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 television writer, Chris Lang. Chris trained at RADA and worked for several years as an actor before turning his hand to writing. After several years working on established shows, including The Bill, Casualty, Soldier Soldier, and Hustle, he created his first original drama, The Glass, starring John Thor and Sarah Lancashire in 2001. He has since gone on to create many, often award-winning, British television series, not to mention a few French ones as well. There was Amnesia in 2004, Torn in 2007, A Mother’s Son in 2012, and two of his series, Innocent and also Dark Heart, started filming in 2018 with Innocent’s second series supposed to start filming this year. But it’s Unforgotten, the multi-award-winning detective drama that he writes and produces that he’s probably most well known for. And in fact, if Covid hadn’t struck, he probably wouldn’t have time for this interview as he’d be filming its fourth series. So British television’s loss is our gain. Chris Lang, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

Thank you very much for having me.

It’s a pleasure. So how did you find getting hold of your offcuts? Did you have them all to hand?

Well, the more recent stuff is all very to hand because it’s all on my computer. But of course, the older stuff was really only in hard copy or possibly on one of those very strange discs that you used to slot into an Amstrad 9512. But yeah, as good as lost effectively. So yeah, I went, I did literally go into a cupboard and pull out a dusty old box from the back of the cupboard, which I had not looked at for sort of 20 years. And there was a stack of old scripts that had actually never even been put onto any kind of computer, let alone an Amstrad.

Were they typed or handwritten?

Well, they were typed, but not by me because in the olden day, well, I obviously didn’t know how to type, but we used to write them longhand and then we send them off to a typist. Which seems just absolutely…

Oh, it’s the 1950s or something.

Exactly. It seems completely absurd that we didn’t. But in a way, you know, you would have had to have learned properly how to type because, you know, now when you type on a computer or a laptop, obviously you can make a billion mistakes and just correct them very easily. If you’re doing it on a typewriter, obviously you can’t really do that. So yeah, I used to send them off to a typist. I was the first person amongst my cohort to buy a computer. And I remember my flatmate walking in and it was an Amstrad 9512 and it would have been in about 1986 or 87. And he said, what’s that? And I said that it’s a computer and I’m going to, I’m from now on, I’m going to write on this. He said, that’s absolutely ridiculous. He said, you’ll never use that. You’ll never use it.

Oh, and presumably you did. And that’s, that’s how I did it.

I wrote 20 scripts of the bill on that computer. And I loved it at the Amstrad. It was the first computer at home computer that everyone got. And I loved it. It had some functions on it that I still miss to this very day, but it was always, I mean, it would always go wrong. And it would always suddenly, the worst thing you could ever see is dis-corrupted. And there was a bloke who lived in Roehampton called Dr. Dave, who, and you got his number from the exchange and marked, and you could send your disc to him in the post, and then he’d send it back, hopefully corrected and uncorrupted and your files would be there. And that happened to be a lot, you know, you’d be halfway right through a bill script, and suddenly the message would come up, file corrupted, and it was just as bad as it could get. And then you’d send it to Dr. Dave, and he would or he wouldn’t miraculously recover it.

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

So this is a scene from a TV drama that I wrote, first wrote in about 2016, although I came up with the idea many years before that, and it’s called Testament.

Interior office, JB White, London. A large lavatory with numerous cubicles, seemingly empty. But from one cubicle, the sound of someone being quietly and efficiently sick. And then the chain is flushed, the doors open and John walks out, white-faced, thin-lipped, walks to the sink, rinses his face, dries it with a paper towel, and then looks at himself, long and hard, shitting himself.

Help me out here, Dad.

A beat, dry mouth swallow, and then he looks at his watch. Cannot delay any longer, and he picks up his briefcase and walks out. Interior boardroom, Day. A boardroom in which wait maybe 15 serious-looking men and women, and then the door opens and John walks in.

Morning, everyone.

Morning, John.

And he walks to the end of the long table and is about to sit in the chair, just to the right of it, and then suddenly realises and moves on one to sit at the head. He gets his papers out of his briefcase, places them in front of him, takes a second to compose himself, and then…

So I’d like to start, if I may, by thanking everyone for their extremely kind messages. My father would have been deeply touched by the many lovely sentiments expressed in them. He really would.

A beat. He nods. And he nods. He takes a sip of water. A beat. And then finally…

And then he would have stuck all the cards in a drawer…

And he looks up to face the board, to look them in the eye.

Said that was all well and good.

Obviously a stock phrase of Jack’s. Get a few smiles round the table.

But we still have a company to run. Still have over 3000 employees to look after. Still have over 2 million customers to serve. And so… With that very much in mind, I’m going to ask you now to look at item number one on the agenda today. The vote… For myself to take over as CEO of JB White Ltd. With immediate effect. Nothing much to say on this. I believe it’s what my father would have wanted and it’s certainly what I believe as COO would be in the company’s best interests. And so I ask you to cast your vote now, please. All those in favour?

And he looks down at his agenda sheet now, even as he raises his own hand, not quite able to look at the room yet. But we watch the room. We watch as maybe half the hands go up immediately. And we watch as a few more go up, a little less certainly. And then we watch as the last few go up. But only, we sense, as the dalliers realise they might be isolated. Which is when John finally looks up, to now see every hand up and he nods. Tears coming to his eyes. So many emotions, pride, sadness and responsibility. But mostly fear.

So Testament. Tell us about Testament.

Well, I’d always been fascinated with the Testament part of it. I don’t know whether this is self-explanatory or not, comes from Last Will and Testament. And basically it’s a show about the fallout from the death of a fairly sort of patriarchal figure, a very successful self-made businessman and his will and what it says in it. And it’s obviously about a family, but it’s really a show about love and how that’s expressed or not in a will. And it’s just a subject that I’ve always been fascinated by. And it’s a good example of how an idea can sit with you for a very long time before you find the right expression for it. And this one, I guess I’d had the idea sometime in the sort of early noughties. And then I just, you know, I was busy doing other stuff. And then I finally created a document which seemed to land with a broadcaster and they commissioned a script. And then it sort of landed on the desks of various broadcasters just as succession. It came out in the States. And whilst it was very different, this is often the way in my business, this is obviously a very English story. And it was a story that wasn’t really about, you know, insanely wealthy family like they are in succession. It was a story that actually was multi-generational but also multi-class and very diverse family in many ways. So it felt much more sort of, it had a far broader spectrum of characters. But you know, as is often the way, if it feels to be touching a similar subject, you know, broadcasters are quite nervous of that. So yeah, it was frustrating, but it’s just very, very common for that to happen in certainly in drama. We’re all tending to sort of work in the same areas and things are in the ether and they tend to sort of occur to people often at the same time. And I don’t know how long Jesse Armstrong had had his idea for, I’m sure a very long time as well. But yeah, it was just bad timing. But one is often the benefit of good timing, so you can’t moan.

Oh, that’s true, yeah. And talking of bad timing, actually, obviously the pandemic, as I mentioned in the introduction, had disrupted the filming of two of your series.

Yeah, yeah.

The pandemic itself, is that a good thing for you in as much as has it inspired you to, or do you think it will inspire you to create drama around it at all?

No, definitely not. I mean, not that it hasn’t, I’m not saying it hasn’t inspired me, I just wouldn’t. Not just because I think there will be lots of people writing their pandemic drama, but I just don’t think people will be particularly deliriously happy to watch it. I think it’s been an incredibly difficult time for lots of people. And I think, obviously drama’s job is often to reflect the world around you, but I just feel people will need a break from that for a while, maybe in 10 years, people will wanna see their lockdown dramas. But my guess is they don’t really wanna come straight out of lockdown and the first sort of things that start feeding through in the next two or three years are lockdown dramas. But the other difficult issue is as you move forward, how much do you incorporate some sense of lockdown or the fact that a pandemic has happened in the stuff you write. I’m not saying write about a pandemic, but how much do you reflect it?

To acknowledge it’s happened.

How much do you acknowledge it? Yeah, I mean, we’re about to start shooting Innocent in Ireland and we hadn’t even started with Unforgotten, it’s slightly different in that we were 11 weeks into it. So there’s no question that you could even, you know, bow to it at all or make a nod to it at all. You couldn’t because you’ve got to be consistent with what went before. But Innocent, we’ve had discussions, you know, should people be walking into shops with face masks on or whatever? And, you know, we think not, but maybe for some of the reasons that I was saying before.

Interesting dilemma. Anyway, time for your next off cut. Tell us what this is, please.

Well, this, embarrassingly enough, is an extract. I don’t know why I gave you this, but I did. So this is an extract from my diary written in 1983, and I’m going to go read as I hear it read back to me now.

The evidence speaks for itself. Having just seen Paul over the weekend, I now see that friendship is familiarity. The review is now over, although it looks like there may be a chance of doing it at the Donmar warehouse in the autumn, which is pretty good. It’s very interesting reading this diary, as it chronicles its way through my life. When I wrote my last entry, I knew nothing of the future. When I wrote my first entry, it’s now so interesting to read with the hindsight I now have. It’s as if I can almost say hello to the future, as I know that I will read this entry in a couple of weeks and I will be a different person. Still no work, Marron Parg gone away, and by myself, literally, it seems. I’m writing this at 4.30 in the afternoon, which is about the time I go into one of my panics. I am V lonely and depressed at the moment about everything. It’s terrible to come to terms with one’s own situation and realize I can do nothing about it. I’ve been born with a meager talent for writing and I’m eking out a living by it, but I’m not brilliant at it. I’m not brilliant at being funny, just quite funny. I’m not V good looking, just fairly good looking, just quite a good drummer. I’d give anything to excel at just one thing. Mind you, everyone has faults and one could take the attitude that it’s talent, it’s comparative and that I’m lucky to score quite well at it. I’ve just read Oscar Wilde’s biography, an amazing man. I really admire his commitment to his ideals and his genius, both were so perfect. Perfection in anything is something that I would love to achieve. Yet there he was, a genius who had incredible talents, but still had a life dominated by incredible loneliness. It escapes no one.

