sent it to a former colleague to say, look, will you, what do you, what do you think of this?

You’re someone who’d worked in sitcoms and stuff and knew about it. And he said, um, well, he said it’s perhaps not quite ready to go, but, uh, one of the things he said was in terms of the farm scenes and that it gets to, and there’s a treatment that takes onto the farm, he was wondering if the animals could talk so the animals could have a voice in this as well.

And I think he was imagining something in along the lines of desperate housewives, you know, where. You hear the, the dead former housewife kind of narrates that series.

Laura: Oh, right.

Piers: Yes. He was imagining could one of these dead animals, a cow or something, actually be a very sardonic narrator for this stick com.

Oh, see? And I was like, see, I

Laura: thought he was picturing animals like in a field talking to each other.

Piers: No, he was thinking much more like a grownup kind of sardonic, a voiceover. Voiceover and I thought it was quite fun, but I didn’t really know how to make it work, but it really got me thinking about talking animals.

And I then had a break from, uh, I, I finished my job at Tri Aspect and I had a, a summer off for the first time since leaving university. Really? And I just felt like a creative kind of recharge. And almost on a whim really, I booked myself onto this creative writing course, an Arvin course in Ted Hughes’s old house in West Yorkshire.

A beautiful place. And they wanted you ideally to bring something and it was, it was general how to start writing fiction. And I was like, oh God, what am I gonna do? I’ve got time. So. And I thought, well, the only thing I’ve got knocking around is this sitcom dead animals. But obviously that’s not right ’cause it’s fiction.

And so I just started writing this thing, thinking about talking animals and something very different to my surprise came out, which was this kind of dystopian children’s book with a young boy in a world without animals who discovers he can talk to the few who’ve survived and became a very different story.

But funnily enough. It’s still in a way about my childhood growing up in a remote can with loads of wildlife and there’s lots of farming scenes in it. There’s a character in the sitcom called Kester who’s a Lord of the Rings obsessive, uh, who becomes ke last wild, who’s not a Lord of the Rings set of the world, but a Lord of the Rings doesn’t exist.

But it’s just curious to me how these things very different, very grown up. Sort of sitcom. Yeah. Becomes this kind of children’s book. But I guess that’s how ideas twist and shape in the mind.

Laura: Yeah, that is very interesting. ’cause no one could have predicted that pathway at all. And nobody directed you.

Nobody said what you should do really is right. A kid’s book or what you should do is make it dystopian. It came completely from you. There was no influence apart from your friend who said maybe have a talking animal in it.

Piers: Yeah. I mean the only, because this was in 2008 that I ended up doing the. Course and the starting the book, and I’d been trying to work on the sitcom, hadn’t been getting very far and was getting a bit frustrated, and the same friend said, well, look, if you can’t get it made as a teller, you could always try writing as a novel.

And again, I just. That sitcom you heard there was no, I tried turning that into a book for about 10 seconds and that was never gonna work. Um, and, but I think part of it is, I think part of the trick with writing is not wanting it too much. And I’d grown up really loving sitcoms. I mean, I dunno, it’s who watches sitcoms now, but I’d, I do really love them.

Uh, I do, I do. But I mean, it, it feel, it was very much a form of the. Definitely of the nineties and the early naughties. It was a really exciting form and so many great writers and I kinda really wanted to do it. And I think I wanted it too much. I didn’t really want to write children’s books. I kind of like, I loved children’s books as a child and obviously some very big children’s books came out at the start of this century.

Uh, and that was, that intrigued me and I read them, but it wasn’t such a sort of deeply held ambition in a way that freed me up just to try and. Understand it and get good at it without writing and constantly second guessing myself and trying too hard to be funny or clever.

Laura: Okay. Time for another off cut.

Now, tell us about this one.

Piers: So this is many questions, which is a treatment, actually I think for a radio format that I wrote in 2003.

Actor 4: Many questions.

Piers: Local problems solved

Actor 1: by famous people.

Actor 4: Monday, 6:30 PM and Sunday, 12:00 PM 30 minutes.

Actor 1: A question and answer show where local communities have their real life dramas solved and advised upon by a panel of celebrities.

We’ll come to your town and advise you on how to get your neighbors to turn down that stereo or what to do if you think your daughter’s staying out too late with the wrong sort. Our panel of comedians, writers, lifestyle commentators and personalities will soon have you seeing the funny side of your domestic problem, whether it be them next door or her upstairs.

Actor 4: The increasing amount of advice columns in the papers, the burgeoning number of message boards on the internet where people exchange tips on anything from DIY to social etiquette, not to mention the ever expanding lifestyle industry shows us however, ever more prepared we are to get the best advice for any problem.

If there’s a dilemma, you can guarantee someone somewhere will have the answer. We don’t claim to have that, but we’ll give you at least four to choose from,

Actor 1: whether it be community based,

Actor 4: who should get the use of the village green on Sundays, the cricket team or the local kids, domestic. What would the panel do if they won the lottery?

I recently won a hundred thousand pounds and don’t know what to do.

Actor 1: Or just one of life’s mysteries.

Actor 4: Where do the socks go? In tumble dryers.

Actor 1: We’ll do our best to help.

Actor 4: Chaired by Mark Radcliffe. Our panel of advisors are here to help if they can, but they’re more likely to make you smile. The panel will typically be made up of a range of personalities,

Actor 1: a lifestyle guru, Trini or Susanna from BBC Two’s, what not to wear, or Mary Killen, the spectator’s social agony aunt or guardian, colonist Mill Millington.

They’ll always carry a profoundly different spin depending on the philosophy and the most likely to offer some genuinely good advice,

Actor 4: a political figure. Perhaps the Bumptious comedy of Boris Johnson or the more seic wit of Tony Banks. Or we might have a political commentator such as Matthew Paris or Polly Toby, and attempt to see the personal in context of the bigger national picture,

Actor 1: a local character.

We’ll find someone from your hometown who’s known outside it and see if they still have the local touch. Did Michael winner go to the local school or did Julie Birch Hill once live around the corner? Either way, this third panelist will be someone local. But whose strong opinions may no longer be welcome?

Actor 4: A comic, a comedian of the more whimsical, kind, perhaps Ross Noble or Daniel Kitson to take a less than prosaic approach to life’s problems.

Actor 1: It’s a bit like home Truths Live, but without the Schmalz, our opinionated, diverse panel will take your queries and problems seriously. But the range of their answers combined with the disputes they’re bound to have with each other over the best solution is guaranteed entertainment.

Actor 4: A traditional and simple radio format given a modern twist.

Piers: Okay. Can’t imagine why that was a odd.

Laura: Well, I mean, it’s, it’s not a terrible idea. It just does sound like quite a lot of things. Uh, particularly radio things,

Piers: other things. Yeah. It sort of sounds, I think that program exists. I think it’s called Question Time, and it’s not so funny.

I mean, it does, it does

Laura: feel very familiar. So it doesn’t feel like a terrible idea, just too similar to stuff that was probably already around at the time, I imagine.

Piers: Mm-hmm. I, I, I chose this because I can’t, I can’t remember exactly who, where this was, so obviously a radio format, so I was, uh, I guess pitching for Radio four, but.

Until I started writing books. This was kind of my bread and butter and, uh, there’s many, many worse ideas I came up with in this one, believe it or not.

Laura: Oh, really? Such as, but I didn’t wanna share

Piers: them ’cause they’re probably owned by, technically owned by huge media giants. Well, so you sold them then. Well, I was paid to come up with them.

So they still technically in them, not that they’re worth anything, but they’re often of this kind of ilk and you know, it’s not great. It is derivative, but actually, you know, writing one of these a day or you know, a few a week, it’s sort of, again, going back to that weird thing about creative process, it was.

Bizarrely. I know it doesn’t sound like it, but it was such good training to, to become a writer because you get given this idea or come up this idea with someone else, I can’t remember the genesis of this one. And you sit down and write it and you just had to do it. And sometimes they, you know, we did actually come up with some really good ideas that got made into programs, but most of the time you came with ideas as all ideas are really, that are sort of not quite, as you say, they’re a bit derivatives, a bit similar to everything else.

Mm. But you don’t really know that until you’ve written it up. And just that sort of discipline of writing up stuff, uh, nonsense and gradually weird as it may sound, learning how to tell a story, like learning how to present an idea. Mm. And tell a story. This was very early and not in any way, particularly anything to be and, and particularly remarkable about it.

And, but it was through writing stuff like this that I sort of found my way to writing. Fiction or does it maybe the

Laura: discipline prepared you and the pressure. Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, I have to say that the thing I did enjoy most, as I’m sure, uh, probably the listener will, uh, the elements of historical interest, the many questions suggested guests, Boris Johnson and his Bumptious comedy,

Piers: no, God, I really hate my former self.

Laura: That was

Piers: Oh, that, that’s one for the archives. Definitely don’t blame me, but I mean, reality, you know. The idea of a panel of that included Michael, winner and Poly Toby. I mean, it’s just, and Ross Noble, it’s just not gonna happen. I mean, and also I love the fact I suggested Ross Noble, Daniel Kitson, who are famously iconoclastic and really quite reluctant to do stuff that’s not, yes, Daniel kids would

Laura: never.

Go on this show like this, this never

Piers: in a million years, never wouldn’t touch it with a barge

Laura: pole. And Ross no Will. Well, if you put him on, he would probably, who knows what show would be the result of it. Yeah, yeah. Quite, quite. But, uh, Trinny and Susanna. Wow. Oh, I to love that show. I can’t remember who

Piers: Tony Banks is either.

Laura: Oh, he was the, he I know who I’ve met him. Oh, he’s off the close show. Was your coach? No, no, no. Tony Banks was the mp. He was an MP for, I think he was the culture secretary at Point. Oh, that’s it. Yeah. Cultural sport. He was very charming. Sort of smiley eyed, kind of. Uh, no. He died about 20 years ago. But no, he was a very fairy char.

