My problem is I keep developing things which are big and expensive and extravagant because that’s what I would like to watch but I have to write to my strengths of what I think I’m good at. I can’t write a sort of Sally Wainwright domestic drama which you know she’s brilliant and there are many other rights like that but I can’t write that. I try and write something like that and before I know it you know an alien’s arrived or they’ve gone back in time or half the cast have been shot in a gruesome manner. I like genre stuff so I’ll leave the other stuff to those who do it much better than me.

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 is the second part of my conversation with Charlie Higson. So rather than run through his many achievements all over again, you’re better off hopping back one episode for the full introduction. The headlines though, you probably know him as the co-creator, writer and star of The Fast Show and or as a best-selling novelist, author of the young James Bond series and a whole range of crime, horror and young adult books.

In part one, Charlie’s offcuts included a mash-up of two Monty Python sketches for a Harry Enfield show, a scene from the first episode of a big-scale TV drama about the young Winston Churchill and a wonderfully creepy short story that predated Frozen by several years. And the variety continues in this episode. So picking up where we left off, here’s Charlie introducing his next offcut, though do be warned there is a fair bit of swearing quite early on.

This is a film script which I wrote in 1998 called Don’t Go Crazy. Interior, pool at the gym, evening. Alex, Phil, Lester and Rob are sat around the pool.

It’s good to have you back, Phil. The pool felt empty without you. Well, I just… Don’t say anything depressing, Phil.

I came here to relax. Alex, have you ever considered taking a bit of exercise while you were here? It is a gym after all. I only come here for the pool and the sauna.

You do two lengths, then you sit there drinking wine. It relaxes me. But maybe if you did some exercise, you wouldn’t be such a fat fuck.

I’m not a fat fuck. Well, you’re not a thin fuck. Who says I have to be any kind of a fuck? No, you’re definitely a fuck, Alex.

That’s not in dispute. And you’re definitely getting fat. You’re a fat fuck, Alex.

Let’s face it. You only need to be as fit as your lifestyle requires. All these freaks doing weights and tramping for hours up imaginary staircases.

What do they need to be so fit for? They all work in offices, for lifting phones to their ears, for opening their car doors. No, to look better, to be healthier, to not be a fat fuck. I’m perfectly healthy.

All blokes think that. Look, it keeps Sarah off my back. She thinks I get some exercise so she doesn’t keep on at me about me dying young.

Christ, I would have thought she’d be relieved. The thought of living with you. We’re perfectly happy in our own way.

We’ve worked out a system. If you want to be successful in a relationship, Phil, you have to have a system. You pompous prick.

Well, I hope it’s cheering you up, Phil, having a go at me. You know, what you need is a fuck, Phil. It’s fucking that’s fucked me up, Lester.

Girls, what I actually need is to stop thinking about fucking. Your problem with women is you appear too fucking desperate, Phil. Can you tell me something? Can you tell me why I should take any advice on women from you lot? You, you’ve been 10 years with the same woman.

You, you’ve never spent longer than about 10 seconds with one woman. And you have an almost supernatural ability to attract mad women from miles around. Hello, I’m bonkers.

Ah, well, you must go out with Lester then. Well, at least we’re all getting a fuck. I don’t know.

I don’t really like sex anymore. What? I find it too troubling. I know Sarah too well and I just feel so… I feel so ridiculous.

And it reminds me too immediately of my longing and my need. Yeah, I know what you mean. You’re all fucking bonkers.

Okay. There’s a lot of bad language in there, isn’t there? Yes, a lot of… there will be a warning before this episode goes out. Don’t worry.

Explicit. E for explicit. But it’s all right. Don’t mind a bit of swearing. So Don’t Go Crazy is the name of the film’s script. Tell us about it. Tell us about the story.

Well, one of my favourite American crime authors is Charles Williford. He wrote some brilliant books.

And I was reading one of them and it was… quite a lot of it was these four guys sitting around a motel swimming pool in America, just kind of shooting the breeze with each other. And then it develops into a crime story. And I quite liked that idea.

I thought, I want to just start a film like that. So it starts with these four guys around a swimming pool in a gym in London with a view out over the city. And it was a way of writing about men.

And it was a way of writing about London. And I developed it originally. I thought it would be good for me, Paul Whitehouse, Mark Williams and Simon Day.

So we would play these four friends. And the basic premise is one of them, which would have been Mark Williams’ character, announces to his mates that he’s had enough and he wants to kill himself. Right.

And I thought I would turn around what the normal story is that it’s about how they try and persuade him not to. And, you know, he’s got a great life. He shouldn’t throw it away.

But in this one, they go, all right, then, well, we’ll help you. And so they do. And they sort of discuss how they should do it and and what should happen.

And and they sort of set up things which he doesn’t go through with. And obviously, in the end, he doesn’t kill himself. And everything that they’ve done actually persuades him that he doesn’t want to do that and that they are good friends.

And along along the way, it’s a it’s a comedy, a comedy about blokes, really. And a lot of it is about how blokes don’t, you know, when they get together, they don’t really talk about personal things and emotions and stuff. Mostly talk about films they’ve seen or football or cars or whatever.

So, yeah, and I quite like the script. I thought it was good. And for a while, I was developing it with Working Title, with Working Title Films, who I got to know through doing Random Hot Coat Deceased, because that was through Working Title Television.

They set up a television arm. So I got to know Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, the two guys that run it. And we started developing the film.

