Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer. Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is the multi-award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster Jay Rayner. Although he’s written columns and features on subjects across all aspects of modern life, he is probably best known for his pieces about food and drink, having been The Observer’s restaurant critic for the past 20 years. On the airwaves, he’s been the host of Radio 4’s Kitchen Cabinet since 2012, and on television, his numerous appearances include being a judge in multiple series of Masterchef, being the resident food expert on BBC’s The One Show, and in the US, he was a part of the expert panel on Top Chef Masters for Bravo. As a writer of books, he’s published four novels and seven works of non-fiction, and his latest work, My Last Supper, has just come out in paperback. His book, A Greedy Man in a Hungry World About the Challenges of Food Security in the 21st Century, became a one-man show which toured Britain for 18 months and resulted in him giving evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Food, the Environment and Rural Affairs. Add to that his many live shows playing jazz piano with the Jay Rayner Quartet. And you have a man who may possibly have been subject to puns on the phrase, if music be the food of love, one too many times. Jay Rayner, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

Lovely to be here. I’m slightly exhausted by listening to that account of me.

Well, you shouldn’t be so damn productive. That’s your own fault. Has anybody actually used that phrase, if music be the food of love?

I suspect they have. I mean, it’s my own fault because when we started gigging as the Jay Rayner quartet, one of the selling points was that, you know, people know me through food. So we’d do a whole bunch of songs that are food related. So the original show was called A Night Of Food And Agony. It might still be called that actually. And so if there are any puns like that to be made, you know, I’m entirely responsible for them.

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

Well, the bluntest answer to that is is because I have been a print journalist, you’ve allude to the fact that I’ve written on almost everything. People know me as a writer who writes restaurant reviews and writes about food, but I have covered literally everything apart from sport. And even then I once wrote about the All-Amateur Natural Bodybuilding Championships. And one of the, I’m gonna say it’s a skill, one of the skills of the inveterate print journalist is I can write anywhere. And I have done. If you give me a device, I can sit there and write. And in fact, on occasion back in the old days when I was a hardcore news journalist, I could actually dictate it off the top of my head. I didn’t do that very often. It wasn’t great. So in reality, I can write anywhere, but I’m talking to you today from my desk, which is the front upstairs room of the house in Brixton that I’ve lived in for over 20 years. It has a large desk. It has all the stuff. I mean, it’s just, you know, it’s just a bleeding office. What can I tell you?

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

This is an outtake from my latest book, My Last Supper, which is a piece of nonfiction about my pursuit of my last meal on earth. And it was first published last year in 2019.

I have seen only three dead bodies in my life, which strikes me as remarkable for a 50 something man. Everybody who has ever lived has also died or will do so. It is to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, the only certainty in life along with taxes. And you can dodge the latter with the help of a devious accountant. Nobody can help you dodge death, not even a devious doctor. And yet just three, two of whom belong to my parents. Death is the part of life we hide from. The other body belonged to a middle-aged man with a luxurious mustache. He was staying at the same hotel as my family in Southern Portugal in the late seventies. He was a weak swimmer. After a good lunch, he went in the water, got out of his depth, panicked and had a heart attack. By the time I saw him, his body was out of the pool and was being worked on by two men pumping his chest. I would have been 11 or 12, old enough to recognise the futility of what was going on down there. I remember looking down from one of the balconies that ringed the pool as a hot afternoon gave way to the long shadows of early evening and being struck by how different he didn’t look. Take away the men trying to restart his heart and he was just a chap, asleep poolside. The fact that this was the body of a dead man was more a concept than anything tangible. With my mother, it was obvious. Claire had taken her time about dying. It was an emergency operation on her bowel that had put her in hospital and from which she never recovered, slipping between intensive care, isolation rooms and for a short period, her bedroom at home. One day to cheer her up, I called up Scots in Mayfair, one of London’s great seafood restaurants and a place she loved. Scots did not do takeaways, but I asked if they might make an exception, both for me and, more importantly, my old mum. The life of a restaurant critic is, of course, one long line of perks. There surely had to be another. So it proved. They put freshly cooked blinis, a tiny glass bowl of chopped shallots and another of crumbled egg yolk onto a Scots branded plate and then added to the side a small tin of caviar. The whole plate was wrapped up in cling film to keep everything in place for the journey to North London.

Well, this book’s already published. So what happened to this section? Why didn’t it make the final cut?

I don’t think it made the final cut because it was just a bit gloomy, actually. I think I felt it was performative in me going on about death. No, obviously both my parents have died. And at times I have written pieces for The Observer, the newspaper for which I write, on both of them. A long piece for my mother because Claire Rayner was well known and a prominent figure. And they got me to write sort of 3,000 words when she died. And I wrote a smaller piece on my father around food. And people always congratulate you when you write movingly about the death of a parent. And my view is that if you cannot write well about that subject, you have no business being a writer because the material is so strong, frankly. That sounds kind of cynical and all of that. And I think after writing this passage, I looked at and felt I’d done it to death, literally, figuratively enough already with the dead parents. The death of my mother appeared in a previous book. It was just too much. I mean, listening to it, I have to say, nice piece of writing. The prose is all there. It’s almost, dare I say, it’s involving. But just because something sounds nice doesn’t mean it has a place in the narrative. And so it needed to be cut.

