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.

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 had an agent at the time, she’d say, darling, it’s not so much a draft as some used pieces of paper. And sometimes I’ll say that to myself. When I’m writing something, I’m like, this is bullshit. And I go, well, you know, the worst idea written down is still 100% better than the best idea never written down. So even if it’s just like used pieces of paper, that’s still okay.

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 episode is the brilliant Lynn Ferguson, writer, performer, story coach, occasional stand-up, and yes, the voice of a certain plaster scene chicken. You might know her from her writing on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, her award-winning solo shows, or her work with Pixar on the animated film Brave. Originally from Scotland, Lynn first moved to London to pursue her wonderfully varied career before heading stateside in 2008, when TV and film writing took her to Los Angeles. She’s done everything from serious theatre at the National to glorious chaos at the Edinburgh Fringe, and she has a real gift for uncovering truth in stories, whether she’s writing them, performing them, or helping others shape theirs. When I asked Lynn for her offcuts, she sent me loads. And honestly, I’d love to have included more, but we just didn’t have the time. So naturally, my first question to her was, how easy was it to find them all?

Everything’s difficult to find. I think the thing that was, it was such a brilliant task, Laura, I have to tell you, because it made me realise how many things I write and don’t really finish.

Oh.

Yeah, I do. I write a lot. Well, I write less now because I have, I do a weekly blog that has to go out every Sunday. So it’s meant that writing bigger projects, I’m much more picky about what one I pick up. So it was interesting, really, because I found all these things and I was like, I totally had forgotten I even wrote that. And some of the stuff that I’ve given you as well was, it’s fascinating because, well, it’s fascinating for me. Because there was, before I moved to America, there would be things that I would write that I was all passionate about. Right. Like, so I wrote a sitcom for BBC Four, right, Radio Four, which I did three series of. And I was really passionate about it. And the reason I did the sitcom was because I cared about it and it mattered to me and it was all about the stuff, right? And then I moved over here and there’s a whole thing in America about stuff you just have to do. And so like a whole load of stuff was like pitches that I’d forgotten, that I’d written. And one of the things that I nearly sent you and then didn’t, because I was like, that’s just too weird, was something that I wrote for, it was a musical for, I know, a musical for a bunch of Christians from Middle America. And then I was like, oh no.

So you were commissioned by them?

Yeah. Yeah.

They said, Lynn Ferguson, please, you’re the woman to create a musical about our religion. Is that what happened?

Yeah. Well, you know, they were in a band and they did stuff and they were devout Christians and they needed something to promote their band. So they wanted this thing and I wrote a pitch for it. And I think it went quite well. And then I was like, no, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to give you that because it was too weird.

You withheld it from them after that. No, you can’t have this now.

I think they felt it was too populist. I don’t know. Right. But it’s in a sort of haze of… I’ve done a lot of work in America where I just… Someone says, can you do that? And I go, yeah, okay. It’s one of the things that I really, really wish British writers would understand about themselves. It’s how incredibly flexible they are and how skilled it is. The way that America works, not now because things have changed, but… So when I first went into a writer’s room here, people had trained at Yale and Harvard and stuff like that to write jokes. And I was like, whoa. I mean, basically, when you’re writing a joke, you’re looking at two sentence, three sentence structure with a return in there somewhere. It’s like not rocket science. But yet they’ve, you know, they trained at it. And if you ask those people to write a play, they’d be like, oh, well, I don’t know. Don’t know that I could do that. Whereas British people, you’re sort of expected to be able to take it from the beginning and take it right through to the end. I mean, having said that, I do think it’s a good idea for writers to work in a writer’s room even just once because it does something to the speed of your writing, which I didn’t have before. Like now, if someone says, can you write something? If I say yes, then it’s done. I don’t really do a thing where I’m like, but can I write it or can I not write it? I’m like, OK, you want that? When do you want it for? Yeah, OK. Well, I don’t know what it’s that fantastic. It just changes the way you are. But that’s what a writer’s room does.

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

This is ridiculous, proves my point. This is The Real Duck Dynasty and it was written about 2013 and it was originally a pitch for a Nick Jr. animation series.

Real Duck Dynasty is an animated series full of intrigue, double dealing, sex, power and jokes of animated ducks in the oil industry. Drake Mallard’s family have been in the oil industry since his great-great-grandaddy flew over from Ireland. Though it may have started with humble beginnings, Mallard Oil is now a billion dollar business with thousands of employees. Drake may have been born into riches, but his life is far from perfect. He has two ex-wives, his present wife in therapy, trying to work out why she’s unable to lay an egg. He has six children, countless grandchildren and the weight of the Mallard business on his shoulders. And in business, a crisis is looming. On one side, the inevitable dwindling of fossil fuels and the constant struggle to find new supplies. On the other side, environmentalists constantly harping on about destroying the planet. Main Characters Drake, the head of the family.

Distinguished, elegant and refined. He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty when the situation arises. He tries to live his life with strong moral principles, but sometimes he has to do the wrong thing to make something right. Now in middle age, he knows he should retire, but he has had the business for so long, he wouldn’t know how to let go. And besides, there’s no one he can trust.

Ariel, a beautiful Scandinavian white-crested duck, a former model, she’s the envy of many, but she is emotionally fragile, having discovered that she for some reason is unable to lay an egg.

Shirley, Drake’s ex-wife, glamorous, scheming and devious. She’d do anything to take Drake’s fortune and get him to come crawling back to her on his knees.