But the film world works very differently to the TV world. And it’s quite slow and cumbersome. And this is one of the reasons, I think, why we’ve made so few comedy films.

You know, in America, someone’s got a funny character on Saturday Night Live. Oh, we’ll make a film. We’ll do it quickly.

It might be a hit. It might be rubbish. But we’ll get it out there and get these things done.

And then we put these guys together. They’re good. But it’s a lot slower and more cumbersome in this country.

We don’t really have an industry. And if you look back, it’s amazing. We’ve had so much good comedy on the TV.

Very few good comedy films. So this would, in fact, sort of be a fast show film. Yes.

But not with the millions of characters. Although, you know, the way these things go, once you get into the film world, suddenly it’s, well, we can’t get the financing if it’s you guys. But if it’s Hugh Grant, whatever.

But surely that would be part of its appeal, no? The fact that it’s the fast show. Yes, but they’re film people, you see. And there is a gap between film people and TV people.

And often when someone eventually gets around to making a film, it’s a bit late. It’s a bit after the event. You know, like the Alan Partridge film was 10 years too late, really.

Great film, though. Probably not as good as a TV show. But so it was quite cumbersome and it was taking a long time.

And then there was the Twin Towers attack. Oh, yes. And they said, and it may have just been an excuse because they wanted to get out of it.

They didn’t want to make it. They said, you know, since the Twin Towers attack, people don’t want dark humour. They want things to be light and breezy and fun.

And we think this central idea of them trying to help him commit suicide, could you change it that actually they’re trying to persuade him not to? And I said, well, yeah, but that’s the whole joke. That’s the whole idea of the film. And things do get changed because of this.

I remember I was asked by Working Title if I wanted to work as a script doctor on this thriller script that they were developing. And I read it and I thought, I don’t get this. And I went back to them.

I said, I really don’t understand what it is about this film that you wanted to get it made. What’s this kind of USP that you thought? Yeah, because it’s mystifying me. And I said, well, we were originally developing it as it was going to be the first Channel Tunnel thriller.

And it was about someone planting a bomb in the Channel Tunnel. But then someone else announced they were making a film of that. So we took that part out of it.

And I said, yeah, but that means you just don’t have an idea. There’s no idea behind this film. And this happens a lot in that world.

You know, you get a certain amount down the line. We’ve got the financing. We’ve got this.

Oh, we can’t do that. But we’ll take that out. And suddenly you’ve got something that makes no sense at all.

So I didn’t pursue Don’t Go Crazy. And obviously, if I did go back to it, it would not be with us in it anymore. But I still think it’s quite a funny script.

And they’re quite interesting characters. Well, I mean, there’s a renewed interest in the Farsha. You’re going on tour.

Yeah, but we’re too old. You know, this was written for people in their late 30s. And it couldn’t be for people in their early 60s or mid 60s.

However old your team are? We could do. Well, I’m just thinking, could BBC finance it partly or, you know, sort of as a, not a TV special, but… A BBC couldn’t. We can’t be seen to encourage people committing suicide.

Oh, God, right. OK. Again, you know, I’ve got hundreds of these things.

I’ve got so many unmade films. I’ve got so many pilots and Bibles for TV series that I’ve worked on. It’s often something will lie fallow for a while.

And then you’ll meet someone, you’ll have a conversation. Oh, we’re looking for this type of thing. You say, oh, I got something like that.

It’s like my picture book, my first picture book. What’s that noise? I’ve done with a fabulous Nadia Shireen. I was with her and she said, oh, have you ever written anything we could work on together? I said, well, when my kids were little, I wrote this story.

I never really finished it. But a boy who gets inside a cardboard box makes a lot of noise. She said, oh, I’d like to see that.

And I dug it out. And I think the last version of it was from 1994. And she said, this is great.

Let’s do it. So I kind of finished it and we published it. So, you know, things can get a second lease of life and come back.

OK, let’s move on to your next offcut. What is this one? This is a Doctor Who script that I wrote in 2016 called The Birthday Present. Interior, house in the desert, back room, day.

Amy and the Doctor find themselves in a bedroom full of British Eighth Army desert troops in shorts and wide helmets. A bed stands against one wall. There’s a back door here and two glassless windows.

The troops are firing from the windows and through the open doorway. Throughout the scene, they completely ignore the Doctor and Amy, who duck down as an explosion outside sends a cloud of dust into the room. Sniper! A bullet cracks and one of the soldiers falls away from the window, dead.

Grenade! He lobs a grenade out. There’s an explosion across the road. It’s chaos.

Bullets everywhere. The Doctor and Amy cower, trying to avoid being hit. German machine gun nest at five o’clock! I’m on it! He runs out into the street.

There’s the rattle of machine gun fire and a cry. The machine gun rakes the building. Two more soldiers fall back, dead.

See the pyramids and die. There’s something not right here, Amy. Will you stop seeing that? Another soldier goes up to the window.

All soldiers look the same in uniform, but he looks identical to the one who ran out into the street. Sniper! I’m on it! Look around you, Amy. What is wrong with this picture? What, even apart from the guns and the explosions? Grenade! The soldier who just shouted grenade.

Wasn’t he shot before? I don’t know. I was too busy ducking. Concentrate, Amy.

We’re in the middle of a battle and yet… There’s no blood? There are no bodies. Indeed. As they look around the room, there’s no evidence of the several soldiers who have been shot.