I remember being overwhelmed by his charm in real life. I had no idea who he was at the time. But you know, some people have larger than life kind of charisma. Yeah, he was one of them. So I’ve never forgotten Tony Banks. No. He died about 15, 20 years ago.

Piers: Killing, killing people off through, uh, putting them in formats while they may.

Laura: Yes. There’s not many of them that are alive or certainly their careers aren’t so alive. But anyway, that’s not, that’s not

Piers: for us to say. And, and I think it’s an interesting, I mean, it’s not a great idea, but it’s also one of those funny things where actually you’ve probably added one more ingredient that was original.

It might be. It’s just that it, it’s, there’s not enough to it.

Laura: Yeah. Okay. Moving on now let’s have your next off cut.

Piers: Um, this is a one page treatment for a romantic comedy novel. I started writing in 2007, called the year everyone else Got Married.

Actor 1: Hi, I’m Josh, and this is my story.

Actor 4: Excuse me. I think you’ll find it’s mine as well.

I’m Myra, by the way, and he never introduces me properly. Another one of the many things which

Actor 1: brought us closer together over the last year and what a year it’s been. Josh Haynes is now friends with Myra Duke. They hooked up at New Year and it was fucking freezing. You see, this was the year everyone else decided to get married.

Everyone else I know. Anyway, I didn’t even know half of them. That’s because we just met, and not everyone literally, but I think 12 weddings in one year is about as close as you’re ever going to get. That’s right. 12. One wedding a month.

Actor 4: Every month for a whole year. That is two stag dues, 10 weddings. One of them is mothers, one of them gay, and one of them literally at the bad end of a shotgun, an engagement party, and a divorce celebration, whatever that is.

Actor 2: Status update. Josh Haynes is deciding that he really hates weddings, especially other peoples in foreign countries. Status update. Myra Duke is having an amazing year. So many beautiful weddings, and now she’s off to one in Italy.

Actor 1: I’m not kidding. I really hate weddings. We’ve got 12 to get through just so long as it doesn’t give her any ideas,

Actor 4: just so long as it doesn’t put him off.

Actor 2: Relationship. Josh Haynes and Myra Duke changed the relationship status to, huh?

Laura: Now that weird ending there is because the text you sent ended mid-sentence with a question mark, so it does, we didn’t know it does. How to

Piers: actually vocalize that question mark. I think that’s a great vocalization. Oh, brilliant.

I have no idea. There was much discussion, let me tell you. Okay,

Laura: so you only wrote this is a one page treatment?

Piers: Yeah, I mean, maybe this is the thing I sent, maybe there are bits of, but I never really got off the ground. I mean, it was. It was definitely a point I think so many people have in their lives that I was kind of in my, uh, early thirties and going through that experience of summers being, oh my God, we’re doing this weekend.

It’s another wedding. And they’re lovely and they’re go, they’re gorgeous and, uh, some are better than others. And some of them are in London, which is brilliant where I live and others are miles away, which is lovely, but also really expensive And, yeah. Sometimes you’re invited and you don’t know people very well, but you go, ’cause you really should sometimes, you know, literally everyone.

And there’s so much gossip and drama swirling around. Other times the speech just make you want the floor to swallow you up. Mm-hmm. And so on and so on. And I felt there was a lot of mileage in it. But I also think, and I think, I think there is, I think there is an idea, and I’ve talked to other people who’ve had this idea, who’ve had a similar experience.

But I think I was in that phase of writing TV formats where one day you’re asked to write a sort of, you know, a game show about winning loads of money. The next day you’re asked to write a really sensitive treatment for a documentary about treating, you know, some refugees who’ve ended up somewhere, or the next day you’re asked to write a kind of current affairs type format.

So you slightly kid yourself that you are a sort of, you know, master of all trades. Mm-hmm. And. I think interestingly, this was me a year before I started writing books properly. This was me edging towards writing books, but still with that very TV kind of commercial sort of mindset.

(music): Yeah.

Piers: And there is a book here to be written.

If I was a kind of. Brilliant romantic comedy novelist or someone who writes those brilliant beach, we, you know, if I someone like Jenny Corgan or if I someone like Emma Henry or there’s so, so many people who could write a brilliant version of this story. I’m not sure I’m that person, but it was an interesting exercise in, it was like a transition from tv.

It’s sort of very commercial and. But it’s not really grounded in enough real characters or set up to to work. But you know, it was a step.

Laura: Well, in the same year, 2007, your dad, Paul Toay, wrote salmon fishing in the Yemen, um, and became a successful writer. Did that in any way make you think, ah, actually that’s something I’d like to do as well.

Piers: Huge. Hugely. Yeah. He showed me how to do a good romantic comedy. Um. And I think because I, it focused my mind because I just, as you may be guessing, by all these half started things in the job I was doing, I had a lot of unfocused, creative energy mm-hmm. That I was making living from doing it for other pe for other people.

Laura: Yeah.

Piers: But the thing about developing ideas is it, it, I worked with some brilliant people and learned so much, but ultimately it’s. You get a bit frustrated because brilliant ideas are misunderstood and don’t get made. Terrible ideas do get made, brilliant ideas get made terribly, and so on and so on, and you don’t have any control over that, and you don’t quite get the follow through, uh, of least learning.

You don’t learn. Because you just write the proposal and it’s on to the next one. So I was slightly flaming around thinking, coming up with things like this, thinking I’ve got to try and do something else, but I just didn’t really know what was I gonna write sitcoms? Was I gonna write romantic beach reads?

And then my dad out of the blue who’d, I mean, he loved reading, he read English University and he’d got me into reading and it was a big part of his life. And I’d discovered once. In my parents’ house in a shoebox, an unfinished novel. Um, but that’s not unusual. A lot of people have unfinished novels in shoe boxes.

Um, but it was a total surprise when really he’d more or less was stepping back from work. He was in his, he was back to 10 60 and he took me out for dinner and said, I’ve got some to tell you something. It’s a secret and a surprise. And I was like, oh my God. Like my dad didn’t do surprises. Like he was a very.

Quiet, quietly spoken, modest. He just didn’t, I was like, this is bad. It’s like, oh God, you know what, what? What terrible news are you gonna tell me? And it was like, he said, I’ve written a novel called Salmon Fishing in Yemen. And I was like, it’s called the Whaty What? And uh. And then it was just this amazing thing where he, he hadn’t told any of his family.

He’d written three books and thrown three away, but this one he’d written half of, got an agent interested, who then said, please write the rest. And then it sold for, you know, I mean, especially now where publishing is now a huge amount of money and was lined up for film adaptations, all the rest of it.

And it was just so thrilling because it made him so happy in a way that I hadn’t seen him Oh, in a particular way. I’d seen him happy before, but in a very particular way and, and I was very proud and I didn’t want to do what the kind of stuff he was writing. That would’ve been a bit close, but it made me think, well, look, I spent my life reacting against my parents as you do.

’cause he was in business. And I was thought, I don’t want to go into business. I’m really creative. I want to go and be an artist in London. And then I was like, oh my God, now my dad’s an artist. I should have been a lawyer. Everything’s gone wrong. Uh, so I should have, I was like, what do I do? I can either.

Like, go and, uh, go to law school, don’t wanna do that. So I was like, well, maybe, you know, uh, I don’t, I’m not sure these things inherited, but I was like, look, your dad’s writing books. That is one of the things you thought about doing. So that kind of informed the creator writing course. I was like, well, let’s take this seriously and see if there’s anything in that.

(music): Right.

Piers: And it really helped because he. I was writing kids books, he was writing out books, so very different. But he was, he knew the publishing world before I did and gave me lots of advice. Um, so it was lovely and totally unexpected in the way these, the, the nicest things. Often now.

Laura: Oh. So the opposite of, uh, my father.

I, I felt I had to beat him, sort of the EPU situation, you know,

Piers: it, it wasn’t because he hadn’t been, I, I, you know, I’d got all outta my system with like, you know, you are a businessman doing engineering, and I’m working with cool comedy people in London. Um, and so I’d called that and he was totally, of course.

Completely unimpressed and wasn’t remotely interested in any of that.

(music): Yeah.

Piers: Didn’t understand any of it. It was like, what are you doing with your life? Um, so then when I started writing books, at least kind of got what that those were. Yeah. ’cause he was writing them. So it was nice. It brought us together.

Laura: Oh, that’s lovely. Right. Well, let’s have another off cut,

Piers: please. What’s this one? So, um, this is a social media status update. Uh, several, uh, that I wrote from 2013, uh, called Alfonso the

Actor 3: Weevil. I. As I mentioned in my status update this morning, there’s a small, dusty, great beetle, ought to be more precise, a weevil called Alfonso, who lives on my desk.

He’s a fan of early Tom Hanks movies, and some of you have come across him before. I believe he’s often too busy with his own projects to stop and talk. But this morning I saw him perching on the corner of my porridge bowl eyeing me suspiciously. What are you looking at, Alfonso? I said, unable to ignore him any longer.

What do you think I’m looking at? He said, I looked around behind me, but there wasn’t anything there. Just some books on a shelf and a pile of unopened post. Am I being thick? I asked him. Alfonso climbed down off the bowl and onto the strip between the edge of my keyboard and the screen, which he finds a very convivial temperature.

I’m looking at you. He said, why are you always on Facebook? I’m not always on Facebook. I said, yes, you are. I am not stupid. You know. Prove it. He got out a small weevil sized notebook and flicked through the pages and began to read off a list of times 9:30 AM 9:45 AM 10:00 AM 10:14 AM 10:16 AM 10:58 AM 11 or 4:00 AM I thought that you were meant to be writing a book.

It’s not that simple. I counted beginning to feel a little uneasy. What do you know about it? Anyway, you are only a weevil. Precisely. He replied triumphantly and I could tell he was giving a rather smug grin. Precisely nothing. You are not even on Facebook. And as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I saw that I’d fallen into his trap.

No, he said in that way of his, which always makes my blood boil. I am not on Facebook. And what have I accomplished this morning? Would you like to know? I pretended I hadn’t heard and visited myself with an urgent email demanding my attention about an extra cheap Cialis clearance sale in somewhere called Ano.

