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

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin and this is the Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished had rejected. Or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh yes.

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

Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

Good morning, sir. Can I help?

Yes, I’d like to buy a shop bell.

I’m sorry.

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

I’m afraid we don’t sell those,

but you’ve got one on your door.

Nevertheless.

Look, I’m not an idiot, okay?

No.

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

It is.

Which specializes in shop fittings.

It does.

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

I understand.

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

Yes.

But it’s not. It’s a hardware shop

which doesn’t sell Shop bells.

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

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

Sell me the bell.

Do you even own a shop?

No.

Then why do you want a shop bell?

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

It’s a bit old hat, isn’t it?

What do you mean?

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

I mainly work for Radio four.

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

What do you mean?

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

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

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

Then why have you got one?

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

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

Oh my God.

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

I don’t know anymore.

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

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

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

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

Mm-hmm.

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

Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

Mm.

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

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

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

I thought you say comedy.

No, no. Did Yes. Yes.

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

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

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

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

Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

Oh, otherwise known as actors,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shaven with special thanks to this week’s guest. Dan Maier, the Offcuts were performed by Emma Clarke, Chris Pavlo, Jake Yapp, Nigel Pilkington, and Helen Goldwyn, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com and please do subscribe, rate, and review us.

Thanks for listening.

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 apparent failures paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is writer and presenter Jon Holmes, a nine-time Radio Academy Award winner, recipient of two BAFTAs and numerous other accolades. On radio, Jon has written for comedy shows including Dead Ringers, Armando Iannucci’s Charm Offensive, and The Now Show. He’s had four series of his own satire, Listen Against, and his most recent creation, The Skewer, has just finished its first series on Radio 4. His TV writing credits include Horrible Histories, Harry Hill, Top Gear and Mock The Week. As a radio presenter, Jon has made headlines for his sometimes outrageous content and currently holds the record for the largest fine ever for taste and decency offenses in British broadcasting. Despite this, he’s since sat in for Chris Evans on the Radio 2 Breakfast Show, performed at the Royal Albert Hall, and been attacked by fire ants on the Rwanda Congolese border while making a documentary about mountain gorillas. In between creating and performing, he fits in writing books, five to date, hosting podcasts, The The One Show Show, and being a travel writer for The Sunday Times. Jon Holmes, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

So what does your offcuts folder, your virtual bottom drawer, look like in real life? Are you very organized?

No, not really. I tend to write in two ways. So one, if I’m writing for radio that I’m presenting, I will hand write it and scribble it down. And it’s then, by the time I get to do it on the radio, it’s utterly unreadable to even me. And that’s just in a drawer. All of that going back years, like to when I used to do a radio station called Power FM on the South Coast. And I used to hand write all the material and I’ve still got it all in vague folders. But then if I’m writing stuff for sort of Radio 4, and if you like sort of more built stuff, then it’s typed. And most of it, the old stuff anyway, is all on floppy disks. And I have no means of getting that off the floppy disks, which is why everything we’re talking about today is sort of after they fell out of fashion and other computers came in.

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

Well, this was written, I think, in 2008. And it was a treatment, sort of a pitch document with sample script bits for a TV comedy series. And it was called Real World Spies.

Real World Spies does exactly what it says on the tin. You know how in Spooks or 24 or in movies where none of the things that plague us in real life ever go wrong? So-called satellite uplinks always work first time, mobile phones always get a signal. Real World Spies is a fully realised sitcom for everyone who’s ever watched 24 and thought, why doesn’t Jack Bauer ever get a message saying Microsoft Word has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down? Example story and dialogue.

Interior office day. Spies Travis and Jennifer are deep undercover in enemy headquarters. While the suspicious and sinister boss is at lunch, they’re in his office trying to urgently download vital information onto a memory pen.

Hurry up!

It won’t recognise the stick.

Try another socket.

I have, it just won’t work. It says this stick isn’t compatible with Windows Vista. I’ll have to nip to PC World and buy the right stick.

OK, but run!

We see Jennifer in PC World. There’s a queue at the checkout. This dramatically intercuts with Travis waiting in the office, watching the clock and the boss finishing his lunch and heading back. Jennifer almost reaches the front of the queue. There is an old man in front of her buying an iPod Nano.

Would you like the gold extended warranty?

What does that mean?

An extra £60 means a no quibble money back guarantee should the item fail.

Well, it’s a present, so…

Just fill this for me.

Have you got a pen?

Look, can you hurry up?

I’m filling in the form for the warranty.

Well, don’t, it’s a rip-off.

How do you know?

Because I work for the government.

She takes his pen.

Now, fuck off!

There follows a hard-stopping intercut sequence of Jennifer paying, Travis waiting and the boss in a lift. Jennifer pays and runs out. The girl shouts… But she’s gone. We see Travis having to leave the office. The boss arriving back and Jennifer getting there nowhere near in time. Travis meets her in the corridor. Got one.

Too late.

Well, this was a waste of money then.

Did you get a receipt?

We can take it back.

She didn’t.

Oh, for God’s sake!

This is a world where the global missile defence shield won’t switch on because no-one has got the right adapter. Where uploading blueprints of a terrorist hideout to a PDA simply wouldn’t work because you just went into a tunnel. And where a car chase is blocked by traffic lights at some roadworks and Travis and Jennifer are stuck behind a learner driver. This is a sitcom about what happens when the best of the best have the worst possible day. This is Real World Spies.

