Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer. Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is the bestselling author, TV writer, actress and presenter, Emma Kennedy. You’ll know her from the numerous TV comedies she’s appeared in, which include Goodness Gracious Me, The Smoking Room and Miranda, or possibly from her work with fellow comedian Richard Herring in his various podcasts. As a writer, she adapted her autobiographical book, The Tent, The Bucket and Me, to become BBC TV series, The Kennedys, and has published another 10 books, including four for children, with a further book, The Time of Our Lives, out later this year. Emma is also a well-known face in the presenting world, having done a lot of work with Comic Relief, including organising the Guinness World Record-breaking Largest Kazoo Ensemble Ever at the Royal Albert Hall in 2011. In 2012, she won the coveted title of Celebrity Masterchef. She’s also won Celebrity Mastermind and Pointless, and nearly won the World Conquer Championship, but a soft nut let her down. Emma Kennedy, what a rollercoaster ride. Welcome to the off-cuts drawer. Masterchef, Mastermind. It feels like there should be a third master prize in there you’ve won.

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

Is there a lot of competition?

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

So, maybe another Guinness Book of Records record?

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

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

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

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

I’ve done the triple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

She sits on the desk with me.

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

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

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

Bye, thanks for coming.

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

Yes, yes, yes!

Thank God!

I can’t believe they’ve gone.

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

We’ve got a free weekend.

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

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

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

Can I have a tin with a spoon?

Yes.

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

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

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

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

Yes, try the boxes.

Right.

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

Nothing. We can do anything we want.

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

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

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

Ta-da! Found them!

George’s hand is covered in oil.

Oh, look, can you pass me a…

He looks around for something to wipe his hands clean.

No, not the guest towels.

Well, we haven’t got any guests.

I don’t care. They’re for guests.

But I live here.

Right. So you’re not a guest.

Emily hands him some kitchen roll.

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

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

Alright, Biscuits.

Cool, cool.

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

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

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

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

I’m a guest.

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

No, it’s not. It’s Ian.

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

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

Yeah, right.

Cool, cool.

Where are you going?

Bus stop.

No, where are you going?

Bus stop.

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

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

Right then, I’m off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

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

Right.

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

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

It was after I’d written the Wilma Tenderfoots.

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

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

So you didn’t submit it to anybody?

No, no.

You just started it and stopped yourself?

Yeah.

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

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

To you or someone you know?

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve heard stories like that before.

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

Really?

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

It’s about like GIs did in the war.

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

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

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

Your blog into a book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That sounds fascinating.

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

Oh, no. How frustrating.

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

And that was an eye opener.

Why?

Because it’s so much easier to write.

Than comedy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clem, can we have a chat?

Who’s that in the car?

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

Does he want a coffee or something?

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

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

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

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

What’s going on?

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

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

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

Is this a joke?

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

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

Look, I know this looks bad.

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

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

Five months? While I had cancer?

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

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

Are they ironed?

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

She slumps into a chair, head in hands.

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

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

No. I was wondering if you could tell him?

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

Trevor looks down and shakes his head.

Come on, where’s she from?

Preston.

Oh, Trevor. How could you?

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

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

How delightful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You write jokes and everything.

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

Is there enough Lego in the world?

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

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

Yeah, I started it a year ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is that cow?

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

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

Utterly holds up an oversized watch.

Me o’clock, work o’clock.

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

Hang on.

There is no work o’clock on that watch.

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

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

Farmer Lee looms in.

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

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

I’ve got that star, Farmer Lee.

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

But what is team building?

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

Big brother house! I’m gonna be famous!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing animation or writing for kids?

Writing animation for children.

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

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

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

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

What about a children’s book?

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

Right, yes it would.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Emma Kennedy. The Offcuts were performed by Beth Chalmers, Emma Clarke, Toby Longworth, Leah Marks and Keith Wickham, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer. Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is writer, comedian, and actress, Katherine Jakeways. As a writer, she rose to prominence with her first radio series, North by Northamptonshire, a gentle award nominated comedy drama with an all-star cast that ran for three series on Radio 4. She went on to create and write three series of All Those Women for Radio 4, one series of Guilt Trip, various other single works, and her radio play, Where This Service Will Terminate, was so popular, it was extended to include another four installments of the story. If you recognize her voice, it could be from her appearance in countless TV comedies, including Outnumbered, Mid Morning Matters with Alan Partridge, and Tracey Ullman’s Show, which she also wrote on, or from the recent Horrible Histories film where she played the lead character’s mum. Katherine Jakeways, welcome to the Offcuts Drawer.

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

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

Good, well, thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many did you end up playing in the end?

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

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

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

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

So how old were you when you wrote this?

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

Was it Love’s Young Dream?

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

So coy, let’s call him Tim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the same production, from the Hamlet.

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

They were character exercises, though, character monologues.

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry about the exclamation, Mark.

It suddenly felt a bit…

I’m Mary.

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

Laura’s mom.

That’s it.

Do we do both, or is that the French?

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

Yeah, I’m all set.

And Mary, it’s a pleasure.

Likewise. Well, we’ll be, won’t we?

Very soon, family.

Now, he must be exhausted. Let me…

She tries to take his suitcase.

No, no, you know what?

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

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

So now what? We…

I take you home, and we can… wedding.

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

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

And it’s your first time in England?

Very first.

Well, it must all seem very…

No queen.

Where is she?

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

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

David Beckham.

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

No idea. David Attenborough.

Of course.

With his little monkeys and his nature.

So is your car…?

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

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

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

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

Well, the Queen insists on it.

I bet she does.

I bet she does.

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

I saw the agenda.

I like it. We know where we stand.

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

Jo puts a reassuring hand on Mary’s hand.

You plan. You’re a planner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it’s politeness, isn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children’s TV channel.

Yeah, children’s show, which I wrote in 2013 and it’s called The Magical Mirror of Magic.

In Pryorwood Park School, just near the caretakers’ cupboard, on the corridor where you queue up for lunch and try not to get told off for mucking about, there’s a cloakroom. And just off the cloakroom, there are children’s toilets. And in the toilets, as well as the three cubicles containing oddly low loos and the basins with soap dispensers which usually don’t work, there’s a mirror. It’s the end mirror. The one above the basin in the corner that you wouldn’t normally go to. And the mirror has got a crack in it, which as far as anyone knows has been there since the school was built. Nobody knows, but it’s a magic mirror. When anyone looks into it and makes a wish, and you’d be surprised how often that happens, the wish comes true. Nobody knows why, but there are often strange goings on at Priorwood Park. When Josh Leesons was told off twice in one morning by two different teachers, he happened to wish, while washing his hands, that just for one day, his whole class could be teachers and his teachers could be pupils. See how they like it. And they did see. And they didn’t like it. When Stacey Maloney noticed that Miss Cohen, the PE teacher, was looking a bit lonely, she couldn’t help but wish that Mr. Friedman, the art teacher, might notice too and ask her to marry him. Much to Miss Cohen’s surprise, during afternoon break, he did. Sophie Hernandez wished to be a princess. Claire Rowell wished her brother would get lost. Fergus Green wished he was a caveman when he found out that they didn’t eat vegetables. George Bradbury’s mum wished that while she was at parents’ evening, Miss Harewood would tell her George was better behaved than the son of her next door neighbour. Mrs. Fisham, the head teacher, wished that the school wasn’t so scruffy and simply couldn’t believe how much less scruffy it became. Ben Irving wished that he could get his own back on Spencer Norman and his gang. Evie and Maggie wished that they didn’t have to do their maths test, even if it meant aliens landing in the playground. When the bell rings for the end of school, all the weird goings on at Priorwood are over and everything goes back to normal, but often lessons have been learned. And if not, often someone had fallen over and landed head first in a bucket.