It escapes neither me nor Oscar Wilde, you see?

Yeah, you had like two peas in the pod.

Two peas in a pod. I love that effortless segue from my meager talent into Oscar Wilde there.

Oh, no, you’re doing yourself down. That’s, I thought that was quite a considered diary entry, considering the self-indulgence of most, I don’t know, were you 20, 21, teenager?

Yeah, 21.

Right, they can be a lot more self-indulgent than that. I thought that wasn’t too bad.

Yes, it did make me go red as I heard it back. It was one thing reading it and it’s another thing hearing it read out loud. I mean, I was surprised when I read it by how low I clearly was at that time. That’s not my recollection, but unless I was playing up for the diary, which I don’t think I was, I obviously was struggling more than I thought. But some of the sentiments, apart from the fairly good looking, I still have today, but I’m completely at ease with them. I never thought I was brilliant at anything and I still don’t. I always knew I was a mediocre actor. I was definitely a mediocre drummer. That was very important to me at that point. I was definitely mediocre at comedy. Okay, but definitely not brilliant. But as a writer, I was okay then and then I worked very, very hard to get quite good. But I’m sort of, I’m happy with that, you know? I know I’ll never be a genius, I’ll never be brilliant, but I’m very happy with being very competent at it.

Fair enough, as you should be. This diary, did you, obviously writing it at 21, did you always keep a diary? Did you have a diary as a child, for example?

No, not at all. I started keeping it when I left home because I guess, you know, I thought it would be interesting and it’s what sort of arty people did. And I only kept it up for about a year. I guess I wasn’t interested enough in expressing my thoughts about my life. I wasn’t quite solipsistic enough, although that diary would suggest otherwise. And in the end, of course, your diary becomes your screenplays because that’s where you find out what you think about things as, who was it who said that? Auden or JB. Priestley or someone, how can I know what I think until I see what I write? And that’s how I often discover how I feel about something.

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

Right, so this is, yeah, this is a scene from my first ever screenplay that I co-wrote with Hugh Grant, who I was in repertory theatre with, my first ever job in Nottingham. We wrote this in 1984 and it’s called Rep.

Interior, stage door area, playhouse, day. Fire doors crash open and Porrick, wild-eyed and dripping sweat, approaches the stage doorkeeper, Derek, who sits in his cubbyhole.

Hello, sorry, do you know where the read-through for A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, please?

Yes, thanks.

Could you tell me where it is then, please?

Certainly, up the stairs and straight ahead of you.

Thanks very much.

He bolts. Interior, rehearsal room, playhouse, day. Tony is still at it.

So what I’m saying is for Christ’s sake, let’s not be in awe of Shakespeare or over-reverent with his text. If we just knock him about a bit and take the knocks, he’ll give us right back. Oh, he’s quite a bruiser, our Will. I think something extraordinary will come out of that tussle.

Smiling nods from the cast.

Politics! He’s got him. Let’s not get into that now. Brackets, I think he was certainly no Thatcherite. Close brackets.

Right on nods from the cast.

But enough of me. Let’s read it. Just before we start, let’s join hands and get a nice gentle hum going and take a moment to make our own magic ring, as it were, our space, where things will happen, things will grow, our enchanted circle.

The actors do as they are bid. Tony surveys them. His eyes alive with magic.

Terrific! Great! Hold that!

At this moment, the door swings open and Porrik enters with his suitcase and plastic bag. He is confronted by 15 humming actors, all staring at him with solemn faces. Close up on Porrik’s reaction. Tony motions Porrik to come in and sit down.

Hold what we have. This is Porrik Kerrigan, ladies and gentlemen, who’s playing flute. So, James, when you’re ready, no acting, no performances, just read it. Begin.

James is an old actor with a big voice and he’s buggered if he’s not going to give a performance.

Now, fair Hippolyta, our napula draws on apace. Four happy days bring in another moon, but oh me thinks how slow this old moon wanes.

Dissolve to interior, rehearsal room, playhouse, day. This sounded like it could be very entertaining. What was the plot line of this film?

It was sort of fairly autobiographical. We’d both gone for basically our first jobs to do six months of rep. I don’t even know if such a thing exists anymore. I’d left the Royal Academy and Hugh had just left Oxford University and we both got a six month contract to play as cast. And we arrived pretty much on the same day and became good friends. We were both the youngest members of the cast and the ones who had to do a bit of stage management and do the very small parts. And we did that for six months. And it was an eye opening experience for both of us and a challenge in many ways, because we both wanted to be doing much, much more. I think we both wanted to have much more control over the way our careers were going. And I think rep sort of came out of that. So it was the story of a person sort of bucking against that sort of system and the company and struggling to fit in, which we both did. I mean, we did fit in, but we struggled with it, both of us.

Was it a comedy, this screenplay?

Yeah, I’d say it probably was. Well, I mean, we thought probably it was very funny, but I hope it had some muscularity and it had something to say as well. It was a rite of passage film, really. It was about whether the antagonist or the protagonist could survive all sorts of vicissitudes, some of which were of his own making and his relationship with his girlfriend breaks down, which certainly happened to me during that six months away and struggling to know how you fit into a company, which both of us found really difficult and struggling to accept that you were the most junior member of the cast. Neither was particularly good with accepting, I guess, our place in the universe at that point. So it was a story about that. There were some tensions there because it was quite, I think it was quite healthy to sort of buck against things, but also we were young and overly confident and thought we were God’s gift. So a lot of it, if I read it now, I think we’d come across as arses. Ha ha ha.

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. Well, the reason I asked about the comedy was because obviously you two got together and formed Jockeys of Norfolk, which was a comedy group with Andy Taylor. Also the scene that we heard I thought was quite funny. So you obviously discovered that you had the same sense of humour. So tell us about Jockeys of Norfolk.

I mean, Rep was written after we’d sort of started to write proper comedy and was obviously our attempt to be more serious writers. But yeah, we started to write some sketches at Nottingham Playhouse because we were asked to contribute something to some sort of anniversary of Nottingham Playhouse. And we wrote this sketch about Robin Hood coming out as Mary. Now I still think that’s a great gag. And Robin Hood, obviously, a Nottingham character, you see. So it was, it had local relevance as well. And we performed it and we’re astonished that people really did laugh. And this sort of slightly mysterious art form that, you know, you’re a writer or a comedy writer suddenly felt quite tangible. And so we thought, well, let’s try and write a full show, which we did. We wrote an hour and a half long.

Wow, that’s a big leap from one sketch to an hour and a half.

Well, I think we wrote sort of maybe three sketches, four sketches for other sort of slightly smaller things. And then we went into a local art center and did, maybe it wasn’t an hour. Maybe at that point it was like 45 minutes. And then we brought it to London. It was a proper full length show. And then it went to the Edinburgh Festival and it did very well there. And then we did our own TV show and that was not good.

That was not good.

It was not good. No, we didn’t know really.

What was it, BBC? Give me more details here.

It wasn’t BBC. It was made by Tine Tees Television. And at a time in like 85 or something when shows didn’t necessarily all get shown on the network. And I think it’s broadcast was prefaced by the words, and for those of you still with us, the time now approaching 1:30 a.m., and it’s time for a sideways look at life. And when you’re prefaced by that, you know your show’s in trouble. And it only went out in Newcastle and you can find it somewhere, I think, on YouTube, but it’s probably somewhere there because of Hugh. But it’s not a great work of art.

Right, right.

And that kind of did for us. We kind of then, we sort of slightly splintered and I went off and carried on writing. And I don’t know what happened to Hugh.

Yeah, never heard of him again. Disappeared off the face of the earth. Let’s have another off cut now. Tell us about this one.

So, well, this is the script for a radio commercial for Brill Cream, which was written in about 1985, I believe.

Here we are in one of London’s gayest nightspots, home of Britain’s latest dance craze. It’s called The Shake and everybody’s doing it. Hang on a minute, not quite everybody. What’s up with you two? Not dancing?

No, I won’t dance with my boyfriend because The Shake makes his hair so untidy.

I like him to look smart at all times.

Yes, chum, we’re sorry, but your hair’s a mess. Why not try Brill Cream?

Brill Cream?

Yes, Brill Cream, because just a little dab of Brill Cream every time you comb keeps your hair supple and manageable wherever you go, whatever you do. How do you feel now, you two? No more worries about The Shake.

That’s right.

Well, you’re certainly a lucky fellow. She’s a smashing looking gal. Go on, kiss her, you clod. And remember, for the smart, modern look and healthy hair, it’s got to be Brill Cream.

Congratulations, that’s a fabulous piece of copywriting. I really enjoyed that. That’s a shame that didn’t get made.

They did record, we did record it. But the agency, or the client rather didn’t go for it. And I think they played it once in order to enter it into the awards ceremonies. But yeah, we loved writing those ads. They were the first ads I ever wrote. When we came down from Edinburgh, we got picked up by Mel Smith and Griffreys Jones’ company, which at that point was a radio commercial production company called Talkback.

