My problem is I keep developing things which are big and expensive and extravagant because that’s what I would like to watch but I have to write to my strengths of what I think I’m good at. I can’t write a sort of Sally Wainwright domestic drama which you know she’s brilliant and there are many other rights like that but I can’t write that. I try and write something like that and before I know it you know an alien’s arrived or they’ve gone back in time or half the cast have been shot in a gruesome manner. I like genre stuff so I’ll leave the other stuff to those who do it much better than me.

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

This is the second part of my conversation with Charlie Higson. So rather than run through his many achievements all over again, you’re better off hopping back one episode for the full introduction. The headlines though, you probably know him as the co-creator, writer and star of The Fast Show and or as a best-selling novelist, author of the young James Bond series and a whole range of crime, horror and young adult books.

In part one, Charlie’s offcuts included a mash-up of two Monty Python sketches for a Harry Enfield show, a scene from the first episode of a big-scale TV drama about the young Winston Churchill and a wonderfully creepy short story that predated Frozen by several years. And the variety continues in this episode. So picking up where we left off, here’s Charlie introducing his next offcut, though do be warned there is a fair bit of swearing quite early on.

This is a film script which I wrote in 1998 called Don’t Go Crazy. Interior, pool at the gym, evening. Alex, Phil, Lester and Rob are sat around the pool.

It’s good to have you back, Phil. The pool felt empty without you. Well, I just… Don’t say anything depressing, Phil.

I came here to relax. Alex, have you ever considered taking a bit of exercise while you were here? It is a gym after all. I only come here for the pool and the sauna.

You do two lengths, then you sit there drinking wine. It relaxes me. But maybe if you did some exercise, you wouldn’t be such a fat fuck.

I’m not a fat fuck. Well, you’re not a thin fuck. Who says I have to be any kind of a fuck? No, you’re definitely a fuck, Alex.

That’s not in dispute. And you’re definitely getting fat. You’re a fat fuck, Alex.

Let’s face it. You only need to be as fit as your lifestyle requires. All these freaks doing weights and tramping for hours up imaginary staircases.

What do they need to be so fit for? They all work in offices, for lifting phones to their ears, for opening their car doors. No, to look better, to be healthier, to not be a fat fuck. I’m perfectly healthy.

All blokes think that. Look, it keeps Sarah off my back. She thinks I get some exercise so she doesn’t keep on at me about me dying young.

Christ, I would have thought she’d be relieved. The thought of living with you. We’re perfectly happy in our own way.

We’ve worked out a system. If you want to be successful in a relationship, Phil, you have to have a system. You pompous prick.

Well, I hope it’s cheering you up, Phil, having a go at me. You know, what you need is a fuck, Phil. It’s fucking that’s fucked me up, Lester.

Girls, what I actually need is to stop thinking about fucking. Your problem with women is you appear too fucking desperate, Phil. Can you tell me something? Can you tell me why I should take any advice on women from you lot? You, you’ve been 10 years with the same woman.

You, you’ve never spent longer than about 10 seconds with one woman. And you have an almost supernatural ability to attract mad women from miles around. Hello, I’m bonkers.

Ah, well, you must go out with Lester then. Well, at least we’re all getting a fuck. I don’t know.

I don’t really like sex anymore. What? I find it too troubling. I know Sarah too well and I just feel so… I feel so ridiculous.

And it reminds me too immediately of my longing and my need. Yeah, I know what you mean. You’re all fucking bonkers.

Okay. There’s a lot of bad language in there, isn’t there? Yes, a lot of… there will be a warning before this episode goes out. Don’t worry.

Explicit. E for explicit. But it’s all right. Don’t mind a bit of swearing. So Don’t Go Crazy is the name of the film’s script. Tell us about it. Tell us about the story.

Well, one of my favourite American crime authors is Charles Williford. He wrote some brilliant books.

And I was reading one of them and it was… quite a lot of it was these four guys sitting around a motel swimming pool in America, just kind of shooting the breeze with each other. And then it develops into a crime story. And I quite liked that idea.

I thought, I want to just start a film like that. So it starts with these four guys around a swimming pool in a gym in London with a view out over the city. And it was a way of writing about men.

And it was a way of writing about London. And I developed it originally. I thought it would be good for me, Paul Whitehouse, Mark Williams and Simon Day.

So we would play these four friends. And the basic premise is one of them, which would have been Mark Williams’ character, announces to his mates that he’s had enough and he wants to kill himself. Right.

And I thought I would turn around what the normal story is that it’s about how they try and persuade him not to. And, you know, he’s got a great life. He shouldn’t throw it away.

But in this one, they go, all right, then, well, we’ll help you. And so they do. And they sort of discuss how they should do it and and what should happen.

And and they sort of set up things which he doesn’t go through with. And obviously, in the end, he doesn’t kill himself. And everything that they’ve done actually persuades him that he doesn’t want to do that and that they are good friends.

And along along the way, it’s a it’s a comedy, a comedy about blokes, really. And a lot of it is about how blokes don’t, you know, when they get together, they don’t really talk about personal things and emotions and stuff. Mostly talk about films they’ve seen or football or cars or whatever.

So, yeah, and I quite like the script. I thought it was good. And for a while, I was developing it with Working Title, with Working Title Films, who I got to know through doing Random Hot Coat Deceased, because that was through Working Title Television.

They set up a television arm. So I got to know Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, the two guys that run it. And we started developing the film.

But the film world works very differently to the TV world. And it’s quite slow and cumbersome. And this is one of the reasons, I think, why we’ve made so few comedy films.

You know, in America, someone’s got a funny character on Saturday Night Live. Oh, we’ll make a film. We’ll do it quickly.

It might be a hit. It might be rubbish. But we’ll get it out there and get these things done.

And then we put these guys together. They’re good. But it’s a lot slower and more cumbersome in this country.

We don’t really have an industry. And if you look back, it’s amazing. We’ve had so much good comedy on the TV.

Very few good comedy films. So this would, in fact, sort of be a fast show film. Yes.

But not with the millions of characters. Although, you know, the way these things go, once you get into the film world, suddenly it’s, well, we can’t get the financing if it’s you guys. But if it’s Hugh Grant, whatever.

But surely that would be part of its appeal, no? The fact that it’s the fast show. Yes, but they’re film people, you see. And there is a gap between film people and TV people.

And often when someone eventually gets around to making a film, it’s a bit late. It’s a bit after the event. You know, like the Alan Partridge film was 10 years too late, really.

Great film, though. Probably not as good as a TV show. But so it was quite cumbersome and it was taking a long time.

And then there was the Twin Towers attack. Oh, yes. And they said, and it may have just been an excuse because they wanted to get out of it.

They didn’t want to make it. They said, you know, since the Twin Towers attack, people don’t want dark humour. They want things to be light and breezy and fun.

And we think this central idea of them trying to help him commit suicide, could you change it that actually they’re trying to persuade him not to? And I said, well, yeah, but that’s the whole joke. That’s the whole idea of the film. And things do get changed because of this.

I remember I was asked by Working Title if I wanted to work as a script doctor on this thriller script that they were developing. And I read it and I thought, I don’t get this. And I went back to them.

I said, I really don’t understand what it is about this film that you wanted to get it made. What’s this kind of USP that you thought? Yeah, because it’s mystifying me. And I said, well, we were originally developing it as it was going to be the first Channel Tunnel thriller.

And it was about someone planting a bomb in the Channel Tunnel. But then someone else announced they were making a film of that. So we took that part out of it.

And I said, yeah, but that means you just don’t have an idea. There’s no idea behind this film. And this happens a lot in that world.

You know, you get a certain amount down the line. We’ve got the financing. We’ve got this.

Oh, we can’t do that. But we’ll take that out. And suddenly you’ve got something that makes no sense at all.

So I didn’t pursue Don’t Go Crazy. And obviously, if I did go back to it, it would not be with us in it anymore. But I still think it’s quite a funny script.

And they’re quite interesting characters. Well, I mean, there’s a renewed interest in the Farsha. You’re going on tour.

Yeah, but we’re too old. You know, this was written for people in their late 30s. And it couldn’t be for people in their early 60s or mid 60s.

However old your team are? We could do. Well, I’m just thinking, could BBC finance it partly or, you know, sort of as a, not a TV special, but… A BBC couldn’t. We can’t be seen to encourage people committing suicide.

Oh, God, right. OK. Again, you know, I’ve got hundreds of these things.

I’ve got so many unmade films. I’ve got so many pilots and Bibles for TV series that I’ve worked on. It’s often something will lie fallow for a while.

And then you’ll meet someone, you’ll have a conversation. Oh, we’re looking for this type of thing. You say, oh, I got something like that.

It’s like my picture book, my first picture book. What’s that noise? I’ve done with a fabulous Nadia Shireen. I was with her and she said, oh, have you ever written anything we could work on together? I said, well, when my kids were little, I wrote this story.

I never really finished it. But a boy who gets inside a cardboard box makes a lot of noise. She said, oh, I’d like to see that.

And I dug it out. And I think the last version of it was from 1994. And she said, this is great.

Let’s do it. So I kind of finished it and we published it. So, you know, things can get a second lease of life and come back.

OK, let’s move on to your next offcut. What is this one? This is a Doctor Who script that I wrote in 2016 called The Birthday Present. Interior, house in the desert, back room, day.

Amy and the Doctor find themselves in a bedroom full of British Eighth Army desert troops in shorts and wide helmets. A bed stands against one wall. There’s a back door here and two glassless windows.

The troops are firing from the windows and through the open doorway. Throughout the scene, they completely ignore the Doctor and Amy, who duck down as an explosion outside sends a cloud of dust into the room. Sniper! A bullet cracks and one of the soldiers falls away from the window, dead.

Grenade! He lobs a grenade out. There’s an explosion across the road. It’s chaos.

Bullets everywhere. The Doctor and Amy cower, trying to avoid being hit. German machine gun nest at five o’clock! I’m on it! He runs out into the street.

There’s the rattle of machine gun fire and a cry. The machine gun rakes the building. Two more soldiers fall back, dead.

See the pyramids and die. There’s something not right here, Amy. Will you stop seeing that? Another soldier goes up to the window.

All soldiers look the same in uniform, but he looks identical to the one who ran out into the street. Sniper! I’m on it! Look around you, Amy. What is wrong with this picture? What, even apart from the guns and the explosions? Grenade! The soldier who just shouted grenade.

Wasn’t he shot before? I don’t know. I was too busy ducking. Concentrate, Amy.

We’re in the middle of a battle and yet… There’s no blood? There are no bodies. Indeed. As they look around the room, there’s no evidence of the several soldiers who have been shot.

Keep your eyes on one of them. Okay. Wait till he’s shot.

What? Just watch. Amy watches as the second British Tommy is shot and falls dead. He sprawls in the dust on the floor among broken pottery and ammunition cases.

Nothing’s happening. What am I supposed to be looking at? Over there! Amy spins around to look where the doctor’s pointing. Can’t see anything.

Turns back to the dead soldier who has disappeared. Where’d he go? I’m not sure he was ever there in the first place. What’s going on? I think we’re caught in a wrinkle of time.

We’re seeing different times at the same time. But that’s impossible. No, it’s not.

Space is folded in on itself. That’s how the TARDIS is able to travel anywhere and to any time. Look.

As the gun battle rages around them, the doctor pulls a blanket off the bed, uncovering a white sheet. He fissures a large marker pen out of his pocket and draws a dot on the sheet. Okay, we’re here.

North Africa, 1943 or thereabout. And over here… The doctor draws another point a long way away on the sheet. Is ancient Egypt.

4567 BC, okay? He hands the marker pen to Amy and points to the dots. So how would you get from here to there? Amy draws a straight line across the sheet. No, too slow.

That would take centuries. The doctor tugs the sheet off the bed and scrumbles it into a ball, oblivious to the bullets that smack into the wall all around him. Then he carefully peels back the layers, revealing that the two dots are now touching.

Abracadabra! You didn’t submit this script, you said. Well, it’s a long story. I knew Russell Davis enough to say hello to him and have a conversation.

I knew Stephen Moffat much better. And when he was showrunning, we talked about me possibly writing a script. And I wanted to do something, because they’d never done it.

I said, look, computer gaming is such a big thing with kids. You haven’t ever done anything about that. You should do.

But the interesting thing about the showrunners is that Doctor Who very much kind of is a representation of whatever their concerns are. So Russell Davis, there was a lot of human drama, but there was also quite a lot of satire in it. Stephen Moffat, as we know, is a brainy fellow.

And he likes kind of complicated, brainy things. And that’s what he likes writing about and making up incredibly complex, folded in stories. And, you know, his Doctor Who was quite similar to Sherlock Holmes.

So he liked some aspects of what I was talking about. But obviously, he wasn’t that excited by the idea of computer games. It wasn’t really part of his world.

But I play a huge amount of computer games and my boys did, too. And it was interesting that under Stephen, the Doctor Who probably started to move away from being aimed at 10 year old boys and girls. But what was great was it was a series.

You know, there was science fiction and there were adventures. And it was great that the hero of it was different to the other sort of heroes you were shown. A male hero who didn’t have a gun, wasn’t beating people by fighting.

He used his brain and he used technology and wizardry. He’s a wizard. But Stephen, the scripts became very complicated and complex.

And he started getting very interested, really, in what was the online fan community and particularly American online fan community. He was trying to push it into America where it would be aimed at an older audience. And I felt it did slightly move away from being a fun Saturday night show for kids to watch.

And so mine was about how it’s the sort of Tron idea that the Doctor and Amy get trapped inside a game, which I mean, obviously you can’t do. So it’s essentially it’s a game. The game essentially gets inside you.

It starts to manipulate your brain so that you think you are in a in a real world. But it’s a game that this thing is playing. So, you know, I had a lot of fun writing it and working it up.

And I worked up a pitch document and Stephen was so busy that it was months, I think years before I eventually could have a meeting with him. And I developed it to a certain extent. And it’s quite interesting, the Doctor Who world, there was a huge team, a sort of support team to keep this thing running.

And, you know, it was a bit like trying to get to see the emperor, only dealing with his minions and his court or trying to get access to the pope or something. So eventually I got through to Stephen and he’s very energetic, full of ideas, throwing ideas out there. And my story was quite, quite straightforward.

It was about gaming. You know, it’s about the universe could be about to be destroyed. And he realises that someone is playing a game and they don’t realise and they are actually controlling everything that’s going on.

And it turns out that it’s just a young teenage kid. And Stephen says, well, you could try this or do that. And, yeah, it’d be great if he went there.

And it started becoming more Stephen Moffat-ish. And I was saying, well, that sort of makes it a lot bigger and expands it. Also, don’t worry about that.

No, no, no, no. We’d never worry about that when we start. We’d make as big as we can and throw as much as we can and make it exciting.

And then and then when we know what the budget is, we worry about this stuff and then we pull it back. But, you know, don’t restrict yourself now. So I went away and did what he said and came back.

And the team said I didn’t get access back to him again. The team said, well, it’s just too big and expensive. We can’t do this.

And by that point, I thought I’m not pursuing this. I’ve been banging my head against the wall. And I’d been I’d started writing it just just to see for myself whether it worked.

And so then I thought, well, I might as well finish writing it. Have some fun with it. So I did write it up into a complete script.

I mean, you can tell when it was written. Yeah, it was still Matt Smith and Amy Pond. And yes, and I’ve just sat on it since.

Could it be resubmitted now, do we think? Well, Doctor Who has changed so much now that it’s it’s become a different show, really. It seems to be about something else. And nobody really knows where it will be next.

I mean, it was interesting because when Chris Chibnall took it on, I’d been working with him on I was in Broadchurch and he was talking about what he was going to do with it. He thought that the bar to entry was set too high and that a 10-year-old kid coming to this would be absolutely mystified. He said he was going to strip away all that, go back to basics.

I do like the reboot like they did with the Marvel comics and stuff. Year zero. And he sort of did that a little bit, but he did also at the same time change quite a lot of the for want of a better word, the DNA of the series.

It became a bit of a team and also much as I love Jodie Whittaker again, who I’d worked with on Broadchurch and she’s and she’s a brilliant actress and she was great as Doctor Who. I felt it was a shame because it was the only show on TV in which a male hero wasn’t an action man. And I thought that was such a good role model for boys and was giving them something they weren’t getting elsewhere.

It was really interesting to see what happens when you make it a girl, a woman. But for me, that changed what I thought was a real strength of the show. Now, another huge TV franchise you got involved in, as you mentioned, is the Randall and Hopkirk deceased relaunch, which I loved as a child.

The original. I also loved yours as well, but I had a bit of a crush on Hopkirk when I was very young. But you wrote and produced the whole series and it starred your mate, Jim, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer.

That sounds like a huge endeavour from being a writer or a performer dabbling in the two. I also played a different character in every episode, rather foolishly. Oh, did you? Very Alfred Hitchcockian.

I didn’t. Yes, it was. I didn’t write all of it.

I was the lead writer. I was the showrunner, although we don’t really have that role in this country. But I did manage to get in a lot of really good writers to work on it with me, like the League of Gentlemen guys and people like that.

It did look like a lot of fun. It was. It was huge fun.

And it came about because Working Title TV was set up. And at the time, they were sort of under the umbrella of Universal, who had bought up the whole of the loo grade, the ATV catalogue, all those great shows from the 60s. They were looking through it to see which ones would stand up to remake.

And they went for Adderall and Hopkirk to see because it was a really good idea. It had been a popular show. Two detectives.

One of them’s a ghost. But it had never quite gained the respect of, say, the Avengers or the Prisoner. So whilst people sort of remembered it, they didn’t remember it in that great detail.

And, you know, it was proficiently made, but it wasn’t like a sacred classic that you couldn’t touch. So they felt, you know, well, we could update it and just keep the idea. But Vic and Bob, though, Vic and Bob, an interesting choice.

Well, Vic and Bob got in touch with them and they said, here you’re talking about making Randall Hopkirk deceased. Vic’s white suit was obviously inspired by the original Hopkirk deceased. I did not know that.

Yeah. And so they said, look, we’d love to have a go. We want to get away from doing shooting stars.

We want to do something different. Have a go at doing something with a story. And suddenly it became a package.

You think, yeah, Randall Hopkirk with Vic and Bob. That’s a thing. And they said, would I? Because they liked me as a writer and someone they like working with.

They said they didn’t want to write it themselves. They didn’t feel that that was their forte. But would I like to write at least the pilot? So we did and we developed it and people liked it.

And then we came up, you know, to run the series. And I said, well, you know, why don’t I show run this thing? Because I know how it works. And this is something I wanted, you know, I always wanted to do that kind of thing.

And also direct some of it. But it nearly killed me. It was so much work.

And yes, it was huge fun, but incredibly stressful. Filming is, you know, it’s a grind. You’re constantly fighting time, money, the weather, actors getting it right.

And to be stuck with no escape, you know, from right from the day run, writing it to filming it, to editing it to all of that is a huge amount of work. And it was very, it was very stressful. But you went back for the second series, did you? Yes.

Yeah. But also, I think by the end, that was when it was more stressful, because by the time we’d finished filming the second series, we kind of knew that the show hadn’t taken off the way the BBC wanted and they weren’t going to do another series. So once you’ve got that drive and energy taken out of it, it becomes even more hard work.

But it did mean that the last couple of episodes we shot, we just said, look, let’s stop trying to keep everyone happy and let’s just go bonkers. OK, let’s move on now with your next Offcut, please. This is a children’s story called Far Away Forest Friends that I wrote in 2004 and never published.

I am the happiest and the prettiest fairy in the forest. And with one tap of her magic wand, they would forget all about being cross and start dancing and singing and clapping their hands with joy. If anyone was ever bored, then Dingle would sit down on a spotted toadstool, wave her wand and fill the forest with sweet music.

In a flash, they would be bored no longer and they would spring to their feet and dance and sing and clap their hands all day long. And sometimes well into the night. It didn’t matter that their feet might start to bleed and that they couldn’t stop dancing to eat or drink, for their smile would be wider than the river bright that winds through the forest.

In fact, the smiles that Dingle put on their faces were so wide that it sometimes hurt quite badly. The river bright is as much as 45 feet wide in some places. Can you imagine a smile 45 feet wide? That’s going to hurt, isn’t it? But Dingle didn’t care, because it is quite the most awful thing to be bored, isn’t it? Yes, little Dingle brought happiness and joy with her wherever she went.

If anyone was tired and just wanted to sleep in their beds all day long like a silly lazybones, then Dingle would fly in through their bedroom window, sprinkle fairy dust on them with her silver wand and they would jump out of bed with a cry of joy and begin to sing and dance and tidy their room and do the washing up and maybe fix the roof and oh, how merry they would be. And when it came to bedtime, they would see their soft cosy bed with its goose down pillows and its coverlet all covered with a pattern of pretty flowers. But would they lie down? No, they would not, because they would be dancing away and singing like mad and clapping their hands like a lunatic.

Dingle the magic fairy never rested. You should have seen her as she flitted through the forest, bringing happiness and laughter and dancing, lots and lots of dancing, into the lives of all the forest friends who didn’t know what on earth they would have done without her. Which is why it was such a shame when one day she was eaten by a giant toad called Roger.

Now, this is a children’s story that you never developed. How far did it get? I did show it to my people at Puffin, and we talked about it. The idea was that there was going to be a whole series of books about different characters in the faraway forest.

But partly I couldn’t think of another story. Right, so this was going to be a collection of stories. Well, it would be like a little collection of books, you know, like Mr Men.

A lot more text than Mr Men. Well, that’s the thing, but at the time there had been things like A Series of Unfortunate Events, which was a lovely set of little hardback books for slightly older readers, but, you know, sort of breaking down the barriers, I suppose, of what you expect for certain reader ages. But yes, as I say, but partly I didn’t press on, because again, probably something else came up and I wrote another book instead.

But also, and you could see there’s a couple of moments in there that even as far back in 2004, that people were starting to think, and certainly publishers, they have to be very, very careful, you know, about what you can and can’t put in a kid’s book. And there had been a rise in more irreverent books, but… There was a backlash, wasn’t there? Yeah, to a certain extent, you know. What could you not say? What were you not allowed to imply? Well, you know, bleeding feet, someone being described as a lunatic.

The story ends with her, there’s this sort of big fairy tale book that she produces, and she ends up, they free her from Roger the Toad, but then she flies off and gets snapped shut inside a big fairy tale book, and everyone cheers, because they don’t want her back. But it’s, you know, you can’t do that, have that sort of violence and trauma. So, you know, you can have fun.

You can’t have violence in a children’s book. It’s a tricky one, it’s a tricky one. Children are very violent.

I know, but publishers sort of worry about encouraging that. It goes in waves. You know, it’s like what happened, they did a version where they toned down the Roald Dahl books, because, you know, you can’t call people fat.

You can’t call people ugly. You can’t say a woman is a witch. If they’re evil, they start to look ugly.

And things like that, which is all the fun of the books and why kids love them. And you can see why you don’t necessarily want to be saying those things, you know, equating ugliness with evil and old women are evil, whatever. But without that, books can be boring, a little boring and bland.

So, you know, I think there was a certain sensitivity about that when I went, even back in 2004, when I wrote that story. OK, fair enough. I think if I had come up with loads of other stories and ideas, I would have pushed it.

But alternatively, I might go back to it one day and say, well, let’s just try and make this work as a fun little one off. And let’s see what we can get away with. So obviously, if anybody doesn’t know, apart from your fame from The Fast Show and also being a prolific novelist, you’ve written a lot of stuff for younger readers that has been published, but you’re probably most well known in the younger reader space for your novels featuring the young James Bond.

Now, how did that come about? Was that your idea or was it suggested to you? Well, no, it wasn’t my idea at all. It was generated by the Ian Fleming Estate, Ian Fleming Publications, IFP. They were looking ahead to the release of Casino Royale and the whole of the James Bond film franchise being rebooted and refreshed.

And so they knew there was going to be a lot of stuff about Bond. It was also coming up to the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth in the early noughties. And there had been many continuation Bond novels after Fleming, more than he wrote.

There’d been more continuation novels. That had been permitted by the estate? Yes, they’re all commissioned by IFP. They were wanting to remind people where Bond started as a literary creation.

So they were looking at finding, you know, serious, inverted commas, adult authors to write continuation novels, which ended up being the likes of, the first one was Sebastian Foulkes. Then they had William Boyd and eventually Antony Horowitz. But Antony Horowitz had had huge success at the time with his Alex Rider books, which were very much a contemporary teenage James Bond.

Yes, my sons read the whole lot of those. Yes. And so they thought, well, we’ve got the actual James Bond.

We should do our own books about the early life of young James Bond. And really on the back of Harry Potter, kids’ books had become a viable thing. There was money to be made.

Writers were being taken seriously. There was a big resurgence in kids’ reading. And there were various other authors who were doing things.

There was Robert Muchmore who wrote a series, a sort of young secret agents called the Cherub series. Oh yes, we read those as well. Yep.

And so they were thinking, well, we should do our own young James Bond books. And I wrote these four crime books in the early 90s. And I had a fantastic editor working on them called Kate Jones, who ended up working for IFP.

And she was in charge of these new projects. And she suggested that I might be a good possibility to write the young James Bond books. She knew I had boys.

She knew I was a big James Bond fan. And she felt that my writing style, the sort of very stripped back, hard-boiled American style, would work very well with kids because it’s very unfussy and unflowery and it’s sort of straight to the point. And so she approached me and said, was I interested? And I said, God, yes, I’m interested.

I’d love to do that. It’d be the perfect thing to write for my own boys. So I got the gig.

And I had a huge fun writing them. I wrote five of them. But then I thought, if I don’t move on and do something else, that’s all anyone will want for me.

Because they sold really, really well. And I thought, I don’t want to be stuck for the rest of my life working on somebody else’s creation, essentially. Sure.

Time for another Offcut now. Tell us about this one, please. This is another unmade film script I wrote in 2013, based on Beauty and the Beast, called Beast.

She goes up the wide staircase. She sees an open door and walks along the landing towards it. Interior, madame’s room, night.

Bella’s bags are in the old lady’s bedroom, which has been tidied up a little. It is dimly lit by an old lamp. Bella opens the wardrobe and finds that her clothes have been hung up neatly.

She looks around. There is an old-fashioned dressing table with combs and brushes, makeup and perfume, etc. The room is more grown up than her own room at home.

