Tony Jay and I didn’t agree on anything politically, and I didn’t want people to think that the Yes Minister was a Tory programme, which it wasn’t, because we both implicitly had a right of veto. We never discussed it, but if I didn’t like something that Tony wrote, I could change it. If Tony didn’t like something I wrote, we’d change it.

We’d find a way through. And in those days, unlike more recently, it was really possible for people with opposing political views to still be friends. That’s less probable today.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. This episode, my guest is Jonathan Lynn, a writer, director, and actor whose career spans television, film, stage, and books.

He first came to prominence in the Cambridge Footlights, performing alongside contemporaries that included John Cleese and Graham Chapman, and on television, he acted in series including Doctor in the House, The Liverbirds, The Good Life, and the Jack Rosenthal plays Burmits for Boy and The Knowledge. As a writer, he penned episodes for the Doctor series, for sitcom On the Buses, and for comedian Harry Worth, but he is best known for co-creating and co-writing the acclaimed political satires Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, awards for which are too numerous to list here. He later co-authored companion books The Complete Yes Minister and The Complete Yes Prime Minister, which spent 106 weeks in the Sunday Times Best Selling Top Ten list.

His career in film includes writing the screenplays for The Internecine Project, Clue, and Nuns on the Run, also directing the latter two, as well as directing other films that include My Cousin Vinny, The Distinguished Gentleman, Sergeant Bilko, The Whole Nine Yards, and The Fighting Temptations. Other directing credits include award-winning stage productions for the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and multiple West End shows. In fact, he has contributed to a wide range of film, stage, and television projects over several decades, which we just don’t have time to include here.

And most recently, he has returned to the world of political satire with a new stage play, I’m Sorry, Prime Minister, which is set to premiere in London’s West End in January 2026. Jonathan Lynn, welcome to the Offcuts Drawer. Thank you.

The Yes Minister, Yes Prime Minister project has seen various iterations. Firstly, you had two different levels of government, which turned into two very successful TV sitcoms, and then they became books, which were also hugely successful and bestsellers. And this time round, it’s theatre.

Why this genre? Well, I’ve always worked in the theatre before I worked in television or film or anything, and I like the theatre. And about 12 years ago, I’m not sure actually, maybe a bit longer, we did a play called Yes Prime Minister, which was all original material, it wasn’t from the series. And it opened at the Chichester Festival, and then it transferred to the Gielgud Theatre in London.

And after that, it played at the Apollo Theatre, and then the Gielgud again, and then the Trafalgar, and it did two national tours. So it went on for two or three years and was immensely successful. So I thought, why not do one more about a final chapter for Humphrey and Jim? All right, so you’re keeping the same characters? Oh, yes.

It’s about Humphrey and Jim, and they’re both old men, they’re in their 80s. Right. Are they both still in government? No, no, they’ve been retired for years.

And they’re bewildered by the world the way it is now, as most people are. And it’s a sort of LSA play about loss, about loss of friends, family, job. You know, what do you do if you’re forced to retire around about the age of 60? And that was your whole interest in life.

What do you do for the next 20 years? What do you do, well, for the rest of your life? What do you do when you were used to everybody hanging on your every word, everything you said mattered? And now nobody really cares what you think or say about anything. So it’s about the loss of power, loss of everything. The only play I’ve seen that’s on this subject really is King Lear.

But my play is funnier. So it’s not so much a satire on British government anymore then? Well, it is in a way, because it’s about, you know, Jim. What it’s about is Jim is now master of Oxford College.

And the student body and the fellows want to get rid of him because he’s been politically incorrect in a variety of ways. And he gets Humphrey to come and help him, or he hopes he can get Humphrey to come and help him. They haven’t spoken for years.

And so it’s a reunion. But I think of it as the final chapter in the story of Jim and Humphrey. And who have you cast for Humphrey and Jim? Jim is being played by Griff Rhys-Jones and Humphrey by Clive Francis.

And we tried out to play about a year and a half ago in Cirencester at the Barn Theatre, and then Theatre Royal Bath and now the Theatre of Cambridge. And I played Jim at that point. Did you? And Clive played Sir Hertford, yes, which was a bit nerve-wracking.

I hadn’t been on stage for 41 years. How’d it go? It went incredibly well, as you can tell, because we’re opening in the West End now. And you’re not tempted to go back into the play yourself? I’m not, no, because I have Parkinson’s disease and my movement is now pretty strange.

And also, I’m not a famous actor. And Griff Rhys-Jones is. And he’s wonderfully funny.

Excellent. Successful sitcoms, especially British successful sitcoms, they’re often sold abroad to be turned into the American equivalent or the Israeli equivalent or the German equivalent. Did you ever have any country try and do their own version of Yes Minister or Yes Prime Minister? Not as far as we know.

I think there was one tried in Sweden that was so clearly based on our show, but they hadn’t bought the rights, so we stopped that. But I’m not sure about that. This is the distant past.

And we had a lot of enquiries at the time, a lot of people wanting to make an American series based on our series, which has happened, as you know, with so many others. But it doesn’t translate. The separation of powers, the presidency, Congress, all the power structure is different in America, or was at that time.

Now it’s a sort of dictatorship. But it just didn’t translate. And we didn’t mind that.

