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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His three assailants lie groaning. Titles. The Diamond.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interior. Cheese Shop. Day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, no. It’s not off. It’s ripe.

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

No, no, no. It’s perfectly ripe. Mmm.

Smell the aroma. Beautiful aroma. Very pungent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh. But I thought I might be. Ah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somebody missing. Who knows what. Eventually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe. Jerry types. Mayday enters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could almost be there in 18… looking after her, if it wasn’t for all these people around me in polyester separates and bum bags. I’m a Jane Austen fan, you see, a proper one, not… There is loud beeping. Oh, hang on.

Body Biz Spa, promoting wellness for all, how may I help? Just putting you through. A proper Jane Austen fan, not of the films, not of the TV stuff, not even of Colin Firth in Drenched Britches. The books, the books do it for me.

I was too young, really, when I picked up my first one, Emma. I fell in love with… More loud beeping. Oh, hang on.

Body Biz Spa, promoting wellness for all, how may I help? He’s not in on Thursdays. I’m sure Janine can help. Putting you through.

Just totally fell in love with Emma. The language, so witty and so correct. Jane always said exactly what she meant, never scrabbled around.

It was pithy, that’s what it was. I gobbled all the books up, then the biographies, the letters. I can quote her comments to Cassandra.

They were so close, they were sisters, like sisters can be. Good morning. I need a towel.

There you go. Have they fixed locker number 12 in the changing room? I don’t know, madam. Probably.

I hope so. It’s my favourite. I love it at Body Biz.

All these nice people. A people watch, you see, because I write. Excuse me, excuse me, may I see your membership card, please? No, I’m afraid I have to see it.

Oh God, we’ve got to run ahead of the spinning class. Hang on. Judy leaves her desk, suddenly knocking over things.

Madam? Later. Tea break at last. Not much tea gets drunk.

It’s all scribble, scribble, scribble. I’m working on my fourth novel, based very closely on the style of my heroine, Jane Austen. It’s a kind of epic about a fierce love between star-crossed estate agents.

Freehold of the Heart. Good title, I think. Or is it terrible? This, well, I thought it was the beginning of a sort of chiclet type book.

I mean, Jane Austen is every chiclet writer’s favourite writer and all that. But then I looked back on your notes and thought, oh, hold on. This is not that at all.

Can you explain to the listener what this project was, please? Yes, I can. Gentle listener. This is a very dear thing to my heart that, yes, all chiclet, which we’re not supposed to say anymore.

We’re supposed to say commercial women’s fiction. But I’m very happy with chiclet. Everybody loves Jane Austen, but there is an assumption that you love her for the sugary, pastel dresses and the romance.

And actually, I did really, really love her and always have for the genius. So it was partly a reaction to how annoyed that made me. But yes, I went to Jordan many times with my long-suffering husband in tow.

And I always looked in that mirror, thrilled to think that Jane Austen looked in it. And I used to think, I wish I could nick this. I’ve got a criminal mind.

What can I say? So my heroine actually does steal it, which is very unlikely, but she gets away with it. She props it up in her attic bedroom. She has a terrible relationship with her sister.

Her husband doesn’t support her, is never home, is always away on business. She’s very neglected and she pretends things are okay. And she’s actually very unhappy.

And she slowly dies like Jane Austen did until she disappears. And there’s no reflection in the mirror at all. So yeah, it does veer away from Chick-fil-A quite speedily.

Perhaps why it didn’t get put on, Laura. So it started out as a sort of, oh, is this going to be Jane Austen helps this woman either become a writer or find her the love of her life? No, it kills her in a horrid, nasty, she basically fades away. Wow.

Yeah. And so you wrote the whole play? I wrote the whole play. I always write the whole everything.

I never half write anything. I write the whole everything, which is why if you had two years of airtime, we could fill it with my stuff. But yes, I wrote the whole play and yeah, my agent wasn’t mad about it.

I sent it to a couple of, you know, the way it goes, you can send it to people, you know, who might send it to people they know. And I think it was just, it was a mixed bag. And if I’m really honest, I never expected it to get made.

It was just something I really wanted to write. We have to be quite strict about genre. It’s a business.

It’s a depressing business at times, but yeah, it did straddle two genres and neither quite happy. When you’re saying disciplined about genre, you mean when you’re writing novels or everywhere within the writing? Well, certainly in novels, I mean, strictly in novels and in my experience elsewhere. Yeah, especially if you introduce humour.

I mean, I have seen very successful humour drama and humour crime and humour thriller, but they’re not as pure, I think, and they don’t gain as much attention or get as many green lights as a purer thing, because the worst thing a producer wants to be is confused by what you’ve written. They want to go, I know exactly who will listen to this. I know exactly how much to spend on this.

So yes, I do think unless you’ve got a track record, if you want to try and hit the spot, it’s best to be clear about your intent. And I don’t think much as I enjoyed that play, and I really was great hearing it dramatised. That was great fun.

I always thought, yeah, this is not going to go on. You do, don’t you, when you write things? Sometimes you think, yeah, not going to go. Right, time for another off cut.