So this was written for Children’s TV. Now you’ve worked a lot with the Horrible Histories team. You were in the movie, as I mentioned, playing quite a big part.

Yes, thanks.

Did you ever write on Horrible Histories or were you just actress?

I did the odd sketch for Horrible Histories. I’m very much not one of their regular writing team and I was never one of their regular performing team. I was sort of part of it because I knew the people involved quite well and all of the actors in it were people that I’d started out with, like we were saying, sort of at the Hen and Chickens and Jim Howick and Ben Wilbond and people that I’d known for years really and we’d done a lot of sort of live stuff. There used to be a thing called Ealing Live, which was an early character comedy night that they did at Ealing Film Studios in West London. It was so exciting at the time and so much fun and so sort of important actually in retrospect for the people who came out of it. So I’m in a handful of the sketches and I wrote on a handful of them. I’m thrilled to be even any part of it now because particularly when you have kids, you suddenly realize what an amazing God I am.

I was going to ask you, have you ever written anything with a view to your kids being able to either read it or watch it on television to get extra kudos points for Mummy Being Cool?

Well, they’ve got no interest at all in me being cool. In fact, they’re now of an age where me being cool is the worst case scenario. You know, they would hate the thought of me trying to be cool. But yeah, when you have young kids, you do get a bit more interested in children’s television because, of course, you have a period in your life where it’s the main thing that you’re watching. And you see the CBBC’s years and then you grow into the sort of CBBC stuff. And some of it’s brilliant, like Horrible Histories, and some of it’s less good. And yeah, if you’re a writer, if you’re involved in that world in any way, inevitably you’re going to go, oh, I reckon I could have a go at that. And I did do some writing actually. In the early days of me trying to get into telly, I did a couple of episodes of some children’s TV shows. I did, there’s a show called Go Jetters. Your kids are older than mine.

Yes, I’ve heard of Go Jetters.

It was quite a big deal. I think maybe it is still quite a big deal. My kids are too old for that now, but I gather I think it is still quite a big deal. I had a couple of episodes of that. Oh, and there was a thing that was, if I’m going to call it the Furchester Hotel, which was a lot of the Muppets characters and stuff. So no, not actually the Muppets, the Sesame Street. Oh God, isn’t it awful? I’m not quite sure of the difference and I would have known at the time, but anyway, it was puppets. So I did.

You wrote them or you were in them?

I wrote them, so I had a couple of years where I was on a list of names that people would come to for doing children’s TV and when you get on one of those lists, particularly if you’re a woman actually, because a lot of them are blokes, you do get asked to do other stuff. So I quite often got asked to do for a while episodes of kids TV shows and in the end I had to sort of start saying no to it because like I say, it’s snowballs and once you’ve been asked to do that kind of thing, you just become one of the people that gets asked to do all the new ones. So I could have gone on and done a lot more of that, but it wasn’t quite where I wanted my career to.

No middle aged women who could apologise all the time.

No, or there would have been.

If I had ever got my own children’s series, we would have ended up being about a lonely middle aged woman on an island somewhere logging to get off the island and a load of kids and puppets and stuff around them, which actually, I might write that down, it’s quite a good idea. But the proposal that you just heard, I included that partly because it was an amusing thing that I had woken up in the middle of the night once years ago. And you know, sometimes when you’re a writer or anybody, I think, you sort of wake up in the night and go, I’ve just had a brilliant idea and I’ve got to write it down. And you write it down and then in the morning, you look back at it and think, God, what the hell was that? Well, I had done this and thought I’ve really nailed it. I’ve had a really brilliant idea. And I woke up and all it said on my notes, bit of my phone was the magical mirror of magic. And that was all in my head. This was a fully formed sort of brilliant series. You’re accepting the awards. Yeah, I was absolutely picking the frog. And then later on, I was asked by a children’s producer to come up with a proposal for a children’s show. So this, the magical mirror of magic, the proposal never went anywhere beyond it being sent back and forth between me and a producer once or twice, I think, I don’t think it ever even got shown to a commissioner or anything like that. But it’s a useful example, I thought, of just how many of these things that as a writer, you end up writing and it almost becomes an art form in itself. It’s like a whole different skill in some ways from writing a TV show or writing a script, is writing these bloody proposals, which you end up doing so many of, and you sort of write them in your sleep. And it’s funny when you hit them back at it, it’s things like, and then something really interesting happens because clearly you haven’t thought of what the interesting thing is gonna be, but you have to sort of tease the fact that you’ve got lots of other good ideas and then there might be some learning that goes on and then they really learn a few things about themselves or then something really surprising happens and you don’t actually know what these things are, but you’re having to tease to the commissioner that there will be some good ideas that you’ll have at some time in the future if they give you some money for it. But like I said, I don’t think a commissioner ever even laid eyes on it, but maybe one day they will see it and go, hang on. Really after some kind of magical mirror type show, ideally with some extra magic thrown in. Yeah, maybe that will make my fortune one day, but so far not yet.

What time’s your final off cut now? Can you tell us what it is?

So this is from a pilot for a TV show that I made for the BBC in, I think, about 2018, and it was called Carol and Vinnie.

Interior, Carol’s house. Carol, her dad Derek and his girlfriend Jackie are whispering in the kitchen. Through the door, we can see Carol’s nephew Vinnie watching telly in the living room. Carol’s anxious, wiping surfaces and putting her coat on.

We wonder why Bevert turned up when nobody had died.

You’re a soft touch, Carol. You’ve always been the same.

I’m gonna get a few bits. I need to think what to give him. Do you think he’s into petty fallu?

He’s into petty crime.

He’s just a normal teenager, isn’t he? What are teenagers into?

Wanking. Jackie. I’m sorry, but they are, aren’t they?

Right, well, I think that sort of thing’s his own business.

How long’s he staying with you?

I don’t know yet.

Well, those sheets will be your business.

He needs a job, that’s a thing. In the absence of national service, keep him out of your hair.

Because you’re not good with mess, are you, Carol?

She’s OCDC.

You’re no good when you’re anxious.

I’m learning to be.

Brian Hadman takes on casual stuff. He may have a woman’s arse, but he knows how to run a business.

Yes, maybe you could mention it to him, Dad.

He just bangs on about his bloody charity.

You ask him. Bebbel, he won’t believe her luck offloading one of those kids onto you.

It’s not offloading. He just needs to be out of town, away from bad influences and…

Sponging off you for a bit.

He won’t be sponging if he gets a job, Dad. I’m going to keep an eye on him. I’m not very up on what teenagers like.

Drinking.

Music. Girls. Trainers. Burgers. Computer games. Parties. And wanking.

Carol leaves. This is one of your more recent projects. Can you tell us about it? It got filmed, didn’t it?