And there is something of a fairytale feel about it. She sits on the bed, takes out her cell phone, starts to dial. You’re as beautiful as your picture.

Bella looks up, startled. The Beast is in the doorway, backlit so that she cannot see his face. He is nevertheless a huge, menacing presence in the cramped space.

I wish I could say the same for you, but I can’t hardly see you. That’s for the best. So, what do I call you? As far as you’re concerned, I don’t have a name.

You will need to give me your telephone. Do you want to come and get it? First, turn off the lamp. Don’t you think you’re taking this anonymity thing a little too far? Turn it off! Bella cringes back, then turns the lamp off.

The Beast steps towards her, a vast, lumbering shape in the near darkness. Your phone is no use to you here. Oh right, I get it.

Spooky old house in the woods, young girl all alone, no signal on her cell phone. The Beast suddenly takes the phone and smashes it to pieces on the bedside table. He puts what’s left of it into his pocket.

Bella stands. Okay, do you want to get this over with then? What? Oh, come on. We both know what this is all about, why I’m here.

What do you want? She starts to unbutton her top. She is shaking with fear, but trying not to show just how scared she is. What are you doing? How do you want me then? In tears? A little girl on her knees with an upturned face? Oh please, don’t hurt me! Or maybe you want me frozen like a baby deer in the headlights? Or do you like defiant? Maybe you’d like me to fight back a little, huh? Maybe make you feel big and strong? Or do you want me to fake it? Oh yes, yes big man, oh my god, do it to me! How do you want me? She can’t keep it up.

She starts to cry. By now, her top is completely undone and hanging open, half covering her naked breasts. You are braver than your father.

Slowly, the Beast reaches out for her. Holds her arms with his ruined hands. She glances down and winces.

You haven’t answered my question. How do I want you? Yes. You would do this for your father? Bella nods, too scared to speak.

Breathing heavily, the Beast leans in toward her. A sliver of moonlight falls across his face. Bella’s eyes widen in horror, then she screws them shut and twists away from him.

With a roar, the Beast flings her onto the bed. She breaks down completely into a mess of tears. When she at last looks up, the Beast is gone.

What a scene. Yes, it’s not quite Disney. No, no, it’s not.

No. And actually, there was another scene that I really wanted to do because it was very funny, but then it became so shocking. And I just thought, no, it’s too shocking.

I think the audience might get quite upset by it because there’s a lot of comedy in this, but there is some really nasty stuff as well. Tell us about it. Yeah, well, my first novel was published in 1991.

It was called King of the Ants. And George Wendt from… Norm in Cheers. Norm in Cheers was over in London working on something.

A friend of mine was working on it. And for some reason, he gave him a copy of this book, King of the Ants, and said, here, George, my friend’s written this. I think it’s really good.

You might like it. And George Wendt did. And he became obsessed by it.

And he got in touch with me and said, Charlie, I really want to make a movie of this book and play the main villain. And I was a bit nonplussed. I said, well, great, let’s try it.

And we tried it. But I mean, that book is, yes, it’s quite nasty. I think many people are surprised, certainly in my earlier books, just they are quite dark.

And there’s a lot of black humour in them. I can’t write things without humour. But, you know, there are elements of, you know, there’s a lot of psychopaths and horror in them.

And as a result, we found it hard to get made. But George Wendt was a very good friend of the American film director Stuart Gordon, who probably is most famous for Re-Animator. And he then went on and did a lot of sort of kind of horror, fantasy, sci-fi stuff.

And his career was going great. And he developed and was about to direct Honey, I Shrunk the Kids when he had a heart attack. Oh.

And as a result, they couldn’t get insurance to make that. And he couldn’t make films over a certain budget. So George Wendt said, well, maybe we could do it with Stuart.

And so we did a film of King of the Ants, which I kind of Americanised. It was all filmed in L.A. and George was in it. And was it called King of the Ants? Can we look it up and see it? It was called King of the Ants.

And it’s just been re-released in a very posh DVD. So it is available to watch. It’s quite full on and it’s quite nasty.

And then later on, he said, oh, I’ve been approached by this movie company to try and develop a horror version of Beauty and the Beast. Oh. So that is how I ended up working with Beast.

And we worked for some time on the script. So it’s a sort of cross between a horror movie and a gangster movie. This big guy has been incredibly badly beaten up and disfigured by these gangsters.

But he’s immensely strong. And he’s a good guy like Beast is in Beauty and the Beast. He’s a good guy, but he’s quite violent.

And I had a lot of fun developing it with Stuart and trying to make it horrific, scary, but also with a lot of black humour. There’s a lot of things in these, particularly in these kind of cheap exploitation movies where someone says, I’m going to stick my hand so far up your ass. I’m going to work you like a puppet.

But then he does. You see, normally in these films, they never follow through on it. But the Beast does.

And so I had a lot of fun with things like that. So it’s kind of its body horror rather than supernatural. And we were developing it.

But I don’t know how much I can say. But I think the company that Stuart was working with, I’m not sure how bona fide they were in the end, because it suddenly all went quiet and I didn’t really hear any more about it. And I don’t know if he went off and made a version of Beauty and the Beast with a different script, but it just stopped and didn’t happen.

Right. Are you ever tempted to be a director at all, considering you write so much stuff? Well, I’d love to. As I said, when I was a kid, that’s what I really wanted to do, was be a film director.

And I’ve directed TV. I directed some of Randall and Hotkirt Deceased. I directed, we did some online fast show stuff, which I’ve directed.

A series called Bellamy’s People, which I directed. So I love directing. And that always was my passion.

But you haven’t done a film. I haven’t done a film. Maybe I should, because, you know, maybe do a cheap horror film.

Because I do love horror. You’ve got enough scripts for it. Short of material, must be said.

Right. Well, we have come to your final offcut. Tell us about this one, please.

This is another pilot for a TV series that was never made. This was from 2020. And it’s a TV series named after the diamond, and it’s called Koh-i-Noor.

Exterior, main road, day. Vikram is walking along, the sounds of the demonstration in the background. He glances back to see Danny Boy, Colin and the thug following him.

He looks up, checking where he is. Makes a decision. Exterior, dead end street, London, day.

Vikram enters a nondescript side street, loading bays on either side. The sounds of the demonstration diminishing. Danny Boy, Colin and the thug come in after him.

Vikram stops, looks around. He can go no further. It’s a dead end.

You’re right. It’s dead. Nothing ever happens here.

Which is why there are no surveillance cameras. Result. Exactly.

Vikram squares up to the three men, still clutching his vulnerable sandwich bag. They can see now that he is tougher and more self-assured than they first assumed. There’s a hard glint of anger in his eyes.

You need to learn some respect. Your country’s only what it is because of what the British Empire give you. I think you’ll find you took away a lot more than you ever gave us.

No. You have a go at our country, but you’re happy to come over here and take our hand out. Most of the things you worship in this country, you’ve taken from somewhere else.

Your language, your monarchy, your music, your cooking. But the way you fight, that is all your own. You what? I’ve seen how you like to fight.

The English way. At a million football matches. He goes into a sarcastic impression of a football hooligan having a go.

That weird, slightly silly way they prance about. Chest out, arms swinging, elbows out. Little ineffective kicks darting in and out, not really wanting to get stuck in.

There’s something of the Monty Python fish-slapping dance about it. If you want to fight properly, you need to learn from filthy foreigners. Well, maybe we’ll learn you how to fight.

Colin shoves Vikram backwards, then advances. And as he goes to shove him again, Vikram neatly sidesteps and performs a quick, intimate yet devastating self-defence move that ends with Colin flat on his back. Now Vikram executes a perfect standing roundhouse kick to the head and the thug goes down.

Finally, as Danny Boy goes for him, Vikram does a balletic double kick to the chin and Danny Boy goes down. Huh, well, same difference. He walks off, his sandwich bag still intact and untouched.

His three assailants lie groaning. Titles. The Diamond.

That’s the cold open, then, of the pilot script. Yes. So Vikram is going to be like an Indian James Bond, is that right? Well, to a certain extent.

I mean, he’s a Secret Service agent and the plot of it is that the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the famous and controversial diamond, is stolen and he is tasked with trying to get it back. And the series sort of follows the diamond as it gets stolen and re-stolen by all the various different representatives of all the various different countries and cultures that claim that the Koh-i-Noor is theirs. So it is initially stolen by a bunch of white van men who are enraged that the British government is talking about giving it back.

But the history of the Koh-i-Noor diamond is fascinating in that it passed through so many different hands that it is actually sort of impossible to say who it rightfully belongs to. And the story involves the Taliban, it involves Indians, Iranians. I was trying to have fun with it.

If it had progressed to a series, I would have had to get in some Indian, at least one Indian writer to work on it with me because it is a multicultural series. And, you know, as with everything I write, there’s quite a lot of humour in it, but it’s a way of partly looking at history and, yeah, and modern politics and geopolitics. It’s the most recent of the offcuts that you sent us.

So that was a long ago, 2020. Is there any chance it might be resurrected, do you think? It’s a tricky one because, again, as I developed it, a bit like the Winston Churchill one, it is a huge, you know, spanning continents story. Budget are we talking about as a problem? Yeah, budget, but yeah, the scope of it is big, you know, because it follows a lot of Indian history and the Middle East and, you know, there is action and adventure through it and kind of reconstructions of the past.

Oh, right. So it’s a big deal. But, you know, it was developed at a time when the likes of Netflix were saying they wanted stuff, you know, they didn’t want everything to be American and about America.

And they were looking at, you know, they are now set up in somewhere like India. They make a lot of Indian content. And so there was a lot of talk of wanting to do series like that.

And this was commissioned actually by an Indian team. And I thought the only way to really tell this story to get away from some of the controversy was to was to put in quite a lot of humour. So it’s a sort of light hearted, a heist movie type of feel to it.

But my problem is I keep developing things which are big and expensive and extravagant because that’s what I would like to watch. But I have to write to my strengths of what I think I’m good at. I can’t write a sort of Sally Wainwright domestic drama, which, you know, she’s brilliant.

And there are many other rights like that. I can’t write that. I try and write something like that.

And, you know, before I know it, you know, an alien’s arrived. They’ve gone back in time. Half the cast have been shot in a gruesome manner.

I like genre stuff. So I leave the other stuff to those who do it much better than me. And, you know, we hit the same problems that you get on a lot of things where the Indian side of it tried to raise more money for them.

They said, oh, it’s too English. And the English side said, oh, it’s too Indian. And as I say, well, it’s kind of both.

It’s half and half. It’s telling the story of the story of India and it’s telling the story of the British Raj and it’s telling the story of contemporary nationalistic politics. Well, you’ve worked on so many projects, you know, high profile, big budget.

Some of them. Is it any easier pitching projects now or do you still get a similar kind of rate of rejection for TV anyway? It’s not easier at all. And I’m not the demographic that TV companies and streamers are looking for.

They want the new young thing. Often the new young things find they can’t deliver and they have to hire a lot of old crocs like me to help them out. But coming in as the face of things, you know, it’s hard.

It’s just it. Same here. Same in the States.

You know, showrunners in the States who massively more successful than me have made huge shows. You know, you read interviews with them. They say, I can’t get anything off the ground anymore.

I don’t know what’s happening. And when the streamers sort of burst onto the scene, it felt like there was a sort of golden age. It was a gold rush.

It’s like suddenly there’s all this money washing around. They’re making all this stuff so much more content and everybody was jumping on it. But they came in and they had a different approach and traditionally what you would do to pitch something, you would make a pitch document which outlines over a few pages what the thing is.

And then you would if they were interested in that, you would then knock up a sort of series breakdown and they would commission things based on that in the UK. In America, they had that hugely ruinous pilot season thing where you would have to make the whole thing fully budgeted and then they would make a decision. So the Americans have moved away from that.

They’ve got more sensible. But in the UK now, because the streamers say we will only look at a script, we won’t look at a pitch document. We need a script and a full Bible for the series, which you will then have to go in and pitch to them.

It means that all these production companies have taken on the burden and the cost of commissioning full length scripts, which inevitably you get knocked down because they start saying, well, we can’t really afford to pay you your full work. We’ll pay you this. And if it gets made, we’ll work it into the contract that you get the full thing.

So it’s kind of knocking everyone’s prices down. And there’s a massive over commissioning of stuff by the production companies. Yes.

And they’re having to pay for the burden of that. So a lot of them now are under the umbrella of larger media companies who’ve got more money, but it’s wasteful and it’s wasteful of people’s time and talent. So it’s better for the Americans because they are now making decisions based on scripts.

But it’s worse for the British because you’re having to write scripts. So that’s why I’ve got so many of these things is because I get paid. OK, to develop them.

But, you know, having to come up with ideas and characters and whole series, and that can be quite draining. And you go and pitch it and then you see what they’ve actually made and how different it is from what you were pitching. You think, OK, I can see why they made that and I can see why they didn’t want what I went in and pitched.

And you can tell within the first minute or two, really, whether they are actually interested. So, no, nothing is easier. And you talk to anyone on TV, they’ll say it’s a real struggle.

Production companies are really struggling. And yeah, you know, who knows what happens? But, you know, when things don’t move, I just go back and write another book. Well, we have come to the end of the show.

How was it for you? It was marvellous and it was great to be reminded of some of these old projects. Yes, you have certainly sent me a lot of stuff, more than I usually receive and of very good quality as well. Well, I thought you might whittle it down and say, oh, I want to do these five or whatever.

But yeah, but then there was, oh no, but if I do this and talk about that, it’s a total headache. Thank you, Charlie. Well, it’s lucky I didn’t send you everything.

I was very surprised that of all the offcuts you sent me, such a small percentage was actually comedy, comedy sketches. Considering how much comedy you have worked on in your career, there were no rejected fast show sketches. Why was that? Well, there probably were fast show sketches that we wrote and never used, but I don’t have any of that stuff on my computer because when I started writing a fast show, I had an Amstrad and it was all on floppy discs.

I don’t know where they are and whether you can still read the things. So yeah, some of that stuff was printed off. But I mean, in the end, most, you know, it would be like the odd sketch of a character where we wrote 10 sketches and only wrote eight.

And there would be a reason why we didn’t do the other sketches. And they would probably only be one line or two lines long. So it’d be quite short to actually demonstrate, I suppose.

Yes. So really, yeah, the stuff I wrote for Harry’s show, there were a couple of other bits I wrote for that. But that seemed to be the one that kind of explained itself best.

Also, I would have loved to read the pitch document for the fast show, how you actually described it written down in words. I don’t suppose you still got that. That does still exist.

That is… Oh, does it? Yeah, that’s in the archive. And also the actual, you know, the initial pitch document scripts. Oh, right.

Which, again, was hard to do because obviously they’re short sketches and you need to read three or four of them before you get it. So it didn’t fully reflect how the finished series was, but it was an idea. So if anybody wants to see it, they have to go to the University of East Anglia.

Yes. And knock on their door and say, could I look at Charlie Higson’s archive, please? I mean, one day might do some kind of a script book. But it’s interesting, you know, on paper, there’s not much to them.

It’s like one page. But if that’s the page that made everything happen, then it’s of historical significance. Well, yeah, as I say, my archive is there.

So if anyone wants to go and look at it, I think you just arrange in advance what you want to look at. You can go and have a look. Well, we are now at the actual end.

And all that’s left for me to say is Charlie Higson, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your offcuts drawer with us. Well, thank you for having me on.

It’s been a marvellous trip down memory lane. The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Charlie Higson. The offcuts were performed by Beth Chalmers, Shash Hira, Kenny Blyth, Chris Kent, Keith Wickham, Noni Lewis and Nigel Pilkington.

And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

There’s a great thing about being a writer is it doesn’t cost anything to sit down at your computer and write something. And if it’s a novel, that’s it. I mean, obviously, if it’s a script, you then rely on loads of other people and millions of pounds to turn it into something.

But that’s the great joy of being a writer is you don’t always have to wait for somebody to say, oh, here’s some money, go and do some writing. You can write something and hope to sell it later. Hello, I’m Laura Shavin and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected or couldn’t quite find a home for.

We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this episode is Charlie Higson, who began his creative career in the early 80s as lead singer of a band named The Higsons. He then moved into comedy writing and performance, teaming up with Paul Whitehouse to write for the successful Harry Enfield sketch show before co-creating and performing in the BBC sketch series The Fast Show, which ran from 1994.

Beyond sketch comedy, he worked in television drama, serving as writer, producer and occasional actor on Randall and Hopkirk Deceased in the early 2000s and created the 2015 ITV series Jekyll and Hyde. On the literary side, he authored four novels in the 1990s and he gained wide recognition for writing the first five instalments of the authorised teenage-era James Bond novels, beginning with Silverfin in 2005 and ending with By Royal Command in 2008. He also created the hugely successful post-apocalyptic horror young adult series The Enemy, with seven novels between 2009 and 2015.

In 2018, he wrote a game book for the revived Fighting Fantasy series and returned to the Bond universe in 2023, this time featuring Bond as an adult with On His Majesty’s Secret Service. More recently, he launched the podcast Willy Willy Harry Ste, exploring the history of the British monarchy, with a companion non-fiction book, illustrated by Jim Moyer, also known as Vic Reeves. And at the time of broadcast, he’s on a national tour of An Evening with The Fast Show, which celebrates 30 years since the series started.

With such a busy and diverse career, there was an awful lot to talk about and Charlie’s offcuts and interview contained so much good stuff that rather than try and cram it in and cut it down, I’ve decided to release it as two episodes. And this is the first part, which began with me asking him what project, if any, he was writing on at the moment. Yes, well I am working on another book.

It was commissioned some time ago. It’s already late because my most recent book, my first non-fiction history book, consumed my life and took over my life in a way that I hadn’t quite taken on board the amount of work it takes to do a non-fiction. It’s much easier to just make stuff up and not have to do any research.

It just comes off the top of your head. Although, of course, that does rely on you being able to squeeze things out of your brain. Yes, so the other thing I am working on is a new adult James Bond novel.

Ah, is that the follow on from the 2023 one? Yes, it is. On His Majesty’s Secret Service. Yes, which went down very well and I sort of initially work with the Fleming Estate and we developed an idea for a novel.

And yes, they went out and sold it and that is going to be out kind of September 2026. And I thought I could write it in parallel, in conjunction with doing the history book. I thought, well, you know, I could do fiction in the morning and non-fiction in the afternoon or the other way around.

But the history book was so much work, researching it and structuring it and wrestling it into a narrative that it was just my brain, I was just too exhausted. And it’s much easier, you know, I found I’m 67 now. When I was younger, I could quite easily work on three things at once and just flit about.

And I had the energy for that. I do find that a little bit harder now getting the concentration. And of course, there’s all the other things in life that come in and distract you and things that you have to do.

There’s a great story about James Cameron. The film director. The film director and obviously also screenwriter that he had three scripts to work on when he was a lot younger.

And he basically shut himself away in a hotel when nobody could get to him. And now I think he has himself said he had not necessarily a suitcase full, but quite a lot of drugs to keep him going and room service. And he set up at three separate tables, three different typewriters, and he would hammer away at one script until he could do no more.

Then he would refresh himself and move to the next table and carry on on that one. And by the time he came out of the hotel, he had the Terminator, Rambo and Aliens. No.

Well, I, you know, I think I’ve probably slightly embellished, but he was certainly working on those three things at the same time. And you can do that when you’re young. But, you know, then when he was older, it took him like 20 years or something to write Avatar.

And it was crap. Well, let’s kick off with your first off cut now. Can you tell us, please, what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written? This is Cheese Shop and it’s a comedy script I wrote for Harry Enfield’s spoof history of BBC Two, which was called The Story of the Twos back in 2013.

Interior. Cheese Shop. Day.

Enter a customer. Hello. I wish to register a complete.

Hello, Miss? What do you mean Miss? Mister! I’m sorry. I have a cold. I wish to make a complete.

We’re closing for lunch. Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this cheese, what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

Oh, yes. The Norwegian Blue. What’s wrong with it? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad.

It’s gone off. That’s what’s wrong with it. No, no.

It’s ripe. Look, meaty. I know an off cheese when I see one and I’m looking at one right now.

No, no. It’s not off. It’s ripe.

Remarkable cheese, the Norwegian Blue, isn’t it? Beautiful veining. The veining don’t enter into it. It’s gone off.

No, no, no. It’s perfectly ripe. Mmm.

Smell the aroma. Beautiful aroma. Very pungent.

I’ll give you pungent, sonny. It’s pungentness is virgin on the emetic. He unwraps the cheese and thrusts it in the owner’s face.

He winces, recoils and gags. Oh, delicious. Perfectly ripe.

A good cheese should make you want to gag, sir. It’s a sign of maturity. He throws up in a bucket.

You did more than gag, my good man. You just threw up in a bucket. No, I didn’t.

Yes, you did. I saw you. That was clear in my throat.

That’s a lovely bit of cheese. Oh, now look, mate. I’ve definitely had enough of this.

This cheese is definitely off. And when I purchased it not half an hour ago, you assured me that its uniquely eye-watering aroma was due to it being fresh out of a cow’s underbelly. Well, the wrapping’s made it sweat a bit, that’s all.

You need to get it on a cheese board. Get it on a cheese board? What kind of talk is that? If I take it out of its wrapping, it’ll run all over the place like a toxic spill. The Norwegian blue is famous for its resemblance to a toxic spill.

Look, I took the liberty of examining this cheese when I got it home. And I can assure you it’s passed its sell-by date. It’s bleeding off.

It’s rank. Rotten to the core. Its metabolic processes are now history.

It is beyond putrid. It is decrepit, atrophied, unsavoury, decomposed, mouldering, high. It smells like the shithouse door on a tuna boat.

It is giving me the wiggins. It is, in short, off. This is an off cheese.

Well, I’d better replace it then. He takes a quick peek behind the counter. Sorry, Squire, I’ve had a look round the back of the shop and we’re right out of cheese.

I see, I see. I get the picture. I got a parrot.

Ha ha ha. So those who are in the comedy know will probably recognise that being an amalgamation of the dead parrot and cheese shop sketches from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Very clever.

Well done. Well, it was fun doing that. It was a fun sort of technical exercise because, you know, the style of Monty Python is so strong.

It is easy. Well, not easy, but it is a fun challenge to kind of write in that. Well, it’s very recognisable.

Yes. And Harry didn’t use it in the end. And in fact, I was going to work on the whole series with him, but something came up and I had to go away and do something else, so I didn’t.

And Harry slightly took the series in a different direction to how we had originally discussed it. It was less sort of parodying. It was a fantastic programme, though.

Yes, it was great. There was a lot of really good stuff in it. There was some nasty stuff on there.

I loved it. Some really cutting, evil stuff. But you wouldn’t work on that in the end because you were doing something else? Yes.

And it was always a problem because, you know, I worked a lot with Harry in his first TV sketch show. And then we parted company because we both had quite strong personalities and we would often pull in different directions. And Harry just thought in the end, well, this is my show, so I’m in charge.

Charlie can go and do something else. Ah. But Paul, you see, Paul is very good.

In writing partnerships, it’s like a marriage. You both have to bring something different to it. There’s no point you both being the same and being able to do the same thing.

And in a writing partnership, you tend to have one of the pair who kind of wanders around the room throwing out ideas and going into routines and just doing crazy stuff. And then the other is the one who sits at the computer or typewriter, as it used to be, kind of writing it down and structuring it and thinking, how do I make that into a sketch? Oh, I use that bit and put it with that. And so you have the sort of, it’s the left hand and the right hand of the piano.

So the left hand is sort of doing all the structure and the right hand is doing all the fancy stuff. So which one are you? I am very much left hand. I mean, obviously, you’re both coming up with funny ideas.

But I tend to be the one who always was at the computer. Is that with both of them? Is that with Paul and Harry? Well, that’s the thing is Paul is very much right hand. And when he’s with Harry, Harry is left hand and he’s right hand.

So Harry is the one who’s sort of scratching his head and worrying about things. And Paul is just saying, no, this is funny, let’s do this, let’s do that. So there was, once there were three of us, there were two left handers and one right hand.

If I’d been right hand, would have been different because I could have just been throwing out ideas and not worrying about anything else. But I tend to sort of get in and worry about stuff. Now, in public recognition terms, you’re probably most well known for the TV sketch show, The Fast Show as a writer and a performer.

Now, apart from enjoying the huge success running on and off for like 20 years or so, including specials, the show is notable for being different from sketch shows that went before in that an episode would have a lot more sketches, which would be much shorter than the norm. And a lot of the comedy came down to recognise characters and their punchlines. How did that format come about? Was it a deliberate decision? It was, yes, because there were several factors.

One is that Paul and I, Paul Whitehouse and myself, had been working on a Harry’s sketch show at the Harry Enfield television programme. And the first stuff we’d written with Harry was character stuff, doing Stub Ross, and then we all created loads of money together. And we both, Paul and I both really loved character comedy.

That was, you know, probably our favourite type of TV comedy. And we’d grown up on things like Dick Emery, Benny Hill, Monty Python. Although Monty Python, well, they did have some recurring characters.

And I guess it sort of goes back to the British musical tradition of people creating your stage persona and having your character. So we loved doing that. So we did that with Harry.

But we didn’t want to be stuck as Harry Enfield’s writers forever. We wanted to do our own stuff. But we knew if we were going to do another character-based sketch show, it couldn’t be exactly the same as Harry’s.

But that would be our template, because Harry had the same influences that we did. So we were always looking for a way… Because we collected material, which for one reason or another wasn’t right for Harry. Either there was a thing that Paul could do, but there was no role for Harry, or he just didn’t think it was funny.

So we collected quite a lot of material, and we were thinking, well, how do we do this? We wanted it to be a team show, not just a star pairing as Harry and Paul had done. And the producer, absolutely brilliant comedy producer, the best around, Geoffrey Perkins, who we’d worked with on Harry’s show and on Saturday Night Live, for the launch, I think, of the second series of Harry’s sketch show, he cut together a sort of highlights reel to show off the new characters and some of the highlights. And Paul and I said to him, oh, no, you need to show whole sketches or a whole episode, because the characters won’t work if you’re just showing one or two lines.

And he said, no, no, it works really well, actually. You’d be surprised. And he showed it, and Paul and I watching it, we simultaneously had a lightbulb moment and said, what if we tried to do a whole show like this that was just the highlights, just do the funny stuff and cut out all the rest? Because, you know, there’d been shows like The Two Ronnies, very funny and enormously popular, but some of their sketches were, like, eight minutes long.