When you say we, it’s you, Andy and Hugh.

Andy and Hugh, yeah. And they asked us to start writing for them and start writing radio ads, which Mel and Griff at that point were just about as successful as it was possible to be in the world of comedy. And it felt such a sort of honor and a big break for us. And we wrote many, many, many commercials for their company. That Talkback obviously went on to become a sort of beer moth of a production company in both drama, but primarily in comedy. Created The 11 O’Clock Show, first company, I think to put Ricky Gervais on the TV and Ali G. And had a long relationship with Steve Coogan. But they started out as a radio production company in a tiny little office in Carnaby Street. And we used to sit there and write radio ads for them, mostly the ones that were made or aired anyway.

You weren’t tempted by the huge amounts of money in advertising to stay in advertising.

Well, we were offered it and no, we weren’t, but it was tempting, yeah. Because we write all these ads for the big agencies of that time. And sometimes, their creative directors would say, guys, would you guys like a job here? And you know, when you were a young actor writer and you weren’t earning a fortune, it was quite tempting. But I knew, again, it was that thing. I didn’t want to work for anyone and be an employee. I wanted the freedom to work with who I wanted to work with. And to a degree, the freedom to tell someone to bugger off if you felt that your creative vision sounds pretentious, that that’s what it was, was being compromised and you weren’t going where you wanted to go.

And you knew at that point that you wanted to be a proper writer, a writer of hour-long dramas rather than 30-second comedy vignettes.

I certainly, yeah, I was beginning to realize that. I don’t know if I knew at that point, but I certainly knew that whilst I really, really enjoyed it, and it was actually very well paid, I knew that it wasn’t substantial enough for me. And I wrote a lot of much more ephemeral stuff and silly stuff for quite a few years more after that. But around about the early 90s, I made a very conscious decision to stop writing sort of sketches, which is what I was doing in commercials and to move into drama.

Another off cut now. Tell us what the next one is, please.

This is the first episode of a TV series written in 2014 called Ben and Jerry.

Interior Bar. Interior Rachel’s House. Interior Nina’s House. Night. And here is Jerry, still on her phone, waiting at a table, talking on Skype to Rachel and Nina, her dating committee. The clock on the wall saying 8.12.

My hair’s gone Brian May and my eyes look like scoops of Raspberry Ripple.

What am I doing here?

Jerry, sweetheart, you look annoyingly gorgeous.

And you’re there because unlike your idiot husband, there are good men out there.

I’m sure there are.

I just… I don’t have the bandwidth right now. I have too much unresolved crap in my life. Maybe when I’ve sorted that out, then I can…

And she turns to see Ben, sweaty, beardy, filthy, breathless, but handsome Ben.

Yes, hi. Sorry I’m late. Did you get my messages?

Oh, no, sorry.

I’ve been on the phone fairly solidly for the last half hour and I haven’t checked.

Oh, right. God, I’m really sorry. I was trying to get hold of you to say I couldn’t come.

Oh, right.

But obviously I didn’t hear back from you and I didn’t want to stand you up, so…

Oh. OK.

So…

I’m really, really sorry.

No, no, that’s…

A beat. And then she frowns.

So, sorry, I’m confused. Are you just here now to tell me you’re not staying or…?

Er, well, yes, basically.

Oh. Right. OK, fine.

And he can see this hurts. Why would it not?

I mean, I could stay for one drink if…

No, no, I wouldn’t want you to stay just because you felt you…

No, I mean, in the normal run of things, I would want to. I definitely would want to. And, you know, not coming was absolutely nothing to do with you. It was me and…

Right.

Just a very bad few days and…

I know those.

You’re very attractive and your profile was lovely and…

And then, thank fuck, his phone rings. Teo.

Sorry, I have to take this. It’s my au pair. Teo? Ollie has done big wet shit on carpet. Right. It’s Holly, Teo. The cat’s name is pronounced Holly.

I know how cat’s name is pronounced.

Oh, nice. His eight-year-old son is shot on the carpet.

I’ll be right back.

He clicks off, turns to her. She is hands up in surrender.

Well, nice to meet you.

What can I say?

And he could say a million things, but what is there?

Goodbye, though. Nice pic.

Which is so palpably inadequate that he just acknowledges this and then turns and goes, cursing himself as he does. And we stay on her. She picks up her wine and drains it and then fills the glass again.

So is this going to be a romance? Would it have had a happy ending, this series, Ben and Jerry?

Yeah. Oh, it’s absolutely. It was a romantic comedy, and it was totally autobiographical. Yeah, it was how I met my wife, my second wife. And it was the story of that, which was a difficult relationship because I was a widower, she was a divorcee, and we both had a lot of children. I had three and she had two. And Ben and Jerry was the story of two people who meet each other and who fall in love fairly quickly, but then have to navigate their way through myriad difficulties in order to end up being able to properly be with one another and in reality live with each other and bring two different families together. And that was my story. That was what happened to me in 2009. I met my wife on an internet dating site that my brother had put me on. And we kind of fell in love, but it was really hard to bring both of our families together. And we didn’t manage to do that until 2012 when we finally managed to move in and 2013 when we married. So that’s the happy ending. So it was a story of, you know, five series story about how you navigate that with, you know, I had lots of issues with my family and my late wife’s family and my kids obviously grieving their mother and my wife’s kids struggling with a divorce and all of those problems.

So not really the Brady Bunch at all?

Well, it became the Brady Bunch. And in fact, our wedding invite was a mock up of the Brady Bunch photo. So it became that, exactly that. But the story of Ben and Jerry is, you know, the story of it wasn’t, you know, it’s not a love story in the sense that we knew we loved each other. We fell in love. But it’s what do you do when there are all sorts of other things in the way of getting to be with one another. But yeah, we overcame them all. And here we are, seven, eight years later, very, very happy.

You have spoken before about your life being affected by the tragedy of your first wife’s death. Presumably that has influenced your writing quite a lot. It must have influenced everything, of course.

Yeah, it does. It changes everything about you and about how you see the world. In some ways, weirdly, and I always feel nervous saying this because it’s difficult to explain, but there are strange positives that come out of such an awful situation because you understand the kindness that exists in the world in a way that perhaps you didn’t understand it before. And there was tremendous kindness shown to me and my boys in the aftermath of their mum’s death. And also I think it really, really allows you to understand other people’s pain in a way that you didn’t before because you’ve experienced it and you’ve felt it. And I think that’s absolutely fed through into my writing. I think one of the nice things people often say about a show like Unforgotten is that it’s a compassionate show. And I’m not sure if I would have been able to write that show having not gone through something so traumatic and therefore being able to understand what real catastrophic pain felt like. And so, yes, an absolutely awful event, but of course there are always positive things that can come out of even the worst tragedy.

Moving on now, let’s have another off-cut. Can you tell us about this one?

This is from 2010 and it’s a pitch, a three-page pitch for a TV drama called What a Fucking Rotter.

On the 13th of November 1965, the word fuck, as uttered by Kenneth Tynan, was heard for the very first time on British television. It took eight long years for the word to be used again by Peregrine Worsethorn on the programme Nationwide. And then, on the 1st of December 1976, it was heard for the third, fourth and fifth time in a little under two minutes. What a Fucking Rotter tells the story around probably the most infamous television interview ever and how it finished the career of one man, created an icon of another and changed the face of British culture forever. In 1976, Bill Grundy was presenter on Today, a TV magazine show that had been running since the late 60s. With only three channels to choose from, Today was fairly essential early evening viewing for a huge section of the population. As such, Grundy and Eamonn Andrews, his co-host, occupied a place in the nation’s heart that would be hard to imagine today. Of the two, Grundy fancied himself as the more serious journalist. Wearing an almost permanent Paxman-esque expression of slight disdain, he gave off the air of being a man you didn’t mess with. He was a bruiser, a heavyweight. He was a national institution. On that December afternoon, he would have been entirely unconcerned when told by a researcher a few hours before transmission that the booked act, The Rock Group Queen, had had to cancel their appearance on the show. In a new boutique called Sex, at the fag end of the King’s Road, a young entrepreneur by the name of Malcolm McLaren took a phone call from their record label asking if the band he managed would be interested in publicising their act on the Today programme. The band were decidedly lukewarm about the idea, but McLaren persuaded them that it would be a good idea. Perhaps if the Thames TV researcher had done her job a little better, she might have paused before booking them. Aniki in the UK had been released only four days previously and the Pistols had all articulated their contempt for the old order. As Rotten later wryly remarked, affecting bewilderment at the public vitriol aimed in their direction, I don’t understand it. All we’re trying to do is destroy everything.

This sounds like it would have made an excellent drama. What happened to it? Why didn’t it go anywhere?

I don’t know. It actually got commissioned to a script, because this was done through my company, and I didn’t write the script, although I wrote that outline. And a brilliant script was written by a very brilliant writer called Chris Cole. And it just fell foul, I think, of… It was going to be made by BBC Three or Four just about six months before they lost funding. And it was a single film, and those are always hard to get away because the economics of it are really tricky. So, you know, it nearly got there, it nearly got there, and then it fell as often they do at the final hurdle. I think someone did, in the end, make it. It wasn’t off the back of my pitch, but I have a recollection of seeing in broadcast or something someone saying that they did make it. And it’s, you know, why wouldn’t you? It’s such a great story. And that moment was a seminal moment in popular culture and did change the face of music and many other art forms, I would say.