Bill, Drake’s younger brother, smooth, handsome, a playboy, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, though that depends on what kind of bush it is, of course. Though a partner in the firm, Drake has stripped him of most of his responsibilities because of his gambling issues. He receives the equivalent of an allowance rather than have any active involvement in Mallard Oil. Of late, his realization of his lack of involvement, smoldered by the poison from Drake’s ex-wife, Wendy, is fueling a burning resentment for Drake.

Joey, Drake’s 25-year-old son from his first marriage to his late wife, Patty. Patty was the love of Drake’s life and an idealist. Joey has inherited both his mother’s looks and belief that there could be a better world. Joey has become more and more involved with the environmental movement. His efforts could destroy the very foundation of the Mallard Empire.

Drake says, You don’t understand, Ariel.

Every day is just about keeping the wolf from the door.

Drake opens the front door. On the doorstep stands a wolf wearing a suit and holding a clipboard.

Excuse me, sir, we’re conducting a survey about…

Go away!

Drake slams the door shut.

So, tell us what happened to this, the Wealduck Dynasty.

Well, firstly, if I’d had those actors, if I’d had them, maybe it would have gone through. No, the point is, it was originally a pitch for a Nick Jr. animation series, right?

Picture Nick Jr. Picture the three-year-olds who might be watching this.

They were like, yeah, she can’t lay an egg. Oh, wow, they keep the wool from the door, I think. This was within a kind of cluster of things I was asked to write about at the time, these pitches. And I found it, I found it that I was just trying to do what they wanted me to do, but I couldn’t quite nip it in. Like at one point before the Realduck Dynasty, which was the one that I fleshed out, I had an idea for cheese and crackers was the thing I was going to do. And cheese and crackers was a double act. That one guy was a cheese and the other one was a cracker.

Quite literally, cheese and crackers.

Yeah, yeah, because it’s animation, right? But crackers had schizophrenia and cheese was like, was an alcoholic. And I’m like, I don’t know that this is going to work for Nick Jr. So like, there’s a thing with the writing where sometimes you just can’t stop yourself. But also, around 2013, what I realized at the time was a whole load of reality shows were completely like animated shows. And that also reminded me of the whole kind of stuff of actual dynasty that happened, Dallas and dynasty and this stuff that they used to do in the, I guess it would be the 80s and 90s. And that actually, that what they had done in entertainment was they’d taken kind of real life people and placed a narrative structure on top of them and were presenting real life as something that was like dynasty or Dallas, you know. So I was into it in that and then I also just, the characters in reality shows at the time and even still are so ridiculous. I was like, it should be animation. It could be animation.

Not for very small children.

No, for very small. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go through. It didn’t. They were concerned about the real Duck Dynasty. They were concerned about it. And it was generally agreed that probably Nick Jr. was not a good market for me. And I had a similar thing with Disney, actually, where the people at Disney were lovely, lovely people. But I was like, it’s not something that I can write. I have a little bit of darkness in me that seems to not fit for Nick Jr. or Disney that well.

But this is animation and it’s about poultry. And it’s fair to say that you’re probably best known to the general public for your work on a specific poultry animation. Do you see how I did that segway there?

I did. I did.

Chicken Run in 2000 and its sequel, Chicken Run Dawn of the Nugget, 2023. You voiced the character of Mack. How did that come about?

It was quite simple, really. I was in London at the time and my agent said, will you go up for this thing? And I went up for it. And I met Pete and Nick at the audition.

Nick Park?

Yeah, Nick Park and Peter Lord. But there was a group of people there. I just did the read for them. And then I said, you know, the thing is, is there’s a problem you’ve got in your script. And they were like, oh, shut up. And I said, no. The thing is that if it’s a Scottish chicken, you’re going to have to put in hen because Glaswegians particularly will say, are you all right hen or is everything right? And they pissed themselves laughing and looked at me like I was making it up. I said, I shit you not, honestly. Like, Glaswegians will say, are you all right hen? Like, check it out. I said, you don’t even need to give me the job. I’m just telling you, for a matter of detail’s sake, hen has to go in.

Do you think that’s what swayed them towards you?

I do not know.

Did you get involved in the writing at all?

Not in one, but I did in two. Yeah, I did in two. They asked me to come in and look after my own voice in two. I polish different things. I polished on Brave, Pixar’s Brave and stuff like that. I polish on other people’s movies. I do a lot of writing where nobody ever knows that I’ve written on it. I’m okay with that because as long as they pay me cash, what does it matter? With Pixar, it was quite heavy polishing that happened. It got a little closer to actually being a writer, and then we did stuff. But at the time I was working on Brave, I was also working on The Late Late Show. It was like a weird thing because late night writing is basically the two sentence return thing, like you’re writing jokes, and animation is almost like it’s polar opposite. Because you are doing jokes, but you’re really thinking about, I guess maybe, as I talk about that, I’m like there’s a lot of similarities in the sense of economy is a similarity and that I would take sentences out and stuff like that.

Yeah, brevity is very important for gags.

Yeah, it’s important for gags. But in animation, it can be a joke about stuff in Chicken Run 2, where I take stuff out and go, have I saved you a small car? Because like a sentence from a character in stop motion can cost as much as a small car to do.

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

I am cringing, just so you know, I’m cringing. This is pretty much the earliest thing I remember writing. It’s a poem called The Fox Hunt and I wrote it in 1973.

The hounds, the hounds, they’re coming now, with a bark and a woof and a bow wow wow. Got to get to water, because it’s I they’re going to slaughter. The cubs, I can’t go home. They might get the scent and the cubs might moan. Got to get to water, because it’s I they’re going to slaughter. The hounds, the hounds, they’re coming now, with a bark and a woof and a bow wow wow. Got to get to water, because it’s I they’re going to slaughter.