And it had been shown in dozens of countries. And the books had been published in lots of countries. And then it was shown here, not on a big network, but on PBS and public television, and it was very well received.

So we’re pretty happy with all of that. Well, let’s kick off with your first offcut. Can you tell us, please, what it’s called, what genre it was written for, and when it was written? Yes, this one’s called The Bottom Line.

And it’s a screenplay I wrote in 2008. Good morning. As the Chief of Surgery, it’s my doubtful pleasure to welcome you to the Morbidity and Mortality Meeting to discuss the week’s surgical complications in the hope that we can prevent similar screw-ups in future.

You all know the drill. This is a closed meeting. Are we all clear what that means? It means that by tomorrow, half the hospital will know everything we said.

Maybe. So let’s really try to keep it confidential today. Lawsuits at this place have been increasing exponentially, and some of the surgical mistakes on the agenda are even more embarrassing than usual.

Tell me about it. I’m being sued again. I’m wondering if there have been leaks from these meetings.

Oh dear. This must stop. Who’s suing you? Victor Rich.

He’s suing me too. Yeah? I’ve never been sued before. He’ll get used to it.

All right. First, Dr. Duff, your hip replacement. Let’s see the x-ray.

Lights. Lights go out. Duff, an orthopaedic surgeon, speaks as a hip x-ray is shown on a screen.

This is prior to surgery. The hip at the point of disarticulation. Everyone stares at the x-ray, slightly puzzled.

Looks perfectly normal to me. Well, yes, yes. In point of fact, it is perfectly normal.

Now everyone stares at Duff. You removed a perfectly normal hip? Yes. However, we choose to regard this as a positive measure.

There is very severe osteoarthritis degeneration, admittedly, of the other hip. But when the other hip needs replacement, next Thursday, actually, since we didn’t do it this week, electively, of course, his new hip will certainly help speed up his convalescence. They are all still staring at him.

You’re pretending you replaced the wrong hip on purpose. That’s almost worse than doing it by accident. Dr. Duff, may I remind you that the purpose of this meeting is not damage control.

It’s to learn from our mistakes. There were no mistakes in the surgery itself. I did it perfectly.

I don’t know how to reply to that. Everyone shifts uncomfortably in their seats. The question is, why did it happen? Excellent question, sir, if I may say so.

Thank you, Julia. The X-ray wasn’t labelled. There were no left and right markers.

Why not? Someone else was using them. There aren’t any others. It’s the cutbacks.

I see. Cut to interior, a panelled boardroom, day. And now what we’ve just heard is from a film script called The Bottom Line, which you mentioned when you sent it to me, had subsequently changed its name to Samaritans.

And it’s now a novel and has, in fact, been acquired by a UK production company to turn into a TV series. Have I got that right? Yes, that was right at the time we spoke. The UK production company was not able to turn it into a TV series because at the time we made that deal, Netflix and other similar streaming companies were looking for material.

By the time we got something to show them, they were not looking for any more material, which is the situation now. But yes, it became a novel and people could get it on Amazon. And I’m very pleased with it.

It got a lovely response. Yes, excellent reviews from lots of famous people as well. Yeah.

Yes. So are you still looking to turn it into a TV series or a film? Which would you prefer, actually? I don’t think I’m looking to do it anymore. I mean, you reach a point where either you get the show on or you move on.

You can’t keep batting away at something forever. If somebody else buys the rights, I mean, a couple of people have bought the rights to Samaritans already and not managed to get… I mean, somebody else, Linda Obst, bought the rights for Sony Pictures Television, but she came up with a pitch for the series, which I didn’t like, so I vetoed it. And I’d rather it’s not done than unless it’s done properly.

Right. So what I had to say, which was about the American healthcare system and how catastrophic it is, is all in the book. And sooner or later, somebody will probably think, oh, I could make a film or a TV series.

But obviously, the novel is much fuller. I mean, I added a huge amount of material because the screenplay is very short. You know, the screenplay is about 120 pages and a lot of white space on each page.

And so you have to be very, very economical in what you say. In the novel, I was able to add characters, background, you know, more funny scenes. And on the subject of medicine and doctors, where I first remember you was as an actor in the Doctor in the House series, which you also went on to write on and on the related series, Doctor at Large, Doctor in Charge, Doctor at Sea and Doctor on the Go, I think.

I think so. But you were an actor first. So what prompted you to write the series? Were you part of the original writing team? No, I was engaged as an actor.

But I’d been trying to write for years because I was in my 20s and I discovered that being an actor meant being out of work a lot of the time. That’s so true. So I wanted to write because when I wasn’t acting, I was doing things like selling records at Selfridges and I felt that wasn’t very creative.

So I was acting in the series and then I left it. And one day I got a phone call from another actor in the series, George Layton, with whom I got along really well. And he said, the writers haven’t delivered a script for about three weeks ahead.

Shall we try and do one? And I thought, well, maybe this is an opportunity. I’d been writing for five years without any success. So George and I got together and we wrote an episode.

Was he still an actor on his own? Yes. And it was easy for us in a way because we all knew all the characters. And we wrote what turned out to be a very funny script.

And the producer, Humphrey Barclay, bought it and put it straight into production. And three weeks later it went on the air. And people absolutely loved it.

And suddenly we were deluged with offers. We suddenly became hot writers. And I’d been trying to get anything done for the last five or six years.

