(0:01) We once got a Dave Podmore show on because there was a, I think there was a new commissioner or the person who was responsible for commissioning and I knew didn’t greatly like or understand cricket and I said well we want to do an another Dave Podmore episode this year because as I’m sure you know it’ll be the anniversary exactly a thousand years since cricket began and fortunately this person believed me and commissioned it.

(0:40) 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. On this episode my guest is Christopher Douglas, a British writer, actor and bastion of Radio 4 comedy.

(1:11) He is the co-writer and voice of the titular character in long-running radio sitcom Ed Reardon’s Week, co-written with the late Andrew Nicholds which recently reached its 16th series and groundbreaking 100th episode, having earned the Broadcasting Press Guild Award for Best Radio Programme in both 2005 and 2010. His other long-running writing credits for radio include the creation of the character Dave Podmore, the world’s most disappointing cricketer, a role he has voiced and co-written for over 30 episodes since 1997 and then there’s the writing of two radio series of Mastering the Universe starring Dawn French and the three series radio comedy Beauty of Britain. Additionally he adapted the Victorian novel New Grub Street into a two-part radio drama and wrote the radio play Tristram Shandy in Development which won the 2021 Tinniswood Award.

(2:05) His screen work includes scripting and directing the recurring on-screen persona of actor Nicholas Craig, played by Nigel Planer, for both stage and television in productions such as the Nicholas Craig Masterclass and later programmes for BBC Two and BBC Four which all originated from the spoof autobiography I, an Actor he co-wrote with Planer in 1988. Christopher Douglas welcome to the Offcuts Drawer. Thank you Laura.

(2:34) Now I have to start with I, an Actor because that was one of the most influential books I read as a drama student. I mean after all the serious po-faced navel-gazings of real thespians that we were told to read this was an absolute blast me and my friends were obsessed with it. I have to ask you was it inspired by anyone in particular?

(2:55) No it was inspired by everybody including ourselves really and we were warned against doing it by older professionals who said not that they were worried about being insulted but because they thought it was too much of an in-joke and that sort of we thought well what’s wrong with an in-joke? It’s funny, it’s funny. And there was a sort of spoof acting book that was published I think in the early 60s sometime called the Art of Course Acting and it was much broader than than Nicholas and it was sort of aimed at a wider readership.

(3:34) It was more about amdram? Yes it was really yes and so we were told oh no there’s already a book you know and we thought well that’s that’s got nothing to do with the the world that we observe which is everybody going on about how incredibly dangerous and tough acting is and we just thought it was so funny. Yes.

(3:54) And especially as the people who went on and on about how tough and dangerous it was all seemed to be so so comfortably off and very highly paid. Yes I think Simon Callow’s book had just come out at that point and I remember reading that nodding sagely at it but then when your book came out it was just oh my god it was absolute blindingly fun. Yes I think he slightly took offence and we had to reassure him that it wasn’t his book in particular.

(4:23) The whole bunch of them came out around that time but I don’t think we really we really targeted anyone in particular. As I say it was that you know it was it was sort of against ourselves as well because we’d been actors for you know we’d both been doing it for quite some time 12 years or something I think and I’d done quite a lot of the sort of lower end of the repertory career path and Nigel had done it worked at a sort of slightly more elevated level so we had the whole acting profession pretty much covered really between us. Okay well we’ll talk more about it and Nicholas Craig later in the show but in the meantime let’s get started with your first off-cut can you tell us please what it’s called what genre it was written for and when it was written?

(5:11) This is a scene from The Scarlet City which was written around the late 90s 97 I think and it was a TV pilot script. Hair and Beavis at the dining table. Mrs. Bracewell clears up. Nellie the skivvy enters. Beg pardon sir but it’s one of them girls at the door sir. One of which girls Nellie?

(5:35) You know one of them girls as is all wet and bedraggled what fetches up on the doorstep not knowing however it was they got here sir. Not again I’m sorry sir I’ll get rid of her immediately. One moment tell me Nellie does she wear a velvet trimmed cloak and beneath her hat a cascade of auburn tresses?

Speaker 2

(5:54) Yes sir.

Speaker 1

(5:55) And in her hand a pathetic strap of paper? Yes sir. Forgive me Mr. Hair but we’ve had this so many times whenever we let one in it always leads to trouble. Thank you Mrs. B I think you’ll allow my instinct in these matters is without equal. I have a suspicion that this young woman’s plight is in some way connected with a network of enemy agents. Extraordinary deduction Hair.

(6:17) Is this the same reasoning process that led you to the conclusion that Jack the Ripper is really Mrs. Beaton? It’s by no means as clear-cut as that at this stage. Show her in will you?

(6:28) Very well sir. Emily enters. Mr. Hair thank goodness I’ve found you. Well well what have we here? Proper little pre-Raphaelite wet dream. Forgive me for calling on you but I believe I am in great danger.

(6:42) That is quite all right my dear. Pray sit down and compose yourself. Oh thank you.

(6:46) Perhaps you would be good enough to tell us in your own time how we may be of assistance. An anonymous well-wisher gave me your name and address on this pathetic scrap of paper and I have this strange feeling that you’re the only man in the world who can help me. That is more than likely child.

(7:01) Oh my threadbare cloak has slipped from my shoulders. Sir isn’t this rather predictable? Mrs. Bracewell be good enough to put this pathetic scrap of paper with the others and allow me to conduct this interview in my own way. Now tell me Beavis have you ever beheld such a heart-rending picture of defenceless maidenhood? No indeed it is quite pitiful. The sodden hair, the trembling lip, the tears like mourning dew on an unopened bud.

(7:28) Mrs. Bracewell we need some towels and a change of clothes immediately. Oh for you or her? Her of course.

(7:34) My child I suspect you are in unfortunate circumstances. Give me a break. Is it by any chance the case Emily that you have become the unwitting tool of a group of foreign agents embarked on a plan to attack London with a secret weapon in all probability a large submarine with brass instruments and red velvet upholstery?

(7:56) No I was running away from home. Yeah I apologise for the somewhat devious means by which I was obliged to tease out your true story. I would have told you anyway that’s why I’m here.

(8:08) Then pray continue your narrative girl we are wasting valuable time. This script was commissioned was it? Yes it was it was a sort of intended as a sort of Holmes and Watson parody except that the two men commit crimes rather than solving them and they do things like they go around stealing things on behalf of the British Museum.

(8:37) I seem to remember that I wrote a sort of outline for some other episodes and I think he invented a time machine and there was that sort of territory and it was commissioned by the producer the late Andrei Tichinsky who produced an earlier sitcom that I’d had done on BBC2 called Tiger Road and it was well it didn’t get a second series but Andrei kept faith with me and commissioned me to do this Scarlet City script and the idea was I think we had Stephen Fry in mind for the the sort of Sherlock Holmes character and Joe Brand for the housekeeper Missy Bracewell. I can’t remember why it was turned down or indeed who turned it down but it was it was fun to do anyway.

(9:25) I bet it was were you going to play a part in it? No no I wasn’t actually I didn’t start to sort of interfere in my own scripts until some years later. All right well this was a TV script which is interesting because I suppose what you’re most known for recently probably is radio with your beloved curmudgeonly character Ed Reardon as I mentioned before having just completed his 16th 16th series on Radio 4, 100 episodes in the bag.

(9:54) That is extraordinary for a radio sitcom I mean that’s the sort of numbers you expect from like an American TV show with a room full of writers and you know 22 episodes a series, a hundred episodes. Yes it’s it is unusual. There were shows in the in the 1950s that I think did rather more episodes but that is you say they had teams of writers but I think possibly one of the reasons it’s it’s kept going is that Ed Reardon reacts to whatever’s currently in the air not so much actual events it’s it’s more fashions in the arts or TV or sport journalism politics and so there’s always something new for Ed to be annoyed about and he’s he’s certainly written more than I have and he’s probably earned more but but I think what what makes him a more interesting person than me is that he never feels sorry for himself. Most writers moan on about how hard done by we are but Ed never does that and maybe that’s what’s allowed him to keep going as a comedy character.

(11:00) Well he does bitch about other people though I mean he’s he may not say I’m doing badly but he does resent it when other people do well. Oh yes yes and he’s driven by extreme jealousy for other writers. Has he changed much over the years do you think?

(11:15) Well he sort of has to, he reacts to whatever’s in the air. But none of his attitudes have changed would you say? Well I would like to say no but I suspect they have.

(11:27) I suspect there’s stuff that he said in earlier episodes that I wouldn’t I wouldn’t allow him to say now. You know it’s not like mind your language or anything like that. You know it’s been going for 20 years and I think fashions have changed.

Speaker 2

(11:41) Yes that’s true.

Speaker 1

(11:42) The show I think has changed a little bit because in recent years the budgets everywhere you know inevitably shrank a bit and so we had a jazz band to begin with. Ed used to play in a jazz band. We had a writing class.

(11:58) Ed used to teach creative writing and they sadly have had to go for purely budgetary reasons and you know it’s just what everybody’s had to put up with. And so I think the effect that that’s had is it’s made the stories a bit tighter because there aren’t so many other characters and it takes a bit longer to construct the stories but I think on the whole it’s it’s worked quite well. I mean the latter two series which have been done in this sort of slightly new way and so these sort of recent ten or so episodes are more like plays really, farcical plays rather than topical sitcom that it was when we first started.

(12:40) But it’s hard work but I love writing plays so it suits me. Okay time for another off-cut now. What’s this one?

(12:49) Right this is a play called Oedipus at the Crossroads of Motel. It was written in the early 90s. Your parents are both other men now Martin but their accident could have been much more serious and it made me realise that you should know it was me who first brought you to them.

(13:06) I was adopted? Yes. What so are you my real father?

(13:12) No my dear. He’s entitled to know. He’s over 18.

(13:16) You are aren’t you Martin? Yes. Thank goodness for that.

(13:20) 19 years ago I was directing the Sheffield Panto, Aladdin and Felix who ran Bolton Rep had just done Chinese Bungalow so let me have the drapery in exchange for a favour. Felix Sheppard? Who ran Bolton yes.

(13:33) He’s in the cast of our programme. The Motel? No.

(13:37) He’s Gaston, the chef with a past. Well isn’t that typical of this business? It really is just one big family.

(13:44) And how often do we say that fact is so much stranger than fiction? Not very often at all on this show. We had two fires and a plane crash last week.

(13:54) Felix we need you to answer a very important question. Did you give this man my baby? Your baby?

(14:00) I remember giving him some costumes. Green satin I think. The fabric is immaterial.

(14:06) Felix you told me the baby was sent to Loveday and Latouche’s orphanage in Streatham where he subsequently died. They sent me a lock of hair. Loveday and Latouche was a firm of wig makers and parookiers.

(14:17) I used the moniker to throw everyone off the scent. I thought it was an odd name for a church orphanage. It came off the top of my head.

(14:24) The idea not the hair. So who am I exactly? You mean there was no orphanage?

(14:29) No polio epidemic? Call it a white lie for the greater good. So you two are my real parents?

Speaker 2

(14:36) No.

Speaker 1

(14:37) Your father was the actor whom you replaced as the motel’s likeable barman. He was at Bolton too. The old bloke who killed himself when he was given his notice?