Now, we heard a reference in your diary, and you did mention it yourself, about the fact that you were a drummer and that music was important to you at that time in your life. I didn’t realise as I was just checking something else on the internet, your name popped up as the original drummer of The House Martins.

Yes, it does pop up as that. It’s sort of true. It’s sort of not true as well, though. I mean, in that diary, I say I met Paul for a drink. Oh, is that Paul?

Paul Heaton.

And it was Paul Heaton who I kind of grew up with. And also, I went to school with Fatboy Slim, Norman Cook. And we were all in a band together for a long time when we were kids from about the age of 15 or 16 to maybe 1920. And then just as they were morphing into The House Martins, I played a few demos for them. But I was either at Radar or about to leave and about to go and find my fortune as an actor in Nottingham. And they did say, come up to Hull, you know, we’re going to make a go of this. And I said, no, thanks, I’m going to become a film star. And yes, the rest is, as they say, history.

Oh, shame. What a shame. Mind you, it’s not like you’ve disappeared without a trace.

No. And I went to see Paul at the Royal Albert Hall about a year ago. And I sat next to his mum who I’d not seen for about 30 or 40 years. And it was just so brilliant to see my old mate, who we’d gigged together for years in tiny little village halls, filling out the Royal Albert Hall and everyone singing along to these songs that have been the soundtrack to all of our lives. And it was just a really special moment and to connect with his mum and then see him afterwards. And yeah, I was just so happy to make that connection again.

It’s time for your final off cut now. So tell us about this one, please.

Well, this was written about two weeks ago, in fact. And it’s from the first chapter of a novel that I am starting to write called You Can Run.

As she woke, her thoughts turned immediately back to Nimesh Singh. Nimesh had, like everyone, of course, been struggling for a very long time before he finally gave in. But there was something about his particular defeat that felt emblematic. He’d arrived in the UK in the late 90s to marry a girl from his village, who’d emigrated to Southend the year before. It was just after Labour had been elected, and for a brief period of time it had felt like things could only get better. Blair’s easy charm had seemed to suggest he was different, that here finally was a leader who was smart, emotionally articulate and ideologically driven enough to create a kinder, fairer, more equal society. Hard to say exactly when that particular flame first guttered, but certainly the myriad national and international disasters that had befallen the UK over the following two decades or so had all in some way contributed to where we were now, with each new catastrophe slightly stumbling over the last, hurrying it out of the way so they could get their punch in, their roundhouse kick to the nation’s head. Nimesh’s face had rather exemplified that, both literally and metaphorically, a yellowing bruise on his left cheek, evidencing the vicious blow he’d received a few days before. A local teenager had tried to steal a bottle of vodka from his shop, and when Nimesh had confronted him, he had had the gall to look affronted. As Nimesh then tried to remove the youth from the premises, the lad had flailed a messy fist that had perhaps been unlucky to land, but land it nevertheless did. That night the boy returned with his friends and painted, Pack his go home, across his shop window. Joe was almost as depressed by the redundant apostrophe as she was that a phrase as dated as Frey Bentos Pies should have reared its very ugly head again. It was ignorance of course. It was always ignorance. She did not believe in innate badness and she knew that the kids who wrote it needed her help and understanding just as much as Nimesh and Kuldip did. But sometimes, and yesterday was one such day, that spirit was hard to find because the look on Nimesh’s face was one of betrayal.

So would this be your first novel then?

Yeah, yeah, and it was written, or I started writing it in lockdown. And I hadn’t massively had a yearning to write a novel before, but I had this screenplay on which this was based, which very, very nearly got made last year at the BBC. It was called Flotsam. And then it fell again at the final hurdle. That’s a theme, obviously. And I just didn’t want to waste it. And I really liked the idea. And it was a sort of State of the Nation piece, which had, I thought, a really hooky premise based on a true story that I’d read about a man a few years ago who was running along an Essex beach and came across a bunch of rucksacks washed up on the beach, and they were full of cocaine. And he handed them in to the police, of course, as you should. And when I read it, I thought, wow, I bet there’s quite a few people who wouldn’t, who wouldn’t do that. And that just set off in my mind a story, which is a story about where we are now as a nation. And it taps into some of the themes that Unforgotten tries to address, how we’ve become a slightly compassionless society and how we’ve slightly lost our moral compass, I think, and lost our way and how we need to rediscover that. And it’s a story about a woman who attempts to do that. But I’m only five chapters in and it’s such a different discipline, but really, really an interesting exercise writing in a different way.

Are you very much enjoying it?

I really, really am enjoying it because when you write a screenplay, it’s all about subtext. It’s what you don’t say for the characters, the dialogue you don’t give them that tells the story. Whereas, of course, when you write a novel, it’s all about the interiority of a character. You are literally the only person who can tell the reader what someone is thinking, and you’re allowed to as well. Whereas, it’s the opposite in screenplay. So it was flexing very, very different muscles, and I found that incredibly liberating and refreshing in a way that I was very surprised about, actually. So yeah, that’s an ongoing project. Probably, of course, every single writer in the UK started to write a novel during lockdown. So publishers and agents will be being inundated with them even as we speak, and they’ll all be drivel, including mine.

But yours is actually speculative. You haven’t actually shown it to anyone. Have we got a scoop, basically?

You’ve got a bit of a scoop. I’ve sent the first five chapters to a couple of agents, and we’ll see how we go there. Certainly not going to any publishers. But yeah, and as I say, it may be that they say, do you know what, Chris, you stick with the screenwriting.

I bet they don’t. I bet they don’t. How would you feel about it if they say, yep, we like this, you are now a novelist. What do you think you would choose if you had to, because obviously you only have a certain amount of time in the day, would you choose to write novels or produce and write screenplays?

Well, I think they are for different times of your life. I got a busy few months coming up. Both my shows are going back into production and there’s a couple of other things that might go into production. So if they did say, yeah, we love it and we want it by Christmas or whatever, I’d say, well, I think you might have to wait a little longer. But I don’t want to be working in TV when I’m 70. It’s a really, really tough industry to prevail in and you have to have huge amounts of fight in you. And when you’ve been doing it, as long as I have 25, 30 years, that becomes less attractive as you get a bit older. I’ve done that and I’ve loved it, but there will come a point I know where I’ve had enough of it. And at that point, I think, yeah, the idea of writing novels would appeal.

Well, final question. Having listened to these offcuts, is there anything you’ve noticed that you didn’t realize before, anything that surprised you at all? You could say no, that’s a perfectly valid answer, by the way.

Well, I guess listening to the diary and hearing it read out loud was, it did feel, God, like a little insight to my soul 37 years ago. There’s something different about hearing someone else read your words and made me feel a little sad, I suppose, for someone obviously struggling a little bit. But it all turned out okay in the end. Without wanting to sound smug, God, does that sound smug?

No, it doesn’t sound smug. You’re allowed to be pleased about the way your life turned out. Right, we’ve come to the end of the show. Chris, how was it for you?

It was lovely. It was delightful. Thank you. And thank you very much to your actors who are bringing those things to life, because actually, of course, none of those pieces had I ever heard spoken out loud in that way. And a read through when you go into production on a show is a really special moment, because all of these characters that you’ve only heard in your head and have existed only on a page on your computer suddenly start coming to life. So just to hear those little snippets brought to life by your actors was really a lovely thing to hear. So thank you.

Oh, absolutely our pleasure. Well, Chris Lang, it’s been an honour and a privilege. Best of luck with your upcoming filming. Hope it all gets back on track all right. And thank you so much for sharing the contents of your offcuts drawer with us.

Thanks very much, Laura.

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

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer. Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity pave the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is author Mark Billingham. Mark worked as an actor, a TV writer, and a stand-up comedian before his first crime novel, Sleepyhead, was published in 2001, becoming an instant bestseller in the UK. His subsequent series of novels featuring London-based detective Tom Thorne now totals 16 books with the 17th Cry Baby due out imminently. Mark is also the author of the standalone thrillers In The Dark, Rush Of Blood, and Die Of Shame. His television writing includes several children’s series that he also starred in, Harry’s Mad, What’s That Noise, Made Marion and Her Merry Men, and Night School, and a series based on the Thorne novels in 2010 starring David Morrissey as Tom Thorne. Words like master and masterpiece are regularly flung about in his reviews, although possibly not quite as many times as the word grizzly. Mark Billingham, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

Hello, thank you for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ooh, that’s a bit snarky.

Oh dear.

Not a fan of That’s Life, hey?

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

I’d watch it.

Yeah.

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

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

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

Why is it the best?

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

And he’s just this working stiff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, that would sound awful.

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

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

It was basic. No, completely basic.

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

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

There was a crossover.

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

No, there’s nothing embarrassing about it.

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

Yes. Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a podcast like this. And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. I was going to say that Stand Up influenced your novel writing because I read somewhere, well, obviously, Tom Thorne is named after fellow Stand Up, Paul Thorne, apparently. Does he know that?

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

Do they know that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Half of the people are dead.

Yes, I know.

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

Tony Banks.

On the back of…

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

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

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

Well, they would make it nowadays.

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

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

Yeah, I might have more of a chance now.

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

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

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

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

So what exactly happened?

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

Did they ever get caught?

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

Oh, really?

It was a strange little detail, but they had…

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

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

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

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

God, how dramatic and interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So tell us about this article, then.