I think nothing dates a sketch like the phrase iPod Nano, does it?

Or Windows Vista, or whatever. So you wrote this in 2008, who was it for?

Well, it wasn’t for any specific broadcaster. It was, you know, I had in mind that it could be, you know, just telly. So I think PBC2, I think, and Sky, and it got as far as a production company I was talking to at the time. They kind of liked it, but then, I think just sort of said, well, it feels more like a sketch, not a sitcom. So, which is fair. And I think they were worried that it wouldn’t sustain, you know, six episodes of that sort of thing going wrong. Suffice to say, though, I’ve since seen about three different versions of it on television made by other people.

Now you wrote this in 2008 with your then writing partner, Andy Hurst. How did you two first get together?

We were at uni together initially, and we started off, I think he slept with my girlfriend. I think that was the first thing that happened, or vice versa, I can’t really remember. And, you know, we became firm friends. So I was starting to write stuff for the BBC, still while holding down a day job. I worked in a theatre doing sound and lighting, and I was sending in jokes to the BBC and eventually got a vague callback from someone going, we quite like this sort of cassette you’ve made on an iPod Nano, and we’d like to talk to you about it. You know, who have you kind of written with? It was a sort of spoof of Radio 4. That was the gist of it. It was called Grievous Bodily Radio, and it was a sort of piss-take of all the things that were on Radio 4 and telly and stuff like that. And I sort of thought, well, writing on your own is quite dull. And Andy had a similar sense of humour, and I said, did you fancy coming in and helping me write this? And he did, and then we just sort of carried on.

The rest is history. Yeah. So time for your next off-cut. Tell us about that.

Well, I wrote a book. So this was a memoir, which I was asked to do by a publisher. He sort of said, can you write a sort of memoir book, but sort of funny? And I called it A Portrait of an Idiot as a Young Man. And it came out in 2016, initially. This was sort of the first chapter, I think. First draft, first chapter.

As any parent knows, naming a child is something not to be undertaken lightly. You are bestowing upon this sensitive human creature something with which it will be saddled forever, something which will be used to address it, cajole it, admonish it, call it, and mercilessly taunt it if you pick the wrong name. There’s a girl at my school called Gay Wally. And among pupils and staff alike, she came to epitomize the whole what were your parents thinking debate. Everyone got a nickname at school and as a parent, it’s very easy to accidentally give your offspring’s peers an open goal. My nickname was simply Homesy, which was part of the time on a tradition of simply adding the letter Y to any given surname. It was simple and quick, if not especially satisfying, and thus worked along much the same lines as Pot Noodle. These were easy nicknames formed in a hurry. Among my peers, I could also count Woody, Granty, and Stouty. But the best and most rewarding nicknames were reserved for people who had something wrong with them or had a stupid name bestowed on them by their unthinking parents. Kev, who was fat, was thus known as Fat Kev. Jon Thomas was known as Cock. And despite everyday run-of-the-mill, eminently sensible first names, Wayne Grucock and Lisa Wankling never stood a chance.

That was a particularly interesting off-cut for me, because when I looked at the text that you sent me, every other word was misspelt. It was like you were typing so fast, you didn’t have time to read back what you’d written. Is that what happened? Was it a big brain dump? Did you have to get it all out?

Yeah, it was. I think I tend to write like that, hence the handwriting that I mentioned earlier, because if you’re writing, as I was with this book, so this book’s essentially, the way I got round to it was I had my first child, right, who’s now 10. If you’ve had kids, you go along and they say, all right, so what illnesses might you have hereditary in your family that you might eventually pass on to these children? We need to write that on a form. And I don’t know. I had no answer to the question, what might you have in your background, because I was adopted, and I don’t have any access to any of those records. And I sort of thought, well, I can’t give my children, my daughters, any kind of medical background of who I am, but what I can do is write down how I got to be who I am. And that’s sort of how the book developed. And because it was that sort of pour it all out sort of book, when you write first drafty, you know, and ignore spell check, it’s literally, you know, you’re just writing, writing, writing, writing. But then obviously you go back and you refine it, but to get it all out there, because it was such a sort of from the heart kind of thing. I mean, the caveat with the book is, my daughters will never be allowed to read it. I mean, I overshared to the end, as you can, yeah. I mean, you know, there are chapters in there about being a teenage boy that really give you an insight.

There are too many chapters in there about being a teenage boy.

Yeah, but I, you know, I immediately urge you to go and buy it on Amazon.

Now you come from a very normal, non showbiz family. Your dad was a builder, your mom a nurse. So where did the writing, performing come from then?

