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.

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 pave the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is author Mark Billingham. Mark worked as an actor, a TV writer, and a stand-up comedian before his first crime novel, Sleepyhead, was published in 2001, becoming an instant bestseller in the UK. His subsequent series of novels featuring London-based detective Tom Thorne now totals 16 books with the 17th Cry Baby due out imminently. Mark is also the author of the standalone thrillers In The Dark, Rush Of Blood, and Die Of Shame. His television writing includes several children’s series that he also starred in, Harry’s Mad, What’s That Noise, Made Marion and Her Merry Men, and Night School, and a series based on the Thorne novels in 2010 starring David Morrissey as Tom Thorne. Words like master and masterpiece are regularly flung about in his reviews, although possibly not quite as many times as the word grizzly. Mark Billingham, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

Hello, thank you for having me.

Are you happy with grizzly as an adjective? Was that what you were going for when you started?

I don’t think it applies as much now as it did when I started. I certainly think the books were a lot more grizzly, a lot more violent, you know, 10 or 15 years ago than they are now. And I think that’s because I hope it’s because I’m a better writer than I was then. And I think I’ve learned that less is more and you don’t have to throw the kitchen sink at everything. And a reader’s imagination is a far more powerful weapon than anything a writer can come up with. So, yeah, I think grizzly would have been fair enough when I started, certainly.

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

Oh, God, I am one of those people who can only really write in my office at home. I’m terrible at writing on the go. I can’t write in hotel rooms or on trains. And I suppose the things I need around me are the terrible things I’m looking at as I look around me right now. Far more Beatles toys than any grown man should have. Yeah, you know, like yellow submarine figures and any bit of memorabilia, that kind of stuff. I’m looking right now at a stuffed woodpecker and an old ventriloquist doll and oh my god, some old figures from Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and a huge standee of Elvis Costello. No. Well, I don’t know until you take them away from me. All I know is that I can’t sit and write in a sort of soulless hotel room. I can scribble a few notes in a notebook. You know, I can go, oh, must do that in Chapter 12 or whatever. But I can’t actually sit and put a book together anywhere but here.

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

Well, this is a clip from a novel I eventually abandoned in favour of what actually became my first published novel. This is called The Mechanic and it was written in around 1999.

He was a stone cold mechanic out of Miami with a job to do. Just a regular killing, just some punk who was going to get what was coming to him. It would be a snip. The train now standing at Platform 2 is the 1237 to Coventry calling at Adderley Park, Stetchford, Lee Hall, Marston Green. He downed two fingers of beam and checked the glock strapped beneath his left arm. The weight of it felt good, like an old friend. Hampton in Arden, Barkswell, Tile Hill and Coventry. He slapped a five on a ten for the bartender and slid off the bar stool. It was time for work. Travellers are reminded that there is no buffet service available on this train. We apologize again. The man was late. He might have to slap him around a little later on, once the job was done. The man had lousy timekeeping habits, but he had a bag of money. And he had the name of the poor sap who had an appointment with the Glock. Nobody ever beat the Glock. He smiled. Beat the Glock. Good one. Andy! Maybe he’d do the beat the Glock routine for the guy he was going to ice. Give the poor mutter belly laugh before he bought the farm. Andy! Oh, sorry, Keith. I was— Yeah, course you were. Where the fuck have you been? I said half twelve under the clock. It’s nearly twenty-two. Christ, what have you come as? Andy Bagnell self-consciously pulled his shirt down over his beer-gut and adjusted his ponytail. We’re supposed to be inconspicuous, you dozy prat. I am inconspicuous. In a Hawaiian shirt? You look like you’ve puked up on it. This is from Florida. Trevor got it when he took our Karen and the kids to Disney World. Doody wasn’t listening. He was staring across the busy station concourse towards the public toilets. Bagnell watched him and, for want of anything better to do, he stared as well.

So tell us about this mechanic then. What was it about?

Well, it was a comedy caper set on the Birmingham Canal system. I’m from Birmingham. I thought I should write about the city I grew up in. So it was this sort of comedy caper where this guy imagines himself as some noirish character and talks in this ludicrous way all the time. Actually gets involved in this horrible caper where he robbed somebody in the toilets at New Street Station. I wrote about probably five or six thousand words of it at the same time as I was writing five or six thousand words of what became that first novel Sleepyhead. I sent them both off to the one person I knew in publishing who said ditch the funny one. Now, well, it may well be because it wasn’t remotely funny. I do not know, but what I since learned, what I subsequently learned was that publishers are quite scared of humorous books, which is a bit sad really. I mean, later that year, I actually went to a crime writing convention where one of the sessions was called, Does Humor Hurt Your Sales Figures? I’ve never forgotten that. I suppose it’s because it’s such a subjective thing. And an editor might read a book and think, well, I think that’s hilarious, but will anybody else? Or I don’t find it funny, but maybe that’s just me. And so the safest thing is to just reject it. And when you think about the incredible history of brilliant humorous writing we’ve got in this country, it’s really, really sad that that should be the case. But, you know, you can count the number of bestselling, humorous writers on the fingers of one hand. It does seem to be something people are a bit afraid of. So I went with The Grizzly One and The Mechanic never saw the light of day. I did look at it again, obviously, when I dug it out for your show and thought, you know what, one day I might finish this. I should have done that during lockdown. That’s what I should have done.