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

What did it say?

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

You’ve managed to actually interview these people.

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

He was Polish or the people he killed were Polish?

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

He didn’t like Poles.

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

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

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

Should we be publicising this?

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

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

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

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

So what do you say to that?

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

I thought it worked quite well as a poem.

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

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

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

Great name. Great name.

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

What about original material?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

That bad?

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

That sounds wonderful. Nervous laughter there.

Yeah, very nervous.

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

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

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Mark Billingham. The Offcuts were performed by Emma Clarke, Chris Pavlo, Keith Wickham and Chris Kent, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

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 actress Arabella Weir. Arabella first came to public attention in the 1990s as a member of the cult sketch comedy, The Fast Show, where her memorable characters included Insecure Woman, whose catchphrase, Does My Bum Look Big In This, struck a particular chord with the British public. Since then, she has rarely been out of the spotlight. A novel of the same name became a bestseller and spawned two further novels. She’s also written a trilogy for teenagers and an autobiography called The Real Me Is Thin. She wrote and starred in the TV series Posh Nosh, which paired her with Richard E. Grant, and she is currently playing Beth in the BBC TV comedy Two Doors Down. She’s also been performing her live one-woman show Does My Mum Loom Big In This? around the UK, and once lockdown is lifted, she will hopefully be back out on the road again with it later this year. Arabella Weir, welcome to The Offcut Straw.

Welcome. Isn’t it embarrassing listening to your own lead-in?

Well, I wanted to clear it with you in case I said something that was terribly, terribly incorrect.

No, it all sounds pretty accurate.

Excellent. Well, my first question is usually and will be this time, what does your Offcut Straw look like? What’s the equivalent? Are you very good at keeping hold of your old writing material?

I’m very bad at keeping hold of it on my computer because I’m a bit sort of OCD and I’m constantly deleting emails and thinking, oh, I better delete that file. So I’m very lucky in that my agent has a copy of everything. And as I discovered when you asked me to do this, I have kept a box in my office with a copy of each script, including a script I didn’t write, but someone told me was worth a lot of money, a Doctor Who script of the episode of Doctor Who that I was in. And so, no, I’m not very good because once something has been rejected or kind of not flown, you know, namely no one’s bought it, you kind of, it feels to me like it’s got a slightly bad smell. And then you go, oh, don’t be the wanker that hangs on to the kind of, has anyone seen my hot pants that I looked so bad in? You feel like, you know, when people go, no, they were terrible. Don’t ever wear those hot pants again. So it feels a bit like you’re going, oh, I’m going to trot out that script nobody liked. And so, yes, in fact, there were many more. I could have put, you know, your way, except for they have been deleted forever and there are no copies of them. And I also do think, as you will know better than most, comedy is such a kind of of the moment thing. That doesn’t mean that comedy isn’t funny if you were, you know, Buster Keaton 100 years on or anything. It just means that some stuff you just think, oh, don’t, don’t trot that out again. Anyway.

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

This is called Does My Bum Look Big In This? And it’s a theatre play written around 2001.

Jacqueline Plus casts a limbering up on stage. Jacqueline is at the back trying not to get noticed. We hear Gillian the Nazi’s harsh disembodied voice.

Okay, who hasn’t been here before?

All hands shoot up except Jacqueline’s. She shrinks knowing that she is going to be asked to demonstrate an exercise.

Right, Jacqueline, can you step to the front and show everyone the star jump?

Jacqueline doesn’t respond, studies her feet.

Jacqueline, Jacqueline?

Sorry, what?

Can you come to the front and show us the star jump?

I’m not…

Come on, don’t be shy. We’re all dying to see you.

Jacqueline goes to the front, painfully, reluctantly.

Okay, everyone, just copy Jacqueline.

All right, on the count of three, one, two, three and…

Cue music. Jacqueline star jumps. The others copy her. They start very ragged, but by the fifth or sixth jump are in time with her.

And rest.

Jacqueline talks to the audience.

Don’t worry. I know why she did that. I know what everyone was dying to see. Watch it again.

Okay, everyone, just copy Jacqueline. All right, on the count of three, one, two, three and…

Cue music. Jacqueline does her star jumps, but nobody moves. They’re transfixed by Jacqueline’s bum. Their eyes are glued to it.

It’s my bum, isn’t it? Don’t lie to me. They’re watching my bum. They’re watching that new shelf of fat above my buttocks and below my waist. They’re watching it ooze.

The cast does a synchronized oozing movement.

They’re watching it sink down and spread all over my bum.

The cast does a synchronized sinking and spreading.

I was waving down a taxi the other day.

The cast does synchronized waving down of a taxi.

And I got in the cab, and I sat down, and the shelf of fat on my upper arm was still shuddering.

The cast does synchronized shuddering with their whole bodies.

When will it end?

And rest.

See you next week.

While the rest of the cast disappear, two of them, mother and father, advance towards Jacqueline and stand over her.

It’s not my fault, of course. I had the worst possible start in life. I had a mother and a father.

So, a theatre play. Tell us more about that.

Yes.

I’m a little bit stunned by that. Is that not how you imagined it was going to be?

No, no, no, no, no. I actually found that bit of funny. I was reminded, I haven’t, obviously, I am not a complete narcissist. So, I’m not in the habit of rereading my books or work of any description. So, I’d forgotten quite how sort of neurotic she was, Jacqueline. The book was so successful that I was approached by, I mean, you know, this happens to everybody who writes anything or produces anything that’s very successful. I was approached by producers sort of saying, can you turn this into a play? And with my co-writer, John Cantor, who I wrote Posh Nosh with, we had a sort of stab at it, to him, I have to say a bit more than me. And it never got off the ground. And I’m not sure why. I think, I just had two children in very quick succession. And I think, as is the way with all these things, in my view in life is that you’ve got to have a good idea that has to stand up rather than say, here’s an idea and we’re going to get, I don’t know, Reese Witherspoon to do it. And the moment you go, oh, Reese Witherspoon’s not doing it, they go, oh, it’s a shit idea. Does it mean, so like anything with Reese Witherspoon and it is going to fly because no one’s going to get around the fact that you’ve got Reese Witherspoon in it. Now, before anybody gets excited, I’m not comparing myself to Reese Witherspoon, but the promoters were absolutely saying, you have to be in it and that involved a UK tour. So if memory serves me right, it was, they kind of went, yeah, we’ll do this and that’ll be you touring, you know, in a way that would have made them, I’m sure it would have made me money as well, but let’s not kid ourselves about who was going to make the most money. And that would have been me touring the UK, probably for something like 20 weeks. And I just had two children and it didn’t really fly, but and also, yes, John and I, because I’m, you know, I can’t sort of dismiss his contribution. We were very, what I’ve just said, we both hold to the idea that an idea has to work, not, oh, it works because it’s Arabella doing it. Do you know what I mean? So we both wanted it to be a play that would have flown, had an actress in Australia be doing it.

With the first recast.

Well, yeah, exactly, because otherwise how do you know how good it is if you’re just going, oh, just put anybody from EastEnders in it and it will work. We all know that you can sell a ticket with somebody off EastEnders reading the phone book if they’re currently in EastEnders. And that was very much not what I wanted to do. So anyway, it didn’t sort of die a death more than slightly sort of wilt. But those actors did a good job. That made me laugh that bit. You probably couldn’t say Nazi now, but still.

Let’s go back a little bit further because obviously the title Does My Bum Look Big In This? for the play came from the character’s catchphrase from The Fast Show, which is the character you created, isn’t it? When you first started doing the show, were you brought in as a writer at the beginning or were you the actor and you sort of gradually developed bits and pieces?

More like the latter. What actually happened is I knew Charlie Hickson and Paul Whitehouse from working with Harry on Harry Enfield Show, where they were sort of writers and in Paul’s case, performers, but not, I mean, Charlie’d be in the odd sketch. And then they were talking about this show that they’d had commissioned without Harry, I mean, on their own. And they kind of went, oh, you’re funny. Why don’t you come and do bits in it? But I certainly, it was all very casual. There was certainly no kind of, right, here’s your writing contract and, you know, you will be a writer performer. It was much less kind of formal than that. And then what happened is we did the first series and I was a bit more than, but sort of pretty much girl in sketch that you and I will be very familiar with. Woman in sketch or in the, I’m old enough for it, used to say mum in sketch or, you know, Harry’s girlfriend in sketch. And then we were just wrapping up doing The Fast Show and, you know, the end of the first series. And then we had these days, we had some sort of film left in the camera quite literally. So we decided to kind of do some mucking about and film it. And Paul and Charlie went, why don’t you do someone who’s like you? And I said, what do you mean like me? And they went, oh, you know, always going on about the size of her ass and everything. And I went, I don’t do that. And they went, yeah, you do. So I started sort of mucking about and did, does my bum look big in this? Literally. And if you watch the first series, if you’re a real sort of avid fan, you’ll see me do a tiny bit of it at the end of the first series. And then I applied myself. I remember thinking, you’ve got to stop mucking about. This is your big chance. So I did, I wrote proper sketches for the, you know, with properly written and typed up and, you know, conceived and presented them. And then we filmed them for the second series. And then I remember thinking, nobody in the world is going to get this character because I’m the only person in the world who thinks her whole life would be better if she had a small ass. And then the rest is history, I’m glad to say. But yeah, that’s how she all came about. And then after the third series, a publisher approached me and said, do you think you could write a novel in her voice? And I said, no. And then I thought, oh, God, no, I can’t do that because I’m more gladiatorial now. But in the old days, I used to be more kind of, don’t ask me to do anything because I won’t be able to do it. Because that was my modus operandi at school. You know, it was, set me a task and I will show you how badly I can do this. And that was kind of where I made a name for myself at school. So I’m afraid to say I would approach my career a bit like that as well. So when this publisher said, do you think you can write a book in her voice? I went, absolutely not. How could I write an entire book in that voice? And then a friend of mine actually said, you know, you always do this. You know, you always say, I’m not accepting that challenge. I bet you could write. And to be fair to him, the publisher also was very dogged about it. And then I thought, all right, well, I’ll see if I can do it. And I was able to. So I was very glad I did it.