Now, do you know where, um, Botano is? Alfonso? I asked him, but he was not to be diverted. And first he began. I walked all the way across your desk and that is quite somewhere, you know, and then I walked all the way back. I climbed all over your books. I crawled up the wall a bit. I found some toast, crumbs to eat, and a piece of lint.

What have you done? It’s different. You are only a stupid weevil. I’ve got, you know, invitations to reply to groups to join people to spy on. It’s a whole new dimension to my social life. Whatever you say. He said smirking and he lent against the bottom of my screen with some of his legs crossed and filing some nails with the others.

Now, if you don’t mind, I said flicking him off, so he bounced with a crack against the window sill. I really am trying to write a book. Yes, came a weak little voice streaming up from the floor, and I really am trying to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, so I squashed him, dear Rita, but don’t worry, he’ll be back tomorrow.

Laura: It’s quite extraordinary. A a, a social media update. How, how many of these did you write and, and where?

Piers: I did loads. I did loads on Facebook. I was writing. This, you know, I was, well, 2013, I guess. Uh, maybe they get back even before then, but I was, I think that’s when I decided to collate them into a Word document.

Ah. ‘

Laura: cause the last world was published in 2013, wasn’t it?

Piers: Yeah. And I’d, yeah. And I started writing them when I was trying to, basically, when I was trying to write my book and couldn’t, and I think it was a way, I’m always saying, I, I coach. In my other obvious of day job where I coach writers, and one thing I’m always saying to ’em is like, don’t forget to be like playful.

Don’t, it’s quite intense writing a book. Yeah. And you can get a bit lost in your head and a bit stressed about it and, and you forget the writing is just should be fun as well. Mm-hmm. And these are just the silly I ideas, I mean. In the last while, there is a cockroach who’s a major character called the General who in who starts the story sitting on the rim of someone’s bowl.

So maybe there is some connection there. I’m not sure. Um, I can’t remember the sequence and I’d always liked, and there was a little weevil on my computer that kept. Distract or in my study or somewhere, dunno where it’d come from. It was distracting me and I was So you’re saying this is based

Laura: on a true story?

Piers: Oh this is definitely based on a true story. It’s gonna be a major picture and um, and I was like many people at the time turning way too much time on Facebook.

Piers: And it was the beginning of the great sort of distractor crisis. And, but I posted these little things on Facebook and people, I think they were just like, oh God, Piers is obviously having a nervous breakdown.

I’ll say, I’ll post some nice comments and maybe he’ll step off the ledge. Uh, so, so I was, I was, I, I kept on posting them and gradually the comments got less and less. They were like, yeah, we didn’t really to, we didn’t need to carry on. But I, I enjoyed doing them and they were a really nice sort of outlet.

Laura: Yeah,

Piers: just to like, I think partly also publishing takes so long and, you know, for books to be written and read and edited and, and so, and all that. So I just, I was itching to. Be out there and I was just kind of stretching my, they were just little kind of ex doodles. Really. Yeah. Exercises. But I enjoyed, and they, a loose narrative kind of formed and I just, I en enjoyed doing them, but they’re completely mad.

I dunno what was going through my head, but, um,

Laura: well, staying on the animal theme, your book this year, that letters to a dog, um, and it’s geared towards those who find reading and writing more challenging. Where did, where did that idea for that come from?

Piers: The, uh, Barrington State, this wonderful publisher who pub published books, um, for, uh, children with dyslexia and other challenges they may encounter learning to read their books are all quite short, so they’re all between about seven and a half thousand words and about 10,000 words long, and their printed on this special yellow paper, which makes it easier for dyslexic children to the, the letters jump around less on the page.

But Anthony McGann wrote a book for Barton Stoke, um, called Lark, the one, the Carnegie Medal for Children’s Book. So those restrictions are no. Barrier to the quality or the ambition, right. Of the books. Um, and this book isn’t like that, but it’s, I wanted to write them a long, long time. And actually I was asked to write for them in, in lockdown the first winter of lockdown.

They got in touch. Um, and I was like, most people at that point, the novelty of lockdown had worn off when we went to the winter phase. And ev we definitely was going not mad in the same way as writing about Alfonso the weevil, but slightly kind of like, am I ever gonna work again? Um, you know, his life stopped forever.

Uh, you know, because I’d been planning a play that’d been canceled. My book talk, my book had been postponed event. I mean, I look given what people endured in that time, it’s really, this is like the tiniest viol in the world. But it, it was. In my tiny world, it was like these, these were my preoccupations.

(music): Sure.

Piers: And, uh, I was living in the house with my husband and our dog, so I was probably spending an unhealthy amount of time as you weren’t allowed to see other people. Um, having sort of a magic conversations with, uh, my dog and Barrington Stoke got in touch and I just had had this idea about, you know, obviously dogs don’t talk back, and I’ve written about.

Lots of talking animals, but I wanted to do a kind of realistic story about communicating with animals, and this ideas came to my head about this little boy who is perhaps in hospital. I think that came from us all feeling slightly confined and cooped up, and he’s. Before he goes to hospital, he spotted this dog in a dog home and he really wants it.

And he doesn’t know how to tell his dad. ’cause they’re having, they’re not speaking for various reasons. And this very kind nurse says, well, why didn’t you try writing to the dog? And to his and her surprise, the dog starts writing back to him in hospital. Right. And it’s about the relationship that that develops.

And, um, spoiler, the dog hasn’t actually written back to him, but I’m not gonna say what. Oh no,

Piers: And it was really hard to write. It took me for such a short book. It took me far longer than I meant to, ’cause it was so different to stuff I’ve written before. I’ve written these big adventures and it’s like really short, uh, chapters and telling it basically a long, short story.

But I loved, absolutely loved, absolutely loved doing it, and it’s always, I think what I enjoy most the more I do this is being given new ways to write. Like, you’ve got to do it like this this time. I love the focus and constraints of, of that rather than trying to do it all yourself.

Laura: And talking of big adventures, we’ve now come to your final offcut.

So tell us about this

Piers: one. Uh, this is from last year, 2024, and is a treatment for moderate the damned, the first book in an adult fantasy series.

Actor 2: In Ancient Britain, a land of mists giants and wizards lives moderate the handsome, but arrogant, ambitious, and duplicitous nephew of King Arthur. He’s a knight of the round table at Camelot, who is sent on a quest with his mentor, sir Lancelot.

To investigate a valley terrorized by a strange beast, they find a mystical lion, which they pursue into Carlo’s forest. The lion attacks Lancelot, but moderate slays it, earning Lance Lott’s gratitude for life, returning to Camelot, bathed in glory. They come across a. Priest praying by a chapel. The monk reveals that Mordred is in fact, Arthur’s son, who will one day kill his father and do more damage to the kingdom of Britain than any other man.

The only thing that might redeem him is finding the holy grail, but that will never happen as he’s so treacherous, corrupt, and weak. Incensed and humiliated. Mordred kills the priest in a fit of. Peak Lancelot is appalled by his protege’s crime and drawing. His sword warns him. He must now face justice At Arthur’s court they fight and Lancelot injures Mordred, who flees back to the forest where the dead lions vengeful mate corners him.

Mordred jumps into the lake to escape the animal, but he does not realize it has been cursed by the Enchant Morgan La fey when he emerges. Not only has the lion vanished, but so has Cartloises Forest. Mordrid finds himself climbing out of London’s Docklands in 1984. He must make sense of this new world where the only giants are the dying ones of industry.

The mist is on the nightclub dance floor, and the wizards are all behind computer terminals in the city. He learns that his temporal exile must be a punishment from Arthur’s court in some way. Perhaps he will find his way back and claim Arthur’s throne by finding the holy Grail as the monk claimed to moderate surprise, his ruthless and treacherous nature allows him to thrive in Thatcher’s Britain.

He charms his way into a job as a trainee estate agent, which allows him to keep searching for the Holy Grail under the guise of sourcing and showing properties. Soon he becomes an investor and property developer of his own, and before long. Has attracted the attention of the conservative party who ask him to stand as an mp.

All the while he schemes, plots, lies, seduces members of both sexes, thieves, and murders to get his way, keeping the faith that he’s getting closer to the grail and a return to Camelot.

Laura: Dun, dun dun, dun dun. That’s very exciting. Sammy. I love the evil of the thatcherite years. The government, the ultimate arch villain.

He’s an estate agent. That’s the hilarious, um, yeah. Presuming you’re not a big fan of, of the thatcherite years, et cetera.

Piers: Not a, not a huge fan, but I wanted to kind of ex explore it. Through the ideas of someone you might see as from a heroic set of tales and where that, how that all intersects.

Laura: Would he have been a, an estate agent but a hero, or would he have been an estate agent and a villain?

Piers: I, I’ve always loved reading about kind of an antiheroes, like one of my favorite literary characters is, as you called John Self, but the MOUs hero of Marty Amos’s money. Yes. I like people who in books who are kind of awful and repulsive in every way, but you’re somehow still annoyingly drawn to them and kind of despite their horror show.

And so I thought the eighties was a good setting for that and a sort of good. Twist on a, on a very British kind of myth. And, and, and also I guess maybe looking at the idea that certain kind of ideas of Britishness perished during the Thatcher years and different ones were born. I dunno, I’m getting far too ahead of myself, but, um, it was just a proposal.

It

Laura: struck me that it would make a great TV series. Sorry to drag you back away from novel. Yeah. And back into television, the evil television. But, uh, it did remind me of things like Lucifer and Buffy the Vampire sl, and it, it seems to be a very popular format, particularly if the hero is a handsome, late teen female or male.

Yeah. That, um, I don’t want to drag you away from the, a novelist. No,

Piers: I, maybe you’re right. I, I’ve always been good at the high concept ideas unless, I mean, it’s really interesting. I, I was asked to do this. There was a. The Hawdon Foundation run a beautiful six week writing retreat in a beautiful Italian villa Oh, by the shores of Lake Como.