But why were you starting two books at once? I mean, you’ve not published any before, and most people have enough trouble coming up with the first book. So how come two?

Well, it’s certainly something I’ve never done since. I wish I could tell you. I don’t know. I mean, I definitely had had the idea for what became Sleepyhead, the grizzly serial killer novel. But because I was still working as a stand up at that time, and I love crime fiction, so it seemed natural to at least try a comedy crime novel. And they’re incredibly hard. They’re incredibly hard. It’s like the comedy horror film. I kind of think you can’t be both. You can certainly put humour into a crime novel, into anything. I would not want to read a book that doesn’t have some humour in it because it would just be irredeemably bleak. But a book that just sets out to make you laugh is a very tough ask, I think.

Absolutely. But it’s just the fact that you decided to start them both at the same time, or pretty much the same time. What were you thinking? I’m going to write two books.

I’ll send two books off to publishers to see what they think.

You must be incredibly dedicated and disciplined to be able to sit down and go, I’ve never written before, I’m going to do two.

It was a discipline that I maybe had 20 years ago, but I certainly don’t have it now. I mean, I don’t have more than one idea at one time. I was doing a thing the other day when somebody said, what do you do with all the ideas you reject? And I went, I’ve never rejected an idea. You know, I just kind of go, that’ll do. Let’s write that, you know.

So this one just disappeared. You didn’t look at it again.

No, I didn’t. I didn’t look at it again until really, really recently. And actually I’m really quite happy with it because there’s way more of it than was read out. And I kind of think one of these days I’ll get around to finishing it. And even if my editor went, well, it’s not really what you’re known for, I’m sure I could find somebody who put it out somewhere. Also the idea of any kind of crime fiction set in Birmingham, I started to feel was problematic because by that time I wasn’t living there anymore. And I think it’s easier to write about the streets you walk down. And that accent, I did have a problem with that accent.

But nowadays you’ve got more Peaky Blinders, of course.

Yeah, nowadays it’s become trendy. My name’s Tom Thorne, mate, you’re nicked. It just felt easier to make him a Londoner.

Let’s move on to your second offcut. Can you tell us about this, please?

Oh, well, this is a treatment, in inverted commas, for a spoof TV magazine show called It’s Bizarre. And I think I wrote this sometime in the mid 1990s.

Presenters, Valentine and Cordelia Trevelyan, married. He, overweight, flamboyant, effete. She, skinny, blonde, distant, both very gothic. It’s Bizarre is a 30-minute magazine programme dealing with all aspects of the paranormal, with features on everything from telekinesis to yetis, and articles ranging from the spiritual to the downright eccentric. It has a regular cast of slightly off-the-wall presenters who are actors and play all this completely straight. Features include Coincidence Corner. The Trevelyan sit in wing-backed leather chairs and regale the viewers with tales of coincidence to boggle the mind. On June 17, 1972, 14-year-old Colin Hoxton was appearing on the BBC quiz show, Ask The Family. One question involved the identification of an object photographed from a strange angle. Colin correctly identified the object, Cheesecake. At precisely that moment, 3,000 miles away in Houston, Texas, a man was struck and killed by a slice of cheesecake dropped from the 14th floor of a skyscraper, the dead man’s name, Robert Robinson. Bizarre but true, a series of astonishing facts. All the ties worn by film 93 presenter Barry Norman are made from the wool of a single sheep. It’s Bizarre obviously has its tongue firmly in its cheek, but although the format is preordained and many of the initial articles and features are scripted, the great strength of the show is that much of the content would be viewer driven. It’s Bizarre is in many ways a That’s Life of the paranormal, although of course unlike That’s Life, it is interesting and funny.

Ooh, that’s a bit snarky.

Oh dear.

Not a fan of That’s Life, hey?

No, well, I certainly was when Cyril Fletcher was doing his odd odes and humorous vegetables and all that kind of stuff. Jake Thackeray used to perform on That’s Life and, you know, Jake Thackeray is a huge idol of mine. So that was, yeah, that was a bit pointlessly nasty. And, you know, yes, I think I introduced it as a treatment. That’s probably overstating the case. I think this was a few pages scribbled in a notebook.

They were very tidily scribbled. It wasn’t, you’d obviously thought it out. There were no spelling mistakes or ink blocks or anything like that.

I’m very neat. I’m very neat and organized. Well, I think this was definitely a period in my writing life. So this is, you know, five years before I started trying to write a novel. So I’m writing a bit for television and largely hating it, doing kids’ shows and, you know, collaborate lots and lots of in inverted commas collaborating, which just means writing by committee quite often. So there’s a lot of that going on. And I was just in that period of which, which every freelance writer is in of just throwing as much shit at the wall as you can until something sticks. And, you know, this is, this is from the notebook of shit to throw at walls. And God knows, maybe I’d eaten a bit too much cheese one night and just sort of woke up and thought, God, I quite like some of it.

Yes.

I quite like some of it. I quite like that coincidence corner story.

Yeah, I like the wool of Barry, Barry Norman’s ties.

I’d watch it.

Yeah.