But the book itself is called My Last Supper. The implication of the title is it’s about death. So if it doesn’t involve the death of your parents, Keith, tell us what it does involve.

Yeah, well, it doesn’t involve the death of me either. So the opening, it makes the point, you’ve mentioned that I do live shows and the first one, A Greedy Man In A Hungry World, led to others, one around terrible restaurant experiences called My Dining Hell, and another one called The Ten Food Commandments, which I play a kind of culinary Moses. And I’d always have a question and answer session. And so, always, literally, I mean, well, I’d go 95% of the time. When we get to the question and answer, someone put their hand up and say, imagine you’re on death row, what would your last meal be? And I became intrigued by the question because I thought I’d always say, if I was on death row, I’d have lost my appetite. And that actually, that’s not what you’re being asked. What you’re being asked is if you were to prepare a meal that was the sum of all your parts, that represented you and all your appetites and your urges and your passions, what would you have? And that I thought was very interesting. So it is memoir. It’s about looking at those foods that talk to me through memoir. And obviously at the end of it, I’m still alive. Death is around it slightly, particularly in the intro, when I talk about all those various proper candidates for one who are the people least suited to eating it. But actually, I have to say, I was doing this show, the show that’s around this one, My Last Supper, right up to the point of lockdown. And the idea of doing a show about last meals on earth in the teeth of a murderous pandemic, it’s not really a brilliant sales job, is it? I’ve already done it at a drive-in. So yeah, it’s actually, I hope, an uplifting journey through life and food and memory and emotion and family and all of that stuff. Which again, is probably another reason why I decided to cut this, just didn’t think it needed to be there.

Now you’ve covered all sorts of different subjects in your journalistic career. Why or how did you end up specializing in food and drink?

Why did I accept the job of going out to restaurants on somebody else’s expenses and…

Oh, it was offered to you. You didn’t…

I mean, that’s the honest answer. So I went out to lunch with the editor of The Observer Magazine in 1999. And she said that the then restaurant critic, Kate Flett, was moving on to be the TV critic, which meant they had a vacancy. And literally in that instance, say, well, that’s a job you can’t apply for, but I’d like to do it. I had this vision. Could you imagine one of those in the old days media ads would turn up in The Guardian on Mondays and wanted restaurant critic? Could you imagine the pile of applications? You wouldn’t actually, you know, you wouldn’t ask for applications. I just put my hand up and said, I’d like to do it. You’ve known me a long time, Laura. I’ve always been a chunky chap. I like my lunch. I like my dinner. I’m part of a noisy Northwest London Jewish family communicated through food. I spent my own money in restaurants. And I thought, here’s something I could write about. I didn’t anticipate just what a good fit it would be or what a lucky time it would be to go into the job because it was the beginning of a major restaurant boom. But I also found in the subject so much more than just aesthetics. It’s not about how things taste. It’s about emotions and who we are. And the brilliant thing about a good restaurant is it stops the world and places you somewhere else. So yeah, and that was it. I didn’t intend to go on for 20 years. Various times I said, I should quit and get back to serious journalism, but well, that hasn’t happened.

It is serious journalism, isn’t it?

Well, actually, in my case, I shouldn’t be so disposed of myself because I still remain a reporter. And certainly through lockdown, I was doing an awful lot of proper old-fashioned reporting. I’ve been on that paper, The Observer, for 24 years, and they have long memories, and they know that they can send me out with a notebook and tell me to go and do some news stories. So I have been doing a lot of stuff around coronavirus and its impact on various elements of society. So yeah, you’re right. I’m still doing serious journalism, and then I’m writing restaurant reviews, which I hope are entertaining.

Well, the lack of mortgage, presumably, is a good indication that it is.

Oh no, my parents died, left me a legacy. Let’s not pretend.

You know that’s how it happens.

Check my privilege. I just have, I’ve got loads of it.

Okay, time for another offcut now. Tell us about this one.

This is a clip from Bluff, an unfinished novel I was working on around 1998.

Danny Sacks didn’t plan to be a hitman. As a child, before poker, long before handguns, he had imagined other lives. As the person on the television who told everybody the weather he’d chosen for the next day. Or the man outside their house with the broom and the trolley who kept the streets neat and tidy in autumn. He liked neat and tidy. None of his thoughts turned to killing. It was not what nice Jewish boys from the London suburbs did. It was not even what the nasty Jewish boys from the London suburbs did. They became accountants or quantity surveyors or if they had truly gone to the bad, Sheropodists, destined to measure out their lives in sliced verrucas and corns. Even they did not become murderers. When he was little, his mother also had dreams for her son. But they were fantasies based more on unrealized ambitions for herself than for him. She had wanted a life of Persian rugs, two inches thick, of wedgewood crockery and silver cutlery. Instead, she lived with carpet tiles and lino, willow pattern and stainless steel. She looked to her son to provide that which she had never obtained. Sylvia Sacks imagined newspaper announcements of her Daniel’s achievements, of his victories over death in the operating theatre. She imagined glowing descriptions of his supple cross-examinations in the High Court. Each would include the passing reference she craved. It was so vivid, she could even visualize the serif typography, the drop of the comma after her boy’s name and then her own immortalisation. Mr Daniel Sacks, son of Sylvia and Bernard Sacks of Kingsbury, triumphed yesterday. This was all she now wanted, to live her life as a subclause.

