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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Body Biz Spa, promoting wellness for all, how may I help? Just putting you through. A proper Jane Austen fan, not of the films, not of the TV stuff, not even of Colin Firth in Drenched Britches. The books, the books do it for me.

I was too young, really, when I picked up my first one, Emma. I fell in love with… More loud beeping. Oh, hang on.

Body Biz Spa, promoting wellness for all, how may I help? He’s not in on Thursdays. I’m sure Janine can help. Putting you through.

Just totally fell in love with Emma. The language, so witty and so correct. Jane always said exactly what she meant, never scrabbled around.

It was pithy, that’s what it was. I gobbled all the books up, then the biographies, the letters. I can quote her comments to Cassandra.

They were so close, they were sisters, like sisters can be. Good morning. I need a towel.

There you go. Have they fixed locker number 12 in the changing room? I don’t know, madam. Probably.

I hope so. It’s my favourite. I love it at Body Biz.

All these nice people. A people watch, you see, because I write. Excuse me, excuse me, may I see your membership card, please? No, I’m afraid I have to see it.

Oh God, we’ve got to run ahead of the spinning class. Hang on. Judy leaves her desk, suddenly knocking over things.

Madam? Later. Tea break at last. Not much tea gets drunk.

It’s all scribble, scribble, scribble. I’m working on my fourth novel, based very closely on the style of my heroine, Jane Austen. It’s a kind of epic about a fierce love between star-crossed estate agents.

Freehold of the Heart. Good title, I think. Or is it terrible? This, well, I thought it was the beginning of a sort of chiclet type book.

I mean, Jane Austen is every chiclet writer’s favourite writer and all that. But then I looked back on your notes and thought, oh, hold on. This is not that at all.

Can you explain to the listener what this project was, please? Yes, I can. Gentle listener. This is a very dear thing to my heart that, yes, all chiclet, which we’re not supposed to say anymore.

We’re supposed to say commercial women’s fiction. But I’m very happy with chiclet. Everybody loves Jane Austen, but there is an assumption that you love her for the sugary, pastel dresses and the romance.

And actually, I did really, really love her and always have for the genius. So it was partly a reaction to how annoyed that made me. But yes, I went to Jordan many times with my long-suffering husband in tow.

And I always looked in that mirror, thrilled to think that Jane Austen looked in it. And I used to think, I wish I could nick this. I’ve got a criminal mind.

What can I say? So my heroine actually does steal it, which is very unlikely, but she gets away with it. She props it up in her attic bedroom. She has a terrible relationship with her sister.

Her husband doesn’t support her, is never home, is always away on business. She’s very neglected and she pretends things are okay. And she’s actually very unhappy.

And she slowly dies like Jane Austen did until she disappears. And there’s no reflection in the mirror at all. So yeah, it does veer away from Chick-fil-A quite speedily.

Perhaps why it didn’t get put on, Laura. So it started out as a sort of, oh, is this going to be Jane Austen helps this woman either become a writer or find her the love of her life? No, it kills her in a horrid, nasty, she basically fades away. Wow.

Yeah. And so you wrote the whole play? I wrote the whole play. I always write the whole everything.

I never half write anything. I write the whole everything, which is why if you had two years of airtime, we could fill it with my stuff. But yes, I wrote the whole play and yeah, my agent wasn’t mad about it.

I sent it to a couple of, you know, the way it goes, you can send it to people, you know, who might send it to people they know. And I think it was just, it was a mixed bag. And if I’m really honest, I never expected it to get made.

It was just something I really wanted to write. We have to be quite strict about genre. It’s a business.

It’s a depressing business at times, but yeah, it did straddle two genres and neither quite happy. When you’re saying disciplined about genre, you mean when you’re writing novels or everywhere within the writing? Well, certainly in novels, I mean, strictly in novels and in my experience elsewhere. Yeah, especially if you introduce humour.

I mean, I have seen very successful humour drama and humour crime and humour thriller, but they’re not as pure, I think, and they don’t gain as much attention or get as many green lights as a purer thing, because the worst thing a producer wants to be is confused by what you’ve written. They want to go, I know exactly who will listen to this. I know exactly how much to spend on this.

So yes, I do think unless you’ve got a track record, if you want to try and hit the spot, it’s best to be clear about your intent. And I don’t think much as I enjoyed that play, and I really was great hearing it dramatised. That was great fun.

I always thought, yeah, this is not going to go on. You do, don’t you, when you write things? Sometimes you think, yeah, not going to go. Right, time for another off cut.

Can you tell us about this one, please? Well, this is more radio. This is a comedy and it’s called Number 89 and I wrote it a thousand years ago in 1985. My name is Nancy.

I’m 20 something, five foot something, and I have no distinguishing marks. I live by the river in what the estate agent described as a spacious mansion flat. I don’t own it, I rent it, so there are in my life two very special people, my flatmates.

Breakfast time is the only time when Joanna, Susie and I are all together, when we can relax and enjoy each other’s company and discuss matters of great import. No milk again! Why is there never any milk in this place? Oh dear, oh Susie, I think we’ve got some coffee right now. Oh my cornflakes! There’s no cornflakes either, so you’re in luck.

Oh God, would I be asking too much to try and scrape up a boiled egg? Oh dear, oh Susie, the last egg went into Bernard’s quiche. Great, I starve and your fancy man stuffs himself with quiche. You’re not starving, Susie.

God knows Bernard’s not fancy, and anyone who’s tasted Joanna’s quiche knows better than to stuff themselves with it. Oh Nancy! Make yourself a slice of toast. Oh yes, some lovely toast and marmalade, Susie.

Mmm, lovely, delicious, luxurious toast. I can hardly wait. Why is the grill so filthy? Presumably because you neglected to scrub it after that sausage orgy last night.

Oh, it’s always my fault, isn’t it? I only left it because I had to get to bed and rest my voice. I do have a gig tonight, you know. Yeah, Sus does have a gig tonight, Nancy.

She has a gig tonight, you know. Resting for this gig also stopped you taking out the rubbish? Erm, the rubbish? The rubbish? Are we going to say everything three times? Just so I know, just so I know, just so I know. So, I didn’t take the rubbish out.

Beat me, shoot me, leave it out my bones for the vultures to pick at. The flat’s starting to smell like a Calcutta backstreet. Oh no, oh really? You should- Anyway, you were home all day doing sod all, Joanna.

What’s stopping you taking the rubbish out or cleaning the grill? Well, the rota. I mean- Oh, the precious rota. It’s made out by Nancy, not Moses.

She didn’t stagger down from Mount Sinai with it. It’s chalked onto a blackboard which has a transfer of a care bearer on it. You can ignore the blessed rota, you know.

Susie, pack it in. She’s going to… Cry. No, please.

Anything but that. Don’t, Joanna. I’m sorry.

I’m sorry. Jo, don’t. Shh, shh, shh, shh.

Just because I don’t have a job, I can’t do everything. I try, I really try. But Bernard’s had a virus and that budgie’s more work than he looks.

Poor Joanna. It’s a strain for her to be unemployed, to be the odd one out, to be, well, to be alive, really. Particularly to be alive in the vicinity of someone like Susie, who’s rather sparky.

It’s the artistic temperament, you see. The artistic temperament of a builder’s yard typist who sings in pubs at night. Maybe you’ll hear Susie sing later.

Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to be horribly murdered first. My day promised to be a gruelling one. I had to leave Joanna snivelling on the formica and yoke myself between the shafts of Bootle, Bargle, Hefty and Warnes.

When I became a copywriter, fresh-faced and newly sprung from university, nobody told me I was selling my soul to the devil. That I was prostituting my only skill. That I would one day write a commercial for dog toilet paper.

Ah, the gals in the flat chair scenario. Was this you? It was me. It was me and my two cousins.

Very much me and my two cousins. I mean, the whole budgie thing, I could, you know, I could write War and Peace. But it, do you know, it’s really fascinating listening to that.

It’s so of its time. The humour is so of its time. You could pinpoint that as the 80s.

I sent this off completely cold. I was working in radio advertising at the time. I was in a production house.

And I sent it completely cold to a producer who produced comedy I liked. And she sent me back such an encouraging letter. It was wonderful.

She said it was this, it was that. In short, I loved it and I want to hear more. But this is a topic that is tackled by a lot of first-time writers.

So if you can think of something else and write something else, I’d love to hear that. And I, as you can imagine, went straight back to the desk. And well, the kitchen table in this case.

And scribbled and scribbled and scribbled. And by the time I’d finished it, she’d moved on. And I’d sent it to a guy who took over and he sent me back.

I will never forget what he said. He said, thank you for this. It did raise a titter, he said.

And then he turned it down. I mean, he really hated it. But that stopped me in my tracks.

And instead of just saying sod you and carrying on, I kind of let it lie and went back to doing my little stories for weekly magazines, which I really had a huge cottage industry going. But yeah, that was really interesting. I mean, that wouldn’t get made now.

All the jokes were really obvious because they were made a thousand times during those days. But it’s lovely to hear. It’s a period piece as much as crinolines are.

And I think what she was trying to say to me was that she got a lot of this. And you need to have an original idea. You need to think outside, like literally raising your head from the table and describing what goes on around you.

But it was super encouraging. And I’m really grateful to her. And I think that producers should never underestimate the impact of what they say.

I don’t mean they should be careful or anything. I just mean they should train themselves and think, yeah, I made someone happy with that one word of encouragement. It really is.

It’s important. It matters. Yeah.

Now you mentioned just now about the writing of the short stories. Is this for the Just 17 magazine stuff? Just 17. Yeah.

So what happened there? Oh, another bitter story. I had… Keep them coming. I can get very twisted.

I’ve been sitting there, you know, I had one of those great jobs. I was working with two guys. I was like the girl in the office.

Literally, I did everything. They paid me really well. They took me out to all the restaurants with them.

They treated me like a little sister. Because of that, I was abounding with unearned confidence. And so I sent a soap opera idea to Just 17, which was around the corner from us.

Now, to those people who aren’t as old as us, explain what Just 17 is. Just 17 was like a precursor to Heat magazine, which of course is now defunct as well. I have to explain Heat before I explain Just 17.

Just 17 was one of those sort of magazines. They had the gossip and they had fashion stuff and they had lots and lots of silly photographs of celebrities. It’s where that all started.

I was sort of pointing out what celebrities were wearing and who was going out with who. And their office was exactly what you would wish. It’s all full of girls wearing too fashion-y clothes, laughing their heads off and going out to lunch.

And I just sent it to them and it came out every week, amazingly. Can you imagine a weekly magazine? And it was kind of huge, like all the girls I knew read it. And it just seemed to me it should have… It always had a short story.

And I thought, I’ll punt it a soap opera. Right, when you said a soap opera, so it wasn’t a photo story? No. It was written in words.

It’s actual words. Actual words. And it was basically, yes, a saga that happened every week.

Yes. And you wrote it. And were the lead characters or the lead character, were they 17? They were not.

They were older. They were flat-sharing. Ah, I see now.

I thought, sod you, BBC. Someone’s got to buy this. So yeah, it was literally the house I lived in.

And she said, oh, I’m looking for a serial. Yeah, give me five of these, 200 quid a go. I couldn’t believe it.

And it was great. It was all fun and games until indeed someone did lose an eye. And it was me.

Suddenly, I got a call saying, I’m going to give it away. I’m going to give it to… And she named a guy who was on the writing staff there. And I said, oh, are you sure? She said, yeah, you know, he’s got more experience than you.

It was literally done like that. And I said… Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let me say. So hold on.

You sent an idea for an ongoing story to a magazine. You actually gave them the plot and the characters, et cetera. They went, yes.

They agreed to pay you 200 pounds or whatever to write per episode. And then they gave that story and those ideas to someone else to write. Are they allowed to do that? Well, I did four episodes and thrilled skinny with the whole thing, doing it at work with the guys cheering me on.

And then the vocal came. And it never occurred to me until you just mentioned it that perhaps I owned it. And they couldn’t do that.

But to quote my grandmother, God pays debts without money. And actually paid them with money this time, because for some reason I stayed on the payroll. And I kept getting 200 pounds per week.

And I remember mentioning this to my mum and she went ashen and she said, tell them, tell them it’s fraud. So very, very reluctantly, I told them. And I said, do I have to pay you back? And they said, no, don’t worry about it.

But did they stop paying you the 200 pounds? They did stop paying. Yeah, God damn it. So yeah, but it was a learning curve.

And also I just, I carried on giving them weekly stories, just, you know, one offs for years. You weren’t sort of cast back into the cold. No, no, no.

I’m still in the fold. And I’m giving them very, very genre-based stories where people either got together happily at the end or one of them died. There was no in between.

As it is in life, always. It’s my relationship history. Okay, then, right.

Well, let’s move on and have another offcut. What is this? This is a stage play. And this was about 2006, maybe a little earlier.

And it’s called Troubled. Exterior, street at night. Mary strolls over to take Pat’s arm, both shivering against the cold as they walk along.

Mike, a soldier, nervous with a rifle at the ready, is manning a roadblock. Mary and Pat don’t see him yet. Did you see me, Uncle Brain? Head thrown back, bellowing.

I never heard Donny boy murdered so comprehensively. Leave him alone. He’s a grand voice.

A church bell begins to toll. Beneath the dialogue, it tolls 11 o’clock. That’s 11 o’clock, Pat.

Me mother’ll go through you for a shortcut. We promised half ten. We promised.

We should have gone down Shank Hill. There’s too many riots down there these nights. This is safer.

Oh. Mary and Pat notice the roadblock, hear the crackling of the soldier’s walkie-talkie, take in the cocked rifle. Where are you going? What’s your business? We’re… I’m walking me girlfriend home.

Let’s see some ID. Why? I’m walking me girlfriend home in me hometown. Sean Pat.

She gets out her ID. Mary O’Halloran. O’ this and O’ that.

Begara. It means son of. Pat.

Your ID, mate. Come on, then you can get home and canoodle on her doorstep. He’s obviously never met me ma.

Pat sullenly hands over his ID. Mike looks at it perfunctorily and hands it back. That’s all in order.

Don’t be so touchy, Paddy. Me name’s Pat. That’s what I said.

Paddy. Run along, there’s good kids. Mary and Pat walk away.

Pat looking resentfully back. Soldier appears to whisper urgently in Mike’s ear. There’s no point cheeking them, Pat.

Even poets have tempers, Mary. They shouldn’t be here. They shouldn’t be bloody here.

Oi! Soldier grabs Pat, throws him to the floor, plants a boot in his back and points a rifle at the back of his head. Mike contains Mary without brute force, pushing her to the other side of the stage behind him. It’s important that her face is obscured from Soldier’s vision.

Are you sure? You sure it’s him? Soldier nods. Your boyfriend’s wanted, darling. Dangerous.

That’s me brother. His brother. His brother is on the run.

You’re making a mistake. My mate arrested him once before. He knows him.

Pat’s never been arrested. You’re making a mistake. Me brother.

You want me brother. Soldier moves his boot to Pat’s head. Please, honest to God, he’s not political.

He keeps out of all this. Check his ID again. Go home, love.

Soldier drags Pat to his feet. Mike pushes Mary in opposite direction, not too harshly. Tell me Ma.

Well, you tell his Ma her baby boy’s been naughty and won’t be home tonight. He’s going for a little holiday in the kesh. Pat! Soldier drags Pat off stage.

