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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interior. Cheese Shop. Day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, no. It’s not off. It’s ripe.

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

No, no, no. It’s perfectly ripe. Mmm.

Smell the aroma. Beautiful aroma. Very pungent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.