Can you tell us about this one, please? Well, this is more radio. This is a comedy and it’s called Number 89 and I wrote it a thousand years ago in 1985. My name is Nancy.

I’m 20 something, five foot something, and I have no distinguishing marks. I live by the river in what the estate agent described as a spacious mansion flat. I don’t own it, I rent it, so there are in my life two very special people, my flatmates.

Breakfast time is the only time when Joanna, Susie and I are all together, when we can relax and enjoy each other’s company and discuss matters of great import. No milk again! Why is there never any milk in this place? Oh dear, oh Susie, I think we’ve got some coffee right now. Oh my cornflakes! There’s no cornflakes either, so you’re in luck.

Oh God, would I be asking too much to try and scrape up a boiled egg? Oh dear, oh Susie, the last egg went into Bernard’s quiche. Great, I starve and your fancy man stuffs himself with quiche. You’re not starving, Susie.

God knows Bernard’s not fancy, and anyone who’s tasted Joanna’s quiche knows better than to stuff themselves with it. Oh Nancy! Make yourself a slice of toast. Oh yes, some lovely toast and marmalade, Susie.

Mmm, lovely, delicious, luxurious toast. I can hardly wait. Why is the grill so filthy? Presumably because you neglected to scrub it after that sausage orgy last night.

Oh, it’s always my fault, isn’t it? I only left it because I had to get to bed and rest my voice. I do have a gig tonight, you know. Yeah, Sus does have a gig tonight, Nancy.

She has a gig tonight, you know. Resting for this gig also stopped you taking out the rubbish? Erm, the rubbish? The rubbish? Are we going to say everything three times? Just so I know, just so I know, just so I know. So, I didn’t take the rubbish out.

Beat me, shoot me, leave it out my bones for the vultures to pick at. The flat’s starting to smell like a Calcutta backstreet. Oh no, oh really? You should- Anyway, you were home all day doing sod all, Joanna.

What’s stopping you taking the rubbish out or cleaning the grill? Well, the rota. I mean- Oh, the precious rota. It’s made out by Nancy, not Moses.

She didn’t stagger down from Mount Sinai with it. It’s chalked onto a blackboard which has a transfer of a care bearer on it. You can ignore the blessed rota, you know.

Susie, pack it in. She’s going to… Cry. No, please.

Anything but that. Don’t, Joanna. I’m sorry.

I’m sorry. Jo, don’t. Shh, shh, shh, shh.

Just because I don’t have a job, I can’t do everything. I try, I really try. But Bernard’s had a virus and that budgie’s more work than he looks.

Poor Joanna. It’s a strain for her to be unemployed, to be the odd one out, to be, well, to be alive, really. Particularly to be alive in the vicinity of someone like Susie, who’s rather sparky.

It’s the artistic temperament, you see. The artistic temperament of a builder’s yard typist who sings in pubs at night. Maybe you’ll hear Susie sing later.

Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to be horribly murdered first. My day promised to be a gruelling one. I had to leave Joanna snivelling on the formica and yoke myself between the shafts of Bootle, Bargle, Hefty and Warnes.

When I became a copywriter, fresh-faced and newly sprung from university, nobody told me I was selling my soul to the devil. That I was prostituting my only skill. That I would one day write a commercial for dog toilet paper.

Ah, the gals in the flat chair scenario. Was this you? It was me. It was me and my two cousins.

Very much me and my two cousins. I mean, the whole budgie thing, I could, you know, I could write War and Peace. But it, do you know, it’s really fascinating listening to that.

It’s so of its time. The humour is so of its time. You could pinpoint that as the 80s.

I sent this off completely cold. I was working in radio advertising at the time. I was in a production house.

And I sent it completely cold to a producer who produced comedy I liked. And she sent me back such an encouraging letter. It was wonderful.

She said it was this, it was that. In short, I loved it and I want to hear more. But this is a topic that is tackled by a lot of first-time writers.

So if you can think of something else and write something else, I’d love to hear that. And I, as you can imagine, went straight back to the desk. And well, the kitchen table in this case.

And scribbled and scribbled and scribbled. And by the time I’d finished it, she’d moved on. And I’d sent it to a guy who took over and he sent me back.

I will never forget what he said. He said, thank you for this. It did raise a titter, he said.

And then he turned it down. I mean, he really hated it. But that stopped me in my tracks.

And instead of just saying sod you and carrying on, I kind of let it lie and went back to doing my little stories for weekly magazines, which I really had a huge cottage industry going. But yeah, that was really interesting. I mean, that wouldn’t get made now.

All the jokes were really obvious because they were made a thousand times during those days. But it’s lovely to hear. It’s a period piece as much as crinolines are.

And I think what she was trying to say to me was that she got a lot of this. And you need to have an original idea. You need to think outside, like literally raising your head from the table and describing what goes on around you.

But it was super encouraging. And I’m really grateful to her. And I think that producers should never underestimate the impact of what they say.

I don’t mean they should be careful or anything. I just mean they should train themselves and think, yeah, I made someone happy with that one word of encouragement. It really is.