This was prize-winning, I believe.

Oh my god, I am mortified.

You were seven.

I was seven. I was seven, right? But technically I am still. Do you know that thing when it’s, you can sort of remember writing this. I can remember doing it. I wrote it in the class. It was a teacher called Mrs Doctor, who got us all to write poems and entered them into a competition. And none of us knew. And the first thing I knew about it is I won a Bobby Brewster book, Bobby Brewster’s Balloon Race or something like that. And I got to meet the guy who wrote Bobby Brewster. And I was third prize in the area, or I don’t know, Glasgow or something like that. I don’t really know because I can’t remember the thing. I remember it was a very big deal, but I didn’t. The thing I remember about it most, and God bless that actress for doing it, is that it taught me how to write there, there and there. Because I had to handwrite it out. And so the hounds of hounds of there coming now is T-H-E-Y apostrophe R-E. And I have never forgotten that. And so I can judge people really harshly on their there, there and theirs.

Well, they didn’t win a prize for it as well.

No, right.

But I have to ask, as a seven-year-old, that does seem quite a bleak and frightening tale. But, you know, most people go, I’m going to be a princess. I’m sorry to deal in cliches, but, you know, in a little, and with a unicorn and all my favourite puppy, or maybe I’m going to go horse riding. No, I’m going to be ripped apart by a pack of dogs. Well, did your Mrs. Doctor, fabulous name, by the way, did Mrs. Doctor say, you know, what’s your worst nightmare? Right about that, seven-year-old.

No, I think that, you know what, Laura, I think it’s something that I found while looking out these offcuts for you is like, the real duck dynasty was meant to be for three to six-year-olds. Evidently, it wasn’t going to work that way. Even the fact that I had to, like, abandon cheese and crackers because schizophrenia and alcoholism aren’t great for preschoolers. I suspect because of the way that if, if someone else had written this and I was reading that, I’d be like, you have entirely written this around the fact that you discovered that water and slaughter rhyme and could conceivably be within a thing. So I suspect it’s more like that.

But even so, the word slaughter, not a usual part of a seven-year-old girl’s vocabulary. That’s all I’m saying. But we’ll move on from that. So what were you like at school? Were you very good at English? And did you dream of being a writer at that age?

You know, I guess looking back, I was good at school, but I am the youngest of four. By the time I went to school, my mother was tired. So she started doing teacher training college as soon as I went to school. So she didn’t have an awful lot of time to kind of deal with that stuff really. So I don’t know, but I do remember in primary seven, so maybe what’s that, 11 or 12? They had three people, four people, they used to take out a class and we would talk about greater things like philosophy and stuff like that. It was like special needs, but the other way around, you know.

And the school had chosen you, as in they’d gone, you four, you’re going to this class, or had you volunteered for this? Did you go on that?

No, there was no volunteering. It was no, there was none of that. No, they’d chosen us. They took us out to talk about it.

But what was your dream? When you were a child, what were you thinking? When I leave school, I’m going to work in a factory, be a writer, be a princess, marry a horse. What was your dream?

Well, you know what I think’s interesting just in this is that I think I had more, there was more things that I didn’t want to do than what I did want to do. I knew I didn’t really want to be married, which is ridiculous because I’ve been married now for 25 years. So there we go. But I wanted to see the world. I wanted to see outside. But I really, I didn’t see my first play until maybe, I saw half of one when I was maybe a bit 12. But in Cumbernauld at the time, and all praise to Cumbernauld and local theatres, there was a theatre in Cumbernauld and it was part of a community and there would be people coming round to the schools. I guess they were doing plays, doing theatre and education. And I did think that those people were kind of my tribe, but honestly, I never really did have an idea of what I wanted to do. And I still really don’t. And I’ve spent most of, like, the Chicken Run thing, like turning up and going, look, it’s totally up to you. I don’t, whether you give me the job or not, it’s entirely your thing, but I will tell you, you have to put the word hen in there or it’s not going to work, right? Like a whole load of my life has been that, like literally just turning up to stuff.

Well, time for another Offcut now. What have we got?

Ah, now this is called Memory When It Suits You and it was a novel. I started writing in 2005.

Nobody noticed the women crying. It was 9.35pm and the people on the bus had places to go to, people to see. Thursday 16th December and the number 12 squeezed through the busy streets of London, through the maze of shoppers and traffic and decorations strung all around, proclaiming Joy to the World and Peace on Earth. The passengers had days of their own that they might have wanted to sit there crying about and didn’t, as the bus made its valiant trek from Marble Arch to Forest Hill on an already ambitious timetable. Not a sob or a snivel or even a dewy eye from any of them, and none of them paid the least bit of attention to the woman. In the double seat across from her, slumped somewhere inside a massive hooded sweatshirt and oversized jeans, the puffy teenage boy, eyes closed, a bag full of undecipherable revision notes in a bag beside him, rage against the machines screaming through his earphones. Four rows in front, the 56 year old lady in the pink designer anorak she had ecstatically bagged on the first day of the Debenhams sale 2001, believing when she first put it on that people might treat her with respect, might listen to what she had to say. Now when she puts it on, it only reminds her that it takes more than a designer anorak to change a person’s life. On the disabled seat just behind the driver, the wiry man in his early thirties, his forehead prematurely wrinkled, his fingers nicotine brown, his spindly legs defiantly sporting tracksuit trousers. Six rows behind, the bald man in the cheap pinstripes, face like a baby, simultaneously devouring a Mars duo and a copy of Sue. And at the very back of the bus, the painfully thin girl with big eyes, wearing summer clothes and wringing her hands together, willing the air to swallow her up. None of them noticed the woman in the smart clothes, her dark hair a perfect cut, a diamond solitaire on the fourth finger of her left hand, who sat looking out on a London night with tears silently trickling down her pretty face. She reached into her fendy handbag. There was the envelope. She wasn’t going to think about the envelope. What else? Lipstick, wallet, mobile phone, handkerchiefs, paper for emergencies. The thought forced a watery smile. Dabbing her eyes and putting her hankies, for emergencies, back into her handbag, she remembered her mobile phone. She cradled it in her hand, staring at it as if she’d find an answer. There must be someone. Surely there was someone. Was it really too late? Suddenly the bus jolted to a halt, and the painfully thin girl was flung forward in a flurry of cheap polythene bags and embarrassment. She landed halfway on top of the crying woman, and stammered various apologies in an Eastern European tongue.