Mike exits. Mary takes off her coat and tosses it as abrupt scene change to interior disco.

So, Northern Ireland. I know your maiden name was Bernadette Gorn, which is very Irish, but you didn’t grow up in Ireland yourself, did you? I did not, no. But I tell you, it’s got very long tentacles, Ireland.

Yeah, my mother was from Dublin and my dad was from Mayo, which is on the west, like the east and the west coast. And to be honest, when I was growing up, there was a very, very specific attitude to, especially in Dublin, which was, we don’t want to hear about the north. It was like the troubled or irritating brother who was always in trouble.

And I felt terrible when I grew up that I didn’t know much about it. So I studied it. And obviously you get friends when you’re older from everywhere.

And I had very good friends from Northern Ireland. And I really felt strongly about the fact that they were all just people, and especially they were young people together and they were falling in love with each other and they were not being allowed to do it, seemed preposterous. So yeah, it was quite passionately felt, but yeah, it feels quite juvenile.

And I wasn’t juvenile when I wrote it. So I think it was, is a stab at sort of getting into much deeper waters. And it was actually, it’s David Bowie’s fault because I used to, when I first listened to Heroes, I used to imagine it as being about the Berlin Wall.

And I remember hearing about people who’s like, their loved ones were murdered. And I’ve always had a very strong feeling that the best revenge, if somebody kills somebody you love, is to get them to love you and then you kill yourself. That’s one hell of a plan.

So that’s what this girl was going to do. And it was also about the incredible sort of whimsicality of the Irish, which is just a coin’s turn away from complete bleakness. And so it was sort of a mystical and very brutal kind of treaties on how love gets really screwed up in war, which makes it so much better than it was.

But you know, it’s all an ambition, isn’t it? Every work of art is an ambition, but that was the idea. And what was your childhood like? Did you come from the cliched big Irish family, all sitting around being incredibly witty and basically the cast of Derry Girls? But you didn’t grow up in Ireland, did you? No, no. I was born in Fulham in London and my parents met in London and they brought me up there.

And I did come from the archetypal big Irish family, but our part of it was just me, my mum and my dad. So I was like the unicorn. And if you can begin to imagine how spoiled I was, you haven’t scratched the surface.

And I was spoiled by my parents, then I was spoiled by my aunties, then my grandmother got in with the spoiling. So it was great. I mean, it was very Derry Girls in that there is no privacy and everything is up for discussion.

Everything you do, say, if you walk across a room, you get 18 comments. But I only got that some of the time. Most of the time it was a very quiet house with the dog and my parents and lots of books and too much food.

And so it was nice. It was almost like I holidayed in it. But as I’ve grown older, I realised I am very Irish in that the way I think about things and the way I relate to people.

And it’s interesting to see my daughter. I married a completely English person, but I can see it cropping up unstoppably in her. And I don’t know if you feel that, Laura, that as you get older, your sort of inherent culture starts like bursting forth with the chin hairs.

And I’m just really enjoying it. So yes, it was, I feel like I had a very Irish background, but at the same time, much more sedate than your traditional thoughts of an Irish childhood. And were there any writers or creative types in there? Any great grandparents who turn out to be Brendan Behan or something like that? I don’t know how strongly I can say no.

I mean, a long line of carpenters and painters and basically genteel working class people. That’s what it was. And I mean, also a lot of poverty in the generations before me and then they got okay.

But having said that, my uncle John once got paid a shilling by Brendan Behan. He met him on the bus and Brendan Behan had just got his typewriter out of the pawn shop and he gave it to my uncle John and he said, here’s a shilling, take it to me, Ma, or I will pawn it again. So yeah, it was very, not Dublin stuff, lots of countryside stuff, but no, not one single creative person.

We’ve got a lot of musicians actually. A lot of musicians, lots of singers, but nobody’s written a word except me. So you’re the family first.

I’m the bard. Yes. Right, time for another off cut.

Tell us about this one. This one is, oh, it’s another odd one. This is a novel very close to my heart, which I wrote in about 1999, probably five years before it.

And it’s called Tiddles Gets Life. He stared. It stared back at him.

As incongruous in Pete’s damp, custard-coloured quarters as Gina Lollobrigida, the kitten leapt out of the open box, paws high. It goose-stepped here and there, suddenly fast, then still. Every soft inch of the animal quivered with curiosity, as if it might fart, question marks.

It was agog at the plastic-coated iron leg of Pete’s bed. It held out a paw to bat the roll of toilet paper, standing by the stainless-steel pedestal. It stared up at him, unafraid and seemingly fascinated by his big, soft face.

It’s not an it, Pete reprimanded himself. This thing was a girl. A lady? A child, really, only just torn from its mum.

It’s a she. A she in his cell. That was a first.

Who are you? he asked, softly, afraid his voice might knock her off her fat, beferred feet. Your Tiddles, he answered for her, the name coming so naturally to his lips that it was surely preordained. My Tiddles, he said, quieter still, in case the morbid plasterwork should soak up this new tone of voice and broadcast it to the wing.

How in the name of God was he supposed to pick her up? Tiddles was so small, and Pete’s hands were so big. He flexed his fingers, long, elegant enough in design. They were stained by too many cigarettes and unhappy wanks beneath cheap bedclothes.

L-O-V-E, said his right hand, in dirty blue. H-A-T-E, more convincingly, suggested the left. Paid a pound a day just to be Pete Kennedy, he made no decisions, had no responsibility.

His meals were prepared for him, his clothing washed, ironed badly and returned. There was no manual strapped to the kitten, nobody looking over Pete’s shoulder. He needed a diagram.

His own instincts had led him to this place, after all, and couldn’t be relied upon. Rubbing his nose hard as if he wanted to rub it off, Pete counselled himself to be calm. This morning felt important, it glittered.

The kitten’s debut was sharp and certain in a life defined by its lack of everything, deadlines, change, urgency. The only other distinct moments were conflicts. This moment was fluffy and strange and funny.

That took a minute to sink in. Tiddles was comical. She had funny bones under her tabby stripes.

Pete’s nana had used that expression about some god-awful comic on the screeching 1970s television she’d sat as close to as if they were lovers. Across a chasm of 30 years, Pete understood what she meant. Some people can make you laugh just by doing ordinary things.

Tiddles was one of those people. This was a very interesting piece and certainly your description of what happens in the story again takes a turn that nobody listening to that bit would have any idea of. So, tell us what happens to Tiddles and friend.

Well, yeah, the genesis was I read a long form, really fascinating article about lifers in American jails having a terrible trouble with violence because the stakes were very low for them. They were going to be in prison forever so they may as well act up. So they wanted a way to get them engaged with life so that they could live more calmly.

They introduced the thing that if you were good for long enough, good in inverted commas, whatever that means in prison, you were given a kitten. I know, not very fair on the kitten. But it turned into like a cat lover’s circle.

They became obsessed and in love with their kittens as they grew into cats. The cats were cosseted, they were kept clean, they were fed. And of course, the prisoners knew that if they got into fights or if they disobeyed authority, that the cats would be taken away.

So it had a massive impact on their behaviour, but also, and this was something that really fascinated me, on their feeling, they felt happier and they felt love, like genuine, clean, ordinary love for some other little thing that they were responsible for. And it really moved me because I think men in general, I mean, we’re changing things now the way we talk openly about it, but men in general have always been very in two minds about being frank about their needs emotionally or even having needs that are emotional. So I thought it was lovely that these men who had lived in a really grim and smelly, violent and transactional place suddenly had a fluffy kitten with big eyes looking at them for everything.

So that fascinated me. So I thought, yeah, we’ll start there. And it just grew.

Tiddles is given to this guy who’s imprisoned for life at the horrific murder of an elderly lady. He robbed from her, but he was really violent with it. And he can’t face it.

He can’t talk about what he actually did to her. And he kind of blames her for getting on his nerves, as it were. She was a neighbour.

And as he softens up with Tiddles, he becomes able to talk to his therapists in prison about it. He becomes absolutely besotted with Tiddles. And then we start hearing Tiddles in a voice.

And Tiddles in a voice is that of the old lady he killed. Because as always happens, don’t you hate it when this happens, Laura, the murder victim has been reincarnated as a kitten. Again! I know, that old chauvinist.

And she is being, of course, cared for by Pete, who is finding new dimensions to his soul and falling in love. And she hates Pete. And by the end, she engineers a riot and the prison burns down.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Back, back up. She’s a kitten.

Well, presumably even as a fully formed cat, she’s going to have some limitations as to how she could do something like she creates an entire riot. She does. Tiddles, without even an opposable thumb, manages to get the entire prison rioting.

Basically, she fakes being injured in his enemy’s cell. And Pete thinks that this guy has hurt Tiddles. And, of course, it looks like he has.

And so there’s great enmity between them even more than before. And Pete tries to control himself and he can’t. And Tiddles does it again.

And basically, Tiddles, of course, is sinuous and sinewy and can go all through the prison. And she manages, I can’t quite remember, I know it all fell together very well, Laura, very, very, very believable. But yeah, the whole thing burns down.

And, you know, Pete’s on the roof looking for Tiddles and Tiddles is sauntering off down an alleyway as the whole area is lit by the flames of Pete’s demise. So, yeah, she gets her own back on him quite spectacularly and fair play to her, I think. Yes, that’s an unusual turn up.

Well, that’s what my agent said. And I was always saying to her, I’m still working on Tiddles and she would be very, well, don’t neglect your other stuff. And she didn’t show it to anyone.

She didn’t show it to a single person. So that is in a drawer waiting for its time. Well, who knows? Maybe some publishers listening to this podcast go, do you know what we need? Our company needs a book like Tiddles Gets Life.

We need a reincarnated cat burning down a prison. That’s what’s going to get Netflix on its feet. Yeah.

But yeah. But then after that, you published your first actual book. Yeah, actual book, which was called The Reluctant Landlady.

And did that have any reincarnated cats or prison riots in there? No, not a one. No, shelled. Right.

But that was a romantic novel. Yeah, it was chiclet and we were still allowed to say chiclet then. And it was the next big thing.

And it was touted everywhere and highly exaggerated versions of how many copies it had sold were sent out. And it did really well. And I had an amazing editor.

She’s called Philippa Pride. And she was also Stephen King’s editor, which gives you, I know, which gives you an idea of the power she had. But then Philippa got rid of everyone except Stephen.

She had sort of changes in her career. And I was then handed over. And, you know, when there’s a changing of the guard, it’s not so good to be inherited.

It’s much better when somebody finds you. So things got it. I’m not complaining.

I have consistently published books ever since. But I wasn’t like the next big thing. Suddenly, I was, oh, and I also have to look after you, which did change things.

So yeah, it was, you know, if it hadn’t been so exciting at the beginning, I think it would have been a lot better for me. But as it was, I felt like, I don’t know, I felt like Noel Coward when he was a child star, and he was billed as destiny’s tot. And suddenly, I wasn’t anyone’s tot.

And so it was, yeah, it was, it was, it was quite humbling. And in retrospect, really useful, a really good life lesson. Because 28 novels later.

Well, yeah, I’m still going. I’m still doing the thing. But yeah, it’s, but the sheer amount of pen names will tell you that, you know, publishers constantly look for a debut, they constantly look for freshness.

They keep pretending I’m fresh. And rattled though I am, I go along with it. And yes, don’t quite got there.

But they’ll get published, they’ll get read. So I’m certainly When you say got there, you mean what top of the Sunday Times bestseller list? Exactly, or on it even. But yeah, I mean, I have readers, and I have a career, but I don’t have any name recognition.

How could you with the umpteen names, but even so, and you know, I’d like that. But more than anything else, I like being able to keep myself and to have something to do every day. So I’m plugging away, Laura.

Yeah, well, I’m trying not to feel sorry for you. I mean, 28 books. Are you sold in airport bookshops? Some of them are.

Yeah, the most recent three are the Archer’s ones. Well, there you go. I’m sorry, my sympathies just got out the window.

So you’re obviously doing extremely well. I’ll put away my tiny violin. Yes.

Right, well, we’ve come to your final offcut now. Can you tell us about this one, please? This is a TV screenplay, and it’s called Turpin, and it was written around 2019. Interior, Dick’s house, kitchen, day.

Martha is busy making a list, counting jars on a shelf, pondering, scribbling. Jane is shelling peas at the large scrubbed table. It is sunny and pleasant.

The kitchen lass can do that, Miss Jane. Don’t dirty your white fingers. It’s calming, Martha.

You used to sit me on the barrel over there and tell me I wasn’t allowed to talk until I was done. That was then, and this is now. The lady of the manor won’t shell peas.

Then I must make the most of my freedom before I’m expected to press flowers or read poetry or embroider my own straitjacket. Honey. We’re nearly out of honey.

Dick enters, scowling. Ah, thwit. Down the head, fool.

And good morning to you. Dick slams down the tiara on the table. Martha and Jane gape.

Is that… Martha involuntarily looks about her. It is, madam. Booty from last night’s jape.

What are you doing with it, sir? What do you think, woman? I stole it last night. Dragged it off that ugly aristocrat myself. Father! Lord Jane, were you out the day they delivered irony? This was left with poor widow Fleetwood by our kindly highwayman.

Surely that’s a good deed, father. The poor woman could buy herself a home with the proceeds of such a bauble. She wouldn’t need a home.

She’d have a nice, cosy coffin. If any of Prothero’s men caught an old widow woman with such a trinket, they’d march her to the gallows. Surely not.

This is England. Aye, England. Where the poor have no voice.

Where they hang old women. Dick feels his neck, suppresses a shudder. Young fool riding around our woods nearly got an innocent killed.

Dick bangs the table. And you, sir, I wouldn’t care to be in your shoes if Prothero had picked you up with that in your pocket. He can’t hurt you, father.

Dick and Martha exchange a look. You’re a man of substance and you have nothing to hide. You could have explained that you simply… Simply? Nothing simple with the likes of Prothero.

He’s been looking for a chance to jump on me and this… He puts the tiara on his head. Would hand it to him on a plate. Your head’s empty, Jane.

Life’s not all singing and shedding peas. Dick sweeps the peas off the table. Jane jumps up, shocked, and runs out the door.

Jane! I didn’t… We watch Jane race across the yard and jump the gate into a field. You never did let those skirts get in your way, girl. I handled that magnificently, eh, Martha? I can hear you thinking it.

Tack that off. It don’t suit you. Dick has forgotten the tiara.

He takes it off. Where does she go, Martha? When she runs off for hours on end like a tinker child. Where does she go? Right.

A TV series about, well, Dick Turpin. And in this case, the daughter of Dick Turpin. Tell us about that.

Yes. Dick has reformed and thinks no one knows he used to be a… A highwayman. And his daughter certainly doesn’t know it.

But he doesn’t know that she’s a highwaywoman. What? Well, yes, I know. Excuse me.

Get out of here. When she runs off like a tinker child, that’s what she’s doing. And she’s about to be married off to a local bigwig, who is a perfectly nice young man.

But she doesn’t want to marry him. She wants to have a wild, crazy life. So, yeah, it was about the pair of them circling each other, father and daughter circling each other, starting to think, hang on, this is a family business.