And it was that old-school writing thing where it was building up towards a punchline. But obviously you have fun along the way, and you’re laboriously grinding towards the payoff, and you’re usually there a couple of minutes before the sketch ends, and you’re just waiting for them to catch up with you. So we thought, no, let’s keep things short.

Let’s just have the characters come on and do what it is that makes them funny. And actually, if you keep it short enough, the sort of sketch is its own punchline, as it were. You don’t have to build up towards the… That’s what the joke is.

You’re just enjoying being with the characters and what they’re doing. Yeah, obviously you need to know when things end, but if you keep it short enough, I mean, like, Mark Williams had the character Jesse, who comes out of a shed and says, This week I have been mostly eating terramacillata, and goes back in the shed. As I say, it’s kind of the essence of a joke distilled to absolutely, well, nothing, really.

So the character coming out is the punchline, in a way. So we thought, yeah, if you keep it quick and keep it light on its feet, you can move on quickly and people won’t get bored. And also, you know, the first series went out in 94.

This was, by then, videos were popular and home taping people were doing. DVDs were coming out on the market. And we realised that people were consuming television differently.

You were able to go back and look at it again. You know, when Paul and I were growing up, you’d see a Monty Python episode and you’d try and remember it so that you could do it the next day at school because it might be another year before you saw it again, if ever. You couldn’t guarantee things would be repeated.

But we realised by the 90s that people could watch things over and over again, and people were. And our kind of imaginary audience was a band on a touring bus. And the show was very popular with musicians who, after a gig, they say, I’ll put some of the fast show on.

And it’s short and fast and you’re not overstaying your welcome and you can watch things over and over again because you’re not explaining everything all in one hit. Sometimes you might watch a character three or four times before you sort of twig. All right, OK, that’s what this is all about.

So it was designed for repeat viewing. It was almost as if we anticipated YouTube. But, you know, it’s very popular on there because that’s sort of how it was designed.

And also, digital editing was coming in. When we did the first series, we started on tape and then moved over to digital. And with digital editing, you can deal with lots of small bits and pieces much easier and move things around because we’d be shuffling sketches over a whole six, seven, eight episode series and thinking, well, that sketch goes well with that.

We’ve got too much of this performer here or this character’s too much. We need to move that there. But that means we’ve got to move that.

With digital, you can do all that. It’s really easy. With tape, it was a nightmare.

So it was technology. It was the way viewing habits were changing and it was a desire to do something different to Harry’s. Right.

Well, time for another Offcut now. Tell us about this one. Right.

This is The Frost Child, which is a short story that I started in, I think about 1988, and I haven’t quite finished it yet. It wasn’t snowing. It hadn’t snowed at all this winter, but the frost and the whiteness of the fog reminded him of Courchevel, the Alps coated in white.

Nearly a year ago it was now, and still vivid. It would always be vivid, whenever it was cold, whenever it snowed, whenever they showed skiing on the TV, he’d remember. Of course, he’d never actually go skiing again himself, the thing he’d loved doing most in the world.

He could picture Amy now, the person he’d loved above all else. Yes, he had to accept that. Loved more than Kate.

He’d tried not to think about Amy for the whole journey, but the fog ahead was like a blank page, and her picture kept drawing itself across it. There wasn’t anything else to look at. He sees her now, how she was, standing in the cottage door, the wreath still up from Christmas.

She likes it so much she’s begged them not to take it down, though it’s looking rather tatty. She’s wrapped up against the cold and wearing the new bobble-hat that Kate gave her for Christmas, and she looks utterly, utterly miserable. Please don’t go, Daddy.

Do you have to go? Yes, Amy dear, we’ve told you. You’re a big girl now. It’ll be fun for you, an adventure, having the run of the cottage.

I don’t want to run round the cottage. I don’t want to be alone. Yes, well, you won’t be alone, will you, darling? Kate says briskly.

Claudia will be here. You’re too young to come skiing. It’ll be dangerous for you.

We’ll be back before you know it. And once again, Kate goes over the instructions with Claudia. If it weren’t for Claudia, they wouldn’t be going at all.

The last girl they had had been completely hopeless, more work than if they hadn’t had a nanny at all. But Claudia’s great, totally confident and competent. But she looks so young, almost a child herself, so small.

But competent. She’s a treasure. Phil shivered.

It had been on this road that it had happened. No, no, that wasn’t right. Claudia wouldn’t have come this way.

The hospital was the other way, wasn’t it, up through the woods and over the ridge? Stop it. You know you must never think about that. You can’t change what happened to Amy.

But it was impossible. Her thin, sweet voice, her face. They’re everywhere.

As they get into the car that time, that last time, Amy runs down and presses her face against the window. Can’t you take me with you? No, Kate snaps. Now you’ve been told, so just behave yourself.

Amy opens her mouth wide and screws her eyes shut and begins to wail. Phil winds the window down and tries to touch her, but she pulls away. No, she shrieks, you don’t love me.

Phil feels like he’s been kicked in the gut. But Kate just laughs. Don’t be a silly, she says.

And Amy, embarrassed, looks at her feet. Now Claudia comes over and gently but firmly leads Amy back to the cottage. Why can’t she understand that she can’t come, Kate says as they drive off.

Phil says nothing, because the thing is, he can’t understand either. This was unfinished, you said. Yeah, that was like a Sunday afternoon with Radio 4 on, sitting by the fire in December.

Yes, well, it was finished, but I never liked the original ending. Oh, what was the original ending? Well, in the original ending, I mean, you could tell from that reading, you know, it’s about a husband and wife who’ve lost a child. And you can tell from that reading that the wife appears to be unsympathetic.

And in the original end of the story, she was. But, and I’m still working it, because I want her to actually, that all the time she has known more and has been trying to protect her husband. Oh, so this is really still ongoing, you weren’t being flippant? Yes, yes.

And that’s why I haven’t published it. I mean, I wrote it. My wife’s family have a little cottage down in Wales, and we went down there, pre-kids, for New Year’s Eve with a bunch of friends.

And somebody said, oh, Charlie, why don’t you write some kind of spooky story that you can read out? Because it’s quite a spooky, isolated cottage. So I did, I wrote this story quite quickly. This was in 1988? It was around about that time, yes.

But I wrote it on an old Amstrad, so I can’t, I thought I’d lost the story, but my archive went to my old university, UEA, and it turned up in a bunch of old papers. And they said, oh, we found this. What is it? I thought, amazing.

So I’ve been working on it since. And yeah, the story went down very well, but I thought I could do a better and more interesting ending. The thing is, it’s still a story rather than, say, a novel.

Yes, yes, it’s a short story. I mean, you know, it could be adapted into a sort of one of those BBC ghost story for Christmas type things, because it is a ghost story. I mean, the other thing, actually, when I reread it again, because the central conceit in it is that there was this fairy tale that the wife read as a child called The Frost Child, which is about a sort of evil kid that if it touches you, it turns you to ice.

And of course, since writing the story, Frozen has become a big thing. And I’m reading it, I’m thinking, oh my God, actually, this is the same story as Frozen. I need to change that or at least have the characters acknowledge, well, that’s a bit like Frozen.

So yeah, there’s a few things to sort out, but I return to it now and then and kind of tinker with it because it has got a nice atmosphere and it is quite, quite spooky. Well, this is the earliest piece of writing you gave me. So tell me about your childhood.

Where did you grow up? Did you come from a creative family? Where’s all this writing-y, acting-y stuff come from? I had a very ordinary sort of home counties upbringing. I was born in Somerset, but then I grew up in first Sussex, near Crawley, and then in Kent down near Sevenoaks. My father was an accountant who then became a management consultant, classic commuter.

He would set off in the morning with his bowler hat. Did he have a bowler hat? Yeah, he did to start with, yes. I was born in 58, so yeah, in the late 60s into the 70s and then he stopped wearing it, but yeah.

My mother was, she did a bit of teaching, I guess what today would be called special needs. She’d go into schools and spend time with the kids who were special needs, as I say, that’s what they’re called now. She also did a bit of amateur dramatics, which was the closest we came to doing anything creative really.

But not writing? No writers? No, no, nothing. No. The best advice my father ever gave me, when I was 16, he said, look, you obviously enjoy writing and you’re a good writer, because I’d been writing stuff since I was 10, little books and things.

You know, if I read a book I liked, I’d write stories in that vein and draw little drawings and things. And yeah, I was writing sort of fantasy novels when I was a teenager. And he said, look, obviously you’re good at writing, you obviously enjoy it.

It’s a fantastic thing to do. You can do it all your life, doesn’t cost you anything. But whatever you do, make sure you get yourself a proper job, because you will never make any money as a writer.

And the reason that was such good advice is because I was 16, I completely ignored everything that my father said to me. And I did the opposite of what he said. And I’ve never had a proper job.

And I’ve been lucky enough, and I appreciate that I am very lucky, to have been able to make a living as a writer. You know, making things up, people pay me to do it. Did you always want to be a writer? I always enjoyed writing.

I mean, but, you know, as we were saying, I didn’t know any writers. It wasn’t anything… It wasn’t a tangible goal. Yeah, and certainly, you know, TV, I wouldn’t have dreamt of going on TV.

This was before media studies or anything like that. These felt like things that other people did. But I carried on doing it.

I carried on writing novels. And then when I went to university, I wrote a couple of sort of student novels, should we say. This was the sort of heyday of postmodernism.

So unreadable novels. But I was using, you know, I was quite interested in people like William Burroughs, who would use genre elements in a sort of cut up way. So there’d be bits of sort of Western fiction or pirate fiction or science fiction in his books, all kind of jumbled up together.

And I’d been doing stuff like that. What did young Charles dream of being when he grew up? Well, my sort of fantasy thing was I thought I would really love to make films. So creative.

You didn’t want to be a train driver or an astronaut? I always knew I was going to do something. No, no, no. It was always going to be creative.

I loved art as well. So I thought I might be a painter. I might be a writer.

I would love to make films. But again, I didn’t know a way of doing that. But then at university, I carried on writing.

So I was comfortable writing. I enjoyed writing. And I met Paul Whitehouse in Norwich University in 77.

And this was pre-alternative comedy. So you wouldn’t have dreamed of going on stage doing comedy, but you would form a band. So we formed a punk band together.

So then I really got into music. That’s the other thing I’d really liked doing was music and playing the piano and stuff. So I always knew I would do something creative.

Well, appropriately now, tell us about your next offcut. This is a pitch document that I knocked up quite quickly in 2016 and it’s called Ghosts of Dead Rockstars. A hugely popular and successful rock star is backstage getting ready for a monster comeback gig at the O2.

It’s not going well, however. He’s wasted, edgy, arrogant, insecure and losing it fast. He rows with his band, who seem to hate him.

He rows with his gorgeous girlfriend over his infidelities. He rows with his long-term and long-suffering manager. He even rows with his chef and the guy selling merch.

In short, he’s a mess and the gig is shaping up to be a disaster. In the end, he locks himself in his dressing room and refuses to talk to anyone. Things have taken their toll.

Years of constant touring, late nights, a rootless existence, losing touch with family and friends, alcohol and drug abuse, meaningless sex with groupies, more money than he knows how to spend have left him disillusioned and wrung out. He has lost his mojo, completely disillusioned with not just his own music, but all music. Nothing seems to matter to him anymore.

His dark night of the soul now takes a turn for the worse. He swallows a gut full of sleeping pills and whisky. In his semi-comatose state, he imagines, or perhaps it’s for real, that he’s visited by the ghosts of several dead rock stars.

The likes of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Louis Armstrong, Buddy Holly, Elvis, Billie Holiday, Cass Elliot, Mark Bolan, John Lennon, Bob Marley, Keith Moon, there are so many possibilities. Just like the ghosts in A Christmas Carol or the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life and the heavenly spirit guide in A Matter of Life and Death, he’s taken on a tour. He has shown how his music has touched people’s lives, how important it has been for them.

The young girl brought out of a coma in hospital. All the couples brought together and starting families. Depressed, suicidal teenagers who his music gave hope to.

He’s shown his past, his early days, playing in tiny clubs when he was so excited about music. He’s shown the present, the fans in the auditorium waiting in intense anticipation for the gig. His fellow bandmates, yes, they moan about him and give him a hard time, but it’s clear they do actually love and respect him and wouldn’t be here at the O2 without him.

He’s also shown the future, all that he might achieve, coming to terms with his demons and settling down and starting a family of his own. The dead musicians also talk about their own lives, those that died young, for instance, lament what might have been, all they might have achieved, how none of them really meant to end it all. Some of the ghosts will be funny, some moving, some inspirational.

Jimi Hendrix, for instance, could keep banging on about the ridiculously pompous rock opera he was planning to write. And it’s a great opportunity for some fun cameos.

This was a pitch for a TV series, that’s that right? No, it was for a film. It was for a film, right. It sounds very much like a cross between It’s A Wonderful Life and Channel 4 Star Stories.

How far did it get? Yes, it didn’t get very far at all. I put it together quite quickly because a friend of mine, who I also met at university, Dave Cummings, who was in the band with me and Paul and ended up as a commotion with Lloyd Cole and as part of Del Amitri. And somebody had mentioned to him that someone was wanting to do some kind of music-based, rock-based project, and we have any ideas.

So I sort of came up with that. And the idea was if they bit that Dave and I would write it together. And they said, oh, no, that’s not what we’re looking for.

And I didn’t do any much with it because I was doing other stuff. Well, you know, listening to it there, it does sound like a really good idea, actually. It is, yes.

And a way of looking at music. Because, you know, I was in, well, two bands when I was younger, and I was a singer, professional singer for six years. And, you know, I probably know more people in the music, who make music than who do comedy, you know, right up to good friends with Paul McCartney’s musical director.

So I have a lot of contacts with that world and sort of thought it could be a really good idea. And, you know, it sort of touches on the idea of the 27 Club, you know, that so many musicians apparently died when they were 27. But actually, it’s a tiny fraction.

But, you know, if you just concentrate on them, it looks like that’s when they all died, which is why I put in people like Louis Armstrong, I think. Also, it was quite a lot of fun. And I thought it was a different way of, you know, looking at how important music is for people.

I mean, this was quite interesting digging out all this stuff for this podcast. I mean, what I sent you is a fraction of what I got over the years. You throw stuff out there.

Some of it you paid for, some of it you just develop yourself and you see what sticks and something else. At the time, I got commissioned to do something else. So that ended up in the bottom drawer, as it’s called.

But going through it all again, I’m thinking, oh, that’s actually quite good. Maybe I should try and do some more. Yes, I think you should.

I mean, you’ve now got a fair amount of heft behind you. You should be able to generate. You can imagine being a big Christmas special film or Netflix or Amazon, you know, a big production.

I definitely can see that. I was very surprised that that didn’t get anywhere. But if you are busy doing other things, that makes sense, I suppose.

So you were in a band, you were in two bands and when you say you were a professional singer for six years, was that when you were in a band or you were a professional singer anyway? Yes, yes. No, no, no. So the first band was a student punk band with Paul and Dave called The Right Hand Lovers.

And in true punk style, we burned brightly and burnt ourselves out. Within a year, we’d come and gone. So then I formed another band because Paul, other than Dave, everyone else in the band was kicked out of university.

So then I started another band with a fresh intake of students, which ended up being called The Higgsons. And that I carried on doing after university for six years. And why did it all end, the band thing? Many factors.

One was that the bass player and I started doing decorating when we weren’t on tour as a way to actually make some money. You did decorating with Paul Whitehouse? Well, that was later on. First of all, it was with Colin Williams, the bass player, because we didn’t make any money in the band.

When we were on tour, it was fine because we’d be given free sandwiches and beer. But between touring, there was no income. So we started doing decorating and we were pretty good at it.

We worked well together. And we were living in London by this point and, you know, there is no shortage of houses to decorate in London. And we realised that the band was getting in the way of our decorating.

So we thought, well, if we stick to just the decorating, then we make quite a good living, which we did. But also, you know, I’d been doing it for six years. I was feeling I was starting to get too old for it.

And really, in my heart of hearts, well, not in my heart of hearts, I knew, I completely knew that I was not cut out to be a rock star, to take it to the next level. To do that, a lead singer has to believe in themselves as being God, as being a messiah. You’ve got to go out on stage at a stadium and stick your hands in the air and put them together and expect 10,000 people to clap along with you.

It requires a certain level of ego and self-belief and belief in what you’re doing there. And you do have to behave as, I am a rock star. And I could never do that.

We always had too much sort of self-deprecating humour. So we were great at a club level and at the sort of medium-sized venues. But I knew that really, I didn’t have what it took to take it to the next level.

Because this was, by now, we’re in the sort of second half of the 80s, and music was changing. Most of the places that we hit, the small music venues we’ve been able to play at, were all stopping having live bands and just going over to DJs. And some of the bands who’d been doing stuff like we had did manage to kind of reinvent themselves as club bands, like someone like The Farm, for instance.

And we thought, do we want to do that? And I thought, actually, you know what, I don’t think I really want to be doing this for the rest of my life. It’s not, whilst I’ve had a great time doing it, I thought, I’ve had enough of it now. I want to do other things, and particularly writing.

So yeah, we became full-time decorators. And then Paul and I started writing together. Okay, let’s move on to the next offcut now.

Can you tell us about this one, please? All right. This is King Bullet, which is a film script from 2001. You should have left me.

I was going to, but right now you’re all I’ve got. Me, and a bag full of money. What did Tom have all that money in the house for, anyway? Your birthday present.

How do you mean? He was buying you a painting, off the Russians. An icon? Yeah. Tom was doing that for me? Yeah.

Look, I’m sorry to fuck up your birthday party like that. It was nothing personal. I can’t believe he was buying me an icon.

We saw some on holiday. I told him I thought they were beautiful. He remembered.

Rublev smuggled it out of Russia. Jesus, Danny, you haven’t got a chance. He’s just a man.

An old man. He’s past it. Being young’s not so fantastic.

Yeah, but don’t you ever think about it? What it used to be like? Don’t you ever think about, you know, a young man’s body? A young man’s stamina? You haven’t got a chance. I don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t have run.

Maybe we should have stayed to fight. He doesn’t frighten me. He frightens me.

Still now, after 30 years. Sometimes he can look at you and he knows. Is that why you’ve stayed with him? Because you’re frightened of what he’d do if you left? I’ve stayed with him because I love him.

And in his way, he loves me. You’re sure of that, are you? Long time ago, I found out he’d been cheating on me. A German girl singer, Annalise.

He had a kid by her and everything. Well, I hit the roof, didn’t I? We’d not been married long and it looked like it was all over, but he promised me he was finished with her and she didn’t mean nothing to him. Said he’d never see her again.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. And he proved it. He used to have a boat.

Big motor launch, you know. He and the lads used to stock up with beer and that and go out fishing. One day, they all went out with Annalise.

And when they came back, she wasn’t with them. Jesus. When Tom fixes something, he fixes it.

Like our Paula’s husband. Paula? Our daughter. She married a guy called Antonio.

Best looking bloke you ever saw. Well, one day, same old story, Tom finds out he’s been playing away from home. He burned his face off with a blowtorch.

Father of our grandchildren. Didn’t kill him, but I guess Antonio couldn’t live with it. After three months in hospital, he jumped off the roof.

Like I said, Danny, you haven’t got a chance. That’s a cheery little story, isn’t it? Yes. Tell us about this story.

It’s quite violent. Yeah, it is. It’s a British gangster story.

I mainly wrote it because I had a new computer and new software. Final draft or something? Well, possibly final draft. I can’t remember when that kind of launched.

And I wanted to practise writing a full length script. And I had an idea for a story. This was sort of, I guess the 90s had been the heyday for the sort of British gangster movie.

So I thought I’d have a go at writing something in that style. And I’m not sure I ever showed it to anyone, actually, when I’d finished it. I can’t remember.

So it was mainly, as I say, it was a technical exercise. Did you read through it this time before you sent it to me? No, I read a bit of it just to check that it wasn’t complete rubbish. Yeah, it’d be interesting to go back and revisit it.

But yeah, it’s about an ageing British gangster. And in my mind at the time, I was thinking of Michael Caine, who’s living in a proper gangster’s mansion in Essex with his younger wife. She’s not like a 20 year old, but she’s younger than him.

And this guy comes in and robs him and takes his wife hostage. And that’s the two that are speaking in the car and they kind of, they end up falling in love and the main man comes after them. And yeah, there’s a lot of violence and killing and shooting.

I wrote, in the early 90s, I wrote four crime novels. I was a big fan, well, still am a big fan of American kind of hard-boiled crime writing, but also the pulp writers, really interesting writers of the 50s, 60s and 70s, people like Jim Thompson, who is my all time favourite writer. And I’ve always liked trying to write that sort of thing that’s a bit sort of twisted at its core.

Right. And that’s what this was. This was a film version of something like that, you’d say? Yeah, it was a bit of the sort of pulp fiction type of writing, a bit of the British gangster fiction.

I think probably by the time I’d finished it, there was a feeling like we’d had enough of British gangster films, and nobody was going to be that interested in making another one. But I always keep thinking, well, when I’ve got time, I’ll go back and look at these and see which ones to develop. Right.

This one never had an audience until now. Yeah, no, I mean, well, I think I showed it to Mark Mylod, who we worked with on The Fast Show and ended up directing it. And then I worked with him, made a series of Randall and Hopkirk Deceased with Vic and Bob.

And Mark then went off to Hollywood and he now does things like Game of Thrones. He was the lead director on Succession and he’s now overdoing the new Harry Potter TV series. So I think I showed it to him and he found some of the bits of it funny, but I think he would have preferred if I’d written a comedy.

I mean, there is elements of comedy in it, but then it sort of turns serious. So I like that juxtaposition of something’s quite funny and then it turns really dark. Now, you’d recently finished or had a break from The Fast Show at this point.

It’s difficult for me to have a timeline, like you say, you do a lot of things at the same time. So it’s difficult to know what you were actually working on because the dates that I can have access to are publication dates or broadcast dates. So I don’t know what you were actually doing.

But I think you were also working on other TV projects, but none of them were comedy, or at least not sort of pure comedy, sketch comedy like The Fast Show. Were you kind of comedied out at that point? Did you have enough of that format? Well, writing sketch shows is, it burns through a huge amount of material, particularly on The Fast Show where we’re trying to keep things as short as possible. So you’re having to write, you know, 30 mini dramas, an episode, and it’s got to be funny, and the characters have got to work, and there’s got to be a point to it.

And it’s quite tiring. So inevitably, you kind of think, well, I’d like to do something a bit different to comedy, you know, use a different part of the brain and flex some other muscles. And that can make it easier for you to then go back and write more sketch comedy.

So, you know, there are two things I’d always wanted to do. One was, I loved growing up in the 60s, I loved all those fantastical TV shows that people used to make at the time. Things like The Prisoner, The Avengers, The Champions, Adam Adamant.

There were loads of them. And these were big mainstream shows, a lot of them made by ITV. And that’s what people loved watching.

And of course, there was all the American stuff coming in, Star Trek and whatever. And that’s what I really loved, that sort of slightly fantastical TV drama, which it stopped in the 70s. It was killed by kitchen sink drama.

And everything started to be, it was all about gritty, gritty realism, which is fine. But it meant that everything was judged on how realistic it was. And we stopped making those shows.

We still kept in port and all the American ones, which were very popular. But if you tried to do anything like that in British TV, people would say, well, this is for kids, isn’t it? It’s fantasy. So it died out.

So when I had the opportunity to do a remake of Randal Hotkirk Deceased, which was another of those ATV shows from the 60s, 70s, I thought, brilliant, that would be a lot of fun to do. And everybody, you know, that we got involved in it thought the same. We had a fantastic lineup of actors and designer, cinematographer, whatever, because they said, we never get a chance to do this sort of thing.

This is so much fun. But inevitably, it goes out. People said, isn’t this a kid’s thing? One of them’s a ghost.

So people didn’t get it. So I was quite pleased, actually, that well, I mean, you know, it’s interesting because the first episode got 10 and a half million viewers, which is pretty phenomenal. But unfortunately, it kind of dropped from week to week over the two series.

And we ended up around about kind of four million. So that trajectory was going in the wrong direction. Perhaps if we’d pushed through and been able to get a third series, we might have been able to reverse a trend.

But it didn’t happen. But then not long after that, Russell Davis rebooted Doctor Who and managed to do, you know, to bring back a sense of fun and fantasy and science fiction. But what he was really clever at doing was mixing fantasy and rooting that in solid family drama with Billy Piper and her family and all that sort of story.

And he was really clever about that. But what I found very gratifying is that a lot of people who I’d worked with on Randall Hotkirk ended up working on that. So Murray Gold, who did the music for us, did the music for Doctor Who.

David Tennant, who had starred in our first episode, ended up as Doctor Who. Writers like Gareth Roberts went on from there. Mark Gatiss from The League of Gentlemen had worked on Randall Hotkirk.

So, you know, I was thinking, well, well, Russell is coming really from the same sort of place as I am and hats off to him for making it successful. And it did change the TV landscape. Well, it didn’t, it didn’t.

I thought, great, now we’ll be having more fantasy shows and maybe some stuff for adults, but it didn’t happen. It was, no, we can do that in Doctor Who because that’s a special thing, but don’t try and do it anywhere else. But I mean, but through the, I suppose, I suppose Charlie Booker with Black Mirror has done something much more interesting.

But it’s really through the streamers that now they are less focused on kitchen sink dramas. Very much less and very much more focused on fantasy. But you look at, you know, you look at drama on TV, it’s, I mean, there’s some great stuff, but it’s, you know, it’s cop shows, it’s doctors, it’s missing children.

Oh, well, time for another off cut now. What have we got? Right. This is a pilot TV script that I developed in 2018 for a series about the young Winston Churchill.

Maudie. And what do I call you? My father is, well… At school, they used to call me Copperknob. My hair? Oh, right.

So come on then, Copperknob. What do you want? What does any young man want? I can tell you that in one sentence. A man wants three things.

He wants money, he wants excitement, and he wants to make his mark. To be someone. That’s a longer sentence than mine was going to be.

Maudie leans in on him, but Winston breaks away and circles the room, reciting verse in mock heroic style. And then out spoke brave Horatius, the captain of the gate. To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late, and how can man die better than facing fearful odds for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods? Winston? Winston! Still in his shirt and tie.