(14:46) Not your fault. Not directly but I was a cause of his death. I wouldn’t go that far.

(14:52) Unknowingly perhaps but I was. This calls for an ad in the stage. You may be cheeky waiter and charming chatelaine to 18 million viewers but in real life you are mother and son.

(15:03) It’s almost like one of the motel’s own more sensational storylines. God this is terrible. It’s alright.

(15:09) No it’s not. It means I’ve killed me father and slept with me… Don’t worry about Dennis.

(15:14) He was going to be written out anyway. And as for the other thing darling I told you it doesn’t count on location. Well that’s quite the punchline.

(15:26) Oh gosh that was… Is this the end of the play? That was complicated wasn’t it?

(15:32) No I don’t think it was. I think it… It went on from there?

(15:36) Yes. I think I did finish it actually. I couldn’t get anywhere with it.

(15:42) My agent said it was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. It was rather sort of complicated how it came about because I was actually in Crossroads when I was about… I think I was 18 when I went into it and I played a cheeky waiter.

(16:01) They gave me a trial three weeks to see how… And then at the end of three weeks they said right you can stay on. We’ll make you the waiter and then they realised they couldn’t make me the barman because I was too young.

(16:17) So they gave me a birthday so that I could serve behind the bar. And I had a party but I was only 17. So then a few weeks later I had another birthday.

(16:30) No party this time and then I was able to go and serve behind the bar. And I was in it for a year and a half or something. And the other sort of inspiration for this I suppose was that I was an only child and for a while I was slightly unsure about who my father was.

(16:47) When I was very little anyway I had a stepfather. But that was a pretty standard upbringing. But I think only children often feel they’re doing things wrong all the time.

(16:59) I did especially when I started working in theatre. And then when I was surrounded by all these older more experienced people when I went into Crossroads I sort of felt I was doing something wrong the whole time. Many years later really when I read Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy I was struck by the way that Oedipus believes everything he’s told about his origins.

(17:21) And he never questions anything even though he wants this terrible history not to be true. And my instinct is to see comedy in any situation. It seemed logical to set the Oedipus story in the Crossroads motel.

(17:35) I thought it would be quite fun. Obviously having heard that I think I’d been probably reading a lot of Joe Alton when I sat down to write it. But I think what you’ve just heard was a bit too big for its boots really.

(17:49) The general idea is quite funny but then when you get right to that punchline you go oh this is potentially a little darker than we previously thought. But this is the earliest offcut that you sent and you mentioned your parents just now. They both worked in entertainment.

(18:05) But what about you? Did you know you wanted to act because you were following your parents? And all this writing, did you do writing at school?

(18:12) Were you good at it? Where’s that come from? Well yes all three of my parents worked in theatre and then in television.

(18:22) So the first paid writing job I had or the first thing I got paid for was on a game show called Huey Green’s Double Your Money. I think it was 1964. And I got half a crown for sending in a question.

(18:36) And I think the question was which of the following heavenly bodies is closest to the earth? Is it the moon, is it Mars or Brigitte Bardot? That tells you when it was.

(18:52) How old were you when you wrote that? At the age of eight or nine. I can’t imagine that was original.

(18:59) I must have got it from somewhere. But anyway I got paid two and six for it. And then I progressed to writing, helping to write questions for the TV game show Mr and Mrs, which my stepfather directed and for which my mother wrote the questions.

(19:16) So in school holidays I used to help her write the questions. Oh wow. I remember Mr and Mrs. They had a child writing the questions. Yes they did, yeah. Well I only sort of helped, I suggested things. It was actually my first experience of literary rejection, with my mother telling me that the questions weren’t good enough.

(19:34) And then I sort of followed their lead. I left school when I was 15 and sort of went to work in theatre. And one of my first acting jobs was playing a Christmas turkey in Mr and Mrs. So I had to run on the set, do something mischievous, I can’t remember what. And then as a punishment I was sent into the soundproof box. And when I went into the soundproof box in my turkey outfit, having got my laugh, I remember that, I could still hear the show’s host talking to the audience. I thought, well if I can hear that, all the people who go on Mr and Mrs must be able to hear the questions and the answers that their spouses give.

(20:13) So I thought all these years, and nobody thought to cheat. They just, well maybe some of them did. But there’s something quite moving about that.

(20:22) Yeah, well unless of course there was some kind of music or something played in there.

Speaker 2

(20:25) Ah, maybe there was.

Speaker 1

(20:26) Yeah, you see, maybe something else. But it was quite shocking to me at the time. But the writing thing, I mean, I don’t mean to in any way dis your writing at a young age.

(20:35) It’s not really the same thing as writing plays. Were you writing much at school? No, I mean, I left school with very few O-levels and I had really very little education at all.

(20:49) And I did manage to write a play when I was quite young. I’d been working as an actor for some years by then. And when I was in my early 20s, I did manage to write a script which I tried to sell as a film script and couldn’t get anybody to read it.

(21:04) And so I sent it to a radio producer. The play was about cricket. It was about a cricket tour in the 1930s called the Bodyline Tour where the English team were thought to have pushed the boundaries of sportsmanship or cheated, as the Australians saw it.

(21:18) Anyway, this script, the producer I sent it to, Jane Morgan, she was mad about cricket, I’ve been told that. And she wanted to do it. And we got it on.

(21:29) It was 1980, I think, so I was still quite young. And then after that, having tried to sell it as a film script and then it becoming a radio script, then David Putnam bought the rights to it. And I thought, oh, great, this is the ability.

(21:43) The film was never made. But I got commissioned to write the biography of the leading character who was a man very well known in cricket circles but had never had a biography written, a man called Douglas Jardine. And so writing this book became my education.

(22:02) So I hadn’t learnt very much at school, but I learnt an awful lot over the year and a half or two years to write this book. So that was my education, really. It was an odd way of going about it.

(22:13) But that was where I sort of learnt to write, really, at that time. Interesting. Well, moving on now, let’s have another off-cut.

(22:21) What’s this one? Well, this is from a radio pilot script. It’s called Nicholas and Lysander and it involves Nicholas Craig and his son, Lysander.

(22:36) Dad, have you seen my lucky scarf? Are you in for supper tonight? No, don’t worry about me.

(22:44) I’m not. I’m worried about parting with significant sums of money at Morrison’s for food which gets wasted because you don’t turn up to eat it. Yeah, that’s why I’m saying don’t worry.

(22:52) Really need my scarf. It’s got an 8 out of 10 strike rate. Right.

(22:57) But what tends to happen, Lysander, is that you say don’t worry, so I don’t, and then you appear with a pitiful countenance and I have to divide my meagre past in two, which is more than a little vexing. So are you complaining a do turn up or a don’t? Because it can’t really be both, can it?

(23:12) Maybe I left it in Chiswick. Oh, got to stop sleeping with models. They always nick your clothes.

(23:17) Where is it? Lysander. Why don’t you make one of your favourites, like kidneys, brains, then you won’t have to share it, will you?

(23:25) Or get vexed. No, I’ll have to leap to the AGA and make you a Spanish omelette while mine goes cold because that’s all there is in the house. Well, don’t.

(23:33) A house, moreover, which is falling down and whose running costs have just quadrupled. So sell it. Don’t worry, dear, it’s going on the market this morning.

(23:41) Cool. Cool? It’s too big for you.

(23:43) You fall asleep drunk on the sofa every night. You don’t even need one bedroom, never mind five. Sell it, Dad.

(23:49) You wouldn’t think it was very cool if I turned around and said we’re moving to Bounds Green. Well, I wouldn’t mind because I’m getting a place with Max. Max appears in feature films he won’t want to share with you unless he needs someone to wait in for the drug delivery man.

(24:01) Might get somewhere on my own. Depends if I get this job. Running another club night at the Hubbly Bubbly Bar is not a job.

(24:07) I told you, I’ve got an audition for a movie. That’s why I seriously do need my scarf with the silver threads running through. Corporate training movie?

(24:17) Or don’t forget to turn the gas off movie? It’s a short. Oh, the creative activity of choice for the latter day layabout.

(24:24) Has Orlando got a job yet? No, he’s making a short film. Is this the gilded youth who’s directing it?

(24:31) Dad. Lucy Bunting. Why do they always sound like characters from a nursery rhyme?

(24:36) Give it back, I need the address. 48 Hoxton Square. Who’d have thought it?

(24:40) Lysander snatches the paper. Thank you. I was in a short film once.

(24:45) I had to be a ludicrous farm labourer with lines so fatuous I spoke them precisely as written just to confront them with the evidence of their own imbecility. Good one, Dad. Can you tell me where my scarf is so I can actually do something with my life?

(24:56) Like take part in a Tosspot Trustafarian Vanity Project? Dad. Which scarf?

(25:01) It’s like Liberty’s in our understairs cupboard. The one Max got me from Turkmenistan. Darn.

(25:06) You’ve taken it to go to your Russian lesson again, haven’t you? I have not. Just because she recognised you from an old episode of Middlemarch don’t kid yourself you’re cougar prey.

(25:15) Lysander starts something about in the cupboard. What’s delusional, Lysander, is to suppose you will not be out on your arse or indeed flogging said orifice up and down the award-winningly restored Regent’s Canal towpath unless one of us gets a paid job. Where’s my scarf?

(25:31) And talking of rental, I’m charging £100 a week from now on. Good. I’m charging you for ruining my life and being a smug, self-obsessed, poisonous, gay-arsed, alcoholic, scarf-stealing, criminally inadequate father.

(25:44) So we’re quit! FX Front Door Slam. Then the sound of a drink pouring.

(25:48) Nicholas dials on his phone. Hello, Miriam Medeiro. Geriatric client here.

(25:54) You may want of a person called Lucy Bunting. Not as would be reasonable to assume a character out of Motherfucking Goose but yet another Whitechapel wanker squandering her parents’ money on a short film. I know we said never again, but it might be worth a nudgelet.

(26:14) Nicholas Craig moved on a bit there, hasn’t he? He did that very well, didn’t they? Yes.

(26:19) Yes, I remember we had a… It didn’t get anywhere, but we did have a reading of it. I think we had a reading at Attrick and it’s mentioned, isn’t it, the short film job and I think Lysander, he tries to start a festival of short films and his father’s very sort of dismissive of it, but because they live in Primrose Hill, hundreds of people come round with their short films wanting to enter the festival.

(26:46) They charge, you know, a £500 entry fee and so it ends up with Nicholas on his wonderfully large dining table with about £5 million in cash just moaning about, all I’ve got is this endless, endless admin to deal with and he’s just being given all this money and he’s still moaning about it. I thought it was quite funny, but obviously nobody else in power did. You wrote it with Nigel Planer.

(27:17) How did you meet the two of you? I’d known him for quite some while, I think, through Andrew actually, through my late writing partner who had a wonderful office just off Charlotte Street and he used to write Agony with Stan Hay and there were two cartoonists he shared the front office with and everybody just dropped in for lunch. It was one of those central London places that just became a bit of a meeting place and I met Nigel there and then, you know, we’d sort of see each other’s shows and so we’d become friendly by the time we started on Nicholas.