That’s a really lovely little piece that actually.

Isn’t it? So should we have a moment’s mourning while I explain what Bluff was?

I’m rather hoping there’s good news, but okay, tell us about the novel.

All right, so I need to go back here. I published my first novel, a novel called The Marble Kiss in 1994, when I was in my late 20s. And it was a somewhat complex art history romance thriller set in the present day in the 15th century, because that’s what you write when you’re 26. And it was nicely received, didn’t break any bestseller lists or anything. We’ve got shortlisted for a good award and all of that. I then had a problem with the second one, which we’ll come to. At which point an agent said to me, what do you really want to write about? And it was an interesting question, because I realized I’d written by that point, two novels that I’d never have gone into a shop and bought. And this dawning realization that I was writing stuff I myself wouldn’t buy was very, very important. And out of that came a novel called Day of Atonement, a big hulking lump of Judaica, which took my very secular family by surprise. It was the story of two chaps, Mal Jones and, oh, I forgot the name of my characters. Anyway, two chaps who meet down the side of what is quite clearly Stonegrove Synagogue in age where one, Rosh Hashanah, sneaked around the side for a fag. One has a machine for taking the fat off chicken soup. The other one has a business mind and they go into business. And it tells the story of their life from sort of the late 60s to the 90s. And it’s really, it’s the portrait of a friendship and it is really quite Jewish. And it worked very, very nicely. I’m very proud of that book because I wrote it when I was very young and it’s got a real emotional heart in it. And I needed to come up with a follow-up to that. And that follow-up was this book that we just heard a section from called Bluff. Now, Bluff was kind of a good idea and maybe a terrible one. I wrote 50,000 words of it and the truth is that no publisher wanted to publish it, which suggested it wasn’t necessarily as good an idea as I thought it was. But it was about a guy called Danny Sax who was terrible at poker, continued to play poker, but in another life was brilliant at bluffing because he was a hitman who never killed anyone. He managed to convince his victims to let him remove their identities from the world. It was a sort of caper really. And I liked the idea of a Jewish hitman with all his neuroses. I’d found that voice in Day of Atonement quite successfully and I liked it again for this. And at the heart of it was what happens to a fake hitman when someone is sent to kill him. It was kind of a romp. That was the idea. It was gonna be a romp. It was gonna be one eye on the gallery. It was a lot of comedy. And I think you can sense that in the passage you just heard. But as I say, no publisher wanted it. And this sort of gets to the meat of, I suppose what your podcast is, The Offcuts Drawer. How do we feel about that after the amount of work it takes? It takes a lot of work to write 50,000 words of a novel. And it was painful at the time. It is never anything but painful, but you kind of have to accept, I think, that if 15 publishers have passed, you’re not necessarily robbing the culture of something that needed to be there. And so, you know, it was hard, but I kind of accepted it. It’s certainly not one of those projects that I’ve gone back to over the years thinking, hmm, I really should revive that.

Well, very sanguine of you, I must admit.

Well, you know, I was thinking about this when you asked me if I’d do this. And the truth is, although I’m, you know, quite a neurotic in certain ways, I am quite sanguine about this stuff. You write and you write and you write, and writing doesn’t exist unless somebody’s read it. And you cannot protest that everybody’s missed the point if everybody’s saying no. And that’s not to say that maybe some people might have enjoyed bluff if it had ever been completed and read. But nobody has a right to be published. And I know this drives certain writers who are finding it tough to get published, absolutely not, but you don’t. You have to make an argument for yourself on the page, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. And if a lot of publishers look at it and go, no, I mean, obviously there are all the stories of books that were turned down time and time again and then went on to be great classics. But in the main, I think you have to take it on the chin.

Okay, time for your next offcut. Can you tell us what this is, please?

Right, well, this is actually from a piece of journalism written in 2003. It’s from a newspaper feature that never got published about a drag queen called Lady Ding.

Lady Ding couldn’t be at the Welsh Lesbian and Gay Mardi Gras in Cardiff this year, but she still managed to stop the show. For 10 minutes on that last Saturday in August, the screen at the side of the stage was filled with video footage of her act. All gold and lacquered hair and massive shoulder pads and crooked grin. There was no audio, but they smothered the silence with Nobody Does It Like Me, sung by Martine McCutcheon. Lady Ding would have liked that, her friend said. When it came to singing, she would always find the wrong way to do it. That was part of the act, the forgotten words and the lousy voice and the scowl at the indignity of it all. When the video had finished and the music had faded, the crowd of 35,000 cheered. Gold balloons held by Ding’s family and friends in the crowd were released to float away on the afternoon breeze and Cardiff’s gay community said a last goodbye to one of the greatest drag queens the city had ever seen. Three weeks earlier, the body of Jason Massier, the man who created and performed Lady Ding, had been found floating in reeds at the edge of Panavane pond near his home village of Markham, high up in the valleys. He was 32 years old. The death of someone so young is always a tragedy, but anyone talking to Lady Ding’s fans over the past few weeks would have understood something deeper too. A sense of an opportunity that had been stolen from them, of the chance that they had lost to enjoy the success which should have been hers. She was one of the most talented drag queens I’ve ever seen, said Chris Marshall, who’s managed gay bars all over Britain and now runs Cardiff’s King’s Cross pub where she performed so often. Not just one of the most talented in Cardiff, but anywhere. Kerry Dupree, the Welsh drag queen who has already made it onto the national stage and knows what it takes to get there, agrees. Jason had created a real character. He’d thought about it. He wasn’t just a puff in a frock. There’s too much of that in drag today. Jason had something.