This is a bus lane, you wanker!

The driver yelled through the front window to a cyclist, who was far enough ahead to breathe both a smile and a definitive hand gesture. You want to drive on the road, you fucking tosser? You can pay the fucking road tax! The lady in the pink anorak tutted. The man in the tracksuit sucked air through his teeth, and the bald man with the face like a baby ate another mouthful of Mars bar, still engrossed in his copy of Sue.

So presumably this didn’t get finished, this novel.

Do you know what? No, it didn’t at all. And it’s one of those ones that periodically I think I’ll pick it up again, and then I pick it up again, then I do a bit. Maybe I’ll do a day or two days work on it, and then I go, yeah, whatever. What made me laugh as I was listening to it, as I was like, yeah, because the voice of that writer there, that’s the voice of a writer where you’d go, you know what, you should write a series for Nick Jr. That would be awesome.

Yeah, it’s all coming together now.

It’s like totally, why would you even think that? The thing with Memory When It Suits You and it’s what is problematic about it as a book and what is problematic, I think, about my own writing is that I, when I lived in London, I guess from maybe 1996 to 2008, something like that. And London is just full of story. It’s like full of it. You walk down a street anywhere or go on a bus and you can feel it all around like all these people are running a story all at the same time. And with Memory When It Suits You, what happens at the end of that chapter is that she leaves the bus and she goes to Waterloo Bridge, I think it’s a bridge anyway. And she stands at the end of the bridge and thinks about what is possible. And then she holds her hands out and like Angel of the North or whatever and she jumps, right? And then the next chapter is a party boat and it’s these guys who work in insurance. And they’re on this boat going along the Thames. And it’s all about just work politics and the same kind of shite that’s happening on the bus, really, with all these blustery people of having their own story and not listening. And this guy is out, the main guy Ronan is out in the boat having a cigarette and he looks up and he sees the Angel of the North. And as she jumps, she lands on the boat of all the chances. And so then it’s a whole story, a kind of dance between him and her trying to work out how they go to where they go to and whatever. But I’ve written too many characters and the story gets too rich. And I feel like there’s a danger with writing. Don’t fall in love with your characters because when you fall in love with your characters, everything that they do seems too interesting. And actually sometimes it’s not that interesting and you have to thin it down. It’s funny, I’ve been watching a lot of Morse recently because the world’s going crazy. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that. And so like periodically what I do is I’ll binge watch something to kind of keep my head out of other things. And I’ve been watching Morse and it’s interesting one as in how miserable it is. Because he’s quite a miserable guy. But two, how much of the stuff they don’t tell you about him. And as I was listening to Memory when it’s… Your actors by the way are just brilliant. So thank you to them. When I was listening to that, I was like, yeah, you know, as a writer, I could really do with thinning it down.

Somebody to come and clean it up, perhaps.

Yeah, a polish.

I wonder who could do that. Do we know the one who does this?

But it’s to do with the thing of sometimes with writing, you need to be a little bit brutal. And I think I like these people too much, or I care about these people too much. And so, and actually I like London too much.

Yes. Well, you were there for quite a long time, weren’t you? And then you left in 2008 to, you went to Sunny LA to join the writing team on your brother Craig’s late night TV chat show. What was that like? I mean, what was it like writing for your own brother?

Doesn’t really make any difference. You know, like the thing with Craig is he’s incredibly talented. Like he’s, I know that people do praise him for being funny and all that stuff. And I know that I’m biased, but he’s like super smart and really talented. He’s a really clever guy. And so really what you’re doing is you’re just feeding it. That show that he did, we, you know what, we were like moving cushions around because most of the lifting, virtually all of it came from the jungle that is his head. And so I feel like, like I knew how to supply the kind of bricks to make the machine, you know, operate or whatever. My metaphors are all over the place. But basically, I knew enough to put enough coins in the machine, if you like, because you’re delivering two sentence, three sentence things. Yeah. But really, really it was him doing all that. And what it did is there’s not really any time to think about relationships. And I know that sounds mental, but there’s really not. So I had to go in it. The first meeting would be 10 o’clock in the morning. And then we’d have, I guess, maybe 15, 20 minute meeting on a rough idea of what topic we’re taking for the day. And then you go off to your office and you’d have two hours, maybe, till lunchtime to write jokes, two pages of jokes on that topic. And then after lunch, you’d have half an hour for lunch and then you’d write, you know, topicals, evergreens, you know, like so anything that was let say that, I mean, I’m glad I’m not doing it now because it’ll be Trump, right? Because that’s all that seems to be reported in the news. But there was a time, one that I do remember was there was a plane that landed in some river somewhere. So we had written everything and set out for the day. And then this guy, Sully Sullenberger or something like that, landed.

There was a film that Tom Hanks played the part in the film of his life, Sully Sullivan or something, his name was, I think.