(27:54) And had you started with the view to let’s invent a good character for Nigel or did you just start writing something together and then go, oh, do you know what? Nigel could play that. No, it was his idea.

(28:04) He said, I think there’s an actor character. That’s all he had really at that point and then we just started reading around it and realising what sort of… He was a bit young to do it, really.

(28:14) He was still in his thirties when we did it and he should have sort of been a bit older because he was sort of on the way out, as it were, but he was terrific. And the character got richer as Nigel got older and we did a lot of shows, a lot of Nicholas shows.

Speaker 2

(28:32) Like what, theatre and TV?

Speaker 1

(28:34) Yes, yeah, we had a stage show that we did and we’d sort of get that out of its box and take it out on the road. But we began on TV by doing the Late Show unit and they wanted a sort of 20-minute piece from Nicholas and a sort of master class type thing and because BBC obviously had all the rights to the Wogan show, we did a master class on how to be on Wogan. And I remember I had two old VCR machines and just a pile of VHSs of Wogan and I’d be on my hands and knees putting these cassettes in and watching this stuff over and over again.

(29:12) Now it was just such an easy job to do but it took me weeks to do this 20-minute piece. And then we did two series and then quite a lot of single hour-long shows for BBC Four, so we did a lot of shows. Excellent.

(29:27) Well, he deserved it. He was a brilliant creation. I speak on behalf of me and my entire generation of drama school graduates.

(29:34) Oh, thank you. Loved it. Anyway, time for your next off-cut now.

(29:37) Can you tell us about this one, please? This is from an unfinished novel called Ghost Story. I wrote it in 2007 and this is the first page.

(29:49) I had been expecting this particular death for some years and given the peculiar closeness of my relationship with the dead woman, it was going to be a busy few hours.

And given the peculiar closeness of my relationship with the dead woman, it was going to be a busy few hours, possibly days. News of a celebrity demise often comes to people in my trade as a welcome excuse to set aside the task in hand, put the kettle on, perhaps have a hunk of low-fat mature cheddar and think about composing an apposite soundbite. Almost invariably the holiday mood sours once it becomes clear that no one is much interested in what a freelance writer has to say about the late national treasure or the time when our professional paths crossed.

But last Tuesday morning I knew it would be different. Not long after the turn of the century, I spent 15 intense months inhabiting the role of Joy Adams’ analyst, flatterer, collaborator and, somewhat resentful, servant. She, in turn, proved to be my tormentor, victim and financial saviour.

You’d have to go back to the days of Nelson’s Navy to find an enforced intimacy between two people so wholly out of sympathy with each other. Joy and I were yoked together by a publisher and set to work to money. A truckload for her and a much-needed Nissan Micra for me, Mike Green, the anonymous ghost.

When the news of Joy’s death popped up on the screen, I hardly needed to think about which would be the best stories to toss to which particular hacks. Nobody else alive has more facts at their fingertips about this woman. It’s not something I’m in any way proud of.

In fact, I would much rather not have had so much show-business trivia cluttering up my memory. As I sat at the computer, braced for the first wave of demands for information, Twitter threw up the usual inadequacies. R.I.P. Joy Adams, drivelled, a million-pound-a-year television executive, truly spelt T-R-U-L-E-Y.

An incredible comedy genius, her split-second-timing was amaze-five-ays. I know, of course, that criticising the spelling of a tweeter is widely considered to be a cheap shot and, in all probability, a criminal violation of a stupid bastard’s personal journey. So I confined myself to observing that you can always tell when someone doesn’t know what to say about an actor if they resort to commending their split-second timing.

The overpaid executive’s lame eulogy received 80,000 likes and 14,000 retweets, plus several compliments for his beautiful words. Out of the radio came the voice of a footballer remembering the day Joy paid a presidential visit to the lad’s changing room and he found himself shaking her hand while wearing no shorts. A stand-up comic said she was a game-changer.

(3:48) An actor who was the last but one Captain Birdseye said she was incredibly down-to-earth. By the time the Director-General of the BBC appeared on Newsnight to deliver his tribute, Joy’s timing was crafted to nanosecond perfection. I realised that they were probably not going to ask me for my recollections.

So instead, I’ve decided to set down for my own satisfaction the true story of what passed between Joy and myself. This is a record of 15 unpleasant months in the life of the nation’s favourite nan, who was also, although the nation is not yet aware of this, their favourite murderer. Ooh, that sounds so intriguing.

But this is based on your real-life work, isn’t it? Well, very loosely, yes. I mean, not with a murderer specifically. I spent a year and a half, I think, as June Whitfield’s ghostwriter, around 1998-99, and we actually got on pretty well.

But for the purposes of this story, it works better if the two characters are at loggerheads. Yes, of course. I say we got on pretty well, but she could be quite hard to please sometimes.

And I think it was Chapter 5 went through dozens of, literally dozens of drafts, and we had a big argument when she insisted that the height of the popularity of the Beatles was during the Second World War. So we had sort of rather circular arguments like that. And I developed a strategy.

I invented the Museum of Social History. So anything that she challenged, I said, well, no, I have actually had that fact-checked with the Museum of Social History. No.

Which she accepted without question. And the trouble was, though, that she then thought the Museum of Social History sounded so interesting that she wanted to come with me to go there. So I had to say it was a bit sharp for refurbishment or something.

But anyway, in the novel, I made the National Treasurer, I gave her a different name, made her a murderer. And of course, June didn’t murder anyone. But the idea did seem sort of good fun because she was at the peak of her National Treasure status.

And I’d say that sliding into June’s character there, because Andrew Nickolds and Nick Newman, who I also worked with, they worked with me on a proposal for a film script sort of based on this novel idea and the real experience called Killing June Whitfield, in which June murders her arch rival in order to And we took this to June, who was very keen on the idea of being a master criminal, but she didn’t want to murder anyone. So we thought, okay, so how can we make this way? She said she’d much rather be a great train robber or something like that. And then she decided that she didn’t want to be a criminal at all, because people would think she really was.

And she had a good point there, because I’d read some of the fan letters that she received. And, you know, fan mail is very odd. And she might have had to spend, she feared she might have to spend hours on chat shows and local radio explaining that she wasn’t a murderer.

So that was the end of it, unfortunately. But you actually wrote, you ghost wrote her autobiography as well. Yes, that’s right.

(7:19) They actually did get written. And it was on the whole, you know, absolutely fascinating experience. And she kept so much, I imagine he’s gone to the Theatre Museum now or something.

But this sort of vast archive of scripts, Hancock scripts, and, you know, absolute sort of milestones of comedy that she had in her sort of attic room. Yes, well, she did work with everyone, didn’t she? Oh, yes, worked with everyone. And at a time when it was quite difficult for women comedians to get work.

And she didn’t particularly see that as an achievement. But I think she was aware of how good she was, obviously. And yes, I mean, she worked with, you know, Arthur Askey, Noel Coward, Tommy Cooper, you know, just about everybody.

(8:07) So what’s with the recent fashion for cosy murder stories? I don’t know if you’ve noticed it on television casts of older actors playing detectives. And in fact, the Thursday Murder Club, the success of Richard Osman’s book now made into a film where the lead characters are pensioners. In fact, a lot of TV detectives are now middle aged, if not older women as well.

(8:32) I’m wondering, is it worth possibly reviving this? I know that she’s the criminal in this. But as a cosy character in a cosy murder story, is this something you might consider? Yeah, that’s a very good idea. It’s such an obvious connection.

Honestly, it hadn’t occurred to me that. But yeah, that’s a good idea. Okay, let’s move on to the next offcut.

What have we got now? This is a clip from my adaptation of Tristram Shandy for Radio 4. It’s an ad for a donkey charity. And I’ve chosen it because the director cut it. Graham’s slow pastoral music or melancholy piano.

(9:11) If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not save a donkey from dying senselessly? By donating just three pounds a month, you could relieve the suffering of donkeys abroad who are hungry, thirsty, and struggling with loads that are far too wide. Text SAVE to 0007 or call 0800 099 0774. Or why not adopt an ill-treated donkey? I’ve chosen the perfect donkey for my husband and two for my best friend, Linda.

(9:40) They’ll love their adoption pack with pictures of their new donkey friends. Visit donkeyaid.org and click donkeys in your inbox now. Thank you.

(9:49) The music ends. Oh, it’s lovely to hear that. Yes, the director cut it, so I was very pleased.

Thank you. Oh, excellent. Our pleasure.

Now, this was an interesting play. I heard this, Tristram Shandy in development. It wasn’t Tristram Shandy, to be fair.

It was Tristram Shandy in development. It was a play, if I remember rightly, about a production of Tristram Shandy. I can’t remember if it was a film or a play that it was being produced.

(10:14) Well, the idea was that it was a sort of rather pretentious radio drama workshop, and it was broadcast as though it was a podcast. But yes, it’s not as wide of the mark as you might think, actually, because Lawrence Stern, when he wrote Tristram Shandy, part of the joke was that he needed money to subsidise the writing. And so he peppered the text with adverts and appeals for money so that he could keep writing, rather in the way that podcasters do now.

(10:47) We don’t, by the way. Well, that’s why I hope to sneak that clip on there. So just as Stern sort of satirised the world of publishing, I put the boot into radio drama.

But, you know, you could really, it’s so malleable, this story, you could sort of set it… That’s Tristram Shandy, you mean? Yes, you could set Tristram Shandy anywhere, really. Frank Cottrell Boyce did a wonderful film version about 15 years ago. It’s set in the film world and, you know, you could set it in the world of publishing or the world of theatre.

The beats of the story work equally well, I think. Well, we’ve heard from that and earlier Off Cuts that you sort of like a bit of historical comedy because you spoofed the Conan Doyle and similar style detective yarns we heard earlier, and this is taking a well-known 18th century novel as its subject matter. Have you always had a love of historical literature? Are you particularly well-read? No, no, I’m not.

Not at all, really. But I suppose, well, there are adaptations that are out of copyright. I see, it’s a financial issue.

(11:57) No, I think actually I’ve sort of, rather than being inspired so much by English comedy or literature, I think that I probably learnt more from theatre and from American sitcoms, actually, than from British ones. I taught comedy for New York University for a few years and I thought, there’s no point in teaching American students about British sitcoms, telling them about Heidi High or Hello, Hello. So, I watched a great deal of Frasier, Seinfeld, Simpsons, Roseanne and so on.

(12:28) And I learnt a huge amount from them. The main lesson being that you can’t keep more than three plots running at the same time. You can just about get away with three.

Two is better. Best of all is one. Really? I thought best is three, isn’t it? The ABC plot system.

(12:45) I just think, if you can do without them, and if you think that. Well, it’s a way of involving all the characters, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s the thing. Sometimes you can’t do it in one because you’ve got too many characters, absolutely, as you say.

But if you think of your favourite sitcom episodes of a particular favourite sitcom, they’re often the one that just has one plot or one plot with two very slight digressions. But, you know, it’s 28 minutes or in the States, 22, 24 minutes. You know, it’s not that long.

(13:16) You have to keep the narrative quite simple. Right. But you’ve never been tempted to write a sitcom in the way that Americans do.

Your style seems very British, whatever American influences you may have picked up. Is that true? Yes. I’m very envious of the American system.