And then suddenly I was an overnight success. Well, Humphrey asked us to write lots of other Doctor episodes. And then we were asked to write for a series of On the Buses, which I found terribly hard.

Oh, why did you find it hard? Well, I was familiar with it, but it just wasn’t really my sense of humour. And our job was to make it seamless so that when Ronnie Wolfe and Ronnie Chesney, who had created the series, they were off making a film of On the Buses. And it was our job to continue, as it were, seamlessly.

And it worked very well. But I found it hard. You know, with jokes about the price of fish.

And I hadn’t really learned about research yet. So I suppose I could have made it easier for myself if I’d gone to a bus depot and talked to some bus drivers and bus conductors and inspectors. Although it might not have made any difference at all.

But George found it easier than I did. And we wrote a series that people really liked. As an actor, were you ever tempted to write yourself into the shows, into the scripts, on any of the projects you’ve written on? Yes, I was.

I was tempted. We did a series, George and I went on, to do a series called My Brother’s Keeper at Granada Television. And we wrote it for ourselves.

It was an idea of mine about when I was at Cambridge, sometime in the Dark Ages, criminology was one of the subjects I was doing as part of a law degree. And there was a twin study. You know, twin studies are used to determine whether or not characteristics of people are caused by what they used to call nature or nurture.

In other words, were they genetic? And there was an experiment with nine identical twins whose twin brothers were missing. And they were all policemen. And they managed to find 13 of these missing identical twins.

And interestingly, nine of them were convicts and the other four were policemen. Wow. So I don’t know what it really suggested.

I think it suggested that people genetically were either very law-abiding or very anti-law-abiding. Right. So we wrote these parts and we played the twins.

And it was well received. And we did two series of Granada. But then Granada didn’t continue it.

So at that point, George and I stopped writing together. And then I didn’t write anything for myself until we did the pilot of Yes Minister. Oh, who were you in Yes Minister? No, I wasn’t.

Oh. But I thought I might be. Ah.

When we were writing it. There was Jim and Humphrey and the part of Bernard Woolley I thought I could play. And then I decided that it just wasn’t a good idea.

It would be much better to find somebody else than for me to be able to look at rehearsals objectively. And it’s hard to be objective about something if you have written it and you’re in it. That’s true.

Yes. And we were very lucky we found Derek Foulds. And in the end, I was very glad I had not suggested myself for the part.

I never suggested myself. It was all in my head. So did you ever get to the point because you’re writing, you’re acting, directing, did you ever get to the point where you thought I’m not an actor anymore.

I’m a writer and director or has acting never really been off the table if the right part came along? Acting was off the table for years after My Brother’s Keeper and before Yes Minister. I was director of the Cambridge Theatre Company that was a touring company Arts Council subsidised based on the Arts Theatre, Cambridge and it toured all over the country. And I was director of that for nearly five years.

And we did about 40 productions in that time. And I never cast myself at all. I think it’s very unusual for actors who are directors.

So it was clear to me I could always find someone who I would rather see play the part. So at that point it was clear to me that I wasn’t really interested in acting anymore except occasionally with people who I really liked. Okay then, let’s move on.

Time for another off-cut now. Can you tell us about this one? This is a one-act play that I wrote only a few years ago. I think it was 2018.

It’s called Primitive Murderous Rage. The audience should become convinced that something has gone wrong. Forgotten lines.

Somebody missing. Who knows what. Eventually.

You’re supposed to say something. He nods. That’s up to you.

How about, why are you here? Not really. He nods. Bill nods again.

Look, I didn’t come here to be bored. I can be bored at home. Are you bored at home? Yes.

Why are you bored? I don’t know. So, in the absence of anything better to do, you decided to bore me too? No, that’s not fair. Are you chronically bored? I think so.

You’re not saying I’m boring you? You are boring me, actually. But I’m not the cause of your boredom. No.

So, what now? Ball’s in your court. Why? You’re the one who’s bored. Can you tell me why you’re bored? No, I just am.

Why don’t you tell me? That’s why I’m here. I can’t tell you anything until you tell me something. There’s nothing to tell.

There must be something. Something about your life. My life’s boring.

Is that why you’re here? Because you’re bored? Yes. He nods. Now you’re bored too.

No, not now that I know that your boredom is in fact the presenting problem. He waits, nodding occasionally. Eventually.

Is there anything else you want to mention before you go? You want me to go? Do you want to go? Why do you always answer a question with a question? Why do you think? You mentioned when you sent this that this was in fact written as part of a double bill. So what happened to the other play? The other play was called Oedipus Gate and it was about Oedipus the King, Sophocles, in the form of Donald Trump. Oh.

And that play is no longer relevant because Trump has, it was written during the first Trump presidency and now it’s all quite different. So it was a topical political play. But I wanted to write a play about boredom because I thought that was a challenge.

Just the challenge of boredom that you were interested in. There was no point that you wanted to make or any kind of conclusion you wished to reach? Oh well yes there was. I mean as the play goes along it’s clear that she suffers from a condition that the play calls primitive murderous rage.

Ah, hence the title. And the psychiatrist is really inept and doesn’t really know what to do about it. He’s very, he thinks he’s very scholarly and original.

But in fact he’s very pedestrian and he outlines his theories. Other than about boredom it’s a play about psychotherapy. And my wife is a psychotherapist.