What’s going on? But Dick being very conservative because he knows this could mean death, all their houses stolen from them and everyone in prison and hanged. And she’s, of course, much more giddy and thinks they can get away with it forever. So, yeah, it’s very Saturday evening.

It’s that early Saturday evening romp where they always seem to have huge budgets, always lots of horses in them. And also a real throwback to a film I was obsessed with as a child called The Wicked Lady. Ah, yes.

Margaret Watson Fonteyn, isn’t it? No, Margaret something. Oh, we’re going to have to look this up now, Laura. Margaret something, the mum at the beauty spot.

Go on, look it up. It’s called The Wicked Lady. It’s called The Wicked Lady.

It’s Margaret Douda. Rutherford, no, not Rutherford. No, that’d be different, Margaret.

Margaret Lockwood, of course. Margaret Lockwood and that wonderful actor with the plummy voice in it as well. Hold on, we haven’t got his name yet.

James. No, that’s Michael Winner’s version. Did you know there was a Michael Winner version? 1983.

Not Mel Ferret, hold on. Oh, James Mason, of course. James Mason.

James Mason. And he was her lover and I just loved it. It was all sort of rushing out of rooms and cracking whips and a hat on the side with a feather in it.

And I just thought it’d be brilliant. If I was an actress, I’d love to be playing that role. So yes, again, it was kind of comedy.

It would have been a series serial. I mean, you know, the end of the series would always be Dick or Jane escaping from the gallows. And it was just fun to write.

And it did get sent to people, but it never got any interest at all. I think there were probably half a dozen other similar things circling. It’s now I know that it’s kind of a perennial thing to open.

Oh, is it? Yeah, there’s a lot of it. I mean, there’s two Harryman things on at the moment. There was that Noel Fielding one that was cancelled and that really lovely one.

Renegade Nell. Renegade Nell as well, which was lovely. So yeah, I don’t think I was the right person to write it, but it was fun.

And I’m very, very proud of the line, booty from last night’s Jape. And to hear it said so, so actorishly is a delight. But that’s the thing, like all that language.

And do you know who else is in there? Lorna Doon. We did Lorna Doon when I was about nine. And that being out in the wind, being a girl and having to struggle with all your 50 petticoats, but still jumping on the horse and getting away.

I just love all that. Right. But you’re working on another TV project at the moment based on The Archers.

Yes. Got three books set in Radio 4 hit soap opera, The Archer’s Village of Ambridge, taking place before The Archers started. Now that is an excellent idea because The Archers has a huge audience in this country anyway, very popular.

I mean, it feels like the prequel options are endless. Well, that’s what I think. We’re trying to get it away.

It just so happens that my agent also is the agent of the editor of The Archers. And she kind of got us both in a room and said, this could be great, couldn’t it? So we did it with the Biebs blessing. And I had the staff on Speed Dial to talk about what kind of tractor would they have had before the war? Bovine diseases.

I actually have a folder of bovine diseases. And of course, keeping the kind of lineage, the pedigree of the families straight because people take it as they should incredibly seriously. It’s a delightful world to dip your toe in.

I can’t tell you how safe and lovely it is in the world of The Archers, but not in a kind of silly way, just in a kind of really nice people doing important jobs. Well, it’s very what the BBC does best. But yeah, I mean, I’d watch it.

But yeah, we’re talking to people and there’s lots of meetings that should have been emails. But yeah, I hope one day to see that, but it’s not like it’s not coming to a screen near you anytime soon. It just seems like a really good idea.

It does. It seems like an excellent idea. You’ve already got three books out of it, have you? Yeah.

And presumably there are endless others. You just have to keep going. And yes, but before that, the Archers in the Stone Age, I mean, yeah, we can just keep going back.

And it is, of course, the war is just like prime archers going to time, isn’t it? Yes. You know, all that kind of gritting your teeth and getting on with it and, you know, putting up with rationing. And I had a ball writing those books.

I presume you have many more plans coming out, surely? Don’t stop. No, they haven’t asked for any more. And do you need their permission to do that? Yes and no.

The problem is the plan was always that the end of the last book in the trilogy would be the day of the first episode of the radio serial. So we’re getting a crossing of universes and a crossing of ley lines. So I can’t get my archers to do what I want them to do.

But what about, you know, like the Star Wars, did it for God’s sake? Yeah, that’s true. Surely prequels of prequels. I mean, also the American TV series Yellowstone has about four spinoff series already.

Pre that and then pre that and pre that. I mean, the question, I suppose, is whether you’d be allowed to, do you need to apply to them for the IP and all that? Absolutely. Yeah, you do.

You do. And you have to share the profits with them. So yeah, you do.

You know, I can parley this into a pension if I keep yakking. But yeah, I mean, that is the idea, to kind of flesh it out and make it, you know, really nice sort of period thing. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I can’t do it on my own, Laura.

You mean for the TV series? Exactly. So we’ll work on that. But yeah, it was a joy and is a continuing joy to write about the archers, I have to say.

Excellent. Well, we have come to the end of the show. How was it for you, Bernie? It was lovely.

It was really lovely. I enjoyed the podcast anyway. And it’s surreal to be on this end of it, I have to say.

And yeah, thank you for being so gentle with me, Laura. I’m not quite sure what you thought I should be doing. I’m generally, I’m a very vanilla presenter.

I don’t do anything to anybody. So you’re always going to be safe. But having heard your offcuts, do you think any of these offcuts are worth going back to and having another stand back? Or do we think that their time has passed? I think if I’m honest, I think their whole time has passed.

But hearing Tiddles, I want to write about the cat who burns the prison down. I’m going to forcefully… And not as a children’s book, which the implication is the cat that burned down the prison. Exactly.

The lifeless cat that burned… No, I just, I want to get back into Tiddles. I love Tiddles. So yeah, I think they’re all backdated.

I think they’re all in my rearview mirror now. I really do think they are. And I think that’s great.

It’s nice to have a very crowded rearview mirror. But yeah, it is reminding me actually, just how… I remember someone saying to Ronnie Barker once when I was a kid watching him on, I think it was on Parkinson, said, do you ever worry that you won’t be able to make any more jokes that you’ve used up all your jokes? And he said, no, it’s like writing music. There’s only a certain amount of notes, but there’s no end to the amount of music you can write.

And I think the same is true of kind of literary endeavours. It’s just like a self-generating machine inside you. It’s an engine.

And it’s kind of nice to be reminded that your engine works. So thank you for that, Laura. It was absolutely our pleasure.

Well, it’s been great fun to talk to you today, Bernie, Juliet, Claire, MB, Alice, Catherine and Bernadette. Best of luck in your new home. And thank you for sharing the contents of your offcut straw with us.

Thank you, Laura. The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Bernadette Strachan. The offcuts were performed by Shash Hira, Noni Lewis, Beth Chalmers, Marcus Hutton and Emma Clarke.

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

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

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

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

Good, well, thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many did you end up playing in the end?

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

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

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

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

So how old were you when you wrote this?

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

Was it Love’s Young Dream?

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

So coy, let’s call him Tim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the same production, from the Hamlet.

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

They were character exercises, though, character monologues.

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry about the exclamation, Mark.

It suddenly felt a bit…

I’m Mary.

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

Laura’s mom.

That’s it.

Do we do both, or is that the French?

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

Yeah, I’m all set.

And Mary, it’s a pleasure.

Likewise. Well, we’ll be, won’t we?

Very soon, family.

Now, he must be exhausted. Let me…

She tries to take his suitcase.

No, no, you know what?

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

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

So now what? We…

I take you home, and we can… wedding.

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

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

And it’s your first time in England?

Very first.

Well, it must all seem very…

No queen.

Where is she?

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

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

David Beckham.

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

No idea. David Attenborough.

Of course.

With his little monkeys and his nature.

So is your car…?

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

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

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

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

Well, the Queen insists on it.

I bet she does.

I bet she does.

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

I saw the agenda.

I like it. We know where we stand.

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

Jo puts a reassuring hand on Mary’s hand.

You plan. You’re a planner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it’s politeness, isn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children’s TV channel.

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

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

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

Yes, thanks.

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

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

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

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

Yes, I’ve heard of Go Jetters.

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

You wrote them or you were in them?

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

No middle aged women who could apologise all the time.

No, or there would have been.

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

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

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

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

We wonder why Bevert turned up when nobody had died.

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

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

He’s into petty crime.

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

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

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

How long’s he staying with you?

I don’t know yet.

Well, those sheets will be your business.

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

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

She’s OCDC.

You’re no good when you’re anxious.

I’m learning to be.

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

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

He just bangs on about his bloody charity.

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

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

Sponging off you for a bit.

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

Drinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, I’ve really enjoyed it.

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

Thanks so much for having me. Thank you.

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

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer. Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is writer Jenny Colgan, author of over 40 romantic comedy, children’s, and science fiction books, since her first novel, Amanda’s Wedding, was published in 2000. In 2013, she won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award for Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweet Shop of Dreams, and then the Romantic Novelist Association Award for Comedy Novel of the Year in 2018 for The Summer Seaside Kitchen. Also writing as Jane Beaton, she created the Little School by the Sea series, described by her many fans as Mallory Towers for grownups, and for the Dr Who franchise, she’s written at least nine works under the name of JT. Colgan or Jenny T. Colgan. With her latest novels, The Bookshop on the Shore and 500 Miles from You both recently published, and Christmas at the Island Hotel coming later in the year, work ethic is clearly not an issue. Jenny Colgan, welcome to the Offcuts Drawer. 40 plus books in 20 years, that works out as two books a year. Have you got a, you must have a pretty good system worked out.

Well, I mean, some are novellas and some are for children. So they’re not all kind of full length titles. But yeah, I mean, I write two and a half thousand words a day, which if for some people seems like a lot, but if you’re a journalist or a sci-fi writer, doesn’t seem very much, about four days a week, because when my children were young, we lived in France. And in France, they don’t have school on Wednesdays. So you always take Wednesdays off. So that’s about 10,000 words a week. So, you know, you can have a first draft in about 10 weeks or so. And then a couple of months to edit and review it. So I don’t think it’s quite as, you know, it sounds like, I hate to go, you churn them out, don’t you? As if I literally just kind of, you know, I’m like that character in Little Britain that just types with a big kind of cat in her lap. How many now? Which is not the case at all. But, you know, I’m quite focused. When I wasn’t, before I had children, I would just kind of fanny about and do one book a year. And then, since I had children, of course, I was paying for every hour I wasn’t at home when someone else had to look after them.

Right.

That very much focuses the mind on how much it’s possible to get done.

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

This is a poem published in the British Medical Journal called Ode to NHS Managers. And I wrote it in 1995.

I am the voice of government. As such I speak for all. This country’s people put me here. I merely heed their call. A servant of the people, I am doing all for the best as I witness the slow puncture of the NHS. As a hospital, your role is not much more than drug dispenser. You could take some business tips from being as smart as Marks and Spencer. That is, listen to your market. Try to broaden your appeal. Did you know you only interest the old and down at heel? Trendy logos are quite helpful and that tender business sells. Paying £1.59 per hour in conditions worse than hell. That was a stroke of genius and I think it’s working well. Though what’s that oozing down the wall and what’s that awful smell? And doctors were always whingers, as you very well know. All this paperwork is good for them. It keeps them on their toes. Their divorce rates and depression are nothing deeply sinister. It’s quite a bit below the norm for your average cabinet minister. As for care in the community, you’re starting now to drone. It’s the ideal smart solution for a schizoid on their own. Instead of being protected, we will send them out alone and circumnavigate the cardboard box that most of them call home. And when the country’s had enough, and when the crying’s still, and when we’ve all but given up on trying for our ill, and when the figures are cut and dried, the episodes objectified, and when the hospitals subside and everyone has neatly died, if there is left a call for who neglected national health, for who betrayed us all, then who will kindly take the blame? Who led us to this fall? Why, those who push the paper ever flowing from within. Those who must make the scalpel cuts in budget, not in skin. Those nasty suits who endlessly act cruelly, mad and viciously. The ones who most vociferously won’t play this game to win. Blame managers, don’t look at me in your last mewling lament. Well you might very well think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment.

This was written in 1995 when you were not yet a writer. So who were you when you wrote this?

I was an administrator in the NHS, it will not surprise you to know. And that was the first piece of writing I ever got paid for. They accepted it. They have a kind of spoof issue, the BMG, that they run every Christmas time where they run lots of bits and pieces. And I was just so excited. And it was 50 pounds in the early 90s. And that was a fortune. I was working in a hospital in Bedford and living in a nursing home. And that 50 pounds, just I remember putting the check in, and you’re not meant to put the check in the first time you get paid, are you? You’re meant to pin it to the wall. But I put it in and I spent it mentally about four times. And I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to make any money in my life.

Well, what inspired you to write it?

I mean, like most writers, I was always writing something. You know, it was rubbish, but I was doodling away and doing stuff.

So at that point, what, you had just finished university, is that right?

I left university in 92 and picked up my first job. That would have been in about 94. I joined the NHS graduate management training scheme, and then they had a big internal push on to, they’d always had management that was very similar to each other and very dry and had always been the same. And so they had this big push to go and look for slightly different people, different thinkers. So one of the people in my intake was Johnny Popper, Robert Popper’s brother, who now heads a think tank and who was the inspiration behind Friday Night Dinner. Right. You know, there’s somebody that now runs a massive income. It was full of interesting people who did, from all sorts of diverse backgrounds, all of whom were completely useless in the environment they put us in. They kind of said, go and find us some mavericks. And they did. And we all left within about six months. It was a catastrophe in many, many ways.

Were you doing your stand up at that point?

I was. Yeah, I just started. I left the hospital and I went to work for a health think tank in London, really, just to get me to London. And that’s when I started doing a kind of open, I did a Jill Edwards comedy course and I started doing open spots. I did astoundingly few, considering how much mileage I’ve subsequently had. I just wasn’t very good. And I didn’t do it enough. And I started at the same time as Chappie, of course, Chappie Keepersandy and Jimmy Carr, Jimmy, I remember, and their work ethic, Jimmy’s work ethic, do you remember? There was not a gig he would not turn up to and just go on stage and he just, every time you saw him, he was six months better than he’d been the week before. He was so brilliant. And I just didn’t have it. Although I met, one, I met some brilliant people and learned a lot. And then two, when I wrote a novel, I didn’t write to the publishers, hi, I’m an NHS administrative assistant, would you like to read my novel? I said, hi, I’m an up and coming stand up on the comedy circuit. Would you like to read my novel? And of course, that made a huge difference, really. So from that perspective, except, let me tell you, more than one hideous kind of literary event or conference or library show that I’ve been introduced as, you know, ex stand up Jenny Colgan. And I’ve done, I did like 16 gigs and you can see come out and you see these really expectant faces, you know, there is nothing less funny than someone that you’ve been told is going to be hilarious. So I’ve had some kind of real professional stand up and I’m just standing there going yeah, not really. So but it did help.

So you went from NHS to stand up to novelist.

That was the sort of, Well, I was working in NHS and the stand up was the kind of night, night job really. And of course, you know, I’d send poems all over the place, obviously.

So was it poetry that you were mainly writing at that point then?