So who was this written for?

So this was written for The Observer and was a classic example of, if I made my name anywhere in journalism before writing restaurant reviews, of the sort of work I did, which was the long form feature where you take a small news story that you’ve found in the in briefs, perhaps in the Western Mail or whatever, in this case, a Cardiff newspaper, and you say, well, there’s something bigger in this. There’s a bigger story. So I spent maybe, I think, three days in Cardiff, on the ground to research this. And as it says, it’s the story of this chap who performed as a drag queen called Lady Ding, suffered from depression and killed himself. And it was clear that he was much more than just another drag queen on the scene because the whole of the Cardiff Lesbian Gay Pride stopped that year to celebrate him. And I went to Cardiff and I spoke to his friends and I went to the bars that he’d performed at. And I even went high up into the valleys where he’d been born. I had these fascinating conversations because I don’t know about you, but I, at that point, this is 2003, so we’re going back nearly 20 years. I’d assumed the valleys to be very conservative places. And there was this intriguing line where it said, nobody cares up here whether you’re gay or you’re straight. Life is on a knife edge. It’s a struggle and, you know, who you’re having sex with is of no interest to anybody at all. I thought it was absolutely fascinating. So it was about taking a small story and turning it, giving it its due, giving it its space to breathe. And I did a lot of these three to 5,000 word features where you’re trying to breathe real life into a story. And the reality is I included this because I would say 98% of my journalism, possibly more, gets into print. Not always the way. Back in my freelance career, when I was right at the beginning, I’d lose a few pieces along the way. I wouldn’t make it, it would be spiked. But this is one of the very rare, big features, for whatever reason, never made it into the features well of The Observer Magazine.

Do you know why?

Well, it’s a funny old thing, the features well. The editors of magazines are trying to create a gallery. Even now in the age of online, they have to think in terms of the object, the printed object in their hands, then whatever else happens, it goes online. And it’s always about getting the mix right. And I think week by week, this story never found its place in the well. And until eventually, after about nine months, we all had to put our hands up and go, well, it’s dead, isn’t it? Because, you know, journalism ages. They were apologetic, but not vastly apologetic because that is newspapers. There are times when things don’t make it into print. You go off, you write, and you get paid for it. And it doesn’t happen. But I think, weirdly, this one has always stung slightly more than some of the bigger projects that we’re talking about today.

As that article shows, you do cover a lot of subjects, and you’re writing about mental health issues. You got your nomination for a mental health media award. Was this sort of part of it, because the suicide element?

So with those awards, sometimes you have to look at an accident of how many pieces you happen to have written in any one year. And this really was about a person’s story rather than the mental health issues, although obviously they played a part. But I think in one particular year, I’d written about mental health issues inside Holloway prison. I’d written another piece about a change in government policy on access to medication and permissions and so forth. And that’s the way of being a, you know, a jobbing journalist. You can end up with little specialisms. And then suddenly you seem to be the guy who’s, you know, heading off to Whitemore prison to interview someone. So just happenstance. But no, with this one, I think it really was about a personality, about an individual and about a milieu, drag, you know, we’re all across drag now. Thanks to RuPaul and so forth. We think we know what that is. But back in 2003, it would have been very much more niche.

Next offcut, please. What’s this one?

This is the opening to The Memory Man, a completely finished and unpublished novel written in around 1995.