Keep your eyes on one of them. Okay. Wait till he’s shot.

What? Just watch. Amy watches as the second British Tommy is shot and falls dead. He sprawls in the dust on the floor among broken pottery and ammunition cases.

Nothing’s happening. What am I supposed to be looking at? Over there! Amy spins around to look where the doctor’s pointing. Can’t see anything.

Turns back to the dead soldier who has disappeared. Where’d he go? I’m not sure he was ever there in the first place. What’s going on? I think we’re caught in a wrinkle of time.

We’re seeing different times at the same time. But that’s impossible. No, it’s not.

Space is folded in on itself. That’s how the TARDIS is able to travel anywhere and to any time. Look.

As the gun battle rages around them, the doctor pulls a blanket off the bed, uncovering a white sheet. He fissures a large marker pen out of his pocket and draws a dot on the sheet. Okay, we’re here.

North Africa, 1943 or thereabout. And over here… The doctor draws another point a long way away on the sheet. Is ancient Egypt.

4567 BC, okay? He hands the marker pen to Amy and points to the dots. So how would you get from here to there? Amy draws a straight line across the sheet. No, too slow.

That would take centuries. The doctor tugs the sheet off the bed and scrumbles it into a ball, oblivious to the bullets that smack into the wall all around him. Then he carefully peels back the layers, revealing that the two dots are now touching.

Abracadabra! You didn’t submit this script, you said. Well, it’s a long story. I knew Russell Davis enough to say hello to him and have a conversation.

I knew Stephen Moffat much better. And when he was showrunning, we talked about me possibly writing a script. And I wanted to do something, because they’d never done it.

I said, look, computer gaming is such a big thing with kids. You haven’t ever done anything about that. You should do.

But the interesting thing about the showrunners is that Doctor Who very much kind of is a representation of whatever their concerns are. So Russell Davis, there was a lot of human drama, but there was also quite a lot of satire in it. Stephen Moffat, as we know, is a brainy fellow.

And he likes kind of complicated, brainy things. And that’s what he likes writing about and making up incredibly complex, folded in stories. And, you know, his Doctor Who was quite similar to Sherlock Holmes.

So he liked some aspects of what I was talking about. But obviously, he wasn’t that excited by the idea of computer games. It wasn’t really part of his world.

But I play a huge amount of computer games and my boys did, too. And it was interesting that under Stephen, the Doctor Who probably started to move away from being aimed at 10 year old boys and girls. But what was great was it was a series.

You know, there was science fiction and there were adventures. And it was great that the hero of it was different to the other sort of heroes you were shown. A male hero who didn’t have a gun, wasn’t beating people by fighting.

He used his brain and he used technology and wizardry. He’s a wizard. But Stephen, the scripts became very complicated and complex.

And he started getting very interested, really, in what was the online fan community and particularly American online fan community. He was trying to push it into America where it would be aimed at an older audience. And I felt it did slightly move away from being a fun Saturday night show for kids to watch.

And so mine was about how it’s the sort of Tron idea that the Doctor and Amy get trapped inside a game, which I mean, obviously you can’t do. So it’s essentially it’s a game. The game essentially gets inside you.

It starts to manipulate your brain so that you think you are in a in a real world. But it’s a game that this thing is playing. So, you know, I had a lot of fun writing it and working it up.

And I worked up a pitch document and Stephen was so busy that it was months, I think years before I eventually could have a meeting with him. And I developed it to a certain extent. And it’s quite interesting, the Doctor Who world, there was a huge team, a sort of support team to keep this thing running.

And, you know, it was a bit like trying to get to see the emperor, only dealing with his minions and his court or trying to get access to the pope or something. So eventually I got through to Stephen and he’s very energetic, full of ideas, throwing ideas out there. And my story was quite, quite straightforward.

It was about gaming. You know, it’s about the universe could be about to be destroyed. And he realises that someone is playing a game and they don’t realise and they are actually controlling everything that’s going on.

And it turns out that it’s just a young teenage kid. And Stephen says, well, you could try this or do that. And, yeah, it’d be great if he went there.

And it started becoming more Stephen Moffat-ish. And I was saying, well, that sort of makes it a lot bigger and expands it. Also, don’t worry about that.

No, no, no, no. We’d never worry about that when we start. We’d make as big as we can and throw as much as we can and make it exciting.

And then and then when we know what the budget is, we worry about this stuff and then we pull it back. But, you know, don’t restrict yourself now. So I went away and did what he said and came back.

And the team said I didn’t get access back to him again. The team said, well, it’s just too big and expensive. We can’t do this.

And by that point, I thought I’m not pursuing this. I’ve been banging my head against the wall. And I’d been I’d started writing it just just to see for myself whether it worked.

And so then I thought, well, I might as well finish writing it. Have some fun with it. So I did write it up into a complete script.

I mean, you can tell when it was written. Yeah, it was still Matt Smith and Amy Pond. And yes, and I’ve just sat on it since.

Could it be resubmitted now, do we think? Well, Doctor Who has changed so much now that it’s it’s become a different show, really. It seems to be about something else. And nobody really knows where it will be next.

I mean, it was interesting because when Chris Chibnall took it on, I’d been working with him on I was in Broadchurch and he was talking about what he was going to do with it. He thought that the bar to entry was set too high and that a 10-year-old kid coming to this would be absolutely mystified. He said he was going to strip away all that, go back to basics.