Or maybe I wouldn’t. I think it was, do you know what? It was also in that period of television where, you know, the kind of late night shows that seem to be very much designed for people coming home from the pub. And you just turn them on and watch any old nonsense, you know, with the kebab and you know, three cheese to the wind. And I think I thought, yeah, I can come up with something like that. Clearly, I couldn’t and can’t. That was my best attempt. I don’t think it never got submitted. I mean, I didn’t ever show it to anybody, I don’t think.

Oh, oh, I see. Oh, that’s quite disappointing. I’d be very interested in their feedback. What they would say about why it wouldn’t work. So what kind of television and reading and culture basically were you a fan of when you were growing up?

Oh, lots of crime stuff. I always drawn to anything with violence and car chases and, you know, the Sweeney, all the American stuff, Kojak and Columbo, of which I remain. You know, it is the greatest cop show ever made. And you can argue with me. I’m curious.

Why is it the best?

Oh, my God. Well, you just have to look at the people that worked on it. You know, far from anything else. I mean, Spielberg directed the pilot. You had people like Steven Bochco, who went on to great Hill Street Blues. Jonathan Demme, who directed Silence Of The Lambs. Incredible people behind the scenes. And the people that created it, Levinson and Lincoln, actually based it on Crime And Punishment. And they wanted their detective to be like the detective in Crime And Punishment, the constable or whatever it is. And it’s actually a show about class. You know, when you think about it, it’s about this working stiff, who the villain always underestimates. And the villain is always an architect, a classical musician, you know, a TV chef. They’re always somebody from the sort of upper classes.

And he’s just this working stiff.

Yeah, very high status. And they underestimate him and they don’t imagine that he’s got a mind like Steel Trap. And what it did, of course, most famously, was to completely invert the classic format of a crime drama where you knew exactly who the killer was and exactly how they’d done it in the first five minutes. And the rest of the show is this sort of dance of death between Columbo and this villain. How is he going to catch him? What’s the mistake the villain’s going to make? It’s a show I’ve always loved. And of course, Peter Falk. Peter Falk. And I got to do a… I made a documentary about the show a few years ago on radio and got to interview him, not long before he died. So somewhere on tape, I do have that man saying, one more thing, Mr. Billingham. And that, you know, I can go to my grave a happy man.

So what kind of family were you from? Do you have a history in your family of performers or creators, or were you the first?

No, God. No, absolutely not. Yeah, I was the first. Just big show off. And it has just been what’s lawfully called a career is just an attempt to show off and avoid a proper job. You know, I’m now showing off writing books. It’s still a performance. I’ve always been a performer of one sort or another. And it just, you know, from that first moment, I was at the kind of school where it was easy to be a bit anonymous if you weren’t a brilliant sportsman or a brilliant scholar. And I was neither of those things. And then the school play came along. And from the moment I got cast as the artful Dodger in Oliver, that was it. That was me sorted. That’s all I ever wanted to do, really.

Well, time for your next off-cut. Can you tell us what this is, please?

Well, I mentioned stand up. This is a piece of stand up material that I wrote in around 2001. I’m not sure I ever performed it, but it’s about complaining.

Are you having a good time? Okay, by and large. But would you say so if you weren’t? There’s certain things that British do very well. Obviously, there’s queuing, talking about the weather, and choking at major sporting events. But one thing we cannot do is complain. We’re shit at it. Some clumsy twat sends me sprawling in the street. I stand up and say sorry. Sorry? It’s at its worst in restaurants. Not only are we shit at complaining, we’re hugely embarrassed if somebody else does. Now, I happen to be married to one of this country’s few truly great complainers. She bloody loves it. I’m easily pleased in restaurants. You can slap a plate of food in front of me that’s cold or burned or bears no resemblance whatsoever to the thing I actually ordered. Basically, something the third chef has vomited onto the plate. The waiter says, is everything all right, sir? And I’m like, lovely. Couldn’t be better. Thank you so much. My wife is slightly different. If we go out for a meal, she’s not had a good night unless she’s changed tables three times, sent back the starter and called the head waiter a cunt. I mean, I do complain, but for some reason, it’s inversely proportional to the amount of money I’m spending. If I’m out celebrating in a flash restaurant, I’m Mr. Weedy. I’m Monsieur Iselie Pleased. If I’ve spent £35 on a Chateaubriand, you can stick a turd on a plate in front of me and I’m like, oh yum, that’s perfect. Put me in a greasy spoon on the other hand. I mean, get me in McDonald’s and suddenly I’m cocky fucking dick. Excuse me, my good man, but my sesame seed bun is a tad undercooked and these chicken McNuggets are an absolute mcfucking disgrace. Talking of which, posh people should not be allowed in McDonald’s. They just open one in Hampstead and eating in there is a fucking nightmare. Posh people and fast food is not a good mix. They just don’t understand the concept. You stand there in the queue behind Jeremy and Amanda with little Georgina and Freddie in tow, but do they decide like the rest of us what to order in advance? Do they bother to consult the huge fuck off menu above the counter? No, you’re stuck behind these fuckers. You’re in a hurry. They get to the front, the 14 year old serving says, can I help you? And they’re like, yeah, what’s good today? Nothing’s good. It’s McDonald’s for Christ’s sake. Now order something quick and fuck off. But no, they stand there discussing the menu and then the kid with the stars on his badge makes the fatal mistake of asking them if there’s anything they’d like to drink. No, McDonald’s does not have a fucking wine waiter.

Goodness me. So you didn’t perform much in front of children, I’m guessing.