Here is a lad sitting in the long grass, arse damp, knees muddy. He tries to hold his breath, one hand squeezing his tummy as though grabbing the air in the palm of his hand to keep it there. He doesn’t want to make a noise, doesn’t want to frighten the animal any more than necessary. When he does breathe, he can hear a growling inside his nostrils, the cavities wet and stuffed up from the sobs of a few minutes before. Here then am I, nine years old, bottom lip bitten between teeth, the only witness to the killing of a friend. In the field, twenty feet in front of me, the animal lies flat, a gulping, snorting carcass in waiting, neck tensed, its spindle-thin legs splayed hard before it, the broken one at the back turned away, useless. Papa has the gun, the rifle butt wedged into his armpit like a crutch. He tries to position the end of the barrel just behind the animal’s eye. That’s where it has to be, he says, to be quick. He wants to do it with one bullet. Why pay for two when you can do it with one? Bullets cost money, he says. So do goats, I think, but I don’t say it out loud. He doesn’t want to know how much goats cost. A pistol would be better, something small and hand-sized instead of this tree-trunk lump of wood and metal which keeps slipping off her fur and bearing its steel snout in the earth. Each time he has to lift the barrel up and clean the mud out of the hole, sticking his little finger up there in the way he does when he’s digging around in his ears for wax. And when he does it, taking his hand off her shoulder to turn the weapon around in his hands, she flaps and twitches in the grass, like some big fat cod dumped on a quayside. I wanted to help hold her, just so she knew I was there, one hand on her side where you can feel the ribs and the deep thump of her heart. But Papa wouldn’t have it. I had to be back here, watching. Now the gun is clean again. He gets down on one knee, uses the other to guide the barrel into place, closes an eye as though taking aim, even though he can’t miss. I want to tell him that he’s hurting her by pushing the gun down so hard, but I know it’s just because he doesn’t want it to slip off again. And anyway, I don’t want to stop him. I just want him to do it now. And then there’s a bang, and some smoke, and Papa shouts shit and falls backwards and she twitches one last time, a puddle of thick black goo dribbles out of her head onto the grass. Beatrice is dead. I think about crying, but I don’t feel like it anymore.

Was this written before your first published novel?

No, that’s the hilarious thing. Most people’s unpublished novel is the first one they write. This is my second, which is quite funny. Well, at the time, I thought I had struck lucky in 92. 92 was a big year for me. I won Young Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards, and publishers started showing interest in me. They said, do you want to write a novel? Because anybody who had a byline in a newspaper, they immediately thought you wanted to write a novel. At first, I’d said no. And then I came up with a couple of chapters, which became my first novel, The Marble Kiss, that art history romance thriller, and it was bought by Pam McMillan in a two book deal, get me, for a modest two book deal. And The Marble Kiss did, as I say, all right. It got some nice, appreciative reviews, it got shortlisted for an award, but it didn’t sell very many. But then I had to write the next one under the two book deal. And one summer, my wife and I, Pat and I had gone off, still without kids, we’d gone off to the south of France one summer and there was a traveling circus and it was clearly a family circus and, you know, the circus, it was tiny and the circus animals were goats. And they were much loved goats because clearly they were source of milk as well as performers. And the clown was the 10 year old kid who frankly looked a bit miserable to be doing this again. And I sat there watching this thinking, oh, there must be a novel in telling this story, you’re meant to be in the circus, you’re meant to be exciting, but actually you’re bored and you’re miserable and you don’t want to be here from the point of view of a 10 year old. Now, at that point, I then in, I don’t want to be down on myself as a young man, but it all got a bit baroque. So the story and actually, I have to say, I do think there is quality to this book, The Memory Man. It’s about a kid who is part of a circus traveling through Vichy, France during the Second World War, and something happens. He gets drawn in to resistance work and stuff to do with French Jews being rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Cut to the present day, it was a time slip, and there’s a very, very old man who’s being brought to trial as a Nazi war criminal in France, and he has gone and acquired for himself a lawyer, and the lawyer is actually the kid who was in the circus.

Is that the big reveal?

It’s sort of the big reveal, and he’s the child who ran away from the circus to be boring. He wanted to be a lawyer. He wanted to be dull, and he gets drawn back into the history of his childhood and the Holocaust in France. It’s not unambitious, and it’s about memory and memory acts and all of that. And what happened, I completed this book, and I’d been through many editors at Pan Macmillan. Eventually, the boss of Pan Macmillan would apologize to me for this. I went through five editors between signing that two book deal and then finally parting company with them. They said that they had decided to cancel something like 20 book contracts where the advances were 10 grand or less, which included mine. And so they canceled the contract. And I got paid my whacking four-figure sum. And then it went out. My then agent sent it around and nobody wanted to publish it. What can I tell you, Laura? Nobody wanted it. That was hard. That was very, very hard. But it was also the beginning of an understanding, as I say, it’s an interesting book. And every now and then I look at it and think maybe there’s a way to get this published. But at one point, I had an absolutely appalling idea. Should I confess my appalling idea?

Absolutely.

All right, because I didn’t do it. So it’s fine. But I had this idea. What would happen if I resubmitted this under the pseudonym, what should we call it, Danielle Schwartz or something, a young Jewish woman who is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and then see what would happen?

But surely, as a North London Jew, you must have some Holocaust survivor stuff in your past.

Oh, yeah, we’ve all got a bit of that, but I don’t think that’s how I was known. But anyway, there’s a whole book. And interestingly, my dear old ma, who wrote about 50 novels herself, always said that that was the one that she felt had got away. But I made it almost a point of principle. I am a grown up writer. I will let it go. And I did let it go.

Right. Well, we’re time for another Offcut now, what have we got?

Right. Now, this only sort of fits into the title Offcuts, if you’re being very pessimistic, but we’ll let it sit there. It’s from a theatre play, the first draft of which I wrote in 2010, the most recent draft I wrote in 2019. It’s called The Devil’s Interval.

My dad was the classic scholarship boy, first person from his lot to go to grammar school. So exams were a big thing. And if he passed them, it meant he was supposed to be there, became addicted, got him into some college to do business studies, all of that. Swear he became an accountant just because of all the exams there were.