It did, yeah. We actually made a pilot of this. It was a script that was commissioned for the BBC, and we made a pilot of it with Rebecca Front and Kayode Yawoomi playing Carol and Vinnie, the title characters. And we had a really brilliant cast and Frances Barber and David Bradley and Amanda Barry, and it was really brilliant people. It was an amazing experience, actually, because it was the first time that something I’d written for telly was actually made in real life and put on the screen with proper budget and made in a proper way. And when you’re used to having done Edinburgh shows and even radio shows where the budgets are tiny and the team is very small and it’s you and a producer mainly, or it’s you entirely if it’s Edinburgh shows and handing out bloody leaflets yourself on the Royal Mile, to go from that, admittedly, over the course of 20 years, so it wasn’t like it was an overnight thing, but to suddenly be on a TV set where everybody there is asking you questions. So there’s a costume department who are showing you photos of costumes that you have to make a decision on, and there’s an art department coming up with props and sets and stuff that you’ve just scribbled on a bit of paper in your bedroom late at night, and then suddenly they’re all there, and they’re bringing you eight different versions of that that you have to make a decision on. It’s like a sort of chocolate box of excitement, and I don’t think you would ever get over that excitement, actually. The sort of thrill of something you’ve written, and suddenly there it is in front of you with really brilliant actors doing it properly and taking it seriously and doing it for a job. So, yeah, so we made it, and we were really proud of it, actually, and it didn’t get picked up by the BBC, which was obviously very disappointing. There’s still a chance that, you know, it’s still elsewhere, and it may go on to become something else, but the BBC didn’t want it at the time, which was very… It was sad, and it was disappointing. I can sort of see the reasons why now, actually, in retrospect, but there were things I would do differently about it, and that’s a learning process, and I think it’s a real luxury to be able to sort of make those mistakes and move on from them. And I think, like I was saying about the radio series that I’ve done, you learn as you go, and there’s sort of experience now. For radio, for me, I sort of vaguely know what I’m doing. But telly, I am still learning, and I’m doing several other telly scripts now, which I know will be much better as a result of having made the mistakes on that first thing. But yeah, it’s really lovely to sort of hear a bit of it again, and I hope it may have another life in future.

Well, a final question. Are there any offcuts that you’ve still got that you didn’t want us to hear today?

Oh, that’s a good question, isn’t it? Oh, there are hundreds. My laptop’s absolutely filled with bits and pieces. I did toy with the idea. I’ve never really written a diary. I did briefly as a teenager, but only sort of in a sort of note-y way. When I was pregnant with my daughter the first time I was pregnant, I did write a diary. And I’ve never properly read it back, actually, but I did toy with the idea of sending you a bit of that. But I’ve never even shown that to my husband, I don’t think. That would have been a scoop. I know, it would have been a scoop, wouldn’t it? And it’s probably massively tedious in that way that you are when you’re pregnant, and you think every tiny detail is fascinating to other people. And then as soon as you’re out of that world, you’re like, what the fuck are you on about that? I mean, far less interesting for other people than it is for you at the time, which is absolutely as it should be. So I did wonder about that. And I’ve got a million sort of early bits of monologues and stuff. And I tell you what I did try and find actually, and I couldn’t find, is the first time I did any kind of sort of comedy writing accidentally was when I was at university. I went to Sheffield University and we had a, I did English, but it was a sort of drama module that I always chose. And we had a guest lecturer who came for a term and talked to us, and it was Jack Rosenthal, who, yeah, which was really amazing. Actually, I didn’t realize quite what a big deal that was at the time. But he came and did two or three workshops with us and sort of encouraged us to write little sort of scenes and stuff. And he singled mine out, which was thrilling at the time, because I’d never thought of myself as being able to write at that stage. And he actually was really lovely to me and sort of talked to me afterwards. And I had a very brief sort of couple of phone conversations with him about it subsequently, where he gave me some advice and stuff. And then he died, of course, really sadly. And I always slightly wished that I’d got in touch with him. And in fact, you know what? I saw Maureen Lippman on the telly the other day and I said to my husband, God, I really ought to get in touch with Maureen Lippman, because I’d never met her, but because obviously she was married to him. And I would love to get in touch with her and maybe I will actually. Maybe this will be the impetus that I need, because now I’ve said it out loud to you. I should get in touch with her and say to her what a lovely man he was and how my memories of him are that he was so supportive. And he said, oh, I think you’ve really got something, you’ve really got an ear for dialogue. I may have paraphrased what he said there, but in my head that’s what he said. And so when I ended up doing comedy, I remembered, I thought back to that and thought, I remember Jack Rosenthal said some nice things about my writing. But it took me another at least 10 years after that to actually do it in any sort of serious way.

That was the turning point or that was the seed that was planted.

And somewhere in my parents’ house, somewhere on some ancient computer, there’ll be a version of that script which I’d like to have found and didn’t. But that would be another one that I would like to unearth one of these days.

Well, Katherine Jakeways, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you.

Oh, I’ve really enjoyed it.

Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thanks so much for having me. Thank you.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with thanks to this week’s special guest, Katherine Jakeways. The Offcuts were performed by Rachel Atkins, Beth Chalmers, Emma Clarke, Toby Longworth and Leah Marks, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much.

Were you teachers pet?

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

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

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

But it was a pastiche, you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What? Two sugars?

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

Flanagan, keep the door shut!

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

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

Skating enters.

Morning, snails!

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

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

Really? To do what, exactly?

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

Any biscuits?

Blini, what are you doing?

Playing chess.

With yourself?

My right brain is playing my left.

I see.

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

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

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

Blini, what is the point of all this?

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

They haven’t been listening.

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

I have no milk.

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

My gerbils!

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

Ah, Jesus!

Blinney, if you must keep dead animals…

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

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

Blinney indicates his name, written on the container.

Hello? Blinney’s!

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

Caveat emptia! Let the poora beware!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s true.

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

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

That was how I saw it. Yes. Yeah.

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

Thank you.

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

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

They are workshops, I think.

Not just what they call workshops, they are workshops.

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

Is it a means to an end?

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

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

Yes, it was, definitely.

What was it like?

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

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

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

I love that line. I love that line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, some of the shorter ones I did get.

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

I see, right, right.

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

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

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

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

You know, it’s kind of…

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

Right, yeah.

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

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

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

Woman arrives home from work. Husband is watching telly.

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

Oh, that’s something I ordered.

Not off the telly? Not again?

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

What? What is it?

It’s a small hadron collider.

What?

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

What are you talking about? What does it do?

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

Send it back.

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

We already have a walk.

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

That plug doesn’t look normal.

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

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

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

I thought they were extinct.

What?

The Higgs bison.

Not bison, boson.

What’s the difference?

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

Nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

The noises go crazy.

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

What are you going to do with it?

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

They open it.

Where is it then?

I think it gets stuck in this bit here.

I can’t see anything.

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

I’ll get my glasses.

Get me a Jiffy bag too, will you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will any of the porn be going in?

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

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

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

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

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

No, I don’t think so.

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

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

Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer. Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is writer and actress Arabella Weir. Arabella first came to public attention in the 1990s as a member of the cult sketch comedy, The Fast Show, where her memorable characters included Insecure Woman, whose catchphrase, Does My Bum Look Big In This, struck a particular chord with the British public. Since then, she has rarely been out of the spotlight. A novel of the same name became a bestseller and spawned two further novels. She’s also written a trilogy for teenagers and an autobiography called The Real Me Is Thin. She wrote and starred in the TV series Posh Nosh, which paired her with Richard E. Grant, and she is currently playing Beth in the BBC TV comedy Two Doors Down. She’s also been performing her live one-woman show Does My Mum Loom Big In This? around the UK, and once lockdown is lifted, she will hopefully be back out on the road again with it later this year. Arabella Weir, welcome to The Offcut Straw.