Well, I don’t know. You see, that’s interesting because I, that’s part of what I talked about in the book was the whole nature nurture debate is quite fascinating to me because, you know, I had this idea that, you know, because I was technically picked out from a line of babies, right? The next couple through the door may not have been my parents, if you like, so I could have been brought up somewhere else by another couple entirely. And so my question to myself, and I actually still don’t really know the answer is, would I have ended up doing this through nature rather than nurture? Would I have always been destined to write and do stuff like that? Or was that, you know, kind of part of my upbringing? Because my dad, while they certainly weren’t from any kind of show-busy family, my dad was very into comedy and from a very young age used to play me albums from the goodies. And my mum was a nurse, as you mentioned. She used to do night shifts. And she’d put me to bed before she went off to do night shifts. And then she’d go and catch the bus at the end of the row. And so about nine o’clock at night, then my dad would come upstairs and bring me downstairs and sit me in front of repeats of Monty Python. And so I associated comedy with being a bit sort of naughty. He’s like, don’t tell your mum, but come and watch a man being hit with a fish. And I didn’t understand what was going on at all. But I loved it. And it was kind of bonding with dad sort of thing. So that’s kind of where I guess my interest started. And he had these albums. And then my first albums were music albums. They were comedy albums. The first album I bought was probably not 9 o’clock news or something from when they used to do those albums. So I was always kind of into it.

Let’s have your next off cut, please.

OK, well, this is a scene that never got used for the sitcom Miranda. So Miranda Hart’s very successful sitcom, of which this was no successful part.

Miranda and her date are in the cinema watching a film we do not see. We hear the soundtrack.

Who’s that? Shh! No, seriously, I don’t know who that is. That man. Who’s he supposed to be? What?

He’s the bloke whose daughter’s been kidnapped.

Right. Well, is he a goodie or a baddie?

What?

Goodie or baddie, him?

Goodie.

Miranda eats more popcorn.

So is he the bloke that was shot?

No.

Who was shot then?

The bloke with the wife.

What wife? Who’s that?

The cop who’s been in the film from the start. Do you always do this when you watch a film? No, not always.

I watched a film last week and there wasn’t even a cop in it.

What was it?

I don’t know.

It was on TV.

Beverly Hills Cop.

So, do you know why this scene didn’t get you?

No, I mean, it was one of, I wasn’t part of the writing, it was what I was. I ended up working with Miranda on a couple of Radio 4 things years ago, before she was famous. And then, Egtra and I sort of met her again, and then we ended up doing some stuff on Radio 2 together. And as part of that, she was sort of developing the next series of the sitcom and everything else. And she just said, oh, can you come up with some stuff and some writing and some bits? But I was never kind of part of the actual team she had. I was just sort of the, you know, I know this bloke. And so it was about just developing storylines and everything else. And that was just a sample bit of script from a cinema storyline that was kind of floating around. But that happens a lot. I think if you’re a writer and you get asked to do those things, it’s about sort of, she was entirely free to take a cinema scene and you’ve won line from it if you wanted to, you know, and build it into what she was writing, which is kind of the point. She just wanted ideas bounced around, I think.

Now, Miranda’s not the only celebrity you’ve been teamed with, you’ve written for. You also work with Stephen Fry.

Yes, so Stephen Fry used to present The BAFTAs. You may know that, Graham Norton does it now, but Stephen Fry used to present it, and I would write, co-write the script for The BAFTAs, which is, it sounds very glamorous, which it sort of is on one level, but at, you know, two in the morning when you’re being rung up from Hollywood by, I don’t know, Leonardo’s people who want to change a joke. It’s not so much fun when you’ve got to wait up for those calls. But you find that actors, so Stephen, Stephen’s job, you know, is to sort of introduce them, as you know, if you’ve watched the BAFTAs, you know, his job is to do the monologue at the beginning and then some sort of pithy introduction to whoever’s coming on to do the, to hand out the award for best hair or whatever it is. But your job as a writer on that is to write those lines as well for the people who are giving out the award for best hair. So you’ve got that really kind of awkward thing where you’re giving jokes you’ve written to Hollywood A-list actors who are shit at acting, right? Because they, what they are, they’re good at acting characters, but they can’t be themselves and they really struggle with it, right? That’s why when you’ve ever watched these things, if there’s an actor that you think, oh, they’re great and they come out and they just sort of stare blindly ahead, vaguely trying to read an autocue and it’s terrible. That’s why, because they’re trying to be themselves and they can’t. And it was really interesting insight into how that world works behind the scenes. You know, one of those surreal moments of your life. So my job is to stand off stage next to the, where it’s being typed into the autocue, the thing they have to read on the stage, to change anything at the last minute, right? That might just crop up. No, they were in there, but the example I’ll give you, right? So what happened was, we were just doing the run through to the blank room, and what they do is they put cutouts of the celebrities’ faces and stick them to the backs of all the chairs before they arrive. So the camera crew and the director can know where to cut. So if someone’s going, cut to Gwyneth Paltrow smiling or looking grumpy, they know where she’s sitting. So in the rehearsal, they’ll cut to these chairs. Anyway, so we’re going through all of this, and then all the scripts are being, sort of Stephens running through the jokes. And at the back of the room, the door opens and Keanu Reeves walks in with his entourage of people. And he’s just sort of standing there. And just at the point where we got to a joke about Keanu Reeves’ acting, right? And I thought, well, this isn’t going to go well, is it? And it was some sort of joke matrix. If he’d taken the blue pill, he might have been a better actor. I can’t remember. Anyway, the next thing we know is there’s a note from his people that says, Mr. Reeves isn’t very happy with that, that joke. Can you change it? So we came up with some other joke. That’s fine. That went into the script. Stephen then read it out as it’s happening. Now Keanu Reeves is then standing, waiting to go on, of course, cause he’s being introduced. Stephen does his intro. Keanu Reeves goes on stage, does his presentation, comes off stage, looks at me and said, what happened to the acting joke? And I went, and he went, cause he was really funny. Like he was really, what happened to that? And I was like, you said we had to cut it out? And he went, no, I didn’t. And it turned out, of course, these people that were with him had just done it on his behalf. And even though he had no interest in, he was up for it, you know? And I think that happens a lot with these people. And that was at the point where Richard Gere was about to go on stage, okay? And this was all going on. So he’s going, what happened to my joke? Richard Gere’s about to go on stage. The floor manager’s going, 20 seconds, Mr. Gere. And the wardrobe assistant comes up and adjusts his bow tie, which falls apart, cause it’s a proper bow tie. Right, so either surreal moments. I’m then watching Keanu Reeves talking to me about jokes while helping Richard Gere tie his bow tie. And I was thinking, this is the weirdest night of my life.

