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

Hello, thank you for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ooh, that’s a bit snarky.

Oh dear.

Not a fan of That’s Life, hey?

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

I’d watch it.

Yeah.

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

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

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

Why is it the best?

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

And he’s just this working stiff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, that would sound awful.

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

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

It was basic. No, completely basic.

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

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

There was a crossover.

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

No, there’s nothing embarrassing about it.

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

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

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

Do they know that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Half of the people are dead.

Yes, I know.

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

Tony Banks.

On the back of…

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

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

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

Well, they would make it nowadays.

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

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

Yeah, I might have more of a chance now.

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

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

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

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

So what exactly happened?

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

Did they ever get caught?

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

Oh, really?

It was a strange little detail, but they had…

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

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

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

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

God, how dramatic and interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So tell us about this article, then.

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

What did it say?

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

You’ve managed to actually interview these people.

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

He was Polish or the people he killed were Polish?

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

He didn’t like Poles.

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

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

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

Should we be publicising this?

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

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

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

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

So what do you say to that?

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

I thought it worked quite well as a poem.

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

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

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

Great name. Great name.

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

What about original material?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

That bad?

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

That sounds wonderful. Nervous laughter there.

Yeah, very nervous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much.

Were you teachers pet?

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

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

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

But it was a pastiche, you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What? Two sugars?

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

Flanagan, keep the door shut!

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

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

Skating enters.

Morning, snails!

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

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

Really? To do what, exactly?

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

Any biscuits?

Blini, what are you doing?

Playing chess.

With yourself?

My right brain is playing my left.

I see.

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

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

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

Blini, what is the point of all this?

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

They haven’t been listening.

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

I have no milk.

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

My gerbils!

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

Ah, Jesus!

Blinney, if you must keep dead animals…

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

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

Blinney indicates his name, written on the container.

Hello? Blinney’s!

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

Caveat emptia! Let the poora beware!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s true.

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

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

That was how I saw it. Yes. Yeah.

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

Thank you.

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

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

They are workshops, I think.

Not just what they call workshops, they are workshops.

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

Is it a means to an end?

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

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

Yes, it was, definitely.

What was it like?

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

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

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

I love that line. I love that line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, some of the shorter ones I did get.

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

I see, right, right.

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

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

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

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

You know, it’s kind of…

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

Right, yeah.

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

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

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

Woman arrives home from work. Husband is watching telly.

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

Oh, that’s something I ordered.

Not off the telly? Not again?

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

What? What is it?

It’s a small hadron collider.

What?

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

What are you talking about? What does it do?

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

Send it back.

I will not send it back. Look, I’ll show you. There. Isn’t she a beauty?

We already have a walk.

It’s not a walk, it’s a small hadron collider. Look, you take the lid off there, you put the hadrons in there, you put the lid back on and pow! Subatomic popcorn. Here, let me plug it in.

That plug doesn’t look normal.

Well, it’s probably heavy duty. Yeah, look, 15 million amps.

That’s like your fan heater, isn’t it? Or does it do poached eggs?

It doesn’t do any kind of eggs. It does cutting edge nuclear research. It enables us to be part of the search for the great unifying theory, the universal law of everything, the god particle, the Higgs boson.

I thought they were extinct.

What?

The Higgs bison.

Not bison, boson.

What’s the difference?

The difference between a bison and a boson? The difference is almost, and I mean very, very nearly, the entire bison. OK, right, here goes.

Nothing.

Hang on, it’s on standby. There we go.

Doctor Who noises. These escalate and get more intense for a few seconds.

OK, now I’ll just put a few of these hadrons in here. They supply you with a starter pack.

They’re like sprouts. And this is going to detect…

Bosons, yes, hopefully. Look, look, it’s got a little boson counter on the top. Watch it.

The noises go crazy.

There, look, one boson. It found one. Let’s get it out.

What are you going to do with it?

I don’t know. Send it to the Royal Society or something, I suppose. Maybe we should contact Knowles HQ.

They open it.

Where is it then?

I think it gets stuck in this bit here.

I can’t see anything.

They’re very, very small, aren’t they?

I’ll get my glasses.

Get me a Jiffy bag too, will you?

Well, this sketch didn’t make the show. Any particular reason why?

I have no idea. It’s a work of genius, isn’t it? It may be that it didn’t come to a satisfactory conclusion. I thought I had thought of an ending for it, but clearly that was a little bit of an anticlimax. But the line I liked, I don’t know, do you want to guess what line I liked? I always liked it.