And so I’ve known dozens of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts during her career. And this play is a sort of satirical version of the worst of them. Do you know lots of people with primitive murderous rage or just those who treated them? Yes, large numbers of people.

I think most people have. Have primitive murderous rage, which manifests itself as boredom? No, no. It can manifest itself in all kinds of ways.

But as you know anger management is quite a big thing nowadays. I mean a lot of people do things because they’re angry or because they’re very angry, which are not necessarily the right things to do. So I wanted to investigate all that.

And in fact this play is on my list of things to rewrite and expand into a full-length play. Ah, so it doesn’t have to be part of a double bill anymore. That’s right.

When you started your show business career, it was live performance in the theatre, you were in the Footlights and the breakthrough show was Cambridge Circus, which went to Broadway and on television stuff. But you originally joined the cast as a musician, is that right? Well I didn’t really join the cast. I mean I joined the show.

I was in the orchestra, in the orchestra pit. I played drums, percussion. Which at that time I thought I was going to do professionally.

I thought I was going to be a jazz drummer. And I spent a lot of my time at Cambridge playing in the jazz club with some wonderful musicians. But then I joined the Footlights Club with Eric Arnall.

We knew each other, we were in the same college. He wrote a sketch, which we both did. And the only way you could get into the Footlights in those days was to make the committee laugh.

And we did. We got into it as members. Was it a musical sketch? Because he’s obviously very musical as well.

No, it wasn’t musical. No, it wasn’t a musical sketch. I can’t remember what the subject was exactly.

I think it was two centuries outside Buckingham Palace, but I can’t remember more than that. And I found the script, oh, 30 years later, literally in a bottom drawer. And so I had it framed and sent it to Eric.

I think it was the first sketch he ever wrote. Oh, lovely. So the show went to the West End.

A producer called Michael White saw it at Cambridge. And it went to West End, where it did pretty well, actually. And John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Bill Oddie, Timbrook Taylor, Joe Kendall, and a couple of other people.

And then I left it because I was just in the band. And I went on to work at the Edinburgh Festival. Still as a musician, or were you acting then? No, no.

This was a production of Waiting for Godot, which Stephen Frears, another Cambridge friend, was directing. And then I went back to my third year. All the others that were leaving Cambridge, and I was a year behind.

And the year I graduated, the following year, I got a phone call from Bill Oddie right after my exams. And he said, Cambridge Service is going to Broadway. Do you want to come? And I said, well, they have a Musician’s Union there.

I wouldn’t be allowed to. He said, no, no, in the cast. So I said, yes, of course.

So my first acting job was actually on Broadway. And my first TV show was the Ed Sullivan Show with 70 million viewers live. Spectacular.

And it’s been sort of downhill ever since, really. So you took over as an actor. Did you do any writing there too, or was the script already set in stone by then? The script was already more or less set.

And I wasn’t the writer then. I mean, at Cambridge, I hadn’t started writing. And I didn’t know how it was done.

I very much admired John Cleese and Bill Oddie, who wrote the majority of the show, because they could write funny scripts. And I thought it was sort of a magic gift. So when did you find out that you could do it too? Well, I told you about Doctor in the House.

Oh, that was literally the first time you’d done any writing. Because I thought if you’d been involved with the Footlights, that you would be contributing to the shows a bit yourself. But not at all.

No, no, not at all. They were all writers and comedians. And I really wanted to be an actor at that point.

And after we were on Broadway, they came back and started a radio show that was immensely popular called I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. And I wasn’t in that because I didn’t write. And Graham Garden joined the cast of that, because he could write.

And I just acted in plays. You mentioned the Ed Sullivan show with the 70 million audience. Did that give you more confidence, do you think? And possibly even too much confidence, because that’s one hell of a gift for an actor.

It didn’t give me any confidence at all. I mean, I was doing it with a group of people, who we did a song and I did a very short sketch, which people thought was funny. But no, it didn’t really give me confidence.

I mean, we were there on Broadway, which sounded very glamorous. But we were getting 30 quid a week. And I was staying in a really run-down hotel in Times Square.

And it was distinctly unglamorous. But, you know, it was a terrific opportunity for someone aged 21, who had been in Susan three months earlier. Of course, yeah.

Okay, moving on now. Let’s have your next Offcut, please. What’s that? This is a treatment for a screenplay called The Rocket’s Red Glare, which was written in about 2006.

And I wrote it with somebody called M. G. Lord, who’s a writer in Los Angeles.

This is not based on a true story. This is a true story.

This is a tale of two scientists, perhaps the two most important rocket pioneers of the 20th century. One was an idealist, an internationalist, and a humanitarian. He was an American.

His name was Dr. Frank Molina. He is the protagonist of the film. He was interested in pure science, and he developed a rocket to study meteorology, our planet, and space.

He was not interested in money. The other was his nemesis, interested in fame, wealth, and power over his fellow human beings. He was German.

He is the antagonist. His name was Dr. Werner von Braun. He developed his rockets with Hitler’s personal approval as revenge and terror weapons against the British.

Molina, troubled by the poverty he saw during the Great Depression, flirted with communism very briefly in the 1930s, until Stalin signed a pact with Hitler, and the scales fell from his eyes. Von Braun was an active Nazi and a member of the SS until he surrendered to the Americans, who protected him because they wanted his knowledge, and they didn’t want the Soviet Union to have access to his knowledge. Molina was from a dirt-poor background.