I think I wrote a children’s story that I sent to Bloomsbury and they went, what? They very kindly wrote back, which I think these days most people don’t. But you know, you know what it’s like in your 20s, you just have a hunger for it. You know, you’re just desperate for it. And because I grew up or I was a student in Edinburgh, which meant I’d always worked the Edinburgh Festival. So I’d worked the Go to Balloon, I worked the Pleasance, I worked the Traverse for years. So I would see these other young people when they were actors, which I wasn’t, but they were creators, they were creative people talking about creative things. And, you know, John Hannah would come in, have a drink with that girl from this life. And, you know, it would just be full of amazing stuff going on. And I just wanted to be in it. I just didn’t know how or what my met you was going to be. But with that extraordinary kind of I’m 24, you know, get out of my way.

Time for another off cut. Jenny, what’s this one?

OK, number two, this is a clip from The Scientist written in 2014, which is a passionate, it says in my note, was a passionate romance, is a passionate historical romance, because I believe in this one. Set at the birthplace of atomic warfare.

He was there. Oh, how my heart leapt, sitting at a small desk in the corner of the room in front of the blackboard. There were piles of exercise books and scraps of paper around him, and he was writing intently in one, whilst his other hand drummed repeatedly on the table. His foot tapped the floor, too. It was like he could never be still. He was a whirl of constant motion. I think that’s why he needed so much sex. It was the only thing I ever saw still him, sent to him, drag him away from that odd land he spent the rest of his life in, where everything vibrated on a quantum level, where nothing was still nor ever could be, and everything hurtled about constantly, simply in order to exist. Dick lived his entire life like that. He didn’t notice I was there until I made a small noise and moved across the threshold. Also, I wanted to shut the door behind me in case anyone passed by and saw us. I was feeling brazen, but I hadn’t completely lost my mind. His face broke into a broad smile to see me, and he put his pencil down and opened his arms. Sis, he said, and his pleasure was so obvious and unforced, I couldn’t find it in myself to ask, well, what did I even want to ask? Where had he been? I knew where he’d been. He’d been at work. Why hadn’t he stormed in my house and taken me in front of my husband? Why he hadn’t ridden up on a white horse and carried me away from all this? My feverish brain was completely fogged with lust, and I couldn’t even think straight. I put all of that nonsense out of my mind. I was here now, and he was grinning at me like someone had just given him a present. Come over here. I was just thinking about you. This was a complete lie. I had seen him. Whatever he was thinking about, you know, you and I wouldn’t understand it in a million years. In fact, whatever he was thinking about, it’s entirely possible he was the first person ever to think it. Anyway, I didn’t care about that just then. I just was so overwhelmed to see him again, and I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. Come over here and sit down on my lap, he said. Distract me from throwing confetti. Why are you throwing confetti? As I made my way over, I noticed that the ground was indeed covered in confetti. Dick shrugged. Just a math problem. Good one, too. Why was he throwing confetti? I asked the old lady on the bed. But I knew the answer before she even said it. Fallout, said Sissy. He was calculating the trajectory of nuclear fallout.

Well, you said this was a historical romance. So did you finish writing it? What’s happened to it?

I did. I did finish it. And we just, as these things happen sometimes, we just couldn’t find a home for it. It’s quite dirty. And sometimes you think, you know, just because you’re profoundly interested in a period, you think it’s going to appeal to lots of people and it doesn’t necessarily. And there also came a point where it was just like, well, you know, there’s lots of people that read my books because they’re comforting or because they’re warm. You know, but they’re not dirty. And so do we really want to mess with people in that way who might be expecting one thing and get something else? So for all sorts of reasons, we didn’t push it, but I’m very fond of it.

So basically you’re saying this is a bit more risque than the other stuff.

Oh, it is, yeah.

You didn’t want to maybe rename yourself. You’ve been Jenny T. Colgan and JT. Colgan for science fiction. Could you not create another… Well, you could, but I mean, that’s very difficult to do.

You know, there’s a million books published every 10 seconds. And when publishers go to quite a lot of trouble to kind of build up a brand, it’s very difficult to start from scratch and say, you should read this person you’ve never heard of and that you can’t Google and it doesn’t really exist. We can’t tell you why. You know, it’s a big undertaking and I already have a very big job. So I would like one day to see it come out in some form or another. And it’s funny because both my agents in the UK and the US, both of them really loved it. But it’s just one of, it’s niche for it. Very niche. If you’re really massively into physics, yeah, exactly, kind of math porn, you know, it’s quite a small crossover diagram. But that’s alright. I’m proud of it and I’m proud I wrote it.

So it’s a full novel sitting in your drawer.

A full novel sitting in my drawer. Yeah, so it’s a kind of, you know, it’s a woman that was at the Manhattan Project in the war. She’s very old and so she’s interviewed by a contemporary woman who’s having all sorts of problems with kind of Tinder dating and kind of how the transactional nature of contemporary sexual politics compared to the extraordinary kind of power, I think, of the forbidden. I think John Fowles and the French Lieutenant’s woman, he always says, was sex sexier then? He obviously thinks that it was, you know, and that I find that interesting too.

Now, I read in an interview where you said you reckoned your big break came when you wrote Meet Me at the Cupcake Café and you credit not the romance element but the baking element for your success. Is that right?

It was certainly one of these serendipitous things that happened, which is I wrote that book just the year the first bake-off started. And the first bake-off wasn’t a massive thing. But then, of course, books are published a year after they’ve written. So it came out the following year and then the second season hit and everything kind of went a bit kind of cake-orientated bananas. It was lovely. It just gave people, a lot of people who may not have read me or who may have thought, oh, that’s, you know, she writes for young people or it’s not really for me. It opened up a much broader, wider market. So I have a massive debt and fondness for bake-off, purely by coincidence.

And are you a big baker yourself? I know there’s lots of recipes in your books. Are they genuine?

Yeah, well, I mean, at the time I was living in France. And so I had to learn to cook because you have to cook in France. You can’t buy ready meals or anything. Plus I had three kids under four, so, you know, I wasn’t going anywhere. But in France, you don’t really bake. It seemed like a really curious thing to do, because why would you? You’re not going to be better than the patisserie. And the patisserie is only like 90 metres away. So, you know, people would come around and I’d offer them a piece of cake. And, of course, French women being French women, they just go, no, merci. They don’t do what I’m supposed to do. They just go, oh, I shouldn’t. Oh, it’s so naughty. Oh, a tiny bit. You know, that. Nonsense. French women just go, well, no, I’m not going to eat cake. It’s the middle of the afternoon. What’s the matter, you crazy? So, you know, I was at a kind of slightly odd anyway in France, and then I started baking. But I think it’s comforting, and it is not difficult. You know, a nine year old can do it if you follow instructions, and I like that about it. My mother was a great cook and a baker, so I have happy memories of, you know, licking her old, you know, the spoons to her cakes. And so it’s that feeling that I was going for. You’re not going to become a master baker through reading my books. But hopefully you’ll share, you know, a little bit of the satisfaction that you get from doing it.

Right. Let’s have your next off-cut, Jenny. Tell us about this one.

This is from The Bunnies of Bromwood, a book, an entire book that I wrote when I was 10. So this would be 19, well, about 1980, 1981.

This is great, said Bath Bunny. Now I want everyone to do a length of the pool backstroke. But this isn’t a swimming lesson, complained Paris Bunny. Oh no, said Bath Bunny. Hurry up about it. Suddenly there was a scream.

Help! Help! Save me!

It was Currant Bunny, who in seeing some nice lily pads had gone over to get one, but the water was far out of her depth, and as she could not swim very well, she could only cry for help. At once Bath Bunny began to swim quickly towards her. Grabbing her, he began to get back to shore. Oh, you heavy lump! He spluttered to Currant Bunny, who had fainted. After what seemed like a year to Bath Bunny, he finally reached shallow water. He dragged poor Curranty out and began giving her the kiss of life. Oh, the poor little bunny, murmured Paris Bunny. No, I don’t want any soppy nonsense, said Cream Bunny rather sharply. She’ll be all right, so that’s an end of it. Look, she’s got a small piece of paper in her hand, said Bath Bunny. Oh, it’s probably a bit of rubbish some human has chucked in, snapped Creamy Bunny. Gosh! suddenly exclaimed Bath Bunny. Look, everyone, come and see this. Oh, what is it? asked Paris Bunny. The paper in her hand, it is a treasure map. What? said everybody. A treasure map! shouted Bath Bunny.

So there you go. What did you think of that?

Actually, my father came across it a couple of months back. It’s a whole book. There’s like about 120 pages of it, all written out in varying handwriting that I worked on for, you know, quite a lot of time. And he said, oh, I’m going to send it over. It’ll be hilarious. I was like, I know. There was a bit that I did not send you where one of the rabbits has a baby as written by a nine year old who had no idea how anybody had babies.

Oh, I’d love to have seen that.

I know. I just couldn’t. It just made me cringe so much. I tell you why, because my parents used to get drunk at dinner parties and weed it out to their friends. It was very naughty of them. But I think, you know, of course, in retrospect, they were very proud that this ridiculous child had written an entire book.

And so they should be. They were spectacular. All the different characters in there. I have to say, when I was typing that out, copying it from your handwriting, I was laughing so much at the various phrases. I thought it was lovely. It really did make me laugh. I suppose you are actually a children’s author now, so you do know your stuff. But to someone who’s not a children’s author, I thought, oh, could there be something else?

It would be funny if the only thing that was actually worth revisiting was the thing I’d written when I was nine. But yes, no, I had no idea my dad still had it because he’s moved a few times. And it was, yeah, really odd to feel, even just to feel the weight of it. Again, I was getting, my daughter’s ten and I’m going to maybe hand over to her.

So did you have a lot of projects like that? Is this a one-off work or do you have several oeuvres by the young Jenny?

There was just a lot of stuff. I remember my primary school, which was quite small, they used to hang, they don’t do this kind of thing anymore, but the pieces of work they considered to be good, they would hang outside in the corridors. And I was everywhere. There was one I’d written about a mining disaster. So everybody else was kind of writing about a lovely horse and I was writing about people dying in a mining disaster. So I do, like people that knew me then, the two things I’ll say is, oh, you know, you were always like in the papers and for writing something stupid, or we never knew what the top of your head looked like because it was always underneath a gigantic book.

So your family, do you come from a family of readers and writers?

I certainly come from a family. Well, both my parents were teachers and both my parents came from very poor backgrounds. My mother in particular, my grandfather, my mother’s father did not learn to read until he was, my mother taught him, I think, when she was an adult. So she was your archetypal working class, pushy, pushy mum, you know? Right. We can’t really afford it, but I found a guy that will teach you how to play the piano for, in return for an apple pie, you know, and that’s the guy. We’re going to the library and she took me to the library every single week. So I was first in my family to go to university, that kind of thing. So that kind of full support, but very pushy and quite snobby. And of course, that generation of working class mothers of whom, you know, a lot of us are massive beneficiaries. But then, of course, we all turned like proper bourgeois. We were really snobby. My mother’s fondness for prawn cocktail, you know, I was such a snob. I was absolutely a pub. Basically, they built us into what they desperately wanted. And then, you know, then they found us absolutely insufferable.

Right, let’s have another offcut now. What’s this one?

This is from around 2012. And it was an idea for a television series for very young children, for CBeebies, featuring Dr Puppet, which is, you can Google it, it’s a thing, Dr Puppet versions of the characters of Dr Who, specifically Matt Smith and little Amelia Pond.

It was early on a Saturday morning in Amelia Pond’s garden. And Amelia was pestering a frosty caterpillar.

Oi, no poking, he needs time.

Be a butterfly, caterpillar. Oh, he’s gone. Are you a butterfly yet?

He’s gone because of all the poking.

Maybe it’s helping butterfly?

This is the duck thing all over again.

Can I see a proper caterpillar?

There’s a lot of tentacles. I mean a lot.

Let’s go. Bye, aunt.

Sound effects of footsteps.

Tentacles, tentacles.

Oh, good, you brought the custard.

We hear the TARDIS wheeze and then the opening credit music, the children’s version of the Dr Who theme.

I’m the doctor.

And I’m Amelia Pond.

And we travel in the TARDIS to have adventures on the planet of… Amelia’s garden!

Exterior Amelia’s garden. Everything on the planet is oversized, lush and green. The doctor and Amelia are smaller than blades of grass. The doctor is standing there on his own in front of the TARDIS.

Amelia?

A huge caterpillar waddles into view, looking perturbed. Amelia is sliding down something which looks slippery and fun, but turns out to be… The caterpillar speaks.

Would you mind terribly getting off my larvae?

Well, that’s quite an intriguing idea. And when you sent it to me, it had some very cute illustrations for this. You mentioned Dr Puppet. Who’s Dr Puppet?

It’s a woman in America. She’s an animator. And on the side, she makes these unbelievably crafted versions of Dr Who. And these perfect puppet versions. You really should Google it. It’s just Dr Puppet, one word. They’re beautiful. And she makes these little stop-motion animations. But of course, it takes her forever because she’s doing it effectively in her own time. And she’s not working with the BBC. She’s just doing it as a project. And so I was like, well, I write for Dr Who. You make these amazing things. And Matt, at the time, was the doctor who’s a wonderful doctor with children. Not all the doctors work terribly well with children. Peter Capaldi is a brilliant doctor, but he’s terrifying to children. And so we got together and we had these animations and we took them along. And it was one of these things where it was instantly. So, you know, for tiny children, instead of going to a different planet, you look at a different animal every week, but you have the same relationship and the same lovely adventures. And also the other thing is before us, children never went in the TARDIS and now they do. It used to be the rule that children weren’t allowed to travel in the TARDIS, but now they are. So it was one of these things that everything about it was charming and Matt was leaving and everything was in flux and it was such a huge, it’s expensive. So even to make five or six minute films in stop motion is so expensive. So, you know, and this is why I’m quite glad I write novels really, because when you write a novel, you write it, we make some changes and then it appears in the shops, you know, if you’re trying to make TV, it relies on who’s available, what you can do, your costumes, your sets, all the rest of it. If you’re trying to make animation, it’s even more difficult. So I realise I’m in a very easy creative genre because it’s just me and a typewriter, but it is quite dispiriting. I mean, I’ve had, you know, dozens of novels published. We’ve sold screenwrites to most of them, and I’ve never had a single thing made, you know, just because it’s very, very difficult to do that. So, you know, it was always a long shot, but I could see it just be in that very classic BBC style. I’ve been something so lovely.

Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a brand new podcast like this. And visit offcutstraw.com for more details about the writers and actors and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. Now, Dr Who is a big part of your writing life. When I looked on Wikipedia, you’ve either written five or nine Dr Who books. Probably both those numbers are incorrect. How many have you written for Dr Who?

Oh, goodness. Two novels about five or six novellas, two full-length audio dramas for David Tennant and Catherine Tate, and one for the very amazing Alex Kingston.

Although I find audio drama very difficult. Why?