I do like the reboot like they did with the Marvel comics and stuff. Year zero. And he sort of did that a little bit, but he did also at the same time change quite a lot of the for want of a better word, the DNA of the series.

It became a bit of a team and also much as I love Jodie Whittaker again, who I’d worked with on Broadchurch and she’s and she’s a brilliant actress and she was great as Doctor Who. I felt it was a shame because it was the only show on TV in which a male hero wasn’t an action man. And I thought that was such a good role model for boys and was giving them something they weren’t getting elsewhere.

It was really interesting to see what happens when you make it a girl, a woman. But for me, that changed what I thought was a real strength of the show. Now, another huge TV franchise you got involved in, as you mentioned, is the Randall and Hopkirk deceased relaunch, which I loved as a child.

The original. I also loved yours as well, but I had a bit of a crush on Hopkirk when I was very young. But you wrote and produced the whole series and it starred your mate, Jim, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer.

That sounds like a huge endeavour from being a writer or a performer dabbling in the two. I also played a different character in every episode, rather foolishly. Oh, did you? Very Alfred Hitchcockian.

I didn’t. Yes, it was. I didn’t write all of it.

I was the lead writer. I was the showrunner, although we don’t really have that role in this country. But I did manage to get in a lot of really good writers to work on it with me, like the League of Gentlemen guys and people like that.

It did look like a lot of fun. It was. It was huge fun.

And it came about because Working Title TV was set up. And at the time, they were sort of under the umbrella of Universal, who had bought up the whole of the loo grade, the ATV catalogue, all those great shows from the 60s. They were looking through it to see which ones would stand up to remake.

And they went for Adderall and Hopkirk to see because it was a really good idea. It had been a popular show. Two detectives.

One of them’s a ghost. But it had never quite gained the respect of, say, the Avengers or the Prisoner. So whilst people sort of remembered it, they didn’t remember it in that great detail.

And, you know, it was proficiently made, but it wasn’t like a sacred classic that you couldn’t touch. So they felt, you know, well, we could update it and just keep the idea. But Vic and Bob, though, Vic and Bob, an interesting choice.

Well, Vic and Bob got in touch with them and they said, here you’re talking about making Randall Hopkirk deceased. Vic’s white suit was obviously inspired by the original Hopkirk deceased. I did not know that.

Yeah. And so they said, look, we’d love to have a go. We want to get away from doing shooting stars.

We want to do something different. Have a go at doing something with a story. And suddenly it became a package.

You think, yeah, Randall Hopkirk with Vic and Bob. That’s a thing. And they said, would I? Because they liked me as a writer and someone they like working with.

They said they didn’t want to write it themselves. They didn’t feel that that was their forte. But would I like to write at least the pilot? So we did and we developed it and people liked it.

And then we came up, you know, to run the series. And I said, well, you know, why don’t I show run this thing? Because I know how it works. And this is something I wanted, you know, I always wanted to do that kind of thing.

And also direct some of it. But it nearly killed me. It was so much work.

And yes, it was huge fun, but incredibly stressful. Filming is, you know, it’s a grind. You’re constantly fighting time, money, the weather, actors getting it right.

And to be stuck with no escape, you know, from right from the day run, writing it to filming it, to editing it to all of that is a huge amount of work. And it was very, it was very stressful. But you went back for the second series, did you? Yes.

Yeah. But also, I think by the end, that was when it was more stressful, because by the time we’d finished filming the second series, we kind of knew that the show hadn’t taken off the way the BBC wanted and they weren’t going to do another series. So once you’ve got that drive and energy taken out of it, it becomes even more hard work.

But it did mean that the last couple of episodes we shot, we just said, look, let’s stop trying to keep everyone happy and let’s just go bonkers. OK, let’s move on now with your next Offcut, please. This is a children’s story called Far Away Forest Friends that I wrote in 2004 and never published.

I am the happiest and the prettiest fairy in the forest. And with one tap of her magic wand, they would forget all about being cross and start dancing and singing and clapping their hands with joy. If anyone was ever bored, then Dingle would sit down on a spotted toadstool, wave her wand and fill the forest with sweet music.

In a flash, they would be bored no longer and they would spring to their feet and dance and sing and clap their hands all day long. And sometimes well into the night. It didn’t matter that their feet might start to bleed and that they couldn’t stop dancing to eat or drink, for their smile would be wider than the river bright that winds through the forest.

In fact, the smiles that Dingle put on their faces were so wide that it sometimes hurt quite badly. The river bright is as much as 45 feet wide in some places. Can you imagine a smile 45 feet wide? That’s going to hurt, isn’t it? But Dingle didn’t care, because it is quite the most awful thing to be bored, isn’t it? Yes, little Dingle brought happiness and joy with her wherever she went.

If anyone was tired and just wanted to sleep in their beds all day long like a silly lazybones, then Dingle would fly in through their bedroom window, sprinkle fairy dust on them with her silver wand and they would jump out of bed with a cry of joy and begin to sing and dance and tidy their room and do the washing up and maybe fix the roof and oh, how merry they would be. And when it came to bedtime, they would see their soft cosy bed with its goose down pillows and its coverlet all covered with a pattern of pretty flowers. But would they lie down? No, they would not, because they would be dancing away and singing like mad and clapping their hands like a lunatic.

Dingle the magic fairy never rested. You should have seen her as she flitted through the forest, bringing happiness and laughter and dancing, lots and lots of dancing, into the lives of all the forest friends who didn’t know what on earth they would have done without her. Which is why it was such a shame when one day she was eaten by a giant toad called Roger.