So we were writing, we had written the topic that day and then that happened. And then we had to rewrite the topic that day. And then we still, everybody’s called back in, you had to rewrite it. And then you’re, you’ve got like topicals like about, I don’t know, Beyoncé or Jennifer Aniston or whatever, like just random shit. And and then the show is recorded at five. Right. And you’re doing that for, you do it Monday to Thursday and there’s two shows on a Thursday. So like the show isn’t written, it doesn’t start getting written until ten in the morning and it’s recorded in front of a studio audience at five. There isn’t any time for any of that shit. It’d be lovely to be wandering about going, yeah, well, you know, he’s my brother. It’s like, you’re at the coalface. Yeah. And the pressure is quite heavy because even if you don’t really feel like doing it, there’s still a show that’s getting recorded at five o’clock that’s going out that same night. So you don’t have any space for your feelings. It’s a little hardcore. But like I say, he is amazing. I don’t know how he did it for as long as he did. I guess it sort of fits with his rhythm really, which is that he likes to be fast in and out, you know.

Right. Another Offcut now. Tell us what we’re about to hear.

Now, this is from 2016. It’s called Red Riding Hood and it’s part of an idea for an adult storybook.

The front door stays shut. That’s the rules. The doorbell rings. Some idiot knocks on the door. You stay put. Sit in that chair and you do not make a sound. Do you hear? Or there’ll be trouble, big trouble. Because when there’s someone out there, that door must never open. Not ever. Rules, order, avoidance, restraint. Get that? Stop whimpering. Rules, order, avoidance, restraint. R-O-A-R. I call it roar. Made it up myself, you know. Yes. Amuse myself, no end. Piss myself laughing for days. What exactly are you whimpering for? Oh, I see. Oh, funny. You think that someone could rescue you? No, no rescue. It’s far too late for that. The doors are locked. The windows are nailed shut. And we’ll get on just fine. Cozy. 2008 was the last time that door opened when the bell rang. 3.37 on a Thursday afternoon. I saw them through the spy hole. Girl scouts with cookies. Tasty. Tempting. The kettle was on the gas hob. 3.45. I have tea. I would not answer the door. Not right. But I wanted one. I could almost smell them. Ding dong. I should not. I would not answer the door. The water started to bubble in the kettle. I could hear them chattering outside. If we sell this box of sediments, then we’ve only got these two to go. Like chirping little birds. Like you used to like to chatter. Once upon a time. The water in the kettle began to hiss. I’d ignore them. Maybe the bell’s not working. Let me try. The doorbell rang again. Persistent. I had to give them that. Let’s just go. There’s nobody in. Yes. Go. Run away. We’ve only got a couple of boxes left. My mouth was watering. Let them go. This will pass. But then the kettle started to boil. A long, lone wolf whistle. Did you hear that? There’s somebody in there. I turned off the gas. The house was silent. Maybe there’s an old lady in there. Maybe she didn’t hear us. Maybe she’s fallen and can’t get up. Maybe she’s in trouble. Then the unmistakable tapping of ten-year-old knuckles. Knock, knock, knock. Knock, knock, knock. It was out of my hands.

Stories. Now, you said this was for an adult storybook. You’re very much, as you mentioned, stories are your thing, aren’t they?

Yeah.

You worked a lot in the storytelling space. How did you get into that? I know you mentioned The Moth, which is a great podcast where people go up on stage and tell real life stories, things that happened to them in front of an audience. Were you at the beginning when The Moth started or you just stumbled upon it? How did all that happen?

You know, it’s well, I’ve always been interested in stories. I’ve always, it doesn’t really matter what I write. There will always be a monologue in it. I like people to get a monologue. And maybe that goes back to my acting days or whatever, but I like to give a character a monologue, particularly if they’re the one that I’m in love with most of all. The thing that I was doing, I did a thing in Edinburgh. I don’t know if it was the one before I came to America, but I did a project called Biographies in a Bag, which was solo shows where each actor, each solo show was half an hour and the only set was a chair. And each character had whatever props they needed. They could have it in one bag that they would carry on, sit in the chair, do their play, then leave. And as they left, the next character would come on stage with their bag and do their play. And they were basically just monologue stories. So I’ve always been into that. Then when I came over to America, it was complicated because I was working really hard. Like I was at The Late Late Show for two and a half years and there really isn’t an awful lot of room to do anything else. And then in the middle of that, I started working for Pixar at the same time. So I was doing…

On Brave.

Working on animation. Yeah. So it was just a lot. And there’s a friend of mine, Kemp Powers, and he wrote Soul. And he wrote One Night in Miami and he did Spider-Man and stuff like that. And he’s just a top guy. And we had both done an event where we were doing, I think we were doing readings at the event. And we just hit it off. We became friends, me and Mark and him and his partner Shannon, we just became mates. And they were around at my house one night and he had done The Moth where The Moth do this thing called a slam where in essence you sort of audition your story. And I was objected to that even as a stand up, I would never do an open spot because I was so fricking argumentative. So we get into this argument about it where he said, well, you know, what other way would you do it? And I said, well, you should just be able to just deliver a story. And he went, how many people do you think want to do a story? And I said, but I’ve done a lot of stories. I know how to do them. And he said, so nepotism, would that work? Would that be the way that you would do it? Or you would take your resume to do it? Or would you find it easier just to do the, you know, the slam? Because he had done the slam, right? And I was like, fuck it, I’ll do the slam to prove you wrong, right?

The proof being that you would pass, you mean?

Well, the proof being that I wasn’t so anti-rules that I couldn’t fit into anything.

Right.