I’d love to be involved with it, the writing team, I think, because, you know, they take it so seriously. There’s a lot of money in it, so they take it very seriously. And so there’s a show I particularly admire at the moment called Hacks, which has a team of writers and, as do all the great American sitcoms, but they’re also in it, some of them.

And I think that’s a very good system. I’d love to work in that. But I think it’s that we can’t afford to do it in this country.

I’m pretty sure it’s that. But when you talk about the technicalities of plotting, particularly, to execs in this country, they often just cover their ears and hum. They just really don’t want to know about it.

(14:19) They just want you to get on with it and finish it as soon as possible. And maybe they know that they can’t afford a writing team, so don’t even think about it. Right.

Time for your final offcut now. Can you tell us what it is?

Yes, this is called Rum Bum and Biscuit, and it’s a radio sitcom pilot written by Nick Newman and myself in 2003.

Interior. War-room of HMS Indubitable, 1804. Captain Francis Peckham scratches out his ship’s log as the ship rolls and creaks.

I, Francis Fairfax Peckham, captain of His Majesty’s ship Indubitable, do hereby commence the log of today’s action upon the island of Rhodes on this first day of June in the year of our Lord, 1804.

(15:06) The engagement cannot, in the strictest sense, be termed a naval battle, being more of an argument in a restaurant. It is nonetheless another valiant chapter in the career of HMS Indubitable. Exterior.

The main deck. FX distant battle. Another famous victory, Francis.

Thank you, Septimus. I’ll wager that Taverna will think twice before trying again to seat a captain of His Majesty’s navy at a wobbly table. The waitress was doing her best with a folded-up napkin, and it was the poor girl’s first day.

And her last, I fancy. But what of my wound, Septimus? Is there any hope that your medical skills might staunch the blood and save my arm? It’s only a paper cut from the menu. Septimus, my old friend, I bleed.

(15:51) Oh! Oh! Have you removed the limb? No, just drawn a smiley face on your sticking plaster. Ah, then once again I appear to have cheated death. Well, you certainly cheated the restaurant.

You didn’t even pay for the retsina that we had at the bar. Ah, Mr. Runkle. Um, aye aye, sir.

Captain, matey, whatever. You appeared to relish your first taste of combat. Yeah, it was a really good laugh.

(16:17) It’s like being back in the sixth form at Stowe, basically. Perhaps that explains why you went into battle flicking a wet towel rather than a cutlet. Quite so, Septimus.

I see nothing escapes the keen eye of the scientist. Mr. Runkle, how many enemy diners did we dispatch? Yeah, so I reckon we slotted, like, about seven of them. Does that include the German tourists whom I ran through with a kebab skewer? Oh, for sure, yeah.

And the guy with the guitar? I de-bagged him first. That was quite a laugh, too, actually. And our own losses? Probably about a hundred, sadly.

Our guys got so tanked up waiting for a table, they just, like, fell off the quayside and, like, drowned, basically. Oh, that is, I suppose, the terrible price of war. Give those impertinent Greeks a broadside of grape for their trouble, Mr. Runkle.

(17:10) Right. Okay, so you want me to throw some grapes at them? Oh, damn it, man, I’ll do it myself. FX fires a big cannon.

(17:20) Excellent shot, Francis. You flattened most of that ancient Venetian fortress. Let us not waste time on the idle exchange of compliments, Septimus.

(17:27) We must set sail for mainland Greece with all dispatch. Excellent. Are we going to, like, nick some more archaeological treasures? Francis, we haven’t got room for any more temples and statues.

(17:38) I desire some assorted marbles which will look exceedingly well in my dear wife’s new bathroom. Way anchor, Mr. Runkle. Raise the gallant yards and set a course for the Argolid.

(17:50) Okay, for sure. Yeah. So it’s probably going to be quicker if I write to my mum and get her to do what you said, yeah? Uh, right.

So this, according to the notes that came with it, is based on the novels of Patrick O’Brien and is about Nelson’s navy. Where was this going to go story-wise? Um, well, I think we hoped we could involve an audience, actually. A bit like doing Mrs. Brown’s Voice, because it would be very difficult to build a convincing early 19th century man of war.

And if you film it, it’s just ruinously expensive. So we thought it’d be quite fun to do it in a sort of slightly Heath Robinson way in a studio. As a TV pilot, we intended it.

(18:37) So it’s going to be an audience show? Yeah, an audience show, yeah. And we had for many years, both the shows that I’ve done and done with Nick and various other people, we’ve had a very good sound effects technician called Alison, who arrives when you’re going to record with all these strange bits and pieces that make the noise of something else. And when we have done live shows or audience shows, when Alison sets up her table, the audience just becomes absolutely transfixed by it.

(19:10) And we thought, well, actually, it’s Alison who’s the star of the show. So we made Alison a character in this nautical yarn so that she would actually make the noises of the battles as they were going on in the studio and you would see her in vision. It’s an idea that I noticed becoming adopted everywhere.

I sort of nicked it from myself in my Tristram Shandy adaptation because it was the sound effects technician who ends up having to play Tristram Shandy. And when Nick Newman and Ian Hislop wrote a stage play about Spike Milligan, there’s a sound effects technician in that as well. So I think if we did it now, we’d have to sort of find a slightly different way of serving it.

But you asked me earlier if I’d read a lot of historical novels and stuff. And I thought, well, no, I haven’t. But then I thought, well, actually, Ed Reardon is based on the anti-hero of George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, which Andrew introduced me to years and years ago, 40 years ago or something, a novel that we both loved.

And the leading character, he’s actually called Edwin Reardon. And we were going to call him that Edwin. But right at the start, Sally Hawkins, who plays Ping, Ed’s agent, she improvised a line down the phone calling me Edward.

We didn’t have time to re-record it. So I’ve had to sort of avoid the issue of what his name is for 96 episodes or something. But there was a serious purpose to basing Ed Reardon on Edwin Reardon because Edwin is sort of the archetypal ill-used writer.

He lives in a garret, he gets very badly paid and very badly treated, and he’s a terrible failure. But in recent times, he’s become to seem less so because I’ve written a bit about George Gissing who based the novel largely on his own experience. When he wrote this novel, he got 150 quid for it.

And in today’s money, that would be enough to build yourself a house. I mean, you’d be lucky to get a fraction of that for a novel. I think you sometimes don’t even get any money at all until a novel starts to sell.

So Ed Reardon started out as being a reflection of Edwin Reardon, the Victorian ill-used writer. But yeah, but now it’s sort of, it should be the other way around. And Ed is quite unusual in that he actually earns his living from writing.

And very few jobbing writers, jobbing hacks of his level, managed to do that. The same with jobbing actors, they mostly have a side hustle of some kind. Although Ed was doing teaching, which is what a lot of writers and actors do as well.

(21:52) That’s right. Yes, we had to do away with that. But yes, yes.

(21:56) So that’s the thing. Now you mentioned when you sensed the rum, bum and biscuit, but I must ask why rum, bum and biscuit? I get rum, possibly could get biscuit, but what’s bum? It’s an old saying about the Navy and I can’t remember who first used it, but it’s just what life in the Navy is. It might have originally been rum, buggery and the lash.

(22:23) I think it’s Winston Churchill actually. Oh, I see. And then it got sort of shortened to rum, bum and biscuit for some reason.

(22:30) Oh, okay. Well, that’s an education. Yeah.

When you sent it to me, you mentioned that you had had a project on a similar subject turned down by the BBC last year. What was that about? I get so many, I have so many offcuts. I’m reminded of them every time I wake up the computer and there’s a folder saying, it’s like a sort of writing necropolis saying, BBC drama proposals.

This vast collection of rejected stuff. So I can’t actually remember, there’s so many of them. Oh, I know.

There is a similarity. The crew of this Man of War, they go around stealing stuff. Again, more thieves.

(23:13) Like the Elgin Marbles. And so I wrote that sort of Holmes and Watson parody where that’s exactly what they do. And in fact, I got another one turned down just a few months ago about the man who was accused and sort of convicted of defacing the Elgin Marbles in the 1930s.

You know, the British Museum over-cleaned the Elgin Marbles and this man took the rap for it. He’s completely innocent. And I thought there was an interesting subject for a radio play, but no, it’s not to me.

But yes, you’re quite right. That thing keeps popping up. Hmm.

Interesting theme to have. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show. How was it for you, Christopher Douglas? Yes, it was nice to hear those things that I thought were dead and buried come back to life.

(24:00) So that was lovely. But I suppose it’s a bit shaming in a way just for the sheer, vast quantity of rejection. But I don’t think they’re terrible.

But yes, I have to acknowledge that they didn’t hit the spot with the commissioners. Are there any that surprise you? Anything you might wish to go back and perhaps redevelop? Yes, I think that the sitcoms, there were a few in there, weren’t there? I think some of those could work still. Yeah.

(24:31) Yeah, because obviously there’s a turnover of staff at the BBC, just like anywhere. So somebody who turned you down once may have come. Yes, we once got a Dave Podmore show on because there was a, I think there was a new commissioner or the person who was responsible for commissioning.

And I knew, didn’t greatly like or understand cricket. And I said, well, we want to do another Dave Podmore episode this year, because as I’m sure you know, it will be the anniversary of exactly a thousand years since cricket began. And fortunately, this person believed me and commissioned it.

So you can get round it sometimes. Excellent. Well, it has been lovely to talk to you, Christopher Douglas.

(25:18) Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcut straw with us. Thanks very much. The Offcut straw was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Christopher Douglas.

(25:35) The Offcuts were performed by Nigel Pilkington, Jake Yapp, Beth Chalmers, Christopher Kent, Emma Clarke and Helen Goldwyn. And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us.

Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh yes.

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

Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

Good morning, sir. Can I help?

Yes, I’d like to buy a shop bell.

I’m sorry.

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

I’m afraid we don’t sell those,

but you’ve got one on your door.

Nevertheless.

Look, I’m not an idiot, okay?

No.

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

It is.

Which specializes in shop fittings.

It does.

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

I understand.

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

Yes.

But it’s not. It’s a hardware shop

which doesn’t sell Shop bells.

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

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

Sell me the bell.

Do you even own a shop?

No.

Then why do you want a shop bell?

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

It’s a bit old hat, isn’t it?

What do you mean?

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

I mainly work for Radio four.

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

What do you mean?

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

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

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

Then why have you got one?

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

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

Oh my God.

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

I don’t know anymore.

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

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

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

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

Mm-hmm.

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

Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

Mm.

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

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

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

I thought you say comedy.

No, no. Did Yes. Yes.

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

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

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

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

Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

Oh, otherwise known as actors,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much.

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

Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is serious journalism, isn’t it?

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

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

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

You know that’s how it happens.

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

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

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

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

That’s a really lovely little piece that actually.

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

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

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

Well, very sanguine of you, I must admit.

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

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

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

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

So who was this written for?

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

Do you know why?

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

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

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

Next offcut, please. What’s this one?

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

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

Was this written before your first published novel?

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

Is that the big reveal?

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

Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play quietly, love. Your dad’s studying.

He was always studying.

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

Ferg begins to play a classical medley.

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

Of course, lad, plenty more.

It’s called grade eight.

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

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

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

My sodding old man!