He was interested in social justice, and he was tolerant of all people, if not all points of view. Von Braun was a baron, and was not interested in social justice. He handpicked Jewish scientists to work on the V1 and V2 at the Mittelbau-Dörer concentration camps, and allowed them to starve to death.

Molina had nothing to hide, didn’t care about money, lived a good life and, by a quirk of fate, ultimately died both wealthy and fulfilled. Von Braun died famous and powerful, but he lived the second half of his life in fear that his past would be revealed in spite of a massive and deceitful PR campaign. Molina, who developed the rocket that first went into space, is almost completely forgotten.

Von Braun, the lesser of the two scientists, has been immortalised as the father of the American space programme at NASA. This is their story. Now this didn’t make it because… What happened to it? What happened to it was David Brown, who was a very important producer, produced The Sting and Jaws and Driving Miss Daisy and a number of very successful films, was extremely interested in it and we were just about to start writing a screenplay when he died and we, I don’t know, for some reason we didn’t get anyone else interested and it sort of fell away from our priorities.

But I think it would be a wonderful film still. But there isn’t a screenplay yet, it’s just, there’s a long treatment, I think it’s about 20 pages, telling the whole story. So you could still be shopping it around then? I could be but I’m not.

M.G. Lord, who’s a terrific writer, she teaches creative writing at USC, University of Southern California, and her father worked with Melina and that’s how she knew the story. So we worked on it together and enjoyed it very much. But I don’t know, for one reason or another, my agents were unable to interest anybody else in this and so it fell by the wayside.

I think it’s because it would have been a very expensive film. It’s again another project along political lines. Are you very politically active? You wrote Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister with Anthony Jay, who was very close with Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government.

Were the two of you politically aligned or were you more neutral and just interested in the entertainment of it all? I’m not politically active really, although I take a great interest in it. I am very politically aware. Tony Jay and I didn’t agree on anything politically.

He was quite right-wing, and increasingly so as he got older, and he did a lot of work for speeches and things for Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson and Mrs. Thatcher, Norman Tebbit, and I had very little sympathy with all of that. Mainly because, apart from the fact that I didn’t agree with their political views mostly, I had very little sympathy with it because I didn’t want people to think that Yes Minister was, as it were, a Tory programme, which it wasn’t. Because we both implicitly had a right of veto.

We never discussed it. But if I didn’t like something that Tony wrote, I could change it. If Tony didn’t like something I wrote, we’d change it.

We’d find a way through. And in those days, unlike more recently, it was really possible for people of opposing political views to still be friends. That’s less probable today.

And Tony and I were very good friends. And we tolerated each other’s views amiably. And I just used to beg him, you know, to make sure that his conservative connections weren’t written about in the papers at the time.

And on the whole, they weren’t. And your West End play coming up, the I’m Sorry Prime Minister. Well, government behaviour has changed beyond recognition since the 1980s when you were writing Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister.

Do you have to incorporate those changes? Or do you think that the politics is still, at its heart, kind of the same beast? Politics is always the same beast. Politicians are always people who are interested in short-term changes in order to win the next election. The civil servants were interested in something long-term and that they felt was good for Britain.

But of course, they weren’t elected. And it wasn’t for them to say what was good for Britain. That was the essential conflict.

But this play, which is now being called I’m Sorry Prime Minister. But when I actually wrote it, the full title was I’m Sorry Prime Minister, I Can’t Quite Remember. And that’s what it’s going to say outside the theatre and in the programme.

And, you know, they both have memory problems. You know, they’re old. And it’s about what it’s like to be old and forgotten and ignored.

And about all the mistakes they made in their political careers. Orrin Humphrey in his civil service career. So it is about politics, but it’s not about contemporary politics.

The series was never about politics either. People always used to say it was a political series. But actually, it wasn’t.

It was a series about government. Politics is quite separate from government. Politics is what goes on in the House of Commons and people make big speeches.

And, you know, it’s essentially theatre. Government happens in Whitehall and nobody really knows how it’s done. Right.

OK, time for another off-cut now. What have we got? This is called Mayday and it’s a screenplay I wrote in the late 90s based on a novel I’ve written of the same name that was published two or three years earlier. Scripts, sandwiches and half-eaten pizzas litter the room.

Three melancholy, hard-bitten writer pals, Max Kirsch, Sidney Byte and Jerry Kelly. Jerry is reading aloud from the screen of his word processor. How about she says, I’m trying to break it off, but I don’t want to hurt him.

Then sex therapist says, Then don’t break it off. Wait till it goes soft. That’s funny.

Maybe. Jerry types. Mayday enters.

Hey, Ernest, come to help us punch up the show? Jerry, I don’t think I’d be much use. Still blocked? Yep. I finally told Fanny Rush.

What did she say? Do you have to give back the money? I can’t. I spent it. She suggested I plagiarised one of my other books.

That’s not plagiarism. It’s plagiarism if you copy someone else’s work. That’s right.

If you copy your own, they call it your style. What do you know? You’re just a bunch of sitcom writers. That’s how we know.

Plagiarism’s what we do. Come on, fellas. We got 20 minutes left to write this scene.