Welcome. Isn’t it embarrassing listening to your own lead-in?

Well, I wanted to clear it with you in case I said something that was terribly, terribly incorrect.

No, it all sounds pretty accurate.

Excellent. Well, my first question is usually and will be this time, what does your Offcut Straw look like? What’s the equivalent? Are you very good at keeping hold of your old writing material?

I’m very bad at keeping hold of it on my computer because I’m a bit sort of OCD and I’m constantly deleting emails and thinking, oh, I better delete that file. So I’m very lucky in that my agent has a copy of everything. And as I discovered when you asked me to do this, I have kept a box in my office with a copy of each script, including a script I didn’t write, but someone told me was worth a lot of money, a Doctor Who script of the episode of Doctor Who that I was in. And so, no, I’m not very good because once something has been rejected or kind of not flown, you know, namely no one’s bought it, you kind of, it feels to me like it’s got a slightly bad smell. And then you go, oh, don’t be the wanker that hangs on to the kind of, has anyone seen my hot pants that I looked so bad in? You feel like, you know, when people go, no, they were terrible. Don’t ever wear those hot pants again. So it feels a bit like you’re going, oh, I’m going to trot out that script nobody liked. And so, yes, in fact, there were many more. I could have put, you know, your way, except for they have been deleted forever and there are no copies of them. And I also do think, as you will know better than most, comedy is such a kind of of the moment thing. That doesn’t mean that comedy isn’t funny if you were, you know, Buster Keaton 100 years on or anything. It just means that some stuff you just think, oh, don’t, don’t trot that out again. Anyway.

So let’s get started with your first offcut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when you wrote it?

This is called Does My Bum Look Big In This? And it’s a theatre play written around 2001.

Jacqueline Plus casts a limbering up on stage. Jacqueline is at the back trying not to get noticed. We hear Gillian the Nazi’s harsh disembodied voice.

Okay, who hasn’t been here before?

All hands shoot up except Jacqueline’s. She shrinks knowing that she is going to be asked to demonstrate an exercise.

Right, Jacqueline, can you step to the front and show everyone the star jump?

Jacqueline doesn’t respond, studies her feet.

Jacqueline, Jacqueline?

Sorry, what?

Can you come to the front and show us the star jump?

I’m not…

Come on, don’t be shy. We’re all dying to see you.

Jacqueline goes to the front, painfully, reluctantly.

Okay, everyone, just copy Jacqueline.

All right, on the count of three, one, two, three and…

Cue music. Jacqueline star jumps. The others copy her. They start very ragged, but by the fifth or sixth jump are in time with her.

And rest.

Jacqueline talks to the audience.

Don’t worry. I know why she did that. I know what everyone was dying to see. Watch it again.

Okay, everyone, just copy Jacqueline. All right, on the count of three, one, two, three and…

Cue music. Jacqueline does her star jumps, but nobody moves. They’re transfixed by Jacqueline’s bum. Their eyes are glued to it.

It’s my bum, isn’t it? Don’t lie to me. They’re watching my bum. They’re watching that new shelf of fat above my buttocks and below my waist. They’re watching it ooze.

The cast does a synchronized oozing movement.

They’re watching it sink down and spread all over my bum.

The cast does a synchronized sinking and spreading.

I was waving down a taxi the other day.

The cast does synchronized waving down of a taxi.

And I got in the cab, and I sat down, and the shelf of fat on my upper arm was still shuddering.

The cast does synchronized shuddering with their whole bodies.

When will it end?

And rest.

See you next week.

While the rest of the cast disappear, two of them, mother and father, advance towards Jacqueline and stand over her.

It’s not my fault, of course. I had the worst possible start in life. I had a mother and a father.

So, a theatre play. Tell us more about that.

Yes.

I’m a little bit stunned by that. Is that not how you imagined it was going to be?

No, no, no, no, no. I actually found that bit of funny. I was reminded, I haven’t, obviously, I am not a complete narcissist. So, I’m not in the habit of rereading my books or work of any description. So, I’d forgotten quite how sort of neurotic she was, Jacqueline. The book was so successful that I was approached by, I mean, you know, this happens to everybody who writes anything or produces anything that’s very successful. I was approached by producers sort of saying, can you turn this into a play? And with my co-writer, John Cantor, who I wrote Posh Nosh with, we had a sort of stab at it, to him, I have to say a bit more than me. And it never got off the ground. And I’m not sure why. I think, I just had two children in very quick succession. And I think, as is the way with all these things, in my view in life is that you’ve got to have a good idea that has to stand up rather than say, here’s an idea and we’re going to get, I don’t know, Reese Witherspoon to do it. And the moment you go, oh, Reese Witherspoon’s not doing it, they go, oh, it’s a shit idea. Does it mean, so like anything with Reese Witherspoon and it is going to fly because no one’s going to get around the fact that you’ve got Reese Witherspoon in it. Now, before anybody gets excited, I’m not comparing myself to Reese Witherspoon, but the promoters were absolutely saying, you have to be in it and that involved a UK tour. So if memory serves me right, it was, they kind of went, yeah, we’ll do this and that’ll be you touring, you know, in a way that would have made them, I’m sure it would have made me money as well, but let’s not kid ourselves about who was going to make the most money. And that would have been me touring the UK, probably for something like 20 weeks. And I just had two children and it didn’t really fly, but and also, yes, John and I, because I’m, you know, I can’t sort of dismiss his contribution. We were very, what I’ve just said, we both hold to the idea that an idea has to work, not, oh, it works because it’s Arabella doing it. Do you know what I mean? So we both wanted it to be a play that would have flown, had an actress in Australia be doing it.

With the first recast.

Well, yeah, exactly, because otherwise how do you know how good it is if you’re just going, oh, just put anybody from EastEnders in it and it will work. We all know that you can sell a ticket with somebody off EastEnders reading the phone book if they’re currently in EastEnders. And that was very much not what I wanted to do. So anyway, it didn’t sort of die a death more than slightly sort of wilt. But those actors did a good job. That made me laugh that bit. You probably couldn’t say Nazi now, but still.

Let’s go back a little bit further because obviously the title Does My Bum Look Big In This? for the play came from the character’s catchphrase from The Fast Show, which is the character you created, isn’t it? When you first started doing the show, were you brought in as a writer at the beginning or were you the actor and you sort of gradually developed bits and pieces?