And you get invited to apply, which I was very lucky to be done with. The Society of Authors nominated me last year to apply for it, along with a hasten who had about 700 writers from across the world. It wasn’t, uh, so the competition was pretty stiff, and I. I, I was at a stage in my writing career back then where I was finishing various things and feeling very playful and very kind of like, I dunno what to do next.

And always toying with the idea of writing something for adults. And I had to do this quite quickly and it definitely has, to me, that feeling of something that’s, it’s sort of. It’s quite a nice headline concept, but it needs a lot more thought. And as you say, it does. I often think novels actually, it’s quite detailed and I actually think the best books often have just a much simpler idea at their heart, whereas this feels, as you say, it does feel a bit more like a sort of treatment for a, a almost a TV show or a movie rather than something that the kind of question you explore in a book, which is often a bit more.

A particularly a grownup book. And it also shows that thing where I’m still very much got one foot in children’s fantasy, even though I’m sort of literally, why don’t I take a thing children read about and put it in a grownup world? That’s how watch a grownup book. That’s just an interesting first

Laura: move.

Well, the ugly, the television series that always appear to be, uh, of the sort of Netflix charts. Yeah,

Piers: and I’d also read. Fabulous Fantasy series by Lev Grossman called The Magicians, which became a TV series. And that’s sort of about some grownup Americans doing Narnia, but they’re grownups, so they’re sex and violence.

(music): It’s very clever

Piers: and funny, uh, and that that always, that’s always appealed to me. So Netflix, if you’re listening Mordred The Damned is very much available.

Laura: Well, maybe if you put some casting suggestions in there, perhaps.

Piers: Yeah. How about that? Might Tony Banks or Boris Johnson.

Laura: Okay. Right. Well, we have on to the end of the show. How was it for you?

Piers: It was lovely. Thank you. It’s been really interesting and strange to go back to, well, not, not this, I wrote it last year, but everything else, which is from quite a long time ago now and feels like a different, definitely a different me, but also me, if that makes sense.

Which is quite odd, but nice to have that little kind of conversation in my head with, uh, former writing selves and I’ve, yeah, I’ve, I’ve really enjoyed considering the journey.

Laura: Did anything there surprise you at all?

Piers: The sitcom really surprised me because I started reading it. I mean, it’s not great, but like there are some gags in there and I was like, in my head, I’d completely written it off as totally.

Totally, totally terrible. And like in that way you do. And that’s also the first mistake. You mistake when you make, when you start writing is you immediately, when something doesn’t get made, you write the whole thing off as a complete catastrophe. It’s like, no, it’s just like, it just needs work.

Laura: Yeah. Are you someone who might go back into an old project and bring it back to life?

Or do you sort of done it now you’re moving on?

Piers: I a little bit always never say never, but I sort of think there is a weird thing certainly with, I think with stories that. There’s a moment when they’re really alive in your head and you are kind of tuned into them and you’re just kind of living them and excited by them in ways that require to explain.

And then what I found looking back at all of these is I can, I can view them quite intellectually and with detachment, but I don’t have that little spark of. That spark of the possible that makes you really want to sit down and write something. Ah, so we possibly won’t see dead animals then unless, I mean, as I said, if you know Netflix, apple tv, I feel this might be the breakthrough hit you’re after.

Uh, and I stand ready to find that spark of, uh, possibility for the right amount of money. But, uh, I suspect not.

Laura: Well, Piers Torday, it’s been fabulous talking to you. Thank you for sharing the contents of your offcuts drawer with us.

Thanks very much for having me.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin with special thanks to this week’s. Guest, Piers Torday. The offcuts were performed by Kenny Blyth, Helen Goldwyn, David Monteath and David Lane Pusey, 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.

One of the big problems I have, and I’m writing virtually anything is format paralysis. That I kind of have an idea for something, but I don’t know whether it should be a book, a play, a film, a radio piece, uh, an interpretive dance, an animation. And I end up sort of not writing things ’cause I can’t work out what they should be.

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.

This episode, my guest is Dan Maier , whose myriad writing credits span all genres of comedy, television, radio, film, print stage. Just to pick out a few. He was a core member of the writing team for the entire 11 year run of itvs BAFTA award-winning series, Harry Hills TV Burp. He collaborated with Charlie Brooker co-writing, the satirical police procedural.

A touch of cloth for Sky and contributing to Brooker’s other shows. One of the films he’s written on is Sasha Barron Cohen’s The Brothers Grimsby. He’s created comedy and drama on BBC radio with two series of his own comedy, life on Egg, a comedy drama series co-written with his brother Mark Mayer called Trapped and his own debut radio drama, the Not Knowing which was nominated for a Writer’s Guild Award.

The list of his credits runs to literally pages and further includes among other things. Books, newspaper articles, the TV soap opera, Emma Dale, and even game shows with his own creation quizzes for Channel four. A very busy man indeed. Dan Maier, welcome to the Offcuts Drawer.

Thanks very much. I’m exhausted just listening to that.

So many projects you’ve been working on so many formats. What’s the most recent bit of writing you’ve been doing? Or indeed are you still working on?

Uh, I’ve just written totally on spec, written a horror film. Oh. Which is something I’ve never done before. But, um, screenplays, I’m quite enjoying. At the moment, it’s the sort of form that I thought was too big and intimidating to ever attempt. And then I co-wrote screenplay with a very talented John Niven.

Oh yes.

And that was, that was really enjoyable. And we’ve subsequently, um, done something else that’s kind of started as a telly thing. I’ve turned into a screenplay and then I’ve written another one. Nothing has yet made it as far as the screen.

Mm-hmm.

But that’s quite an enjoyable process. So that’s the probably the thing I’ve been doing the most. Right recently. Uh, horror though. I’m looking at your other credits. I don’t see any horror. So why are the leap? No, and I’m not particularly a horror fan, so I thought it was quite interesting. You know, I’ve seen a few horror films, but I’m not steeped in it, so I thought I’m going in there with kind of naivety.

If I’m writing kind of very familiar horror tropes and cliche, then I dunno that I’m doing it. So I’m sort of going in quite innocently rather than second guessing myself though, I quite like the idea that I’m. Sort of trying to write a genre that I only have a superficial knowledge of. And you’re writing this one on your own, are you?

Yeah. Yeah. That’s very brave. If you are writing a project on your own about a subject, you are not that clued up about that. That’s that’s confidence. That is, well, it’s all stories, Laura isn’t, it’s all stories. Oh, it’s so true. You are so right. Um, right. Well, let’s kick off with your first offcut. Can you tell us please, what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Okay. This is a radio sketch that I wrote for a well-known double act in 2013, and it’s called Shop Bell fx Door opens, shop Bell, Tinkles prominently Street Sounds Door Shuts Street. Sounds cut out.

Good morning, sir. Can I help?

Yes, I’d like to buy a shop bell.

I’m sorry.

I want to buy a shop bell. A bell That Tinkles when you open the door. of a shop.

I’m afraid we don’t sell those,

but you’ve got one on your door.

Nevertheless.

Look, I’m not an idiot, okay?

No.

What I mean is this isn’t a situation like that joke. That joke where a man goes into a pet shop and says, I’d like a fly, and the assistant says, we don’t sell them. And the customer says, well, you got one in the window.This isn’t like that, right? He’s clearly an imba seal. That’s the joke. But this is a hardware shop.

It is.

Which specializes in shop fittings.

It does.

So it’s reasonable of me to expect you to sell Shop bells. I’m not just saying it because a shop bell rang when I opened the door.

I understand.

I mean, if this were a fishmongers or a nail bar, my argument would be untenable.

Yes.

But it’s not. It’s a hardware shop

which doesn’t sell Shop bells.

What about the one on the door? It’s not for sale. I thought it might be some kind of display model.

Well, as we don’t stock shop bells, a display model would be at best, misleading.

Sell me the bell.

Do you even own a shop?

No.

Then why do you want a shop bell?

I’m an audio engineer. I record radio comedy and drama. I need a Shop Bell sound effect to establish that certain scenes and sketches are set in a shop.

It’s a bit old hat, isn’t it?

What do you mean?

Well, shops don’t really have shop bells anymore. It’s one of those slightly archaic radio conventions that no longer records to real life. I’m not sure of anyone under the age of 40 would even understand what the sound signified.

I mainly work for Radio four.

Oh, fair enough. But in any case, you don’t really need a Shop Bell to establish that a scene is set in a shop.

What do you mean?

Well, let’s say that instead of this conversation happening in real life, it was happening in a sketch set in a hardware shop.

That’s difficult to imagine, but I’ll try.

Immediately after you came in, I addressed you as sir, and you explained you wanted to buy a Shop Bell. It would’ve been readily apparent to anyone listening that this was a shop. There would’ve be no need for a shop Bell.

Then why have you got one?

Because if you remember, this isn’t a sketch, it’s an actual shop, and I wish to be alerted to the arrival of customers.

But if this is a real shop and not one in a sketch, it undermines the other strand of your argument about shop bells having become archaic. If shop bells only exist as facile scene setting devices in fictional shops and not in real shops, perhaps this shop is in a sketch after all.

Oh my God.

And can I have a packet of three quarter inch wood screws and a modest deadlock, please?

I don’t know anymore.

Um, if I hadn’t seen the character’s names in the margin, I think I would’ve guessed who this was written for because the voices are very clear. But confirm it for the listener who this was written for.

That was written for Mitchell and Webb. Ah, um.

Yeah, they’re very Mitchell and Webby kind of words, I suppose. As soon as I realized that, I thought, of course it is. Of course it couldn’t be anyone else. Did you do a lot of writing for them?

I have done no writing for them whatsoever, funnily enough. Oh, I, um, I know this was from, I think this is when they’d been on the radio, been on the telly, and then went back to radio, if I remember rightly.

Mm-hmm.

And I’d never written anything for them. And, um. Was commissioned to write a few minutes of material and this was among the things what I wrote for them then.

Mm-hmm.