Okay, time for your next off-cut. Tell us what this is, please.

Um, guys, write travel, as you mentioned earlier for the Sunday Times, but they used to do a com called Motormouth, which is where writers were just allowed to spout off about anything that annoyed them in particular. And I had a bit of an issue with car parks.

When the director general of the BBC claimed back the 23p it cost him to park recently, you may have wondered, as I did, not what the hell he thought he was doing with license payers money, but how on earth he managed to park anything anywhere for just 23p. The minimum spend at the cheapest car park I can think of is 70p an hour, or part thereof. And if you try to fob it off with anything else on the grounds that you’re just picking up some dry cleaning, we’ll be back in 15 minutes at most, the machine simply gobs your money back at you with the force of a cat yacking up a coin furball. Yet, if you’ve only got a pound and wood, not unreasonably like 30p back, it’ll merely sit there and refer you to the sign that says it’s unable to give change. And if you leave the car park for a moment to try and get the right change from the shop 20 yards away, a git in a hattel come along and fine you 60 pounds. Car parking is stupidly expensive. Comedian Simon Evans observed that at six pounds an hour, the parking meters outside of Central London McDonald’s were better paid than the people working inside. Where I live, after seven p.m., even if you only want to park for five minutes, it costs one pound fifty. Why? What exactly am I getting in return? For that money, I want a bit more than just a boring old car parking space, thank you. I want entertainment. Clowns, perhaps. All right, not clowns. Everyone hates clowns. And they’re not entertaining unless they’re on fire. But show dogs, perhaps. Or a motorcycle display team. Or a motorcycle display team comprised of show dogs jumping through hoops of burning clowns. As far as I can tell, your money is actually just spent on more signs telling you that you now have to pay more money in order to pay for more signs. I’ve checked on their website, and it turns out all the extra cash from the recent price hike in my car park, Canterbury City Council, in case you were wondering, is being used to take a technological leaf out of the new Transformers film. And so, should you miss your tickets expiry time by just one second, the seemingly innocuous truck parked in the next bay will turn into a massive robot that will loom over the town centre, pluck you bodily out of debilums, smash you back into your car, and then hurl you and it out of the county. Park that thought.

That was a very heartfelt piece. What year was that again?

2006.

What happened to that?

Well, it was a bit of a writing for the newspaper learning curve, so I submitted that, and then when I read it, they don’t tell you this, then I read it back on the Sunday or whenever it was coming out, and it was about two paragraphs, the beginning paragraph, and then a bit of the middle, and then the rest had sort of disappeared, and had been rewritten by the editor. And I was so, well, what’s that about? And he went, well, I just didn’t like it.

In that piece, you named and shamed your local council, because you’re not afraid to antagonise, which has got you into trouble before, hasn’t it?

Well, yes. I mean, at which time would you like to talk about this?

Well, let’s, in the introduction, I mentioned the largest ever find in British broadcasting history. Maybe you’d like to tell us about that.

Well, I was young and Ofcom needed the money. So, well, okay. So I was doing this show on Virgin Radio. This was around 1999, I would say. And I was doing late nights, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights from 10 till 2. And it was a bit of a Wild West situation. There was no one in the building apart from me, the guy who I was doing the show with and a security guard. So there’s no producers or anything like that. So the boss was sort of like, yeah, do what you like. Just, it’s gonna be fine. It’s gonna be funny. Just do what you like. I’ve hired you because you’re a bit edgy, and you’re gonna push the boundaries a bit, and it’s gonna get people talking, which it did, but in all the wrong ways. And so one of the things we did, well, I’ll get onto the big fine, but just as a lead up to that, I’d already been fired from one radio station because we used to do a game on Sundays on Sunday evening, just after Dr. Fox’s chart.

This was you and your writing partner, Andy Hurst.