Well, it’s very difficult. Why are the plays in Radio 4 terrible? It’s very hard. What’s that, Doctor? Well, it’s a cathedral. You can’t see it, but it’s quite complicated to build a world. Actually, I’ll tell you a very quick funny thing which you can edit out if it’s not interesting. When I was working with Big Finish or the audio drama production company, and every year they’ll do a big Doctor range of David Tennant or whoever it is. This three styles of Doctor Who story, there’s a contemporary Doctor Who story set on Earth on the present day. There’s a historical Doctor Who story set in the past that British people would understand. There’s a completely alien Doctor Who story set on a brand new alien planet, a completely different world. Those are the three types of stories that Doctor Who makes. They do three every year, one of which is contemporary home, one of which is historical, one of which is alien. Every bloody time I would be last to get it, I’d go, contemporary, please, okay, historical. And every bloody time, I got alien bloody planet. And it’s so, so you had to start from nothing. You had to start from, here’s a complete, here’s a new planet. Here’s the laws of nature of this planet. Is it underwater? Do they walk upside down? You know, you have to figure out everything. And everyone else is just running around going, oh, this is hilarious. It’s like a fake ghost. And I was like, okay, well, this is, you know, you have to make up the names for the planets and everybody’s name. And anyway, it’s, yeah, it’s really difficult. I mean, it was amazing, just like you have actors now, you know, anything you would write, David Tennant and Catherine Tate are going to make 150,000 times better. But I still didn’t feel that I was, it wasn’t, I wasn’t proud of it.

You weren’t proud of the audio drama, you mean?

No, I’m really proud of the novels. Some of the Dr Who stories I’ve written. If you are a Dr Who fan, you’ll know what picnic at Asgard means. And I wrote that, and I’m so, so, so pleased and proud of it. So I’m really proud of the novels that I’ve written. But I find the audio dramas just, just a little cringy. And just thinking, oh, this isn’t, it’s not quite what I do.

Are they very prescriptive when you write for a franchise like Dr Who? Did they say you can have this, you can’t have that? There are certain laws you have to follow?

But you, I mean, your job then is to push and push and push at what you can and can’t do. The first one I ever did is called Dark Horizons set in Viking times. And at one point, he, it’s Matt Smith again, and he jumps into the water to rescue a child and he kicks off his shoes and trousers. The doctor never removes his trousers. That’s the law. Yes, no, no trouser removal. It is, but that in its own way makes it a lot of fun. And sometimes you get to push things into what becomes canon for the show. You know that this becomes a part of what Doctor Who is. And that’s very exciting. Sometimes it’s just really annoying. I wrote a thing for Alex Kingston, who’s a River Song. And I wrote her in a sonic trowel. And then Steven Moffat wrote the Christmas edition, which has Peter Capaldi and Alex in it again. And it’s literally got the doctor going, what’s that? She goes, it’s my sonic trowel. And he goes, that’s rubbish. And all these Dr Who people are going, oh, so sorry, Steven thinks your sonic trowel is rubbish.

So close and yet so far. What a shame.

Well, I’m still in there. Steven’s a very good friend of mine. But it’s, do you know what? If you’re a real fan of something like I am of Dr Who, it’s so exciting. It’s such fun. Every time you write the Tardis of Warps, that’s the official stage direction is V-W-O-R-P-S. Every time you write the Tardis of Warps, that’s a pretty cool thing to do.

Let’s move on to your next off-cut now. Tell us about this one.

This is from Up on the Rift Tops, which is a middle school book. Let us say that’s about seven to nine year old readers, which I wrote involving my children in 2011. And it has now become the MacGuffin in the Bookshop series. And I will explain that to you after this.

I need to tell Mummy, said Wallace, looking round. And a policeman. The pigeon drew himself up to his full height, 14 centimetres, and said sternly, and what do you think your mother would say if you told her? But I could bring her up here and show her, said Wallace. And police could come in helicopters and get her. The pigeon shook his head. They’d never find the queen of the nathers. They can’t see that way. The rooftop world is only visible to those who already know. Look closer. The pigeon drew him round the four corners of the roof, pointing out distant figures. On a row of old brick houses, a chimney sweep popped gently from one to another. On a bright, shiny glass building, Wallace could make out suddenly a window cleaner, lightly stepping over complicated structures that seemed carved of ice. A young girl, her high-heeled shoes in her hands and carrying a champagne bottle was dodging chimney pots at lightning speed. And far away, across the river, Wallace could just make out white-suited doctors scrambling over the top of the great grey hospital. Our roads are not for everyone, said Robert. Your mother would not see them. The police have never seen them, although they have tried very hard. Most grown-ups belong to the world of the street. They keep their heads down, staring at the pavement, or prodding at those… those… things. They’re telephones, said Wallace. He knew grown-ups did that all the time. It made him really annoyed. Yes, said Robert. You know what happens when they do that all day? Wallace shook his head. They stop looking up. They lose all capacity for wonder. They lose their sense of the roof of the world. And sometimes they kick pigeons.

So, the word MacGuffin. If my memory of Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVD extras is correct, I think I know what that is. But can you explain it anyway?

It’s the thing around which the plot hinges. And it doesn’t really matter what it is. So in Indiana Jones, it’s the Holy Grail, I guess. And it’s in Citizen Kane, it’s Rosebud, it’s the Sledge. It’s whatever the thing is. The thing is that people want, but it’s not necessarily important in itself. So yeah, it’s the thing that the characters have to go through to obtain, but what it is isn’t as important as what happens to the characters while they’re finding it.

So presumably it’s the book that is featured in the Bookshop series, is that right?

Yes, well, the summer of 2012, the Olympic summer, I was stuck in London, because my husband was at sea, with the children, and I started writing it. And it wasn’t a particularly nice summer. And I liked where we were in London, was right in the centre of town. I liked the idea that you can try and make your way over St Paul’s and right across London without putting a foot on the ground, if that was possible, only using the rooftops. And if you put a foot on the ground, then you’re stuffed. So, you know, and to make it out to Galleon Street, which I think is where they’re going, I really liked the idea. And I just put the kids in it to have them in it. And my agent at the time was just like, it’s a very difficult market, which it is, it’s a very old fashioned idea. So I don’t know what we’re going to do with it. And it’s like, okay, that’s fine. However, then when I wrote the first of the bookshop novels, which in America was called The Bookshop on the Corner, they need a priceless first edition to raise money. That’s what they need. And she stumbles upon it. And I thought, well, I’m not, I’m going to have it as this. And so she stumbles upon this amazing, flawless edition of Up on the Rooftops. And I described the cover and she’s like, oh, that amazing classic from my childhood of the children, whose feet can’t touch the ground. And someone else would come in and go, oh, do you remember the Queen of the Nethers? And they’d kind of bond over it. And that was the MacGuffin, you see. And I love the idea of having this idea of this classic book without actually having to write it or to make it that good. And then that book did extraordinarily well in Germany. And then there’s a second one called The Bookshop on the Shore, which is out now, in which it also features. Anyway, there is someone who’s written a book called Up on the Rooftops, which has no connection to it at all, that people keep ordering. And if you go and look on the Amazon page, it’s just people going, what? This is… People are expecting. And I think, I really hope this is going to come to a point where I will actually just have to write it. But there’s no way it can possibly be as good as I’ve built it up to be in the books that reference it. So anyway, if you’re reading my books and thinking, got up on the rooftop sounds great. I agree with you. However, it’s not written and that thing on Amazon, that’s not it.

So how much of it did you write?

No, a couple of it. I’ve found three chapters. I’ve had it plotted. I kind of, in my head, I really like Neil Gaiman’s Never Where, you know, where London is literally what it is. And I just really, and that set under London, and I like this as a kind of equivalent over London, so there would be a scene in the Whispering Gallery at St Paul’s and how they’d have to cross the bridges on the top and, you know, get through Canary Wharf and the pigeons would help them and the Tower of London and, you know, it just, it just felt like it still feels like fun to me or a little bit like the Snow Queen, you know, and they have to catch Delphine, who’s my youngest, who then and now is mischievous and not ever in the mood to be caught. So it was, yeah, it’s nice. Of course, I like reading it. I often write children in my books, partly because I like writing them and I think a lot of people are very bad at writing them and they write very sophisticated, wisecracking children. My pet peeve is children in books and films who are interested in the emotional lives of adults. It’s endless. It’s like, oh, how are you feeling about that? It’s like, kids, literally, you’re just a food dispensing robot there. If a kid is worried about your emotional state of mind, it’s a terrible judgment on your parenting. You know, it’s like throwing yourself downstairs in front of your kids. Don’t do it. So I’m always trying to write very accurate children. And quite often, when they were younger, I would just take the age that they were at and write it in. And it’s actually a really weirdly lovely thing to have now is a record of my children at the ages that they were. You know, it’s particularly three, four, five, because you think you’re going to remember it, but you really don’t. So I like writing children. I like their moral certainty about things.

Well time for another Offcut. Jenny, what’s this one?

This is a clip from White Maasai, oh, jinks. A musical I was collaborating on in 2013 about a true story of a Swiss German woman who married a Maasai warrior.

Exterior Africa, crush, hot, extraordinary amounts of noise and smells. Surrounded by local people, Corinne, young and fresh looking, and Marco are crowded on a dangerously lurching boat.

This is awful.

What are you talking about? It’s wonderful. It’s our holiday. Enjoy it.

But it smells.

Of life.

Of toilets.

Do you hate humans, Marco? Collectively yes. Individually.

I like.

He moves in to embrace her. But as he does so, trips over someone shopping, causing an upset, a lot of flapping and an enormous hubbub. He flounders around, making more mess and upset. An elderly man starts shouting at him as several women eye him crossly. There is a song. But Corinne isn’t looking. She is staring at a man at the very far end of the boat, like a tinger, who is ignoring all of this, instead staring out to sea. He is beautiful and dressed in full warrior clothing. Finally, he glances round to see the hubbub. Marco has slipped on some chicken crap and bursts out laughing. Everything freezes as Corinne gazes at him and he catches her eye. The song changes to something softer and less rousing. I was lost. Interior, nightfall, landing from the boat. Everyone disperses, leaving Marco and Corinne alone. Marco is nervously clutching his bum back. We’re lost. Corinne looks around, listening to the crickets. Smell the night air. Smells of burnt things, nasty burnt things. I thought there was supposed to be a bus here.

Come on, this is Africa, not Switzerland.

Yeah, I see that.

From far off comes a gentle calling noise.

So what was the plan behind this? It was quite a departure.

Well, I have a good friend called Toby Goff, who is a kind of impresario. He puts on world music events is what he does. He travels the world. He puts on a huge Cuban show. He puts on shows from Africa. He puts on shows from Brazil. And he came to Cannes. We were there and we went for breakfast. He said, look, I’ve got the rights to this book. And, you know, I’m thinking of doing something with African music. Would you be interested in writing the book for it? The words that the music fits into. And he gave me the book. And it was a huge, huge bestseller in Switzerland and Germany. I mean, the huge book. And it is about a Swiss, white Swiss German woman who goes on holiday to Africa, goes on one of these tourist events. And one of the guys who dresses up to entertain tourists, she falls in love with him and they get married and she moves to his village and eventually nearly dies in childbirth and comes back. So I was kind of, it’s interesting. It has a lot to say about a lot of different things. But you know what, it just kind of petered out. We could get the music. Toby was in Cuba. You know, all sorts of things happened. I don’t know if it was the right thing to do. It was a few years ago, let me tell you. It seems very odd now, even the title. But hey-ho. I mean, the thing is, you must know this. If somebody says, why don’t you try this? Then you obviously, yes. And then you figure it out later. Theoretically, yes.

It doesn’t.

You still gave it a shot. I always think the worst thing is to not, or to choose not to try anything is also a choice, I always think.

It’s just an interesting combination. A musical, considering your main experiences, pros with a little bit of audio drama, a musical mixed with a subject matter that is quite sensitive.

It’s a choice, yes. I mean, I love musicals and I always, I wrote a libretto for an opera.

Oh, did you?

Yeah, I did. For Pimlico, not for Pimlico Opera. For, oh, I forgot the name of the opera company. Anyway, I did.

Did it get performed?

It did. And I thought this is going to be easy because I like writing rhymes, as you know. This is going to be easy. This is going to be fun. I’m going to be Stephen Fry and write Me and My Girl and, you know, make a fortune or Ben Elton or something. And that this is going to be brilliant because I love musicals. Anyway, it wasn’t brilliant. It’s terrible. It’s really hard. You know, lots of things don’t rhyme with anything. And I ended up moon spooning and tuning it much more than I had hoped.

Nothing goes obviously with Maasai, does it?

Oh, God, I didn’t even get that far. Oh, God.

Oh, can you imagine how awful it would be? Now I can’t even begin to think what you’d rhyme Maasai with.

Oh, he’s a cool guy. I don’t know. It’s terrible. Everything about it was terrible. So no, it didn’t go. And that’s all right. Another thing that is not my destiny is to write a massive, really dodgy musical. Actually, somebody’s turned, you know, the class novels that I’ve written about boarding school. That’s a musical.

Is it? Uh-huh.

I have not plucked up the courage to see it, despite being offered tickets on several occasions. Neither have I played the CD, which has been sent to me, but it does exist as a musical form. Fantastic. I know. I just can’t. I can’t listen to my own audiobooks, right? I just get too embarrassed. But do you know what I’d really love is I’d quite like to sell, quite often people sell their rights to Bollywood firms. And they will make any story that you sell into a musical, and that will become a musical. And I’ve witnessed much joy from people getting their books adapted over there. So fingers crossed.

OK, time for your final off cut. Tell us about this one, please.

This is from a thrill, really is a pitch for a thriller called The Coup, written in 20. Yeah, it was recent because it’s political. So 2018, I think.

22 Princes Street, Edinburgh is notable for a large coffee shop and an extraordinarily clear view of Edinburgh Castle right across the street, for which it is more than worth the price of a large latte, particularly on a clear windy spring day where the sky is a bright pale blue and tiny clouds scud across it, only adding to the perfection of the site. Above it were a suite of rooms with a surprisingly strong security system on the stairs, more than you would think would be needed to deter a lost coffee drinker. Behind the door, though, and the two large men standing on either side of it, was a suite of classic Georgian rooms, panelled with chandeliers and shutters on the windows currently thrown open. A figure stood near the vast marble fireplace, currently filled with a floral bouquet of lilies and pale violet thistles. He was not tall, but stood as if he were. His dark hair was thinning and cut short. He wore a pair of thin-framed glasses on a small featured face. Surprisingly, lush-lashed brown eyes peered curiously through the lenses. He was currently being dressed. On his feet were a pair of shiny black brogues laced around heavy cream wool socks with flashes either side. A short silver-haired man was fussing with a lace cravat worn over a black waistcoat with solid silver diamond-shaped buttons. A jacket fringed with briquette and the same silver buttons on the sleeves was being brushed down at the back. The pure white shirt had lacy cuffs that hung down below the black sleeves of the jacket. Beneath it was an immaculate kilt. The tartan was a fine white base, laced with red and more white on the black background, striking, almost garish. A dress tartan, something to be looked at. The dresser placed a black velvet cap with a large pluming pheasant feather sticking out of the top of it. The effect could have been ridiculous, but the atmosphere in the room was reverential. By the window dust motes bounced in the sunny air. It was a perfect day, although that meant more people out and about. But even so, everything was in place. The man sighed with happiness and moved over to the opposite wall from the fireplace and regarded himself. Bah oui, he said, pleased. Ça marche, non?

So this is called the coup as in C-O-U-P, not C-O-O. So tell us about the coup.