Somebody think of a gag we can borrow. They all chime in with ideas. I envied their facility.

Interior Mayday study night. The cursor is blinking on the screen, which is still empty apart from chapter one. Mayday is unshaven, unwashed, apathetic.

He stares hopelessly out of his magnificent picture window, then at the wall, then at an in-tray full of bills marked past due in red. I had nothing to write, nothing to say. I was living on credit, literary, emotional, and financial, and time was running out.

The one bright spot was the masseuse I shared my life with. We hear the front door open and shut. Randy Toner comes in.

She’s very attractive in her 30s, carrying a folded massage table and big sports bag. Hi. How’s it going? Still blocked? He nods.

She sits on his knee and kisses him hungrily. I can think of something that’s much more fun than writing. Her name was Randy Toner, and I was seeing her at the time.

Seeing is an L.A. word for fucking. I’d been seeing her for a couple of years. She was great at it.

They tip slowly backwards out of his chair and out of view. Interior Mayday study day. Mayday is sitting blankly at his desk again, still staring at his computer.

The words chapter one are still on the screen. Beside him is a glass of scotch and a nearly empty bottle. He stands and wanders into interior Mayday’s state-of-the-art kitchen day.

He pours himself a coffee. Consuela, his pudgy, smiling Mexican maid, is busily cleaning out the fridge. Dramatically, she picks up a milk carton and points to the sell-by date with a reproachful look.

Sell-by date. And she makes a kill gesture, pretending to cut her throat, then hurls it into the garbage. Consuela, my maid, spoke no other English words.

She finds some half-eaten cheese holding it aloft in triumph. Sell-by date. And the offending cheese is cast into the outer darkness.

And as I spoke no Spanish, the relationship was simplified to a level at which I felt entirely comfortable. He sips his coffee and idly opens the copy of LA Weekly, which is lying around on the kitchen counter. Suddenly, he sees something interesting.

Insert the personals. We pan down the column. Stop.

Zoom in to read. Joanna is in desperate need of $10,000 now or soon. No holds barred.

It was then, in that copy of LA Weekly that I’d picked up by chance, that I saw the answer to my problem. This was based on a novel that you wrote, which was successful and seems like a great story, perfect for a film. So why didn’t it get made? I think they thought it was… I think they thought it was too clever.

And being clever is a real problem in the world of Hollywood. But I don’t know. It’s about a man with writer’s block and he finds this ad by Joanna and gets the idea that if he will pay her whatever she asks, she will tell him how much money she earns from her ad and how she does it.

And that will make a story. And it’s a very good idea. But it doesn’t work out very well for him because what it’s really about is how writers manipulate people in their own lives in order to get stories that are interesting.

It’s about what is the writer’s obligation to people that they write about, even if they fictionalise them. And some people really loved it. But, you know, you never know why things don’t get made.

The truth is that about… I think every writer I know maybe has a ratio of about one project in six that gets made. That’s part of the course. There’s only a limited number of films that can be made.

They don’t get made without star names or a star director. And it’s all finally decided by the marketing department. You weren’t tempted to maybe, I don’t know, try it in the UK? Well, it’s set in Los Angeles.

I don’t think it would be possible to make it in the UK. It might have been possible, but that would be very expensive because you have to be some shots in LA. It’s an LA novel.

It’s not about Hollywood. Although he’s a writer. It’s about Los Angeles in the 1980s.

What it was really like. He’s a British expat living in LA then. And you were too? Were you in LA at that point in the 80s? I was, yes.

So how much of him is you? Well, it’s not really me. What I have in common with the character is that we’re both writers. There’s no masseuse hanging around.

No, there’s no masseuse. I had been married to the same woman who I loved for nearly 60 years. And there was no masseuse.

No, no. It’s about what I observed in Los Angeles. Well, we did hear in that particular clip mention of the sitcom writer’s room.

Is that something that you’re familiar with? Did you have much experience of that, working in a stereotypical American-style writer’s room? I did, actually. I was asked to join a show called Mr. President. And George C. Scott was the star in it.

And I didn’t want to do it because Ed Weinberger, who had created The Cosby Show, was the producer and head writer. And I’d read his pilot. And it was a very cosy show.

It was like The Cosby’s in the White House. And it lacked bite or any sort of real comment on Reagan, who was president at the time. So I said no.

And then he kept asking me to do it. And finally, we made a deal by I was going one day a week on Monday for what they called the punch-up. And the script would be… There’d be a read-through in the morning.

And then everyone would give their notes. That is, everyone meaning all the executives. And then the script would come back to the writer’s room.

And we would have to fix it that day. And there were always lots of fixes necessary. And there were about six or seven writers around the table.

And we all worked all day, usually from about 11 a.m. to about one or two in the morning. And of course, this was pre-computers. So we had a chain of typists or secretaries making all the changes during the day.

And I was paid extravagantly for this one day. And I used that to live on when I wrote the complete Yes Prime Minister for the rest of the week. But they never tempted you into a writer’s room as being part of the core team? That really was the core team.

That was the week in which everything was punched up. The day in which everything was punched up. I’m thinking more about developing the plot.

No, that was whoever was credited as the writer on screen. But I did do that one time. I got in one morning and Ed Weinberger said, I want you to read this script.