I mean, I do have a natural resistance to things. So the thing that he had a point with was he was like, it’s fine to disagree with something if you’ve had the experience of doing it. But if you haven’t had the experience of doing it, you’re just being a cantankerous old bastard. And I was like, fuck you. So then I went to do it and it was funny because, you know, you get voted in that slam. I did told this story and you get voted in the slam. And the people who vote are like friends in the audience. So it turns out if you turn up to do Islam and you’ve brought 10 friends with you and they become the judges, then you will win even if your story’s shit. So I did the story and it went fine and I lost. I came third or something. And there was like a riot in this thing. It all went crazy. People were standing up. There was rage about it. Like people were really angry about me not winning the story thing.

Really? They were all arguing going, this is an injustice, Lynn must win.

Yeah. No, it was crazy. And so like I left because I’m like this. When I’d had the argument with Kemp, this wasn’t what I’d planned. So Mark and I did it sharpish. And then the moth called me the next day and said, do you want to do this main stage? And I did a main stage.

Same story?

Yeah, yeah, no, it was the same story. And then so I ended up doing that story like the town hall in New York where I think the recording is, which is, it’s like maybe 1,500, 2,000 people. I did the Albany, did it all over the place, actually Portland, Maine, loads of really Martha’s Vineyard. I worked with the moth for quite a while doing different stories and different things. And then from that, one of the people at the moth called Meg Bowles, who is just a sweetheart, she said, you know, you do know an awful lot about story. You might want to consider teaching people. And so then she helped me set up a story, kind of teaching block. And for a while, I did do that. I would do, I had a theatre and I would do four three hour classes with complete strangers. And we would pick stories from their life. And then on the fifth class, they would do, deliver their story without notes or cheat sheets to an audience, a live audience. And then I was kind of hooked because I realized that people are, the thing that’s problematic with people is not that they don’t have stories to tell. They are just one, not entirely sure that they’re allowed to tell those stories. And two, don’t really have the structure in place to be able to do it. So that when you can get people to tell you what’s really going on, and that takes a while, then you can help them structure it to be in something that’s wonderful. So like I had a guy that used to guard, he was a head of the Marines at Guantanamo Bay. And then it kind of lost it at one point. And we did his story about how he’d come to Guantanamo and why he was there. And he said about the reason that he lost it was he said, I stood looking out into the darkness for so long that the darkness started looking into me. And he said it without any kind of mystical, poetic thing. He just said it as in, that’s the truth. And I had another girl who’d, what story that came out was that she, well it was a horrible thing about being waterboarded and raped. And everybody in the class was freaked out by her telling it. But she was so reasonable when she was talking about it because she hadn’t really thought about it for years. And then it came out that what had happened. And I said, what’s the thing? What would be the message that you would wish me to understand from that event? What is the thing that’s clear in your head about the story? And she said, the sky looks so very blue when you think you’ll never see it again. And it made me really think about how story matters.

Right. Okay, now we’ve come to your final offcut. What’s that, please?

This is an amended scene from a theatre play I was commissioned to write in 2017, and it’s called The Weir Sisters.

Margaret and Grace are preparing a little party for their long lost sister Dorothy. But there are a couple of flies in the ointment. One, the person Dorothy desperately wants to see can’t come to the party. Two, Margaret and Grace are dead. Lights up, a Christmas tree, three old fashioned chairs, a buffet table, an old fashioned phonograph, a room decorated for a cosy little tea party. The recorded version of Vera Lynn singing We’ll Meet Again. Grace, early twenties, slight, gentle, dressed in the style of the 1940s, sings along with Vera as she fixes last minute details for the party. A solid older woman, Margaret, dressed in distinctly 1980s style slacks and blouse, enters carrying a stepladder. She walks over to the record player and pulls the stylus off.

Oh my god, Grace, change the record. This is a party, not a bloody wake.

But Margaret, it’s Vera Lynn. Dorothy likes Vera Lynn.

Nobody likes Vera Lynn, especially not at a party. And Dorothy is ninety-seven. She won’t even remember who she likes.

Vera Lynn was very much the thing in our day.

In your day, Grace, in your day, after you threw off your mortal coil, music changed, thankfully.

Grace takes Vera off the turntable.

A lot of things changed after you died, actually. They put a man on the moon. They invented the contraceptive pill, which, to be honest, if men had been the ones getting pregnant, they’d have invented a couple of centuries earlier. And they not only built a wall through the middle of Berlin, but they also knocked it down again.

Having positioned her ladder, Margaret exits through the stage left door.

It’s just, I remember Dorothy and I used to sing along to Vera Lynn at the dancing. She wrote a letter to me once saying, I looked like Vera Lynn.

And was that meant to be a compliment?

Of course it was. She was the Force’s sweetheart.

There’s an inspiration for you.

It is an inspiration. I don’t understand what you have against Vera Lynn.

Margaret returns carrying a fold-up banner.

Nothing personally. What I object to is being the Force’s sweetheart. I mean, is that really what women are supposed to do? Be pretty and sing songs, inspire the boys as they set off to war.

Is that not a nice thing?

Nice is exactly what it is. Nice means you don’t question anything. Nice means you sit in a corner. Nice means you sing pretty little songs and don’t demand to know why the boys are being sent off to fight in the first place. You know what I think, Grace? I think that if you’re the one deciding to have a war, then you should be the one fighting it on your own. Think on it, Grace. Hitler, Churchill, Stalin in the ring, bare-breasted, and we all stand around taking bets. Stalin, without his high heels, stands a mere five foot four in front of Churchill, who knocks him flat with his whisky breath. Then, fresh with success and a great gust of cigar halitosis, Churchill turns to Hitler and yells at him, Wagner’s Persian, your watercolours are shite, and Hitler runs off greeting and depressed and gobbles up one of his cyanide pellets and he’s gone before you know it. And millions upon millions of lives are saved. But that isn’t what happens and you know why? Because year after year, humans hand over power to those who have no other discernible skill than to claim they’re entitled to it.