Come along, Cinderella. It’s way past midnight. If we don’t look lively, the milk train will leave without us and we’ll be missed at barracks.

Don’t want you done for dereliction of duty, do we? Oh lord, I lost all track of time. I’m not quite sure of the etiquette. Dylan reaches for his wallet and nods to Winston to get a move on.

As Winston ducks back through the door, Maudie comes out still fully clothed. Dylan slips her some money. She looks at it ruefully before folding it up.

I’m not sure I earned that. All he did was talk about himself all night. Then you indulged him in his favourite pastime.

Winston comes back out, putting on his jacket. I’ll be seeing you then, copper knob. Yes, good morning to you.

Dylan is intrigued by this little exchange. Dad, this seems like an excellent idea. How come this didn’t get snapped up instantly? Well, well, it’s a tricky one.

I worked on this for a long time with a fantastic production company with proper backing. And yeah, I worked out, I wrote a pilot and worked out a whole series. And it is the young life of young Winston.

And the thing that really, I thought, actually, yeah, this could be interesting is they showed me this fantastic photograph of him. This was when he was at Sandringham, I think, training to be an officer. And there’s a photograph of him in his uniform.

And he must be about 20. And, you know, he’s young and handsome and dashing. And I thought, we never really see this side of Winston.

We forget, you know, he was a young man. He was a Victorian man. And, you know, we only think of him as he was really in the Second World War.

And I thought, well, that’s fascinating to try and show that side of him. And I mean, at that instant in the scene, that’s based on something that actually happened. That he and the officers came down to London and got drunk in a theatre and had a sort of mini sort of riot.

But also then he went off and he was a war correspondent in Cuba. There was a Cuban War of Independence broke out. And just thought, well, you know, this is really interesting to look at, you know, the makings of the man.

Unfortunately, I think there were two reasons. One, in the original way that I developed the series, I tried to put too much in. It would have been way too expensive because it followed him from there through to being out in India and fighting in the northwest frontier.

And in actual fact, towards the end, before we stopped working on it, we were scaling it back and it was just going to be about his time in Cuba, which is what I should have done in the first place. So that was one problem is I think it put people off the scope. And the other thing was the fact that it is Winston Churchill, because people are very much reassessing him.

And young people certainly don’t want anything to do with him. So you have he’s quite a divisive figure. On one hand, you have sort of certain members of society in the establishment to saying, you know, Churchill was a great, great man who saved us from Hitler.

And then you’ve got and it’s often younger people saying, well, no, actually, he was a terrible man. He was involved in exacerbating the famine in India. And he said some quite racist things.

So it’s kind of like, I mean, the interesting thing about this was this was trying to show him before all that when he was just a young man finding his way in the world. But I think a lot of people thought, I don’t know. I want to keep away.

It’s a touchy subject. But surely that would mean that anything set in, you know, more than sort of 60, 70 years ago, if it’s historically in any way accurate, is going to feature people who would have insulted the sensibilities of people today. Surely there’s a kind of understanding.

Maybe you don’t put those bits of dialogue in. Yeah, but it’s a tricky one because I think it was he’s controversial and he splits so many people that, yeah, you could A, you could see that as, well, this would be a really interesting thing to explore. Or B, you could say, no, it’s too controversial.

We’re going to get into a lot of hot water on this from both sides of the camp because the sort of traditionists will say, well, you can’t be showing Churchill doing this. This is terrible. And then the other side is saying, well, you’re whitewashing him or whatever.

So I don’t know if, again, if other things hadn’t taken over, we might have been able to pursue it more. But we sort of felt we’d gone about as far as we could with it. And yes, I wish actually from the start I’d scaled it back and just concentrated on what he was doing in Cuba.

And you couldn’t do that. I mean, I know you’re busy right now, but you could do. Yeah.

I mean, if someone else would be interested in a series of Winston Churchill, then I’ve got all you need. You have to choose, you know, which thing am I going to push now? And as I say, as I’ve got older, I can’t, I found I can’t work on so many things at once. And, you know, you have to go with where you get a sense of what Netflix are looking for.

The likes of Netflix, well, I’d use them as example of a streamer. They’re not really looking for a series about young Winston Churchill. They want a series about the prime minister’s husband being taken hostage.

But history is your thing, though. I mean, you have, well, you’ve got a history podcast called Willie Willie Harry Stee. Yes.

Based on the mnemonic rhyme for remembering kings and queens of England that I was taught at school. Did you learn it? Yeah. Willie Willie Harry Stee.

Oh, no, how embarrassing. Harry Dick John Harry Three. Oh, I did know it now I’ve forgotten.

That’s great because I mean, so many people didn’t. So it’s nice when you meet someone who did. Even though she can’t remember a single word beyond stee.

Never mind. So, yes, obviously, that’s why you called it that. And of course, you’ve got your book coming out, which is also based on that.

Does it cover the whole of British monarchy from the first Willie of the Willie Willie Harry Stee? Yeah, it’s pretty much a history of England over the last thousand years from 1066 onwards. Yeah, it’s a narrative history about this extraordinary dysfunctional family. And it’s a family saga.

You can follow it from one generation to the next, from William all the way down to King Charles III. It’s the same family. I mean, it takes some mad detours and it gets a bit tangled up here and there.

But but it’s amazing that you can follow that. And it’s a great way of using that story as as a lens through which to to to look at our history in a way to it’s a washing line to hang it all on. And so many people know little bits of English history and they’re not quite sure how it fits together and how one monarch is related to another.

So it’s really for those people who know a bit and want to know a bit more. And the podcast is an episode or two per king, queen? Yes. Yes, that was the idea.

I thought it’s a great would lend itself to a great narrative podcast. And then once I had got to Charles, I’ve gone back and I’m I’m going over the same story again, but looking at other people along the way. Now, in my Facebook feed, I often get adverts for you and Vic Reeves or Jim Moyer doing live shows based on this.

Is it based on the same thing, the same Willie Willie Harry Stee? Yeah, Jim has done the illustrations for the book. So, yeah, we’ve done we’ve done a couple of events together. We’re hoping to do some more.

But it felt like, you know, because Jim and I worked together a lot back in the late 80s and through the 90s, I worked on a lot of Jim and Bob’s comedy shows and what we did live stuff with them before they were on the TV. And there was a lot of crossover between what they were doing and what Paul and I were doing. Paul obviously playing one of Slade on their show.

And Bob actually wrote quite a lot for The Fast Show as well. Oh, did he? So, yeah, he wrote all the filthy lines for Swiss Tony. And so it felt right that because they’ve left us and have buggered off our partners, Jim and I, our partners have gone fishing together.

Oh, yes, of course. I had to put those two together. Yeah, that Jim and I should work on our own project.

Yeah, stuff them. And there we leave it for part one. Listen to the next episode to hear the rest of my interview with Charlie and some more offcuts that include a horror version of Beauty and the Beast, a potential Indian James Bond and a Doctor Who episode that delves into the murky world of alternative computer games.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Charlie Higson. The offcuts were performed by Shash Hira, Kenny Blyth, Christopher Kent, Keith Wickham, Emma Clarke, Noni Lewis and Nigel Pilkington. And the music was by me.

For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh. But I thought I might be. Ah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somebody missing. Who knows what. Eventually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe. Jerry types. Mayday enters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

I’m still going, I’m still doing the thing, but the sheer amount of pen names will tell you that publishers constantly look for a debut, they constantly look for freshness, they keep pretending I’m fresh, and rattled though I am, I go along with it, and yeah, still haven’t quite got there, but they all get published, they all get read, so I’m certainly not complaining.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcut’s 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 today is known by multiple different author names, nom de plumes, or noms de plumes, all of them writers differentiated by genre. She’s Juliet Ashton, but also Claire Sandy, Bernie Gaughan, and M.B. Vincent, and the original persona under which she was first published, Bernadette Strachan. To date, she has written 28 novels, starting with The Reluctant Landlady in 2004, cosy titles that include What Would Mary Berry Do?, Snowed in for Christmas, and Diamonds and Daisies, through to later novels that include the more quirkily titled Jess Castle and the Eyeballs of Death.

For the stage, she co-wrote the book for the musical Next Door’s Baby with her late husband Matthew Strachan, which was based on her own radio play. This has been produced at the Orange Tree Theatre in London, and again at the Tabard Theatre. Her other musical, About Bill, was also staged at the Tabard recently, and starred West End veteran Kim Ismay.

And finally, not content with the five already mentioned, she’s added two more to her harem of author identities, Alice Kavanagh, responsible for the 2023 novel The House That Made Us, and Catherine Miller, who has written a trilogy of books which are prequels to The Archers series on Radio 4, recently turned into a two-part radio drama, with the possibility of reaching our TV screens as well. So, Bernadette, Bernie, Juliet, Claire, MB, Alice and Catherine, welcome all of you to the Offcuts Drawer. Thank you.

We’re all very happy to be here. So, you’ve just moved home. Did that give you the impetus to go through old boxes and find actual paper copies of old projects, or am I presuming you’re 182 and actually was everything neatly organised on a computer or online? No, there were lots of boxes.

And actually, I had to not give in, because there were so many of them. And I found myself pouring over the notes for a novel I never wrote in 2005. So, actually, I dragged myself away.

And also, I had to chuck out a lot because we downsized. So, I kept every notebook, which is insane, as if I’m Arthur Miller, you know, and I’m going to lead them to Yale or something. So, I actually just kept one or two notebooks from each novel, because I do a mixture of longhand and on the screen.

So, yeah, I had to get rid of a lot. And once I looked at them, you know, most of it was, you know, smileys and, you know, sort of insert humour here and things like that. So, it’s no great loss.

But it was, yeah, it was quite sobering. Well, I imagine you have to be pretty organised if you’re juggling so many different professional personae. I think so.

Yeah, you do. And, you know, all the writers you talk to say this, and you know this yourself, it’s a job, you have to be organised, you have to get up and you have to turn up. But yes, when you’re writing two books a year, and one’s a cosy crime, and the other is romantic, you do have to change your hats with great fluidity.

So, yeah, I’m used to it. But that’s one of the most fun parts, actually, I don’t find it a problem. I find that a complete plus because you don’t get bored.

I do think seven different names, presumably seven different personalities. I’m thinking like Snow White’s dwarves, have you got like a sleepy, grumpy, happy? Do you sort of inhabit them as different personalities themselves? Or are you more practical about it? I think of myself, I always remember Margaret Rutherford in Blind Spirit saying when she goes anywhere on a bicycle, she ups with her heart and over the hill. And that’s how I feel in the morning.

I think, well, who am I this morning? Oh, I’m the dreamily romantic, you know, I don’t know, decorating a house or something. Or I am the detective who’s working out what the DNA is. So yeah, it really helps to sort of sit down, centre yourself and get into it.

Normally, what I do is I read a few pages back, and then I just sort of gallop. But I’m very fast. I plan to maniac degree, actually, I over plan.

But that does mean that once you start, I’m sprinting through the whole thing. And that’s the fun bit. That’s the really fun bit.

Right, well, let’s kick off with your first offcut. Can you tell us please what it’s called, what genre it was written for, and when it was written? This is a radio play. And it’s called, rather pretentiously in hindsight, Reflection in an Acton Loft.

And it was written in 2019. away. So the world looks pastel and dusty.

I wish I could touch it. I’d love to touch it. But one of those elderly volunteers would waddle over pointing to the sign and saying it was Jane Austen’s actual mirror.

And it’s very precious and keep your steaming mitts off it. And they’d be right. Things only last this long if they’re cared for.

Imagine this looking glass actually reflected Jane Austen herself, a real face, her eyes and her expression. I know Simon thinks I’m bonkers coming here to Chawton to her museum over and over, but it’s because of this mirror. The other stuff is fine, all correct period and style, but this was hers.

And look at the way her bedroom, her actual real bedroom looks in the mirror. So much more characterful than it does in this raw, sunshiny afternoon. If I lean to the left, I can see the little iron bed, just like the one the poor thing died in, tiny and bruised, hardly making a dent in the bedclothes.

I could almost be there in 18… looking after her, if it wasn’t for all these people around me in polyester separates and bum bags. I’m a Jane Austen fan, you see, a proper one, not… There is loud beeping. Oh, hang on.

Body Biz Spa, promoting wellness for all, how may I help? Just putting you through. A proper Jane Austen fan, not of the films, not of the TV stuff, not even of Colin Firth in Drenched Britches. The books, the books do it for me.

I was too young, really, when I picked up my first one, Emma. I fell in love with… More loud beeping. Oh, hang on.

Body Biz Spa, promoting wellness for all, how may I help? He’s not in on Thursdays. I’m sure Janine can help. Putting you through.

Just totally fell in love with Emma. The language, so witty and so correct. Jane always said exactly what she meant, never scrabbled around.

It was pithy, that’s what it was. I gobbled all the books up, then the biographies, the letters. I can quote her comments to Cassandra.

They were so close, they were sisters, like sisters can be. Good morning. I need a towel.

There you go. Have they fixed locker number 12 in the changing room? I don’t know, madam. Probably.

I hope so. It’s my favourite. I love it at Body Biz.

All these nice people. A people watch, you see, because I write. Excuse me, excuse me, may I see your membership card, please? No, I’m afraid I have to see it.

Oh God, we’ve got to run ahead of the spinning class. Hang on. Judy leaves her desk, suddenly knocking over things.

Madam? Later. Tea break at last. Not much tea gets drunk.

It’s all scribble, scribble, scribble. I’m working on my fourth novel, based very closely on the style of my heroine, Jane Austen. It’s a kind of epic about a fierce love between star-crossed estate agents.

Freehold of the Heart. Good title, I think. Or is it terrible? This, well, I thought it was the beginning of a sort of chiclet type book.

I mean, Jane Austen is every chiclet writer’s favourite writer and all that. But then I looked back on your notes and thought, oh, hold on. This is not that at all.

Can you explain to the listener what this project was, please? Yes, I can. Gentle listener. This is a very dear thing to my heart that, yes, all chiclet, which we’re not supposed to say anymore.

We’re supposed to say commercial women’s fiction. But I’m very happy with chiclet. Everybody loves Jane Austen, but there is an assumption that you love her for the sugary, pastel dresses and the romance.

And actually, I did really, really love her and always have for the genius. So it was partly a reaction to how annoyed that made me. But yes, I went to Jordan many times with my long-suffering husband in tow.

And I always looked in that mirror, thrilled to think that Jane Austen looked in it. And I used to think, I wish I could nick this. I’ve got a criminal mind.

What can I say? So my heroine actually does steal it, which is very unlikely, but she gets away with it. She props it up in her attic bedroom. She has a terrible relationship with her sister.

Her husband doesn’t support her, is never home, is always away on business. She’s very neglected and she pretends things are okay. And she’s actually very unhappy.

And she slowly dies like Jane Austen did until she disappears. And there’s no reflection in the mirror at all. So yeah, it does veer away from Chick-fil-A quite speedily.

Perhaps why it didn’t get put on, Laura. So it started out as a sort of, oh, is this going to be Jane Austen helps this woman either become a writer or find her the love of her life? No, it kills her in a horrid, nasty, she basically fades away. Wow.

Yeah. And so you wrote the whole play? I wrote the whole play. I always write the whole everything.

I never half write anything. I write the whole everything, which is why if you had two years of airtime, we could fill it with my stuff. But yes, I wrote the whole play and yeah, my agent wasn’t mad about it.

I sent it to a couple of, you know, the way it goes, you can send it to people, you know, who might send it to people they know. And I think it was just, it was a mixed bag. And if I’m really honest, I never expected it to get made.

It was just something I really wanted to write. We have to be quite strict about genre. It’s a business.

It’s a depressing business at times, but yeah, it did straddle two genres and neither quite happy. When you’re saying disciplined about genre, you mean when you’re writing novels or everywhere within the writing? Well, certainly in novels, I mean, strictly in novels and in my experience elsewhere. Yeah, especially if you introduce humour.

I mean, I have seen very successful humour drama and humour crime and humour thriller, but they’re not as pure, I think, and they don’t gain as much attention or get as many green lights as a purer thing, because the worst thing a producer wants to be is confused by what you’ve written. They want to go, I know exactly who will listen to this. I know exactly how much to spend on this.

So yes, I do think unless you’ve got a track record, if you want to try and hit the spot, it’s best to be clear about your intent. And I don’t think much as I enjoyed that play, and I really was great hearing it dramatised. That was great fun.

I always thought, yeah, this is not going to go on. You do, don’t you, when you write things? Sometimes you think, yeah, not going to go. Right, time for another off cut.

Can you tell us about this one, please? Well, this is more radio. This is a comedy and it’s called Number 89 and I wrote it a thousand years ago in 1985. My name is Nancy.

I’m 20 something, five foot something, and I have no distinguishing marks. I live by the river in what the estate agent described as a spacious mansion flat. I don’t own it, I rent it, so there are in my life two very special people, my flatmates.

Breakfast time is the only time when Joanna, Susie and I are all together, when we can relax and enjoy each other’s company and discuss matters of great import. No milk again! Why is there never any milk in this place? Oh dear, oh Susie, I think we’ve got some coffee right now. Oh my cornflakes! There’s no cornflakes either, so you’re in luck.

Oh God, would I be asking too much to try and scrape up a boiled egg? Oh dear, oh Susie, the last egg went into Bernard’s quiche. Great, I starve and your fancy man stuffs himself with quiche. You’re not starving, Susie.

God knows Bernard’s not fancy, and anyone who’s tasted Joanna’s quiche knows better than to stuff themselves with it. Oh Nancy! Make yourself a slice of toast. Oh yes, some lovely toast and marmalade, Susie.

Mmm, lovely, delicious, luxurious toast. I can hardly wait. Why is the grill so filthy? Presumably because you neglected to scrub it after that sausage orgy last night.

Oh, it’s always my fault, isn’t it? I only left it because I had to get to bed and rest my voice. I do have a gig tonight, you know. Yeah, Sus does have a gig tonight, Nancy.

She has a gig tonight, you know. Resting for this gig also stopped you taking out the rubbish? Erm, the rubbish? The rubbish? Are we going to say everything three times? Just so I know, just so I know, just so I know. So, I didn’t take the rubbish out.

Beat me, shoot me, leave it out my bones for the vultures to pick at. The flat’s starting to smell like a Calcutta backstreet. Oh no, oh really? You should- Anyway, you were home all day doing sod all, Joanna.

What’s stopping you taking the rubbish out or cleaning the grill? Well, the rota. I mean- Oh, the precious rota. It’s made out by Nancy, not Moses.

She didn’t stagger down from Mount Sinai with it. It’s chalked onto a blackboard which has a transfer of a care bearer on it. You can ignore the blessed rota, you know.

Susie, pack it in. She’s going to… Cry. No, please.

Anything but that. Don’t, Joanna. I’m sorry.

I’m sorry. Jo, don’t. Shh, shh, shh, shh.

Just because I don’t have a job, I can’t do everything. I try, I really try. But Bernard’s had a virus and that budgie’s more work than he looks.

Poor Joanna. It’s a strain for her to be unemployed, to be the odd one out, to be, well, to be alive, really. Particularly to be alive in the vicinity of someone like Susie, who’s rather sparky.

It’s the artistic temperament, you see. The artistic temperament of a builder’s yard typist who sings in pubs at night. Maybe you’ll hear Susie sing later.

Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to be horribly murdered first. My day promised to be a gruelling one. I had to leave Joanna snivelling on the formica and yoke myself between the shafts of Bootle, Bargle, Hefty and Warnes.

When I became a copywriter, fresh-faced and newly sprung from university, nobody told me I was selling my soul to the devil. That I was prostituting my only skill. That I would one day write a commercial for dog toilet paper.

Ah, the gals in the flat chair scenario. Was this you? It was me. It was me and my two cousins.

Very much me and my two cousins. I mean, the whole budgie thing, I could, you know, I could write War and Peace. But it, do you know, it’s really fascinating listening to that.

It’s so of its time. The humour is so of its time. You could pinpoint that as the 80s.

I sent this off completely cold. I was working in radio advertising at the time. I was in a production house.

And I sent it completely cold to a producer who produced comedy I liked. And she sent me back such an encouraging letter. It was wonderful.

She said it was this, it was that. In short, I loved it and I want to hear more. But this is a topic that is tackled by a lot of first-time writers.

So if you can think of something else and write something else, I’d love to hear that. And I, as you can imagine, went straight back to the desk. And well, the kitchen table in this case.

And scribbled and scribbled and scribbled. And by the time I’d finished it, she’d moved on. And I’d sent it to a guy who took over and he sent me back.

I will never forget what he said. He said, thank you for this. It did raise a titter, he said.

And then he turned it down. I mean, he really hated it. But that stopped me in my tracks.

And instead of just saying sod you and carrying on, I kind of let it lie and went back to doing my little stories for weekly magazines, which I really had a huge cottage industry going. But yeah, that was really interesting. I mean, that wouldn’t get made now.

All the jokes were really obvious because they were made a thousand times during those days. But it’s lovely to hear. It’s a period piece as much as crinolines are.

And I think what she was trying to say to me was that she got a lot of this. And you need to have an original idea. You need to think outside, like literally raising your head from the table and describing what goes on around you.

But it was super encouraging. And I’m really grateful to her. And I think that producers should never underestimate the impact of what they say.

I don’t mean they should be careful or anything. I just mean they should train themselves and think, yeah, I made someone happy with that one word of encouragement. It really is.

It’s important. It matters. Yeah.

Now you mentioned just now about the writing of the short stories. Is this for the Just 17 magazine stuff? Just 17. Yeah.

So what happened there? Oh, another bitter story. I had… Keep them coming. I can get very twisted.

I’ve been sitting there, you know, I had one of those great jobs. I was working with two guys. I was like the girl in the office.

Literally, I did everything. They paid me really well. They took me out to all the restaurants with them.

They treated me like a little sister. Because of that, I was abounding with unearned confidence. And so I sent a soap opera idea to Just 17, which was around the corner from us.

Now, to those people who aren’t as old as us, explain what Just 17 is. Just 17 was like a precursor to Heat magazine, which of course is now defunct as well. I have to explain Heat before I explain Just 17.

Just 17 was one of those sort of magazines. They had the gossip and they had fashion stuff and they had lots and lots of silly photographs of celebrities. It’s where that all started.

I was sort of pointing out what celebrities were wearing and who was going out with who. And their office was exactly what you would wish. It’s all full of girls wearing too fashion-y clothes, laughing their heads off and going out to lunch.

And I just sent it to them and it came out every week, amazingly. Can you imagine a weekly magazine? And it was kind of huge, like all the girls I knew read it. And it just seemed to me it should have… It always had a short story.

And I thought, I’ll punt it a soap opera. Right, when you said a soap opera, so it wasn’t a photo story? No. It was written in words.

It’s actual words. Actual words. And it was basically, yes, a saga that happened every week.

Yes. And you wrote it. And were the lead characters or the lead character, were they 17? They were not.

They were older. They were flat-sharing. Ah, I see now.

I thought, sod you, BBC. Someone’s got to buy this. So yeah, it was literally the house I lived in.

And she said, oh, I’m looking for a serial. Yeah, give me five of these, 200 quid a go. I couldn’t believe it.

And it was great. It was all fun and games until indeed someone did lose an eye. And it was me.

Suddenly, I got a call saying, I’m going to give it away. I’m going to give it to… And she named a guy who was on the writing staff there. And I said, oh, are you sure? She said, yeah, you know, he’s got more experience than you.

It was literally done like that. And I said… Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let me say. So hold on.

You sent an idea for an ongoing story to a magazine. You actually gave them the plot and the characters, et cetera. They went, yes.

They agreed to pay you 200 pounds or whatever to write per episode. And then they gave that story and those ideas to someone else to write. Are they allowed to do that? Well, I did four episodes and thrilled skinny with the whole thing, doing it at work with the guys cheering me on.

And then the vocal came. And it never occurred to me until you just mentioned it that perhaps I owned it. And they couldn’t do that.

But to quote my grandmother, God pays debts without money. And actually paid them with money this time, because for some reason I stayed on the payroll. And I kept getting 200 pounds per week.

And I remember mentioning this to my mum and she went ashen and she said, tell them, tell them it’s fraud. So very, very reluctantly, I told them. And I said, do I have to pay you back? And they said, no, don’t worry about it.

But did they stop paying you the 200 pounds? They did stop paying. Yeah, God damn it. So yeah, but it was a learning curve.

And also I just, I carried on giving them weekly stories, just, you know, one offs for years. You weren’t sort of cast back into the cold. No, no, no.

I’m still in the fold. And I’m giving them very, very genre-based stories where people either got together happily at the end or one of them died. There was no in between.

As it is in life, always. It’s my relationship history. Okay, then, right.

Well, let’s move on and have another offcut. What is this? This is a stage play. And this was about 2006, maybe a little earlier.

And it’s called Troubled. Exterior, street at night. Mary strolls over to take Pat’s arm, both shivering against the cold as they walk along.

Mike, a soldier, nervous with a rifle at the ready, is manning a roadblock. Mary and Pat don’t see him yet. Did you see me, Uncle Brain? Head thrown back, bellowing.

I never heard Donny boy murdered so comprehensively. Leave him alone. He’s a grand voice.

A church bell begins to toll. Beneath the dialogue, it tolls 11 o’clock. That’s 11 o’clock, Pat.

Me mother’ll go through you for a shortcut. We promised half ten. We promised.

We should have gone down Shank Hill. There’s too many riots down there these nights. This is safer.

Oh. Mary and Pat notice the roadblock, hear the crackling of the soldier’s walkie-talkie, take in the cocked rifle. Where are you going? What’s your business? We’re… I’m walking me girlfriend home.

Let’s see some ID. Why? I’m walking me girlfriend home in me hometown. Sean Pat.

She gets out her ID. Mary O’Halloran. O’ this and O’ that.

Begara. It means son of. Pat.

Your ID, mate. Come on, then you can get home and canoodle on her doorstep. He’s obviously never met me ma.

Pat sullenly hands over his ID. Mike looks at it perfunctorily and hands it back. That’s all in order.

Don’t be so touchy, Paddy. Me name’s Pat. That’s what I said.

Paddy. Run along, there’s good kids. Mary and Pat walk away.