It’s important. It matters. Yeah.

Now you mentioned just now about the writing of the short stories. Is this for the Just 17 magazine stuff? Just 17. Yeah.

So what happened there? Oh, another bitter story. I had… Keep them coming. I can get very twisted.

I’ve been sitting there, you know, I had one of those great jobs. I was working with two guys. I was like the girl in the office.

Literally, I did everything. They paid me really well. They took me out to all the restaurants with them.

They treated me like a little sister. Because of that, I was abounding with unearned confidence. And so I sent a soap opera idea to Just 17, which was around the corner from us.

Now, to those people who aren’t as old as us, explain what Just 17 is. Just 17 was like a precursor to Heat magazine, which of course is now defunct as well. I have to explain Heat before I explain Just 17.

Just 17 was one of those sort of magazines. They had the gossip and they had fashion stuff and they had lots and lots of silly photographs of celebrities. It’s where that all started.

I was sort of pointing out what celebrities were wearing and who was going out with who. And their office was exactly what you would wish. It’s all full of girls wearing too fashion-y clothes, laughing their heads off and going out to lunch.

And I just sent it to them and it came out every week, amazingly. Can you imagine a weekly magazine? And it was kind of huge, like all the girls I knew read it. And it just seemed to me it should have… It always had a short story.

And I thought, I’ll punt it a soap opera. Right, when you said a soap opera, so it wasn’t a photo story? No. It was written in words.

It’s actual words. Actual words. And it was basically, yes, a saga that happened every week.

Yes. And you wrote it. And were the lead characters or the lead character, were they 17? They were not.

They were older. They were flat-sharing. Ah, I see now.

I thought, sod you, BBC. Someone’s got to buy this. So yeah, it was literally the house I lived in.

And she said, oh, I’m looking for a serial. Yeah, give me five of these, 200 quid a go. I couldn’t believe it.

And it was great. It was all fun and games until indeed someone did lose an eye. And it was me.

Suddenly, I got a call saying, I’m going to give it away. I’m going to give it to… And she named a guy who was on the writing staff there. And I said, oh, are you sure? She said, yeah, you know, he’s got more experience than you.

It was literally done like that. And I said… Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let me say. So hold on.

You sent an idea for an ongoing story to a magazine. You actually gave them the plot and the characters, et cetera. They went, yes.

They agreed to pay you 200 pounds or whatever to write per episode. And then they gave that story and those ideas to someone else to write. Are they allowed to do that? Well, I did four episodes and thrilled skinny with the whole thing, doing it at work with the guys cheering me on.

And then the vocal came. And it never occurred to me until you just mentioned it that perhaps I owned it. And they couldn’t do that.

But to quote my grandmother, God pays debts without money. And actually paid them with money this time, because for some reason I stayed on the payroll. And I kept getting 200 pounds per week.

And I remember mentioning this to my mum and she went ashen and she said, tell them, tell them it’s fraud. So very, very reluctantly, I told them. And I said, do I have to pay you back? And they said, no, don’t worry about it.

But did they stop paying you the 200 pounds? They did stop paying. Yeah, God damn it. So yeah, but it was a learning curve.

And also I just, I carried on giving them weekly stories, just, you know, one offs for years. You weren’t sort of cast back into the cold. No, no, no.

I’m still in the fold. And I’m giving them very, very genre-based stories where people either got together happily at the end or one of them died. There was no in between.

As it is in life, always. It’s my relationship history. Okay, then, right.

Well, let’s move on and have another offcut. What is this? This is a stage play. And this was about 2006, maybe a little earlier.

And it’s called Troubled. Exterior, street at night. Mary strolls over to take Pat’s arm, both shivering against the cold as they walk along.

Mike, a soldier, nervous with a rifle at the ready, is manning a roadblock. Mary and Pat don’t see him yet. Did you see me, Uncle Brain? Head thrown back, bellowing.

I never heard Donny boy murdered so comprehensively. Leave him alone. He’s a grand voice.

A church bell begins to toll. Beneath the dialogue, it tolls 11 o’clock. That’s 11 o’clock, Pat.

Me mother’ll go through you for a shortcut. We promised half ten. We promised.

We should have gone down Shank Hill. There’s too many riots down there these nights. This is safer.

Oh. Mary and Pat notice the roadblock, hear the crackling of the soldier’s walkie-talkie, take in the cocked rifle. Where are you going? What’s your business? We’re… I’m walking me girlfriend home.

Let’s see some ID. Why? I’m walking me girlfriend home in me hometown. Sean Pat.

She gets out her ID. Mary O’Halloran. O’ this and O’ that.

Begara. It means son of. Pat.

Your ID, mate. Come on, then you can get home and canoodle on her doorstep. He’s obviously never met me ma.

Pat sullenly hands over his ID. Mike looks at it perfunctorily and hands it back. That’s all in order.

Don’t be so touchy, Paddy. Me name’s Pat. That’s what I said.

Paddy. Run along, there’s good kids. Mary and Pat walk away.