No, and it’s weird the way, again, that was dug up from an old notebook, that you actually write the swear words in. It’s really bizarre. Like you think, well, you know, that will just come when I perform it. You know, I’ll be riffing and improvising and that stuff will sort itself out. No, I actually wrote in every fucking and I was hoping when, you know, because I kind of knew you’d play that. I was hoping you’d have sort of dubbed in some audience laughter.

No, that would sound awful.

Yeah, it would, wouldn’t it? I mean, any stand-up routine written down is a bit odd, isn’t it? But no, I think I either never did it or I did it once and it died and I never did it again.

I thought it was pretty basic, not basic, but you know.

It was basic. No, completely basic.

No, but basic in as much as it should do fine. It may not be blindingly brilliant, but there are some good jokes in there. I could see audiences laughing at that.

Late night, very drunk at the comedy store. They’d have to be. I think by the time I wrote that, I was already falling out of love with stand-up or either the books had started to do better because there was a few years when they overlapped.

There was a crossover.

There was definitely a crossover and it actually became a practical thing as much as anything in that I was starting to have to travel quite a lot to promote the books. And you can’t work as a stand-up without an awful lot of traveling up and down the motorway, two nights in Leicester, three nights in Nottingham, whatever it might be. So I had a young family and I just wasn’t seeing them. And by that time, I’d already been doing stand-up for at least 20 years. And I just thought, really? Well, in 1987. No, no, not by the time I wrote… When did I write that? When was that? That was about 2001. 1997? Okay, I’d been doing it 15 years by then. And I just kind of had enough. It’s a very good job for a single person. I always think that. And if you’re perfectly happy to… Especially if you’ve got an agent and you’re happy for them to say, here’s your schedule for March, here’s your schedule for April, you’re doing these clubs. You can’t do that when you’ve got a family and you’ve got to sit down with diaries. It’s like a military operation trying to figure out what you’re doing. And I’d had enough of sitting in grotty dressing rooms at 3 o’clock in the morning. I mean, I still miss that 20 minutes on stage. I do. I still miss that buzz you get from that, which is a buzz you can’t get anywhere else. And I get some jollies from doing similar things at book festivals and trying to sneak in as many knob jokes as I can into a discussion about literature. But I don’t really miss the rest. I still hang out with comics all the time. I play poker every week with a bunch of comics who keep me up with what’s happening on the circuit. But that was the most embarrassing bit of old stuff I dug out for you, I think.

No, there’s nothing embarrassing about it.

Oh, there’s worse to come, is there? Yes, much, much worse.

Yes. 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. I was going to say that Stand Up influenced your novel writing because I read somewhere, well, obviously, Tom Thorne is named after fellow Stand Up, Paul Thorne, apparently. Does he know that?

Yes, he does. And there are also characters in the books called Brigstock, Kitson, Holland. It’s certainly in all the early books. I mean, Thorne’s lasted 20 years, but in all the early books, lots of the characters are named after Stand Ups I was working with.

Do they know that?

Yeah, they do. And I would regularly just get asked, can you put me in this? Can you put… The only time I’ve ever asked was when, now, who was it I made? Who was it I made into a hideous paedophile? It will come to me. It will come to me.

I know plenty of comics who would jump at the chance.

Yeah, but that’s the only time I actually asked permission. I thought, you do need to know what I’m gonna do with your character’s name. Yeah, no, I did a lot of that by then. But it did, if I’m guessing where you’re going with this question, Stand Up did really influence the writing later on, because, you know, as you know, you can’t walk out on stage at the comedy store and go, stick with me, I’ll get funny in about 10 minutes. You’ve got to be funny straight away. And I knew I had to engage the reader straight away and keep them engaged and build towards climax and all that sort of stuff. But also, crime writing uses a lot of the same techniques, you know, in terms of the reveal, the pullback and reveal. When you reveal certain bits of information, the timing is very important. Crime novels are full of punchlines. They’re just really dark ones.

And also, I imagine the maverick, hard drinking, hard living rule breaker, the cliche of the stand-up comedian has quite a lot in common with the cliche of the hard-bitten thriller detective. So, probably not a huge leap to make.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. But one of the things you realize quite quickly about that cliche is that it’s an archetype that you can throw away if you want, but you might be in danger. You can decide you want to write a western, in which you have a cowboy who doesn’t have a hat or a horse or a gun, but he’s probably not a cowboy. You know, there are certain boxes you do have to tick. And there are certainly a lot of things you can do within the genre, and there’s no limits to it. You can, you know, write crime novels, set in space. You can do whatever you want. But there are certain boxes you’ve got to tick, I think.

Right, well, let’s have another off-cut. Tell us about this one, please.

Well, it’s another treatment for a TV show, for a TV panel show from the Throwing Shits At The Wall Notebook of the mid-90s, and this one’s called Hot Air.