She turns back to hang the banner.

Really? When you think of it, it’s much easier just being dead.

So, tell us about The Weir Sisters.

The Weir Sisters, there’s a theatre in Glasgow, Lunchtime Theatre that was run by the magnificent woman called Morag Fullerton. They do these one hour plays that go on for a week. She asked me to write a play and I came up with one, which was this, The Weir Sisters. Actually, during the process of writing this, which I knew it was these two sisters waiting for the other sister to arrive and how they would communicate and whatever. During it, I got diagnosed with breast cancer. So actually, I couldn’t see, I didn’t go and see the play because I was here going through surgery and a lot of unpleasantness generally. So my sister, bless her, who had been over here nursing me for a bit, had gone back and seen The Weir Sisters and found it very difficult as you would, I think. So it was an interesting thing to be writing a play about what is death.

But you’ve got breast cancer, you got diagnosis after you’d finished writing or while you were writing?

While I was writing, while I was commissioned. Yeah, no, it was intense. But you know, it was kinda, because at one point I had to say to them, I’m putting the draft in, I’m giving you this first draft, it’s not finished properly, but just run with it because I’m going to fund my mistake to me this Friday. It was like a weird kind of thing going on. It’s fine, I’m fine, you know, I went into remission, I’m a lucky person. If you do get breast cancer, you know, it isn’t the death sentence it used to be and it comes from me. Anyway, but it was interesting to write this because it was about death. I wanted to write a play about death that was really about life and the way that we choose life and that actually, I think that there is something maybe up until The Weir Sisters that hadn’t entirely considered was that, you know, death is not an option. That will be the one that comes for all of us. That’s just going to happen. But how you choose to live your life and how you choose to allow other people to affect your decisions is an option. There is power in it. And so the play itself, how it exists, once you die, you go to this place that is neither up nor down and you get to choose, once you remember how you die, you can choose where you felt at your best, right? Where you felt that you’re most defined. So that’s why Grace is young. She did die young, but she has a secret, which is why she’s based around that time because she’s got something she has to reveal. Margaret dies a bit later than the way that she is set, but she appears and lives at the time that she felt that she was most powerful in her life. And then Dorothy, when she appears, the challenge is to get her to remember how she died because she felt she died so many different times, right? So it is a thing about sacrifice, this play. It’s interesting. And the reason it’s amended is because it was an hour long play that I never got to see, but it did pretty well. And what reviewed well as well, people were saying it was like this movie The Bishop’s Wife. Oh, yes, yes.

With David Nevins.

Yeah. So it has the same sort of feeling. And so then I was like, OK, well, I can’t really do anything with it as a play play. So what I’ll do is I’ll amend it into being two half play, you know, so two act play, so with an interval. So I’ve done that. And then I’ve never done anything with it since then because I’m like, maybe it’s a movie. Maybe I want to do it as a movie. So like part of all of this stuff with all my offcuts is how much I realized I’m not a completer finisher. I think that’s what you’ve taught me, Laura Shavin. I am totally not a completer finisher.

OK, well, I’m sorry. I hadn’t intended to. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show and I was, you know, my normal question is, how was it for you? It seems that you’ve just answered that by saying, I think you discovered you don’t finish things. But that can’t be true. It’s just you didn’t finish these things.

Oh, there’s a load of other things too that I’ve not finished. I didn’t really think that there was a pattern and stuff. But I can see even just in these offcuts that there is a pattern. And I also…

Which particular pattern is it? Or is it just that you didn’t finish?

I think that there is a… I have a resistance to… I mean, I can write what other people ask me to write, but sometimes I resist it. But that’s definitely ducked in a state. And I think the other stuff is that it’s okay to not know… It’s okay to not know the answer. And I used to have this… Around the time that I got… That I was in Chicken Run, I was writing different things. My first play that I wrote was really successful. And so people thought that I could write…

The Heart and Sole?

Yeah.

I saw that.

Oh, did you?

It was very good. Yeah, I did.

Thank you. Well, it was… Actually, you know what? Heart and Sole was meant to be an hour of stand up, and I forgot that and wrote a play, it said. But after it, people seem to think that what I would write would be brilliant. And it wasn’t because writing doesn’t work that way. It literally is only what you can do at the time. And I had an agent at the time who I loved her, actually, because she’d say, she’d say, darling, it’s not so much a draft as some used pieces of paper. And sometimes I’ll say that to myself when I’m writing something, I’m like, this is bullshit. And I go, well, you know, the worst idea written down is still 100% better than the best idea never written down. So even if it’s just like used pieces of paper, that’s still okay.

Well, that’s an excellently wise piece of advice, that is. So listening to those Offcuts, was there anything that surprised you, anything you expected to hear but didn’t, or maybe vice versa, or maybe nothing?