Pat looking resentfully back. Soldier appears to whisper urgently in Mike’s ear. There’s no point cheeking them, Pat.

Even poets have tempers, Mary. They shouldn’t be here. They shouldn’t be bloody here.

Oi! Soldier grabs Pat, throws him to the floor, plants a boot in his back and points a rifle at the back of his head. Mike contains Mary without brute force, pushing her to the other side of the stage behind him. It’s important that her face is obscured from Soldier’s vision.

Are you sure? You sure it’s him? Soldier nods. Your boyfriend’s wanted, darling. Dangerous.

That’s me brother. His brother. His brother is on the run.

You’re making a mistake. My mate arrested him once before. He knows him.

Pat’s never been arrested. You’re making a mistake. Me brother.

You want me brother. Soldier moves his boot to Pat’s head. Please, honest to God, he’s not political.

He keeps out of all this. Check his ID again. Go home, love.

Soldier drags Pat to his feet. Mike pushes Mary in opposite direction, not too harshly. Tell me Ma.

Well, you tell his Ma her baby boy’s been naughty and won’t be home tonight. He’s going for a little holiday in the kesh. Pat! Soldier drags Pat off stage.

Mike exits. Mary takes off her coat and tosses it as abrupt scene change to interior disco.

So, Northern Ireland. I know your maiden name was Bernadette Gorn, which is very Irish, but you didn’t grow up in Ireland yourself, did you? I did not, no. But I tell you, it’s got very long tentacles, Ireland.

Yeah, my mother was from Dublin and my dad was from Mayo, which is on the west, like the east and the west coast. And to be honest, when I was growing up, there was a very, very specific attitude to, especially in Dublin, which was, we don’t want to hear about the north. It was like the troubled or irritating brother who was always in trouble.

And I felt terrible when I grew up that I didn’t know much about it. So I studied it. And obviously you get friends when you’re older from everywhere.

And I had very good friends from Northern Ireland. And I really felt strongly about the fact that they were all just people, and especially they were young people together and they were falling in love with each other and they were not being allowed to do it, seemed preposterous. So yeah, it was quite passionately felt, but yeah, it feels quite juvenile.

And I wasn’t juvenile when I wrote it. So I think it was, is a stab at sort of getting into much deeper waters. And it was actually, it’s David Bowie’s fault because I used to, when I first listened to Heroes, I used to imagine it as being about the Berlin Wall.

And I remember hearing about people who’s like, their loved ones were murdered. And I’ve always had a very strong feeling that the best revenge, if somebody kills somebody you love, is to get them to love you and then you kill yourself. That’s one hell of a plan.

So that’s what this girl was going to do. And it was also about the incredible sort of whimsicality of the Irish, which is just a coin’s turn away from complete bleakness. And so it was sort of a mystical and very brutal kind of treaties on how love gets really screwed up in war, which makes it so much better than it was.

But you know, it’s all an ambition, isn’t it? Every work of art is an ambition, but that was the idea. And what was your childhood like? Did you come from the cliched big Irish family, all sitting around being incredibly witty and basically the cast of Derry Girls? But you didn’t grow up in Ireland, did you? No, no. I was born in Fulham in London and my parents met in London and they brought me up there.

And I did come from the archetypal big Irish family, but our part of it was just me, my mum and my dad. So I was like the unicorn. And if you can begin to imagine how spoiled I was, you haven’t scratched the surface.

And I was spoiled by my parents, then I was spoiled by my aunties, then my grandmother got in with the spoiling. So it was great. I mean, it was very Derry Girls in that there is no privacy and everything is up for discussion.

Everything you do, say, if you walk across a room, you get 18 comments. But I only got that some of the time. Most of the time it was a very quiet house with the dog and my parents and lots of books and too much food.

And so it was nice. It was almost like I holidayed in it. But as I’ve grown older, I realised I am very Irish in that the way I think about things and the way I relate to people.

And it’s interesting to see my daughter. I married a completely English person, but I can see it cropping up unstoppably in her. And I don’t know if you feel that, Laura, that as you get older, your sort of inherent culture starts like bursting forth with the chin hairs.

And I’m just really enjoying it. So yes, it was, I feel like I had a very Irish background, but at the same time, much more sedate than your traditional thoughts of an Irish childhood. And were there any writers or creative types in there? Any great grandparents who turn out to be Brendan Behan or something like that? I don’t know how strongly I can say no.

I mean, a long line of carpenters and painters and basically genteel working class people. That’s what it was. And I mean, also a lot of poverty in the generations before me and then they got okay.

But having said that, my uncle John once got paid a shilling by Brendan Behan. He met him on the bus and Brendan Behan had just got his typewriter out of the pawn shop and he gave it to my uncle John and he said, here’s a shilling, take it to me, Ma, or I will pawn it again. So yeah, it was very, not Dublin stuff, lots of countryside stuff, but no, not one single creative person.

We’ve got a lot of musicians actually. A lot of musicians, lots of singers, but nobody’s written a word except me. So you’re the family first.

I’m the bard. Yes. Right, time for another off cut.