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

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

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

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

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

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

All right, then time for your final offcut now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the character Mark Bassett, the restaurant critic.

Yeah, go on.

Is he you?

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

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

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

Yes, we have.

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

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

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

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

No, I don’t.

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

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

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

It’s been an absolute pleasure.

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

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

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

Is there a lot of competition?

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

So, maybe another Guinness Book of Records record?

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

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

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

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

I’ve done the triple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

She sits on the desk with me.

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

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

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

Bye, thanks for coming.

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

Yes, yes, yes!

Thank God!

I can’t believe they’ve gone.

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

We’ve got a free weekend.

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

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

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

Can I have a tin with a spoon?

Yes.

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

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

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

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

Yes, try the boxes.

Right.

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

Nothing. We can do anything we want.

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

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

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

Ta-da! Found them!

George’s hand is covered in oil.

Oh, look, can you pass me a…

He looks around for something to wipe his hands clean.

No, not the guest towels.

Well, we haven’t got any guests.

I don’t care. They’re for guests.

But I live here.

Right. So you’re not a guest.

Emily hands him some kitchen roll.

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

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

Alright, Biscuits.

Cool, cool.

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

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

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

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

I’m a guest.

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

No, it’s not. It’s Ian.

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

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

Yeah, right.

Cool, cool.

Where are you going?

Bus stop.

No, where are you going?

Bus stop.

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

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

Right then, I’m off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

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

Right.

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

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

It was after I’d written the Wilma Tenderfoots.

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

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

So you didn’t submit it to anybody?

No, no.

You just started it and stopped yourself?

Yeah.

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

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

To you or someone you know?

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve heard stories like that before.

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

Really?

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

It’s about like GIs did in the war.

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

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

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

Your blog into a book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That sounds fascinating.

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

Oh, no. How frustrating.

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

And that was an eye opener.

Why?

Because it’s so much easier to write.

Than comedy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clem, can we have a chat?

Who’s that in the car?

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

Does he want a coffee or something?

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

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

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

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

What’s going on?

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

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

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

Is this a joke?

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

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

Look, I know this looks bad.

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

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

Five months? While I had cancer?

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

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

Are they ironed?

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

She slumps into a chair, head in hands.

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

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

No. I was wondering if you could tell him?

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

Trevor looks down and shakes his head.

Come on, where’s she from?

Preston.

Oh, Trevor. How could you?

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

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

How delightful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You write jokes and everything.

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

Is there enough Lego in the world?

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

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

Yeah, I started it a year ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is that cow?

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

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

Utterly holds up an oversized watch.

Me o’clock, work o’clock.

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

Hang on.

There is no work o’clock on that watch.

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

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

Farmer Lee looms in.

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

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

I’ve got that star, Farmer Lee.

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

But what is team building?

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

Big brother house! I’m gonna be famous!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing animation or writing for kids?

Writing animation for children.

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

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

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

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

What about a children’s book?

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

Right, yes it would.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good, well, thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many did you end up playing in the end?

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

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

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

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

So how old were you when you wrote this?

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

Was it Love’s Young Dream?

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

So coy, let’s call him Tim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the same production, from the Hamlet.

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

They were character exercises, though, character monologues.

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry about the exclamation, Mark.

It suddenly felt a bit…

I’m Mary.

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

Laura’s mom.

That’s it.

Do we do both, or is that the French?

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

Yeah, I’m all set.

And Mary, it’s a pleasure.

Likewise. Well, we’ll be, won’t we?

Very soon, family.

Now, he must be exhausted. Let me…

She tries to take his suitcase.

No, no, you know what?

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

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

So now what? We…

I take you home, and we can… wedding.

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

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

And it’s your first time in England?

Very first.

Well, it must all seem very…

No queen.

Where is she?

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

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

David Beckham.

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

No idea. David Attenborough.

Of course.

With his little monkeys and his nature.

So is your car…?

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

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

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

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

Well, the Queen insists on it.

I bet she does.

I bet she does.

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

I saw the agenda.

I like it. We know where we stand.

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

Jo puts a reassuring hand on Mary’s hand.

You plan. You’re a planner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Well, it’s politeness, isn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children’s TV channel.

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

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

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

Yes, thanks.

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

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

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

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

Yes, I’ve heard of Go Jetters.

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

You wrote them or you were in them?

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

No middle aged women who could apologise all the time.

No, or there would have been.

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

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

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

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

We wonder why Bevert turned up when nobody had died.

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

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

He’s into petty crime.

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

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

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

How long’s he staying with you?

I don’t know yet.

Well, those sheets will be your business.

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

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

She’s OCDC.

You’re no good when you’re anxious.

I’m learning to be.

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

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

He just bangs on about his bloody charity.

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

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

Sponging off you for a bit.

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

Drinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, I’ve really enjoyed it.

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

Thanks so much for having me. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much.

Were you teachers pet?

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

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

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

But it was a pastiche, you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What? Two sugars?

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

Flanagan, keep the door shut!

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

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

Skating enters.

Morning, snails!

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

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

Really? To do what, exactly?

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

Any biscuits?

Blini, what are you doing?

Playing chess.

With yourself?

My right brain is playing my left.

I see.

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

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

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

Blini, what is the point of all this?

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

They haven’t been listening.

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

I have no milk.

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

My gerbils!

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

Ah, Jesus!

Blinney, if you must keep dead animals…

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

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

Blinney indicates his name, written on the container.

Hello? Blinney’s!

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

Caveat emptia! Let the poora beware!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s true.

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

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

That was how I saw it. Yes. Yeah.

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

Thank you.

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

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

They are workshops, I think.

Not just what they call workshops, they are workshops.

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

Is it a means to an end?

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

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

Yes, it was, definitely.

What was it like?

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

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

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

I love that line. I love that line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, some of the shorter ones I did get.

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

I see, right, right.

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

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

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

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

You know, it’s kind of…

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

Right, yeah.

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

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

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

Woman arrives home from work. Husband is watching telly.

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

Oh, that’s something I ordered.

Not off the telly? Not again?

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

What? What is it?

It’s a small hadron collider.

What?

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

What are you talking about? What does it do?

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

Send it back.

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

We already have a walk.

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

That plug doesn’t look normal.

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

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

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

I thought they were extinct.

What?

The Higgs bison.

Not bison, boson.

What’s the difference?

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

Nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

The noises go crazy.

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

What are you going to do with it?

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

They open it.

Where is it then?

I think it gets stuck in this bit here.

I can’t see anything.

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

I’ll get my glasses.

Get me a Jiffy bag too, will you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will any of the porn be going in?

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

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

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

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

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

No, I don’t think so.

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

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

Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer. Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is writer and producer Bill Dare. If you’ve been a regular listener to BBC Radio Comedy over the last 20 years, or you’re a fan of topical, sketch and satire shows on TV, you will doubtless have heard his name on a regular basis. He was the brains behind the 90s comedy sensation, The Mary Whitehouse Experience, the show that introduced the concept Comedy is the New Rock and Roll to the UK when it stars Rob Newman and David Baddiel were the first comedians to fill a gig at the Wembley Arena. He produced eight series of spitting image and created Dead Ringers and The Now Show. With numerous entertainment shows like I’ve Never Seen Star Wars under his belt and comedies he’s written like Brian Gulliver’s Travels and The Secret World, he’s also turned his hand to plays and fiction. And his third novel, The Billion Pound Lie, was published last year. The Standard called his work superb. The Times, quite brilliant. Bill Dare, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

I think it’s good to be here. I am actually quite terrified.

What are you terrified of?

I’m terrified of all this work that I’m exposing, most of which should probably never see the light of day. I mean, it’s either been rejected by me or rejected by someone else. So, you know, my knees are shaking.

Well, the first question I always ask is where do you keep your offcuts? What is your virtual bottom draw look like?

Well, I’m old enough to have actually, you know, the old-fashioned kind of bottom draw. I’ve got a big plastic box or even two, really, that I’ve kept a lot of the stuff I wrote on, you know, typewriters. And then I do also have the various stages of bottom draw. I’ve also got stuff on my computer. I’ve got things on DVD or CD or various forms. But I don’t really like kind of delving into the past very much. I don’t often go into to look at old photographs.

Well, this show may not be much fun for you then, as that’s exactly what we’re doing.

Well, it’s going to be very informative. And you never know, there might be something in it where I think, actually, you know, maybe that wasn’t too bad.

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

This is called We Could Be Heroes. It’s a sitcom pilot script for either radio or TV, and it was written in around 2012.

Hello? Are you a superhero? No, no superheroes here, none at all. Who is this?

I’ll give you a clue.

Nothing.

I was the school keepy-uppy champion.

Not placing you.

Could lick my own elbows?

Still nothing.

Smell the sour milk.

Tony Morphitus. What was that smell?

The sour milk smell?

Yes. That was sour milk.

My mum thought it was full of friendly bacteria. They only seemed friendly.

I heard you’ve become a superhero. No.

Ben said you had. He messaged me on Facebook.

Well, he was lying.

You can’t fly.

Supposing I could fly, it does not make me a superhero. Do you know why? Because a hero makes some sort of personal sacrifice and faces danger on behalf of someone else. I don’t do good deeds. I don’t even recycle, which in Muswell Hill is worse than murder. You sound a bit annoyed. Because I am quite annoyed.

But you can fly. Actually fly just by waving your hands.

Tony, I’ve only been able to fly or ascend for two days and now I’m supposed to be a superhero.

But you can fly.

If you say that again, You’ll vaporize me? I can’t vaporize. Oh. Oh, that’s disappointed you, has it? Oh, I am so sorry, I can’t vaporize.

I can’t pretend I’m not a little disappointed.

This is so typical of Britain. I have a unique talent but you focus on the negative. I now know how Adele must feel.

Will you rescue me? I’m in peril.

How?

Um, hanging from a tall building.

Location?

Not sure yet.

Right, I’m going.

Morning, Fenton.

Oh, Izzy, I would prefer it if you didn’t come into the kitchen wearing only your underwear.

Why? I’m in non-visible mode.

Yes, but seeing a bra and knickers putting the kettle on is, well, it’s disconcerting and, if you must know, a little provocative.

A pair of empty knickers.

Well, they’re not empty, are they? They just look empty. Your bra, you know, it sort of shifts around in a manner that tells me that there’s something inside it. Two things, actually. Two, it’s a reminder that you are a woman, something that most of the time I’m completely oblivious to.

So, tell us more about this particular project. What was the original plan for this script?

Well, it was meant to be a sitcom for radio or TV, but I think I was going to start it on radio. And it was sort of asking the question, what would really happen if people actually got superpowers? You know, they wouldn’t necessarily go around helping people.

Did you actually send the script to anyone? How far did it get in the production process?

It got, I think it was actually commissioned, to my shame, as a script only. And I think in those days, and probably still now, you sort of get a first half fee. And I took the first half fee. And then I don’t think I ever sent the script in or I might have sent various versions. But in the end, I think it was me who wasn’t very happy with it. Couldn’t quite, I just didn’t quite believe in it enough.

Right.

To really want to commit to six episodes.

So it just sort of faded away.