Now, this is a children’s story that you never developed. How far did it get? I did show it to my people at Puffin, and we talked about it. The idea was that there was going to be a whole series of books about different characters in the faraway forest.

But partly I couldn’t think of another story. Right, so this was going to be a collection of stories. Well, it would be like a little collection of books, you know, like Mr Men.

A lot more text than Mr Men. Well, that’s the thing, but at the time there had been things like A Series of Unfortunate Events, which was a lovely set of little hardback books for slightly older readers, but, you know, sort of breaking down the barriers, I suppose, of what you expect for certain reader ages. But yes, as I say, but partly I didn’t press on, because again, probably something else came up and I wrote another book instead.

But also, and you could see there’s a couple of moments in there that even as far back in 2004, that people were starting to think, and certainly publishers, they have to be very, very careful, you know, about what you can and can’t put in a kid’s book. And there had been a rise in more irreverent books, but… There was a backlash, wasn’t there? Yeah, to a certain extent, you know. What could you not say? What were you not allowed to imply? Well, you know, bleeding feet, someone being described as a lunatic.

The story ends with her, there’s this sort of big fairy tale book that she produces, and she ends up, they free her from Roger the Toad, but then she flies off and gets snapped shut inside a big fairy tale book, and everyone cheers, because they don’t want her back. But it’s, you know, you can’t do that, have that sort of violence and trauma. So, you know, you can have fun.

You can’t have violence in a children’s book. It’s a tricky one, it’s a tricky one. Children are very violent.

I know, but publishers sort of worry about encouraging that. It goes in waves. You know, it’s like what happened, they did a version where they toned down the Roald Dahl books, because, you know, you can’t call people fat.

You can’t call people ugly. You can’t say a woman is a witch. If they’re evil, they start to look ugly.

And things like that, which is all the fun of the books and why kids love them. And you can see why you don’t necessarily want to be saying those things, you know, equating ugliness with evil and old women are evil, whatever. But without that, books can be boring, a little boring and bland.

So, you know, I think there was a certain sensitivity about that when I went, even back in 2004, when I wrote that story. OK, fair enough. I think if I had come up with loads of other stories and ideas, I would have pushed it.

But alternatively, I might go back to it one day and say, well, let’s just try and make this work as a fun little one off. And let’s see what we can get away with. So obviously, if anybody doesn’t know, apart from your fame from The Fast Show and also being a prolific novelist, you’ve written a lot of stuff for younger readers that has been published, but you’re probably most well known in the younger reader space for your novels featuring the young James Bond.

Now, how did that come about? Was that your idea or was it suggested to you? Well, no, it wasn’t my idea at all. It was generated by the Ian Fleming Estate, Ian Fleming Publications, IFP. They were looking ahead to the release of Casino Royale and the whole of the James Bond film franchise being rebooted and refreshed.

And so they knew there was going to be a lot of stuff about Bond. It was also coming up to the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth in the early noughties. And there had been many continuation Bond novels after Fleming, more than he wrote.

There’d been more continuation novels. That had been permitted by the estate? Yes, they’re all commissioned by IFP. They were wanting to remind people where Bond started as a literary creation.

So they were looking at finding, you know, serious, inverted commas, adult authors to write continuation novels, which ended up being the likes of, the first one was Sebastian Foulkes. Then they had William Boyd and eventually Antony Horowitz. But Antony Horowitz had had huge success at the time with his Alex Rider books, which were very much a contemporary teenage James Bond.

Yes, my sons read the whole lot of those. Yes. And so they thought, well, we’ve got the actual James Bond.

We should do our own books about the early life of young James Bond. And really on the back of Harry Potter, kids’ books had become a viable thing. There was money to be made.

Writers were being taken seriously. There was a big resurgence in kids’ reading. And there were various other authors who were doing things.

There was Robert Muchmore who wrote a series, a sort of young secret agents called the Cherub series. Oh yes, we read those as well. Yep.

And so they were thinking, well, we should do our own young James Bond books. And I wrote these four crime books in the early 90s. And I had a fantastic editor working on them called Kate Jones, who ended up working for IFP.

And she was in charge of these new projects. And she suggested that I might be a good possibility to write the young James Bond books. She knew I had boys.

She knew I was a big James Bond fan. And she felt that my writing style, the sort of very stripped back, hard-boiled American style, would work very well with kids because it’s very unfussy and unflowery and it’s sort of straight to the point. And so she approached me and said, was I interested? And I said, God, yes, I’m interested.

I’d love to do that. It’d be the perfect thing to write for my own boys. So I got the gig.

And I had a huge fun writing them. I wrote five of them. But then I thought, if I don’t move on and do something else, that’s all anyone will want for me.

Because they sold really, really well. And I thought, I don’t want to be stuck for the rest of my life working on somebody else’s creation, essentially. Sure.

Time for another Offcut now. Tell us about this one, please. This is another unmade film script I wrote in 2013, based on Beauty and the Beast, called Beast.

She goes up the wide staircase. She sees an open door and walks along the landing towards it. Interior, madame’s room, night.

Bella’s bags are in the old lady’s bedroom, which has been tidied up a little. It is dimly lit by an old lamp. Bella opens the wardrobe and finds that her clothes have been hung up neatly.

She looks around. There is an old-fashioned dressing table with combs and brushes, makeup and perfume, etc. The room is more grown up than her own room at home.