I am very surprised that you say that your modus operandi was not doing things because Insecure Woman wasn’t the only character you created. There were at least two others that I can think of that were particularly strong, memorable. I’m guessing you were absolutely responsible for creating them.

Oh, yeah, yeah, no. All the characters you see me do where I’m the kind of central character, they’re all me. No offense. You know, the South African makeup lady and the one that is sadly still very apposite is girl who boys can’t hear. They were all mine. No, that’s because that’s what I’m saying. It was suddenly during The Fast Show, I thought don’t coast anymore. This is your chance and this is what you want to do more than anything in the world. So seize the opportunity. Don’t do a kind of, well, you know, here are a couple of sketches. You know, don’t self-sabotage, as I’ve always done. Seize the opportunity and do your best.

Well done for being able to do that. Thank you. Loads of people, they understand that they should do that and then they don’t and they spend their whole lives going, you know what, I should have done, but you literally did the thing.

Well, quite a lot of therapy, quite a lot of therapy and quite a lot of, well, a lot of encouragement from Paul and Charlie, but basically thinking, I think I’d been around for quite a long time by then. I’ve certainly been working for about, I don’t know, certainly over 10, 12 years by then and thinking, you will be a sort of jobbing actor. I didn’t know The Fast Show was going to be so successful, but I did know that I had a chance ahead of me. So here, so I thought, take this chance because you will look back on this and go, oh yeah, well, I was a bit pissed or I didn’t bother or yeah, it was a few sketches, but I was out having fun. Yes.

Right. Well, anyway, let’s move on to your next off cut now. So tell us what this one is.

This is called English Life and it is a pilot for a radio script I wrote in, do you know, I don’t know, but let’s say sort of 10-ish years ago.

So around 2010, 2010, 2009.

2010, 2009. Who says 2009? Me.

I don’t know.

Me, I just did.

Rafe, you’ve been looking after the animals on our estate for over two years.

That’s right. It’s been a real privilege to work with these creatures.

Tell us about our wild boar.

Oh, they’re amazing. They’re truly amazing. I mean, a wild boar sow breeds once a year and the litter is born in the spring, which is just the most beautiful time to be born.

Oh yes, with the lambs and falling in love, etc.

That’s right. They mature at around 18 months, which is something I really admire because I don’t think I really matured till I was 29 and gave up drinking.

Oh, here we go.

Now, wild boar are a bit like pigs, but they’re not pigs, are they? What would happen if you crossed a boar with a pig?

That’s a really interesting question.

You’d get a big.

Right. I didn’t know they were called that.

What do you give our boar?

Well, apart from, you know, a dose of worm control, I never give any of my animals any kind of drugs. I’ve seen what they do to people. Drugs make you think you’re the only person in the world.

Well, that’s right.

And you wouldn’t want a wild boar to think it was the only wild boar in the world because then it wouldn’t breed, would it? And then it would be the only wild boar in the world, personally.

That’s right. It wouldn’t breed and it wouldn’t grow. That’s the thing about drugs. They stop you growing as a boar or as a person.

God, how depressing can you get?

Drugs are depressing. You’re right. I’ve learnt so much from these creatures and the way they live their lives. One of the things that’s so inspiring is they live their whole life outdoors.

Oh, yes. That’s very good for the complexion, isn’t it? So tell us what you give them to eat.

Well, they forage in the woodland for whatever.

But it’s organic whatever, isn’t it?

And we supplement it with root crops like potatoes and swedes.

Rafe, are you saying you’d like to live your entire life outdoors?

I think it would be an amazing opportunity, yes, but I don’t know if I’d have the inner strength.

Oh, to be honest with you, I’d miss the shops personally.

Well, if you do go native, you’re not pooing all over my estate.

Oh, don’t worry. I’d pick it up. I’d want to. That’s how you keep in touch with yourself.

I don’t want you to pick it up, damn it.

I want you to catch it before it lands. Rafe, obviously you’re coming to our Father’s Day supper.

Tell us what Father’s Day means to you.

Our son Orlando’s the most amazing achievement of my life. And it’s all because I gave up drinking.

Eh?

As soon as I gave up drinking, I was rewarded with a new life. Well, two new lives really, my own and my son’s.

Oh, that’s lovely. I suppose that’s because when you’re drinking, your sperm get a little bit tiddly too, don’t they?

What?

Yes, so they can’t find their way, they keep falling over, lose their little keys to their little front door.

Are you on drugs?

That’s exactly how it feels, Minty.

Yeah. I’m glad you laughed at the same bit, my favourite bit in it as well. Which bit? The bit about the pooing. I chose that bit because those two lines, you’re not pooing on my estate and you’ve got to catch, I want you to catch it before it lands, made me laugh. So I thought I’m using that bit. Anyway, just I’m glad you laughed at that. Anyway, so tell us about this. What was the story of this particular piece of work?

That was a script I wrote with John Cantor because John Cantor and I wrote, and I have to say it was more fun than I’ve ever had in my professional life. We wrote Posh Nosh together and Posh Nosh was my idea. I was watching, I’ve never ever watched cooking shows. I cannot understand why anybody in the world would watch cooking shows. I mean, just cook, don’t fucking watch a show. Anyway, I was watching this and I’d never seen Delia Smith before. Oops, I’m not supposed to say her name. And I just thought, bloody hell, that woman’s been lobotomized. And I thought she was so untv-ish, but it did what cooking shows always make me do, which is think, oh, bloody hell, she can just knock up a risotto in five minutes, whereas for me, it’s hours of sweat and labour, and I never have sort of bataga and all these, you know, recherche things in my fridge. Anyway, so we wrote Posh Nosh, and then we wanted to extend its life.

And Posh Nosh was a tv series, wasn’t it?

It was a tv series that I did with Richard E. Grant, and it was a spoof cookery show. And, oh my god, it was just bliss to do. And Richard played, it was sort of a little bit Fanny and Johnny Craddock. And one of the things we decided was that Richard’s character would be pissed all the time. So then we tried to make it into a radio show, which is, I know, not the normal way around, but we couldn’t get it, we were very bizarrely, we didn’t get it recommissioned on BBC. So we then tried to make it into a radio show, which everyone thought was going to be a slam dunk because it was Richard E. Grant and me, and with Joanna Lumley doing the eye dense, you know, the kind of ads for the posh nosh, in this case, English life products. And it was just when people started, you know, having bespoke picnic baskets and all that yummy mummy, you know, garden trading, cocks and cocks, all those, the white company, all those sort of lifestyle things, the whole kind of, you know, your whole lifestyle will be sort of beige and white. And so we were going to, the whole idea was that we’d create this thing called English Life. And then that was the script for it. And I still think it’s very funny. And I still think they were wrong not to commission it.

And I had a spectacular cast, though, didn’t you?

Well, it was Richard E. Grant, me, Benedict Cumberbatch.

Benedict Cumberbatch?

I think he played Rafe.

And David Tennant and Daisy Haggard were written for it.

Oh, yeah. And sorry. And David played Rafe.

And Daisy played Richard’s sister.

Yes, who was meant to be a sort of one of those, one of those girls usually called, I’m afraid, Arabella. Seeing this, oh, my God, it was like totally amazing because we went to the light at the festival and we stayed in a yurt and we had the best time. And Daisy was absolutely brilliant. Yes, I’d forgotten that it was David. It was Benedict in something else. It was, yeah, my God, what an amazing cast. And they didn’t commission it.

And you had Joanna Lumley in it as well.

Exactly. I hope somebody from Radio 4 is listening to thinking, oh, shit, we missed a chance there. And maybe they can approach us again. Because I’m sure I could get the same cast back.

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. So the Posh Nosh characters, you say, based on a certain TV chef and Fanny and Johnny, because I was wondering, was it based perhaps on your, did you grow up in quite a Posh Nosh kind of family?

Well, I grew up in a hugely, my mother was a phenomenal snob and quite grand. She was Scottish, both my parents were Scottish, but my father came from a very modest background. He was a primary school teacher’s son, but he did very well for himself, mainly thanks to the Second World War, but I don’t think he’d have left Scotland otherwise. But having left Scotland because of the Second World War, he then, as everybody was, joined the forces and was posted to the Middle East and then fell in love with the Middle East, and because of that became a diplomat. But my mother was from a very grand Scottish family, and by the time we were living in London, there were certainly no servants and posh life, but my mother was fantastically snobby about food and people and stuff.

You weren’t doing an impression of her, particularly, were you?

No. The joke there was that my character was supposed to be, as it were, from below stairs, that Richard’s character, who was meant to be genuinely posh, like my mother, had married beneath him because he was, of course, really gay, but needed a kind of nanny character figure in his life. So he has not married my character because she’s his equal, but more because he needs a…

Housekeeper.