Tell us about this one. This one is, oh, it’s another odd one. This is a novel very close to my heart, which I wrote in about 1999, probably five years before it.

And it’s called Tiddles Gets Life. He stared. It stared back at him.

As incongruous in Pete’s damp, custard-coloured quarters as Gina Lollobrigida, the kitten leapt out of the open box, paws high. It goose-stepped here and there, suddenly fast, then still. Every soft inch of the animal quivered with curiosity, as if it might fart, question marks.

It was agog at the plastic-coated iron leg of Pete’s bed. It held out a paw to bat the roll of toilet paper, standing by the stainless-steel pedestal. It stared up at him, unafraid and seemingly fascinated by his big, soft face.

It’s not an it, Pete reprimanded himself. This thing was a girl. A lady? A child, really, only just torn from its mum.

It’s a she. A she in his cell. That was a first.

Who are you? he asked, softly, afraid his voice might knock her off her fat, beferred feet. Your Tiddles, he answered for her, the name coming so naturally to his lips that it was surely preordained. My Tiddles, he said, quieter still, in case the morbid plasterwork should soak up this new tone of voice and broadcast it to the wing.

How in the name of God was he supposed to pick her up? Tiddles was so small, and Pete’s hands were so big. He flexed his fingers, long, elegant enough in design. They were stained by too many cigarettes and unhappy wanks beneath cheap bedclothes.

L-O-V-E, said his right hand, in dirty blue. H-A-T-E, more convincingly, suggested the left. Paid a pound a day just to be Pete Kennedy, he made no decisions, had no responsibility.

His meals were prepared for him, his clothing washed, ironed badly and returned. There was no manual strapped to the kitten, nobody looking over Pete’s shoulder. He needed a diagram.

His own instincts had led him to this place, after all, and couldn’t be relied upon. Rubbing his nose hard as if he wanted to rub it off, Pete counselled himself to be calm. This morning felt important, it glittered.

The kitten’s debut was sharp and certain in a life defined by its lack of everything, deadlines, change, urgency. The only other distinct moments were conflicts. This moment was fluffy and strange and funny.

That took a minute to sink in. Tiddles was comical. She had funny bones under her tabby stripes.

Pete’s nana had used that expression about some god-awful comic on the screeching 1970s television she’d sat as close to as if they were lovers. Across a chasm of 30 years, Pete understood what she meant. Some people can make you laugh just by doing ordinary things.

Tiddles was one of those people. This was a very interesting piece and certainly your description of what happens in the story again takes a turn that nobody listening to that bit would have any idea of. So, tell us what happens to Tiddles and friend.

Well, yeah, the genesis was I read a long form, really fascinating article about lifers in American jails having a terrible trouble with violence because the stakes were very low for them. They were going to be in prison forever so they may as well act up. So they wanted a way to get them engaged with life so that they could live more calmly.

They introduced the thing that if you were good for long enough, good in inverted commas, whatever that means in prison, you were given a kitten. I know, not very fair on the kitten. But it turned into like a cat lover’s circle.

They became obsessed and in love with their kittens as they grew into cats. The cats were cosseted, they were kept clean, they were fed. And of course, the prisoners knew that if they got into fights or if they disobeyed authority, that the cats would be taken away.

So it had a massive impact on their behaviour, but also, and this was something that really fascinated me, on their feeling, they felt happier and they felt love, like genuine, clean, ordinary love for some other little thing that they were responsible for. And it really moved me because I think men in general, I mean, we’re changing things now the way we talk openly about it, but men in general have always been very in two minds about being frank about their needs emotionally or even having needs that are emotional. So I thought it was lovely that these men who had lived in a really grim and smelly, violent and transactional place suddenly had a fluffy kitten with big eyes looking at them for everything.

So that fascinated me. So I thought, yeah, we’ll start there. And it just grew.

Tiddles is given to this guy who’s imprisoned for life at the horrific murder of an elderly lady. He robbed from her, but he was really violent with it. And he can’t face it.

He can’t talk about what he actually did to her. And he kind of blames her for getting on his nerves, as it were. She was a neighbour.

And as he softens up with Tiddles, he becomes able to talk to his therapists in prison about it. He becomes absolutely besotted with Tiddles. And then we start hearing Tiddles in a voice.

And Tiddles in a voice is that of the old lady he killed. Because as always happens, don’t you hate it when this happens, Laura, the murder victim has been reincarnated as a kitten. Again! I know, that old chauvinist.

And she is being, of course, cared for by Pete, who is finding new dimensions to his soul and falling in love. And she hates Pete. And by the end, she engineers a riot and the prison burns down.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Back, back up. She’s a kitten.

Well, presumably even as a fully formed cat, she’s going to have some limitations as to how she could do something like she creates an entire riot. She does. Tiddles, without even an opposable thumb, manages to get the entire prison rioting.

Basically, she fakes being injured in his enemy’s cell. And Pete thinks that this guy has hurt Tiddles. And, of course, it looks like he has.

And so there’s great enmity between them even more than before. And Pete tries to control himself and he can’t. And Tiddles does it again.