Pat looking resentfully back. Soldier appears to whisper urgently in Mike’s ear. There’s no point cheeking them, Pat.

Even poets have tempers, Mary. They shouldn’t be here. They shouldn’t be bloody here.

Oi! Soldier grabs Pat, throws him to the floor, plants a boot in his back and points a rifle at the back of his head. Mike contains Mary without brute force, pushing her to the other side of the stage behind him. It’s important that her face is obscured from Soldier’s vision.

Are you sure? You sure it’s him? Soldier nods. Your boyfriend’s wanted, darling. Dangerous.

That’s me brother. His brother. His brother is on the run.

You’re making a mistake. My mate arrested him once before. He knows him.

Pat’s never been arrested. You’re making a mistake. Me brother.

You want me brother. Soldier moves his boot to Pat’s head. Please, honest to God, he’s not political.

He keeps out of all this. Check his ID again. Go home, love.

Soldier drags Pat to his feet. Mike pushes Mary in opposite direction, not too harshly. Tell me Ma.

Well, you tell his Ma her baby boy’s been naughty and won’t be home tonight. He’s going for a little holiday in the kesh. Pat! Soldier drags Pat off stage.

Mike exits. Mary takes off her coat and tosses it as abrupt scene change to interior disco.

So, Northern Ireland. I know your maiden name was Bernadette Gorn, which is very Irish, but you didn’t grow up in Ireland yourself, did you? I did not, no. But I tell you, it’s got very long tentacles, Ireland.

Yeah, my mother was from Dublin and my dad was from Mayo, which is on the west, like the east and the west coast. And to be honest, when I was growing up, there was a very, very specific attitude to, especially in Dublin, which was, we don’t want to hear about the north. It was like the troubled or irritating brother who was always in trouble.

And I felt terrible when I grew up that I didn’t know much about it. So I studied it. And obviously you get friends when you’re older from everywhere.

And I had very good friends from Northern Ireland. And I really felt strongly about the fact that they were all just people, and especially they were young people together and they were falling in love with each other and they were not being allowed to do it, seemed preposterous. So yeah, it was quite passionately felt, but yeah, it feels quite juvenile.

And I wasn’t juvenile when I wrote it. So I think it was, is a stab at sort of getting into much deeper waters. And it was actually, it’s David Bowie’s fault because I used to, when I first listened to Heroes, I used to imagine it as being about the Berlin Wall.

And I remember hearing about people who’s like, their loved ones were murdered. And I’ve always had a very strong feeling that the best revenge, if somebody kills somebody you love, is to get them to love you and then you kill yourself. That’s one hell of a plan.

So that’s what this girl was going to do. And it was also about the incredible sort of whimsicality of the Irish, which is just a coin’s turn away from complete bleakness. And so it was sort of a mystical and very brutal kind of treaties on how love gets really screwed up in war, which makes it so much better than it was.

But you know, it’s all an ambition, isn’t it? Every work of art is an ambition, but that was the idea. And what was your childhood like? Did you come from the cliched big Irish family, all sitting around being incredibly witty and basically the cast of Derry Girls? But you didn’t grow up in Ireland, did you? No, no. I was born in Fulham in London and my parents met in London and they brought me up there.

And I did come from the archetypal big Irish family, but our part of it was just me, my mum and my dad. So I was like the unicorn. And if you can begin to imagine how spoiled I was, you haven’t scratched the surface.

And I was spoiled by my parents, then I was spoiled by my aunties, then my grandmother got in with the spoiling. So it was great. I mean, it was very Derry Girls in that there is no privacy and everything is up for discussion.

Everything you do, say, if you walk across a room, you get 18 comments. But I only got that some of the time. Most of the time it was a very quiet house with the dog and my parents and lots of books and too much food.

And so it was nice. It was almost like I holidayed in it. But as I’ve grown older, I realised I am very Irish in that the way I think about things and the way I relate to people.

And it’s interesting to see my daughter. I married a completely English person, but I can see it cropping up unstoppably in her. And I don’t know if you feel that, Laura, that as you get older, your sort of inherent culture starts like bursting forth with the chin hairs.

And I’m just really enjoying it. So yes, it was, I feel like I had a very Irish background, but at the same time, much more sedate than your traditional thoughts of an Irish childhood. And were there any writers or creative types in there? Any great grandparents who turn out to be Brendan Behan or something like that? I don’t know how strongly I can say no.

I mean, a long line of carpenters and painters and basically genteel working class people. That’s what it was. And I mean, also a lot of poverty in the generations before me and then they got okay.

But having said that, my uncle John once got paid a shilling by Brendan Behan. He met him on the bus and Brendan Behan had just got his typewriter out of the pawn shop and he gave it to my uncle John and he said, here’s a shilling, take it to me, Ma, or I will pawn it again. So yeah, it was very, not Dublin stuff, lots of countryside stuff, but no, not one single creative person.

We’ve got a lot of musicians actually. A lot of musicians, lots of singers, but nobody’s written a word except me. So you’re the family first.

I’m the bard. Yes. Right, time for another off cut.

Tell us about this one. This one is, oh, it’s another odd one. This is a novel very close to my heart, which I wrote in about 1999, probably five years before it.

And it’s called Tiddles Gets Life. He stared. It stared back at him.

As incongruous in Pete’s damp, custard-coloured quarters as Gina Lollobrigida, the kitten leapt out of the open box, paws high. It goose-stepped here and there, suddenly fast, then still. Every soft inch of the animal quivered with curiosity, as if it might fart, question marks.

It was agog at the plastic-coated iron leg of Pete’s bed. It held out a paw to bat the roll of toilet paper, standing by the stainless-steel pedestal. It stared up at him, unafraid and seemingly fascinated by his big, soft face.

It’s not an it, Pete reprimanded himself. This thing was a girl. A lady? A child, really, only just torn from its mum.

It’s a she. A she in his cell. That was a first.

Who are you? he asked, softly, afraid his voice might knock her off her fat, beferred feet. Your Tiddles, he answered for her, the name coming so naturally to his lips that it was surely preordained. My Tiddles, he said, quieter still, in case the morbid plasterwork should soak up this new tone of voice and broadcast it to the wing.

How in the name of God was he supposed to pick her up? Tiddles was so small, and Pete’s hands were so big. He flexed his fingers, long, elegant enough in design. They were stained by too many cigarettes and unhappy wanks beneath cheap bedclothes.

L-O-V-E, said his right hand, in dirty blue. H-A-T-E, more convincingly, suggested the left. Paid a pound a day just to be Pete Kennedy, he made no decisions, had no responsibility.

His meals were prepared for him, his clothing washed, ironed badly and returned. There was no manual strapped to the kitten, nobody looking over Pete’s shoulder. He needed a diagram.

His own instincts had led him to this place, after all, and couldn’t be relied upon. Rubbing his nose hard as if he wanted to rub it off, Pete counselled himself to be calm. This morning felt important, it glittered.

The kitten’s debut was sharp and certain in a life defined by its lack of everything, deadlines, change, urgency. The only other distinct moments were conflicts. This moment was fluffy and strange and funny.

That took a minute to sink in. Tiddles was comical. She had funny bones under her tabby stripes.

Pete’s nana had used that expression about some god-awful comic on the screeching 1970s television she’d sat as close to as if they were lovers. Across a chasm of 30 years, Pete understood what she meant. Some people can make you laugh just by doing ordinary things.

Tiddles was one of those people. This was a very interesting piece and certainly your description of what happens in the story again takes a turn that nobody listening to that bit would have any idea of. So, tell us what happens to Tiddles and friend.

Well, yeah, the genesis was I read a long form, really fascinating article about lifers in American jails having a terrible trouble with violence because the stakes were very low for them. They were going to be in prison forever so they may as well act up. So they wanted a way to get them engaged with life so that they could live more calmly.

They introduced the thing that if you were good for long enough, good in inverted commas, whatever that means in prison, you were given a kitten. I know, not very fair on the kitten. But it turned into like a cat lover’s circle.

They became obsessed and in love with their kittens as they grew into cats. The cats were cosseted, they were kept clean, they were fed. And of course, the prisoners knew that if they got into fights or if they disobeyed authority, that the cats would be taken away.

So it had a massive impact on their behaviour, but also, and this was something that really fascinated me, on their feeling, they felt happier and they felt love, like genuine, clean, ordinary love for some other little thing that they were responsible for. And it really moved me because I think men in general, I mean, we’re changing things now the way we talk openly about it, but men in general have always been very in two minds about being frank about their needs emotionally or even having needs that are emotional. So I thought it was lovely that these men who had lived in a really grim and smelly, violent and transactional place suddenly had a fluffy kitten with big eyes looking at them for everything.

So that fascinated me. So I thought, yeah, we’ll start there. And it just grew.

Tiddles is given to this guy who’s imprisoned for life at the horrific murder of an elderly lady. He robbed from her, but he was really violent with it. And he can’t face it.

He can’t talk about what he actually did to her. And he kind of blames her for getting on his nerves, as it were. She was a neighbour.

And as he softens up with Tiddles, he becomes able to talk to his therapists in prison about it. He becomes absolutely besotted with Tiddles. And then we start hearing Tiddles in a voice.

And Tiddles in a voice is that of the old lady he killed. Because as always happens, don’t you hate it when this happens, Laura, the murder victim has been reincarnated as a kitten. Again! I know, that old chauvinist.

And she is being, of course, cared for by Pete, who is finding new dimensions to his soul and falling in love. And she hates Pete. And by the end, she engineers a riot and the prison burns down.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Back, back up. She’s a kitten.

Well, presumably even as a fully formed cat, she’s going to have some limitations as to how she could do something like she creates an entire riot. She does. Tiddles, without even an opposable thumb, manages to get the entire prison rioting.

Basically, she fakes being injured in his enemy’s cell. And Pete thinks that this guy has hurt Tiddles. And, of course, it looks like he has.

And so there’s great enmity between them even more than before. And Pete tries to control himself and he can’t. And Tiddles does it again.

And basically, Tiddles, of course, is sinuous and sinewy and can go all through the prison. And she manages, I can’t quite remember, I know it all fell together very well, Laura, very, very, very believable. But yeah, the whole thing burns down.

And, you know, Pete’s on the roof looking for Tiddles and Tiddles is sauntering off down an alleyway as the whole area is lit by the flames of Pete’s demise. So, yeah, she gets her own back on him quite spectacularly and fair play to her, I think. Yes, that’s an unusual turn up.

Well, that’s what my agent said. And I was always saying to her, I’m still working on Tiddles and she would be very, well, don’t neglect your other stuff. And she didn’t show it to anyone.

She didn’t show it to a single person. So that is in a drawer waiting for its time. Well, who knows? Maybe some publishers listening to this podcast go, do you know what we need? Our company needs a book like Tiddles Gets Life.

We need a reincarnated cat burning down a prison. That’s what’s going to get Netflix on its feet. Yeah.

But yeah. But then after that, you published your first actual book. Yeah, actual book, which was called The Reluctant Landlady.

And did that have any reincarnated cats or prison riots in there? No, not a one. No, shelled. Right.

But that was a romantic novel. Yeah, it was chiclet and we were still allowed to say chiclet then. And it was the next big thing.

And it was touted everywhere and highly exaggerated versions of how many copies it had sold were sent out. And it did really well. And I had an amazing editor.

She’s called Philippa Pride. And she was also Stephen King’s editor, which gives you, I know, which gives you an idea of the power she had. But then Philippa got rid of everyone except Stephen.

She had sort of changes in her career. And I was then handed over. And, you know, when there’s a changing of the guard, it’s not so good to be inherited.

It’s much better when somebody finds you. So things got it. I’m not complaining.

I have consistently published books ever since. But I wasn’t like the next big thing. Suddenly, I was, oh, and I also have to look after you, which did change things.

So yeah, it was, you know, if it hadn’t been so exciting at the beginning, I think it would have been a lot better for me. But as it was, I felt like, I don’t know, I felt like Noel Coward when he was a child star, and he was billed as destiny’s tot. And suddenly, I wasn’t anyone’s tot.

And so it was, yeah, it was, it was, it was quite humbling. And in retrospect, really useful, a really good life lesson. Because 28 novels later.

Well, yeah, I’m still going. I’m still doing the thing. But yeah, it’s, but the sheer amount of pen names will tell you that, you know, publishers constantly look for a debut, they constantly look for freshness.

They keep pretending I’m fresh. And rattled though I am, I go along with it. And yes, don’t quite got there.

But they’ll get published, they’ll get read. So I’m certainly When you say got there, you mean what top of the Sunday Times bestseller list? Exactly, or on it even. But yeah, I mean, I have readers, and I have a career, but I don’t have any name recognition.

How could you with the umpteen names, but even so, and you know, I’d like that. But more than anything else, I like being able to keep myself and to have something to do every day. So I’m plugging away, Laura.

Yeah, well, I’m trying not to feel sorry for you. I mean, 28 books. Are you sold in airport bookshops? Some of them are.

Yeah, the most recent three are the Archer’s ones. Well, there you go. I’m sorry, my sympathies just got out the window.

So you’re obviously doing extremely well. I’ll put away my tiny violin. Yes.

Right, well, we’ve come to your final offcut now. Can you tell us about this one, please? This is a TV screenplay, and it’s called Turpin, and it was written around 2019. Interior, Dick’s house, kitchen, day.

Martha is busy making a list, counting jars on a shelf, pondering, scribbling. Jane is shelling peas at the large scrubbed table. It is sunny and pleasant.

The kitchen lass can do that, Miss Jane. Don’t dirty your white fingers. It’s calming, Martha.

You used to sit me on the barrel over there and tell me I wasn’t allowed to talk until I was done. That was then, and this is now. The lady of the manor won’t shell peas.

Then I must make the most of my freedom before I’m expected to press flowers or read poetry or embroider my own straitjacket. Honey. We’re nearly out of honey.

Dick enters, scowling. Ah, thwit. Down the head, fool.

And good morning to you. Dick slams down the tiara on the table. Martha and Jane gape.

Is that… Martha involuntarily looks about her. It is, madam. Booty from last night’s jape.

What are you doing with it, sir? What do you think, woman? I stole it last night. Dragged it off that ugly aristocrat myself. Father! Lord Jane, were you out the day they delivered irony? This was left with poor widow Fleetwood by our kindly highwayman.

Surely that’s a good deed, father. The poor woman could buy herself a home with the proceeds of such a bauble. She wouldn’t need a home.

She’d have a nice, cosy coffin. If any of Prothero’s men caught an old widow woman with such a trinket, they’d march her to the gallows. Surely not.

This is England. Aye, England. Where the poor have no voice.

Where they hang old women. Dick feels his neck, suppresses a shudder. Young fool riding around our woods nearly got an innocent killed.

Dick bangs the table. And you, sir, I wouldn’t care to be in your shoes if Prothero had picked you up with that in your pocket. He can’t hurt you, father.

Dick and Martha exchange a look. You’re a man of substance and you have nothing to hide. You could have explained that you simply… Simply? Nothing simple with the likes of Prothero.

He’s been looking for a chance to jump on me and this… He puts the tiara on his head. Would hand it to him on a plate. Your head’s empty, Jane.

Life’s not all singing and shedding peas. Dick sweeps the peas off the table. Jane jumps up, shocked, and runs out the door.

Jane! I didn’t… We watch Jane race across the yard and jump the gate into a field. You never did let those skirts get in your way, girl. I handled that magnificently, eh, Martha? I can hear you thinking it.

Tack that off. It don’t suit you. Dick has forgotten the tiara.

He takes it off. Where does she go, Martha? When she runs off for hours on end like a tinker child. Where does she go? Right.

A TV series about, well, Dick Turpin. And in this case, the daughter of Dick Turpin. Tell us about that.

Yes. Dick has reformed and thinks no one knows he used to be a… A highwayman. And his daughter certainly doesn’t know it.

But he doesn’t know that she’s a highwaywoman. What? Well, yes, I know. Excuse me.

Get out of here. When she runs off like a tinker child, that’s what she’s doing. And she’s about to be married off to a local bigwig, who is a perfectly nice young man.

But she doesn’t want to marry him. She wants to have a wild, crazy life. So, yeah, it was about the pair of them circling each other, father and daughter circling each other, starting to think, hang on, this is a family business.

What’s going on? But Dick being very conservative because he knows this could mean death, all their houses stolen from them and everyone in prison and hanged. And she’s, of course, much more giddy and thinks they can get away with it forever. So, yeah, it’s very Saturday evening.

It’s that early Saturday evening romp where they always seem to have huge budgets, always lots of horses in them. And also a real throwback to a film I was obsessed with as a child called The Wicked Lady. Ah, yes.

Margaret Watson Fonteyn, isn’t it? No, Margaret something. Oh, we’re going to have to look this up now, Laura. Margaret something, the mum at the beauty spot.

Go on, look it up. It’s called The Wicked Lady. It’s called The Wicked Lady.

It’s Margaret Douda. Rutherford, no, not Rutherford. No, that’d be different, Margaret.

Margaret Lockwood, of course. Margaret Lockwood and that wonderful actor with the plummy voice in it as well. Hold on, we haven’t got his name yet.

James. No, that’s Michael Winner’s version. Did you know there was a Michael Winner version? 1983.

Not Mel Ferret, hold on. Oh, James Mason, of course. James Mason.

James Mason. And he was her lover and I just loved it. It was all sort of rushing out of rooms and cracking whips and a hat on the side with a feather in it.

And I just thought it’d be brilliant. If I was an actress, I’d love to be playing that role. So yes, again, it was kind of comedy.

It would have been a series serial. I mean, you know, the end of the series would always be Dick or Jane escaping from the gallows. And it was just fun to write.

And it did get sent to people, but it never got any interest at all. I think there were probably half a dozen other similar things circling. It’s now I know that it’s kind of a perennial thing to open.

Oh, is it? Yeah, there’s a lot of it. I mean, there’s two Harryman things on at the moment. There was that Noel Fielding one that was cancelled and that really lovely one.

Renegade Nell. Renegade Nell as well, which was lovely. So yeah, I don’t think I was the right person to write it, but it was fun.

And I’m very, very proud of the line, booty from last night’s Jape. And to hear it said so, so actorishly is a delight. But that’s the thing, like all that language.

And do you know who else is in there? Lorna Doon. We did Lorna Doon when I was about nine. And that being out in the wind, being a girl and having to struggle with all your 50 petticoats, but still jumping on the horse and getting away.

I just love all that. Right. But you’re working on another TV project at the moment based on The Archers.

Yes. Got three books set in Radio 4 hit soap opera, The Archer’s Village of Ambridge, taking place before The Archers started. Now that is an excellent idea because The Archers has a huge audience in this country anyway, very popular.

I mean, it feels like the prequel options are endless. Well, that’s what I think. We’re trying to get it away.

It just so happens that my agent also is the agent of the editor of The Archers. And she kind of got us both in a room and said, this could be great, couldn’t it? So we did it with the Biebs blessing. And I had the staff on Speed Dial to talk about what kind of tractor would they have had before the war? Bovine diseases.

I actually have a folder of bovine diseases. And of course, keeping the kind of lineage, the pedigree of the families straight because people take it as they should incredibly seriously. It’s a delightful world to dip your toe in.

I can’t tell you how safe and lovely it is in the world of The Archers, but not in a kind of silly way, just in a kind of really nice people doing important jobs. Well, it’s very what the BBC does best. But yeah, I mean, I’d watch it.

But yeah, we’re talking to people and there’s lots of meetings that should have been emails. But yeah, I hope one day to see that, but it’s not like it’s not coming to a screen near you anytime soon. It just seems like a really good idea.

It does. It seems like an excellent idea. You’ve already got three books out of it, have you? Yeah.

And presumably there are endless others. You just have to keep going. And yes, but before that, the Archers in the Stone Age, I mean, yeah, we can just keep going back.

And it is, of course, the war is just like prime archers going to time, isn’t it? Yes. You know, all that kind of gritting your teeth and getting on with it and, you know, putting up with rationing. And I had a ball writing those books.

I presume you have many more plans coming out, surely? Don’t stop. No, they haven’t asked for any more. And do you need their permission to do that? Yes and no.

The problem is the plan was always that the end of the last book in the trilogy would be the day of the first episode of the radio serial. So we’re getting a crossing of universes and a crossing of ley lines. So I can’t get my archers to do what I want them to do.

But what about, you know, like the Star Wars, did it for God’s sake? Yeah, that’s true. Surely prequels of prequels. I mean, also the American TV series Yellowstone has about four spinoff series already.

Pre that and then pre that and pre that. I mean, the question, I suppose, is whether you’d be allowed to, do you need to apply to them for the IP and all that? Absolutely. Yeah, you do.

You do. And you have to share the profits with them. So yeah, you do.

You know, I can parley this into a pension if I keep yakking. But yeah, I mean, that is the idea, to kind of flesh it out and make it, you know, really nice sort of period thing. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I can’t do it on my own, Laura.

You mean for the TV series? Exactly. So we’ll work on that. But yeah, it was a joy and is a continuing joy to write about the archers, I have to say.

Excellent. Well, we have come to the end of the show. How was it for you, Bernie? It was lovely.

It was really lovely. I enjoyed the podcast anyway. And it’s surreal to be on this end of it, I have to say.

And yeah, thank you for being so gentle with me, Laura. I’m not quite sure what you thought I should be doing. I’m generally, I’m a very vanilla presenter.

I don’t do anything to anybody. So you’re always going to be safe. But having heard your offcuts, do you think any of these offcuts are worth going back to and having another stand back? Or do we think that their time has passed? I think if I’m honest, I think their whole time has passed.

But hearing Tiddles, I want to write about the cat who burns the prison down. I’m going to forcefully… And not as a children’s book, which the implication is the cat that burned down the prison. Exactly.

The lifeless cat that burned… No, I just, I want to get back into Tiddles. I love Tiddles. So yeah, I think they’re all backdated.

I think they’re all in my rearview mirror now. I really do think they are. And I think that’s great.

It’s nice to have a very crowded rearview mirror. But yeah, it is reminding me actually, just how… I remember someone saying to Ronnie Barker once when I was a kid watching him on, I think it was on Parkinson, said, do you ever worry that you won’t be able to make any more jokes that you’ve used up all your jokes? And he said, no, it’s like writing music. There’s only a certain amount of notes, but there’s no end to the amount of music you can write.

And I think the same is true of kind of literary endeavours. It’s just like a self-generating machine inside you. It’s an engine.

And it’s kind of nice to be reminded that your engine works. So thank you for that, Laura. It was absolutely our pleasure.

Well, it’s been great fun to talk to you today, Bernie, Juliet, Claire, MB, Alice, Catherine and Bernadette. Best of luck in your new home. And thank you for sharing the contents of your offcut straw with us.

Thank you, Laura. The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Bernadette Strachan. The offcuts were performed by Shash Hira, Noni Lewis, Beth Chalmers, Marcus Hutton and Emma Clarke.

And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer. Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is writer Jenny Colgan, author of over 40 romantic comedy, children’s, and science fiction books, since her first novel, Amanda’s Wedding, was published in 2000. In 2013, she won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award for Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweet Shop of Dreams, and then the Romantic Novelist Association Award for Comedy Novel of the Year in 2018 for The Summer Seaside Kitchen. Also writing as Jane Beaton, she created the Little School by the Sea series, described by her many fans as Mallory Towers for grownups, and for the Dr Who franchise, she’s written at least nine works under the name of JT. Colgan or Jenny T. Colgan. With her latest novels, The Bookshop on the Shore and 500 Miles from You both recently published, and Christmas at the Island Hotel coming later in the year, work ethic is clearly not an issue. Jenny Colgan, welcome to the Offcuts Drawer. 40 plus books in 20 years, that works out as two books a year. Have you got a, you must have a pretty good system worked out.

Well, I mean, some are novellas and some are for children. So they’re not all kind of full length titles. But yeah, I mean, I write two and a half thousand words a day, which if for some people seems like a lot, but if you’re a journalist or a sci-fi writer, doesn’t seem very much, about four days a week, because when my children were young, we lived in France. And in France, they don’t have school on Wednesdays. So you always take Wednesdays off. So that’s about 10,000 words a week. So, you know, you can have a first draft in about 10 weeks or so. And then a couple of months to edit and review it. So I don’t think it’s quite as, you know, it sounds like, I hate to go, you churn them out, don’t you? As if I literally just kind of, you know, I’m like that character in Little Britain that just types with a big kind of cat in her lap. How many now? Which is not the case at all. But, you know, I’m quite focused. When I wasn’t, before I had children, I would just kind of fanny about and do one book a year. And then, since I had children, of course, I was paying for every hour I wasn’t at home when someone else had to look after them.

Right.

That very much focuses the mind on how much it’s possible to get done.

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 you wrote it?

This is a poem published in the British Medical Journal called Ode to NHS Managers. And I wrote it in 1995.

I am the voice of government. As such I speak for all. This country’s people put me here. I merely heed their call. A servant of the people, I am doing all for the best as I witness the slow puncture of the NHS. As a hospital, your role is not much more than drug dispenser. You could take some business tips from being as smart as Marks and Spencer. That is, listen to your market. Try to broaden your appeal. Did you know you only interest the old and down at heel? Trendy logos are quite helpful and that tender business sells. Paying £1.59 per hour in conditions worse than hell. That was a stroke of genius and I think it’s working well. Though what’s that oozing down the wall and what’s that awful smell? And doctors were always whingers, as you very well know. All this paperwork is good for them. It keeps them on their toes. Their divorce rates and depression are nothing deeply sinister. It’s quite a bit below the norm for your average cabinet minister. As for care in the community, you’re starting now to drone. It’s the ideal smart solution for a schizoid on their own. Instead of being protected, we will send them out alone and circumnavigate the cardboard box that most of them call home. And when the country’s had enough, and when the crying’s still, and when we’ve all but given up on trying for our ill, and when the figures are cut and dried, the episodes objectified, and when the hospitals subside and everyone has neatly died, if there is left a call for who neglected national health, for who betrayed us all, then who will kindly take the blame? Who led us to this fall? Why, those who push the paper ever flowing from within. Those who must make the scalpel cuts in budget, not in skin. Those nasty suits who endlessly act cruelly, mad and viciously. The ones who most vociferously won’t play this game to win. Blame managers, don’t look at me in your last mewling lament. Well you might very well think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.

This was written in 1995 when you were not yet a writer. So who were you when you wrote this?