Well, the line I liked, I wonder if it’s the same one, is that the difference is almost the entire…

Yes, that’s right. I did like it and I think that was a good example of the sort of thing I did like, which was it was playing with intellectually curious ideas. But I think there was actually a lot of excitement about the Hadron Collider at that time and there were photographs of it on the front page of newspapers and so on and we all got very positive about what it would mean. And then they found the Higgs boson almost immediately and they went, yup, there it is. And then we heard no more about it. Again, you know, there’s been no explanation as to whether or not this has changed our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality. I mean, apparently the Higgs boson is something to do with our understanding of how gravity works. Anyway, it was all part of the excitement at the time and I like the idea of being able to get one out of an innovations catalogue.

Now, talking about this show at the odd half hour, it was a sketch show that you were a writer on but not a performer.

Yes, I was a bit miffed about that but they did have good performers. They got Justin Edwards on who was clearly fulfilling the role that I would have fulfilled if I’d been on it. And Justin is a brilliant sketch actor and writes in quite a similar sort of mode to myself actually. And I tried to write all my sketches for Justin basically because Justin was my kind of avatar in the sketch show and that is very much my weakness. I have to acknowledge that as a sketch writer, I will write basically what I would do if I would think so. I was kind of planning to write to him.

But you’ve written on quite a few shows that you’ve not been the performing voice that you’re writing for.

I wrote for 8 out of 10 Cats a little bit. But again, now I was writing for Jimmy Carr, who’s kind of similar to me. Supercilious, middle class, sneering. That’s what I can do. And then I wrote a little bit for Sean Lock on that. And I would sit with Sean. And actually, I think Sean mainly wanted somebody to sort of sounding board. If you’re writing with somebody, I’ve got writers who I write with like this, it’s as much that they want to hear themselves saying something to the other writer and seeing your reaction and you build with it. Do you want to mean like you share a joke with them, but you’re not creating stuff from scratch. And I could do that. Yeah, I did find at some point, you know, I felt I am earning enough now, and there’s enough viability in my own stand up career. I should really sort of try and put everything that I have creatively behind writing my own stuff. Because if you’re writing like I would write with Dara O’Brien sometimes, and Dara would say, oh, I want to talk about, you know, what it’s like to be a stay at home dad and going to the toddler groups with your young kid and everyone else there as a mum. And I was thinking, ah, that’s kind of something I am doing myself. And I had kind of thought of some material about. Now, do I give him the material I’ve already sort of half thought about? Or do I put that to one side and try and think of new stuff? Or do I say, I’m sorry, I can’t do that because anything good I think of, I won’t be able to give? Do you know what I mean? So you feel conflicted. And I could conceivably have written for somebody whose life was so different from mine that it wouldn’t work, you know, anything I thought of would only be for them. But then it wouldn’t, I probably wouldn’t be able to think of it, you know what I mean? So it wouldn’t be very good material. I’m happier writing my own stuff and then anything that doesn’t work for me as stand up now, I sort of put on to my Patreon, which is a website kind of thing where people can sign up to subscribe to my kind of musings and thinkings and so on. And on Twitter and things like that, you know, and I’d rather just own everything that I write.

Right, time for the final offcut. Can you tell us what it is and what it’s called?

Yes, this was poetry, and this was a poem I wrote called Wanted, and this is from 1996.

Wanted. Men to fill positions. A glove for the hand of the royal physician. A swab for the sweat of the minister’s brow. Grease for the cunt of the sacred cow. Excuses abandon you now. Vacant. Space to be uptaken. A leg, arm, or tit to be sliced up for bacon. Unmurdered siblings, untested babies. New heads for migraines. Skin grafts for scabies. Your answers are murmured by maybes. Gone now. These opportunities missed. The pure prepubescent, the unbroken wrist. Televoidulent mindscapes, unverbular thought. Deaf eyes and blind ears, uncorrupted, untaught. Unaware of the concept of ought.

Ooh, that sounds very impressive, but I have no idea what it’s about.