And basically, Tiddles, of course, is sinuous and sinewy and can go all through the prison. And she manages, I can’t quite remember, I know it all fell together very well, Laura, very, very, very believable. But yeah, the whole thing burns down.

And, you know, Pete’s on the roof looking for Tiddles and Tiddles is sauntering off down an alleyway as the whole area is lit by the flames of Pete’s demise. So, yeah, she gets her own back on him quite spectacularly and fair play to her, I think. Yes, that’s an unusual turn up.

Well, that’s what my agent said. And I was always saying to her, I’m still working on Tiddles and she would be very, well, don’t neglect your other stuff. And she didn’t show it to anyone.

She didn’t show it to a single person. So that is in a drawer waiting for its time. Well, who knows? Maybe some publishers listening to this podcast go, do you know what we need? Our company needs a book like Tiddles Gets Life.

We need a reincarnated cat burning down a prison. That’s what’s going to get Netflix on its feet. Yeah.

But yeah. But then after that, you published your first actual book. Yeah, actual book, which was called The Reluctant Landlady.

And did that have any reincarnated cats or prison riots in there? No, not a one. No, shelled. Right.

But that was a romantic novel. Yeah, it was chiclet and we were still allowed to say chiclet then. And it was the next big thing.

And it was touted everywhere and highly exaggerated versions of how many copies it had sold were sent out. And it did really well. And I had an amazing editor.

She’s called Philippa Pride. And she was also Stephen King’s editor, which gives you, I know, which gives you an idea of the power she had. But then Philippa got rid of everyone except Stephen.

She had sort of changes in her career. And I was then handed over. And, you know, when there’s a changing of the guard, it’s not so good to be inherited.

It’s much better when somebody finds you. So things got it. I’m not complaining.

I have consistently published books ever since. But I wasn’t like the next big thing. Suddenly, I was, oh, and I also have to look after you, which did change things.

So yeah, it was, you know, if it hadn’t been so exciting at the beginning, I think it would have been a lot better for me. But as it was, I felt like, I don’t know, I felt like Noel Coward when he was a child star, and he was billed as destiny’s tot. And suddenly, I wasn’t anyone’s tot.

And so it was, yeah, it was, it was, it was quite humbling. And in retrospect, really useful, a really good life lesson. Because 28 novels later.

Well, yeah, I’m still going. I’m still doing the thing. But yeah, it’s, but the sheer amount of pen names will tell you that, you know, publishers constantly look for a debut, they constantly look for freshness.

They keep pretending I’m fresh. And rattled though I am, I go along with it. And yes, don’t quite got there.

But they’ll get published, they’ll get read. So I’m certainly When you say got there, you mean what top of the Sunday Times bestseller list? Exactly, or on it even. But yeah, I mean, I have readers, and I have a career, but I don’t have any name recognition.

How could you with the umpteen names, but even so, and you know, I’d like that. But more than anything else, I like being able to keep myself and to have something to do every day. So I’m plugging away, Laura.

Yeah, well, I’m trying not to feel sorry for you. I mean, 28 books. Are you sold in airport bookshops? Some of them are.

Yeah, the most recent three are the Archer’s ones. Well, there you go. I’m sorry, my sympathies just got out the window.

So you’re obviously doing extremely well. I’ll put away my tiny violin. Yes.

Right, well, we’ve come to your final offcut now. Can you tell us about this one, please? This is a TV screenplay, and it’s called Turpin, and it was written around 2019. Interior, Dick’s house, kitchen, day.

Martha is busy making a list, counting jars on a shelf, pondering, scribbling. Jane is shelling peas at the large scrubbed table. It is sunny and pleasant.

The kitchen lass can do that, Miss Jane. Don’t dirty your white fingers. It’s calming, Martha.

You used to sit me on the barrel over there and tell me I wasn’t allowed to talk until I was done. That was then, and this is now. The lady of the manor won’t shell peas.

Then I must make the most of my freedom before I’m expected to press flowers or read poetry or embroider my own straitjacket. Honey. We’re nearly out of honey.

Dick enters, scowling. Ah, thwit. Down the head, fool.

And good morning to you. Dick slams down the tiara on the table. Martha and Jane gape.

Is that… Martha involuntarily looks about her. It is, madam. Booty from last night’s jape.

What are you doing with it, sir? What do you think, woman? I stole it last night. Dragged it off that ugly aristocrat myself. Father! Lord Jane, were you out the day they delivered irony? This was left with poor widow Fleetwood by our kindly highwayman.

Surely that’s a good deed, father. The poor woman could buy herself a home with the proceeds of such a bauble. She wouldn’t need a home.

She’d have a nice, cosy coffin. If any of Prothero’s men caught an old widow woman with such a trinket, they’d march her to the gallows. Surely not.

This is England. Aye, England. Where the poor have no voice.

Where they hang old women. Dick feels his neck, suppresses a shudder. Young fool riding around our woods nearly got an innocent killed.

Dick bangs the table. And you, sir, I wouldn’t care to be in your shoes if Prothero had picked you up with that in your pocket. He can’t hurt you, father.