Faded away, yes. But I did read it again recently because of this show. And I thought, actually, there is something in it. There is something in it. It kind of reminded me a little bit of the Big Bang Theory in its tone. And there were some good jokes. So, you know, it might be one of those that I look at again.

Right. Now, comedy is your specialty. It’s the genre you’re most known for. How did that come about? Were you always a big comedy fan?

I’ve never been a comedy fan, actually. I probably watched and listened to less comedy than probably the average person. I enjoy it, but I’m not a nerd about it. And there’s probably not a single series that I’ve watched all of. And I can’t quote you from my favorite shows at all.

So you’re never a fan of Monty Python or The Goons?

I liked Monty Python. I really liked it. Especially as a teenager, definitely. I suppose that was the one that I really, really did want to watch. But I’m not nerdy about comedy at all. I think quite a lot of people who work in comedy don’t watch that much of it.

But what about listening to it, considering you do an awful lot of work on the radio? Did you listen to The Goons?

I’m not quite that old, Laura. I’ve never heard The Goons. I tell you what did have a big effect on me is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. When that came on, and I do have a connection to that, I did think, wow, that’s the sort of thing I’d like to write one day.

Your connection obviously is your father was the voice of the book. Your father was Peter Jones. But when you first heard Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it was the comedy itself that you appreciated, was it?

The fact that my father did the voice gave it a personal connection, but I think I would have loved it anyway. And just the way radio can create pictures in the mind was a revelation to me.

Did you ever want to be a comedian yourself?

I think I sort of fantasized about it now and again, but it was the writing of it that drew me more than the performance aspect. The performance aspect absolutely terrified me. So I think given the choice, I think I’d rather have written for a comedian than be one myself. And when I do audience shows, like most producers, I go and do a little warm up. And yeah, I’ve got a sort of half a dozen jokes, but I don’t even enjoy that. I find that quite nerve wracking. And it’s probably the thing I least like about producing radio shows actually.

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

I can. This is a letter I wrote to the Evening Standard newspaper in 1972 when I was 12.

Dear Evening Standard, A friend of mine at summer camp said this to me. I like being at boarding school because at day school, once you’ve done your homework and watched TV, there’s not time to play. I thought this would be a good idea for your cartoonist. Please send check to William Jones, aged 12.

Now, that’s quite an unusual piece of writing. We don’t normally have something that’s quite that old in the show. But this wasn’t quite the earliest piece of writing that we could find. There was a poem you wrote when you were nine. Can you tell us about that?

This is just something that I found and probably claimed to have written. There was an old lady from Kent whose nose was remarkably bent. One day, they suppose, she followed her nose and nobody knows where she went. That was something I plagiarized and sent to, I think it was either Wizard or Chopper comic. And they published it and they sent me a Spirograph as a reward. Spirograph was a drawing game. I don’t know if you know what Spirograph is.

I remember, tragically, I do remember what Spirograph is.

Which I was quite pleased with.

Great toy.

That was my first sort of published work, albeit plagiarized.

And that was the first time you submitted your writing and got paid for it. Do you think that was what first gave you the idea of writing being a way to earn money for the future?

Yes. I think the Letter to the Evening Standard did because I got £2 for it.

Really?

And I actually looked up how much that would be worth now. It’s about £25. And my dad said that I should invest it in premium bonds. So, yes, I had a kind of the connection between writing and money was probably laid in those early days.

So what was your home life like? Were your parents very big personalities?

My father, despite being quite famous, was quite reserved. He didn’t have a lot of showbiz friends coming around. And it was kind of tricky because one year he’d be on television and be quite famous and people would go, oh, your dad’s on the telly. Then the next year, perhaps he wouldn’t be. And people say, well, why isn’t your dad on the telly anymore? He used to be famous. Sometimes he was in shows that I thought were kind of quite embarrassing because, as you know, as an actor, you don’t always get to choose what you’re in. You have to sort of do what pays the rent. So it would be in things that were a little bit embarrassing. In fact, there was one occasion, it was 1975. I was 15, and my dad took a role in a film called Confessions of a Pop Performer. Yeah, it’s a sort of X-rated carry-on. You imagine carry-on, but with bare naked bodies.

Yeah, was Robin Asquith in it by any chance?

Robin Asquith was in it, and my dad, I remember my dad got the script and said, Oh, this is terrible, but you know, it’s money. And he was so naive that he decided to take the whole family to the premiere. Bearing in mind, I was 15, my brother was 16, 17, my sister was about 19, my mother, very strong feminist, and we all sat there absolutely cringing at all these sex scenes. And my dad, and I completely believe him, just never realized how explicit it was going to be because in the script it says something like, and now a sexy romp or something like that, it didn’t go into any detail. So he never got the idea that it was going to be anything much more than a slightly cheekier carry on.

So what happened, what was it like when your dad got the job of the book in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? That must have been huge.

Well, that did change things a bit because I think I was about 16, 17 by that time. And I’d moved school and had a slightly more sophisticated friends. And we all listened to it. And that I really remember thinking, yeah, I’m really proud of that.

And then, of course, it went on to be a cult. So it sort of stuck around forever, really. It’s still very much.

Yeah, it went to TV. And the strange thing is that I think probably there were two series on radio and one on TV. And I think probably the whole thing for my dad was probably a day and a half’s work because it was just reading. But all the voiceover work that came off the back of it meant that we could live reasonably well for the next 10 years or so.

Let’s move on. Let’s hear about your next offcut, please. What is it?

This is the first chapter of The World’s Longest Suicide Note, an unpublished novel I wrote in 1996.

To the uncommitted browser in Smiths, you could do worse than buy this book. Someone has laid down their life so that you may read. And while you’re there, why don’t you ask them why they never know anything about the books? Ask them about this one. Have they even heard of it? Not a chance. Go to the Hove branch and ask them about Simone de Beauvoir, and they’ll tell you he doesn’t work there anymore. While you’re deciding, I have to contemplate two gargantuan tasks. First, achieving about 70,000 words of honest prose. That’s equivalent to 340 essays for Miss Fraser. And, I’ll be frank, I want to settle a few old scores. And this is the only way I know to do it. But I won’t gabble, I’ll be strictly chronological. I want this to be good. Or, at least, be minus. It’s the last thing I’ll ever do. If it stinks, then my whole life will have been for nothing. The other task ahead is self-imposed death. Not that it frightens me. At best, it’s a return to the state of pre-existence, and I don’t recall that period being particularly arduous. How to do it? I’ve dreamt that I phone a removal service, and then slip both wrists. I drain a little blood onto mum’s hand-made-in-eth-Nikistan rug, then climb into a large wooden crate. The removal man delivers it to the door of my headmaster, who was sometimes called Sod Simmons, but more often God. God hopes it’s a gift from a grateful ex-pupil who’s now a millionaire. Instead, he finds my naked body with some paper stuck to my genitals. A message is scrawled in blood. Ex-spell me now, you bastard! You did this! God collapses. Oh, how terrible I’ve been! Music swells. The end. Sadly, the dream never does end there. After some confusion, I’m sitting in a corner writing I must not commit suicide ten million times.

So, that was written in the voice of a 15-year-old, although you weren’t a teenager when you wrote it.

No.

What kind of a teenager were you? Were you very academic, for example?

Nothing could be further from the truth. There are sort of two phases, really, in my teenage life. Before I was 16, I lived in Hove because my mother decided to go to university when she was 50 and took me off to Sussex, because she went to Sussex University. And I was considered to be the thickest kid in the school. And people used to use the word bill or billish to mean stupid. So other kids would be insulted. If they said something stupid, people would say, oh, that’s so billish, you’re such a bill. I mean, it was part because I was sort of an undiagnosed dyslexic. They hadn’t really invented dyslexia then. But my story about my maths teacher, who was also my form teacher and also my careers advisor. So he knew me quite well. And we all had to go and see our careers advisor when we were 15. And I went along and he said, so Bill, what do you want to do with your life? And I said, well, I’d like to be a psychologist. And he said, you know that to be a psychologist, you have to go to university. And I said, yes, I would like to do that. He said, to do that, you will need to get A levels. And I said, well, I hope to get some A levels. He said, to get A levels, you need to stay on in sixth form. And to do that, you need to get at least three O levels. And I said, well, I’m going to really work hard and try and get three O levels. He said, OK, well, just wait there a minute. And he went to, he sorted through some index cards and he pulled out an index card and he gave it to me. And he said, that is the name of an address of a hairdressing salon in Brighton. And they are looking for a trainee hair washer. So I went from being possibly a psychologist to being a trainee hair washer in about 20 minutes. So yes, I wasn’t academic, I think, to answer your question.

You weren’t considered academic by the school, but obviously they were proved massively wrong because you did go to university, didn’t you?

I did. I went to Smiths and I found all these little books about how to pass O levels. And I just studied them for three weeks. And in fact, I got the best O level results in my form. And then I went to London and went to a different school, different group of people. And then it all changed. I mean, I had friends for the first time, really. And I was in a band and I met a girl and all that sort of thing. And that was all quite fun. And in fact, our band was quite successful. Madness supported us once.

Really?

Absolutely. About three times, I think. And it was, yeah, I would say that was a time that was, you know, what being a teenager should be, really.

Were you doing a lot of creating when you were at university? Had you started writing your comedies or bits of novels?

At uni, no, I think I just thought one day I’ll be a writer. It’s one of those things I now advise people to, you know, don’t think about doing it one day, just actually start. I wrote one play while I was at uni that never got on. I’m glad I couldn’t find that because I suspect it would have been really, really bad. And, yeah, I was into Ben Elton’s plays. He was quite an inspiration.

You were actually cast in his plays, you performed next to him. What was that like?

It was odd because, I mean, Ben Elton was an absolute force of nature at uni. He really was, I mean, everyone knew who he was and he was very prolific. He wrote about three or four plays a year and put them all on.

Did that intimidate you at all, comparing yourself to such a prolific writer?

No, because I think he was writing in such a different style. He was writing in that very, very broad, sort of almost Panto-esque style that I had no interest in writing, really.

Time for your next offcut. Tell us about this one.

This is a sketch I wrote for the TV series Alas, Smith and Jones in 1986.

In just a few moments, you will see, for the first time on any television set anywhere in the world, a talking giraffe. A giraffe who can converse, recite poetry and even sing popular tunes. At least, that is what he told us. So without more ado, please welcome Victor the Talking Giraffe. Victor?

Hello?

Ah, there you are.

When you’re ready.

Just a sec.

Any moment now, Victor will walk up this walkway here and take a seat. Great moment in the history of, well, the history of this kind of thing.

Won’t be long.

Well, you can hear it for yourselves. The uncannily human sound of Victor the Talking Giraffe.

Mel walks on dressed normally. Griff is flummoxed.

I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say it’s all done with hidden tape recorders.

What is?

The old vocalisations. Look, nothing hidden in the mouth. No wires attached or completely genuine. Go on, ask me anything you like. Surprise me, make it really hard.

I’m ready.

You throw it, I’ll catch it. All right.

Where’s the giraffe?

How many giraffes do you want?

One.

And one you have got. Tell you what, I’ll do a bit of Shakespeare.

You aren’t a giraffe.

How do you know?

Where’s the long neck, the four legs, the brown spots?

All right, all right, keep your tights on.