This was Andy Hurst, yeah. And we used to do this two hour show on a Sunday night. And it became cult listening amongst the kids, really, the school kids and the teenagers. This was down in Hampshire. And one of the games we had was that you had to phone the show and live on air, you had to put an object of your choosing through a neighbor’s letter box, all right? And then the object of the game, okay, which is when we started the clock, was to knock on the door, right? And that’s when we started the clock, the knock. And then we timed how long it took for you to get that object back. So people would be like, put things through the letter box, knock on the door, clock’s started. And someone asked me, yeah, I guess, I’m really sorry. You know, I accidentally put my hammer with some soil cellar taped to it through your letter box. Can I have it back? And then this weird conversation that you’d hear on air would carry on. Anyway, it was just fine, people with carrots, it’s just crest or something. And it all went wrong when someone put a live squirrel through someone’s letter box. I mean, it was very funny, but it destroyed their hallway. And I got fired.

But you know, it was.

But the big fine. The big fine, the big fine. The big fine was for a game, and I’m not proud of this now, just as a caveat. Not really. And it was a game, it was called Swearing Radio Hangman for the under 12s. So what happened was that we were playing this every Friday night at midnight, and the idea was, as a listen to parents, you would ring up, go, Mike, get your kid out of bed, and they’re gonna play Hangman with swear words to win a CD. So it was all fine until one week, nine-year-old Katie came on, and it was five letters, three letters, four letters. And she was guessing, and her parents were helping her. That was the thing, her parents were going, yeah, go on, it’s an, ask for a P, ask for a, is it a P? Yeah, it’s the P is the fourth letter of the first word, right? And her parents go, T, T, yeah, T. It’s the first and last letter of the middle three-letter word. And eventually, what happened was, she sped…

Everybody’s slowly getting what it is.

But this is why it worked on the radio, because if you’re listening, you’re way ahead of the kid, right? And so in the end, she did spell out the phrase, soapy tit wank, which, you know, looking back now, I can see why that might have been a problem.

Were there complaints, Jon Holmes?

One, one complaint from an old lady who tuned in by accident, by her own admission. So she complained, Ofcom got involved, decided that had really had stepped over several broadcasting rules, which it probably had. But what’s great, if you do get a complaint made against you and Ofcom get involved, you get a transcript of it. And in the cold light of day, right, it reads really badly.

On air, it was like, ha ha ha, she said, funny thing.

And her parents are laughing. So it then said, and the presenter then encouraged the nine-year-old child to shout the phrase, soapy tit wank, into the next song, which happened to be Deacon Blue.

Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha.

Ha ha ha ha. Well, so the Ofcom said, well, that’s 150,000 pounds, please. I know. Which Virgin then had to pay, but then the boss who, by the way, had encouraged me, thought this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard anyway, suddenly went, oh shit, I didn’t know he was doing it. I had no idea he was doing this. I had no idea. He’s fired, we fire him. And they fired me and that got the fine halved down to 75K because they took action. But that was a good learning curving too. All bosses are bastards, aren’t they? Sell you down the river, they will. Right, so this was called So Solid News. So it was a spoof showbiz news show. And it was a pilot for Capital Radio. This was written in 2003.

Headlines.

Holly Vallance arrested for horse ripping. Blurry footage shows neighbor star coring the genitals of a mare in an Essex field.

Sorcerer David Blaine disintegrates upon reentry into society after hanging in a glass box.

And Radiohead’s next album will be a live musical version of the Hutton Inquiry.

Boy 14 finds perv pop star in Pringles.

14 year old Kyle Cooper from Leighton Buzzard got a shock this week when he opened a tube of Pringles only to find that one was the spitting image of the child-bothering, stroke-faced former pop star Jonathan King. The sour, cream and chive flavored snack had been accidentally baked in the shape of the infamous presenter right down to the baseball cap and Under 18’s disco-induced erection. I was quite frightened, said Miles, whose father is a policeman. I immediately gave it to my dad because I thought that Jonathan King-Crisp might try to buy me a panda pop and then bugger me in the arse. Pringles, the manufacturer of Pringles, have vowed to look into the matter, as they say it’s a matter of policy not to include snack-style effigies of kiddie-fiddlers in their packs. The incident comes at a particularly bad time for crisps in general, as only two months ago a child found a dead hawk in a packet of frazzles and one of the missing bodies from the Moore’s murders turned up in some watsits.

Children’s organ theft scandal continues.

Following the recent investigation into the theft of children’s organs at Alderhay Hospital, details are emerging of a similar scandal at a children’s clinic in Kent. For years, doctors in Fabersham have been taking organs and putting them into other children without permission. Police were alerted last week and have since carried out a number of spot checks during which a number of children were broken open and found to have stolen organs inside. Six medical staff have been arrested following the discovery of a Bon Tempe Hit 406, a Casio Step Lighter and a Hammond XP1, all wired into the inside of a 10-year-old. The scandal follows a previous incident in 1998 when detectives found a glockenspiel growing on the side of a boy at the home of a former nurse.

Nice.

Well, I can’t think why that wasn’t broadcast.

That sort of precludes my next question, yes. Topical comedy, that news-based comedy style is something you’ve done a lot of. You started there, in fact, didn’t you?

Yeah, yes.

What was the first programme you worked on?