Oh, it was just such a fun idea. It was really kind of post-Brexit. And there is a guy, there’s a Belgian guy who for years has been marching around saying he can prove his bloodline back to the Stewart’s, therefore he’s the rightful king of Scotland. And he’s not allowed in Edinburgh Castle, which is true. He officially is not allowed in Edinburgh Castle, partly because he’s a nuisance. But I love the idea that in a state of kind of extraordinary confusion politically, that he would take over Scotland in a world where London, Westminster couldn’t give a rat’s ass, which I think they really don’t about Scotland, where you’d have the First Minister kind of being given everything she wanted, but in a way she really didn’t want, you know, and kind of as soon as it’s happening, loads of Scots, especially if the weather was nice, going, yeah, all right, we’ll give this guy. It was so funny and violent and dramatic and taking, you know, having a siege on the whole of Edinburgh Castle. And I was chatting to my friend, Hugo Rifkin, the brilliant political writer. I just, it was such a big dramatic idea and we pitched it to a few places and no one would touch it with a barge pole. It was very sticky. And actually it was my favourite rejection note that we’ve ever had, I think, was from someone at the BBC saying, we can’t risk taking this project on in case it actually happens. The likelihood of something equally stupid happening in Scottish politics could not be ruled out. So it was, it’s written there as prose, but the idea was that it would be a movie, that it would be a kind of assault on the castle, a declaration of sovereignty from when London didn’t care. But oh yeah, I know it was. It was going to be a thriller. They were going to take the castle by force. They were going to declare himself king and then he would become extraordinarily popular. London wouldn’t care, the First Minister would have to make a decision about what to do about the whole thing. So it was a kind of big daft silly.

That sounds like a brilliant idea. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t go for that. I mean, maybe you could change names and maybe not make him Belgian, make him Swiss or Italian or something.

Well, quite, yes. Any of that you could do. I know. Well, of course, at the time, the idea of having, they shot the last Avengers film in Edinburgh and the last Fast and Furious film in Edinburgh and both times it was a complete nutter habit for everybody that lives there. But, you know, it’s huge, it’s epic. You need crowds, you need people storming the city, you need people up on the battlements.

Oh, there’s CGI for that sort of thing, surely, by now.

Oh, see, Lauren, now you’re perking me. Now I want to do it again. And also, you know, I have no, I write little books about baking, you know, I have no, you know, I’m not coming into this with any chops at all. I had to accidentally, like, bump into James Cameron on a plane. Oh, that’s a terrible, you know, strategy for a career. But yeah, no, I still, I still think it was, it was just the way everybody reacted when you said, well, it’s about a king declaring Scottish independence by taking over Edinburgh Castle. And people just cringe. My agent just had her hands over her eyes. Please don’t talk to me about this.

Really, that’s so interesting. I’m so, I am very surprised. I wonder if you tried to resubmit it now.

I wonder if the reaction will be the same. Interesting. I’m tired just thinking about it.

Right, well, I mentioned at the beginning that you’ve just had two novels come out. Obviously, one of them very much just. The Bookshop on the Shore and 500 Miles from You and Christmas at the Island Hotel is coming later in the year. So presumably it’s time for a holiday now. Would you have more plans of writing projects starting now?

Well, I’ll have a book coming out this time next year, which means I’ll need to finish it by October or so. So I am writing about the lockdown, and I think we’ll need to see, because people have quite good memories of being in things like the war or living under Stalin. People tend to remember good bits about bad experiences. And I will be interested to see next year if people are quite nostalgic about the beautiful sunny days and about being at home and the birdsong and so on, and forget all the horrible stuff that was going on. And I write about isolated communities anyway. So I’m writing about an isolated community that has to decide how to behave under lockdown, essentially.

But they can’t meet each other, surely? Or can they?

Well, if you’re running a bakery, you’re a central worker. So there’s that. But also, there might be, for example, two people stranded on the island that can’t get home who are a balcony apart. I like it. I like that a lot. I think there’s potential in that. So what I’m going to do is I’m writing it. And then if it turns out next year that people really don’t, they’re just fed up of it. They just want to get back to their normal lives and really don’t want to read about it at all. Well, then, I mean, a novel is just about how people behave in a crisis situation. That’s all a novel is. So I lift out the lockdown crisis and we’ll make it a flood. We’ll do something else with it, I think. But I think the fundamentals of how isolated communities or how small communities work under crisis. So I think I’m going to focus on that and see how it goes.

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

I think I’m slightly surprised that my tastes are broader or my interests are broader. I think this probably says a bit about the commercial world, not just of fiction, but of anything really, which is that once you hit on something people like, then there is quite a lot of pressure internationally to keep doing it. And, you know, so Ian Rankin will write Rebus novels or Stephen King will always write monster novels, you know. And that’s interesting to me that I do, you know, obviously have quite a lot of different ideas, but kind of plough quite a narrow furrow. But on the other hand, I have quite, I feel quite a kind of responsibility is a weird word, but yeah, sentiment towards my readers, you know, particularly who just say no. When I get my holiday, me and my daughter, we buy a book between us and we take it and I read it and then she reads it and that’s what we do. And it’s always nice that, but also I do feel that for me to go, well, I know you like to read books about islands, but no, shut up and sit down. You’re going to read this book about a coup. You know, it feels a bit that I wouldn’t want to do that. Does that make sense? Yes, yes. So there’s a sense that I, you know, sometimes it feels that my career runs on quite a narrow track, even though my interests are very Catholic. But actually, I wouldn’t necessarily want it any other way. I’m not prepared to go and sit through those gruesome meetings of which you must have been in thousands, of pitching and pitching to a very disinterested 24-year-old. Rather than doing something that I already know makes people happy. So it’s nice to have these side projects. And actually, it was nice to look at them again and go, you know what, I think the scientist was great. But it wasn’t, we weren’t in a position to say, hey, everyone shut up. I know you like this story, but we’re going to give you this, you know. And also, I like my job. I like doing what I do. So I wouldn’t want to throw away what I have for something which may or may not work.

So it’s a little journey to remind you of what is also in your brain.

Yes.

I can’t express it any more articulately than you and you’re the writer.

You have done it perfectly, except the poetry, I don’t think I’ll write any more of that. Or the racist music, I’ll probably stay away from that.

Oh, that’s… no way. Well, Jenny Colgan, it’s been absolutely lovely to talk to you and thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thanks, Laura.

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

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer.

Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these apparent failures paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is writer and presenter Jon Holmes, a nine-time Radio Academy Award winner, recipient of two BAFTAs and numerous other accolades. On radio, Jon has written for comedy shows including Dead Ringers, Armando Iannucci’s Charm Offensive, and The Now Show. He’s had four series of his own satire, Listen Against, and his most recent creation, The Skewer, has just finished its first series on Radio 4. His TV writing credits include Horrible Histories, Harry Hill, Top Gear and Mock The Week. As a radio presenter, Jon has made headlines for his sometimes outrageous content and currently holds the record for the largest fine ever for taste and decency offenses in British broadcasting. Despite this, he’s since sat in for Chris Evans on the Radio 2 Breakfast Show, performed at the Royal Albert Hall, and been attacked by fire ants on the Rwanda Congolese border while making a documentary about mountain gorillas. In between creating and performing, he fits in writing books, five to date, hosting podcasts, The The One Show Show, and being a travel writer for The Sunday Times. Jon Holmes, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

So what does your offcuts folder, your virtual bottom drawer, look like in real life? Are you very organized?

No, not really. I tend to write in two ways. So one, if I’m writing for radio that I’m presenting, I will hand write it and scribble it down. And it’s then, by the time I get to do it on the radio, it’s utterly unreadable to even me. And that’s just in a drawer. All of that going back years, like to when I used to do a radio station called Power FM on the South Coast. And I used to hand write all the material and I’ve still got it all in vague folders. But then if I’m writing stuff for sort of Radio 4, and if you like sort of more built stuff, then it’s typed. And most of it, the old stuff anyway, is all on floppy disks. And I have no means of getting that off the floppy disks, which is why everything we’re talking about today is sort of after they fell out of fashion and other computers came in.

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

Well, this was written, I think, in 2008. And it was a treatment, sort of a pitch document with sample script bits for a TV comedy series. And it was called Real World Spies.

Real World Spies does exactly what it says on the tin. You know how in Spooks or 24 or in movies where none of the things that plague us in real life ever go wrong? So-called satellite uplinks always work first time, mobile phones always get a signal. Real World Spies is a fully realised sitcom for everyone who’s ever watched 24 and thought, why doesn’t Jack Bauer ever get a message saying Microsoft Word has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down? Example story and dialogue.

Interior office day. Spies Travis and Jennifer are deep undercover in enemy headquarters. While the suspicious and sinister boss is at lunch, they’re in his office trying to urgently download vital information onto a memory pen.

Hurry up!

It won’t recognise the stick.

Try another socket.

I have, it just won’t work. It says this stick isn’t compatible with Windows Vista. I’ll have to nip to PC World and buy the right stick.

OK, but run!

We see Jennifer in PC World. There’s a queue at the checkout. This dramatically intercuts with Travis waiting in the office, watching the clock and the boss finishing his lunch and heading back. Jennifer almost reaches the front of the queue. There is an old man in front of her buying an iPod Nano.

Would you like the gold extended warranty?

What does that mean?

An extra £60 means a no quibble money back guarantee should the item fail.

Well, it’s a present, so…

Just fill this for me.

Have you got a pen?

Look, can you hurry up?

I’m filling in the form for the warranty.

Well, don’t, it’s a rip-off.

How do you know?

Because I work for the government.

She takes his pen.

Now, fuck off!

There follows a hard-stopping intercut sequence of Jennifer paying, Travis waiting and the boss in a lift. Jennifer pays and runs out. The girl shouts… But she’s gone. We see Travis having to leave the office. The boss arriving back and Jennifer getting there nowhere near in time. Travis meets her in the corridor. Got one.

Too late.

Well, this was a waste of money then.

Did you get a receipt?

We can take it back.

She didn’t.

Oh, for God’s sake!

This is a world where the global missile defence shield won’t switch on because no-one has got the right adapter. Where uploading blueprints of a terrorist hideout to a PDA simply wouldn’t work because you just went into a tunnel. And where a car chase is blocked by traffic lights at some roadworks and Travis and Jennifer are stuck behind a learner driver. This is a sitcom about what happens when the best of the best have the worst possible day. This is Real World Spies.

I think nothing dates a sketch like the phrase iPod Nano, does it?

Or Windows Vista, or whatever. So you wrote this in 2008, who was it for?

Well, it wasn’t for any specific broadcaster. It was, you know, I had in mind that it could be, you know, just telly. So I think PBC2, I think, and Sky, and it got as far as a production company I was talking to at the time. They kind of liked it, but then, I think just sort of said, well, it feels more like a sketch, not a sitcom. So, which is fair. And I think they were worried that it wouldn’t sustain, you know, six episodes of that sort of thing going wrong. Suffice to say, though, I’ve since seen about three different versions of it on television made by other people.

Now you wrote this in 2008 with your then writing partner, Andy Hurst. How did you two first get together?

We were at uni together initially, and we started off, I think he slept with my girlfriend. I think that was the first thing that happened, or vice versa, I can’t really remember. And, you know, we became firm friends. So I was starting to write stuff for the BBC, still while holding down a day job. I worked in a theatre doing sound and lighting, and I was sending in jokes to the BBC and eventually got a vague callback from someone going, we quite like this sort of cassette you’ve made on an iPod Nano, and we’d like to talk to you about it. You know, who have you kind of written with? It was a sort of spoof of Radio 4. That was the gist of it. It was called Grievous Bodily Radio, and it was a sort of piss-take of all the things that were on Radio 4 and telly and stuff like that. And I sort of thought, well, writing on your own is quite dull. And Andy had a similar sense of humour, and I said, did you fancy coming in and helping me write this? And he did, and then we just sort of carried on.

The rest is history. Yeah. So time for your next off-cut. Tell us about that.

Well, I wrote a book. So this was a memoir, which I was asked to do by a publisher. He sort of said, can you write a sort of memoir book, but sort of funny? And I called it A Portrait of an Idiot as a Young Man. And it came out in 2016, initially. This was sort of the first chapter, I think. First draft, first chapter.

As any parent knows, naming a child is something not to be undertaken lightly. You are bestowing upon this sensitive human creature something with which it will be saddled forever, something which will be used to address it, cajole it, admonish it, call it, and mercilessly taunt it if you pick the wrong name. There’s a girl at my school called Gay Wally. And among pupils and staff alike, she came to epitomize the whole what were your parents thinking debate. Everyone got a nickname at school and as a parent, it’s very easy to accidentally give your offspring’s peers an open goal. My nickname was simply Homesy, which was part of the time on a tradition of simply adding the letter Y to any given surname. It was simple and quick, if not especially satisfying, and thus worked along much the same lines as Pot Noodle. These were easy nicknames formed in a hurry. Among my peers, I could also count Woody, Granty, and Stouty. But the best and most rewarding nicknames were reserved for people who had something wrong with them or had a stupid name bestowed on them by their unthinking parents. Kev, who was fat, was thus known as Fat Kev. Jon Thomas was known as Cock. And despite everyday run-of-the-mill, eminently sensible first names, Wayne Grucock and Lisa Wankling never stood a chance.

That was a particularly interesting off-cut for me, because when I looked at the text that you sent me, every other word was misspelt. It was like you were typing so fast, you didn’t have time to read back what you’d written. Is that what happened? Was it a big brain dump? Did you have to get it all out?

Yeah, it was. I think I tend to write like that, hence the handwriting that I mentioned earlier, because if you’re writing, as I was with this book, so this book’s essentially, the way I got round to it was I had my first child, right, who’s now 10. If you’ve had kids, you go along and they say, all right, so what illnesses might you have hereditary in your family that you might eventually pass on to these children? We need to write that on a form. And I don’t know. I had no answer to the question, what might you have in your background, because I was adopted, and I don’t have any access to any of those records. And I sort of thought, well, I can’t give my children, my daughters, any kind of medical background of who I am, but what I can do is write down how I got to be who I am. And that’s sort of how the book developed. And because it was that sort of pour it all out sort of book, when you write first drafty, you know, and ignore spell check, it’s literally, you know, you’re just writing, writing, writing, writing. But then obviously you go back and you refine it, but to get it all out there, because it was such a sort of from the heart kind of thing. I mean, the caveat with the book is, my daughters will never be allowed to read it. I mean, I overshared to the end, as you can, yeah. I mean, you know, there are chapters in there about being a teenage boy that really give you an insight.

There are too many chapters in there about being a teenage boy.

Yeah, but I, you know, I immediately urge you to go and buy it on Amazon.

Now you come from a very normal, non showbiz family. Your dad was a builder, your mom a nurse. So where did the writing, performing come from then?