More like the latter. What actually happened is I knew Charlie Hickson and Paul Whitehouse from working with Harry on Harry Enfield Show, where they were sort of writers and in Paul’s case, performers, but not, I mean, Charlie’d be in the odd sketch. And then they were talking about this show that they’d had commissioned without Harry, I mean, on their own. And they kind of went, oh, you’re funny. Why don’t you come and do bits in it? But I certainly, it was all very casual. There was certainly no kind of, right, here’s your writing contract and, you know, you will be a writer performer. It was much less kind of formal than that. And then what happened is we did the first series and I was a bit more than, but sort of pretty much girl in sketch that you and I will be very familiar with. Woman in sketch or in the, I’m old enough for it, used to say mum in sketch or, you know, Harry’s girlfriend in sketch. And then we were just wrapping up doing The Fast Show and, you know, the end of the first series. And then we had these days, we had some sort of film left in the camera quite literally. So we decided to kind of do some mucking about and film it. And Paul and Charlie went, why don’t you do someone who’s like you? And I said, what do you mean like me? And they went, oh, you know, always going on about the size of her ass and everything. And I went, I don’t do that. And they went, yeah, you do. So I started sort of mucking about and did, does my bum look big in this? Literally. And if you watch the first series, if you’re a real sort of avid fan, you’ll see me do a tiny bit of it at the end of the first series. And then I applied myself. I remember thinking, you’ve got to stop mucking about. This is your big chance. So I did, I wrote proper sketches for the, you know, with properly written and typed up and, you know, conceived and presented them. And then we filmed them for the second series. And then I remember thinking, nobody in the world is going to get this character because I’m the only person in the world who thinks her whole life would be better if she had a small ass. And then the rest is history, I’m glad to say. But yeah, that’s how she all came about. And then after the third series, a publisher approached me and said, do you think you could write a novel in her voice? And I said, no. And then I thought, oh, God, no, I can’t do that because I’m more gladiatorial now. But in the old days, I used to be more kind of, don’t ask me to do anything because I won’t be able to do it. Because that was my modus operandi at school. You know, it was, set me a task and I will show you how badly I can do this. And that was kind of where I made a name for myself at school. So I’m afraid to say I would approach my career a bit like that as well. So when this publisher said, do you think you can write a book in her voice? I went, absolutely not. How could I write an entire book in that voice? And then a friend of mine actually said, you know, you always do this. You know, you always say, I’m not accepting that challenge. I bet you could write. And to be fair to him, the publisher also was very dogged about it. And then I thought, all right, well, I’ll see if I can do it. And I was able to. So I was very glad I did it.

I am very surprised that you say that your modus operandi was not doing things because Insecure Woman wasn’t the only character you created. There were at least two others that I can think of that were particularly strong, memorable. I’m guessing you were absolutely responsible for creating them.

Oh, yeah, yeah, no. All the characters you see me do where I’m the kind of central character, they’re all me. No offense. You know, the South African makeup lady and the one that is sadly still very apposite is girl who boys can’t hear. They were all mine. No, that’s because that’s what I’m saying. It was suddenly during The Fast Show, I thought don’t coast anymore. This is your chance and this is what you want to do more than anything in the world. So seize the opportunity. Don’t do a kind of, well, you know, here are a couple of sketches. You know, don’t self-sabotage, as I’ve always done. Seize the opportunity and do your best.

Well done for being able to do that. Thank you. Loads of people, they understand that they should do that and then they don’t and they spend their whole lives going, you know what, I should have done, but you literally did the thing.

Well, quite a lot of therapy, quite a lot of therapy and quite a lot of, well, a lot of encouragement from Paul and Charlie, but basically thinking, I think I’d been around for quite a long time by then. I’ve certainly been working for about, I don’t know, certainly over 10, 12 years by then and thinking, you will be a sort of jobbing actor. I didn’t know The Fast Show was going to be so successful, but I did know that I had a chance ahead of me. So here, so I thought, take this chance because you will look back on this and go, oh yeah, well, I was a bit pissed or I didn’t bother or yeah, it was a few sketches, but I was out having fun. Yes.

Right. Well, anyway, let’s move on to your next off cut now. So tell us what this one is.

This is called English Life and it is a pilot for a radio script I wrote in, do you know, I don’t know, but let’s say sort of 10-ish years ago.

So around 2010, 2010, 2009.

2010, 2009. Who says 2009? Me.

I don’t know.

Me, I just did.

Rafe, you’ve been looking after the animals on our estate for over two years.

That’s right. It’s been a real privilege to work with these creatures.

Tell us about our wild boar.

Oh, they’re amazing. They’re truly amazing. I mean, a wild boar sow breeds once a year and the litter is born in the spring, which is just the most beautiful time to be born.

Oh yes, with the lambs and falling in love, etc.

That’s right. They mature at around 18 months, which is something I really admire because I don’t think I really matured till I was 29 and gave up drinking.

Oh, here we go.

Now, wild boar are a bit like pigs, but they’re not pigs, are they? What would happen if you crossed a boar with a pig?

That’s a really interesting question.

You’d get a big.

Right. I didn’t know they were called that.

What do you give our boar?

Well, apart from, you know, a dose of worm control, I never give any of my animals any kind of drugs. I’ve seen what they do to people. Drugs make you think you’re the only person in the world.

Well, that’s right.

And you wouldn’t want a wild boar to think it was the only wild boar in the world because then it wouldn’t breed, would it? And then it would be the only wild boar in the world, personally.

That’s right. It wouldn’t breed and it wouldn’t grow. That’s the thing about drugs. They stop you growing as a boar or as a person.

God, how depressing can you get?

Drugs are depressing. You’re right. I’ve learnt so much from these creatures and the way they live their lives. One of the things that’s so inspiring is they live their whole life outdoors.

Oh, yes. That’s very good for the complexion, isn’t it? So tell us what you give them to eat.

Well, they forage in the woodland for whatever.

But it’s organic whatever, isn’t it?

And we supplement it with root crops like potatoes and swedes.

Rafe, are you saying you’d like to live your entire life outdoors?

I think it would be an amazing opportunity, yes, but I don’t know if I’d have the inner strength.

Oh, to be honest with you, I’d miss the shops personally.

Well, if you do go native, you’re not pooing all over my estate.

Oh, don’t worry. I’d pick it up. I’d want to. That’s how you keep in touch with yourself.

I don’t want you to pick it up, damn it.

I want you to catch it before it lands. Rafe, obviously you’re coming to our Father’s Day supper.

Tell us what Father’s Day means to you.

Our son Orlando’s the most amazing achievement of my life. And it’s all because I gave up drinking.

Eh?

As soon as I gave up drinking, I was rewarded with a new life. Well, two new lives really, my own and my son’s.

Oh, that’s lovely. I suppose that’s because when you’re drinking, your sperm get a little bit tiddly too, don’t they?

What?

Yes, so they can’t find their way, they keep falling over, lose their little keys to their little front door.

Are you on drugs?

That’s exactly how it feels, Minty.

Yeah. I’m glad you laughed at the same bit, my favourite bit in it as well. Which bit? The bit about the pooing. I chose that bit because those two lines, you’re not pooing on my estate and you’ve got to catch, I want you to catch it before it lands, made me laugh. So I thought I’m using that bit. Anyway, just I’m glad you laughed at that. Anyway, so tell us about this. What was the story of this particular piece of work?

That was a script I wrote with John Cantor because John Cantor and I wrote, and I have to say it was more fun than I’ve ever had in my professional life. We wrote Posh Nosh together and Posh Nosh was my idea. I was watching, I’ve never ever watched cooking shows. I cannot understand why anybody in the world would watch cooking shows. I mean, just cook, don’t fucking watch a show. Anyway, I was watching this and I’d never seen Delia Smith before. Oops, I’m not supposed to say her name. And I just thought, bloody hell, that woman’s been lobotomized. And I thought she was so untv-ish, but it did what cooking shows always make me do, which is think, oh, bloody hell, she can just knock up a risotto in five minutes, whereas for me, it’s hours of sweat and labour, and I never have sort of bataga and all these, you know, recherche things in my fridge. Anyway, so we wrote Posh Nosh, and then we wanted to extend its life.