Well, the first joke I ever sold was The Week Ending, which was a radio for Open Door Policy comedy show, which was, anybody could send sketches in there, do a thing called News Jack now, which is a kind of similar idea, but it was a good way of just getting people who were interested in comedy writing an access point into this ivory tower of getting comedy onto the radio. And my first joke, I got about 13 pounds for it. And that was while I was working at the theatre that I mentioned. And I, but I was always very into the news. And the reason for that, my first, I think the first two things that I suddenly realised what topical comedy was and could be. So I mentioned Not The Nine O’Clock News. And I remember my dad, again, we were watching Not The Nine O’Clock News together. So this would have been what, 1982, I think or something. And there was a joke where they, there was an advert that was for the coal board and their slogan was come home to a real fire. Okay, and I was aware as a kid of that being a TV ad or a billboard ad or something, just to promote coal at the time. And Not The Nine O’Clock News did that as an advert. And I was also aware of the news story, because we used to go on holiday to Wales, that Welsh nationalists were burning holiday cottages. Okay, and I knew that was in the news. And then suddenly I saw this, come home to a real fire by a cottage in Wales, right? Was this, and I suddenly thought, oh my God, that’s amazing. They’ve taken an advert and a news story and done that. And I was fascinated by that. And then my dad sort of said, yeah, yeah, that’s kind of how news comedy works. You know, that was my eye-opening view. And Spitting Image was the same. When I first saw Spitting Image, I saw a news story in the morning and then saw a joke about it, about Spitting Image that night and just thought, God, how did they do that? That suddenly just happened. And then I suddenly realized you could write jokes about the news and also that way you never run out of material.

You were at the beginning of Dead Ringers, weren’t you? Because that’s a news based comedy show.

Yeah, yeah, Dead Ringers. So you’re familiar with Dead Ringers. So Radio 4 went to telly and then went back to, limped back to Radio 4 with his tail between his legs. And it came about because Radio 4 were looking, again, career long story short, I ended up as a contract writer for BBC Radio Comedy in around 98, I suppose, sort of time. And I was sitting in an office with Andy, who we’ve been talking about, and a producer, Bill Dare, who still produces it, stuck his head around the door and said, oh, you two are paid to be here for some reason. I’ve got some impressionists. I want to do a spinning image on the radio program to do something. And so it left us to it. And so we sort of started writing what became the pilot of Dead Ringers. But what we’ve done, the thing we’d made for Radio 4 before that, which sort of got us in there, was a thing called Grievous Bodily Radio, which was this thing that spoofed Radio 4. And it got, for career pattern, loads of complaints, right? Because we’d made it for Radio 1. Radio 1 then chucked out all their DJs, you probably remember that in the late 90s, and indeed all their comedy. So Radio 4 bought this Radio 1 series that we made and just put it on Radio 4, which confused the hell out of Radio 4 listeners, who all complained about it. And then we got this writing gig, but we kind of then rewrote Grievous Bodily Radio, but with impressions in it. And then everyone suddenly loved it instead of hating it. And we were completely puzzled. If you just put funny voices in it, get away with anything, it turns out. And so we made a pilot and everyone loved it, it went to series. And yes, all that early Radio 4 spoof stuff in there that was topical all came from that sort of background.

And it’s been running for 20 years.

I know, yeah.

Are you a naturally very political person?

I’ve become more so, I think. I think as a kid, well, as I said, that eye opening Welsh nationalist burning cottages joke made me realize there was a whole seam to mine, if that’s not too, if a terrible coal based, anyway it is, but gloss over it. And I suddenly realized that there was all this stuff going on and then like any teenager, I sort of got quite interested in politics and joined Youth CND, even though I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I did get to have a meeting in Youth CND, I was meeting above a pub and I was too young to drink, but the guy who was running it was old enough to buy the drinks, so that’s kind of why I got into politics.

Right, so not really very political then?

Not really, no, just alcoholic.

Right, let’s have another off cut now. What’s this one?

This, oh yeah, so I got asked to write travel for the Sunday Times. So the travel editor just said, look, you know, I quite like what you do. Have you thought about doing travel writing? Would you like to? To which my immediate answer was yes, I would like to do that. So in the last 10 years or so, I’ve done some very odd things, including the fire ants you mentioned in the beginning and hospitalized by Sia Atkins in Puerto Rico and all manner of terrible stories. But this is a piece that never made it, it was a commission, I wrote it, this was 2013. It was about to be published, but then a breaking news story stopped them publishing it.

Think of the enormous hotels of Dubai and you probably think they’re full of oversized Russians gorging themselves on oversized buffets before waddling out into the heat and beaching themselves by the pool. And you’d probably be right. Dubai is much like Liberace. You’ve heard of it, you know it’s glamorous, but you probably don’t want to go there. It’s also younger than Liberace. He was 67 when he died, yet Dubai, as we know it, is just over 50 years old. Founded in 1966 on the discovery of oil when it was a declining port, and is now a shimmering oasis of sand, steel and football as holiday homes on a manmade island that’s been built in the shape of a plant. Yet for a garish city with little history, there’s a corner of this conurbation that’s working hard for our ecological future. The monorail that snakes out across the palm leads to the Atlantis, a five-star luxury hotel that’s themed around the mythological lost underworld city of Plato’s time and dates all the way back to 2008. But it’s here, in this unlikely location, that a successful conservation program is thriving. These are strobulating polyps, Marine Manager Dennis Blom tells me, as he guides me around the pipes, incubation tanks and filtration systems, and is home to more than 65,000 species of fish. Are they, I say, pretending to know what he’s just said. In front of me, a dozen pinhead-sized things are drifting happily around a tiny tank. They look like drops of snot. They’ll grow into a fully-sized jellyfish, he says, saving me from my ignorance.