Dick and Martha exchange a look. You’re a man of substance and you have nothing to hide. You could have explained that you simply… Simply? Nothing simple with the likes of Prothero.

He’s been looking for a chance to jump on me and this… He puts the tiara on his head. Would hand it to him on a plate. Your head’s empty, Jane.

Life’s not all singing and shedding peas. Dick sweeps the peas off the table. Jane jumps up, shocked, and runs out the door.

Jane! I didn’t… We watch Jane race across the yard and jump the gate into a field. You never did let those skirts get in your way, girl. I handled that magnificently, eh, Martha? I can hear you thinking it.

Tack that off. It don’t suit you. Dick has forgotten the tiara.

He takes it off. Where does she go, Martha? When she runs off for hours on end like a tinker child. Where does she go? Right.

A TV series about, well, Dick Turpin. And in this case, the daughter of Dick Turpin. Tell us about that.

Yes. Dick has reformed and thinks no one knows he used to be a… A highwayman. And his daughter certainly doesn’t know it.

But he doesn’t know that she’s a highwaywoman. What? Well, yes, I know. Excuse me.

Get out of here. When she runs off like a tinker child, that’s what she’s doing. And she’s about to be married off to a local bigwig, who is a perfectly nice young man.

But she doesn’t want to marry him. She wants to have a wild, crazy life. So, yeah, it was about the pair of them circling each other, father and daughter circling each other, starting to think, hang on, this is a family business.

What’s going on? But Dick being very conservative because he knows this could mean death, all their houses stolen from them and everyone in prison and hanged. And she’s, of course, much more giddy and thinks they can get away with it forever. So, yeah, it’s very Saturday evening.

It’s that early Saturday evening romp where they always seem to have huge budgets, always lots of horses in them. And also a real throwback to a film I was obsessed with as a child called The Wicked Lady. Ah, yes.

Margaret Watson Fonteyn, isn’t it? No, Margaret something. Oh, we’re going to have to look this up now, Laura. Margaret something, the mum at the beauty spot.

Go on, look it up. It’s called The Wicked Lady. It’s called The Wicked Lady.

It’s Margaret Douda. Rutherford, no, not Rutherford. No, that’d be different, Margaret.

Margaret Lockwood, of course. Margaret Lockwood and that wonderful actor with the plummy voice in it as well. Hold on, we haven’t got his name yet.

James. No, that’s Michael Winner’s version. Did you know there was a Michael Winner version? 1983.

Not Mel Ferret, hold on. Oh, James Mason, of course. James Mason.

James Mason. And he was her lover and I just loved it. It was all sort of rushing out of rooms and cracking whips and a hat on the side with a feather in it.

And I just thought it’d be brilliant. If I was an actress, I’d love to be playing that role. So yes, again, it was kind of comedy.

It would have been a series serial. I mean, you know, the end of the series would always be Dick or Jane escaping from the gallows. And it was just fun to write.

And it did get sent to people, but it never got any interest at all. I think there were probably half a dozen other similar things circling. It’s now I know that it’s kind of a perennial thing to open.

Oh, is it? Yeah, there’s a lot of it. I mean, there’s two Harryman things on at the moment. There was that Noel Fielding one that was cancelled and that really lovely one.

Renegade Nell. Renegade Nell as well, which was lovely. So yeah, I don’t think I was the right person to write it, but it was fun.

And I’m very, very proud of the line, booty from last night’s Jape. And to hear it said so, so actorishly is a delight. But that’s the thing, like all that language.

And do you know who else is in there? Lorna Doon. We did Lorna Doon when I was about nine. And that being out in the wind, being a girl and having to struggle with all your 50 petticoats, but still jumping on the horse and getting away.

I just love all that. Right. But you’re working on another TV project at the moment based on The Archers.

Yes. Got three books set in Radio 4 hit soap opera, The Archer’s Village of Ambridge, taking place before The Archers started. Now that is an excellent idea because The Archers has a huge audience in this country anyway, very popular.

I mean, it feels like the prequel options are endless. Well, that’s what I think. We’re trying to get it away.

It just so happens that my agent also is the agent of the editor of The Archers. And she kind of got us both in a room and said, this could be great, couldn’t it? So we did it with the Biebs blessing. And I had the staff on Speed Dial to talk about what kind of tractor would they have had before the war? Bovine diseases.

I actually have a folder of bovine diseases. And of course, keeping the kind of lineage, the pedigree of the families straight because people take it as they should incredibly seriously. It’s a delightful world to dip your toe in.

I can’t tell you how safe and lovely it is in the world of The Archers, but not in a kind of silly way, just in a kind of really nice people doing important jobs. Well, it’s very what the BBC does best. But yeah, I mean, I’d watch it.

But yeah, we’re talking to people and there’s lots of meetings that should have been emails. But yeah, I hope one day to see that, but it’s not like it’s not coming to a screen near you anytime soon. It just seems like a really good idea.

It does. It seems like an excellent idea. You’ve already got three books out of it, have you? Yeah.