You know, what was surprising about it was that I get through, you know, like I do this weekly blog, right? So I write a blog that goes out every Sunday, like every Sunday. And at the end of the year of doing a blog, I do a book, right? And my great terror is that I’m writing the same thing every week. And my great terror with writing is that I’m writing the same thing. And I noticed in those things where I was like, they’re really not the same thing. The real Duck Dynasty was about, I’m trying to do something that’s just not going to work. The Fox Hunt, God bless seven year old me and my weirdness. Memory when it suits you is about a love, actually a kind of love for London and don’t forget the good bits. Red Riding Hood I still believe in, but it’s a complicated thing and I don’t know how to do that yet. And The Weir Sisters, it is a thing about, you can write through the most difficult of times. And sometimes writing does make you feel better when you do. I think that The Weir Sisters would be, I think The Weir Sisters as a structure that it was and worked, I think there is a better structure for them. I just have to decide what that structure is. Because what was lovely here in it, because I wrote that what, nearly 10 years ago, something like that, eight years ago. And then listening to it, I was like, yeah, that’s the truth for now though. Like, you could totally see that a bit now. So I’m like, oh, maybe I should do something with that, right?

Yes, you definitely could, yeah. Well Lynn Ferguson, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today.

You too, my friend.

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

Thank you for asking me.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Lynn Ferguson. The Offcuts were performed by David Monteath, Nigel Pilkington, Beth Chalmers, Christopher Kent and Gayanne Potter, and the music was by me. For more details, visit offcutsdrawer.com, and please subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

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

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

Is there a lot of competition?

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

So, maybe another Guinness Book of Records record?

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

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

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

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

I’ve done the triple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

She sits on the desk with me.

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

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

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

Bye, thanks for coming.

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

Yes, yes, yes!

Thank God!

I can’t believe they’ve gone.

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

We’ve got a free weekend.

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

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

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

Can I have a tin with a spoon?

Yes.

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

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

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

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

Yes, try the boxes.

Right.

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

Nothing. We can do anything we want.

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

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

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

Ta-da! Found them!

George’s hand is covered in oil.

Oh, look, can you pass me a…

He looks around for something to wipe his hands clean.

No, not the guest towels.

Well, we haven’t got any guests.

I don’t care. They’re for guests.

But I live here.

Right. So you’re not a guest.

Emily hands him some kitchen roll.

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

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

Alright, Biscuits.

Cool, cool.

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

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

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

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

I’m a guest.

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

No, it’s not. It’s Ian.

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

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

Yeah, right.

Cool, cool.

Where are you going?

Bus stop.

No, where are you going?

Bus stop.

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

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

Right then, I’m off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

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

Right.

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

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

It was after I’d written the Wilma Tenderfoots.

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

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

So you didn’t submit it to anybody?

No, no.

You just started it and stopped yourself?

Yeah.

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

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

To you or someone you know?

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve heard stories like that before.

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

Really?

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

It’s about like GIs did in the war.

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

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

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

Your blog into a book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That sounds fascinating.

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

Oh, no. How frustrating.

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

And that was an eye opener.

Why?

Because it’s so much easier to write.

Than comedy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clem, can we have a chat?

Who’s that in the car?

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

Does he want a coffee or something?

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

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

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

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

What’s going on?

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

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

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

Is this a joke?

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

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

Look, I know this looks bad.

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

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

Five months? While I had cancer?

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

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

Are they ironed?

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

She slumps into a chair, head in hands.

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

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

No. I was wondering if you could tell him?

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

Trevor looks down and shakes his head.

Come on, where’s she from?

Preston.

Oh, Trevor. How could you?

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

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

How delightful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You write jokes and everything.

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

Is there enough Lego in the world?

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

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

Yeah, I started it a year ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is that cow?

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

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

Utterly holds up an oversized watch.

Me o’clock, work o’clock.

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

Hang on.

There is no work o’clock on that watch.

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

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

Farmer Lee looms in.

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

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

I’ve got that star, Farmer Lee.

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

But what is team building?

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

Big brother house! I’m gonna be famous!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing animation or writing for kids?

Writing animation for children.

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

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

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

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

What about a children’s book?

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

Right, yes it would.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good, well, thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many did you end up playing in the end?

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

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

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

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

So how old were you when you wrote this?

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

Was it Love’s Young Dream?

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

So coy, let’s call him Tim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the same production, from the Hamlet.

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

They were character exercises, though, character monologues.

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry about the exclamation, Mark.

It suddenly felt a bit…

I’m Mary.

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

Laura’s mom.

That’s it.

Do we do both, or is that the French?

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

Yeah, I’m all set.

And Mary, it’s a pleasure.

Likewise. Well, we’ll be, won’t we?

Very soon, family.

Now, he must be exhausted. Let me…

She tries to take his suitcase.

No, no, you know what?

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

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

So now what? We…

I take you home, and we can… wedding.

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

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

And it’s your first time in England?

Very first.

Well, it must all seem very…

No queen.

Where is she?

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

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

David Beckham.

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

No idea. David Attenborough.

Of course.

With his little monkeys and his nature.

So is your car…?

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

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

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

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

Well, the Queen insists on it.

I bet she does.

I bet she does.

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

I saw the agenda.

I like it. We know where we stand.

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

Jo puts a reassuring hand on Mary’s hand.

You plan. You’re a planner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it’s politeness, isn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children’s TV channel.

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

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

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

Yes, thanks.

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

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

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

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

Yes, I’ve heard of Go Jetters.

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

You wrote them or you were in them?

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

No middle aged women who could apologise all the time.

No, or there would have been.

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

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

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

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

We wonder why Bevert turned up when nobody had died.

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

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

He’s into petty crime.

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

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

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

How long’s he staying with you?

I don’t know yet.

Well, those sheets will be your business.

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

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

She’s OCDC.

You’re no good when you’re anxious.

I’m learning to be.

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

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

He just bangs on about his bloody charity.

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

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

Sponging off you for a bit.

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

Drinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, I’ve really enjoyed it.

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

Thanks so much for having me. Thank you.

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