Well, I don’t know. You see, that’s interesting because I, that’s part of what I talked about in the book was the whole nature nurture debate is quite fascinating to me because, you know, I had this idea that, you know, because I was technically picked out from a line of babies, right? The next couple through the door may not have been my parents, if you like, so I could have been brought up somewhere else by another couple entirely. And so my question to myself, and I actually still don’t really know the answer is, would I have ended up doing this through nature rather than nurture? Would I have always been destined to write and do stuff like that? Or was that, you know, kind of part of my upbringing? Because my dad, while they certainly weren’t from any kind of show-busy family, my dad was very into comedy and from a very young age used to play me albums from the goodies. And my mum was a nurse, as you mentioned. She used to do night shifts. And she’d put me to bed before she went off to do night shifts. And then she’d go and catch the bus at the end of the row. And so about nine o’clock at night, then my dad would come upstairs and bring me downstairs and sit me in front of repeats of Monty Python. And so I associated comedy with being a bit sort of naughty. He’s like, don’t tell your mum, but come and watch a man being hit with a fish. And I didn’t understand what was going on at all. But I loved it. And it was kind of bonding with dad sort of thing. So that’s kind of where I guess my interest started. And he had these albums. And then my first albums were music albums. They were comedy albums. The first album I bought was probably not 9 o’clock news or something from when they used to do those albums. So I was always kind of into it.

Let’s have your next off cut, please.

OK, well, this is a scene that never got used for the sitcom Miranda. So Miranda Hart’s very successful sitcom, of which this was no successful part.

Miranda and her date are in the cinema watching a film we do not see. We hear the soundtrack.

Who’s that? Shh! No, seriously, I don’t know who that is. That man. Who’s he supposed to be? What?

He’s the bloke whose daughter’s been kidnapped.

Right. Well, is he a goodie or a baddie?

What?

Goodie or baddie, him?

Goodie.

Miranda eats more popcorn.

So is he the bloke that was shot?

No.

Who was shot then?

The bloke with the wife.

What wife? Who’s that?

The cop who’s been in the film from the start. Do you always do this when you watch a film? No, not always.

I watched a film last week and there wasn’t even a cop in it.

What was it?

I don’t know.

It was on TV.

Beverly Hills Cop.

So, do you know why this scene didn’t get you?

No, I mean, it was one of, I wasn’t part of the writing, it was what I was. I ended up working with Miranda on a couple of Radio 4 things years ago, before she was famous. And then, Egtra and I sort of met her again, and then we ended up doing some stuff on Radio 2 together. And as part of that, she was sort of developing the next series of the sitcom and everything else. And she just said, oh, can you come up with some stuff and some writing and some bits? But I was never kind of part of the actual team she had. I was just sort of the, you know, I know this bloke. And so it was about just developing storylines and everything else. And that was just a sample bit of script from a cinema storyline that was kind of floating around. But that happens a lot. I think if you’re a writer and you get asked to do those things, it’s about sort of, she was entirely free to take a cinema scene and you’ve won line from it if you wanted to, you know, and build it into what she was writing, which is kind of the point. She just wanted ideas bounced around, I think.

Now, Miranda’s not the only celebrity you’ve been teamed with, you’ve written for. You also work with Stephen Fry.

Yes, so Stephen Fry used to present The BAFTAs. You may know that, Graham Norton does it now, but Stephen Fry used to present it, and I would write, co-write the script for The BAFTAs, which is, it sounds very glamorous, which it sort of is on one level, but at, you know, two in the morning when you’re being rung up from Hollywood by, I don’t know, Leonardo’s people who want to change a joke. It’s not so much fun when you’ve got to wait up for those calls. But you find that actors, so Stephen, Stephen’s job, you know, is to sort of introduce them, as you know, if you’ve watched the BAFTAs, you know, his job is to do the monologue at the beginning and then some sort of pithy introduction to whoever’s coming on to do the, to hand out the award for best hair or whatever it is. But your job as a writer on that is to write those lines as well for the people who are giving out the award for best hair. So you’ve got that really kind of awkward thing where you’re giving jokes you’ve written to Hollywood A-list actors who are shit at acting, right? Because they, what they are, they’re good at acting characters, but they can’t be themselves and they really struggle with it, right? That’s why when you’ve ever watched these things, if there’s an actor that you think, oh, they’re great and they come out and they just sort of stare blindly ahead, vaguely trying to read an autocue and it’s terrible. That’s why, because they’re trying to be themselves and they can’t. And it was really interesting insight into how that world works behind the scenes. You know, one of those surreal moments of your life. So my job is to stand off stage next to the, where it’s being typed into the autocue, the thing they have to read on the stage, to change anything at the last minute, right? That might just crop up. No, they were in there, but the example I’ll give you, right? So what happened was, we were just doing the run through to the blank room, and what they do is they put cutouts of the celebrities’ faces and stick them to the backs of all the chairs before they arrive. So the camera crew and the director can know where to cut. So if someone’s going, cut to Gwyneth Paltrow smiling or looking grumpy, they know where she’s sitting. So in the rehearsal, they’ll cut to these chairs. Anyway, so we’re going through all of this, and then all the scripts are being, sort of Stephens running through the jokes. And at the back of the room, the door opens and Keanu Reeves walks in with his entourage of people. And he’s just sort of standing there. And just at the point where we got to a joke about Keanu Reeves’ acting, right? And I thought, well, this isn’t going to go well, is it? And it was some sort of joke matrix. If he’d taken the blue pill, he might have been a better actor. I can’t remember. Anyway, the next thing we know is there’s a note from his people that says, Mr. Reeves isn’t very happy with that, that joke. Can you change it? So we came up with some other joke. That’s fine. That went into the script. Stephen then read it out as it’s happening. Now Keanu Reeves is then standing, waiting to go on, of course, cause he’s being introduced. Stephen does his intro. Keanu Reeves goes on stage, does his presentation, comes off stage, looks at me and said, what happened to the acting joke? And I went, and he went, cause he was really funny. Like he was really, what happened to that? And I was like, you said we had to cut it out? And he went, no, I didn’t. And it turned out, of course, these people that were with him had just done it on his behalf. And even though he had no interest in, he was up for it, you know? And I think that happens a lot with these people. And that was at the point where Richard Gere was about to go on stage, okay? And this was all going on. So he’s going, what happened to my joke? Richard Gere’s about to go on stage. The floor manager’s going, 20 seconds, Mr. Gere. And the wardrobe assistant comes up and adjusts his bow tie, which falls apart, cause it’s a proper bow tie. Right, so either surreal moments. I’m then watching Keanu Reeves talking to me about jokes while helping Richard Gere tie his bow tie. And I was thinking, this is the weirdest night of my life.

Okay, time for your next off-cut. Tell us what this is, please.

Um, guys, write travel, as you mentioned earlier for the Sunday Times, but they used to do a com called Motormouth, which is where writers were just allowed to spout off about anything that annoyed them in particular. And I had a bit of an issue with car parks.

When the director general of the BBC claimed back the 23p it cost him to park recently, you may have wondered, as I did, not what the hell he thought he was doing with license payers money, but how on earth he managed to park anything anywhere for just 23p. The minimum spend at the cheapest car park I can think of is 70p an hour, or part thereof. And if you try to fob it off with anything else on the grounds that you’re just picking up some dry cleaning, we’ll be back in 15 minutes at most, the machine simply gobs your money back at you with the force of a cat yacking up a coin furball. Yet, if you’ve only got a pound and wood, not unreasonably like 30p back, it’ll merely sit there and refer you to the sign that says it’s unable to give change. And if you leave the car park for a moment to try and get the right change from the shop 20 yards away, a git in a hattel come along and fine you 60 pounds. Car parking is stupidly expensive. Comedian Simon Evans observed that at six pounds an hour, the parking meters outside of Central London McDonald’s were better paid than the people working inside. Where I live, after seven p.m., even if you only want to park for five minutes, it costs one pound fifty. Why? What exactly am I getting in return? For that money, I want a bit more than just a boring old car parking space, thank you. I want entertainment. Clowns, perhaps. All right, not clowns. Everyone hates clowns. And they’re not entertaining unless they’re on fire. But show dogs, perhaps. Or a motorcycle display team. Or a motorcycle display team comprised of show dogs jumping through hoops of burning clowns. As far as I can tell, your money is actually just spent on more signs telling you that you now have to pay more money in order to pay for more signs. I’ve checked on their website, and it turns out all the extra cash from the recent price hike in my car park, Canterbury City Council, in case you were wondering, is being used to take a technological leaf out of the new Transformers film. And so, should you miss your tickets expiry time by just one second, the seemingly innocuous truck parked in the next bay will turn into a massive robot that will loom over the town centre, pluck you bodily out of debilums, smash you back into your car, and then hurl you and it out of the county. Park that thought.

That was a very heartfelt piece. What year was that again?

2006.

What happened to that?

Well, it was a bit of a writing for the newspaper learning curve, so I submitted that, and then when I read it, they don’t tell you this, then I read it back on the Sunday or whenever it was coming out, and it was about two paragraphs, the beginning paragraph, and then a bit of the middle, and then the rest had sort of disappeared, and had been rewritten by the editor. And I was so, well, what’s that about? And he went, well, I just didn’t like it.

In that piece, you named and shamed your local council, because you’re not afraid to antagonise, which has got you into trouble before, hasn’t it?

Well, yes. I mean, at which time would you like to talk about this?

Well, let’s, in the introduction, I mentioned the largest ever find in British broadcasting history. Maybe you’d like to tell us about that.

Well, I was young and Ofcom needed the money. So, well, okay. So I was doing this show on Virgin Radio. This was around 1999, I would say. And I was doing late nights, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights from 10 till 2. And it was a bit of a Wild West situation. There was no one in the building apart from me, the guy who I was doing the show with and a security guard. So there’s no producers or anything like that. So the boss was sort of like, yeah, do what you like. Just, it’s gonna be fine. It’s gonna be funny. Just do what you like. I’ve hired you because you’re a bit edgy, and you’re gonna push the boundaries a bit, and it’s gonna get people talking, which it did, but in all the wrong ways. And so one of the things we did, well, I’ll get onto the big fine, but just as a lead up to that, I’d already been fired from one radio station because we used to do a game on Sundays on Sunday evening, just after Dr. Fox’s chart.

This was you and your writing partner, Andy Hurst.

This was Andy Hurst, yeah. And we used to do this two hour show on a Sunday night. And it became cult listening amongst the kids, really, the school kids and the teenagers. This was down in Hampshire. And one of the games we had was that you had to phone the show and live on air, you had to put an object of your choosing through a neighbor’s letter box, all right? And then the object of the game, okay, which is when we started the clock, was to knock on the door, right? And that’s when we started the clock, the knock. And then we timed how long it took for you to get that object back. So people would be like, put things through the letter box, knock on the door, clock’s started. And someone asked me, yeah, I guess, I’m really sorry. You know, I accidentally put my hammer with some soil cellar taped to it through your letter box. Can I have it back? And then this weird conversation that you’d hear on air would carry on. Anyway, it was just fine, people with carrots, it’s just crest or something. And it all went wrong when someone put a live squirrel through someone’s letter box. I mean, it was very funny, but it destroyed their hallway. And I got fired.

But you know, it was.

But the big fine. The big fine, the big fine. The big fine was for a game, and I’m not proud of this now, just as a caveat. Not really. And it was a game, it was called Swearing Radio Hangman for the under 12s. So what happened was that we were playing this every Friday night at midnight, and the idea was, as a listen to parents, you would ring up, go, Mike, get your kid out of bed, and they’re gonna play Hangman with swear words to win a CD. So it was all fine until one week, nine-year-old Katie came on, and it was five letters, three letters, four letters. And she was guessing, and her parents were helping her. That was the thing, her parents were going, yeah, go on, it’s an, ask for a P, ask for a, is it a P? Yeah, it’s the P is the fourth letter of the first word, right? And her parents go, T, T, yeah, T. It’s the first and last letter of the middle three-letter word. And eventually, what happened was, she sped…

Everybody’s slowly getting what it is.

But this is why it worked on the radio, because if you’re listening, you’re way ahead of the kid, right? And so in the end, she did spell out the phrase, soapy tit wank, which, you know, looking back now, I can see why that might have been a problem.

Were there complaints, Jon Holmes?

One, one complaint from an old lady who tuned in by accident, by her own admission. So she complained, Ofcom got involved, decided that had really had stepped over several broadcasting rules, which it probably had. But what’s great, if you do get a complaint made against you and Ofcom get involved, you get a transcript of it. And in the cold light of day, right, it reads really badly.

On air, it was like, ha ha ha, she said, funny thing.

And her parents are laughing. So it then said, and the presenter then encouraged the nine-year-old child to shout the phrase, soapy tit wank, into the next song, which happened to be Deacon Blue.

Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha.

Ha ha ha ha. Well, so the Ofcom said, well, that’s 150,000 pounds, please. I know. Which Virgin then had to pay, but then the boss who, by the way, had encouraged me, thought this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard anyway, suddenly went, oh shit, I didn’t know he was doing it. I had no idea he was doing this. I had no idea. He’s fired, we fire him. And they fired me and that got the fine halved down to 75K because they took action. But that was a good learning curving too. All bosses are bastards, aren’t they? Sell you down the river, they will. Right, so this was called So Solid News. So it was a spoof showbiz news show. And it was a pilot for Capital Radio. This was written in 2003.

Headlines.

Holly Vallance arrested for horse ripping. Blurry footage shows neighbor star coring the genitals of a mare in an Essex field.

Sorcerer David Blaine disintegrates upon reentry into society after hanging in a glass box.

And Radiohead’s next album will be a live musical version of the Hutton Inquiry.

Boy 14 finds perv pop star in Pringles.

14 year old Kyle Cooper from Leighton Buzzard got a shock this week when he opened a tube of Pringles only to find that one was the spitting image of the child-bothering, stroke-faced former pop star Jonathan King. The sour, cream and chive flavored snack had been accidentally baked in the shape of the infamous presenter right down to the baseball cap and Under 18’s disco-induced erection. I was quite frightened, said Miles, whose father is a policeman. I immediately gave it to my dad because I thought that Jonathan King-Crisp might try to buy me a panda pop and then bugger me in the arse. Pringles, the manufacturer of Pringles, have vowed to look into the matter, as they say it’s a matter of policy not to include snack-style effigies of kiddie-fiddlers in their packs. The incident comes at a particularly bad time for crisps in general, as only two months ago a child found a dead hawk in a packet of frazzles and one of the missing bodies from the Moore’s murders turned up in some watsits.

Children’s organ theft scandal continues.

Following the recent investigation into the theft of children’s organs at Alderhay Hospital, details are emerging of a similar scandal at a children’s clinic in Kent. For years, doctors in Fabersham have been taking organs and putting them into other children without permission. Police were alerted last week and have since carried out a number of spot checks during which a number of children were broken open and found to have stolen organs inside. Six medical staff have been arrested following the discovery of a Bon Tempe Hit 406, a Casio Step Lighter and a Hammond XP1, all wired into the inside of a 10-year-old. The scandal follows a previous incident in 1998 when detectives found a glockenspiel growing on the side of a boy at the home of a former nurse.

Nice.

Well, I can’t think why that wasn’t broadcast.

That sort of precludes my next question, yes. Topical comedy, that news-based comedy style is something you’ve done a lot of. You started there, in fact, didn’t you?

Yeah, yes.

What was the first programme you worked on?