And over here is where we encourage sea roses to release sperm directly into seawater.

Of course it is. Nearby, eight different race species are being born and nurtured. Not since I lived in student halls have I been surrounded by so much attempted breeding.

So what was the story that meant that Sunday Times didn’t publish this?

What’s interesting about travel writing is you get to do some amazing things, okay? You get to go around the world, and this was one, I thought, quite an interesting story, because Dubai had a very bad reputation, still does, because of the money that gets spent and the oil and just the way, human rights, not least, and also keeping dolphins and so forth in captivity, which the big hotels have their own dolphin pools, which is very frowned upon now, but they’re also running this ecology conservation program, which is very well funded, which not many people knew about, and that’s quite a good angle for a story, and the editor, indeed, agreed with me, said actually, no, not enough people know about the conservation work. Anyway, the moment it was about to be published, a big story broke about the dolphins in captivity, in Dubai specifically, and how they were in quite a lot of trouble for it, and were getting loads of criticism, so the editor rightly just said, that’s just not gonna chime, is it, with the current news? So, no, we’re gonna spike that one, and the annoying thing is about being a travel writer is you only get paid on publication, right? So you don’t get paid to do the job, you only get paid when it’s published.

But you do get paid to go on a trip, don’t you?

Well, you don’t get paid to go on a trip.

They pay for your trip.

So you get a free trip, yeah, but that is true. I’m not complaining, but it’s annoying when you do write something and then you just don’t get paid any money. A free trip’s already gone, but you won’t pay the mortgage. That’s the annoying part of it. But I’m certainly not gonna, I got to do some incredible things in travel terms. Crocodile hunting in Papua New Guinea and that kind of thing.

You’re the obvious choice.

I am the obvious choice for that, which you never get a chance to do ordinarily.

Well, that’s a very cushy job. Right, time for your final off-cut, Jon. Tell us what we are about to hear.

So this is from Horrible Histories. So Horrible Histories range of books, as I’m sure you know, that got turned into a live action TV series in the sort of mid to late noughties. And I was part of the original writing team and this was a sketch I think I wrote. The thing about Horrible Histories was that the sketches had to be absolutely factually accurate. You couldn’t, it has to have jokes, but it also has to be absolutely true as to what happened in history. And they were very, very keen on that. And we had advisors on board to go, that would never happen, you can’t use that in the basis of a joke. So all of it’s true and exactly what happened. But for some reason, just in the pile of scripts, this one never got used.

Exterior day, we hear a battle raging. A Viking lies on the ground, clutching a very obvious arrow in his stomach. Another Viking comes over.

Oh no, what is it? What’s the matter?

What do you mean what’s the matter?

I’ve been shot with an arrow. What, that?

Then it’s just a splinter.

A splinter?

Yeah, it’ll probably pop out on its own eventually.

It’s not a splinter, it’s an arrow in the stomach, so help me!

Well, I’m not really sure what to do.

Well, do what Vikings are supposed to do and call on the gods for advice. Then hurry up, because it’s starting to smart a bit.

All right, all right, hold on then.

He drops to his knees to pray.

Oh, Odin, Chief God of the Vikings, are you there?

Split screen, Odin answers.

Viking, Medical Direct Helpline, Odin, Chief God of the Vikings speaking. How may I help you today?

Hello, yes, I’ve got a fellow Viking here with an arrow in the gut, any advice?

Hmm, an arrow, you say?

I think so.

Hmm, are you sure it’s not a splinter?

He says, are you sure it’s not a splinter?

It’s not a splinter. It’s not a splinter.

Yes, I was gonna say, because if it was, it’ll probably just pop out on its own eventually.

That’s what I said. It’s an arrow in the stomach.

Oh, well, then there are certain Viking medical procedures that we have to follow. First, you have to feed him a meal of oats, onions and herbs.

I’m not sure he’s very hungry.

It’s a special meal. Just feed him.

Viking Two opens his Viking bag. As luck would have it, there’s a bowl of yuck in there. He tries to spoon some into Viking One’s mouth, who moves his face away like a child.

Come on, open wide. Odin says it’s good for you.

Come on.

Don’t want to.

Longboat.

It does that flying the spoon like an aeroplane into the mouth trick and Viking One eats it.

Okay, now what? You want me to what?

Stick your nose into the hole in his tummy. Get it right in there. Right in the guts and the bits of intestine. Have a good ol smell.

What’s he saying to do next?

Nothing.

He says we’re done.

Oh, come on. You’re a Viking. You’re not scared of a few smelly guts, are you?

He sticks his nose near Viking One’s tummy.

Get away. Odin says I’ve got to smell your guts.

What?

Good point.

Hang on.

Why? Simple. If it smells of onions and herbs, then his intestines have been pierced and he’ll die. If you can’t smell onions and herbs, he’ll live. So just patch him up.

Righto.

He smells the wound again.

Smells of onions? What?

No, it doesn’t.

Definitely getting something herby. Onions and herby.

You’ve had it, mate. No, I haven’t. Actually, it doesn’t hurt anymore. I’m as right as rain.

Ah, you smell like soup.