Play quietly, love. Your dad’s studying.

He was always studying.

If you’ve got certificates, no one can ever argue.

Ferg begins to play a classical medley.

But dad, there’s got to be more to all this than just passing grade seven.

Of course, lad, plenty more.

It’s called grade eight.

At the back, a light piece of cocktail bar piano jazz starts up. Ferg stands to address the audience.

You remember I told Sam I’d never made it to grade eight. Funny story. A week before my grade eight exam, I hiked my guts out across Dartmoor as part of this Duke of Edinburgh gold award thing I was on. Right at the end, just as I was about to finish the job, I was given this signed chit to prove I’d done the task. Now, for my dad, pieces of paper were like pages from the holy bloody Bible. I had to take it back to show dad or he simply wouldn’t believe I’d done it. So I’m holding on to this piece of paper for dear life, stumbling down off the moor like I’m six pints down at closing time and that knackered. And I’m on this path by stream. Of course there’s a sudden gust of wind, isn’t there? And bang, the paper’s out of my hand. There it is in the stream. I dive at it like I’m rugby tackling the piece of paper because I have to show it to dad. Have to. Hit the deck with massive force. Throw my hand into the water to break my fall and I smash it against a rock so hard I know it’s broken. No question. Actually, it’s not a very funny story, is it?

He gets to his feet, walks to the piano and slams his fists against the keyboard, bringing the music to a halt.

My sodding old man!

Tell us the story of The Devil’s Interval from 2010 to today.

Right, so around 2009, 2010, I started doing an awful lot of TV work. Somewhere along the line, Laura, I gathered a bit of work and became, I don’t know, well known. I was bloody busy and I felt like I didn’t own myself anymore and I wanted something that was mine. I needed to write something that was mine. I have, as you mentioned, I play jazz piano and I have done for a very long time. And I’ve done a jazz piano night class at Goldsmiths a few years before, but I’ve been intrigued by the dynamic in the room. The way, you know, at night classes, people bring their stories in with them. And I saw a piece of theater in there. So that’s what The Devil’s Interval is. It’s a story of a jazz piano night class, five students, one teacher, three pianos. And the key is every single actor on that stage plays, which creates some issues, it has to be said, but that was the idea. And each of the students has a moment when they come forward and tells their story. Imagine it as a kind of jazz solo. There’s also an overarching narrative to this. I worked on it with a dear friend of mine, Joe Thompson, who’s another jazz pianist, a very, very fine jazz pianist. And it has gone through six drafts, which is not that unusual in theater, it has to be said. I mean, you know, you have a history in theater too, and you know that. The Devil’s Interval, by the way, is the sharpened fourth or the flattened fifth. The Roman Catholic Church regarded it as evil, and it’s one of the key tones in jazz, which is marvelous. And at various times, it has come very close to being produced. We had a slot at the Watford Palace, which is a great, you know, just outside London theater. And they were ready to produce it, but we needed extra money to be able to take it into town, and we needed the right cast to be able to take it into town. We’ve had some very good names attached to it over the years. Then another director came on, he was very keen, and he was gonna take it to another place and another director, and it’s, you know, it’s a classic story, and it was revived again, which is why I did the sixth draft in 2019. It’s gone through various versions, long, short, such is the way of things. I still think it’s a real goer. I mean, this is not, I think we know, this is not the moment in which to be trying to get pieces of theater on stage, but I wrote it because I wanted to sit in the theater and watch it. And the idea, the way the music plays, the way you actually watch the actors, the musicians compose in real time, that was the idea.

Sorry, they have to not only play the piano and act, but they have to compose.

Well, the idea was that as we get deeper into it, they would start properly improvising. We’d worked out a boot camp for them. Obviously every single one of the actors had to have a history with jazz, or at least piano. I mean, they didn’t have to be jazz pianists. They just had to play jazz pianists, but we reckoned between us, we could get them there. It’s a very ambitious piece, but not in terms of theater. I was very careful to make sure it was one set and the asset, three pianos, well, look after them and you can flog them off again. Afterwards, I had many conversations with producers over the years saying, and the great thing is, you can sell the pianos on. Early on, I was asked if I would sit on a panel at the National Theater to talk about Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen. So you can imagine that, you know, Rayner, the restaurant critic, the observer, would have quite a good view on Wesker’s The Kitchen. And I agreed to do it. And they said, there’s a stipend, there’s a fee, 150 quid. I said, I’ll waive my fee, but I’ll trade you a moment sitting on a panel on stage for a coffee with Sebastian Born, the literary manager of the National Theater. And they agreed. So I took Bashbourne out, people probably don’t know the name, but he was in his time, the literary gatekeeper at the National. And I took him out for coffee and described this play. And actually, in a moment of, I think, great control, I didn’t do this until we were on the third draft. And I described what the idea was. And he said, so you think you’re writing this? And then I did the thing which must make any literary manager’s blood run cold. I went, no, here it is, and pushed the script across the table. Bash was very, very supportive. He said, it’s not right for the National, but I really think this has got something. And he put us in touch with Endless Producers. And so it goes. Over the years, it’s gone through lots of offices and never quite made it. And that’s why I say I might be cheating in putting it in The Offcuts Drawer because I’m not quite ready to say that that’s gone.