But it didn’t run. So, uh, yes, it’s a curio in that it’s a thing that didn’t go, but also for. A very talented pair obviously, that I’ve, that I never have actually otherwise written for.So it’s kind of my, my go at writing in those voices, which was kind of enjoyable.

But you say that they commissioned you to write to some stuff. Did you write some other stuff and this is the one that didn’t get made? Or this, the stuff that you wrote that didn’t get made?

I think this is the stuff. So I mean, I think I was, for those that don’t know the way it works or used to work anyway in radio and some telly writing is that you would get commissioned by minutes if it’s a sketch show quite often, rather than somebody saying write five sketches, they will say, write five minutes, or they’ll commission you to write two minutes for an episode, or 10 minutes for a series or something like that.So I think I had like a five minute commission. Uh, so I think I wrote two or three sketches of which this was one. It’s interesting. I find that, um, hearing it now, I kind of think the problem I have is I get very attached to things and I’ve, you know, I’ve listened to other people on your podcast, Laura, who sort of hear their old stuff and they’ve completely forgotten about it and they sort of laugh it off as veia.

Mm.

And part of my problem is I get very attached to stuff and I don’t really let anything go. And I still think things that I wrote 25 years ago might have a chance. Mm. Uh, so in a way I’m more relaxed with this ’cause this is so specifically. Written for, um, David and Rob. That I sort of feel quite content that it’s just sort of, it’s not a thing that anybody else is ever gonna make.So I sort of feel,

well, I dunno. I mean, I think you could, I think you could get another sketch team doing it. It’s just the David Mitchell’s particular delivery style works very well with this script. But I don’t think it could only be David Mitchell’s delivery style. And obviously Rob, uh uh, Rob Webb doesn’t have quite as much character work to do in this bit, but I reckon you might even be able to get women to do it.I’m, I’m just saying what I know.

Crazy magic women. I know just as a women are allowed to work in shops.

I thought you say comedy.

No, no. Did Yes. Yes.

But all I’m saying is that I thought that this sketch could stand alone, could be performed by any half decent comedic pairing. Frankly,

thanks very much. I mean, I also like it ’cause it’s so absolutely radio, because obviously it’s, you know, yeah, it’s deconstructing the form and all that kind of stuff that you, it wouldn’t really work anywhere else.

So do you find it restricting or freeing when you’re writing in someone else’s voice?

Uh. That’s a good question. I probably haven’t done it that much in a way that’s quite so pronounced as this. I mean, I enjoyed it here. I found it sort of quite freeing and inspiring that once you have that character, that kind of David Mitchell pedantic character, that was enjoyable to do because he takes his time over every part of an argument.That’s quite enjoyable to do as well because you don’t have to. Self-edit quite so much. That particular character. You just lay out an argument very sort of clearly and patiently, which is quite enjoyable in terms of writing and other people’s voices. It’s a funny one because I suppose the, you know, the person that I’ve wrote for the longest was Harry Hill.

Mm-hmm.

And he has a very distinctive voice. But once you’ve written for him for a while, you are doing it subconsciously, I suppose. You’re not sort of really thinking about it. Mm-hmm. And also the brilliant thing about Harry is you write a joke in your own voice in a sense, and he’ll take it and make it into his.

And I think the best performers will probably do that if you’re talking about writing for writer performers. Mm-hmm. You don’t necessarily have to write so perfectly in their voices because I think if they’re good and they’re on it, they will take something you’ve done and finesse it so that it is in their own voice.I can’t really think of too many instances of writing for a very distinctive voice.

You write for Charlie Brooker, though he’s quite different to Harry Hill and you, you wrote, I dunno if they were gags or whatever, that you wrote specifically for him, but he was the one performing them

Well, yeah. For the wipe shows and the um.The review of the year shows that we did a couple of those on wipes. I think it’s similar that you, you have an idea, but he will, he’ll rewrite it in his own right voice. I think he’s not someone who just sort of sits there and you put a script in front of him, which is the great thing about people like Charlie and Harry that um, you know, they’re not just sort of mannequins that are just parroting what you say.

Oh, otherwise known as actors,

they’re actually helping you by improving what you say. Yes. Um, yeah. Okay. Yeah. But, um, yeah, they, so they, you know, they make you look good as a writer because they’ll, they’ll take the best of what you’ve done and, and then finesse it and put it in their own voices, which I think is the best kind of people to write for, really.

Right. Okay. Well, time for another off cut. Now tell us about this one.

Uh, so this is a post written in 2004 for a blog, and the blog is called The Diary of fw, Cleve Gentlemen.

My aunt Mr. Gallion, informs me expressly desired that her carriage be drawn by four lama, a gentle reader, I confess, a degree of despair.Those of you blessed with both a fair memory and the courtesy to have studied prior entries in this journal will doubtless associate my deceased relatives remarkable post-mortem demand with the time described by her to me, and thanks by me to you spent amongst the people of the Andes. You may see the employment of the llama in the funeral procession as a touching symbol of the close and kind relationship fermented betwixt my aunt and the pipe playing squat faced children.

She so ly described in her letters, however, scrutiny of her papers in the days following her death revealed how I, and by unfortunate association, gentle reader, you were led by Aunt Perpetua on the journey of such fictive extravagance. I can scarcely bring myself now to relate the truth of the affair.

Aunt Perpetua did indeed visit the land of the inker, but unwillingly her steamer capsized on route to Bueno Aires, and she was washed up on a beach in Peru, bitten by an antler crab. She became delirious in the care of local villagers with whom she stayed for just two days before a hospital ship. The ascension collected her and the other survivors are made for port in the Argentine.

Bad weather denied them. However, and the extraordinary decision was made to sail for home. Seven weeks later, the exhausted crew and gravely ill patients arrived in South Hampton. Unfortunately, when words spread to the harbor authority that the ascension bore amongst its cargo were touring North hum and Cricket 11, all suffering with typhoid permission to disembark was refused and the ship was forced ahead for Ireland.

Where such concerns over public health are of course less apparent. Still delirious and now touched by Typhus. Aunt Perpetua was committed to the county Sanitorium in Cork, where according to the crumpled practitioner’s notes recovered from her papers. She not only developed a complexion of sallow skin and angry pustules, but sank into a deeper and more unpredictable delirium.

By turns the notes record, she believed herself to be a Manchester Baker’s wife named Joyce Carter. Hands valet to Arch Duke, Gregory of West Failure, and a Bevel Edge, Sheratan Mahogany side table. It was presumably as the last of these that Perpetua suffered a twisted knee and bruising to the ribs as the consequence of an incident involving another patient, a Mr.

FL, who labored in turn under the unfortunate conception that he was a large vase of chrysanthemums.

It feels like it should be animated. It feels like the, all the mad activities going on there, I could just see like a little cartoon.

Oh, that’s interesting. I never thought about that, but that kind of goes to a, a problem that I have. I find a thing in writing. It’s interesting you should say that. ’cause one of the big problems I have, and I’m writing virtually anything, is format paralysis. I kind of have an idea for something, but I don’t know whether it should be a book. A play, a film, a radio piece, uh, an interpretive dance, an animation or, and I end up sort of not writing things ’cause I can’t work out what they should be.

Wow.

So, um, it’s interesting you should say that ’cause that’s not a form I’d really thought about for that, but yes.

Well, it is a, a memoir. Yes. I was gonna ask you why it was a blog and not a book. ’cause it, it’s a very, very diary of a nobody very Pooter. But is it blog just ’cause we live in the 21st century?

Well, the time it was written, it was, I think that’s kind of one of the things that hopefully is funny about it in this case is the medium that I chose to write it in. I sometime in the early two thousands, sort of discovered the blogging community and started reading a few people’s blogs that would just be.

As they were. They’re just sort of daily journals of different stripes. And so the way that that worked is, you know, you would write a blog, you would leave comments on other people’s blogs, and by doing that they would hopefully read yours and you build up this sort of network of people who write and read each other’s stuff.

And I found that quite interesting. And I tried it as myself, I think. I think I wrote a few blog entries just sort of everyday quoted in bits and pieces, but I didn’t have the discipline to stick with it. And at the same time, for some time, I’d been collecting books from secondhand bookshops, books of Victorian and Edwardian, thought generally written by men with too much money and too much time on their hands.

There’s a sort of strain of these books you’ll find of people doing experiments, people having theories, people just writing about. Whatever they fancied writing about, because they sort of wanted their names presumably to go down in history for a thing in the realm of science. Um, but yeah, I just found it a fun way of doing it.

And so I wrote I think two or three stories each broken down into, uh, a series of entries I shall continue in my next entry kind of thing. Uh, and then. Being me, I, again, I lost the discipline to carry on doing it, but I, I think at that point I thought, well, maybe this should just be a book. And, uh, it is one of those things that I, I do think about revisiting because kind of like it’s had something in common with David Mitchell.

Again, it is, it’s writing in character. I mean this time, you know, for a cr, completely created character, but it’s a similar type of enjoyable verbosity where you can write at length, but it’s still choosing the language in a nice, specific, enjoyable way. But it’s long-winded. It’s verbose, but it’s, I hope, elegant as well.

Well, I think it is. Okay, well time for another off cut. Now what have we got? Okay. This is a radio sketch that I wrote in 2010, and it’s called Five Live Trailer. This is a trailer for five live. I’m saying some things and so am I. There’s no real reason for us both to be here. It could just be me. Oh, it could just be me.

But this way it sounds like more effort’s gone into making the thing. Than if it was all one person saying all the words. We usually make it sound like I’m in the room and I’m in the room as well. But sometimes we make it sound like I’m in the room and I’m on the phone, and then other times like I’m in the room and I’m on the phone.

But we never make it sound like we are both on the phone because that would mean. There’d be no one in the room then who would feed the cat. Often the things I start to say are finished by me. Sometimes he finishes them in the room and sometimes on the phone, but occasionally, instead of finishing each other’s sentences, we just repeat what the other person said, repeat what the other person said.