Well, a housekeeper. That’s exactly it. And while he goes off and does what he likes with, as it turns out, have the series been made rave. Someone who is his equal, but so no, my character, if anything, I’m playing my granny from Dumfermland, someone who was not new that she wasn’t quite up to others. And I wouldn’t insert myself there. And although my character wasn’t Scottish, she was meant to be the daughter of a publican. My god, that is probably the favourite thing in my life I’ve ever done.

Pochnosh.

Yes, and English life. And I’m going to spit tax about them not commissioning English life. Commission it now, whoever’s listening to this.

Well, I’d say it’s early days. There will be people listening, especially when they hear that the people, you can get attached to it.

Listeners, I can guarantee Richard E. Grant, David Tennant and Daisy Haggard, and if not Daisy, Lady of Your Choice. Actress Lady of Your Choice.

Right. Let’s move on to another offcut. Can you tell us about number three, please?

This is called Goodbye Yellowbit Road, and it was a pilot for a TV sitcom, which again I wrote with John Canter in, oh, I’m going to say about 2008 or nine, around then.

Interior, Paul’s flat, bedroom. The bedroom of a fussily over-decorated flat. Paul is making the bed. He puts an exotic cover over the duvet. He then carefully distributes a number of soft toys along the top of the bed. Paul is a very pretty, flamboyantly dressed 25-year-old. He is unmistakably gay.

Now, Big Ted, you know you can’t sit next to George. You two just squabble. You can sit next to silly Sue. Monkey, you’re in charge.

As Paul debates where to put a rabbit, Susan enters from the en-suite bathroom. She’s in her 30s, neatly dressed, unremarkable woman, much less pretty than Paul. She has a no-nonsense Mary Poppins quality. She wears a work suit.

I’ve left Monkey in charge today.

Well, it is his turn.

Do they know about tonight?

Yes, and they’ve promised to behave.

Susan looks nervous. Don’t worry, Mum and Dad will love you.

Do you think?

Of course. Paul taps his temples with his forefingers. It’s one of Paul and Susan’s shared gestures.

Positive thoughts.

Susan does likewise. Positive thoughts. But Susan still looks worried.

What?

Well, it’s just that… What?

You’ve never introduced them to a girlfriend before.

Oh, girlfriend, boyfriend, what does it matter?

You’re the one, that’s what matters. I am so lucky.

No, I am so lucky.

Oh no, I am so lucky.

No, no, no, I am so lucky.

No, I am so lucky.

No, I am so lucky.

Susan smiles but is a little anxious about the time this is taking.

I don’t want to be late.

OK, but…

Paul steps back, gives her an appraising look, then waggles his index fingers underneath his earlobes. Susan immediately realises she has failed to perfect her outfit.

Which ones?

Oops, heart-shaped box.

Susan takes the earrings out of a heart-shaped box by the bed and gives Paul a genuinely loving look. Paul kisses Susan and covers Rabbit’s eyes to protect it from embarrassment. Paul pops Rabbit down next to Monkey and tells them…

Be good!

So, this is interesting because did I read it on the paper or where did I get this information from? You wrote this for David Tennant. Is that right?

Yes. David is probably one of the first people, obviously only after he became famous and people started paying attention to him. But he’s probably one of the first people, certainly that I know of, that people, the papers would refer to as metrosexual. And, you know, just camp is what they meant. And, of course, David is camp. I mean, but if camp means you’re not, if you’re prepared to wear beautiful suits and beautiful clothes and be nice to women, then so be it. And it just, as I say, John and I wrote that together and we’ve both always been fascinated by, I won’t name them because it’s probably libelous, but when you meet these people or see them on telly and they’re unbelievably camp, and then they say, yes, happily married to Susan or whoever it is for years, you think, what? You can’t be heterosexual. Now that script is probably very dated, although it did make me laugh. And I suppose in a world where people were still feeling the need, and let’s face it, there are plenty out there still, but to sort of pretend to be something they’re not. I mean, we were very much not laughing at Paul’s character there because the idea was that he had been gay, but that he’d fallen in love with a woman.

Right. So he was genuinely bisexual or at this point heterosexual, whatever. At this point, heterosexual.

He wasn’t hiding anything. No, no, no. And he wasn’t pretending he hadn’t been gay. He wasn’t going, oh, I’ve seen the light, now I’m straight. He was just saying, now I’ve fallen in love with Susan. And the jokes that we were making were absolutely not about someone’s sexuality or their choices, but the jokes were about how the people in his life, because his mother was brilliantly played. We did a BBC pilot sitcom reading, which went really, really well, and his mother was absolutely brilliantly played by Anita Dobson. And the joke there was that Anita, her character, was determined to keep him gay because he went to Shirley Bassey concerts with her and went to salsa classes and she was losing him to another woman. And the other joke was that the two gay characters who were still gay, played by Steve Pemberton, and I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember who the other one was, they were all going, you’re not bisexual, you’re having an episode. And so those were the jokes. So even though it may sound dated now, there was never a kind of, isn’t it hilarious that a man is camped?

Isn’t it very on the nose right now with more fluid sexuality and everything, the fact that your character is a modern day 2020 man or 2020 person, should I say?

Yeah, it was more about, as comedy often is, about the people around the central character going, I want you to be something other than you are. And, you know, and their kind of their agenda, their agenda. Thank you very much. I can never not think of Mary Archer when I say that, because do you remember when the fragrant Mary Archer, you have to be a certain age, was asked in court the second time around when they lost, is it not true that you had issued him ultimatums? And Mary Archer said, I am not in the habit of issuing ultimata. And I thought, oh, that’s you told. Because, of course, it’s not ultimatums, it’s ultimata. Anyway. But yes, I think now two heterosexual white middle class writers might have a difficulty getting that script away. But again, it was the most fantastic cast. It was Anita Dobson, David Tennant, Olivia Colman, Steve Pemberton. Olivia Colman played Susan.

Wow. OK, well impressed.

Yes, it was. And you know what? I’m going to shame the BBC. It was about to be commissioned. And then someone went, Oh, there’s that program, Rose and whatever it was called. It was an ITV show in it was at the sort of beginning of everyone thinking Alan Davis was the second coming. And I’m not saying Alan’s no good. I’m just saying they commissioning everything that he was in. And he was supposed to be a gay man who’d fallen in love with a woman. And that was called Rose and something. And it was on ITV. And literally the BBC went, Oh, we’re not commissioning this now. And of course, now they’d commission it. But David wasn’t as famous as he now is. And neither was Steve. Anita was.

Or Olivia.

Or Olivia. Yes, quite. So another mistake they made.

Yes.

In my view.

Although I must say, I’m very surprised. Why weren’t you the mum? When I read it, I thought, well, she’s written this part for herself. She’s a very flamboyant character.

First of all, I can’t be David’s mother. Thank you very much.

I didn’t realize it was David’s.

But also, it was very important that she brought with it, and Anita is a bit older than me, she brought with it that kind of fun all the time. Oh, let’s go and get a cocktail. You know, that she brought that kind of fizz with her. And Anita’s got that and I don’t have it. I’m not saying I couldn’t have played it, but Anita, absolutely. The moment she said yes, we were just dancing around the room because we just thought that’s exactly the kind of energy that just that sort of slightly showbiz energy, you know, someone you can absolutely see going to salsa three times a week. And also she was meant to be, the idea was that they were working class. And I don’t think anyone ever looks at me in a million years and thinks I’m an East End working class woman.

Let’s move on to your next off cut, Arabella. What’s this one?

This is called Riverdeep Mountain High and it is a treatment or even a script for a musical based on the songs of the little known Tina Turner. And it must have been around 2004.

Riverdeep Mountain High A proposal for a musical featuring the songs of Tina Turner. First act. Born and raised in the small town of Nutbush, Belle dreams of becoming a famous dancer. She’s young and beautiful. She wants to leave town and make a go of it in the big city. Her ma, Mary, doesn’t want her to go. This is Nutbush, where you go to the store on Friday and church on Sunday. Mary sings Nutbush City Limits. Belle’s younger brother, Matt, not much more than a teenager at this point, doesn’t want Belle to go either. He joins in with his mother singing Nutbush City Limits. The whole community, old and young, eventually join in. Belle joins in too, but giving the song sarcastically, its small townness is exactly why she has to leave. Mary doesn’t see why Belle can’t make a success of herself right here. Belle laughs this suggestion off. She knows that big opportunities are only available in big towns. Mary has lived life in the big city and seen it all. She sings proud Mary. Belle takes over the song when it turns rocky. Mary knows that real values, lasting friendships and relationships are rare in the big city. There’s a boy in Nutbush, Nate. He loves Belle, but believes in her and wants her to pursue her dreams. Belle likes and respects him, but hasn’t fallen in love with him the way he has with her. Nate sings River Deep, Mountain High. Belle duets with him, then leaves. She has to go. Mary is very upset and makes Belle promise to write every week. Belle arrives in the big city and looks for a job. She sees an ad for dancers outside a nightclub. It’s owned by a very attractive but shady guy, Sharky. Sharky tells Belle he thinks she’s very attractive. Belle explains her ambitions. Sharky says he has big connections in the dance world, which he says he’ll use to get Belle a proper dancing job while she works as a dancer in his club. That’s fine with Belle. She knows that everyone starts out at the bottom. Explaining what he needs in the bar, Sharky sings Honky Tonk Woman. Belle learns fast and duets with him. Very soon Belle becomes bowled over by the glamorous Sharky. He’s a big city guy with big city money.