Chairman Dickie Branston, DB, overseas crew selection and flight. Flight always, ultimately doomed, crew doomed, DB always survives to fly again next week. Only one celeb will survive the fated balloon journey, different route every week. Panel, four celebs, round one, crew selection. Each panelist given two celebs, broadly speaking, a goodie, much loved public figure, and a baddie, a figure the public love to hate. Up to panelist which one they want to promote and which one they want to ground. One minute to vigorously defend the one they want to see grounded and attack the celeb they want to see stepping into the basket. So Stephen Fry gets Saddam Hussein and Glenn Hoddle. Tony Banks gets Naomi Campbell and Tim Henman. Francis Edmonds gets Chris Evans and Frank Bruno. Panelist gets Tony Blair and Silla Black. At end of round one, DB awards points for originality, wit and good questions and selects the four members of the crew. Now each panellist for the duration of the flight becomes that celeb, vigorously defending their alter ego in the face of an assortment of on-board crises. Round two, altitude. The balloon is losing altitude and we need to lose a crew member. Rather like an old-fashioned balloon debate, it’s strictly every person for themselves and while each in theory has a chance to speak on why they shouldn’t be callously thrown overboard, swiftly degenerates into a free-for-all with DB trying to keep peace as we descend into vicious insult, scurrilous rumour, lying and blatant self-interest. Political figures tend to thrive in this round. At end of round, DB decides which crew member to sacrifice and four becomes three. Round three, dinner time. Crew are starving. One has to become the on-board meal, but which? Each celeb has to actively pursue one another describing how they like them cooked and eaten, with points for originality, recipe-wise and imagination. Ultimate decision, as always, is DB’s. At end of round, one crew member becomes dinner, down to two. Final round, hot air. Each of final two compete to lift balloon. How much hot air can they generate by waffling about their lives, loves, careers, while being shamelessly heckled and sidetracked by other panellists? Losing celeb is yoiked overboard. The celeb-winning panellist is announced, end of flight, with losers to nominate future flight crews for future flights. According to the notes on your script, there were three possible titles for this. Hot Air, which is the one you’ve gone with, Flight To Nowhere or Celebrity Plane Crash. Now that’s the one I like the best. That’s such a bad taste title. I love it.

It is. I still quite like it. Yeah, no, I still like it. Again, I think that would be, you know, one of those programs on Channel 4 or Channel 5 now that you came in after the pub and stuck on. And it’s fatally flawed. Even listening to it, you can see it because when it started, I thought, oh, that’s quite interesting. But then the idea that these panelists have to pretend to be Chris Evans or Cilla Black or boy, those names, all those people that were big celebs back then.

Half of the people are dead.

Yes, I know.

You see, it really does date it. You’ve got names like Tony Banks.

Tony Banks.

On the back of…

And I presume, I mean, Tony Banks, the MP and not Tony Banks, the keyboard player at Genesis.

Presumably, he’s the political figure who would thrive in all that lying.

But I think I looked at it in the cold light of day and went, you cannot be serious. You really think somebody’s going to make that?

Well, they would make it nowadays.

Well, that’s the thing. I do look at some of the stuff that’s on now. I mean, the way panel games have kind of gone with that degree of sort of craziness and bad taste and yeah.

Well, now you’re Mark Billingham, bestselling novelist.

Yeah, I might have more of a chance now.

Obviously, you’ve done a lot of television writing. This was a panel show. I couldn’t find any reference to any panel shows that you’ve written for. You’re mainly children’s television, weren’t you?

I was doing the air. I was doing a lot of kids’ TV drama and animation. I mean, some of which was quite good. But when you’re writing animation, the money for these shows comes from all over the world, from a dozen different countries. So you would get a dozen different sets of notes. You’d put a script in and then you get, here’s a note from France. Here are the notes from Lithuania. Here are the notes from Eurovision. And eventually, you’d go, can you put that stuff back in to the eighth draft that you took out two drafts ago? And you’d start going, life is too short. It really was tremendously hard work just to write a half hour episode of an animated kids show. And some were more fun than others, but eventually I just got heartily sick of it.

But it was while you were writing Night School in 1997 that I believe you and your writing partner had the personal experience of crime violence. I wondered, was that what made you shift from the television children’s writing to crime novels?

I don’t know whether it was quite as clinical as that. What I can certainly say is that when I did start writing the novels, which was only two years later or 18 months later, that fed directly into it.

So what exactly happened?

Definitely. We were attacked and held hostage in our hotel room. We were in Manchester working on this show, Night School, and we’d gone out the first couple of nights, gone out on the town. On the third night, we said, right, let’s stay in and we’ve got to do some work on the script. So you come over to my room. We’ll watch, I remember it was on the telly, we’ll watch ER and we’ll watch University Challenge and we’ll have food delivered to the room. We had pizza and a beer for a fiver each. We were sitting in my room watching telly, talking about the filming we were due to do tomorrow, and there’s a knock on the door. I went, oh, that’s going to be room service, come for the trays. I opened the door just without thinking, and it was three guys in balaclavas who just burst in and beat the shit out of us and put bags over our heads and tied us up and ran around Manchester with our debit cards and took whatever they could take, cash and phones and watches and just threatened to kill us for three hours, held us in there for three hours because this happened at about nine o’clock and they needed to use the cash point cards either side of midnight so they could get two days worth of money. And yeah, it was truly, truly horrible and when I started writing, I thought I want to write about victims and I want to write about what it’s like to be properly afraid, you know, not sitting on a roller coaster afraid, but am I going to see my wife and kids again afraid? So yeah, it definitely, it fed into becoming a crime rights.

Did they ever get caught?