I was an administrator in the NHS, it will not surprise you to know. And that was the first piece of writing I ever got paid for. They accepted it. They have a kind of spoof issue, the BMG, that they run every Christmas time where they run lots of bits and pieces. And I was just so excited. And it was 50 pounds in the early 90s. And that was a fortune. I was working in a hospital in Bedford and living in a nursing home. And that 50 pounds, just I remember putting the check in, and you’re not meant to put the check in the first time you get paid, are you? You’re meant to pin it to the wall. But I put it in and I spent it mentally about four times. And I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to make any money in my life.

Well, what inspired you to write it?

I mean, like most writers, I was always writing something. You know, it was rubbish, but I was doodling away and doing stuff.

So at that point, what, you had just finished university, is that right?

I left university in 92 and picked up my first job. That would have been in about 94. I joined the NHS graduate management training scheme, and then they had a big internal push on to, they’d always had management that was very similar to each other and very dry and had always been the same. And so they had this big push to go and look for slightly different people, different thinkers. So one of the people in my intake was Johnny Popper, Robert Popper’s brother, who now heads a think tank and who was the inspiration behind Friday Night Dinner. Right. You know, there’s somebody that now runs a massive income. It was full of interesting people who did, from all sorts of diverse backgrounds, all of whom were completely useless in the environment they put us in. They kind of said, go and find us some mavericks. And they did. And we all left within about six months. It was a catastrophe in many, many ways.

Were you doing your stand up at that point?

I was. Yeah, I just started. I left the hospital and I went to work for a health think tank in London, really, just to get me to London. And that’s when I started doing a kind of open, I did a Jill Edwards comedy course and I started doing open spots. I did astoundingly few, considering how much mileage I’ve subsequently had. I just wasn’t very good. And I didn’t do it enough. And I started at the same time as Chappie, of course, Chappie Keepersandy and Jimmy Carr, Jimmy, I remember, and their work ethic, Jimmy’s work ethic, do you remember? There was not a gig he would not turn up to and just go on stage and he just, every time you saw him, he was six months better than he’d been the week before. He was so brilliant. And I just didn’t have it. Although I met, one, I met some brilliant people and learned a lot. And then two, when I wrote a novel, I didn’t write to the publishers, hi, I’m an NHS administrative assistant, would you like to read my novel? I said, hi, I’m an up and coming stand up on the comedy circuit. Would you like to read my novel? And of course, that made a huge difference, really. So from that perspective, except, let me tell you, more than one hideous kind of literary event or conference or library show that I’ve been introduced as, you know, ex stand up Jenny Colgan. And I’ve done, I did like 16 gigs and you can see come out and you see these really expectant faces, you know, there is nothing less funny than someone that you’ve been told is going to be hilarious. So I’ve had some kind of real professional stand up and I’m just standing there going yeah, not really. So but it did help.

So you went from NHS to stand up to novelist.

That was the sort of, Well, I was working in NHS and the stand up was the kind of night, night job really. And of course, you know, I’d send poems all over the place, obviously.

So was it poetry that you were mainly writing at that point then?

I think I wrote a children’s story that I sent to Bloomsbury and they went, what? They very kindly wrote back, which I think these days most people don’t. But you know, you know what it’s like in your 20s, you just have a hunger for it. You know, you’re just desperate for it. And because I grew up or I was a student in Edinburgh, which meant I’d always worked the Edinburgh Festival. So I’d worked the Go to Balloon, I worked the Pleasance, I worked the Traverse for years. So I would see these other young people when they were actors, which I wasn’t, but they were creators, they were creative people talking about creative things. And, you know, John Hannah would come in, have a drink with that girl from this life. And, you know, it would just be full of amazing stuff going on. And I just wanted to be in it. I just didn’t know how or what my met you was going to be. But with that extraordinary kind of I’m 24, you know, get out of my way.

Time for another off cut. Jenny, what’s this one?

OK, number two, this is a clip from The Scientist written in 2014, which is a passionate, it says in my note, was a passionate romance, is a passionate historical romance, because I believe in this one. Set at the birthplace of atomic warfare.

He was there. Oh, how my heart leapt, sitting at a small desk in the corner of the room in front of the blackboard. There were piles of exercise books and scraps of paper around him, and he was writing intently in one, whilst his other hand drummed repeatedly on the table. His foot tapped the floor, too. It was like he could never be still. He was a whirl of constant motion. I think that’s why he needed so much sex. It was the only thing I ever saw still him, sent to him, drag him away from that odd land he spent the rest of his life in, where everything vibrated on a quantum level, where nothing was still nor ever could be, and everything hurtled about constantly, simply in order to exist. Dick lived his entire life like that. He didn’t notice I was there until I made a small noise and moved across the threshold. Also, I wanted to shut the door behind me in case anyone passed by and saw us. I was feeling brazen, but I hadn’t completely lost my mind. His face broke into a broad smile to see me, and he put his pencil down and opened his arms. Sis, he said, and his pleasure was so obvious and unforced, I couldn’t find it in myself to ask, well, what did I even want to ask? Where had he been? I knew where he’d been. He’d been at work. Why hadn’t he stormed in my house and taken me in front of my husband? Why he hadn’t ridden up on a white horse and carried me away from all this? My feverish brain was completely fogged with lust, and I couldn’t even think straight. I put all of that nonsense out of my mind. I was here now, and he was grinning at me like someone had just given him a present. Come over here. I was just thinking about you. This was a complete lie. I had seen him. Whatever he was thinking about, you know, you and I wouldn’t understand it in a million years. In fact, whatever he was thinking about, it’s entirely possible he was the first person ever to think it. Anyway, I didn’t care about that just then. I just was so overwhelmed to see him again, and I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. Come over here and sit down on my lap, he said. Distract me from throwing confetti. Why are you throwing confetti? As I made my way over, I noticed that the ground was indeed covered in confetti. Dick shrugged. Just a math problem. Good one, too. Why was he throwing confetti? I asked the old lady on the bed. But I knew the answer before she even said it. Fallout, said Sissy. He was calculating the trajectory of nuclear fallout.

Well, you said this was a historical romance. So did you finish writing it? What’s happened to it?

I did. I did finish it. And we just, as these things happen sometimes, we just couldn’t find a home for it. It’s quite dirty. And sometimes you think, you know, just because you’re profoundly interested in a period, you think it’s going to appeal to lots of people and it doesn’t necessarily. And there also came a point where it was just like, well, you know, there’s lots of people that read my books because they’re comforting or because they’re warm. You know, but they’re not dirty. And so do we really want to mess with people in that way who might be expecting one thing and get something else? So for all sorts of reasons, we didn’t push it, but I’m very fond of it.

So basically you’re saying this is a bit more risque than the other stuff.

Oh, it is, yeah.

You didn’t want to maybe rename yourself. You’ve been Jenny T. Colgan and JT. Colgan for science fiction. Could you not create another… Well, you could, but I mean, that’s very difficult to do.

You know, there’s a million books published every 10 seconds. And when publishers go to quite a lot of trouble to kind of build up a brand, it’s very difficult to start from scratch and say, you should read this person you’ve never heard of and that you can’t Google and it doesn’t really exist. We can’t tell you why. You know, it’s a big undertaking and I already have a very big job. So I would like one day to see it come out in some form or another. And it’s funny because both my agents in the UK and the US, both of them really loved it. But it’s just one of, it’s niche for it. Very niche. If you’re really massively into physics, yeah, exactly, kind of math porn, you know, it’s quite a small crossover diagram. But that’s alright. I’m proud of it and I’m proud I wrote it.

So it’s a full novel sitting in your drawer.

A full novel sitting in my drawer. Yeah, so it’s a kind of, you know, it’s a woman that was at the Manhattan Project in the war. She’s very old and so she’s interviewed by a contemporary woman who’s having all sorts of problems with kind of Tinder dating and kind of how the transactional nature of contemporary sexual politics compared to the extraordinary kind of power, I think, of the forbidden. I think John Fowles and the French Lieutenant’s woman, he always says, was sex sexier then? He obviously thinks that it was, you know, and that I find that interesting too.

Now, I read in an interview where you said you reckoned your big break came when you wrote Meet Me at the Cupcake Café and you credit not the romance element but the baking element for your success. Is that right?

It was certainly one of these serendipitous things that happened, which is I wrote that book just the year the first bake-off started. And the first bake-off wasn’t a massive thing. But then, of course, books are published a year after they’ve written. So it came out the following year and then the second season hit and everything kind of went a bit kind of cake-orientated bananas. It was lovely. It just gave people, a lot of people who may not have read me or who may have thought, oh, that’s, you know, she writes for young people or it’s not really for me. It opened up a much broader, wider market. So I have a massive debt and fondness for bake-off, purely by coincidence.

And are you a big baker yourself? I know there’s lots of recipes in your books. Are they genuine?

Yeah, well, I mean, at the time I was living in France. And so I had to learn to cook because you have to cook in France. You can’t buy ready meals or anything. Plus I had three kids under four, so, you know, I wasn’t going anywhere. But in France, you don’t really bake. It seemed like a really curious thing to do, because why would you? You’re not going to be better than the patisserie. And the patisserie is only like 90 metres away. So, you know, people would come around and I’d offer them a piece of cake. And, of course, French women being French women, they just go, no, merci. They don’t do what I’m supposed to do. They just go, oh, I shouldn’t. Oh, it’s so naughty. Oh, a tiny bit. You know, that. Nonsense. French women just go, well, no, I’m not going to eat cake. It’s the middle of the afternoon. What’s the matter, you crazy? So, you know, I was at a kind of slightly odd anyway in France, and then I started baking. But I think it’s comforting, and it is not difficult. You know, a nine year old can do it if you follow instructions, and I like that about it. My mother was a great cook and a baker, so I have happy memories of, you know, licking her old, you know, the spoons to her cakes. And so it’s that feeling that I was going for. You’re not going to become a master baker through reading my books. But hopefully you’ll share, you know, a little bit of the satisfaction that you get from doing it.

Right. Let’s have your next off-cut, Jenny. Tell us about this one.

This is from The Bunnies of Bromwood, a book, an entire book that I wrote when I was 10. So this would be 19, well, about 1980, 1981.

This is great, said Bath Bunny. Now I want everyone to do a length of the pool backstroke. But this isn’t a swimming lesson, complained Paris Bunny. Oh no, said Bath Bunny. Hurry up about it. Suddenly there was a scream.

Help! Help! Save me!

It was Currant Bunny, who in seeing some nice lily pads had gone over to get one, but the water was far out of her depth, and as she could not swim very well, she could only cry for help. At once Bath Bunny began to swim quickly towards her. Grabbing her, he began to get back to shore. Oh, you heavy lump! He spluttered to Currant Bunny, who had fainted. After what seemed like a year to Bath Bunny, he finally reached shallow water. He dragged poor Curranty out and began giving her the kiss of life. Oh, the poor little bunny, murmured Paris Bunny. No, I don’t want any soppy nonsense, said Cream Bunny rather sharply. She’ll be all right, so that’s an end of it. Look, she’s got a small piece of paper in her hand, said Bath Bunny. Oh, it’s probably a bit of rubbish some human has chucked in, snapped Creamy Bunny. Gosh! suddenly exclaimed Bath Bunny. Look, everyone, come and see this. Oh, what is it? asked Paris Bunny. The paper in her hand, it is a treasure map. What? said everybody. A treasure map! shouted Bath Bunny.

So there you go. What did you think of that?

Actually, my father came across it a couple of months back. It’s a whole book. There’s like about 120 pages of it, all written out in varying handwriting that I worked on for, you know, quite a lot of time. And he said, oh, I’m going to send it over. It’ll be hilarious. I was like, I know. There was a bit that I did not send you where one of the rabbits has a baby as written by a nine year old who had no idea how anybody had babies.

Oh, I’d love to have seen that.

I know. I just couldn’t. It just made me cringe so much. I tell you why, because my parents used to get drunk at dinner parties and weed it out to their friends. It was very naughty of them. But I think, you know, of course, in retrospect, they were very proud that this ridiculous child had written an entire book.

And so they should be. They were spectacular. All the different characters in there. I have to say, when I was typing that out, copying it from your handwriting, I was laughing so much at the various phrases. I thought it was lovely. It really did make me laugh. I suppose you are actually a children’s author now, so you do know your stuff. But to someone who’s not a children’s author, I thought, oh, could there be something else?

It would be funny if the only thing that was actually worth revisiting was the thing I’d written when I was nine. But yes, no, I had no idea my dad still had it because he’s moved a few times. And it was, yeah, really odd to feel, even just to feel the weight of it. Again, I was getting, my daughter’s ten and I’m going to maybe hand over to her.

So did you have a lot of projects like that? Is this a one-off work or do you have several oeuvres by the young Jenny?

There was just a lot of stuff. I remember my primary school, which was quite small, they used to hang, they don’t do this kind of thing anymore, but the pieces of work they considered to be good, they would hang outside in the corridors. And I was everywhere. There was one I’d written about a mining disaster. So everybody else was kind of writing about a lovely horse and I was writing about people dying in a mining disaster. So I do, like people that knew me then, the two things I’ll say is, oh, you know, you were always like in the papers and for writing something stupid, or we never knew what the top of your head looked like because it was always underneath a gigantic book.

So your family, do you come from a family of readers and writers?

I certainly come from a family. Well, both my parents were teachers and both my parents came from very poor backgrounds. My mother in particular, my grandfather, my mother’s father did not learn to read until he was, my mother taught him, I think, when she was an adult. So she was your archetypal working class, pushy, pushy mum, you know? Right. We can’t really afford it, but I found a guy that will teach you how to play the piano for, in return for an apple pie, you know, and that’s the guy. We’re going to the library and she took me to the library every single week. So I was first in my family to go to university, that kind of thing. So that kind of full support, but very pushy and quite snobby. And of course, that generation of working class mothers of whom, you know, a lot of us are massive beneficiaries. But then, of course, we all turned like proper bourgeois. We were really snobby. My mother’s fondness for prawn cocktail, you know, I was such a snob. I was absolutely a pub. Basically, they built us into what they desperately wanted. And then, you know, then they found us absolutely insufferable.

Right, let’s have another offcut now. What’s this one?

This is from around 2012. And it was an idea for a television series for very young children, for CBeebies, featuring Dr Puppet, which is, you can Google it, it’s a thing, Dr Puppet versions of the characters of Dr Who, specifically Matt Smith and little Amelia Pond.

It was early on a Saturday morning in Amelia Pond’s garden. And Amelia was pestering a frosty caterpillar.

Oi, no poking, he needs time.

Be a butterfly, caterpillar. Oh, he’s gone. Are you a butterfly yet?

He’s gone because of all the poking.

Maybe it’s helping butterfly?

This is the duck thing all over again.

Can I see a proper caterpillar?

There’s a lot of tentacles. I mean a lot.

Let’s go. Bye, aunt.

Sound effects of footsteps.

Tentacles, tentacles.

Oh, good, you brought the custard.

We hear the TARDIS wheeze and then the opening credit music, the children’s version of the Dr Who theme.

I’m the doctor.

And I’m Amelia Pond.

And we travel in the TARDIS to have adventures on the planet of… Amelia’s garden!

Exterior Amelia’s garden. Everything on the planet is oversized, lush and green. The doctor and Amelia are smaller than blades of grass. The doctor is standing there on his own in front of the TARDIS.

Amelia?

A huge caterpillar waddles into view, looking perturbed. Amelia is sliding down something which looks slippery and fun, but turns out to be… The caterpillar speaks.

Would you mind terribly getting off my larvae?

Well, that’s quite an intriguing idea. And when you sent it to me, it had some very cute illustrations for this. You mentioned Dr Puppet. Who’s Dr Puppet?

It’s a woman in America. She’s an animator. And on the side, she makes these unbelievably crafted versions of Dr Who. And these perfect puppet versions. You really should Google it. It’s just Dr Puppet, one word. They’re beautiful. And she makes these little stop-motion animations. But of course, it takes her forever because she’s doing it effectively in her own time. And she’s not working with the BBC. She’s just doing it as a project. And so I was like, well, I write for Dr Who. You make these amazing things. And Matt, at the time, was the doctor who’s a wonderful doctor with children. Not all the doctors work terribly well with children. Peter Capaldi is a brilliant doctor, but he’s terrifying to children. And so we got together and we had these animations and we took them along. And it was one of these things where it was instantly. So, you know, for tiny children, instead of going to a different planet, you look at a different animal every week, but you have the same relationship and the same lovely adventures. And also the other thing is before us, children never went in the TARDIS and now they do. It used to be the rule that children weren’t allowed to travel in the TARDIS, but now they are. So it was one of these things that everything about it was charming and Matt was leaving and everything was in flux and it was such a huge, it’s expensive. So even to make five or six minute films in stop motion is so expensive. So, you know, and this is why I’m quite glad I write novels really, because when you write a novel, you write it, we make some changes and then it appears in the shops, you know, if you’re trying to make TV, it relies on who’s available, what you can do, your costumes, your sets, all the rest of it. If you’re trying to make animation, it’s even more difficult. So I realise I’m in a very easy creative genre because it’s just me and a typewriter, but it is quite dispiriting. I mean, I’ve had, you know, dozens of novels published. We’ve sold screenwrites to most of them, and I’ve never had a single thing made, you know, just because it’s very, very difficult to do that. So, you know, it was always a long shot, but I could see it just be in that very classic BBC style. I’ve been something so lovely.

Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a brand new podcast like this. And visit offcutstraw.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. Now, Dr Who is a big part of your writing life. When I looked on Wikipedia, you’ve either written five or nine Dr Who books. Probably both those numbers are incorrect. How many have you written for Dr Who?

Oh, goodness. Two novels about five or six novellas, two full-length audio dramas for David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and one for the very amazing Alex Kingston.

Although I find audio drama very difficult. Why?

Well, it’s very difficult. Why are the plays in Radio 4 terrible? It’s very hard. What’s that, Doctor? Well, it’s a cathedral. You can’t see it, but it’s quite complicated to build a world. Actually, I’ll tell you a very quick funny thing which you can edit out if it’s not interesting. When I was working with Big Finish or the audio drama production company, and every year they’ll do a big Doctor range of David Tennant or whoever it is. This three styles of Doctor Who story, there’s a contemporary Doctor Who story set on Earth on the present day. There’s a historical Doctor Who story set in the past that British people would understand. There’s a completely alien Doctor Who story set on a brand new alien planet, a completely different world. Those are the three types of stories that Doctor Who makes. They do three every year, one of which is contemporary home, one of which is historical, one of which is alien. Every bloody time I would be last to get it, I’d go, contemporary, please, okay, historical. And every bloody time, I got alien bloody planet. And it’s so, so you had to start from nothing. You had to start from, here’s a complete, here’s a new planet. Here’s the laws of nature of this planet. Is it underwater? Do they walk upside down? You know, you have to figure out everything. And everyone else is just running around going, oh, this is hilarious. It’s like a fake ghost. And I was like, okay, well, this is, you know, you have to make up the names for the planets and everybody’s name. And anyway, it’s, yeah, it’s really difficult. I mean, it was amazing, just like you have actors now, you know, anything you would write, David Tennant and Catherine Tate are going to make 150,000 times better. But I still didn’t feel that I was, it wasn’t, I wasn’t proud of it.

You weren’t proud of the audio drama, you mean?

No, I’m really proud of the novels. Some of the Dr Who stories I’ve written. If you are a Dr Who fan, you’ll know what picnic at Asgard means. And I wrote that, and I’m so, so, so pleased and proud of it. So I’m really proud of the novels that I’ve written. But I find the audio dramas just, just a little cringy. And just thinking, oh, this isn’t, it’s not quite what I do.

Are they very prescriptive when you write for a franchise like Dr Who? Did they say you can have this, you can’t have that? There are certain laws you have to follow?

But you, I mean, your job then is to push and push and push at what you can and can’t do. The first one I ever did is called Dark Horizons set in Viking times. And at one point, he, it’s Matt Smith again, and he jumps into the water to rescue a child and he kicks off his shoes and trousers. The doctor never removes his trousers. That’s the law. Yes, no, no trouser removal. It is, but that in its own way makes it a lot of fun. And sometimes you get to push things into what becomes canon for the show. You know that this becomes a part of what Doctor Who is. And that’s very exciting. Sometimes it’s just really annoying. I wrote a thing for Alex Kingston, who’s a River Song. And I wrote her in a sonic trowel. And then Steven Moffat wrote the Christmas edition, which has Peter Capaldi and Alex in it again. And it’s literally got the doctor going, what’s that? She goes, it’s my sonic trowel. And he goes, that’s rubbish. And all these Dr Who people are going, oh, so sorry, Steven thinks your sonic trowel is rubbish.

So close and yet so far. What a shame.

Well, I’m still in there. Steven’s a very good friend of mine. But it’s, do you know what? If you’re a real fan of something like I am of Dr Who, it’s so exciting. It’s such fun. Every time you write the Tardis of Warps, that’s the official stage direction is V-W-O-R-P-S. Every time you write the Tardis of Warps, that’s a pretty cool thing to do.

Let’s move on to your next off-cut now. Tell us about this one.

This is from Up on the Rift Tops, which is a middle school book. Let us say that’s about seven to nine year old readers, which I wrote involving my children in 2011. And it has now become the MacGuffin in the Bookshop series. And I will explain that to you after this.

I need to tell Mummy, said Wallace, looking round. And a policeman. The pigeon drew himself up to his full height, 14 centimetres, and said sternly, and what do you think your mother would say if you told her? But I could bring her up here and show her, said Wallace. And police could come in helicopters and get her. The pigeon shook his head. They’d never find the queen of the nathers. They can’t see that way. The rooftop world is only visible to those who already know. Look closer. The pigeon drew him round the four corners of the roof, pointing out distant figures. On a row of old brick houses, a chimney sweep popped gently from one to another. On a bright, shiny glass building, Wallace could make out suddenly a window cleaner, lightly stepping over complicated structures that seemed carved of ice. A young girl, her high-heeled shoes in her hands and carrying a champagne bottle was dodging chimney pots at lightning speed. And far away, across the river, Wallace could just make out white-suited doctors scrambling over the top of the great grey hospital. Our roads are not for everyone, said Robert. Your mother would not see them. The police have never seen them, although they have tried very hard. Most grown-ups belong to the world of the street. They keep their heads down, staring at the pavement, or prodding at those… those… things. They’re telephones, said Wallace. He knew grown-ups did that all the time. It made him really annoyed. Yes, said Robert. You know what happens when they do that all day? Wallace shook his head. They stop looking up. They lose all capacity for wonder. They lose their sense of the roof of the world. And sometimes they kick pigeons.

So, the word MacGuffin. If my memory of Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVD extras is correct, I think I know what that is. But can you explain it anyway?

It’s the thing around which the plot hinges. And it doesn’t really matter what it is. So in Indiana Jones, it’s the Holy Grail, I guess. And it’s in Citizen Kane, it’s Rosebud, it’s the Sledge. It’s whatever the thing is. The thing is that people want, but it’s not necessarily important in itself. So yeah, it’s the thing that the characters have to go through to obtain, but what it is isn’t as important as what happens to the characters while they’re finding it.

So presumably it’s the book that is featured in the Bookshop series, is that right?

Yes, well, the summer of 2012, the Olympic summer, I was stuck in London, because my husband was at sea, with the children, and I started writing it. And it wasn’t a particularly nice summer. And I liked where we were in London, was right in the centre of town. I liked the idea that you can try and make your way over St Paul’s and right across London without putting a foot on the ground, if that was possible, only using the rooftops. And if you put a foot on the ground, then you’re stuffed. So, you know, and to make it out to Galleon Street, which I think is where they’re going, I really liked the idea. And I just put the kids in it to have them in it. And my agent at the time was just like, it’s a very difficult market, which it is, it’s a very old fashioned idea. So I don’t know what we’re going to do with it. And it’s like, okay, that’s fine. However, then when I wrote the first of the bookshop novels, which in America was called The Bookshop on the Corner, they need a priceless first edition to raise money. That’s what they need. And she stumbles upon it. And I thought, well, I’m not, I’m going to have it as this. And so she stumbles upon this amazing, flawless edition of Up on the Rooftops. And I described the cover and she’s like, oh, that amazing classic from my childhood of the children, whose feet can’t touch the ground. And someone else would come in and go, oh, do you remember the Queen of the Nethers? And they’d kind of bond over it. And that was the MacGuffin, you see. And I love the idea of having this idea of this classic book without actually having to write it or to make it that good. And then that book did extraordinarily well in Germany. And then there’s a second one called The Bookshop on the Shore, which is out now, in which it also features. Anyway, there is someone who’s written a book called Up on the Rooftops, which has no connection to it at all, that people keep ordering. And if you go and look on the Amazon page, it’s just people going, what? This is… People are expecting. And I think, I really hope this is going to come to a point where I will actually just have to write it. But there’s no way it can possibly be as good as I’ve built it up to be in the books that reference it. So anyway, if you’re reading my books and thinking, got up on the rooftop sounds great. I agree with you. However, it’s not written and that thing on Amazon, that’s not it.

So how much of it did you write?

No, a couple of it. I’ve found three chapters. I’ve had it plotted. I kind of, in my head, I really like Neil Gaiman’s Never Where, you know, where London is literally what it is. And I just really, and that set under London, and I like this as a kind of equivalent over London, so there would be a scene in the Whispering Gallery at St Paul’s and how they’d have to cross the bridges on the top and, you know, get through Canary Wharf and the pigeons would help them and the Tower of London and, you know, it just, it just felt like it still feels like fun to me or a little bit like the Snow Queen, you know, and they have to catch Delphine, who’s my youngest, who then and now is mischievous and not ever in the mood to be caught. So it was, yeah, it’s nice. Of course, I like reading it. I often write children in my books, partly because I like writing them and I think a lot of people are very bad at writing them and they write very sophisticated, wisecracking children. My pet peeve is children in books and films who are interested in the emotional lives of adults. It’s endless. It’s like, oh, how are you feeling about that? It’s like, kids, literally, you’re just a food dispensing robot there. If a kid is worried about your emotional state of mind, it’s a terrible judgment on your parenting. You know, it’s like throwing yourself downstairs in front of your kids. Don’t do it. So I’m always trying to write very accurate children. And quite often, when they were younger, I would just take the age that they were at and write it in. And it’s actually a really weirdly lovely thing to have now is a record of my children at the ages that they were. You know, it’s particularly three, four, five, because you think you’re going to remember it, but you really don’t. So I like writing children. I like their moral certainty about things.