No, it’s kind of brooding and meaningless, isn’t it? It’s very teenage, given that I was 31 when I wrote that. I should really have grown out of that nonsense. Well, I don’t know. I think there’s kind of some value perhaps in prodding that kind of stuff. I used to enjoy writing it and creating images that triggered something in my head, but quite possibly wouldn’t in anybody else’s. I think what I was possibly thinking about was one thing which I had done for money, which was to make myself available for drug testing. People did this quite a bit. I actually did it even while I had a job at one point. I would take mornings off to go and supplement the majors with it. There was one where you took either a painkiller or a placebo. Then half an hour later, they would put an electric shock against your teeth. Then you had to say at what point you could no longer stand the pain. Then they would test whether it had gone up or down. There was another one, again, with the painkiller, where they would put like a… You know when they do blood pressure, like a sort of inflated sleeve around your upper arm. Then you had to open and flex your fist until you could no longer again bear the pain. They would test that. It was quite humiliating and degrading in a way. It was 150 quid, which was quite a lot of money, it seemed to me then. And there were some more scary ones which I tried to get onto and couldn’t get onto where people, I can’t remember what they were testing for. But I remember thinking that is really not what you would call like a situation’s vacant. You know, there’s something quite kind of unsavoury about this, which I’m letting myself in for. But at the same time, I had somehow lost a sense of self-esteem or something that might have protected me from it. But I wouldn’t want to overstretch the degree to which there’s any coherent, you know, the thought going on, let alone a successful manifestation of it. But the great thing with poetry and with writing generally, I think, I mean, if I had to say one thing about writing and why it’s quite pleasant actually listening to some of this stuff, I think, I mean, to read other people’s books is great. Obviously, there are some great novels that have been written and some great poetry and so on. But I still think really almost all writing that exists, you know, other people’s writing should be thought of as worm castes. And the thing to do is to be burrowing your own hole, you know, there’s nothing that compares with the satisfaction of writing yourself and of having written and when you revisit your old worm castes, as third rate as they might well appear to other people, I get enormous satisfaction from just remembering the experience and the feeling of having done them. And I don’t think I’ve ever read anything which gave me as much enjoyment and satisfaction as the sense of things coming together unexpectedly when you’re actually writing them. But you know, it’s a great way of just drawing the thread out from your brain and seeing what’s in there and what might be causing congestion of one kind or another. You know, it’s a good mental health practice, I think.

Now, you’re going to be collating all your writing, comedy, presumably the poetry in the articles. If you mentioned it before, you’re creating sort of a Simon Evans archive in Patreon, is that right?

I am, that’s right, I’m putting up a Patreon, I’m going to incorporate it or migrate it hopefully over to my website soon as well. But yes, you realize you accrue quite a lot of stuff over the years. So I am putting that on online and sort of annotating it a little bit. And also, there are a few other full length scripts I’ve written as well. And yeah, gradually, one by one, pretty much everything will go on there. And then I can burn down the actual house.

Will any of the porn be going in?

I’ve got a few of the early letters, but I do still have limousine lust, which was the the story mentioned in there, which was published in Erotic Stories. And that’s about 3000 words. And I might reprint that. Yeah, a short answer is yes, I think it will. Credited to VS. Vasanthi, I wrote that was my pen name for that VS. Vasanthi. And I’ll tell you where that name came from. VS. I just took as quite promising initials because there was VS. Pritchett and VS. Naipaul, who I thought, so that sounds quite literary. Vasanthi was the name of a child whom I was sponsoring through a thing called Plan International. She was, she lived in Madras, I think, and I paid £12 a month. And I thought, well, she’s going to get paid for by the money that I earned from this.

It’s not, you know, it’s coming slightly seedy about this, young girl.

It’s quite disgusting, isn’t it? Yes. I don’t, I never even saw her, but I just like the name Vasanthi. It has, it almost sounds like a sort of goddess of love, like you might find her on a temple type thing. So anyway, that was the name I took. It is absolutely disgraceful, though, you’re right, incredibly disrespectful. But nevertheless, she did get her years’ pay out of it, so that pretty much covered her for that year. So I guess she would probably have taken that bargain.

Absolutely. Final question. Having listened to clips of all your different bits of writing over the years, is there anything you’ve learned or anything you’re surprised by?

I don’t think I’ve changed that much, really. I think, in terms of learning stuff, you might learn from one moment to the next, but I don’t think a huge amount of wisdom or experience has accumulated. I could easily have made those same mistakes this morning. And there’s some lines in there from 10, 20 years ago that I’d be quite happy to come out with again.

No, I don’t think so.

The only thing I’ve become aware of is, as you do as a stand up, is how you’re perceived on stage and what you can get away with in terms of what you might be pretending to as an audience in terms of your persona. You have to listen to the audience and what they see you as in terms of what you can get away with on stage. But when you’re a writer, you can be anyone, you know. And so, you know, as that cartoon goes, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Right, well, Simon Evans, thank you for opening your virtual bottom drawer and sharing your offcuts with us.

Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Simon Evans. The Offcuts were performed by Beth Chalmers, Toby Longworth, Nigel Pilkington and Keith Wickham. The music was by me and this was a Speakable production.