And Posh Nosh was a tv series, wasn’t it?

It was a tv series that I did with Richard E. Grant, and it was a spoof cookery show. And, oh my god, it was just bliss to do. And Richard played, it was sort of a little bit Fanny and Johnny Craddock. And one of the things we decided was that Richard’s character would be pissed all the time. So then we tried to make it into a radio show, which is, I know, not the normal way around, but we couldn’t get it, we were very bizarrely, we didn’t get it recommissioned on BBC. So we then tried to make it into a radio show, which everyone thought was going to be a slam dunk because it was Richard E. Grant and me, and with Joanna Lumley doing the eye dense, you know, the kind of ads for the posh nosh, in this case, English life products. And it was just when people started, you know, having bespoke picnic baskets and all that yummy mummy, you know, garden trading, cocks and cocks, all those, the white company, all those sort of lifestyle things, the whole kind of, you know, your whole lifestyle will be sort of beige and white. And so we were going to, the whole idea was that we’d create this thing called English Life. And then that was the script for it. And I still think it’s very funny. And I still think they were wrong not to commission it.

And I had a spectacular cast, though, didn’t you?

Well, it was Richard E. Grant, me, Benedict Cumberbatch.

Benedict Cumberbatch?

I think he played Rafe.

And David Tennant and Daisy Haggard were written for it.

Oh, yeah. And sorry. And David played Rafe.

And Daisy played Richard’s sister.

Yes, who was meant to be a sort of one of those, one of those girls usually called, I’m afraid, Arabella. Seeing this, oh, my God, it was like totally amazing because we went to the light at the festival and we stayed in a yurt and we had the best time. And Daisy was absolutely brilliant. Yes, I’d forgotten that it was David. It was Benedict in something else. It was, yeah, my God, what an amazing cast. And they didn’t commission it.

And you had Joanna Lumley in it as well.

Exactly. I hope somebody from Radio 4 is listening to thinking, oh, shit, we missed a chance there. And maybe they can approach us again. Because I’m sure I could get the same cast back.

Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a brand new podcast like this. And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. So the Posh Nosh characters, you say, based on a certain TV chef and Fanny and Johnny, because I was wondering, was it based perhaps on your, did you grow up in quite a Posh Nosh kind of family?

Well, I grew up in a hugely, my mother was a phenomenal snob and quite grand. She was Scottish, both my parents were Scottish, but my father came from a very modest background. He was a primary school teacher’s son, but he did very well for himself, mainly thanks to the Second World War, but I don’t think he’d have left Scotland otherwise. But having left Scotland because of the Second World War, he then, as everybody was, joined the forces and was posted to the Middle East and then fell in love with the Middle East, and because of that became a diplomat. But my mother was from a very grand Scottish family, and by the time we were living in London, there were certainly no servants and posh life, but my mother was fantastically snobby about food and people and stuff.

You weren’t doing an impression of her, particularly, were you?

No. The joke there was that my character was supposed to be, as it were, from below stairs, that Richard’s character, who was meant to be genuinely posh, like my mother, had married beneath him because he was, of course, really gay, but needed a kind of nanny character figure in his life. So he has not married my character because she’s his equal, but more because he needs a…

Housekeeper.

Well, a housekeeper. That’s exactly it. And while he goes off and does what he likes with, as it turns out, have the series been made rave. Someone who is his equal, but so no, my character, if anything, I’m playing my granny from Dumfermland, someone who was not new that she wasn’t quite up to others. And I wouldn’t insert myself there. And although my character wasn’t Scottish, she was meant to be the daughter of a publican. My god, that is probably the favourite thing in my life I’ve ever done.

Pochnosh.

Yes, and English life. And I’m going to spit tax about them not commissioning English life. Commission it now, whoever’s listening to this.

Well, I’d say it’s early days. There will be people listening, especially when they hear that the people, you can get attached to it.

Listeners, I can guarantee Richard E. Grant, David Tennant and Daisy Haggard, and if not Daisy, Lady of Your Choice. Actress Lady of Your Choice.

Right. Let’s move on to another offcut. Can you tell us about number three, please?

This is called Goodbye Yellowbit Road, and it was a pilot for a TV sitcom, which again I wrote with John Canter in, oh, I’m going to say about 2008 or nine, around then.

Interior, Paul’s flat, bedroom. The bedroom of a fussily over-decorated flat. Paul is making the bed. He puts an exotic cover over the duvet. He then carefully distributes a number of soft toys along the top of the bed. Paul is a very pretty, flamboyantly dressed 25-year-old. He is unmistakably gay.

Now, Big Ted, you know you can’t sit next to George. You two just squabble. You can sit next to silly Sue. Monkey, you’re in charge.

As Paul debates where to put a rabbit, Susan enters from the en-suite bathroom. She’s in her 30s, neatly dressed, unremarkable woman, much less pretty than Paul. She has a no-nonsense Mary Poppins quality. She wears a work suit.

I’ve left Monkey in charge today.

Well, it is his turn.

Do they know about tonight?

Yes, and they’ve promised to behave.

Susan looks nervous. Don’t worry, Mum and Dad will love you.

Do you think?

Of course. Paul taps his temples with his forefingers. It’s one of Paul and Susan’s shared gestures.

Positive thoughts.

Susan does likewise. Positive thoughts. But Susan still looks worried.

What?

Well, it’s just that… What?

You’ve never introduced them to a girlfriend before.

Oh, girlfriend, boyfriend, what does it matter?

You’re the one, that’s what matters. I am so lucky.

No, I am so lucky.

Oh no, I am so lucky.

No, no, no, I am so lucky.

No, I am so lucky.

No, I am so lucky.

Susan smiles but is a little anxious about the time this is taking.

I don’t want to be late.

OK, but…

Paul steps back, gives her an appraising look, then waggles his index fingers underneath his earlobes. Susan immediately realises she has failed to perfect her outfit.

Which ones?

Oops, heart-shaped box.

Susan takes the earrings out of a heart-shaped box by the bed and gives Paul a genuinely loving look. Paul kisses Susan and covers Rabbit’s eyes to protect it from embarrassment. Paul pops Rabbit down next to Monkey and tells them…

Be good!

So, this is interesting because did I read it on the paper or where did I get this information from? You wrote this for David Tennant. Is that right?

Yes. David is probably one of the first people, obviously only after he became famous and people started paying attention to him. But he’s probably one of the first people, certainly that I know of, that people, the papers would refer to as metrosexual. And, you know, just camp is what they meant. And, of course, David is camp. I mean, but if camp means you’re not, if you’re prepared to wear beautiful suits and beautiful clothes and be nice to women, then so be it. And it just, as I say, John and I wrote that together and we’ve both always been fascinated by, I won’t name them because it’s probably libelous, but when you meet these people or see them on telly and they’re unbelievably camp, and then they say, yes, happily married to Susan or whoever it is for years, you think, what? You can’t be heterosexual. Now that script is probably very dated, although it did make me laugh. And I suppose in a world where people were still feeling the need, and let’s face it, there are plenty out there still, but to sort of pretend to be something they’re not. I mean, we were very much not laughing at Paul’s character there because the idea was that he had been gay, but that he’d fallen in love with a woman.

Right. So he was genuinely bisexual or at this point heterosexual, whatever. At this point, heterosexual.