The person in the room says the thing, says the thing, and the person on the phone repeats it, repeats it. Until they start to sound like an annoying child ing child. We might jazz things up with a clip of commentary from the motor racing or the horse racing or the people racing, but it doesn’t really help.

Perhaps they’ll use some of the money they save on six music to make five live trailers sound a bit less. Tossed off. Tossed off, but probably not. Probably not. Shh, you shush.

So your original description of this, when I asked you about what genre it was written for, you said it was written for your own amusement with you as a performer. What were you hoping to do with it? Eventually, I, I put like, put it on YouTube or something. Probably it’s just an observation about five live trailers really.

I just, I started noticing that these tropes about. The trailer’s on five live and I, I just ended up writing this. I didn’t think, I never really had it in mind that, uh, it was beyond a radio sketch or anything. I really just did it to please myself and thought it would be good if I could, um, record it, but I didn’t really have the technical wherewithal.

Um, but I think you can feel the sort of rage when you, when I hear it back, I can sort of hear that sort of fury. Fury, uh, the frustration of having to listen to that kind of writing. I mean, not really. It’s just that sort of, those tropes, once you, once you notice them, you can’t unno them, that that’s what five live do, that they’ll have a bit like this and then they’ll have a bit like this and that.

They haven’t really, they haven’t really changed. I think what struck me about it is I, I used to, I spent five years writing radio commercials in the 1990s. That was my one proper job. Ah, and that was really good training. As I say, that’s really good like bootcamp for writing radio sketches because you are having to write something in 30 seconds, 40 seconds, and you have to sell something at the end of it.

And you’ve gotta be really focused and there’s no time for indulgence. I, I was lucky enough to work for a company that wanted to make radio advertising more creative. Basically, so it was a good opportunity to do creative work. So radio is kind of your springboard into comedy. Is it? Before getting your job in radio, were you kind of always a bit of a a comedy geek?

A comedy fan growing up through school and all that sort of thing? Or did it just happen because you had to be witty and grab people’s attention within the radio ad sort of spectrum? I was always, I was never a comedy. Geek, I would say. I’m not one of those people that is, has an encyclopedic knowledge of every episode of Eastbound and Down, or, you know, knows who the grip was on Steptoe and Sun and things like that.

I, I, I’m not that guy, but yes, I was like writing, I always enjoyed comedy and I was like writing comedy since I was at school. Me and my friend Nick Brownley used to write sketches in the six form common Room. Oh. Which, if I could find, if they were digitally and it’s on a digital form, I would’ve sent you some of those.

Laura, but I dunno where they’re in a, they’re in a lockup somewhere in a notebook from the, from the 1980s. Did you perform them or did you just write them for No, we just sort of wrote them for our own amusement, I think. And then after I left university, I got the opportunity to, to write radio ads, which was a great way.

You know, I wanted to, I knew I wanted to write professionally and this was a, a really good opportunity to do so that a lot of people probably wouldn’t think of or wouldn’t get. And as I say, I was lucky enough to be writing for a company that wanted their ads to be fun and creative and to use kind of celebrity voices on some of them rather than the sort of circuit voiceovers and that.

So that’s. That was nice. That’s a, you know, opportunity to work with actors and comedians and things like that. But then how did you pivot from writing for straight ads to actually actively being a comedy writer? What, what was the connection? Well, I did that for five years, as I say, and one of the. ’cause we were sort of good at it and we won a lot of awards.

We, we started writing some ads for, this is slightly confusing for the radio advertising bureau. So there’s a body called the radio advertising bureau, which was kind of the body that promoted ad uh, radio as an advertising medium to businesses. And, and they themselves as a way of promoting radio for advertising.

Had, um, monthly awards. So I wrote the ads that announced the results of the radio advertising bureau best out of the month. Uh, and we had Johnny Vaughan. Oh, uh, voicing them, right? Yeah. And this was in, uh. 1997 I think. And it was just before he started working on the big breakfast. And he liked the stuff that I was writing and I’d come down to London.

I was still working in Bradford then, and I’d come down to London once a month and do a recording session with him. Uh, and he seemed to sort of like my sense of humor. So when he got a job on the big breakfast. They’d never used comedy writers before. It had always been producer written before Johnny and Denise started doing it.

Uh, but then they decided to use writers and he recommended me, he as a, to have a trial writing on the big breakfast, uh, which I did. And then that sort of became a longer term thing. And from there I wrote on another stuff. So I, I have Johnny Vaughn to thank for my entry into the world of comedy writing, which was quite the, the baptism of fire from going from.

Writing radio ads to getting up at two in the morning, be it standing in a cold porter cabin in bow at quarter past five, going through the day’s newspapers, having to write a 15 minute newspaper review that was gonna be broadcast three hours later. That was quite, that was quite a pressure first. It’s quite good to have that as your first job in, in comedy writing, I think.

’cause after that, most of the other stuff seemed like, uh, you know, a breeze. Yeah. Um. On now let’s have your next off cut. So this is a theater piece that I wrote in 2009, and it’s called The Plagiarist.

Channel five are looking for a precinct. Drama says Harriet typing. Ian Emerald leans against Harriet’s window, forehead pressed to the glass and gazes at the street below. What the fuck he asks is a precinct drama. For a few moments, he thinks the tapping of keys is to be her only answer. It’s a drama.

Harriet eventually replies set in. Don’t say a precinct. It’s something like the bill or casualty, something with a central location that can generate, you know, storylines infinitely good. Christ well says Harriet. Finishing the email to one of her more successful clients, confirming the format rights she’d negotiated for him on a new hidden camera TV show.

Give me something to flog and I’ll take it to whoever you like. Ian leans back from the window leaving a small, greasy arc unnoticed on the glass. TV is dead. He informs his agent. Then write a play. Ian sits down opposite Harriet taking a script from her desk. Fuck that. He looks at the title sheet. Hot Wash by Mark Litten.

Hurst. Let me guess. Is it a sitcom set in the Lare by any chance? Harriet says nothing, and Ian turns the page. Scene one, interior Laundre fucking bullseye. Who’s Mark Hurst? It was sent in on spec. She says he’s looking for representation. Good luck with that, says Ian. Dropping the script on Harriet’s desk and sending a pencil rolling over the edge, at least says Harriet, showing no interest in recovering the pencil.

He’s fucking written something. Back in his flat, Ian waits for the kettle to boil and stares blankly into his small courtyard garden in which things grow equally unfettered and unencouraged. He’s written nothing today. The meeting with his agent while essentially redundant, nevertheless constitutes work.

And so he could now go and watch a DVD unencumbered by guilt, taking his mug of tea into the living room, though Ian reflects that, he wrote nothing yesterday either or the day before. In fact, as he sits down and Absently manipulates the legs of the incredible Hulk action figure recently given to him by his friend Jerry, as an ironic 40th birthday gift and purchase it on the handle of the hot mug.

He tallies his professional achievements of the last three months. They amount to two days work on a doomed game show pilot for quite generic sketches with no specific recipient in mind. And the bullet points for an idea for an outline, for a treatment for a sitcom on the floor. A pile of the previous weekend’s, newspapers appears to be connected by a cable to a wall socket.

Ian removes the papers revealing his Sony via underneath. He opens the laptop, which has optimistically been left on standby for five days, and G logs onto the internet. Too many distractions at home, Ian needs a change of scene. He Googles Lake District Hotel BMB, and persuades himself that as a means to an end.

This too constitutes work. In fact, all in all, it was turning out to be quite a productive day.

Well, this, I’m guessing it is very true to life. I, I, I, just hearing it back now is so exposing. I didn’t realize quite how old biographical it was until I heard it back. I would say though I have never owned a Sony bio, so it’s not, oh, yes. In that case, you’re completely cleared. Uh, but no, I’m God almighty.

I, I mean, that’s. Yes. I mean, obviously there is a, it has a fantastic little microcosm of everything. You, if you wanna be a writer, listen to this. This will tell you everything you need to know about the life of a writer. Well, a writer for hire. Yeah. You’ve just summed up the entire existence. But I’m, I’m guessing this is true, not having been a, a writer for hire, but it sounds like it is absolutely true.

Is it? There is a lot about that experience that I, it is very true to life. I think. Yes, I’ve, I know I’ve obviously tried to make the character a bit more monstrous than I would be to hide myself somewhere. I think you always would always do that if you put anything autobiographical in any character. I think instinct is to exaggerate so that you know what is actually true.

To you is I loved the bitterness though. The bitterness. This conversation with his agent and this sort of like sort of almost snarling through gritted teeth about other people and fuck that. I hope that’s the exaggeration bit as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think I’d be that much of a prick, but obviously there’s that sort of internal voice, which is.

Fury impotence is, mm. I didn’t think he sounded like a brick. I think he sounded completely believable. There’s voiceover variations of that and active variations of that. I just heard that and went, yeah, that would be me if I was a writer. Completely. But it was written as a theater piece. Yes, I know. It’s kind of weird, isn’t it?

Because he just listen to that and think, well, this is obviously a book. Um, yeah, I did write the theater piece. I think I was inspired by sort of long form. Storytelling pieces, that sort of things that Ben Moore would do, and those kinds of really great gripping things where there’s just one person on stage.

But I thought, well, the idea here was that there would be, it would be that kind of thing. Mm-hmm. But there would be two narrators. And the two narrators are telling. Different stories and we cut back and forth between the two stories. And then the two stories seemed completely unrelated, but they then collide.

Yeah. And that was the form of the thing. And then as it goes on, it becomes a lot more deconstructed and meta as. The narrators, one of the narrators kind of breaks away from part of the story that he’s telling and kind of says, hang on, this doesn’t make sense. Points out sort of narrative inconsistencies in the story, and the whole thing kind of breaks down.

Oh, very Breton in a very indulgent, meta deconstructed way. So that was kind of the idea and that. What I was talking earlier about format paralysis is probably a good example. I wrote this for theater, but I think I, and I read the whole thing back. It was about two and a quarter hours, so it would be about two and a quarter hours of two people on stage reading out what is basically a short story.