Oh, God, no. No, no, no, no. You know, there was all the police were there sealing all the rooms off and CID were there going and actually they’d never heard of anything like it happening. But it was quite a serious crime. You know, they had gone down for some hard time, these lads. And about one really interesting little detail that I think I put in a book somewhere, quite a few things that happened. I used it as a direct plot point in my second book, but they wouldn’t let us into the room. Obviously, we were put up somewhere else and the room was sealed off. But afterwards, we needed to go back into the room to get a few things. I needed to get some clothes or whatever and I said, can I go back into the room? And I went back into the bathroom and there’s no way to put this delicately, but the people that were holding us hostage had made rather a mess in the bathroom. Just in a way that made it very obvious to me they were as terrified as we were.

Oh, really?

It was a strange little detail, but they had…

So many questions. I can’t actually formulate one of them.

I know. I know. And they got nothing out of it. I mean, what did they get? A few hundred quid and a couple of phones and risking… And why you?

And also, why two people? Surely there’s more of a risk. Surely choose one person.

Well, I think what the police did conclude was that it was some kind of inside job in that they got them on CCTV coming into the hotel and it wasn’t like they wandered around randomly knocking on doors. They came straight up to whatever floor I was on and came straight to my room because I’d ordered room service. But I just think they just knocked on the door thinking that if I get… Because there were no spy holes in the door. And if I’d gone, who is it? They’d just have said room service. And as it is, I just opened the door without… And this was the time I was still working as a standup. I was staying in a lot of hotels. To this day, I don’t feel particularly safe in a hotel. Somebody says, hello, come to change your bed or whatever. I’m like, yeah, I want ID. I want you to sit. I’m not letting you in. You just don’t expect something like that to happen in a hotel room, do you? That was one of the reasons it was so shocking. And weird, little weird details that… I was the one that answered the door. So I answered the door and the guy smacked me in the face and I kind of ran back into the room and these three guys burst in balaclavas. And my mate, Pete, who was sitting in the chair in the corner, literally jumped out of his chair. You know that expression, he jumped out of his chair. I saw him. There was no part of it making contact with the floor or the chair, but it was bonkers. And I think they thought we were a couple, which is the other kind of interesting little detail because at one point they said, give us your pin number or we’ll hurt you. And I was going, oh, oh, oh, oh, I don’t know. And they went, no, give us your pin number or we’ll hurt your mate. And all I was thinking was, hurt my mate. Just fine. We’re not we’re not an item. Yeah, there we are.

God, how dramatic and interesting.

As brushes with violent crime go, it wasn’t too bad.

No. And you lived to tell the tale quite a few times.

I did live to tell the tale and get a few books out of it.

Right. So let’s have one more off-cut. Tell us about this one now.

Well, talking about violence, this is an article I wrote about the notorious murderer Ian Brady in 2017.

It was, of course, the terrible suffering inflicted on their victims by Brady and Hindley that led to their notoriety as the very personification of evil. And while I find it easy to understand the celebration, first of Hindley’s death in 1992 and now her partners, there is one word which has cropped up repeatedly in much of the coverage that, I must confess, makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Monster. For me, it is a word that is too easily trotted out, too convenient. It implies a creature that is somehow otherworldly or supernatural, and sadly Ian Brady was anything but that. It’s a categorisation that allows us to put the likes of Brady and Hindley in a box marked Not Us to point and shudder and say, that’s what monsters look like. I do not have the slightest doubt that Ian Brady was clinically insane. He saw visions and heard voices. That in no way excuses his heinous crimes or diminishes the unimaginable suffering endured by his victims or their loved ones, but elevating these incomprehensible acts to almost mythic levels of evil, while perhaps making them easier to process, is not helpful to any of us in the long run. There have been others who have committed crimes as dreadful as Ian Brady’s. Robert Black, four young girls, raped and murdered. Mohammed Bijay, 16 young boys, raped and murdered. Javed Iqbal, over a hundred boys, aged 6 to 16, raped and murdered. And it would be naive to believe that there won’t be more. It must be at least arguable that defining such criminals quite as simply as we often do, could hinder attempts to prevent such atrocities in the future. In researching the Moors murders, it was actually the actions of Myra Hindley, rather than those of Brady that disturbed me the most. Not because she was a woman, which seems to me the reason she attracted so much opprobrium until her death. That was not, after all, how women were supposed to behave. It went against the laws of nature. It was rather because while Brady’s murderous perversions were rooted in psychopathy, I could find no evidence whatsoever that the same applied to Hindley. Put simply, she did what she did because she loved Ian Brady, because she wanted to please him, which is something I will never understand.

So tell us about this article, then.

Well, this was, again, an article commissioned just after Ian Brady had died, and an article that never ran because I don’t think it was quite what the paper wanted. I think they wanted a kind of response to Brady’s death, similar to the ones I’d seen in an awful lot of the coverage, which was, you know, good riddance to an evil monster. And I wanted to write something a bit more thoughtful than that. I’d already made a documentary about Brady and Hindley some years before that. And I started formulating the kind of stuff that was in that article. I mean, bizarrely, during the making of that program, Brady wrote to me. He wrote me a letter while he was still alive, which is very disturbing. I remember my wife wanted me to destroy it, didn’t want it in the house.

What did it say?