It’s probably just a splinter.

It’s actually making me feel quite peckish.

If it is a splinter, I’ll probably just pop myself out eventually.

Anything?

Onions and herbs.

Oh, here’s a goner. I’ll prepare a space in the Viking heaven of Valhalla. I’ll finish him off if I were you. It’s the only humane thing to do.

I’ll probably just need a plaster.

Sorry, mate. Doctor’s orders.

Viking 2 draws his axe and there’s an out of vision, squelchy thump of an axe killing Viking 1.

Anything else I can help you with today?

No, that’s it. Thanks.

Thank you for calling Viking Medical Direct. I’ve been Odin, Chief God of the Vikings.

The split screen slides off. Viking 2 picks up the bowl of yuck and eats a spoonful himself.

That sounds like a very horrible history sketch. Why wasn’t it used?

Well, I think it was just one in a, there were a lot of sketches going in and around Horrible Histories, and I think it was just probably one that just fell off the end somewhere. There’s probably a much better one somebody wrote about Vikings. But it’s interesting, because the success of Horrible Histories, I think, came down to partly that kind of thing, in that it was chock full of facts with jokes attached, which is what kids then sort of latched onto.

Yeah, putting the comedy into disguise as facts, like when you put vegetables and mush it up and because you’re born and raised.

Precisely that, yeah. And that’s why I think kids latched onto it. We got a note between series one and series two. I remember this when we were called in and they sort of said, yeah, absolutely, everyone loves it. Of course, you’re gonna commission series two, but can there be fewer decapitations this time? And can you not throw as much shit around?

Were you responsible for the decapitations and the shit?

And the shit, mostly, yeah. Mostly the shit, which is why it didn’t get broadcast.

So writing for children, you fancy doing some more of that?

Well, you know, I mean, probably not the soapy tit wank thing. I think that was probably not going to follow that one up.

Right, so it’s not a natural progression for you?

Well, I think kids, I wouldn’t rule anything out, really. I think kids are a great audience to entertain. It’s horrible. I went around schools talking about the writing of Horrible Histories, just have that first series into primary schools. And what was funny about it was, A, the way kids engage with it, but then I get them to write sketches and then I’d go back the week after and then nick them all. And record their sketches, so they’d done acting and writing and stuff as well as little workshops. But it was great because it just got them interested in comedy and in writing. And notoriously, boys and literacy don’t go well together in school, but what I learned from the teachers it was doing, it was bringing kids into more reading and more literacy. So actually it’s funny that this stuff can sort of cut through. Even when it’s filth, it turns out it can engage kids, which I think is great.

So what’s next? Any writing ambitions still to be realised? Unless you haven’t written a novel, for example.

I haven’t written a novel, no. I’d like to write a film. I’ve got a couple of ideas for a, well, one specific idea for a film that I’ve sort of started developing, but haven’t done anything about it yet. It takes so long to write, doesn’t it? You sit down and you go, I’ve got to write a film. It might take 17 months, this. I haven’t got time for this nonsense. So you’ve got to block yourself out with chunks of time. When I wrote the book, I took myself away for a week initially, wrote 25,000 words. And I went away from my family and I just sat in a, what essentially was a holiday home. I just hired on my own and just sat there 12 hours a day writing for seven days. And then I wrote the next 25,000 words over the summer while doing everything else I was doing, which was presenting a breakfast show, which was a bit of a thing. And then I did the same with the end of the book. I went away and locked myself and did the whole, so you’ve got to kind of focus on it. And something like a film, I think you’ve just got to focus on it solidly, but you’ve got to get the time and space to do it. And also, of course, you’re not being paid necessarily to write it. So once again, you’ve got to find yourself a financial cushion, which is not that easy to find.

True. Well, final question. Having revisited these old bits of writing, how do you feel about them? Were you surprised by anything you heard?

It was rubbish, wasn’t it? No wonder they were rejected.

Nothing gets you actors, obviously.

No, no, not at all. I know it’s really good to hear. I mean, it’s quite interesting to hear two different things, actually. One, it’s brilliant to hear that sketch, because I’ve not obviously heard the Horrible Histories sketch before. So it’s great to hear that with some proper actors doing it. But also interesting in stuff that I’ve only heard in my head, you know, like the column or something, which aren’t joke-fueled, they’re travel stuff. So to hear them actually read out loud is quite an interesting, because that’s not the medium they were designed for. So I think that’s sort of an interesting way of approaching it. But yeah, it’s quite interesting. All writers have that thing of stuff they’ve written down that may lead to nothing. And I mean, as writers, we’ve all got either notes that used to be by our bed, but now it’s phone notes. And occasionally look back through them, thinking, oh, there’s some great ideas in here. And I wake up in the middle of the night and still write these ideas down. And then the next morning, I’d looked at this only this morning because we were talking about this, and I had an idea in the night. And then I woke up and in the dark, I found my glasses because I’m old. And then wrote something down, thinking, well, that’s just gonna be the best sitcom ever. I mean, I can’t wait to share this with the world. Woke up this morning, looked at it, it just said, milky arm.

Thank you very much indeed for letting us rummage around in your Offcuts Drawer. Ladies and gentlemen, Jon Holmes.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Jon Holmes. 

Hi this is Laura again.

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