He wasn’t hiding anything. No, no, no. And he wasn’t pretending he hadn’t been gay. He wasn’t going, oh, I’ve seen the light, now I’m straight. He was just saying, now I’ve fallen in love with Susan. And the jokes that we were making were absolutely not about someone’s sexuality or their choices, but the jokes were about how the people in his life, because his mother was brilliantly played. We did a BBC pilot sitcom reading, which went really, really well, and his mother was absolutely brilliantly played by Anita Dobson. And the joke there was that Anita, her character, was determined to keep him gay because he went to Shirley Bassey concerts with her and went to salsa classes and she was losing him to another woman. And the other joke was that the two gay characters who were still gay, played by Steve Pemberton, and I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember who the other one was, they were all going, you’re not bisexual, you’re having an episode. And so those were the jokes. So even though it may sound dated now, there was never a kind of, isn’t it hilarious that a man is camped?

Isn’t it very on the nose right now with more fluid sexuality and everything, the fact that your character is a modern day 2020 man or 2020 person, should I say?

Yeah, it was more about, as comedy often is, about the people around the central character going, I want you to be something other than you are. And, you know, and their kind of their agenda, their agenda. Thank you very much. I can never not think of Mary Archer when I say that, because do you remember when the fragrant Mary Archer, you have to be a certain age, was asked in court the second time around when they lost, is it not true that you had issued him ultimatums? And Mary Archer said, I am not in the habit of issuing ultimata. And I thought, oh, that’s you told. Because, of course, it’s not ultimatums, it’s ultimata. Anyway. But yes, I think now two heterosexual white middle class writers might have a difficulty getting that script away. But again, it was the most fantastic cast. It was Anita Dobson, David Tennant, Olivia Colman, Steve Pemberton. Olivia Colman played Susan.

Wow. OK, well impressed.

Yes, it was. And you know what? I’m going to shame the BBC. It was about to be commissioned. And then someone went, Oh, there’s that program, Rose and whatever it was called. It was an ITV show in it was at the sort of beginning of everyone thinking Alan Davis was the second coming. And I’m not saying Alan’s no good. I’m just saying they commissioning everything that he was in. And he was supposed to be a gay man who’d fallen in love with a woman. And that was called Rose and something. And it was on ITV. And literally the BBC went, Oh, we’re not commissioning this now. And of course, now they’d commission it. But David wasn’t as famous as he now is. And neither was Steve. Anita was.

Or Olivia.

Or Olivia. Yes, quite. So another mistake they made.

Yes.

In my view.

Although I must say, I’m very surprised. Why weren’t you the mum? When I read it, I thought, well, she’s written this part for herself. She’s a very flamboyant character.

First of all, I can’t be David’s mother. Thank you very much.

I didn’t realize it was David’s.

But also, it was very important that she brought with it, and Anita is a bit older than me, she brought with it that kind of fun all the time. Oh, let’s go and get a cocktail. You know, that she brought that kind of fizz with her. And Anita’s got that and I don’t have it. I’m not saying I couldn’t have played it, but Anita, absolutely. The moment she said yes, we were just dancing around the room because we just thought that’s exactly the kind of energy that just that sort of slightly showbiz energy, you know, someone you can absolutely see going to salsa three times a week. And also she was meant to be, the idea was that they were working class. And I don’t think anyone ever looks at me in a million years and thinks I’m an East End working class woman.

Let’s move on to your next off cut, Arabella. What’s this one?

This is called Riverdeep Mountain High and it is a treatment or even a script for a musical based on the songs of the little known Tina Turner. And it must have been around 2004.

Riverdeep Mountain High A proposal for a musical featuring the songs of Tina Turner. First act. Born and raised in the small town of Nutbush, Belle dreams of becoming a famous dancer. She’s young and beautiful. She wants to leave town and make a go of it in the big city. Her ma, Mary, doesn’t want her to go. This is Nutbush, where you go to the store on Friday and church on Sunday. Mary sings Nutbush City Limits. Belle’s younger brother, Matt, not much more than a teenager at this point, doesn’t want Belle to go either. He joins in with his mother singing Nutbush City Limits. The whole community, old and young, eventually join in. Belle joins in too, but giving the song sarcastically, its small townness is exactly why she has to leave. Mary doesn’t see why Belle can’t make a success of herself right here. Belle laughs this suggestion off. She knows that big opportunities are only available in big towns. Mary has lived life in the big city and seen it all. She sings proud Mary. Belle takes over the song when it turns rocky. Mary knows that real values, lasting friendships and relationships are rare in the big city. There’s a boy in Nutbush, Nate. He loves Belle, but believes in her and wants her to pursue her dreams. Belle likes and respects him, but hasn’t fallen in love with him the way he has with her. Nate sings River Deep, Mountain High. Belle duets with him, then leaves. She has to go. Mary is very upset and makes Belle promise to write every week. Belle arrives in the big city and looks for a job. She sees an ad for dancers outside a nightclub. It’s owned by a very attractive but shady guy, Sharky. Sharky tells Belle he thinks she’s very attractive. Belle explains her ambitions. Sharky says he has big connections in the dance world, which he says he’ll use to get Belle a proper dancing job while she works as a dancer in his club. That’s fine with Belle. She knows that everyone starts out at the bottom. Explaining what he needs in the bar, Sharky sings Honky Tonk Woman. Belle learns fast and duets with him. Very soon Belle becomes bowled over by the glamorous Sharky. He’s a big city guy with big city money.

Right. So this was a musical, an idea for a musical based on the life, the songs of Tina Turner. River Deep Mountain High was its name. Clearly this was actually a good idea because Tina, the Tina Turner musical launched a couple of years ago. So you were 14 years ahead of your time.

Yes, but let’s not be in any way kidding ourselves. I’m sure people for as long as she’s been famous have been going, how can we get a musical out of this? But I think what happened, in fact, I know what happened. We Will Rock You was so successful, suddenly everyone went, that’s what we need to do. We need to get every famous artist there ever was and do a musical, if we can, based on their music. And then, of course, what they did was they started contacting the artists. And then I dare say, I don’t know, 50%, I have no idea. That sort of went, no, no, thanks. And then others went, oh, yes, please. And that’s what happened with me. The producers had been in touch with Tina Turner and she said, yes, in principle. And then they asked me to write the treatment. I don’t know why me, but maybe I knew these producers and I’d worked with them a lot. And I was a woman, obviously, and I think they thought that would be the right perspective, as indeed it should have been. And I put quite a lot of work into it. I put a lot of work into it, actually. But I freely admit that it is not my area. And I liked doing it. And obviously I love, well, not obviously, but I do love Tina Turner. But I just couldn’t get, you know, every time we sort of talked about it, I thought, I can’t, I can’t. I mean, I can do the basic story, which I did. But I don’t think I had, well, apart from anything else, I’m not black. So looking back, it probably shouldn’t ever have been me. And she does have a great story. Her own story is a fantastic story.

Have you seen the Tina Turner musical?

You’ll be very surprised to hear I haven’t. I don’t go to musicals much, but I certainly don’t go to musicals based on somebody’s oeuvre. Yeah, it wasn’t a very sort of happy project, and it didn’t really, there was a bit of sort of pushing around the plate for a while, and then it didn’t fly, and quite rightly so, because I don’t think you want a white middle class woman from North London writing Tina Turner’s story.

Well, like you say, it’s better than a white middle class man writing Tina Turner’s story.