Well, that’s a play. It is, but when it’s basically nothing to look at. That’s true. I think I asked a very lovely Jeremy Dyson of the League of Gentlemen. He read it. And he said, you are, you are just kidding yourself. You’ve written a short story here. There’s no point pretending that you haven’t written prose.

’cause that’s basically what it is. And that’s probably true. But again, it’s that thing of, well, what do you do with it? Well turn it into a book. A book of short stories or a longer story. No, it could be a, a novella, I suppose. Uh, maybe I revisit it and do that with it, but, um, but I quite like the deconstruction element of it and that I did think, again, could it work actually on the radio?

It might be a fun way of Yes. Playing with a form again. And it is, is kind of, it gets quite silly as it goes on, and just in terms of the structure, right, in that these two narrators start arguing amongst themselves or discussing and taking apart the narrative and pointing out the flaws in it. And then I, as a character, as the writer, Dan Meyer, sort of come out of this.

Audience of the theater and go on stage and start demonstrating with them for ruining the performance and say, why? Just stick to just read the stuff out that’s on the page. And then of course one of them rightly says to me, yes, but you’ve, you wrote this as well. You wrote. You interrupting this performance, why are you pretending that this isn’t part of it?

Do you really think this audience think they’ve all come on the one night where everything broke down and the, and the writer came outta the audience and I will, you know, and it sort of disappears up its own asrs slightly then where I’m sort of saying, don’t point that out to them. Your your you are.

Why are you constantly lifting the curtain so that they can see behind it? Yeah. And he the, and the guy says, but you wrote that as well. You, but you had me say that. ’cause it’s, you know, and it sort of becomes this a bit Yeah. Daft. And one of them spoils the ending of the play and I have a go at them for doing that.

Uh, but I kind of enjoyed it. Mm-hmm. So, yes, it’s a thing that in that sense would be. Harder to make work actually on the page. Mm-hmm. ’cause of the deconstruction, unless it turns into some sort of bs, Johnson deconstructed short story, I think stage or possibly radio. Yeah. Might be an interesting way of doing it.

Yeah, it’s a peculiar thing. ’cause is it, say there’s a, there are pros touches in there. It’s written as prose and I think written quite well as prose, but it, it then falls apart in a way which is not conducive. Which is practical. Yes. Uh, so the, and the narrative stuff is probably more laborious on stage or on radio.

So it, it weirdly sort of. It’s like some weird hybrid beast. Well, it feels like you’ve got two projects in there and you just separate them. The, the detail of the writer’s life and the other characters could be a book, but you’d have to obviously truncate it into a play. ’cause like you say, it would take too long Yeah.

To, to explain it all. But then the theatrical convention and the fourth wall breaking and all that stuff is very, uh, you can break the fourth wall, whether what you call in radio the fourth. Glass booth. I don’t know, but you can, you can break that in radio play. Sure. Yeah. But then, yes, I’d say the narrative bit of it is the tricky bit.

Yes. There’s so much there. I can see why you’ve got the issue of, gosh, where do you start? Which bits do you won’t quite go in any box, which is why the box it goes in is a file on my computer where it sits. There’s dust. Right. Well, let’s move on to your next off cut. Now this one is what? Uh, so this is from a children’s book called 30 Planets One Barbecue, which I wrote around 2020.

Can you hear that? Ask Luca Pie. Lila couldn’t hear that. Whatever that was. She could only hear the angry voice in her chest trying to get out. The voice that spoke when she felt upset and started telling someone why, but only inside, not out loud, which felt sore. They’d flown for nine hours. The voice was saying, adding some basic swears because being inside it could get away with it.

Nine hours, and for what still. Lila thought better to feel angry than utterly terrified. She didn’t think that then, though she thought it a few minutes later, once she’d actually been utterly terrified and could more easily make the comparison. No, if you’d asked Lila Pie then standing in damp and total darkness, she would’ve told you her immediate plans involved stomping around after her dad, mainly looking at the muddy ground with some tutting, possibly a bit of eye rolling, and definitely being unimpressed with anything he tried to show or tell her.

She was kind of looking forward to it, and with all that, there was simply no room for feelings like utter terror. But now that her dad had asked her about the that, that she couldn’t hear. Well now that, that, that, that her dad had asked her if she could hear was louder. She could hear that distant thunder, but not coming from the sky, coming from the ground.

And it was getting closer, louder and louder. And then it stopped sounding like thunder. Oh, crud said Luca. No, not thunder. Feet, 400 Maddy feet. We’re in the middle of the hog. No course, Lila shouted, but could hardly hear herself over the sound of galloping. Suddenly she felt herself being pulled. Luca had her arm and was running towards row of lights.

Run. He shouted, letting go again, Lila run. And now very suddenly their lives were in danger and utter terror had very much jumped to the top of her things to feel list. But look, you are probably thinking it would help if you knew what a hog nail was or where Lila and Luca were. Or who Lila and Luca were or who Ampersand I, Amand and Ampersand uca were because you’ve somehow got hold of a glitchy e-reader version or who Jenky is because you are the kind of total toolbox that has to flick to the end of a book before they start reading.

So stop doing that and let’s go back a day.

So this is from the children’s book. How much of it did you actually write? All of it. Oh, um, I wrote an entire thing maybe during lockdown. Pre lockdown. It was locked, downy kind of time. I think I had this idea, and again, the running theme is things going through different versions. I mean, all of them were a book in this case, but different kinds of a book.

Mm-hmm. I’d had the idea of writing an Encyclopedia of Planets, a big thick book, and every page there would be a, a. An illustration of a planet on it. And on the facing page there would be a description of that planet. So they would all be made up planets, but there would be perhaps sort of 300 of them or something and, and they would each have different qualities to them.

And this, it kind of goes back to, I think it’s a thing that I always enjoyed as a kid, and I assume kids still do, which is. Different iterations of a single idea are quite exciting. And what I mean is, I suppose the first example I can sort of think of from childhood would be like the Mr. Men. Mm-hmm. So you read Mr.

Bump and you understand the world and you understand the idea. And then you see there’s another thing called Mr. Tickle. And you go, oh, I see. That’s exciting. And then you see, all right, each one of these things is gonna open with a description of their house, and this is what he looks like. And once you’ve established that as a thing, it seems like an obvious thing to say, but I think there’s something really exciting, particularly as a kid.

About what’s the next one gonna be? What’s the next one gonna be? What’s the next thing that fits into these parameters in this world that I understand? Yeah. And I think there is an instinct for that, which is somehow really exciting, which I wanted to kind of revive in a way, except in this sense it would be a bit different ’cause it’s all in one book that you would turn a page and see another planet.

And you could find your favorite planet and you could have this book for years and maybe find a page in it that you’d never noticed before because you dip in and out of it. And there was something sort of exciting about that. Mm-hmm. And I just kind of liked that idea. So initially it was gonna be that and a very heavily illustrated book, but then I had the idea of actually having a narrative running through it.

So I had this idea for this story and I had the story on one side and the sort of list of planets on the other, and I cut down the list of planets and then managed to weave the story through the list of planets. So it’s become a story about this girl, Lila Pine and her dad, Luca, going on a quest which takes in all these different planets.

So it’s very episodic. Yeah. Travel loggy in a way. And there is an overarching idea to it, but you can also sort of dip in if there’s a particular planet and all these different planets have different qualities to them and a different vibe to them. And some of them help them in their mission and some of them are kind of detours.

And so I just started writing and then by the time I’d finished i’d, I’d written 92,000 words. Oh, wow. My friend, the, the very talented children’s author, Nadia Sharine said, yeah, you can’t have a 92,000 word book for middle grade readers. Yeah. And she said, why don’t you make it into a trilogy? I thought, well, that’s quite good idea.

So I basically then broke it down. And put some sort of connective material between the bits and so entirely on spec. Nobody having asked me to do it. I, I’ve, I’ve written a trilogy of children’s books and Have you submitted it to anyone? Uh, yes. I have yet to find, uh, a literary agent who will take it on.

That’s where it’s at. But yes, it’s very much a thing that I haven’t, um. Written off that I would really like to do something with, weirdly. It’s another thing that would work as an animation. Mm-hmm. Um, probably like an animated series, but that’s not a world I know a huge amount about. So this is just a sort of one-off project on its own.

You’re not changing direction now, slightly that way. Well, mind you, you’re now doing horror film as against the children’s book. So this is yet another branch of your tree, so to speak? Uh, yes. I’d like to try and be a. Jack of all trades, um, a Dantes, uh, trying to muscle into other people’s territory. Why not everyone else does?

Why not? Um, no, I, I didn’t necessarily see a future as a children’s author, although it’s a thing I would love to do if I had an idea that was good enough. Mm. But this was just a one idea. I think these characters could come back. But yeah, this idea just sort of took on a life of its own slightly. And, um, yeah, I really like it.

Um. I think there are a lot of, because of the nature of it, you’re hopping from planet to planet and each planet has its own characteristics. There’s a, there are a lot of ideas packed into these books and, uh, sort of fun visual ideas. Um. With all the different qualities that these planets have, and I think, um, yeah, it would be great to do something with it.

You probably just need to speak to someone who knows about the clear demarcations between the various children’s genres. You know, whether it would work for an animation or, yeah. Even a play, maybe a sort theater play with some imaginative staging maybe. Sure. Yeah. No, it seems a very inventive children’s theater, but that’s interesting.

Yeah. You just got all these different type of formats. I know you’re making it worse. Sorry about that. Yes. Ignore anything I have to say. Right. We’ve come to your final off cut. Tell us about this one, please. This is an episode from a proposed comedy anthology series. Uh, series was. It’s gonna be called the Function Room, and this episode was called Lookalikes and I wrote it in 2008.

Exterior, a night sky. We hear a man’s voice off camera. We are professionals, artisans, craftsmen, and women. Pan down to the exterior of an average pub on the high street of an average English town. We pan pass the pub, sign the rifleman, and across to an upstairs window over which we hear and we’re being treated like cattle.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m asking you to look inside yourselves and find the strengths interior, the function room. As the man speaks, we pan pass the optics behind the bar and reach Sandy the prematurely, aging and balding. 30 something barman. Sandy stands a GOG apparently transfixed by the speech. To find the courage to stand up and demand the respect your talent deserves, we pan down past the glass.