Well time for another Offcut. Jenny, what’s this one?

This is a clip from White Maasai, oh, jinks. A musical I was collaborating on in 2013 about a true story of a Swiss German woman who married a Maasai warrior.

Exterior Africa, crush, hot, extraordinary amounts of noise and smells. Surrounded by local people, Corinne, young and fresh looking, and Marco are crowded on a dangerously lurching boat.

This is awful.

What are you talking about? It’s wonderful. It’s our holiday. Enjoy it.

But it smells.

Of life.

Of toilets.

Do you hate humans, Marco? Collectively yes. Individually.

I like.

He moves in to embrace her. But as he does so, trips over someone shopping, causing an upset, a lot of flapping and an enormous hubbub. He flounders around, making more mess and upset. An elderly man starts shouting at him as several women eye him crossly. There is a song. But Corinne isn’t looking. She is staring at a man at the very far end of the boat, like a tinger, who is ignoring all of this, instead staring out to sea. He is beautiful and dressed in full warrior clothing. Finally, he glances round to see the hubbub. Marco has slipped on some chicken crap and bursts out laughing. Everything freezes as Corinne gazes at him and he catches her eye. The song changes to something softer and less rousing. I was lost. Interior, nightfall, landing from the boat. Everyone disperses, leaving Marco and Corinne alone. Marco is nervously clutching his bum back. We’re lost. Corinne looks around, listening to the crickets. Smell the night air. Smells of burnt things, nasty burnt things. I thought there was supposed to be a bus here.

Come on, this is Africa, not Switzerland.

Yeah, I see that.

From far off comes a gentle calling noise.

So what was the plan behind this? It was quite a departure.

Well, I have a good friend called Toby Goff, who is a kind of impresario. He puts on world music events is what he does. He travels the world. He puts on a huge Cuban show. He puts on shows from Africa. He puts on shows from Brazil. And he came to Cannes. We were there and we went for breakfast. He said, look, I’ve got the rights to this book. And, you know, I’m thinking of doing something with African music. Would you be interested in writing the book for it? The words that the music fits into. And he gave me the book. And it was a huge, huge bestseller in Switzerland and Germany. I mean, the huge book. And it is about a Swiss, white Swiss German woman who goes on holiday to Africa, goes on one of these tourist events. And one of the guys who dresses up to entertain tourists, she falls in love with him and they get married and she moves to his village and eventually nearly dies in childbirth and comes back. So I was kind of, it’s interesting. It has a lot to say about a lot of different things. But you know what, it just kind of petered out. We could get the music. Toby was in Cuba. You know, all sorts of things happened. I don’t know if it was the right thing to do. It was a few years ago, let me tell you. It seems very odd now, even the title. But hey-ho. I mean, the thing is, you must know this. If somebody says, why don’t you try this? Then you obviously, yes. And then you figure it out later. Theoretically, yes.

It doesn’t.

You still gave it a shot. I always think the worst thing is to not, or to choose not to try anything is also a choice, I always think.

It’s just an interesting combination. A musical, considering your main experiences, pros with a little bit of audio drama, a musical mixed with a subject matter that is quite sensitive.

It’s a choice, yes. I mean, I love musicals and I always, I wrote a libretto for an opera.

Oh, did you?

Yeah, I did. For Pimlico, not for Pimlico Opera. For, oh, I forgot the name of the opera company. Anyway, I did.

Did it get performed?

It did. And I thought this is going to be easy because I like writing rhymes, as you know. This is going to be easy. This is going to be fun. I’m going to be Stephen Fry and write Me and My Girl and, you know, make a fortune or Ben Elton or something. And that this is going to be brilliant because I love musicals. Anyway, it wasn’t brilliant. It’s terrible. It’s really hard. You know, lots of things don’t rhyme with anything. And I ended up moon spooning and tuning it much more than I had hoped.

Nothing goes obviously with Maasai, does it?

Oh, God, I didn’t even get that far. Oh, God.

Oh, can you imagine how awful it would be? Now I can’t even begin to think what you’d rhyme Maasai with.

Oh, he’s a cool guy. I don’t know. It’s terrible. Everything about it was terrible. So no, it didn’t go. And that’s all right. Another thing that is not my destiny is to write a massive, really dodgy musical. Actually, somebody’s turned, you know, the class novels that I’ve written about boarding school. That’s a musical.

Is it? Uh-huh.

I have not plucked up the courage to see it, despite being offered tickets on several occasions. Neither have I played the CD, which has been sent to me, but it does exist as a musical form. Fantastic. I know. I just can’t. I can’t listen to my own audiobooks, right? I just get too embarrassed. But do you know what I’d really love is I’d quite like to sell, quite often people sell their rights to Bollywood firms. And they will make any story that you sell into a musical, and that will become a musical. And I’ve witnessed much joy from people getting their books adapted over there. So fingers crossed.

OK, time for your final off cut. Tell us about this one, please.

This is from a thrill, really is a pitch for a thriller called The Coup, written in 20. Yeah, it was recent because it’s political. So 2018, I think.

22 Princes Street, Edinburgh is notable for a large coffee shop and an extraordinarily clear view of Edinburgh Castle right across the street, for which it is more than worth the price of a large latte, particularly on a clear windy spring day where the sky is a bright pale blue and tiny clouds scud across it, only adding to the perfection of the site. Above it were a suite of rooms with a surprisingly strong security system on the stairs, more than you would think would be needed to deter a lost coffee drinker. Behind the door, though, and the two large men standing on either side of it, was a suite of classic Georgian rooms, panelled with chandeliers and shutters on the windows currently thrown open. A figure stood near the vast marble fireplace, currently filled with a floral bouquet of lilies and pale violet thistles. He was not tall, but stood as if he were. His dark hair was thinning and cut short. He wore a pair of thin-framed glasses on a small featured face. Surprisingly, lush-lashed brown eyes peered curiously through the lenses. He was currently being dressed. On his feet were a pair of shiny black brogues laced around heavy cream wool socks with flashes either side. A short silver-haired man was fussing with a lace cravat worn over a black waistcoat with solid silver diamond-shaped buttons. A jacket fringed with briquette and the same silver buttons on the sleeves was being brushed down at the back. The pure white shirt had lacy cuffs that hung down below the black sleeves of the jacket. Beneath it was an immaculate kilt. The tartan was a fine white base, laced with red and more white on the black background, striking, almost garish. A dress tartan, something to be looked at. The dresser placed a black velvet cap with a large pluming pheasant feather sticking out of the top of it. The effect could have been ridiculous, but the atmosphere in the room was reverential. By the window dust motes bounced in the sunny air. It was a perfect day, although that meant more people out and about. But even so, everything was in place. The man sighed with happiness and moved over to the opposite wall from the fireplace and regarded himself. Bah oui, he said, pleased. Ça marche, non?

So this is called the coup as in C-O-U-P, not C-O-O. So tell us about the coup.

Oh, it was just such a fun idea. It was really kind of post-Brexit. And there is a guy, there’s a Belgian guy who for years has been marching around saying he can prove his bloodline back to the Stewart’s, therefore he’s the rightful king of Scotland. And he’s not allowed in Edinburgh Castle, which is true. He officially is not allowed in Edinburgh Castle, partly because he’s a nuisance. But I love the idea that in a state of kind of extraordinary confusion politically, that he would take over Scotland in a world where London, Westminster couldn’t give a rat’s ass, which I think they really don’t about Scotland, where you’d have the First Minister kind of being given everything she wanted, but in a way she really didn’t want, you know, and kind of as soon as it’s happening, loads of Scots, especially if the weather was nice, going, yeah, all right, we’ll give this guy. It was so funny and violent and dramatic and taking, you know, having a siege on the whole of Edinburgh Castle. And I was chatting to my friend, Hugo Rifkin, the brilliant political writer. I just, it was such a big dramatic idea and we pitched it to a few places and no one would touch it with a barge pole. It was very sticky. And actually it was my favourite rejection note that we’ve ever had, I think, was from someone at the BBC saying, we can’t risk taking this project on in case it actually happens. The likelihood of something equally stupid happening in Scottish politics could not be ruled out. So it was, it’s written there as prose, but the idea was that it would be a movie, that it would be a kind of assault on the castle, a declaration of sovereignty from when London didn’t care. But oh yeah, I know it was. It was going to be a thriller. They were going to take the castle by force. They were going to declare himself king and then he would become extraordinarily popular. London wouldn’t care, the First Minister would have to make a decision about what to do about the whole thing. So it was a kind of big daft silly.

That sounds like a brilliant idea. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t go for that. I mean, maybe you could change names and maybe not make him Belgian, make him Swiss or Italian or something.

Well, quite, yes. Any of that you could do. I know. Well, of course, at the time, the idea of having, they shot the last Avengers film in Edinburgh and the last Fast and Furious film in Edinburgh and both times it was a complete nutter habit for everybody that lives there. But, you know, it’s huge, it’s epic. You need crowds, you need people storming the city, you need people up on the battlements.

Oh, there’s CGI for that sort of thing, surely, by now.

Oh, see, Lauren, now you’re perking me. Now I want to do it again. And also, you know, I have no, I write little books about baking, you know, I have no, you know, I’m not coming into this with any chops at all. I had to accidentally, like, bump into James Cameron on a plane. Oh, that’s a terrible, you know, strategy for a career. But yeah, no, I still, I still think it was, it was just the way everybody reacted when you said, well, it’s about a king declaring Scottish independence by taking over Edinburgh Castle. And people just cringe. My agent just had her hands over her eyes. Please don’t talk to me about this.

Really, that’s so interesting. I’m so, I am very surprised. I wonder if you tried to resubmit it now.

I wonder if the reaction will be the same. Interesting. I’m tired just thinking about it.

Right, well, I mentioned at the beginning that you’ve just had two novels come out. Obviously, one of them very much just. The Bookshop on the Shore and 500 Miles from You and Christmas at the Island Hotel is coming later in the year. So presumably it’s time for a holiday now. Would you have more plans of writing projects starting now?

Well, I’ll have a book coming out this time next year, which means I’ll need to finish it by October or so. So I am writing about the lockdown, and I think we’ll need to see, because people have quite good memories of being in things like the war or living under Stalin. People tend to remember good bits about bad experiences. And I will be interested to see next year if people are quite nostalgic about the beautiful sunny days and about being at home and the birdsong and so on, and forget all the horrible stuff that was going on. And I write about isolated communities anyway. So I’m writing about an isolated community that has to decide how to behave under lockdown, essentially.

But they can’t meet each other, surely? Or can they?

Well, if you’re running a bakery, you’re a central worker. So there’s that. But also, there might be, for example, two people stranded on the island that can’t get home who are a balcony apart. I like it. I like that a lot. I think there’s potential in that. So what I’m going to do is I’m writing it. And then if it turns out next year that people really don’t, they’re just fed up of it. They just want to get back to their normal lives and really don’t want to read about it at all. Well, then, I mean, a novel is just about how people behave in a crisis situation. That’s all a novel is. So I lift out the lockdown crisis and we’ll make it a flood. We’ll do something else with it, I think. But I think the fundamentals of how isolated communities or how small communities work under crisis. So I think I’m going to focus on that and see how it goes.

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

I think I’m slightly surprised that my tastes are broader or my interests are broader. I think this probably says a bit about the commercial world, not just of fiction, but of anything really, which is that once you hit on something people like, then there is quite a lot of pressure internationally to keep doing it. And, you know, so Ian Rankin will write Rebus novels or Stephen King will always write monster novels, you know. And that’s interesting to me that I do, you know, obviously have quite a lot of different ideas, but kind of plough quite a narrow furrow. But on the other hand, I have quite, I feel quite a kind of responsibility is a weird word, but yeah, sentiment towards my readers, you know, particularly who just say no. When I get my holiday, me and my daughter, we buy a book between us and we take it and I read it and then she reads it and that’s what we do. And it’s always nice that, but also I do feel that for me to go, well, I know you like to read books about islands, but no, shut up and sit down. You’re going to read this book about a coup. You know, it feels a bit that I wouldn’t want to do that. Does that make sense? Yes, yes. So there’s a sense that I, you know, sometimes it feels that my career runs on quite a narrow track, even though my interests are very Catholic. But actually, I wouldn’t necessarily want it any other way. I’m not prepared to go and sit through those gruesome meetings of which you must have been in thousands, of pitching and pitching to a very disinterested 24-year-old. Rather than doing something that I already know makes people happy. So it’s nice to have these side projects. And actually, it was nice to look at them again and go, you know what, I think the scientist was great. But it wasn’t, we weren’t in a position to say, hey, everyone shut up. I know you like this story, but we’re going to give you this, you know. And also, I like my job. I like doing what I do. So I wouldn’t want to throw away what I have for something which may or may not work.

So it’s a little journey to remind you of what is also in your brain.

Yes.

I can’t express it any more articulately than you and you’re the writer.

You have done it perfectly, except the poetry, I don’t think I’ll write any more of that. Or the racist music, I’ll probably stay away from that.

Oh, that’s… no way. Well, Jenny Colgan, it’s been absolutely lovely to talk to you and thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thanks, Laura.

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

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer.

Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these apparent failures paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is writer and presenter Jon Holmes, a nine-time Radio Academy Award winner, recipient of two BAFTAs and numerous other accolades. On radio, Jon has written for comedy shows including Dead Ringers, Armando Iannucci’s Charm Offensive, and The Now Show. He’s had four series of his own satire, Listen Against, and his most recent creation, The Skewer, has just finished its first series on Radio 4. His TV writing credits include Horrible Histories, Harry Hill, Top Gear and Mock The Week. As a radio presenter, Jon has made headlines for his sometimes outrageous content and currently holds the record for the largest fine ever for taste and decency offenses in British broadcasting. Despite this, he’s since sat in for Chris Evans on the Radio 2 Breakfast Show, performed at the Royal Albert Hall, and been attacked by fire ants on the Rwanda Congolese border while making a documentary about mountain gorillas. In between creating and performing, he fits in writing books, five to date, hosting podcasts, The The One Show Show, and being a travel writer for The Sunday Times. Jon Holmes, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

So what does your offcuts folder, your virtual bottom drawer, look like in real life? Are you very organized?

No, not really. I tend to write in two ways. So one, if I’m writing for radio that I’m presenting, I will hand write it and scribble it down. And it’s then, by the time I get to do it on the radio, it’s utterly unreadable to even me. And that’s just in a drawer. All of that going back years, like to when I used to do a radio station called Power FM on the South Coast. And I used to hand write all the material and I’ve still got it all in vague folders. But then if I’m writing stuff for sort of Radio 4, and if you like sort of more built stuff, then it’s typed. And most of it, the old stuff anyway, is all on floppy disks. And I have no means of getting that off the floppy disks, which is why everything we’re talking about today is sort of after they fell out of fashion and other computers came in.

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

Well, this was written, I think, in 2008. And it was a treatment, sort of a pitch document with sample script bits for a TV comedy series. And it was called Real World Spies.

Real World Spies does exactly what it says on the tin. You know how in Spooks or 24 or in movies where none of the things that plague us in real life ever go wrong? So-called satellite uplinks always work first time, mobile phones always get a signal. Real World Spies is a fully realised sitcom for everyone who’s ever watched 24 and thought, why doesn’t Jack Bauer ever get a message saying Microsoft Word has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down? Example story and dialogue.

Interior office day. Spies Travis and Jennifer are deep undercover in enemy headquarters. While the suspicious and sinister boss is at lunch, they’re in his office trying to urgently download vital information onto a memory pen.

Hurry up!

It won’t recognise the stick.

Try another socket.

I have, it just won’t work. It says this stick isn’t compatible with Windows Vista. I’ll have to nip to PC World and buy the right stick.

OK, but run!

We see Jennifer in PC World. There’s a queue at the checkout. This dramatically intercuts with Travis waiting in the office, watching the clock and the boss finishing his lunch and heading back. Jennifer almost reaches the front of the queue. There is an old man in front of her buying an iPod Nano.

Would you like the gold extended warranty?

What does that mean?

An extra £60 means a no quibble money back guarantee should the item fail.

Well, it’s a present, so…

Just fill this for me.

Have you got a pen?

Look, can you hurry up?

I’m filling in the form for the warranty.

Well, don’t, it’s a rip-off.

How do you know?

Because I work for the government.

She takes his pen.

Now, fuck off!

There follows a hard-stopping intercut sequence of Jennifer paying, Travis waiting and the boss in a lift. Jennifer pays and runs out. The girl shouts… But she’s gone. We see Travis having to leave the office. The boss arriving back and Jennifer getting there nowhere near in time. Travis meets her in the corridor. Got one.

Too late.

Well, this was a waste of money then.

Did you get a receipt?

We can take it back.

She didn’t.

Oh, for God’s sake!

This is a world where the global missile defence shield won’t switch on because no-one has got the right adapter. Where uploading blueprints of a terrorist hideout to a PDA simply wouldn’t work because you just went into a tunnel. And where a car chase is blocked by traffic lights at some roadworks and Travis and Jennifer are stuck behind a learner driver. This is a sitcom about what happens when the best of the best have the worst possible day. This is Real World Spies.

I think nothing dates a sketch like the phrase iPod Nano, does it?

Or Windows Vista, or whatever. So you wrote this in 2008, who was it for?

Well, it wasn’t for any specific broadcaster. It was, you know, I had in mind that it could be, you know, just telly. So I think PBC2, I think, and Sky, and it got as far as a production company I was talking to at the time. They kind of liked it, but then, I think just sort of said, well, it feels more like a sketch, not a sitcom. So, which is fair. And I think they were worried that it wouldn’t sustain, you know, six episodes of that sort of thing going wrong. Suffice to say, though, I’ve since seen about three different versions of it on television made by other people.

Now you wrote this in 2008 with your then writing partner, Andy Hurst. How did you two first get together?

We were at uni together initially, and we started off, I think he slept with my girlfriend. I think that was the first thing that happened, or vice versa, I can’t really remember. And, you know, we became firm friends. So I was starting to write stuff for the BBC, still while holding down a day job. I worked in a theatre doing sound and lighting, and I was sending in jokes to the BBC and eventually got a vague callback from someone going, we quite like this sort of cassette you’ve made on an iPod Nano, and we’d like to talk to you about it. You know, who have you kind of written with? It was a sort of spoof of Radio 4. That was the gist of it. It was called Grievous Bodily Radio, and it was a sort of piss-take of all the things that were on Radio 4 and telly and stuff like that. And I sort of thought, well, writing on your own is quite dull. And Andy had a similar sense of humour, and I said, did you fancy coming in and helping me write this? And he did, and then we just sort of carried on.

The rest is history. Yeah. So time for your next off-cut. Tell us about that.

Well, I wrote a book. So this was a memoir, which I was asked to do by a publisher. He sort of said, can you write a sort of memoir book, but sort of funny? And I called it A Portrait of an Idiot as a Young Man. And it came out in 2016, initially. This was sort of the first chapter, I think. First draft, first chapter.

As any parent knows, naming a child is something not to be undertaken lightly. You are bestowing upon this sensitive human creature something with which it will be saddled forever, something which will be used to address it, cajole it, admonish it, call it, and mercilessly taunt it if you pick the wrong name. There’s a girl at my school called Gay Wally. And among pupils and staff alike, she came to epitomize the whole what were your parents thinking debate. Everyone got a nickname at school and as a parent, it’s very easy to accidentally give your offspring’s peers an open goal. My nickname was simply Homesy, which was part of the time on a tradition of simply adding the letter Y to any given surname. It was simple and quick, if not especially satisfying, and thus worked along much the same lines as Pot Noodle. These were easy nicknames formed in a hurry. Among my peers, I could also count Woody, Granty, and Stouty. But the best and most rewarding nicknames were reserved for people who had something wrong with them or had a stupid name bestowed on them by their unthinking parents. Kev, who was fat, was thus known as Fat Kev. Jon Thomas was known as Cock. And despite everyday run-of-the-mill, eminently sensible first names, Wayne Grucock and Lisa Wankling never stood a chance.

That was a particularly interesting off-cut for me, because when I looked at the text that you sent me, every other word was misspelt. It was like you were typing so fast, you didn’t have time to read back what you’d written. Is that what happened? Was it a big brain dump? Did you have to get it all out?

Yeah, it was. I think I tend to write like that, hence the handwriting that I mentioned earlier, because if you’re writing, as I was with this book, so this book’s essentially, the way I got round to it was I had my first child, right, who’s now 10. If you’ve had kids, you go along and they say, all right, so what illnesses might you have hereditary in your family that you might eventually pass on to these children? We need to write that on a form. And I don’t know. I had no answer to the question, what might you have in your background, because I was adopted, and I don’t have any access to any of those records. And I sort of thought, well, I can’t give my children, my daughters, any kind of medical background of who I am, but what I can do is write down how I got to be who I am. And that’s sort of how the book developed. And because it was that sort of pour it all out sort of book, when you write first drafty, you know, and ignore spell check, it’s literally, you know, you’re just writing, writing, writing, writing. But then obviously you go back and you refine it, but to get it all out there, because it was such a sort of from the heart kind of thing. I mean, the caveat with the book is, my daughters will never be allowed to read it. I mean, I overshared to the end, as you can, yeah. I mean, you know, there are chapters in there about being a teenage boy that really give you an insight.

There are too many chapters in there about being a teenage boy.

Yeah, but I, you know, I immediately urge you to go and buy it on Amazon.

Now you come from a very normal, non showbiz family. Your dad was a builder, your mom a nurse. So where did the writing, performing come from then?

Well, I don’t know. You see, that’s interesting because I, that’s part of what I talked about in the book was the whole nature nurture debate is quite fascinating to me because, you know, I had this idea that, you know, because I was technically picked out from a line of babies, right? The next couple through the door may not have been my parents, if you like, so I could have been brought up somewhere else by another couple entirely. And so my question to myself, and I actually still don’t really know the answer is, would I have ended up doing this through nature rather than nurture? Would I have always been destined to write and do stuff like that? Or was that, you know, kind of part of my upbringing? Because my dad, while they certainly weren’t from any kind of show-busy family, my dad was very into comedy and from a very young age used to play me albums from the goodies. And my mum was a nurse, as you mentioned. She used to do night shifts. And she’d put me to bed before she went off to do night shifts. And then she’d go and catch the bus at the end of the row. And so about nine o’clock at night, then my dad would come upstairs and bring me downstairs and sit me in front of repeats of Monty Python. And so I associated comedy with being a bit sort of naughty. He’s like, don’t tell your mum, but come and watch a man being hit with a fish. And I didn’t understand what was going on at all. But I loved it. And it was kind of bonding with dad sort of thing. So that’s kind of where I guess my interest started. And he had these albums. And then my first albums were music albums. They were comedy albums. The first album I bought was probably not 9 o’clock news or something from when they used to do those albums. So I was always kind of into it.

Let’s have your next off cut, please.

OK, well, this is a scene that never got used for the sitcom Miranda. So Miranda Hart’s very successful sitcom, of which this was no successful part.

Miranda and her date are in the cinema watching a film we do not see. We hear the soundtrack.

Who’s that? Shh! No, seriously, I don’t know who that is. That man. Who’s he supposed to be? What?

He’s the bloke whose daughter’s been kidnapped.

Right. Well, is he a goodie or a baddie?

What?

Goodie or baddie, him?

Goodie.

Miranda eats more popcorn.

So is he the bloke that was shot?

No.

Who was shot then?

The bloke with the wife.

What wife? Who’s that?

The cop who’s been in the film from the start. Do you always do this when you watch a film? No, not always.

I watched a film last week and there wasn’t even a cop in it.

What was it?

I don’t know.

It was on TV.

Beverly Hills Cop.

So, do you know why this scene didn’t get you?

No, I mean, it was one of, I wasn’t part of the writing, it was what I was. I ended up working with Miranda on a couple of Radio 4 things years ago, before she was famous. And then, Egtra and I sort of met her again, and then we ended up doing some stuff on Radio 2 together. And as part of that, she was sort of developing the next series of the sitcom and everything else. And she just said, oh, can you come up with some stuff and some writing and some bits? But I was never kind of part of the actual team she had. I was just sort of the, you know, I know this bloke. And so it was about just developing storylines and everything else. And that was just a sample bit of script from a cinema storyline that was kind of floating around. But that happens a lot. I think if you’re a writer and you get asked to do those things, it’s about sort of, she was entirely free to take a cinema scene and you’ve won line from it if you wanted to, you know, and build it into what she was writing, which is kind of the point. She just wanted ideas bounced around, I think.

Now, Miranda’s not the only celebrity you’ve been teamed with, you’ve written for. You also work with Stephen Fry.