And I said, when do you want me to read it? He said, now, don’t go into the writer’s room. Go up to your office and read this and tell me what you think. So I read this really dreadful script.

And I went back downstairs half an hour later and I said to Ed, I think this is terrible. And he said, oh, I agree. I’d like you to rewrite it.

And I said, when? He said, today. And I said, well, nobody will rewrite the script today. He said, yep.

Don’t go back to the writer’s room. Rewrite the script. So I went upstairs.

I worked on it all day till 8 or 9. And I got halfway through. So I took it down to Ed’s office and said, this is as far as I’ve got. I’m halfway through.

Sorry, I couldn’t finish it. And so I went home and I expected to get a phone call saying that I was fired. And instead, I got a phone call saying, it’s great.

Next week, do the second half. So it wasn’t great. Great is the minimum adjective of praise in an American show business.

So I went in the following week. I wrote the second half. And incredibly, two weeks later, it went into rehearsal and on the air.

And I never saw it. Well, I didn’t want to. I thought it was terrible.

Oh, no. I thought it was just better than what I’d been given to start with. And the series didn’t really work.

And at the end of the first series, George C. Scott left it. And the series finished. Because he’d also thought it would be something much more acerbic and politically interesting.

And he was really upset by the way the scripts were being done. So he left. And that was the end of that series.

But it was a very nice two or three months when I got extremely well paid for one day’s work a week. OK, well, we’ve come to your final offcut. Can you tell us about this one, please? This is a repair I wrote a long time ago.

I’m guessing about 1997. And it’s called The Prenup. Interior.

The dining room. Night. The table is piled high with wedding gifts.

Alice enters, followed by Zach. She turns to him. OK, what is it? Well… Babe, what is it? My dad wants us to have a prenup.

So I didn’t want to mention it before because I knew you’d take it the wrong way. The wrong way? What’s the right way? It’s just that my dad says it’s just sensible. It’s a sensible… Go on.

No, that’s it. Sensible what? Precaution. Precaution? Against what? You think you need to protect yourself from me? Well, I… You don’t know me.

No. I knew you’d react like this. Look, if you feel so strongly, let’s forget it.

Forget it? How can I ever forget this? It’s my dad. What has this got to do with your dad? If we don’t do this, he’ll stop me getting the trust fund. So what? It’s 40 million dollars.

We don’t need his money. Tell him to shove it. Of course we need the money.

40 million dollars? Are you crazy? Am I crazy? You spring a prenup on me the night before our wedding and you ask me if I’m crazy. He only just sprang it on me. Why is a prenup such a problem? You always said you don’t care about money.

I don’t care about money. I’m not marrying you for your money, you doofus. So what’s the… I thought our marriage was going to be a partnership.

Sharing everything. For richer, for poorer, for better, for worse. You just have to trust me.

I have to trust you, but you don’t trust me. I do trust you. It’s just my dad.

Please sign it. You’ve got it with you. You have, haven’t you? Shame-faced, he pulls out a contract from his inside pocket.

Without a word, she holds out her hand for it. He gives it to her. She barely glances at it.

You said he just sprang it on you. A few days ago. You were lying.

I was not lying, just not telling. You said it was hypothetical. You said you were just talking about your father, but now you’re saying you do want me to sign this.

Yes, I do, but only because… Why did you say you didn’t? I just couldn’t see a way to mention it without upsetting you. I’m not upset. I just hadn’t realised I was dispensable, that’s all.

But money’s important. We must be sensible. I understand that.

Alice, darling, I love you. I… I’ll just take this away to read it. I must read it carefully.

Of course, you understand that. She crosses past him, towards the door. He tries to take her in his arms.

Carefully, she disentangles herself. Excuse me? She leaves the room. The accompanying note with this was you couldn’t find a name to play Alice.

Was there anyone in particular you’d approached and they just turned you down, or you just had no particular inspiration for it? I really can’t remember. But the film is about the culture clash between America and England. She’s the daughter of an English judge and she’d been to a fancy school.

She’s quiet and thoughtful and she’s a writer. And he’s a banker and doing rather well. And so it’s about marriage and it’s about the difference between English and American attitudes to marriage at that time.

So the premise of the film was the difference between the cultures of American and English. That was one of the things it was about. It was also, there was a space of romantic comedies in recent years, which weren’t about anything.

They were about just silly, silly setups. This is about a serious dispute. It’s about money and it’s about, you know, whether or not Zach is prepared to marry her and risk losing the fortune that his father was going to give him.

So it’s not an artificial setup. It’s a very real problem that exists in many marriages in those days in America. And now I think in Britain as well.

I think the high court in Britain recognised prenups a few years ago as things that should be taken into account in divorce settlements. And so it’s not quite about a culture clash anymore. But also the script is about romance and that it’s an anti-romantic comedy.

It’s not a romantic comedy. It’s an anti-romantic comedy. Because finally, it’s about what’s important in the relationship.

And it goes into other generations. It goes to Alice’s parents who have lived together not entirely successfully for 40 or 50 years. And to Zach’s father who’s been married lots of times.

He’s a rock star. And so, you know, it really sort of addresses a lot of questions about what’s the basis of marriage and how much money or financial interests or vested interests intrude upon the relationship. And would you have directed this film? I would have, yes.