And there is something of a fairytale feel about it. She sits on the bed, takes out her cell phone, starts to dial. You’re as beautiful as your picture.

Bella looks up, startled. The Beast is in the doorway, backlit so that she cannot see his face. He is nevertheless a huge, menacing presence in the cramped space.

I wish I could say the same for you, but I can’t hardly see you. That’s for the best. So, what do I call you? As far as you’re concerned, I don’t have a name.

You will need to give me your telephone. Do you want to come and get it? First, turn off the lamp. Don’t you think you’re taking this anonymity thing a little too far? Turn it off! Bella cringes back, then turns the lamp off.

The Beast steps towards her, a vast, lumbering shape in the near darkness. Your phone is no use to you here. Oh right, I get it.

Spooky old house in the woods, young girl all alone, no signal on her cell phone. The Beast suddenly takes the phone and smashes it to pieces on the bedside table. He puts what’s left of it into his pocket.

Bella stands. Okay, do you want to get this over with then? What? Oh, come on. We both know what this is all about, why I’m here.

What do you want? She starts to unbutton her top. She is shaking with fear, but trying not to show just how scared she is. What are you doing? How do you want me then? In tears? A little girl on her knees with an upturned face? Oh please, don’t hurt me! Or maybe you want me frozen like a baby deer in the headlights? Or do you like defiant? Maybe you’d like me to fight back a little, huh? Maybe make you feel big and strong? Or do you want me to fake it? Oh yes, yes big man, oh my god, do it to me! How do you want me? She can’t keep it up.

She starts to cry. By now, her top is completely undone and hanging open, half covering her naked breasts. You are braver than your father.

Slowly, the Beast reaches out for her. Holds her arms with his ruined hands. She glances down and winces.

You haven’t answered my question. How do I want you? Yes. You would do this for your father? Bella nods, too scared to speak.

Breathing heavily, the Beast leans in toward her. A sliver of moonlight falls across his face. Bella’s eyes widen in horror, then she screws them shut and twists away from him.

With a roar, the Beast flings her onto the bed. She breaks down completely into a mess of tears. When she at last looks up, the Beast is gone.

What a scene. Yes, it’s not quite Disney. No, no, it’s not.

No. And actually, there was another scene that I really wanted to do because it was very funny, but then it became so shocking. And I just thought, no, it’s too shocking.

I think the audience might get quite upset by it because there’s a lot of comedy in this, but there is some really nasty stuff as well. Tell us about it. Yeah, well, my first novel was published in 1991.

It was called King of the Ants. And George Wendt from… Norm in Cheers. Norm in Cheers was over in London working on something.

A friend of mine was working on it. And for some reason, he gave him a copy of this book, King of the Ants, and said, here, George, my friend’s written this. I think it’s really good.

You might like it. And George Wendt did. And he became obsessed by it.

And he got in touch with me and said, Charlie, I really want to make a movie of this book and play the main villain. And I was a bit nonplussed. I said, well, great, let’s try it.

And we tried it. But I mean, that book is, yes, it’s quite nasty. I think many people are surprised, certainly in my earlier books, just they are quite dark.

And there’s a lot of black humour in them. I can’t write things without humour. But, you know, there are elements of, you know, there’s a lot of psychopaths and horror in them.

And as a result, we found it hard to get made. But George Wendt was a very good friend of the American film director Stuart Gordon, who probably is most famous for Re-Animator. And he then went on and did a lot of sort of kind of horror, fantasy, sci-fi stuff.

And his career was going great. And he developed and was about to direct Honey, I Shrunk the Kids when he had a heart attack. Oh.

And as a result, they couldn’t get insurance to make that. And he couldn’t make films over a certain budget. So George Wendt said, well, maybe we could do it with Stuart.

And so we did a film of King of the Ants, which I kind of Americanised. It was all filmed in L.A. and George was in it. And was it called King of the Ants? Can we look it up and see it? It was called King of the Ants.

And it’s just been re-released in a very posh DVD. So it is available to watch. It’s quite full on and it’s quite nasty.

And then later on, he said, oh, I’ve been approached by this movie company to try and develop a horror version of Beauty and the Beast. Oh. So that is how I ended up working with Beast.

And we worked for some time on the script. So it’s a sort of cross between a horror movie and a gangster movie. This big guy has been incredibly badly beaten up and disfigured by these gangsters.

But he’s immensely strong. And he’s a good guy like Beast is in Beauty and the Beast. He’s a good guy, but he’s quite violent.

And I had a lot of fun developing it with Stuart and trying to make it horrific, scary, but also with a lot of black humour. There’s a lot of things in these, particularly in these kind of cheap exploitation movies where someone says, I’m going to stick my hand so far up your ass. I’m going to work you like a puppet.

But then he does. You see, normally in these films, they never follow through on it. But the Beast does.

And so I had a lot of fun with things like that. So it’s kind of its body horror rather than supernatural. And we were developing it.

But I don’t know how much I can say. But I think the company that Stuart was working with, I’m not sure how bona fide they were in the end, because it suddenly all went quiet and I didn’t really hear any more about it. And I don’t know if he went off and made a version of Beauty and the Beast with a different script, but it just stopped and didn’t happen.

Right. Are you ever tempted to be a director at all, considering you write so much stuff? Well, I’d love to. As I said, when I was a kid, that’s what I really wanted to do, was be a film director.