Well, the first joke I ever sold was The Week Ending, which was a radio for Open Door Policy comedy show, which was, anybody could send sketches in there, do a thing called News Jack now, which is a kind of similar idea, but it was a good way of just getting people who were interested in comedy writing an access point into this ivory tower of getting comedy onto the radio. And my first joke, I got about 13 pounds for it. And that was while I was working at the theatre that I mentioned. And I, but I was always very into the news. And the reason for that, my first, I think the first two things that I suddenly realised what topical comedy was and could be. So I mentioned Not The Nine O’Clock News. And I remember my dad, again, we were watching Not The Nine O’Clock News together. So this would have been what, 1982, I think or something. And there was a joke where they, there was an advert that was for the coal board and their slogan was come home to a real fire. Okay, and I was aware as a kid of that being a TV ad or a billboard ad or something, just to promote coal at the time. And Not The Nine O’Clock News did that as an advert. And I was also aware of the news story, because we used to go on holiday to Wales, that Welsh nationalists were burning holiday cottages. Okay, and I knew that was in the news. And then suddenly I saw this, come home to a real fire by a cottage in Wales, right? Was this, and I suddenly thought, oh my God, that’s amazing. They’ve taken an advert and a news story and done that. And I was fascinated by that. And then my dad sort of said, yeah, yeah, that’s kind of how news comedy works. You know, that was my eye-opening view. And Spitting Image was the same. When I first saw Spitting Image, I saw a news story in the morning and then saw a joke about it, about Spitting Image that night and just thought, God, how did they do that? That suddenly just happened. And then I suddenly realized you could write jokes about the news and also that way you never run out of material.

You were at the beginning of Dead Ringers, weren’t you? Because that’s a news based comedy show.

Yeah, yeah, Dead Ringers. So you’re familiar with Dead Ringers. So Radio 4 went to telly and then went back to, limped back to Radio 4 with his tail between his legs. And it came about because Radio 4 were looking, again, career long story short, I ended up as a contract writer for BBC Radio Comedy in around 98, I suppose, sort of time. And I was sitting in an office with Andy, who we’ve been talking about, and a producer, Bill Dare, who still produces it, stuck his head around the door and said, oh, you two are paid to be here for some reason. I’ve got some impressionists. I want to do a spinning image on the radio program to do something. And so it left us to it. And so we sort of started writing what became the pilot of Dead Ringers. But what we’ve done, the thing we’d made for Radio 4 before that, which sort of got us in there, was a thing called Grievous Bodily Radio, which was this thing that spoofed Radio 4. And it got, for career pattern, loads of complaints, right? Because we’d made it for Radio 1. Radio 1 then chucked out all their DJs, you probably remember that in the late 90s, and indeed all their comedy. So Radio 4 bought this Radio 1 series that we made and just put it on Radio 4, which confused the hell out of Radio 4 listeners, who all complained about it. And then we got this writing gig, but we kind of then rewrote Grievous Bodily Radio, but with impressions in it. And then everyone suddenly loved it instead of hating it. And we were completely puzzled. If you just put funny voices in it, get away with anything, it turns out. And so we made a pilot and everyone loved it, it went to series. And yes, all that early Radio 4 spoof stuff in there that was topical all came from that sort of background.

And it’s been running for 20 years.

I know, yeah.

Are you a naturally very political person?

I’ve become more so, I think. I think as a kid, well, as I said, that eye opening Welsh nationalist burning cottages joke made me realize there was a whole seam to mine, if that’s not too, if a terrible coal based, anyway it is, but gloss over it. And I suddenly realized that there was all this stuff going on and then like any teenager, I sort of got quite interested in politics and joined Youth CND, even though I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I did get to have a meeting in Youth CND, I was meeting above a pub and I was too young to drink, but the guy who was running it was old enough to buy the drinks, so that’s kind of why I got into politics.

Right, so not really very political then?

Not really, no, just alcoholic.

Right, let’s have another off cut now. What’s this one?

This, oh yeah, so I got asked to write travel for the Sunday Times. So the travel editor just said, look, you know, I quite like what you do. Have you thought about doing travel writing? Would you like to? To which my immediate answer was yes, I would like to do that. So in the last 10 years or so, I’ve done some very odd things, including the fire ants you mentioned in the beginning and hospitalized by Sia Atkins in Puerto Rico and all manner of terrible stories. But this is a piece that never made it, it was a commission, I wrote it, this was 2013. It was about to be published, but then a breaking news story stopped them publishing it.

Think of the enormous hotels of Dubai and you probably think they’re full of oversized Russians gorging themselves on oversized buffets before waddling out into the heat and beaching themselves by the pool. And you’d probably be right. Dubai is much like Liberace. You’ve heard of it, you know it’s glamorous, but you probably don’t want to go there. It’s also younger than Liberace. He was 67 when he died, yet Dubai, as we know it, is just over 50 years old. Founded in 1966 on the discovery of oil when it was a declining port, and is now a shimmering oasis of sand, steel and football as holiday homes on a manmade island that’s been built in the shape of a plant. Yet for a garish city with little history, there’s a corner of this conurbation that’s working hard for our ecological future. The monorail that snakes out across the palm leads to the Atlantis, a five-star luxury hotel that’s themed around the mythological lost underworld city of Plato’s time and dates all the way back to 2008. But it’s here, in this unlikely location, that a successful conservation program is thriving. These are strobulating polyps, Marine Manager Dennis Blom tells me, as he guides me around the pipes, incubation tanks and filtration systems, and is home to more than 65,000 species of fish. Are they, I say, pretending to know what he’s just said. In front of me, a dozen pinhead-sized things are drifting happily around a tiny tank. They look like drops of snot. They’ll grow into a fully-sized jellyfish, he says, saving me from my ignorance.

And over here is where we encourage sea roses to release sperm directly into seawater.

Of course it is. Nearby, eight different race species are being born and nurtured. Not since I lived in student halls have I been surrounded by so much attempted breeding.

So what was the story that meant that Sunday Times didn’t publish this?

What’s interesting about travel writing is you get to do some amazing things, okay? You get to go around the world, and this was one, I thought, quite an interesting story, because Dubai had a very bad reputation, still does, because of the money that gets spent and the oil and just the way, human rights, not least, and also keeping dolphins and so forth in captivity, which the big hotels have their own dolphin pools, which is very frowned upon now, but they’re also running this ecology conservation program, which is very well funded, which not many people knew about, and that’s quite a good angle for a story, and the editor, indeed, agreed with me, said actually, no, not enough people know about the conservation work. Anyway, the moment it was about to be published, a big story broke about the dolphins in captivity, in Dubai specifically, and how they were in quite a lot of trouble for it, and were getting loads of criticism, so the editor rightly just said, that’s just not gonna chime, is it, with the current news? So, no, we’re gonna spike that one, and the annoying thing is about being a travel writer is you only get paid on publication, right? So you don’t get paid to do the job, you only get paid when it’s published.

But you do get paid to go on a trip, don’t you?

Well, you don’t get paid to go on a trip.

They pay for your trip.

So you get a free trip, yeah, but that is true. I’m not complaining, but it’s annoying when you do write something and then you just don’t get paid any money. A free trip’s already gone, but you won’t pay the mortgage. That’s the annoying part of it. But I’m certainly not gonna, I got to do some incredible things in travel terms. Crocodile hunting in Papua New Guinea and that kind of thing.

You’re the obvious choice.

I am the obvious choice for that, which you never get a chance to do ordinarily.

Well, that’s a very cushy job. Right, time for your final off-cut, Jon. Tell us what we are about to hear.

So this is from Horrible Histories. So Horrible Histories range of books, as I’m sure you know, that got turned into a live action TV series in the sort of mid to late noughties. And I was part of the original writing team and this was a sketch I think I wrote. The thing about Horrible Histories was that the sketches had to be absolutely factually accurate. You couldn’t, it has to have jokes, but it also has to be absolutely true as to what happened in history. And they were very, very keen on that. And we had advisors on board to go, that would never happen, you can’t use that in the basis of a joke. So all of it’s true and exactly what happened. But for some reason, just in the pile of scripts, this one never got used.

Exterior day, we hear a battle raging. A Viking lies on the ground, clutching a very obvious arrow in his stomach. Another Viking comes over.

Oh no, what is it? What’s the matter?

What do you mean what’s the matter?

I’ve been shot with an arrow. What, that?

Then it’s just a splinter.

A splinter?

Yeah, it’ll probably pop out on its own eventually.

It’s not a splinter, it’s an arrow in the stomach, so help me!

Well, I’m not really sure what to do.

Well, do what Vikings are supposed to do and call on the gods for advice. Then hurry up, because it’s starting to smart a bit.

All right, all right, hold on then.

He drops to his knees to pray.

Oh, Odin, Chief God of the Vikings, are you there?

Split screen, Odin answers.

Viking, Medical Direct Helpline, Odin, Chief God of the Vikings speaking. How may I help you today?

Hello, yes, I’ve got a fellow Viking here with an arrow in the gut, any advice?

Hmm, an arrow, you say?

I think so.

Hmm, are you sure it’s not a splinter?

He says, are you sure it’s not a splinter?

It’s not a splinter. It’s not a splinter.

Yes, I was gonna say, because if it was, it’ll probably just pop out on its own eventually.

That’s what I said. It’s an arrow in the stomach.

Oh, well, then there are certain Viking medical procedures that we have to follow. First, you have to feed him a meal of oats, onions and herbs.

I’m not sure he’s very hungry.

It’s a special meal. Just feed him.

Viking Two opens his Viking bag. As luck would have it, there’s a bowl of yuck in there. He tries to spoon some into Viking One’s mouth, who moves his face away like a child.

Come on, open wide. Odin says it’s good for you.

Come on.

Don’t want to.

Longboat.

It does that flying the spoon like an aeroplane into the mouth trick and Viking One eats it.

Okay, now what? You want me to what?

Stick your nose into the hole in his tummy. Get it right in there. Right in the guts and the bits of intestine. Have a good ol smell.

What’s he saying to do next?

Nothing.

He says we’re done.

Oh, come on. You’re a Viking. You’re not scared of a few smelly guts, are you?

He sticks his nose near Viking One’s tummy.

Get away. Odin says I’ve got to smell your guts.

What?

Good point.

Hang on.

Why? Simple. If it smells of onions and herbs, then his intestines have been pierced and he’ll die. If you can’t smell onions and herbs, he’ll live. So just patch him up.

Righto.

He smells the wound again.

Smells of onions? What?

No, it doesn’t.

Definitely getting something herby. Onions and herby.

You’ve had it, mate. No, I haven’t. Actually, it doesn’t hurt anymore. I’m as right as rain.

Ah, you smell like soup.

It’s probably just a splinter.

It’s actually making me feel quite peckish.

If it is a splinter, I’ll probably just pop myself out eventually.

Anything?

Onions and herbs.

Oh, here’s a goner. I’ll prepare a space in the Viking heaven of Valhalla. I’ll finish him off if I were you. It’s the only humane thing to do.

I’ll probably just need a plaster.

Sorry, mate. Doctor’s orders.

Viking 2 draws his axe and there’s an out of vision, squelchy thump of an axe killing Viking 1.

Anything else I can help you with today?

No, that’s it. Thanks.

Thank you for calling Viking Medical Direct. I’ve been Odin, Chief God of the Vikings.

The split screen slides off. Viking 2 picks up the bowl of yuck and eats a spoonful himself.

That sounds like a very horrible history sketch. Why wasn’t it used?

Well, I think it was just one in a, there were a lot of sketches going in and around Horrible Histories, and I think it was just probably one that just fell off the end somewhere. There’s probably a much better one somebody wrote about Vikings. But it’s interesting, because the success of Horrible Histories, I think, came down to partly that kind of thing, in that it was chock full of facts with jokes attached, which is what kids then sort of latched onto.

Yeah, putting the comedy into disguise as facts, like when you put vegetables and mush it up and because you’re born and raised.

Precisely that, yeah. And that’s why I think kids latched onto it. We got a note between series one and series two. I remember this when we were called in and they sort of said, yeah, absolutely, everyone loves it. Of course, you’re gonna commission series two, but can there be fewer decapitations this time? And can you not throw as much shit around?

Were you responsible for the decapitations and the shit?

And the shit, mostly, yeah. Mostly the shit, which is why it didn’t get broadcast.

So writing for children, you fancy doing some more of that?

Well, you know, I mean, probably not the soapy tit wank thing. I think that was probably not going to follow that one up.

Right, so it’s not a natural progression for you?

Well, I think kids, I wouldn’t rule anything out, really. I think kids are a great audience to entertain. It’s horrible. I went around schools talking about the writing of Horrible Histories, just have that first series into primary schools. And what was funny about it was, A, the way kids engage with it, but then I get them to write sketches and then I’d go back the week after and then nick them all. And record their sketches, so they’d done acting and writing and stuff as well as little workshops. But it was great because it just got them interested in comedy and in writing. And notoriously, boys and literacy don’t go well together in school, but what I learned from the teachers it was doing, it was bringing kids into more reading and more literacy. So actually it’s funny that this stuff can sort of cut through. Even when it’s filth, it turns out it can engage kids, which I think is great.

So what’s next? Any writing ambitions still to be realised? Unless you haven’t written a novel, for example.

I haven’t written a novel, no. I’d like to write a film. I’ve got a couple of ideas for a, well, one specific idea for a film that I’ve sort of started developing, but haven’t done anything about it yet. It takes so long to write, doesn’t it? You sit down and you go, I’ve got to write a film. It might take 17 months, this. I haven’t got time for this nonsense. So you’ve got to block yourself out with chunks of time. When I wrote the book, I took myself away for a week initially, wrote 25,000 words. And I went away from my family and I just sat in a, what essentially was a holiday home. I just hired on my own and just sat there 12 hours a day writing for seven days. And then I wrote the next 25,000 words over the summer while doing everything else I was doing, which was presenting a breakfast show, which was a bit of a thing. And then I did the same with the end of the book. I went away and locked myself and did the whole, so you’ve got to kind of focus on it. And something like a film, I think you’ve just got to focus on it solidly, but you’ve got to get the time and space to do it. And also, of course, you’re not being paid necessarily to write it. So once again, you’ve got to find yourself a financial cushion, which is not that easy to find.

True. Well, final question. Having revisited these old bits of writing, how do you feel about them? Were you surprised by anything you heard?

It was rubbish, wasn’t it? No wonder they were rejected.

Nothing gets you actors, obviously.

No, no, not at all. I know it’s really good to hear. I mean, it’s quite interesting to hear two different things, actually. One, it’s brilliant to hear that sketch, because I’ve not obviously heard the Horrible Histories sketch before. So it’s great to hear that with some proper actors doing it. But also interesting in stuff that I’ve only heard in my head, you know, like the column or something, which aren’t joke-fueled, they’re travel stuff. So to hear them actually read out loud is quite an interesting, because that’s not the medium they were designed for. So I think that’s sort of an interesting way of approaching it. But yeah, it’s quite interesting. All writers have that thing of stuff they’ve written down that may lead to nothing. And I mean, as writers, we’ve all got either notes that used to be by our bed, but now it’s phone notes. And occasionally look back through them, thinking, oh, there’s some great ideas in here. And I wake up in the middle of the night and still write these ideas down. And then the next morning, I’d looked at this only this morning because we were talking about this, and I had an idea in the night. And then I woke up and in the dark, I found my glasses because I’m old. And then wrote something down, thinking, well, that’s just gonna be the best sitcom ever. I mean, I can’t wait to share this with the world. Woke up this morning, looked at it, it just said, milky arm.

Thank you very much indeed for letting us rummage around in your Offcuts Drawer. Ladies and gentlemen, Jon Holmes.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Jon Holmes. 

Hi this is Laura again.

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