That is the only thing that’s better than. And I dare say now, if the producers were doing it again, and I don’t know who wrote the musical, it was successful, wasn’t it? It’s still on.

Yes, it’s still on, yeah. I saw this and I thought, hold on a second, this rings a bell. Did you write the actual musical that’s in the West End? That’s what happened, yeah.

It’s my show. I’m a multimillionaire.

This is just some early notes you scribbled.

Yeah, just some early notes that I knocked out. Yeah, no. It was, I dare say, in many, many draws, in many, many houses around the country, there are people’s proposals for a musical about, insert name, you know, Roger Daltrey, I don’t know, whoever. And yes, that was my attempt at writing one for Tina Turner.

So you haven’t written any other musicals?

That’s absolutely correct, and I think it’s going to stay that way.

But we heard earlier, does my bum look big in this, the theatre play. So you’re not averse to the theatre genre. In fact, you’ve got your one woman show.

And in fact, yeah, as you say, I’ve just been doing and was halted, like many other people, by COVID. I’ve just been doing, I got about a third of the way into my UK tour of my first ever solo show.

First ever?

Does my mum loom big in this? Yes, at my age, my first ever solo show. I think I didn’t have the nerve until now, but also maybe not the material, but I absolutely loved doing it.

Is this you playing you, or do you do characters in it, this sketchy type stuff, or is it just Arabella talking to the audience?

It’s basically all about my mum and her spectacularly appalling attempts at being a parent in the first half. And then in the second half, it’s all about me as a mum and realising that it turns out it’s not that easy. Although, I mean, my mother was like off the scale bad. I mean, not like a mother at all. She literally thought it had nothing to do with her. Eating, being cared for, being protected, just it wasn’t in any way connected to her. Yeah, that’s another story.

That’s extraordinary.

Well, you’ll have to come and see the show, Laura. Yes, I must. When it’s back up and running.

When it’s back on, yes.

Which is supposed to be September this year, but looking more like next year.

So you have managed to reschedule, OK?

Oh yeah, yeah, it’s all rescheduled.

Well, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you introduce your final offcut now?

This is called Stupid Cupid, and it’s a film script that I had commissioned, paid for, or pucker, in 2005, and it was the adaptation of my book of the same name for the movies.

Interior, Priscilla’s house, which is chic bohemian, all Liberty prints and Chinese lacquer. Hat opens a bedroom door and thud. It hits the head of Sam, who was asleep on the floor. He’s hung over and wearing last night’s suit. He has a straggly beard and wild hair. He groans as he hauls himself to his feet.

Sorry.

Oh, you nearly knocked my head off.

It was an accident.

You could have knocked.

It’s my room.

Did we sleep together?

No. Good.

Sam slams the door in her face. Priscilla arrives just in time to nip Hat’s outrage in the bud.

in my room.

Sweetie, you moved out years ago. is going through a rough time, I know. I’m not having that thing at my reception.

That thing is the son of a very good friend.

I just hope you’re not sleeping with him. Oh, Priscilla. I am not. I cannot believe you are sleeping with a tramp.

I am not.

Sleeping with him.

I am not a tramp.

You shut up.

Sam flings open the door.

I am not a tramp.

You’ll have to excuse my niece. Her fiancee has run off. With her brain. That’s a great side with him.

Well, at least he didn’t want you for your body.

For your information, he did not run off. He is having some space.

That happened to my cousin. He ran off six days before the wedding.

This is four. Three. What happened?

He showed up. In a gay bar.

Hat walks off thinking, what a prat.

Hat, come back.

I didn’t want to come anyway.

Priscilla slaps him playfully. Meanwhile, hat flips open her mobile and speed dials.

Jimmy, will you please pick up the stupid phone? I have to pay these people.

So, how far did this script actually get?

Well, it got all the way. I wrote the book, which was quite successful. I say honestly, I mean, it was pretty successful. And the idea was because I don’t think I was married at the time. I can’t remember, but I’d already had my children. And it struck me, and everybody will be familiar with this, that a wedding becomes like a runaway train, no matter how small. In fact, that’s right, I was planning to get married. I already had children. I was in my 40s. I was with the father of the children. And we were just going to get married. But suddenly, everybody in my family had an opinion and you can’t do this, even though we weren’t doing. I was way too old for a kind of, you know, meringue dress and, you know, my auntie doing my whatevers. And yet suddenly had an opinion. And it occurred to me that it was a great comic tool, the idea of a wedding because of the amount of people that feel they have righteous ownership of it rather than the two people getting married. So I came up with this idea, which was loosely based on a true story of someone I knew, whose fiance dumped her a few days before for an epically expensive wedding. And she decided, this was the bit I made up, that she would keep going with the wedding and try to get him back at the same time rather than unravel it, rather than just face the truth. And I do know someone who did that, it wasn’t the husband, she tried to back out, and her parents said, we’ve already paid for the flowers, and they were £6,000. And the parents, instead of going, look, let’s lose the £6,000, they made her go through with it, a big society wedding, and she left him two weeks later. So all these sort of ideas. So anyway, I’d written the book, and then, I can’t remember the name of the production company, but a production company paid me, rather handsomely, those were the days, for the film rights, and part of the deal was that I had to be able to write the script. So I wrote the script, and that I really, really loved doing, and I loved it, yeah. I bought Final Draft, as my father would say, at a normal personal expense, and I really loved doing it, and I still think that would make a great film, because the idea is that she, you know, there’s this runaway train of the wedding, you know, florists, cake makers, dress makers, all going, right, you need to do a fitting, you need to do a last this, and she’s going, I mean, you know, you know very well, Laura, a lot of comedy is to do with sort of anxiety and tragedy and everything, she’s trying to stave off this thing that’s happened, keeping the plates in the air of all the wedding plans and get him back at the same time. So she does a lot of bonkers things to try and get him back at the same time as keeping the wedding going. And meanwhile, get someone to pretend to be him and falls in love with him.

Yes, that was the meet cute we just heard, I believe.

Yeah, I think it was, I mean, you know, maybe rom-coms have had their day. No, never, never. But I think, you know, I’m not one for necessarily saying blowing my own trumpet, but I think it stands up as a concept. Maybe the script wasn’t good enough, I’m prepared to accept that, but the concept I think stands up with the best of them, which is, you know, that is an absolutely classic farce.

Right, well, final question. Having listened to these five bits of writing, is there anything you’ve noticed, anything that surprises you, or obviously there’s a couple that you’d quite, or three of them at least, that you’d like to go back and redevelop, but was there anything that you didn’t expect to hear?

I didn’t expect any of them to still be funny. And I know this is one of those, what do you most like about yourself? Well, it’s probably got to be my fantastic figure, or maybe it’s my amazing face, which I don’t get off and ask, but I think I’m pleased. I’m pleasantly surprised by how funny the ones, most of them still are. And that makes me pleased.

So that sort of reinforces your faith in your ability to write. You were funny then, you’re funny now, sort of thing.

Yes, that’s how I’m going to put it.

Yes.

I was funny then and I’m funny now. Don’t you forget it!

Well, Arabella Weir, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thank you very much indeed, Laura. It’s been a huge pleasure, as always, to talk about myself.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with thanks to this week’s special guest, Arabella Weir. The Offcuts were performed by Rachel Atkins, Beth Chalmers, Chris Pavlo, Leah Marks, Nigel Pilkington and Keith Wickham and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.