The big ears, the tail.

Those are all very conventional attitudes. Times are changing. Look, you’re not completely convinced.

Well, you did say talking giraffe.

And singing. The singing is important. I know. I’ll sing Bar Bar Black Sheep blindfolded. No joke. Cover my eyes and I’ll do the whole thing, start to finish. Can I give you a bit of advice? Go with it. This could make us.

You singing Bar Bar Black Sheep?

I’m the first giraffe to do it.

But you’re not.

I know. But they’re lapping it up. They are totally taken in. Powers of suggestion.

You mean they think you can sing?

They think I’m a…

He indicates the height for a giraffe.

Television is a very powerful medium. But you’ve got to believe.

But if they’ve all come to see a talking…

He also indicates the height for a giraffe.

They’re all going to be a bit disappointed with you.

All right. What do you suggest?

Well, I could just go and say, Ladies and gentlemen, we present the talking… The talking… Baldi.

No, no, no. That’s not the same. I mean, that is not going to make history.

The all talking, all singing. Baldi.

Let’s try it.

Ladies and gentlemen, the all talking, all singing. Baldi.

Medium shot to include a baby giraffe where Mel stood. It is silent.

So that was from the TV sketch show, Alas, Smith and Jones. Were you actually part of the writing team?

I wish I was, but no, that was a sketch I wrote and sent in to the producer, Jamie Ricks. And I’ve no idea whether I even got a response. But I sort of think it sort of almost works. I could do with a trim. I’d love to rewrite it now. But no, it never got on. I used to write a lot of sketches and send them in. I sent in sketches to Fry and Laurie as well. I got a very nice letter back from Stephen Fry himself saying, it’s awfully funny, but we tend to write our own material. And it was a very personal letter.

This is before you did loads of sketch writing, or is this the same time?

This is in my 20s when I spent most of my 20s as a reluctant actor. I got a job sort of by mistake. And I did a bit of acting, hoping to sort of land a big advert that would pay me a lot of money so that I could just write. And I was really trying to be a sort of playwright. I was trying to create shows, formats, anything I could really to get some kind of foothold in the world of television or entertainment. I kind of did anything I could, including writing a lot of sketches and sending them off to no avail.

Boom.

Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a brand new podcast like this. And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. But sketch writing is the genre that you’re possibly the most known for, with The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Spitting Image, Dead Ringers. How did you actually make that shift into being a sketch writer and producer from being an actor?

Well, I did, I suppose, have a lot of practice writing sketches that never got on. And eventually I got a job as a radio comedy producer. That was the start of my actual sort of career, as opposed to just doing bits and pieces. And after doing a show called Weekending, which was the topical show of the time.

As the producer?

As the producer. I still felt that I would prefer to be writing. And I created my own sketch show actually called Life, Death and Sex with Mike and Sue. Oh, yeah. In the sort of mid 90s, I think that was.

When The Mary Whitehouse Experience was early 90s, wasn’t it?

Yeah.

So that was, was that the big break for you?

The Mary Whitehouse Experience was the big break because I was actually asked to do it. I was asked just to create a show for Radio One and I could do anything I wanted. So I looked around at the kind of people who were writing, weekending and doing stand up. And I’d worked a bit with David Baddiel and Rob Newman. So I got Punts and Dennis. Also, I asked Joe Brand and I remember after we’d done a few shows, and we did really push our luck quite a few times with the sort of consent. I was summoned to the, I think it was like the board of directors or something at the BBC. I mean, really senior people, head of radio was there, David Hatch. And he was fuming.

Do you remember why? Do you remember what the sketch was about?

Yeah, it was, the game Shag or Die, and they referred to all kinds of religious figures and so on and…

Offense was caused?

Offense was caused. But only in the BBC, because I went along to this big meeting and David Hatch was furious. He said he’d never been more angry in his career. And all I can say in my defense is that we have had no complaints from the public. And it was true, because it was Radio 1, it was late night Radio 1. Young people were listening, they lapped it up.

Right next, off-cut please, Bill. What is this one?

This is an extract from something called Yes, Neenakanti Really Is On The Radio. It’s a pilot written for the radio in about 2012. Yeah, and you have to imagine that it’s a ventriloquist, I guess. Yes, and her monkey puppet.

Hello, I’m Neena. And I’m Monkey. Welcome to Yes, Neenakanti Really Is On The Radio. Not for long, though. Why would you say that? You have only got a show because the mime artist cancelled. Not true. Well, they know I’m not real. I should think so. They’re not stupid. Oh, not Radio 2, then. It’s Radio 4, the station for intelligent conversation. It’s never on in your house. Mind you, I suppose it’s quite fitting. What is? Ventriloquism and radio. Both dying arts. This is a kind of suicide pact. We’re both going down together. Actually, Monk, radio is going strong. I wish it was ITV. Why? Because I can say ITV. Why can’t you say BBC? Because you’re not a good enough ventriloquist. How dare you? Radio is for people who are too ugly for television. Wandering round Broadcasting House is like a horror show. I’m the sexiest one around and I’m made of polyester. That’s so rude. Can I still swear? No, definitely not. In fact, I’ve had you fitted with a bleeper. It’ll squeak if you try and swear. You did f**king what? You stupid f**k! Can I still say f**k? No, fiddlesticks. Now that we’re on radio, we should try to be more intellectual. An intellectual ventriloquist? That’s an oxymoron. What’s an oxymoron? Well, if you don’t know what it means, why did I say it? Let’s talk about the show. We’ve got lots to look forward to tonight. I’m going to hit the bar later. Can I get me some sweet broadcasting house totty? You’re a monkey. They’re not fussy. Later, Monkey and I will be joined by some other puppets, none of whom are as good as me.

So what happened to this project then?

This was a pilot script and then a pilot program. And Nina Conti, I thought, was brilliant. And Monkey was fantastic. But Radio 4 had never heard of Nina Conti. And they said, oh, we don’t think ventriloquism should be on the radio. I tried to explain that it had been on the radio very successfully in America, very successfully in Britain. And it doesn’t really matter that you can’t see the lips not moving. It’s about two characters.

And so never got commissioned.

It was actually broadcast as a pilot, but it never got a series.

Shame.

Yeah.

Now you like to work in close collaboration with certain individuals like Nina Conti. Also, you’ve done a lot of work with Marcus Brigstocke, who you worked with on The Late Show and I’ve Never Seen Star Wars. What’s the appeal of working with one person?

You can get your shows made. That is the main appeal. If you’ve got a star, it sort of helps to get the show on. But actually, I really enjoyed working with Marcus and Nina because they’re quite collaborative. And they’ll sort of take notes or they’ll take on board ideas. But that’s a little bit unusual. I think a lot of comedians are used to working on their own and they’re used to calling all the shots. It’s not surprising. You know, they’re on their own on stage. So they can be quite difficult to work with. So I haven’t worked with that many.

So how does the arrangement work? Do you sit and write in a room together or do you bring the ideas to them or do they bring them to you?

Well, with Nina, I remember when I first started working with her, I produced a show, a live show that she did and she took to Melbourne Comedy Festival in Edinburgh. And I think it was around that time that I said to her, have you ever tried improvising with Monkey? And she never had said I’ve never improvised anything. And I said, well, let’s try it. Let’s let’s just try it. So we went down to a local comedy club and she just started talking to the audience with Monkey and it really, really worked. And then I practiced with her sort of writing stories, improvising stories. So, you know, that was really, really collaborative. And with Marcus, yeah, I mean, you know, Marcus writes a lot himself. I mean, most of what Marcus performs, he kind of writes himself. And we had a team of writers as well. And I suppose it was more editing that I was doing.

Time for your next offcut. Can you tell us about this one, please?

This is a format document for a radio game show called Unforgettable. And I wrote it in 2015.

Unforgettable Memory Meets Mirth Unforgettable ostensibly tests memory and comprehension, but really it’s a chance to revel in amazing facts and to enjoy people trying to explain things they don’t quite understand, says the host.

What you’re about to witness is Unforgettable, the show that tests how much the brain can absorb and comprehend in just one day. My fellow Swats have had just 24 hours to learn about four fascinating topics completely new to them and to me. How much do they understand? How much can they recall? Who are the goldfish and who the elephants?

Unforgettable ostensibly tests memory and comprehension. The panellists will have been provided before the show with some really unforgettable stuff about four topics, say circus performers, human infancy, nanotechnology and viruses. And their memory and comprehension will be tested. It’s like Have I Got News For You, except instead of reading newspapers, they’ve read a few sheets of A4 and done some of their own probing and thinking. The panel don’t have to be geeks and the subjects aren’t all highbrow. Self-confessed ignoramus Kathy Burke trying to explain string theory will be funny, as will Miles Jupp trying to talk knowledgeably about the work of Coco Chanel or Ian Hislop on Eminem. Funny people with newly acquired knowledge or inspiring concepts or pop culture they aren’t down with, all trying to elucidate them, bluffing where necessary will be the engine of the show. There are bonus points for extra unforgettable facts or flights of fancy. There’s a geeky adjudicator who has really, really swatted up who can be brought in to clarify and assess. Is it a bit like QI? It’s similar territory. Just as Mock the Week, Have I Got News for You, News Quiz, etc. cover the same territory. Luckily that didn’t stop all those shows happening. Unforgettable will be tonally unique. The joy will come from people really excited about having just learnt some amazing, weird or shocking stuff. The excitement will be infectious. The facts will be astonishing. The comedy will be unforgettable.

So this got made as a pilot, didn’t it?

We made it. A very esteemed producer, David Tyler, produced it, and he also hosted it. And Marcus Brigstocke actually was one of the guests. And we all thought it went pretty well, but Radio 4 said they didn’t really understand it.

Oh.

So it never got a series.

Oh.

But it was broadcast.

Right. Right. I see. Now you’ve created a lot of different show formats that you have gone on to produce rather than just write the script for. Yeah. What is the appeal of creating a format rather than writing as such?

Well, I think I probably was influenced by the fact that my dad was in Just a Minute for, you know, since I was about six years old, I think. And he explained to me that the man, Ian Mester, who created Just a Minute, would always get his name on the end of the show and he would always get paid, even though the work he’d done, he’d done many, many years ago. So, this really stuck in my mind. So I thought, well, the thing to do surely is to think of an idea for a show and then it can run and run and run and you’ll still get paid. And it’s almost as if you’re working, but you’re not actually having to do the work. So yeah, that was part of the appeal. And I’ve always tried to think of ideas for shows.

Is the thinking up of the ideas easier or harder than writing, would you say? Is it more fun?

It’s not more fun. No, I think it’s quite hard. But I think what it is, is that it’s rare. You have to think of a lot of ideas before you think of one that actually works. I think that’s what it is. Most just aren’t even worth sending off, I think. But I have created, I suppose, I think it’s 11 or 12 shows that I’ve created one way or another.

Let’s move on to your next offcut. Can you tell us what this is, what it’s called?

This is from a novel I wrote in 2018. It’s called Sexless.