Right. So this was a musical, an idea for a musical based on the life, the songs of Tina Turner. River Deep Mountain High was its name. Clearly this was actually a good idea because Tina, the Tina Turner musical launched a couple of years ago. So you were 14 years ahead of your time.

Yes, but let’s not be in any way kidding ourselves. I’m sure people for as long as she’s been famous have been going, how can we get a musical out of this? But I think what happened, in fact, I know what happened. We Will Rock You was so successful, suddenly everyone went, that’s what we need to do. We need to get every famous artist there ever was and do a musical, if we can, based on their music. And then, of course, what they did was they started contacting the artists. And then I dare say, I don’t know, 50%, I have no idea. That sort of went, no, no, thanks. And then others went, oh, yes, please. And that’s what happened with me. The producers had been in touch with Tina Turner and she said, yes, in principle. And then they asked me to write the treatment. I don’t know why me, but maybe I knew these producers and I’d worked with them a lot. And I was a woman, obviously, and I think they thought that would be the right perspective, as indeed it should have been. And I put quite a lot of work into it. I put a lot of work into it, actually. But I freely admit that it is not my area. And I liked doing it. And obviously I love, well, not obviously, but I do love Tina Turner. But I just couldn’t get, you know, every time we sort of talked about it, I thought, I can’t, I can’t. I mean, I can do the basic story, which I did. But I don’t think I had, well, apart from anything else, I’m not black. So looking back, it probably shouldn’t ever have been me. And she does have a great story. Her own story is a fantastic story.

Have you seen the Tina Turner musical?

You’ll be very surprised to hear I haven’t. I don’t go to musicals much, but I certainly don’t go to musicals based on somebody’s oeuvre. Yeah, it wasn’t a very sort of happy project, and it didn’t really, there was a bit of sort of pushing around the plate for a while, and then it didn’t fly, and quite rightly so, because I don’t think you want a white middle class woman from North London writing Tina Turner’s story.

Well, like you say, it’s better than a white middle class man writing Tina Turner’s story.

That is the only thing that’s better than. And I dare say now, if the producers were doing it again, and I don’t know who wrote the musical, it was successful, wasn’t it? It’s still on.

Yes, it’s still on, yeah. I saw this and I thought, hold on a second, this rings a bell. Did you write the actual musical that’s in the West End? That’s what happened, yeah.

It’s my show. I’m a multimillionaire.

This is just some early notes you scribbled.

Yeah, just some early notes that I knocked out. Yeah, no. It was, I dare say, in many, many draws, in many, many houses around the country, there are people’s proposals for a musical about, insert name, you know, Roger Daltrey, I don’t know, whoever. And yes, that was my attempt at writing one for Tina Turner.

So you haven’t written any other musicals?

That’s absolutely correct, and I think it’s going to stay that way.

But we heard earlier, does my bum look big in this, the theatre play. So you’re not averse to the theatre genre. In fact, you’ve got your one woman show.

And in fact, yeah, as you say, I’ve just been doing and was halted, like many other people, by COVID. I’ve just been doing, I got about a third of the way into my UK tour of my first ever solo show.

First ever?

Does my mum loom big in this? Yes, at my age, my first ever solo show. I think I didn’t have the nerve until now, but also maybe not the material, but I absolutely loved doing it.

Is this you playing you, or do you do characters in it, this sketchy type stuff, or is it just Arabella talking to the audience?

It’s basically all about my mum and her spectacularly appalling attempts at being a parent in the first half. And then in the second half, it’s all about me as a mum and realising that it turns out it’s not that easy. Although, I mean, my mother was like off the scale bad. I mean, not like a mother at all. She literally thought it had nothing to do with her. Eating, being cared for, being protected, just it wasn’t in any way connected to her. Yeah, that’s another story.

That’s extraordinary.

Well, you’ll have to come and see the show, Laura. Yes, I must. When it’s back up and running.

When it’s back on, yes.

Which is supposed to be September this year, but looking more like next year.

So you have managed to reschedule, OK?

Oh yeah, yeah, it’s all rescheduled.

Well, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you introduce your final offcut now?

This is called Stupid Cupid, and it’s a film script that I had commissioned, paid for, or pucker, in 2005, and it was the adaptation of my book of the same name for the movies.

Interior, Priscilla’s house, which is chic bohemian, all Liberty prints and Chinese lacquer. Hat opens a bedroom door and thud. It hits the head of Sam, who was asleep on the floor. He’s hung over and wearing last night’s suit. He has a straggly beard and wild hair. He groans as he hauls himself to his feet.

Sorry.

Oh, you nearly knocked my head off.

It was an accident.

You could have knocked.

It’s my room.

Did we sleep together?

No. Good.

Sam slams the door in her face. Priscilla arrives just in time to nip Hat’s outrage in the bud.

in my room.

Sweetie, you moved out years ago. is going through a rough time, I know. I’m not having that thing at my reception.

That thing is the son of a very good friend.

I just hope you’re not sleeping with him. Oh, Priscilla. I am not. I cannot believe you are sleeping with a tramp.

I am not.

Sleeping with him.

I am not a tramp.

You shut up.

Sam flings open the door.

I am not a tramp.

You’ll have to excuse my niece. Her fiancee has run off. With her brain. That’s a great side with him.

Well, at least he didn’t want you for your body.

For your information, he did not run off. He is having some space.

That happened to my cousin. He ran off six days before the wedding.

This is four. Three. What happened?

He showed up. In a gay bar.

Hat walks off thinking, what a prat.

Hat, come back.

I didn’t want to come anyway.

Priscilla slaps him playfully. Meanwhile, hat flips open her mobile and speed dials.

Jimmy, will you please pick up the stupid phone? I have to pay these people.

So, how far did this script actually get?

Well, it got all the way. I wrote the book, which was quite successful. I say honestly, I mean, it was pretty successful. And the idea was because I don’t think I was married at the time. I can’t remember, but I’d already had my children. And it struck me, and everybody will be familiar with this, that a wedding becomes like a runaway train, no matter how small. In fact, that’s right, I was planning to get married. I already had children. I was in my 40s. I was with the father of the children. And we were just going to get married. But suddenly, everybody in my family had an opinion and you can’t do this, even though we weren’t doing. I was way too old for a kind of, you know, meringue dress and, you know, my auntie doing my whatevers. And yet suddenly had an opinion. And it occurred to me that it was a great comic tool, the idea of a wedding because of the amount of people that feel they have righteous ownership of it rather than the two people getting married. So I came up with this idea, which was loosely based on a true story of someone I knew, whose fiance dumped her a few days before for an epically expensive wedding. And she decided, this was the bit I made up, that she would keep going with the wedding and try to get him back at the same time rather than unravel it, rather than just face the truth. And I do know someone who did that, it wasn’t the husband, she tried to back out, and her parents said, we’ve already paid for the flowers, and they were £6,000. And the parents, instead of going, look, let’s lose the £6,000, they made her go through with it, a big society wedding, and she left him two weeks later. So all these sort of ideas. So anyway, I’d written the book, and then, I can’t remember the name of the production company, but a production company paid me, rather handsomely, those were the days, for the film rights, and part of the deal was that I had to be able to write the script. So I wrote the script, and that I really, really loved doing, and I loved it, yeah. I bought Final Draft, as my father would say, at a normal personal expense, and I really loved doing it, and I still think that would make a great film, because the idea is that she, you know, there’s this runaway train of the wedding, you know, florists, cake makers, dress makers, all going, right, you need to do a fitting, you need to do a last this, and she’s going, I mean, you know, you know very well, Laura, a lot of comedy is to do with sort of anxiety and tragedy and everything, she’s trying to stave off this thing that’s happened, keeping the plates in the air of all the wedding plans and get him back at the same time. So she does a lot of bonkers things to try and get him back at the same time as keeping the wedding going. And meanwhile, get someone to pretend to be him and falls in love with him.

Yes, that was the meet cute we just heard, I believe.

Yeah, I think it was, I mean, you know, maybe rom-coms have had their day. No, never, never. But I think, you know, I’m not one for necessarily saying blowing my own trumpet, but I think it stands up as a concept. Maybe the script wasn’t good enough, I’m prepared to accept that, but the concept I think stands up with the best of them, which is, you know, that is an absolutely classic farce.

Right, well, final question. Having listened to these five bits of writing, is there anything you’ve noticed, anything that surprises you, or obviously there’s a couple that you’d quite, or three of them at least, that you’d like to go back and redevelop, but was there anything that you didn’t expect to hear?

I didn’t expect any of them to still be funny. And I know this is one of those, what do you most like about yourself? Well, it’s probably got to be my fantastic figure, or maybe it’s my amazing face, which I don’t get off and ask, but I think I’m pleased. I’m pleasantly surprised by how funny the ones, most of them still are. And that makes me pleased.

So that sort of reinforces your faith in your ability to write. You were funny then, you’re funny now, sort of thing.

Yes, that’s how I’m going to put it.

Yes.

I was funny then and I’m funny now. Don’t you forget it!

Well, Arabella Weir, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thank you very much indeed, Laura. It’s been a huge pleasure, as always, to talk about myself.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with thanks to this week’s special guest, Arabella Weir. The Offcuts were performed by Rachel Atkins, Beth Chalmers, Chris Pavlo, Leah Marks, Nigel Pilkington and Keith Wickham 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.