Well, he first of all, he wanted me to know what a terrible time he was having. Well, you know, boo hoo, Ian. But he also wanted to let me know in a kind of real Hannibal Lecter kind of way, how clever he was, literally how clever he was, telling me what his IQ was. It was really important to him that I realized what a smart bloke he was. It was very, very weird. But yeah, in researching that program, I came to the conclusion that Brady was properly bonkers, properly, properly bonkers, but that she wasn’t. And it was all rather odd, also great, wonderful little things emerged. You know, he was apparently on this hunger strike for years before he died. Various people that had personal connections with him, you know, prison guards and so on, were happy to tell me that he secretly hid cream eggs and would stuff his face with cream eggs when nobody was looking. Who would have thought that? But now I stand by it. He lied even about the hunger strike. I mean, I stand by every word of that article, actually. I did think it was a little unseemly, the coverage. And not remotely useful. We do the same thing with any one of these, you know, whether it’s Shipman or Fred and Rose West, we go, they’re monsters and put them in that box over there. That’s what they look like. They’re not us. They’re not. Yes, they are. You know, they’re the bloke next door and the friendly doctor and the neighborhood builder. And, you know, you can’t see them coming. And people always pop up at the woodwork whenever something like this happens. They go, yeah, I always knew they were a wrong one, that bloke next door. No, you didn’t. Of course you didn’t. You know, that’s the whole reason they were able to get away with it for so long. And I just, the word monster, the word evil, I don’t think those words are helpful.

So you never met him then when you were doing the menu making the documentary?

He, I think the program makers approached him. God, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been in plenty of prisons in the course of, you know, 20 years writing about crime fiction, done stuff with prisoners and whatever. But that, I’m not sure I could have done that. I’m not sure I could sit and talk to him.

Have you ever interviewed people who have committed the sort of crimes that your villains do?

Yeah.

You’ve managed to actually interview these people.

Yes, I have. Yes, I have. And it’s very, very odd. Very, very odd. The best example is a man called Christian Bala, who was a Polish killer.

He was Polish or the people he killed were Polish?

No, he was Polish. Yeah, these serial killers, they all have these weird little quirks with him.

He didn’t like Poles.

He didn’t like people from Poland. No, he was a Polish killer and it was a very notorious case that had been unsolved for many years. Horrible, brutal, brutal murder. And he then wrote a book. He wrote like a novel in which it became clear that it was him. And he was like, again, had this vastly overestimating his own intelligence and his own skill and whatever. And eventually some cops went, hang on a minute, the stuff that happens in this book is awfully familiar. And he ended up getting caught and whatever. And he became a sort of big, cool celeb. But yeah, so I did a documentary about him and I got to go and interview him in prison in Poland. And it was horrible. I mean, he was just, he did have a kind of, you know, much as I’ve said, I don’t like the words monster and evil. He wasn’t like sitting and talking to a normal person. I mean, yeah, it was like sitting to somebody who’s been in prison for a few years. And so that’s always, you know, people become institutionalized. But because this was the BBC, we were making this, he seemed to think that I could help him in some way. You know, I want you to tell my story. I want you to get this out there so that, you know, the truth will be known. Not the truth that I’m not a killer, because everybody, including him, you know, acknowledged it by that point, but that the world will see my genius.

Oh, gosh. Because that was his angle, was it?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, he’s quite convinced that this book, which is called A Mock, it’s called A Mock.

Should we be publicising this?

No, it’s just, trust me, you know, it’s garbage. But he’s convinced it’s a great work of philosophic literature. But yeah, whenever I’ve been into prisons, for whatever reason it is, you never come out particularly cheery. But I don’t think that’s the point.

Right. Time for your final offcut. Tell us about this one.

Yes. Well, I’ve always fancied myself as a songwriter, God forbid. These are the lyrics for a song, I don’t know what you’ve done with this. These are the lyrics for a song which I wrote only last year in 2019. One of many attempts at writing a country standard. This is called The Taste.

When the bottle is laid down upon the table, as I pull across the glass and start to pour, everything I need is right there on the label. Every flavor that a drinker has in store, dark and smoky, honey sweet, it just don’t matter. Not the grain, the malt, the barley or the blend. I can drink it neat, I can drink it down with water. It always tastes the same way in the end. It tastes of the woman I lost and the pain that cost a life I don’t deserve to see. A nice shot of shame and a kick of blame and the man I was supposed to be. The friends I knew and it tastes of you and the money I blew when I was betting. Whatever it says on the bottle, it tastes of forgetting. Around me I see love and I hear laughter. The workings of the whiskey and the beer. But I will never taste a sweet hereafter, so I’ll keep drinking till the memories disappear. It tastes of the woman I lost and the pain that cost and lies that came so easily. Blood, sweat and tears and wasted years with a hint of all the misery. The friends I knew and it tastes of you and now I’m through with the ways I was set in. Whatever it says on the bottle, it tastes of forgetting. Whatever it says on the bottle, it tastes of forgetting.

So what do you say to that?

Well, they’re very, very nicely read. Obviously it needs a pedal steel and a bass.

I thought it worked quite well as a poem.

It has been made into a demo with some music and stuff. Yeah, this has always been a dream. It used to be a songwriter and I’m a huge fan of country music as is my detective. Couple of years ago, I did a put a show together with a brilliant country Americana act called My Darling Clementine, where I wrote a story based around some of their songs and we toured it. We toured around the country and so I was reading the story, they were playing the songs and it was a whole thing.