Sandy is absent, mindedly drying past the bar, front to the floor, then across to a pair of Gordy Woman shoes. Over which the voice continues. We’ve been lied to, cheated, kept in the dark. Over the next, we pan up over a camp over the top Be Jeweled costume, complete with Feather Bower. Keith West thinks he can get away with it?

Well, not anymore. What makes him think he can treat us like idiots? We come to rest on the speaker’s face. He is dressed and made up as Dame Edna Everage. It’s time for each of us to say, Hey, enough. I’m tired of being undervalued. Bottom up food chain, I’m an artist and I’ve got my dignity. For the first time we see Dame Edna’s audience from his point of view, seated in rows are around 50 men and women.

They are all dressed as famous people. The front row includes Elton John, wg, grace, and Hitler. We can see the likes of Victoria Beckham, Andy Warhol, Churchill, and the Blues Brothers. Tableau. After five seconds silence. There is a rhythmic clanking, buzzing sound cut to behind the bar where the glass washing machine has started up and broken.

The silence cut to sandy expression as before. Uh, yes. We see an arm has gone up in the audience. It belongs to a crocodile Dundee lookalike. What do you mean cheated? Oh. How long have you been with the agency? Chum? Four months joined from Faces Inc. When they got shut down. Well, if you’ve been with Keith for four months, he’s probably been ripping you off for three.

Usually gives a month’s Grace. A Princess Diana lookalike in the row in front of Crocodile Dundee turns to speak to him. Shut down. Is it Face says Inc. Yeah. He charges 15% for starters. What did Faces charge? 10 ne back sits a small man in his early sixties. Yassa Arafat. No wonder they shut down. No, no. We were infestation.

I was quite ply with Mel. Hi. Yeah. Nice girl. 10% book alikes. Charge 12. Jackie Anderson charges 12. Ian, you were with lasting impressions, weren’t you? We see a Winston Churchill lookalike trying to light a cigarette lighter. Oh yeah. What was their commission? Tens Posh Spice sits behind Crocodile Dundee.

Infested with what? 10%. Again, big deal. He’s upfront about it. You know how much he takes when you sign on white, but then he charges a signing on fee.

I was very worried about this piece that we couldn’t do justice as an audio piece because obviously a lot of the comedy depends on the difference between the way a character looks, who they’re dressed as, and whether they’re even a believable lookalike and how they sound. Um, but it’s quite visual, isn’t it?

It is. It is a particularly visual piece. No, I, I was. It was there. Uh, I thought you, you definitely did it justice. Ah, now you said this was part of a series called The Function Room. Yeah. I know you wrote that. Was that not made into a series then? No. There was a pilot that was broadcast. Mm-hmm. Not this episode.

Presumably not the lookalikes, not this episode. So it was. I think it might have been a Comedy Lab, channel four Comedy Lab. I think it was part of that. Oh, yes, yep. Yeah, I’d had the idea of, I noticed there were sort of drama anthology things that were set around a particular place or those sort of Jimmy McGovern things.

Um. Was clocking off. Is that one of those? Yes, yes. That’s one. The street or whatever. Yep. Where you would have different stories that had some linking theme, but they were all individual stories. Yeah. And I noticed that no one had done that in comedy. Really? It didn’t seem to be a thing in comedy. Mm. And it felt like you had opportunity to do.

Single half hour things that had some sort of thematic link. Yeah, so I had this idea of the thematic link being the function room, being this room above a pub. And every week a different group of people would hire that function room for whatever purpose, and that felt like a good fun. Conceit. Yeah. And also I thought you could then have some recurring characters.

So Sandy, the barman appears every week. Yeah. And also in the pilot, we cut away to a couple of barflies at the bar downstairs who are just sort of having bar chat that has no relation to what’s going on Upstairs. There’s a sort of light relief. I thought they could be a running thing. Yeah. And so I wrote this episode, another episode, which was about a neighborhood watch meeting mm-hmm.

Where they all meet up to discuss the fact that someone has been throwing compacted balls of human feces through people’s windows. Uh, and that was commissioned and that was made as a pilot. And I had a, in, uh, the cast was fantastic. It was like the, the late. Paul Ritter was in it. He Oh yes. Great. Um, re shear Smith Simon Day playing one of the, the Barflies downstairs and, um, Kevin Elden.

It’s incredible. It, they were really great and it didn’t get commissioned as a series annoyingly. The sort of regret I have about it is we filmed it in front of an audience. Oh. ’cause they really wanted a studio audience thing. And actually, I don’t think it was at its best as a studio sitcom. Yeah, uh, I think it was a, should have been an on audience thing, but you know, I got to make a comedy program at BBC TV Center with an audience coming in and laughing at jokes.

So that was sort of one of the most incredible experiences of my professional life. That was very exciting to be able to do that. And then it just, um. Yeah, I, I had absolutely no recollection that I’d written a second episode. Obviously, as part of the process, I, I knew I’d sort of sketched out some more episodes, but actually until we did this, I had no recollection that I’d written another one, obviously, about these people from this lookalike agency meeting up.

So, I mean, it’s, the thing that was the back of my mind that I should say is if there are any inside number nine fans listening who are shouting at their broadcast devices. But that’s just inside Number nine. Did that, this was six years before inside number nine, so I hadn’t ripped off the idea of, of linked comedy one-off half hour things.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, at that time, really, I didn’t think, I don’t think anyone, I don’t remember anybody doing it. The thing about Inside Number nine, apart from it, is comedy, but it’s supposed to be horror and it is very much built around the two of them. So, yeah. Um, it’s, it, it is a very, very specific. Series, whereas this is, is much more general, doesn’t seem to have any specific rules apart from the fact that it’s set in that particular venue.

Yeah, yeah. So I, I don’t see how it would clash, especially now as number nine is no longer. So it could, but even if the B, B, C or whoever don’t have the budget for this sort of thing at the moment, again, radio. Maybe not the lookalikes thing because it is quite visual, but, um, as a series, yeah, there’s definitely ways of, of doing that.

I think as, um, on the wireless, uh, I mean that is, I I kind of did something similar, which you mentioned at the, at the start with my brother, we did write a sort of linked anthology comedy. Thing called trapped, where that was the conceits. Every episode is somebody trapped in a situation, either physical or emotional or, so yeah, I’ve done something similar thematically in, in that sense or structurally right in the past on radio.

And, um, it was quite good fun. It’s generating, generating the ideas is obviously the difficult bit when you’ve got a sitcom, when you’ve got your characters and you’ve got all your stuff, I suppose you’ve got some stuff. Pre-printed on the page in a sense. Yeah. It’s harder when you’re starting from scratch each time, which again is a sort of incredible thing about how they managed to maintain that quality on inside.

Number nine. Yes. When they’re starting with a blank page every time. But yeah, I had some other ideas for this, but, um, uh, the lookalikes thing was, I, I’d love to have seen that. I’d love to actually visually see these characters in their costumes, their comedy. The script was very funny, but to actually have that in context.

With, you know the people. Sure, yeah. Dressed up as your dam Mena. Average is Hitler. Hitler’s sitting. It’s been a lot of cool for Hitler lookalikes. Hitler. Never. Not. Funny. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show. How was it for you? Fun. Uh, it’s, it’s good. It was fun. I, with the reservations some this stuff, but it’s kind of like I say, I kind of don’t let stuff go very easy.

So I can’t be sort of, uh, pretend to be sort of embarrassed by my IL or something. It’s, I still like this stuff, you know? Yeah. There was nothing in there to sort of go, ha ha ha, weren’t you a rubbish writer in those days? Now. You’re terribly kind. You’re terribly kind. No, it is, it’s true. Well, those are the pieces you chose to give us, so Yeah, well that’s, yeah, I suppose it was quite self-selecting in that sense.

I left out the worst stuff, uh, the things like the, the FW cleave, the, you know, the Victorian diary. I kind of enjoy listening to that, and that’s a thing where I think where I could. Maybe it’s something to revisit. Mm. And yeah, hearing the stuff just exists is of its time is kind of interesting as well.

Mm-hmm. So, yeah, no, it’s very enjoyable. Felt very indulgent, but it wasn’t, doesn’t feel like it’s my indulgence, so it’s fine. So I, I thank you for that. From listening to that stuff. Is there any advice you’d give a younger you knowing what you now know? Um, the answer could be no, by the way, you’re allowed to say Not really.

No, I think write more and actually try and do something with it, because I think the fear of the sort of lack of confidence in things meant that a lot of stuff was written than I felt I’d scratched an itch and it would go into a draw. Mm-hmm. And I think with a lot of this stuff, I know didn’t make enough effort to actually pitch stuff.

I’m not one of nature’s pitches. Mm-hmm. I’m very much under promise and overdeliver. Whereas I think as a writer, probably just commercially, the reality is you, you sell your ideas and then you worry about actually trying to write them. And I would tend to be the opposite of that, that I think I’m better at that now.

But certainly at that, at the time I wrote most of this stuff, I would just think, well, I’m gonna write this thing just to see if I can write it. Yeah. And then having done that, I would probably lose confidence in it. And as I say, put it in a draw, whereas. Actually being committed to writing something and then being obliged to write it and obliged to show it to them is probably a, a healthier way forward, even though it’s a bit more exposing and a bit more scary mm-hmm.

Than this little solipsistic writers Garrett, that I probably inhabited during most of the, the early noughties from when most of this stuff comes. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, your offcuts have been very entertaining and it’s been fascinating talking to you. Dan Meyer, thank you for sharing the contents of your offcut straw with us.

Thank you very much.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shaven with special thanks to this week’s guest. Dan Maier, the Offcuts were performed by Emma Clarke, Chris Pavlo, Jake Yapp, Nigel Pilkington, and Helen Goldwyn, 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.