And I’ve directed TV. I directed some of Randall and Hotkirt Deceased. I directed, we did some online fast show stuff, which I’ve directed.

A series called Bellamy’s People, which I directed. So I love directing. And that always was my passion.

But you haven’t done a film. I haven’t done a film. Maybe I should, because, you know, maybe do a cheap horror film.

Because I do love horror. You’ve got enough scripts for it. Short of material, must be said.

Right. Well, we have come to your final offcut. Tell us about this one, please.

This is another pilot for a TV series that was never made. This was from 2020. And it’s a TV series named after the diamond, and it’s called Koh-i-Noor.

Exterior, main road, day. Vikram is walking along, the sounds of the demonstration in the background. He glances back to see Danny Boy, Colin and the thug following him.

He looks up, checking where he is. Makes a decision. Exterior, dead end street, London, day.

Vikram enters a nondescript side street, loading bays on either side. The sounds of the demonstration diminishing. Danny Boy, Colin and the thug come in after him.

Vikram stops, looks around. He can go no further. It’s a dead end.

You’re right. It’s dead. Nothing ever happens here.

Which is why there are no surveillance cameras. Result. Exactly.

Vikram squares up to the three men, still clutching his vulnerable sandwich bag. They can see now that he is tougher and more self-assured than they first assumed. There’s a hard glint of anger in his eyes.

You need to learn some respect. Your country’s only what it is because of what the British Empire give you. I think you’ll find you took away a lot more than you ever gave us.

No. You have a go at our country, but you’re happy to come over here and take our hand out. Most of the things you worship in this country, you’ve taken from somewhere else.

Your language, your monarchy, your music, your cooking. But the way you fight, that is all your own. You what? I’ve seen how you like to fight.

The English way. At a million football matches. He goes into a sarcastic impression of a football hooligan having a go.

That weird, slightly silly way they prance about. Chest out, arms swinging, elbows out. Little ineffective kicks darting in and out, not really wanting to get stuck in.

There’s something of the Monty Python fish-slapping dance about it. If you want to fight properly, you need to learn from filthy foreigners. Well, maybe we’ll learn you how to fight.

Colin shoves Vikram backwards, then advances. And as he goes to shove him again, Vikram neatly sidesteps and performs a quick, intimate yet devastating self-defence move that ends with Colin flat on his back. Now Vikram executes a perfect standing roundhouse kick to the head and the thug goes down.

Finally, as Danny Boy goes for him, Vikram does a balletic double kick to the chin and Danny Boy goes down. Huh, well, same difference. He walks off, his sandwich bag still intact and untouched.

His three assailants lie groaning. Titles. The Diamond.

That’s the cold open, then, of the pilot script. Yes. So Vikram is going to be like an Indian James Bond, is that right? Well, to a certain extent.

I mean, he’s a Secret Service agent and the plot of it is that the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the famous and controversial diamond, is stolen and he is tasked with trying to get it back. And the series sort of follows the diamond as it gets stolen and re-stolen by all the various different representatives of all the various different countries and cultures that claim that the Koh-i-Noor is theirs. So it is initially stolen by a bunch of white van men who are enraged that the British government is talking about giving it back.

But the history of the Koh-i-Noor diamond is fascinating in that it passed through so many different hands that it is actually sort of impossible to say who it rightfully belongs to. And the story involves the Taliban, it involves Indians, Iranians. I was trying to have fun with it.

If it had progressed to a series, I would have had to get in some Indian, at least one Indian writer to work on it with me because it is a multicultural series. And, you know, as with everything I write, there’s quite a lot of humour in it, but it’s a way of partly looking at history and, yeah, and modern politics and geopolitics. It’s the most recent of the offcuts that you sent us.

So that was a long ago, 2020. Is there any chance it might be resurrected, do you think? It’s a tricky one because, again, as I developed it, a bit like the Winston Churchill one, it is a huge, you know, spanning continents story. Budget are we talking about as a problem? Yeah, budget, but yeah, the scope of it is big, you know, because it follows a lot of Indian history and the Middle East and, you know, there is action and adventure through it and kind of reconstructions of the past.

Oh, right. So it’s a big deal. But, you know, it was developed at a time when the likes of Netflix were saying they wanted stuff, you know, they didn’t want everything to be American and about America.

And they were looking at, you know, they are now set up in somewhere like India. They make a lot of Indian content. And so there was a lot of talk of wanting to do series like that.

And this was commissioned actually by an Indian team. And I thought the only way to really tell this story to get away from some of the controversy was to was to put in quite a lot of humour. So it’s a sort of light hearted, a heist movie type of feel to it.

But my problem is I keep developing things which are big and expensive and extravagant because that’s what I would like to watch. But I have to write to my strengths of what I think I’m good at. I can’t write a sort of Sally Wainwright domestic drama, which, you know, she’s brilliant.

And there are many other rights like that. I can’t write that. I try and write something like that.

And, you know, before I know it, you know, an alien’s arrived. They’ve gone back in time. Half the cast have been shot in a gruesome manner.

I like genre stuff. So I leave the other stuff to those who do it much better than me. And, you know, we hit the same problems that you get on a lot of things where the Indian side of it tried to raise more money for them.

They said, oh, it’s too English. And the English side said, oh, it’s too Indian. And as I say, well, it’s kind of both.

It’s half and half. It’s telling the story of the story of India and it’s telling the story of the British Raj and it’s telling the story of contemporary nationalistic politics. Well, you’ve worked on so many projects, you know, high profile, big budget.