Well, at the moment it is an offcut, at the time of broadcast it will be an offcut, but who knows, maybe as a direct result of being on The Offcuts Drawer, it ceases to be one, which would be marvelous.

I can happily send it. I have it in PDF and Word format. And I think it would be a great night in theater. And that’s why I wrote it.

All right, then time for your final offcut now.

This is an outtake from my novel, The Apologist, brackets probably my most successful novel, which was published in 2004.

One night, desperate for someone, well, damn it, anyone to accept my apology, I returned alone to the bar where I had met Mandy and Tracy. I had it all worked out. I would identify the most attractive single woman in the room. I would approach her hesitantly, tell her she looked terribly familiar. Were you by any chance part of the French delegation at the African Union Congress in Kinshasa? You weren’t? Gosh, that’s weird. You really are the spitting image of a Parisian woman I met there. My prey, of course, would recognize me and be bowled over by my glossy pattern of celebrity and power. She would ask me to breathe hotly in her ear. Breathing hotly was my new party trick. With these introductions made, all I had to do was slip into bed with her and then treat her terribly badly the next morning. I had no doubt that my newfound sleekness and confidence would enable me to do this. What woman could resist such an approach with its heady mixture of African exotica and French sophistication? All of them, as it happened. The first one said, nice try kiddo, but you’re playing a little out of your league, don’t you think? The second one said, excuse me sir, but just my own reference, where exactly on my face is the word schmuck tattoo? Schmuck tattooed. Which was better than the response from the third woman. She didn’t say anything. She just laughed at me, grabbed her bag and her coat and ran from the bar, still hooting to herself as she clacked her way down the street on vertiginous heels.

Another lovely little piece there, really like that. Why was this not included in the book?

Because a little bit like the very first except we heard, it was over-egging the pudding. I’d already done this gag in a number of ways. So to explain, the apologist began, I was watching an episode of Friends, and it was the one where Monica admits that she’d once been fat, and Chandler admits that he once finished with a girl because she got fat, and Monica makes him go and apologize, and he apologized, and he comes back and he says, gee, if I’d known how good apologizing made me feel, I’d have started doing it years ago. And I turned to my long-suffering partner who was used to me saying this and said, there’s a novel in that, someone who apologizes because they like how it makes them feel. So the apologist is about a restaurant critic, yay, called Mark Bassett, who is renowned for his very negative reviews until one of the chefs he reviews apparently commits suicide as a result of the review. So he goes off and he apologizes to the widow, and it’s an all-around positive experience, and he feels brilliant about himself as a result of that apology. And he decides to apologize for everything he’s ever done wrong, just because he likes the emotional rollercoaster. So you get an insight into his life because he goes around apologizing to everybody, the kid he was horrible to when he was eight years old, the girlfriend he did wrong, all of that. And eventually a video of him apologizing to one particular friend goes viral and becomes so successful that he is appointed chief apologist to the United Nations to travel the world apologizing for the sins of colonialism, slavery. It invented this concept of penitential engagement, the whole academic discipline and captured a moment. And it is a broad political satire with a heart, dare I say it, and is without doubt the most successful book I’ve ever written. It was translated into over a dozen languages. At one point, Brad Pitt was going to produce the film version of it. I even sold a website for ridiculous sums of money. I mean, it was the whole roller coaster. The bit that we’ve just heard, he digs into his role as chief apologist to the United Nations and finds that it’s not quite emotionally satisfying enough apologizing in a political environment. So he needs to go back and create some crimes for which he can apologize on a personal level. And so he’s wandering around trying to trip people up and apologize to them.

I see, when I read that, when we heard that clip and he says, all I have to do is treat her abysmally the next morning. I think he obviously have missed a bit about that’s how you get a girl. You’ve got to be mean to her.

No, no, no, no. He just wanted something to apologize for. And because he’s now an international political celebrity, he’s getting some, he’s never to have any luck in bed, but now he’s sexy and fancy and everybody wants him. And so he thinks he’s really it. It is a classic first person narrator novel in that it’s all about the unreliable narrator who’s not quite clocking what’s going on around him. And this bit will have come out because it was over egging the pudding. And perhaps because it may have made you think just a little too poorly of Mark Bassett, the chief apologist of the United Nations.

And the character Mark Bassett, the restaurant critic.

Yeah, go on.

Is he you?

He was significantly me in certain ways. I mean, not because his personal story doesn’t have my parentage or whatever, but certain of my body issues and stuff from when I was a kid, I’d certainly mind my own life for that to create the bundle of insecurities. Yeah, I threw more of myself into that book than I did any other.

Right, final question. Are there any offcuts that you’ve still got that you haven’t shared with us today?