The train comes into King’s Cross, where she changes to the Metropolitan Line to Hammersmith. She takes the escalator to the main hall, and she looks to see if anyone is at the new hug hub. Two pairs in a clinch, two young men, and a young man with his arms wrapped tightly round a middle-aged woman. All have their eyes closed, their bodies firmly attached. The two men sway slightly. A smart woman of about forty sits alone on the bench. Laura approaches, aware that her intentions might be mistaken. The woman smiles and gets to her feet, her arms beginning to part. Actually, I only wanted to ask you something. The woman looks a little deeper into Laura’s eyes. I know you, don’t I? You may have seen me on Sarah Dean. Laura Dean. Oh, I’m so sorry. Don’t worry a bit. Laura is recognized a few times most days. Would it be okay if I asked you a couple of questions? I won’t attribute. Is this an interview? It’s just a little research, if that’s okay. Could I get a hug afterwards? said the woman with a chuckle. Why not? First question. Is this something you just enjoy or do you think you need it? The woman looked around the station as if the answer might be scrawled on a wall. I don’t know. There was something in her eyes that Laura had seen in crime victims. The sick, the bereaved, the abused. She would not press the point. Do you have a gender preference? Not at all. It’s not about sex, I know. And this isn’t something you would have contemplated before. Oh, no way, the woman laughed. It was an obvious point, really. Now that sex was no longer on anyone’s agenda, affection could be exchanged, mutually enjoyed, without the possibility of being groped or meeting with an unwelcome erection. It wasn’t that affection was more in demand, per se. It was just that the risks had been greatly lowered. A few more questions, and then Laura senses her interviewee is getting anxious about time. She thanks her and held out her arms. The woman steps forward. As they gently squeeze, Laura tries to monitor her feelings. Hairs from the woman’s head tickled her nose. She looked to see if commuters would glance at them, and they did, but only with casual interest. A balloon of anxiety expanded with each breath. Why couldn’t she just relax and enjoy? She felt for signs that it might be over. What was the etiquette here? One hugger gently taps the other’s back. Ah, she felt a light tap on her shoulder. Thank you, said Laura once they decoupled. Thank you. The woman bent to collect her bag, smiled and went on her way. Laura had no idea if the embrace had been successful.

So did you finish this novel?

No, I didn’t. I wrote about probably about 20,000 words of it. And, yeah, it’s about a world where all sexual desire, for some reason, disappears. And I don’t think I ever worked out quite why it’s disappeared. And I gave it to an editor friend and she referred to it as dystopian. I kind of thought, why has she assumed that it’s dystopian? Because I wanted to explore the positives of a world without sex. I think there could be a lot of great things about a world without sex. I mean, women could feel a lot safer for one thing. But one, it would be a novel without any sex, which possibly isn’t necessarily a seller. And I think people just expect if they get a book set sort of in the future where something has tampered with nature, that it’s got to be disastrous, hasn’t it?

Yeah, I suppose that is the received opinion.

You can’t say, well, we’ve tampered with nature and guess what? It’s all worked.

That’s true.

So that is the problem for the book. I mean, the one thing I could do, and if I do ever revisit it, I think I might do it as a series of short stories where for some people, the sexless world actually works and for some people, it doesn’t.

Why did you choose to write it as a novel rather than say a drama?

I think by that time, I’d written three novels and I just felt more comfortable writing a novel. The thing about a novel is that it is whatever happens, if you write a novel, it’s a complete work of art, whereas a script is not really a thing unless it’s actually made.

Obviously, writing a novel, for example, the whole process is a much less sociable affair. I understand that you obviously have complete control over it in one sense, but it is quite a lonely process, isn’t it? You have nobody else contributing to it until an editor comes along and says, change this, change that. But do you not miss the working with other people?

I do a little. I mean, when I have been writing novels, whenever I’m writing alone, I sort of want to sort of turn to a team of writers and say, well, what do you think? Is this working? And of course, they aren’t there. So in that sense, you know, it is. I also really like feedback. I’m not particularly confident about writing, so I always like to get, you know, get someone to give me an opinion.

So you show people your work as you’re writing it. You don’t wait till the end.

Yeah. In fact, I pay people to tell me it’s rubbish.

Right. So we’ve come to your final offcut. Can you tell us a little bit about that one, please?

This is called Support. It’s a pilot script for a TV series and it’s from 2014.

Scene 1. Interior. A meeting room in a church. Evening. Close up on David, a man who finds it hard to assert himself.

Hello. My name is David Bowie. No, not that one. Though I do sometimes think that planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do. Pause for titter.

Widen to reveal David is alone in the room. David has arranged some chairs in a semicircle.

Wish I was that David Bowie. Not that I want to be anyone else. Quite happy with who I am. Quite happy in my own skin. Thank you. Don’t ever state it, David, you’re here for them. Not you. Right, start again. Hello. My name is David Bowie. No, not that one. Although I do…

Tittle sequence. A group of mostly nervous looking people on the semicircle of chairs. David is trying to look in control.

Well, I think we’re all here. Mark, you don’t have a chair. There’s a fold up one there.

Is your name really David Bowie?

Yeah, I’m coming to that. No, it folds the other way. Mind your finger.

Ow!

I bought some fold up chairs at a car boot sale. I love a car boot.

I use them to sell retreads and alloys. Need any?

I think I’m all right, thanks. Cairn, isn’t it?

Anyone need any retreads or alloys?

Or the snide?

Who’s asking?

Or the knockoffs?

They’re at a knockdown price.

I could use some.

See me after. I’ll sort you out.

Right. Well, if we’re all…

I bought a lovely set of cushion covers as a car boots. Two quid.

Oh, you did well there.

Right. Is everyone settled, Mark?

Do you mind if I squeeze my chair in here?

Why don’t you sit there?

Got to think about odd numbers.

Well, don’t be daft. Sit there.

But if he doesn’t want to sit there…

He might have a syndrome.

I’d just rather sit on an even seat.

If you count round the other way, that’s seat number four.

He might have a thing about counting clockwise.

I don’t have a thing about counting clockwise.

Well sit there and have done with it.

Fine, I’ll stand.

Debbie.

I’m Sally. I’m Debbie.

Sorry, could you bring your chair in a bit?

What are the tissues for?

Oh, therefore if anyone gets a bit tearful, that can happen. It does with my other ones.

You’ve got other groups?

Divorced women, women with depression, single mothers, larger women and… women. I seem to enjoy them.

Well, we might as well start. My name is David Bowie. No, not that one.

Now this project looked like it might get made, didn’t it?

Well, we’ve got some names attached. We sent it to David Mitchell, who agreed to play the kind of main character, Mark, or no, David Bowie. I’m surprised I couldn’t remember that. And it was all set in one room. It’s really cheap. So I thought, you know, it might be in with a shout. But no, it was never made.

But it was written for television, though, wasn’t it? Not radio.

It was originally written for TV and then I did a radio version. I’m always sort of flitting between sort of radio and TV versions of things. So I never really know. Sometimes I write something and don’t even really know whether it’s a radio or TV.

Which do you prefer writing for? Which would you prefer it came out on, apart from obviously the money side?

I think my ideal is to write for radio first and then for it to move to TV, which quite a few of my shows have. That’s the ideal because you can you can really get things right on radio. And, you know, hopefully by the time it moves to TV, it’s sort of matured. What I really like is the process of radio because it’s so much quicker. I find producing particularly in TV really pretty boring. It’s very, very slow.

Right. Final question. Having revisited these old bits of writing, how do you feel about them? Are you surprised by anything you’ve heard?

I’m surprised not to have cringed more. I was expecting, I think I said at the beginning, to really hate everything that I heard. I found them not too difficult to listen to and in some cases I quite enjoyed them actually. That’s good. And the extract from Sexless, I thought sounded sort of quite cast, I thought, oh, I can just hear that on Radio 4.

Maybe that’s something you should be doing next. Finish that for Book of the Week.

Yes, we’d love to.

Oh, that’s good. So do you think you might have another stab at any of them?

I think I would possibly, I think I might look at Sexless again, the novel, and I might look at Support, the last two in fact. I might just consider whether I could give them another shot.

Well, we’re very glad to have helped. Bill Dare, thank you for opening your virtual bottom drawer and sharing your offcuts with us.

It has been enlightening. Thank you.

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

Thank you very much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hurry up!

It won’t recognise the stick.

Try another socket.

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

OK, but run!

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

Would you like the gold extended warranty?

What does that mean?

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

Well, it’s a present, so…

Just fill this for me.

Have you got a pen?

Look, can you hurry up?

I’m filling in the form for the warranty.

Well, don’t, it’s a rip-off.

How do you know?

Because I work for the government.

She takes his pen.

Now, fuck off!

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

Too late.

Well, this was a waste of money then.

Did you get a receipt?

We can take it back.

She didn’t.

Oh, for God’s sake!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s have your next off cut, please.

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

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

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

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

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

What?

Goodie or baddie, him?

Goodie.

Miranda eats more popcorn.

So is he the bloke that was shot?

No.

Who was shot then?

The bloke with the wife.

What wife? Who’s that?

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

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

What was it?

I don’t know.

It was on TV.

Beverly Hills Cop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2006.

What happened to that?

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

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

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

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

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

This was you and your writing partner, Andy Hurst.

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

But you know, it was.

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

Everybody’s slowly getting what it is.

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

Were there complaints, Jon Holmes?

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

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

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

Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha.

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

Headlines.

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

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

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

Boy 14 finds perv pop star in Pringles.

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

Children’s organ theft scandal continues.

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

Nice.

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

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

Yeah, yes.

What was the first programme you worked on?

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

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

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

And it’s been running for 20 years.

I know, yeah.

Are you a naturally very political person?

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

Right, so not really very political then?

Not really, no, just alcoholic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They pay for your trip.

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

You’re the obvious choice.

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

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

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

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

Oh no, what is it? What’s the matter?

What do you mean what’s the matter?

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

Then it’s just a splinter.

A splinter?

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

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

Well, I’m not really sure what to do.

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

All right, all right, hold on then.

He drops to his knees to pray.

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

Split screen, Odin answers.

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

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

Hmm, an arrow, you say?

I think so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m not sure he’s very hungry.

It’s a special meal. Just feed him.

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

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

Come on.

Don’t want to.

Longboat.

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

Okay, now what? You want me to what?

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

What’s he saying to do next?

Nothing.

He says we’re done.

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

He sticks his nose near Viking One’s tummy.

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

What?

Good point.

Hang on.

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

Righto.

He smells the wound again.

Smells of onions? What?

No, it doesn’t.

Definitely getting something herby. Onions and herby.

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

Ah, you smell like soup.

It’s probably just a splinter.

It’s actually making me feel quite peckish.

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

Anything?

Onions and herbs.

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

I’ll probably just need a plaster.

Sorry, mate. Doctor’s orders.

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

Anything else I can help you with today?

No, that’s it. Thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Were you responsible for the decapitations and the shit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing gets you actors, obviously.

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

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

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

Hi this is Laura again.

Thanks for listening to The Offcuts Drawer. If you enjoyed this episode, there are others on our website at offcutsdrawer.com. You can also find out more about the writers and actors on the show and there are links to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Please do subscribe, it’s free. And give us a five-star review if you can. Also share it on social media, tell your friends about it. All that sort of stuff helps the show to grow, find more listeners and ultimately enables us to make more episodes. Thanks for your support.