Did you join in with being a musician or were you just the narrator?

Yeah, I read the story and then at the very end, I came on and did a song with them. Yeah, I’m getting those kicks now as part of a band called The Fun Lovin Crime Writers.

Great name. Great name.

Yeah, isn’t it? There’s six of us and we are of course, crime writers. Three of us, and I’m not one of them, are brilliant, brilliant, proper musicians. The other three of us are just clinging on. Stuart Neville, Irish crime writer, Stuart Neville on guitar, who’s a guitar god. I mean, he’s probably brilliant. Doug Johnston, similarly on drums and Luca Vesta on bass. Then there’s me, Val McDermid and Chris Brookmire up front, and me and Chris thrashed at our guitars and Val sings. And we started this off as a bit of fun two years ago, just to do at festivals and stuff. And then last summer we played Glastonbury. Last summer we were on the acoustic stage at Glastonbury. So it’s all got a bit silly, got a bit out of hand. And we had a big tour. We had a big spring tour that the pandemic managed to put the kibosh on. But yeah, we just do cover versions. We’re a party band. We do cover versions of songs about murder. That’s the gimmick. So songs about crime and murder, you know, I Fought The Law, Falsom Prison Blues, Psycho Killer, you know, that kind of stuff. But-

What about original material?

No, we couldn’t, no, no, no, no. That’s absolutely off the table because if six of us, we’re all writers, can you imagine six of us going, I’ve written a song. No, I’ve written a song. Your song’s shit. I’ve written, you know, it would never work. So we just stick to those cover versions. But secretly I harbor this desire that, you know, I can one day write a country standard and that somebody, I’m going to get a call going, X wants to record one of your songs. I mean, most of the people I’d like to record them are long dead, of course, you know, George Jones and Johnny Cash and all those kind of people. But yeah, it’s something I just do in my spare time is write songs that never see the light of day.

Well, you’ve got to have a hobby, I suppose.

Yeah, I mean, you know, well, recently, I’ve discovered jigsaws thanks to the pandemic. But they’re all music based jigsaws, album covers and stuff. But but no, songwriting is a major passion of mine. I mean, I love the perfect pop song or country song, just two minutes, 45 seconds that can tell you a brilliant story. You know, I love songs that tell stories owed to Billy Joe by Bobby Gentry. You know what I mean? The end of which you just go, what? Hey, what was he throwing off the bridge? Oh, my God. Yeah. Any song that tells a brilliant story, I love.

Do you think that’s what you’re going to be aiming for in the future? I mean, you’ve got 20 books now. Is it not time to make another change, perhaps?

I only if I don’t want to make a living anymore. It’s quite a bold move, Laura. Quite a big step.

The thing is, you’ve been quite dramatic and you went from you wrote two books when you’ve never written a book before. You’re somebody clearly who can make things happen when it needs to be done. You’re not someone who sits around and waits for someone to come to them. So I’m just imagining you’re probably…

Yeah.

All right. Don’t give up the day job as such.

Again, it’s such a weird thing to think that writing these stories has become the day job. I mean, it is the best job in the world and you’ve got to treat it like a job, but it’s not, you know, it’s just telling stories. When my kids are annoyed at me, I’ll just go, oh, shut up, get up to your office and write another one of your stupid stories. And it doesn’t matter how many times I tell them that those little stories have put shoes on their feet, pay for their phones in case they’re listening. You know, no, I do love it. I absolutely love it. Well, I don’t necessarily love the writing, I always love the sitting down and doing the writing. But I love all the perks. I love the, I love standing up at stage on a book festival and gobbling off about it. Events in bookshops and book festivals and, and the stuff with The Fun Lovin Crime Writers. It’s just been a joy. It’s showing off. It’s a showing off bit. You know, the writing has become the job. And you can’t always enjoy your job, can you? Especially when people dig out all the old shit that was never deemed good enough.

Well, to be fair, you were the one who sent it to me because my final question would be, are there any off cuts that you’ve still got that you didn’t share with us today?

There are some bits of old stand up, I think, scribbled in that stand up notebook that, oh boy, no, I couldn’t bear to see the light of day.

That bad?

That bad. Because even when I looked at that one that you did, the one about complaining, I thought, yeah, I know, like you said, probably could get away with that if the audience were drunk enough. But there were bits when I just, what were you thinking? Why did you think anybody would find that remotely funny? I suppose you’ve always got to think you get better at stuff, haven’t you? So I mean, I know that when we first spoke about it, you were like, oh, stuff you wrote when you were a kid or whatever. And I remember the first thing I ever wrote. And if it had been written down, if I could have found it, I would have sent it in. It was a Sherlock Holmes pastiche play that I wrote at school when I was about 12, called The Case Of Sherlock Houses. See what I did there? Genius, genius. The Case Of Sherlock Houses and The Golden Goosberry. I can still remember all of it. That was it. And I put it up in front of the class. Well, me too, but I couldn’t find it. I don’t think I’m not sure. It must have been written down in a school exercise book.

That sounds wonderful. Nervous laughter there.

Yeah, very nervous.

Well, Mark Billingham, it’s been absolutely fabulous to talk to you today. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thank you very much. It’s been a hoot.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Mark Billingham. The Offcuts were performed by Emma Clarke, Chris Pavlo, Keith Wickham and Chris Kent, 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.