Because you’ve obviously directed a lot of films, many of the scripts that you didn’t write. Yes. For example, My Cousin Vinny, which is a great film.

As a director who’s also a writer, do you find yourself making changes to someone else’s script? Are you allowed to do that? Oh, yes. Do you need permission? I was hired by 20th Century Fox to actually do the production rewrite of My Cousin Vinny. Is that before you became director? No, when I was director, it was part of the deal.

Ah, I see. But they weren’t happy with the script. They thought it was potentially successful, but they weren’t happy with a number of things about it.

So I did do a production rewrite. I made a number of changes. And I’m not credited, which I think is appropriate because a director has to write at least 50% of a script in order to deserve a credit, because otherwise it’s too easy for a director who’s quite powerful just to rewrite bits here and there and then claim a credit.

That used to happen, but the Writers Guild doesn’t allow it anymore, and I think they’re right. So I did write some of My Cousin Vinny, but most of it, of course, was written by the original writer Dale Lorner. Did you have to consult him when you were rewriting it at all? I chose to.

I chose to, and he didn’t like anything I suggested. So I did it anyway. I mean, there’s bits of dialogue that people still quote, you know, when Vinny says there’s these two utes to the judge, and the judge says, what? And Vinny says, two utes.

And the judge says, what’s a ute? And that was just a conversation that Joe Pesci and I actually had at the Mayflower Hotel in New York when we met to discuss the script. And he said to me, there’s these two utes. And I said, what’s a ute? So I realised that had to go into the script.

And, you know, so I added stuff here and there. I changed the ending. I got Dale to rewrite the very last scene, which wasn’t working.

And, you know, he wasn’t very pleased with what I did, and he should have been, because the film was an enormous success. Okay, well, we have come to the end of the show. How was it for you? Well, fine.

Thank you very much. You know, it’s nice not to have to feel guilty about talking about myself for an hour. Okay, well, let me ask you one final question.

Yes. Is there any advice that you would give a younger you, knowing now what you know about life, the business? Oh, so much advice. I wouldn’t know.

I hardly know where to begin. Is there one snappy little phrase that you would use for the sake of the podcast? Let me think. Advice that I needed or that I could give as a result of my experience? Is there anything, thinking of yourself 50, 60 years ago, is there anything you think, ah, you just need to don’t worry about that, or slow down with this, or this is more important than you think it is? That sort of thing.

I think I would say, that’s a really tricky question. I’m having to think about that. Maybe the answer is no.

I think I did everything pretty much the way it should have been done. No, I think I did nearly everything wrong. So the question is, what did I do? Which of the many things I did wrong? I think I wasn’t always sufficiently open to other people’s ideas.

And I would say, although in the end, you have to be true to yourself. You have to be open to other people’s suggestions and comments. And it took me a long time to learn that.

And I think I would also say, when you’re starting out in this business, take any job that’s offered. You can learn from anything. And the main thing is to keep working and get to know people.

And gradually you’ll find bigger and better opportunities. And I think that applies to everything. It applies to acting, writing, directing, anything in our business.

Now, that is excellent advice. Very useful indeed. Well, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you today, Jonathan Lynn.

Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcut straw with us. Oh, well, thank you. My pleasure.

Thank you very much indeed. The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Jonathan Lynn. The Offcuts were performed by Keith Wickham, Shash Hira, Emma Clarke, Kenny Blyth, Christopher Kent and Beth Chalmers.

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.

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

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

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

Good, well, thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many did you end up playing in the end?

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

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

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

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

So how old were you when you wrote this?

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

Was it Love’s Young Dream?

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

So coy, let’s call him Tim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the same production, from the Hamlet.

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

They were character exercises, though, character monologues.

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry about the exclamation, Mark.

It suddenly felt a bit…

I’m Mary.

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

Laura’s mom.

That’s it.

Do we do both, or is that the French?

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

Yeah, I’m all set.

And Mary, it’s a pleasure.

Likewise. Well, we’ll be, won’t we?

Very soon, family.

Now, he must be exhausted. Let me…

She tries to take his suitcase.

No, no, you know what?

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

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

So now what? We…

I take you home, and we can… wedding.

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

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

And it’s your first time in England?

Very first.

Well, it must all seem very…

No queen.

Where is she?

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

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

David Beckham.

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

No idea. David Attenborough.

Of course.

With his little monkeys and his nature.

So is your car…?

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

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

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

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

Well, the Queen insists on it.

I bet she does.

I bet she does.

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

I saw the agenda.

I like it. We know where we stand.

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

Jo puts a reassuring hand on Mary’s hand.

You plan. You’re a planner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it’s politeness, isn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children’s TV channel.

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

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

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

Yes, thanks.

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

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

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

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

Yes, I’ve heard of Go Jetters.

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

You wrote them or you were in them?

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

No middle aged women who could apologise all the time.

No, or there would have been.

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

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

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

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

We wonder why Bevert turned up when nobody had died.

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

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

He’s into petty crime.

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

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

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

How long’s he staying with you?

I don’t know yet.

Well, those sheets will be your business.

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

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

She’s OCDC.

You’re no good when you’re anxious.

I’m learning to be.

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

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

He just bangs on about his bloody charity.

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

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

Sponging off you for a bit.

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

Drinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, I’ve really enjoyed it.

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

Thanks so much for having me. Thank you.

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