That is an interesting question. I don’t think there are. I mean, I have been… Some people might think that one and a half novels and a whole play that’s been through six drafts, the other bits are sort of smaller and tangential, is quite a lot to have in The Offcuts Drawer. In a writing career of over 30 years, I don’t think it is, actually. I think I’ve been either very fortunate or just blessed with huge unending reserves of talent. If you think of yourself. One or the other, one or the other. You know, I haven’t lost that much along the way. There’s quite a lot of studio-based TV proposals that have never seen the light of day. Probably at least a dozen of those, but we’ve all got those.

Yes, we have.

So I don’t think they really count. So I genuinely think I’m quite fortunate. That said, you know, there’s, what, 150, 200,000 words of unpublished stuff. But then to put that in context, I probably write anywhere between 100 and 200,000 words a year. So it’s livable.

And as for the Memory Man that we heard earlier, have you thought about repurposing it? Could you maybe turn it into a radio play or a film script?

I’ve occasionally toyed with that, but my appetite for going back to something that I wrote well over 20 years ago is limited, if I’m honest. I’d much rather just move on. I genuinely don’t think that I have deprived the culture of anything. Most books, however grand and great we think they are, move down the river, don’t they? They just pass us by and we read them and we enjoy them at the time, however successful they are. The Apologist has a life beyond itself. But for the most part, what we write is just part of the culture that passes by. So I don’t look at The Memory Man, I don’t look at Bluff and think, oh, that’s a waste. I think it’s more important just to keep going, moving forward.

I suppose you have got a sufficient body of work behind you to be able to go, look, I created all of this and that was shared with the public successfully. So maybe you don’t miss The Memory Man and Bluff that much.

No, I don’t.

If you’ve written one or two, you might go, oh, I’d like a bigger body for the amount of work I put in.

Yeah, I don’t think in those terms. I don’t think, oh, I’m, you know, one of the hilarious things is that Claire, my late mother, she published over a hundred books. And when you are faced by that body of work, don’t even think about competing. I was the one who was responsible for voxing them all up and putting them all into storage. I still have a copy of every single edition is in storage. And I remember voxing it all up and putting it in the lock up, the secure lock up, and stepping back from these big piles of cardboard boxes and thinking, and this is not to dismiss her body of work because Claire was, you know, very important work, but thinking, just remind yourself, this is how it ends with, you know, a dozen large cardboard boxes in a lock up. So we live our lives in the moment and it’s about enjoying the process of writing and being a writer rather than one eye on what you might not have completed.

And on that profound note, I think we’ll end it there. It’s been lovely to talk to you, Jay Rayner. Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you. The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Jay Rayner. The Offcuts were performed by Keith Wickham, Christopher Kent, Toby Longworth and Rachel Atkins, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

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

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

Is there a lot of competition?

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

So, maybe another Guinness Book of Records record?

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

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

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

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

I’ve done the triple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

She sits on the desk with me.

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

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

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

Bye, thanks for coming.

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

Yes, yes, yes!

Thank God!

I can’t believe they’ve gone.

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

We’ve got a free weekend.

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

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

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

Can I have a tin with a spoon?

Yes.

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

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

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

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

Yes, try the boxes.

Right.

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

Nothing. We can do anything we want.

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

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

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

Ta-da! Found them!

George’s hand is covered in oil.

Oh, look, can you pass me a…

He looks around for something to wipe his hands clean.

No, not the guest towels.

Well, we haven’t got any guests.

I don’t care. They’re for guests.

But I live here.

Right. So you’re not a guest.

Emily hands him some kitchen roll.

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

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

Alright, Biscuits.

Cool, cool.

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

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

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

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

I’m a guest.

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

No, it’s not. It’s Ian.

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

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

Yeah, right.

Cool, cool.

Where are you going?

Bus stop.

No, where are you going?

Bus stop.

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

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

Right then, I’m off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

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

Right.

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

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

It was after I’d written the Wilma Tenderfoots.

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

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

So you didn’t submit it to anybody?

No, no.

You just started it and stopped yourself?

Yeah.

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

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

To you or someone you know?

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve heard stories like that before.

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

Really?

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

It’s about like GIs did in the war.

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

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

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

Your blog into a book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That sounds fascinating.

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

Oh, no. How frustrating.

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

And that was an eye opener.

Why?

Because it’s so much easier to write.

Than comedy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clem, can we have a chat?

Who’s that in the car?

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

Does he want a coffee or something?

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

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

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

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

What’s going on?

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

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

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

Is this a joke?

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

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

Look, I know this looks bad.

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

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

Five months? While I had cancer?

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

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

Are they ironed?

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

She slumps into a chair, head in hands.

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

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

No. I was wondering if you could tell him?

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

Trevor looks down and shakes his head.

Come on, where’s she from?

Preston.

Oh, Trevor. How could you?

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

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

How delightful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You write jokes and everything.

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

Is there enough Lego in the world?

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

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

Yeah, I started it a year ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is that cow?

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

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

Utterly holds up an oversized watch.

Me o’clock, work o’clock.

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

Hang on.

There is no work o’clock on that watch.

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

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

Farmer Lee looms in.

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

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

I’ve got that star, Farmer Lee.

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

But what is team building?

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

Big brother house! I’m gonna be famous!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing animation or writing for kids?

Writing animation for children.

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

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

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

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

What about a children’s book?

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

Right, yes it would.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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