Some of them. Is it any easier pitching projects now or do you still get a similar kind of rate of rejection for TV anyway? It’s not easier at all. And I’m not the demographic that TV companies and streamers are looking for.

They want the new young thing. Often the new young things find they can’t deliver and they have to hire a lot of old crocs like me to help them out. But coming in as the face of things, you know, it’s hard.

It’s just it. Same here. Same in the States.

You know, showrunners in the States who massively more successful than me have made huge shows. You know, you read interviews with them. They say, I can’t get anything off the ground anymore.

I don’t know what’s happening. And when the streamers sort of burst onto the scene, it felt like there was a sort of golden age. It was a gold rush.

It’s like suddenly there’s all this money washing around. They’re making all this stuff so much more content and everybody was jumping on it. But they came in and they had a different approach and traditionally what you would do to pitch something, you would make a pitch document which outlines over a few pages what the thing is.

And then you would if they were interested in that, you would then knock up a sort of series breakdown and they would commission things based on that in the UK. In America, they had that hugely ruinous pilot season thing where you would have to make the whole thing fully budgeted and then they would make a decision. So the Americans have moved away from that.

They’ve got more sensible. But in the UK now, because the streamers say we will only look at a script, we won’t look at a pitch document. We need a script and a full Bible for the series, which you will then have to go in and pitch to them.

It means that all these production companies have taken on the burden and the cost of commissioning full length scripts, which inevitably you get knocked down because they start saying, well, we can’t really afford to pay you your full work. We’ll pay you this. And if it gets made, we’ll work it into the contract that you get the full thing.

So it’s kind of knocking everyone’s prices down. And there’s a massive over commissioning of stuff by the production companies. Yes.

And they’re having to pay for the burden of that. So a lot of them now are under the umbrella of larger media companies who’ve got more money, but it’s wasteful and it’s wasteful of people’s time and talent. So it’s better for the Americans because they are now making decisions based on scripts.

But it’s worse for the British because you’re having to write scripts. So that’s why I’ve got so many of these things is because I get paid. OK, to develop them.

But, you know, having to come up with ideas and characters and whole series, and that can be quite draining. And you go and pitch it and then you see what they’ve actually made and how different it is from what you were pitching. You think, OK, I can see why they made that and I can see why they didn’t want what I went in and pitched.

And you can tell within the first minute or two, really, whether they are actually interested. So, no, nothing is easier. And you talk to anyone on TV, they’ll say it’s a real struggle.

Production companies are really struggling. And yeah, you know, who knows what happens? But, you know, when things don’t move, I just go back and write another book. Well, we have come to the end of the show.

How was it for you? It was marvellous and it was great to be reminded of some of these old projects. Yes, you have certainly sent me a lot of stuff, more than I usually receive and of very good quality as well. Well, I thought you might whittle it down and say, oh, I want to do these five or whatever.

But yeah, but then there was, oh no, but if I do this and talk about that, it’s a total headache. Thank you, Charlie. Well, it’s lucky I didn’t send you everything.

I was very surprised that of all the offcuts you sent me, such a small percentage was actually comedy, comedy sketches. Considering how much comedy you have worked on in your career, there were no rejected fast show sketches. Why was that? Well, there probably were fast show sketches that we wrote and never used, but I don’t have any of that stuff on my computer because when I started writing a fast show, I had an Amstrad and it was all on floppy discs.

I don’t know where they are and whether you can still read the things. So yeah, some of that stuff was printed off. But I mean, in the end, most, you know, it would be like the odd sketch of a character where we wrote 10 sketches and only wrote eight.

And there would be a reason why we didn’t do the other sketches. And they would probably only be one line or two lines long. So it’d be quite short to actually demonstrate, I suppose.

Yes. So really, yeah, the stuff I wrote for Harry’s show, there were a couple of other bits I wrote for that. But that seemed to be the one that kind of explained itself best.

Also, I would have loved to read the pitch document for the fast show, how you actually described it written down in words. I don’t suppose you still got that. That does still exist.

That is… Oh, does it? Yeah, that’s in the archive. And also the actual, you know, the initial pitch document scripts. Oh, right.

Which, again, was hard to do because obviously they’re short sketches and you need to read three or four of them before you get it. So it didn’t fully reflect how the finished series was, but it was an idea. So if anybody wants to see it, they have to go to the University of East Anglia.

Yes. And knock on their door and say, could I look at Charlie Higson’s archive, please? I mean, one day might do some kind of a script book. But it’s interesting, you know, on paper, there’s not much to them.

It’s like one page. But if that’s the page that made everything happen, then it’s of historical significance. Well, yeah, as I say, my archive is there.

So if anyone wants to go and look at it, I think you just arrange in advance what you want to look at. You can go and have a look. Well, we are now at the actual end.

And all that’s left for me to say is Charlie Higson, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your offcuts drawer with us. Well, thank you for having me on.

It’s been a marvellous trip down memory lane. The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Charlie Higson. The offcuts were performed by Beth Chalmers, Shash Hira, Kenny Blyth, Chris Kent, Keith Wickham, Noni Lewis and Nigel Pilkington.

And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interior. Cheese Shop. Day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, no. It’s not off. It’s ripe.

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

No, no, no. It’s perfectly ripe. Mmm.

Smell the aroma. Beautiful aroma. Very pungent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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