Yes, so Stephen Fry used to present The BAFTAs. You may know that, Graham Norton does it now, but Stephen Fry used to present it, and I would write, co-write the script for The BAFTAs, which is, it sounds very glamorous, which it sort of is on one level, but at, you know, two in the morning when you’re being rung up from Hollywood by, I don’t know, Leonardo’s people who want to change a joke. It’s not so much fun when you’ve got to wait up for those calls. But you find that actors, so Stephen, Stephen’s job, you know, is to sort of introduce them, as you know, if you’ve watched the BAFTAs, you know, his job is to do the monologue at the beginning and then some sort of pithy introduction to whoever’s coming on to do the, to hand out the award for best hair or whatever it is. But your job as a writer on that is to write those lines as well for the people who are giving out the award for best hair. So you’ve got that really kind of awkward thing where you’re giving jokes you’ve written to Hollywood A-list actors who are shit at acting, right? Because they, what they are, they’re good at acting characters, but they can’t be themselves and they really struggle with it, right? That’s why when you’ve ever watched these things, if there’s an actor that you think, oh, they’re great and they come out and they just sort of stare blindly ahead, vaguely trying to read an autocue and it’s terrible. That’s why, because they’re trying to be themselves and they can’t. And it was really interesting insight into how that world works behind the scenes. You know, one of those surreal moments of your life. So my job is to stand off stage next to the, where it’s being typed into the autocue, the thing they have to read on the stage, to change anything at the last minute, right? That might just crop up. No, they were in there, but the example I’ll give you, right? So what happened was, we were just doing the run through to the blank room, and what they do is they put cutouts of the celebrities’ faces and stick them to the backs of all the chairs before they arrive. So the camera crew and the director can know where to cut. So if someone’s going, cut to Gwyneth Paltrow smiling or looking grumpy, they know where she’s sitting. So in the rehearsal, they’ll cut to these chairs. Anyway, so we’re going through all of this, and then all the scripts are being, sort of Stephens running through the jokes. And at the back of the room, the door opens and Keanu Reeves walks in with his entourage of people. And he’s just sort of standing there. And just at the point where we got to a joke about Keanu Reeves’ acting, right? And I thought, well, this isn’t going to go well, is it? And it was some sort of joke matrix. If he’d taken the blue pill, he might have been a better actor. I can’t remember. Anyway, the next thing we know is there’s a note from his people that says, Mr. Reeves isn’t very happy with that, that joke. Can you change it? So we came up with some other joke. That’s fine. That went into the script. Stephen then read it out as it’s happening. Now Keanu Reeves is then standing, waiting to go on, of course, cause he’s being introduced. Stephen does his intro. Keanu Reeves goes on stage, does his presentation, comes off stage, looks at me and said, what happened to the acting joke? And I went, and he went, cause he was really funny. Like he was really, what happened to that? And I was like, you said we had to cut it out? And he went, no, I didn’t. And it turned out, of course, these people that were with him had just done it on his behalf. And even though he had no interest in, he was up for it, you know? And I think that happens a lot with these people. And that was at the point where Richard Gere was about to go on stage, okay? And this was all going on. So he’s going, what happened to my joke? Richard Gere’s about to go on stage. The floor manager’s going, 20 seconds, Mr. Gere. And the wardrobe assistant comes up and adjusts his bow tie, which falls apart, cause it’s a proper bow tie. Right, so either surreal moments. I’m then watching Keanu Reeves talking to me about jokes while helping Richard Gere tie his bow tie. And I was thinking, this is the weirdest night of my life.

Okay, time for your next off-cut. Tell us what this is, please.

Um, guys, write travel, as you mentioned earlier for the Sunday Times, but they used to do a com called Motormouth, which is where writers were just allowed to spout off about anything that annoyed them in particular. And I had a bit of an issue with car parks.

When the director general of the BBC claimed back the 23p it cost him to park recently, you may have wondered, as I did, not what the hell he thought he was doing with license payers money, but how on earth he managed to park anything anywhere for just 23p. The minimum spend at the cheapest car park I can think of is 70p an hour, or part thereof. And if you try to fob it off with anything else on the grounds that you’re just picking up some dry cleaning, we’ll be back in 15 minutes at most, the machine simply gobs your money back at you with the force of a cat yacking up a coin furball. Yet, if you’ve only got a pound and wood, not unreasonably like 30p back, it’ll merely sit there and refer you to the sign that says it’s unable to give change. And if you leave the car park for a moment to try and get the right change from the shop 20 yards away, a git in a hattel come along and fine you 60 pounds. Car parking is stupidly expensive. Comedian Simon Evans observed that at six pounds an hour, the parking meters outside of Central London McDonald’s were better paid than the people working inside. Where I live, after seven p.m., even if you only want to park for five minutes, it costs one pound fifty. Why? What exactly am I getting in return? For that money, I want a bit more than just a boring old car parking space, thank you. I want entertainment. Clowns, perhaps. All right, not clowns. Everyone hates clowns. And they’re not entertaining unless they’re on fire. But show dogs, perhaps. Or a motorcycle display team. Or a motorcycle display team comprised of show dogs jumping through hoops of burning clowns. As far as I can tell, your money is actually just spent on more signs telling you that you now have to pay more money in order to pay for more signs. I’ve checked on their website, and it turns out all the extra cash from the recent price hike in my car park, Canterbury City Council, in case you were wondering, is being used to take a technological leaf out of the new Transformers film. And so, should you miss your tickets expiry time by just one second, the seemingly innocuous truck parked in the next bay will turn into a massive robot that will loom over the town centre, pluck you bodily out of debilums, smash you back into your car, and then hurl you and it out of the county. Park that thought.

That was a very heartfelt piece. What year was that again?

2006.

What happened to that?

Well, it was a bit of a writing for the newspaper learning curve, so I submitted that, and then when I read it, they don’t tell you this, then I read it back on the Sunday or whenever it was coming out, and it was about two paragraphs, the beginning paragraph, and then a bit of the middle, and then the rest had sort of disappeared, and had been rewritten by the editor. And I was so, well, what’s that about? And he went, well, I just didn’t like it.

In that piece, you named and shamed your local council, because you’re not afraid to antagonise, which has got you into trouble before, hasn’t it?

Well, yes. I mean, at which time would you like to talk about this?

Well, let’s, in the introduction, I mentioned the largest ever find in British broadcasting history. Maybe you’d like to tell us about that.

Well, I was young and Ofcom needed the money. So, well, okay. So I was doing this show on Virgin Radio. This was around 1999, I would say. And I was doing late nights, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights from 10 till 2. And it was a bit of a Wild West situation. There was no one in the building apart from me, the guy who I was doing the show with and a security guard. So there’s no producers or anything like that. So the boss was sort of like, yeah, do what you like. Just, it’s gonna be fine. It’s gonna be funny. Just do what you like. I’ve hired you because you’re a bit edgy, and you’re gonna push the boundaries a bit, and it’s gonna get people talking, which it did, but in all the wrong ways. And so one of the things we did, well, I’ll get onto the big fine, but just as a lead up to that, I’d already been fired from one radio station because we used to do a game on Sundays on Sunday evening, just after Dr. Fox’s chart.

This was you and your writing partner, Andy Hurst.

This was Andy Hurst, yeah. And we used to do this two hour show on a Sunday night. And it became cult listening amongst the kids, really, the school kids and the teenagers. This was down in Hampshire. And one of the games we had was that you had to phone the show and live on air, you had to put an object of your choosing through a neighbor’s letter box, all right? And then the object of the game, okay, which is when we started the clock, was to knock on the door, right? And that’s when we started the clock, the knock. And then we timed how long it took for you to get that object back. So people would be like, put things through the letter box, knock on the door, clock’s started. And someone asked me, yeah, I guess, I’m really sorry. You know, I accidentally put my hammer with some soil cellar taped to it through your letter box. Can I have it back? And then this weird conversation that you’d hear on air would carry on. Anyway, it was just fine, people with carrots, it’s just crest or something. And it all went wrong when someone put a live squirrel through someone’s letter box. I mean, it was very funny, but it destroyed their hallway. And I got fired.

But you know, it was.

But the big fine. The big fine, the big fine. The big fine was for a game, and I’m not proud of this now, just as a caveat. Not really. And it was a game, it was called Swearing Radio Hangman for the under 12s. So what happened was that we were playing this every Friday night at midnight, and the idea was, as a listen to parents, you would ring up, go, Mike, get your kid out of bed, and they’re gonna play Hangman with swear words to win a CD. So it was all fine until one week, nine-year-old Katie came on, and it was five letters, three letters, four letters. And she was guessing, and her parents were helping her. That was the thing, her parents were going, yeah, go on, it’s an, ask for a P, ask for a, is it a P? Yeah, it’s the P is the fourth letter of the first word, right? And her parents go, T, T, yeah, T. It’s the first and last letter of the middle three-letter word. And eventually, what happened was, she sped…

Everybody’s slowly getting what it is.

But this is why it worked on the radio, because if you’re listening, you’re way ahead of the kid, right? And so in the end, she did spell out the phrase, soapy tit wank, which, you know, looking back now, I can see why that might have been a problem.

Were there complaints, Jon Holmes?

One, one complaint from an old lady who tuned in by accident, by her own admission. So she complained, Ofcom got involved, decided that had really had stepped over several broadcasting rules, which it probably had. But what’s great, if you do get a complaint made against you and Ofcom get involved, you get a transcript of it. And in the cold light of day, right, it reads really badly.

On air, it was like, ha ha ha, she said, funny thing.

And her parents are laughing. So it then said, and the presenter then encouraged the nine-year-old child to shout the phrase, soapy tit wank, into the next song, which happened to be Deacon Blue.

Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha.

Ha ha ha ha. Well, so the Ofcom said, well, that’s 150,000 pounds, please. I know. Which Virgin then had to pay, but then the boss who, by the way, had encouraged me, thought this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard anyway, suddenly went, oh shit, I didn’t know he was doing it. I had no idea he was doing this. I had no idea. He’s fired, we fire him. And they fired me and that got the fine halved down to 75K because they took action. But that was a good learning curving too. All bosses are bastards, aren’t they? Sell you down the river, they will. Right, so this was called So Solid News. So it was a spoof showbiz news show. And it was a pilot for Capital Radio. This was written in 2003.

Headlines.

Holly Vallance arrested for horse ripping. Blurry footage shows neighbor star coring the genitals of a mare in an Essex field.

Sorcerer David Blaine disintegrates upon reentry into society after hanging in a glass box.

And Radiohead’s next album will be a live musical version of the Hutton Inquiry.

Boy 14 finds perv pop star in Pringles.

14 year old Kyle Cooper from Leighton Buzzard got a shock this week when he opened a tube of Pringles only to find that one was the spitting image of the child-bothering, stroke-faced former pop star Jonathan King. The sour, cream and chive flavored snack had been accidentally baked in the shape of the infamous presenter right down to the baseball cap and Under 18’s disco-induced erection. I was quite frightened, said Miles, whose father is a policeman. I immediately gave it to my dad because I thought that Jonathan King-Crisp might try to buy me a panda pop and then bugger me in the arse. Pringles, the manufacturer of Pringles, have vowed to look into the matter, as they say it’s a matter of policy not to include snack-style effigies of kiddie-fiddlers in their packs. The incident comes at a particularly bad time for crisps in general, as only two months ago a child found a dead hawk in a packet of frazzles and one of the missing bodies from the Moore’s murders turned up in some watsits.

Children’s organ theft scandal continues.

Following the recent investigation into the theft of children’s organs at Alderhay Hospital, details are emerging of a similar scandal at a children’s clinic in Kent. For years, doctors in Fabersham have been taking organs and putting them into other children without permission. Police were alerted last week and have since carried out a number of spot checks during which a number of children were broken open and found to have stolen organs inside. Six medical staff have been arrested following the discovery of a Bon Tempe Hit 406, a Casio Step Lighter and a Hammond XP1, all wired into the inside of a 10-year-old. The scandal follows a previous incident in 1998 when detectives found a glockenspiel growing on the side of a boy at the home of a former nurse.

Nice.

Well, I can’t think why that wasn’t broadcast.

That sort of precludes my next question, yes. Topical comedy, that news-based comedy style is something you’ve done a lot of. You started there, in fact, didn’t you?

Yeah, yes.

What was the first programme you worked on?

Well, the first joke I ever sold was The Week Ending, which was a radio for Open Door Policy comedy show, which was, anybody could send sketches in there, do a thing called News Jack now, which is a kind of similar idea, but it was a good way of just getting people who were interested in comedy writing an access point into this ivory tower of getting comedy onto the radio. And my first joke, I got about 13 pounds for it. And that was while I was working at the theatre that I mentioned. And I, but I was always very into the news. And the reason for that, my first, I think the first two things that I suddenly realised what topical comedy was and could be. So I mentioned Not The Nine O’Clock News. And I remember my dad, again, we were watching Not The Nine O’Clock News together. So this would have been what, 1982, I think or something. And there was a joke where they, there was an advert that was for the coal board and their slogan was come home to a real fire. Okay, and I was aware as a kid of that being a TV ad or a billboard ad or something, just to promote coal at the time. And Not The Nine O’Clock News did that as an advert. And I was also aware of the news story, because we used to go on holiday to Wales, that Welsh nationalists were burning holiday cottages. Okay, and I knew that was in the news. And then suddenly I saw this, come home to a real fire by a cottage in Wales, right? Was this, and I suddenly thought, oh my God, that’s amazing. They’ve taken an advert and a news story and done that. And I was fascinated by that. And then my dad sort of said, yeah, yeah, that’s kind of how news comedy works. You know, that was my eye-opening view. And Spitting Image was the same. When I first saw Spitting Image, I saw a news story in the morning and then saw a joke about it, about Spitting Image that night and just thought, God, how did they do that? That suddenly just happened. And then I suddenly realized you could write jokes about the news and also that way you never run out of material.

You were at the beginning of Dead Ringers, weren’t you? Because that’s a news based comedy show.

Yeah, yeah, Dead Ringers. So you’re familiar with Dead Ringers. So Radio 4 went to telly and then went back to, limped back to Radio 4 with his tail between his legs. And it came about because Radio 4 were looking, again, career long story short, I ended up as a contract writer for BBC Radio Comedy in around 98, I suppose, sort of time. And I was sitting in an office with Andy, who we’ve been talking about, and a producer, Bill Dare, who still produces it, stuck his head around the door and said, oh, you two are paid to be here for some reason. I’ve got some impressionists. I want to do a spinning image on the radio program to do something. And so it left us to it. And so we sort of started writing what became the pilot of Dead Ringers. But what we’ve done, the thing we’d made for Radio 4 before that, which sort of got us in there, was a thing called Grievous Bodily Radio, which was this thing that spoofed Radio 4. And it got, for career pattern, loads of complaints, right? Because we’d made it for Radio 1. Radio 1 then chucked out all their DJs, you probably remember that in the late 90s, and indeed all their comedy. So Radio 4 bought this Radio 1 series that we made and just put it on Radio 4, which confused the hell out of Radio 4 listeners, who all complained about it. And then we got this writing gig, but we kind of then rewrote Grievous Bodily Radio, but with impressions in it. And then everyone suddenly loved it instead of hating it. And we were completely puzzled. If you just put funny voices in it, get away with anything, it turns out. And so we made a pilot and everyone loved it, it went to series. And yes, all that early Radio 4 spoof stuff in there that was topical all came from that sort of background.

And it’s been running for 20 years.

I know, yeah.

Are you a naturally very political person?

I’ve become more so, I think. I think as a kid, well, as I said, that eye opening Welsh nationalist burning cottages joke made me realize there was a whole seam to mine, if that’s not too, if a terrible coal based, anyway it is, but gloss over it. And I suddenly realized that there was all this stuff going on and then like any teenager, I sort of got quite interested in politics and joined Youth CND, even though I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I did get to have a meeting in Youth CND, I was meeting above a pub and I was too young to drink, but the guy who was running it was old enough to buy the drinks, so that’s kind of why I got into politics.

Right, so not really very political then?

Not really, no, just alcoholic.

Right, let’s have another off cut now. What’s this one?

This, oh yeah, so I got asked to write travel for the Sunday Times. So the travel editor just said, look, you know, I quite like what you do. Have you thought about doing travel writing? Would you like to? To which my immediate answer was yes, I would like to do that. So in the last 10 years or so, I’ve done some very odd things, including the fire ants you mentioned in the beginning and hospitalized by Sia Atkins in Puerto Rico and all manner of terrible stories. But this is a piece that never made it, it was a commission, I wrote it, this was 2013. It was about to be published, but then a breaking news story stopped them publishing it.

Think of the enormous hotels of Dubai and you probably think they’re full of oversized Russians gorging themselves on oversized buffets before waddling out into the heat and beaching themselves by the pool. And you’d probably be right. Dubai is much like Liberace. You’ve heard of it, you know it’s glamorous, but you probably don’t want to go there. It’s also younger than Liberace. He was 67 when he died, yet Dubai, as we know it, is just over 50 years old. Founded in 1966 on the discovery of oil when it was a declining port, and is now a shimmering oasis of sand, steel and football as holiday homes on a manmade island that’s been built in the shape of a plant. Yet for a garish city with little history, there’s a corner of this conurbation that’s working hard for our ecological future. The monorail that snakes out across the palm leads to the Atlantis, a five-star luxury hotel that’s themed around the mythological lost underworld city of Plato’s time and dates all the way back to 2008. But it’s here, in this unlikely location, that a successful conservation program is thriving. These are strobulating polyps, Marine Manager Dennis Blom tells me, as he guides me around the pipes, incubation tanks and filtration systems, and is home to more than 65,000 species of fish. Are they, I say, pretending to know what he’s just said. In front of me, a dozen pinhead-sized things are drifting happily around a tiny tank. They look like drops of snot. They’ll grow into a fully-sized jellyfish, he says, saving me from my ignorance.

And over here is where we encourage sea roses to release sperm directly into seawater.

Of course it is. Nearby, eight different race species are being born and nurtured. Not since I lived in student halls have I been surrounded by so much attempted breeding.

So what was the story that meant that Sunday Times didn’t publish this?

What’s interesting about travel writing is you get to do some amazing things, okay? You get to go around the world, and this was one, I thought, quite an interesting story, because Dubai had a very bad reputation, still does, because of the money that gets spent and the oil and just the way, human rights, not least, and also keeping dolphins and so forth in captivity, which the big hotels have their own dolphin pools, which is very frowned upon now, but they’re also running this ecology conservation program, which is very well funded, which not many people knew about, and that’s quite a good angle for a story, and the editor, indeed, agreed with me, said actually, no, not enough people know about the conservation work. Anyway, the moment it was about to be published, a big story broke about the dolphins in captivity, in Dubai specifically, and how they were in quite a lot of trouble for it, and were getting loads of criticism, so the editor rightly just said, that’s just not gonna chime, is it, with the current news? So, no, we’re gonna spike that one, and the annoying thing is about being a travel writer is you only get paid on publication, right? So you don’t get paid to do the job, you only get paid when it’s published.

But you do get paid to go on a trip, don’t you?

Well, you don’t get paid to go on a trip.

They pay for your trip.

So you get a free trip, yeah, but that is true. I’m not complaining, but it’s annoying when you do write something and then you just don’t get paid any money. A free trip’s already gone, but you won’t pay the mortgage. That’s the annoying part of it. But I’m certainly not gonna, I got to do some incredible things in travel terms. Crocodile hunting in Papua New Guinea and that kind of thing.

You’re the obvious choice.

I am the obvious choice for that, which you never get a chance to do ordinarily.

Well, that’s a very cushy job. Right, time for your final off-cut, Jon. Tell us what we are about to hear.

So this is from Horrible Histories. So Horrible Histories range of books, as I’m sure you know, that got turned into a live action TV series in the sort of mid to late noughties. And I was part of the original writing team and this was a sketch I think I wrote. The thing about Horrible Histories was that the sketches had to be absolutely factually accurate. You couldn’t, it has to have jokes, but it also has to be absolutely true as to what happened in history. And they were very, very keen on that. And we had advisors on board to go, that would never happen, you can’t use that in the basis of a joke. So all of it’s true and exactly what happened. But for some reason, just in the pile of scripts, this one never got used.

Exterior day, we hear a battle raging. A Viking lies on the ground, clutching a very obvious arrow in his stomach. Another Viking comes over.

Oh no, what is it? What’s the matter?

What do you mean what’s the matter?

I’ve been shot with an arrow. What, that?

Then it’s just a splinter.

A splinter?

Yeah, it’ll probably pop out on its own eventually.

It’s not a splinter, it’s an arrow in the stomach, so help me!

Well, I’m not really sure what to do.

Well, do what Vikings are supposed to do and call on the gods for advice. Then hurry up, because it’s starting to smart a bit.

All right, all right, hold on then.

He drops to his knees to pray.

Oh, Odin, Chief God of the Vikings, are you there?

Split screen, Odin answers.

Viking, Medical Direct Helpline, Odin, Chief God of the Vikings speaking. How may I help you today?

Hello, yes, I’ve got a fellow Viking here with an arrow in the gut, any advice?

Hmm, an arrow, you say?

I think so.

Hmm, are you sure it’s not a splinter?

He says, are you sure it’s not a splinter?

It’s not a splinter. It’s not a splinter.

Yes, I was gonna say, because if it was, it’ll probably just pop out on its own eventually.

That’s what I said. It’s an arrow in the stomach.

Oh, well, then there are certain Viking medical procedures that we have to follow. First, you have to feed him a meal of oats, onions and herbs.

I’m not sure he’s very hungry.

It’s a special meal. Just feed him.

Viking Two opens his Viking bag. As luck would have it, there’s a bowl of yuck in there. He tries to spoon some into Viking One’s mouth, who moves his face away like a child.

Come on, open wide. Odin says it’s good for you.

Come on.

Don’t want to.

Longboat.

It does that flying the spoon like an aeroplane into the mouth trick and Viking One eats it.

Okay, now what? You want me to what?

Stick your nose into the hole in his tummy. Get it right in there. Right in the guts and the bits of intestine. Have a good ol smell.

What’s he saying to do next?

Nothing.

He says we’re done.

Oh, come on. You’re a Viking. You’re not scared of a few smelly guts, are you?

He sticks his nose near Viking One’s tummy.

Get away. Odin says I’ve got to smell your guts.

What?

Good point.

Hang on.

Why? Simple. If it smells of onions and herbs, then his intestines have been pierced and he’ll die. If you can’t smell onions and herbs, he’ll live. So just patch him up.

Righto.

He smells the wound again.

Smells of onions? What?

No, it doesn’t.

Definitely getting something herby. Onions and herby.

You’ve had it, mate. No, I haven’t. Actually, it doesn’t hurt anymore. I’m as right as rain.

Ah, you smell like soup.

It’s probably just a splinter.

It’s actually making me feel quite peckish.

If it is a splinter, I’ll probably just pop myself out eventually.

Anything?

Onions and herbs.

Oh, here’s a goner. I’ll prepare a space in the Viking heaven of Valhalla. I’ll finish him off if I were you. It’s the only humane thing to do.

I’ll probably just need a plaster.

Sorry, mate. Doctor’s orders.

Viking 2 draws his axe and there’s an out of vision, squelchy thump of an axe killing Viking 1.

Anything else I can help you with today?

No, that’s it. Thanks.

Thank you for calling Viking Medical Direct. I’ve been Odin, Chief God of the Vikings.

The split screen slides off. Viking 2 picks up the bowl of yuck and eats a spoonful himself.

That sounds like a very horrible history sketch. Why wasn’t it used?

Well, I think it was just one in a, there were a lot of sketches going in and around Horrible Histories, and I think it was just probably one that just fell off the end somewhere. There’s probably a much better one somebody wrote about Vikings. But it’s interesting, because the success of Horrible Histories, I think, came down to partly that kind of thing, in that it was chock full of facts with jokes attached, which is what kids then sort of latched onto.

Yeah, putting the comedy into disguise as facts, like when you put vegetables and mush it up and because you’re born and raised.

Precisely that, yeah. And that’s why I think kids latched onto it. We got a note between series one and series two. I remember this when we were called in and they sort of said, yeah, absolutely, everyone loves it. Of course, you’re gonna commission series two, but can there be fewer decapitations this time? And can you not throw as much shit around?

Were you responsible for the decapitations and the shit?

And the shit, mostly, yeah. Mostly the shit, which is why it didn’t get broadcast.

So writing for children, you fancy doing some more of that?

Well, you know, I mean, probably not the soapy tit wank thing. I think that was probably not going to follow that one up.

Right, so it’s not a natural progression for you?

Well, I think kids, I wouldn’t rule anything out, really. I think kids are a great audience to entertain. It’s horrible. I went around schools talking about the writing of Horrible Histories, just have that first series into primary schools. And what was funny about it was, A, the way kids engage with it, but then I get them to write sketches and then I’d go back the week after and then nick them all. And record their sketches, so they’d done acting and writing and stuff as well as little workshops. But it was great because it just got them interested in comedy and in writing. And notoriously, boys and literacy don’t go well together in school, but what I learned from the teachers it was doing, it was bringing kids into more reading and more literacy. So actually it’s funny that this stuff can sort of cut through. Even when it’s filth, it turns out it can engage kids, which I think is great.

So what’s next? Any writing ambitions still to be realised? Unless you haven’t written a novel, for example.

I haven’t written a novel, no. I’d like to write a film. I’ve got a couple of ideas for a, well, one specific idea for a film that I’ve sort of started developing, but haven’t done anything about it yet. It takes so long to write, doesn’t it? You sit down and you go, I’ve got to write a film. It might take 17 months, this. I haven’t got time for this nonsense. So you’ve got to block yourself out with chunks of time. When I wrote the book, I took myself away for a week initially, wrote 25,000 words. And I went away from my family and I just sat in a, what essentially was a holiday home. I just hired on my own and just sat there 12 hours a day writing for seven days. And then I wrote the next 25,000 words over the summer while doing everything else I was doing, which was presenting a breakfast show, which was a bit of a thing. And then I did the same with the end of the book. I went away and locked myself and did the whole, so you’ve got to kind of focus on it. And something like a film, I think you’ve just got to focus on it solidly, but you’ve got to get the time and space to do it. And also, of course, you’re not being paid necessarily to write it. So once again, you’ve got to find yourself a financial cushion, which is not that easy to find.

True. Well, final question. Having revisited these old bits of writing, how do you feel about them? Were you surprised by anything you heard?

It was rubbish, wasn’t it? No wonder they were rejected.

Nothing gets you actors, obviously.

No, no, not at all. I know it’s really good to hear. I mean, it’s quite interesting to hear two different things, actually. One, it’s brilliant to hear that sketch, because I’ve not obviously heard the Horrible Histories sketch before. So it’s great to hear that with some proper actors doing it. But also interesting in stuff that I’ve only heard in my head, you know, like the column or something, which aren’t joke-fueled, they’re travel stuff. So to hear them actually read out loud is quite an interesting, because that’s not the medium they were designed for. So I think that’s sort of an interesting way of approaching it. But yeah, it’s quite interesting. All writers have that thing of stuff they’ve written down that may lead to nothing. And I mean, as writers, we’ve all got either notes that used to be by our bed, but now it’s phone notes. And occasionally look back through them, thinking, oh, there’s some great ideas in here. And I wake up in the middle of the night and still write these ideas down. And then the next morning, I’d looked at this only this morning because we were talking about this, and I had an idea in the night. And then I woke up and in the dark, I found my glasses because I’m old. And then wrote something down, thinking, well, that’s just gonna be the best sitcom ever. I mean, I can’t wait to share this with the world. Woke up this morning, looked at it, it just said, milky arm.

Thank you very much indeed for letting us rummage around in your Offcuts Drawer. Ladies and gentlemen, Jon Holmes.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Jon Holmes. 

Hi this is Laura again.

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