And presumably there are endless others. You just have to keep going. And yes, but before that, the Archers in the Stone Age, I mean, yeah, we can just keep going back.

And it is, of course, the war is just like prime archers going to time, isn’t it? Yes. You know, all that kind of gritting your teeth and getting on with it and, you know, putting up with rationing. And I had a ball writing those books.

I presume you have many more plans coming out, surely? Don’t stop. No, they haven’t asked for any more. And do you need their permission to do that? Yes and no.

The problem is the plan was always that the end of the last book in the trilogy would be the day of the first episode of the radio serial. So we’re getting a crossing of universes and a crossing of ley lines. So I can’t get my archers to do what I want them to do.

But what about, you know, like the Star Wars, did it for God’s sake? Yeah, that’s true. Surely prequels of prequels. I mean, also the American TV series Yellowstone has about four spinoff series already.

Pre that and then pre that and pre that. I mean, the question, I suppose, is whether you’d be allowed to, do you need to apply to them for the IP and all that? Absolutely. Yeah, you do.

You do. And you have to share the profits with them. So yeah, you do.

You know, I can parley this into a pension if I keep yakking. But yeah, I mean, that is the idea, to kind of flesh it out and make it, you know, really nice sort of period thing. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I can’t do it on my own, Laura.

You mean for the TV series? Exactly. So we’ll work on that. But yeah, it was a joy and is a continuing joy to write about the archers, I have to say.

Excellent. Well, we have come to the end of the show. How was it for you, Bernie? It was lovely.

It was really lovely. I enjoyed the podcast anyway. And it’s surreal to be on this end of it, I have to say.

And yeah, thank you for being so gentle with me, Laura. I’m not quite sure what you thought I should be doing. I’m generally, I’m a very vanilla presenter.

I don’t do anything to anybody. So you’re always going to be safe. But having heard your offcuts, do you think any of these offcuts are worth going back to and having another stand back? Or do we think that their time has passed? I think if I’m honest, I think their whole time has passed.

But hearing Tiddles, I want to write about the cat who burns the prison down. I’m going to forcefully… And not as a children’s book, which the implication is the cat that burned down the prison. Exactly.

The lifeless cat that burned… No, I just, I want to get back into Tiddles. I love Tiddles. So yeah, I think they’re all backdated.

I think they’re all in my rearview mirror now. I really do think they are. And I think that’s great.

It’s nice to have a very crowded rearview mirror. But yeah, it is reminding me actually, just how… I remember someone saying to Ronnie Barker once when I was a kid watching him on, I think it was on Parkinson, said, do you ever worry that you won’t be able to make any more jokes that you’ve used up all your jokes? And he said, no, it’s like writing music. There’s only a certain amount of notes, but there’s no end to the amount of music you can write.

And I think the same is true of kind of literary endeavours. It’s just like a self-generating machine inside you. It’s an engine.

And it’s kind of nice to be reminded that your engine works. So thank you for that, Laura. It was absolutely our pleasure.

Well, it’s been great fun to talk to you today, Bernie, Juliet, Claire, MB, Alice, Catherine and Bernadette. Best of luck in your new home. And thank you for sharing the contents of your offcut straw with us.

Thank you, Laura. The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Bernadette Strachan. The offcuts were performed by Shash Hira, Noni Lewis, Beth Chalmers, Marcus Hutton and Emma Clarke.

And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutstraw.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

(0:01) We once got a Dave Podmore show on because there was a, I think there was a new commissioner or the person who was responsible for commissioning and I knew didn’t greatly like or understand cricket and I said well we want to do an another Dave Podmore episode this year because as I’m sure you know it’ll be the anniversary exactly a thousand years since cricket began and fortunately this person believed me and commissioned it.

(0:40) Hello I’m Laura Shavin and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. On this episode my guest is Christopher Douglas, a British writer, actor and bastion of Radio 4 comedy.

(1:11) He is the co-writer and voice of the titular character in long-running radio sitcom Ed Reardon’s Week, co-written with the late Andrew Nicholds which recently reached its 16th series and groundbreaking 100th episode, having earned the Broadcasting Press Guild Award for Best Radio Programme in both 2005 and 2010. His other long-running writing credits for radio include the creation of the character Dave Podmore, the world’s most disappointing cricketer, a role he has voiced and co-written for over 30 episodes since 1997 and then there’s the writing of two radio series of Mastering the Universe starring Dawn French and the three series radio comedy Beauty of Britain. Additionally he adapted the Victorian novel New Grub Street into a two-part radio drama and wrote the radio play Tristram Shandy in Development which won the 2021 Tinniswood Award.

(2:05) His screen work includes scripting and directing the recurring on-screen persona of actor Nicholas Craig, played by Nigel Planer, for both stage and television in productions such as the Nicholas Craig Masterclass and later programmes for BBC Two and BBC Four which all originated from the spoof autobiography I, an Actor he co-wrote with Planer in 1988. Christopher Douglas welcome to the Offcuts Drawer. Thank you Laura.

(2:34) Now I have to start with I, an Actor because that was one of the most influential books I read as a drama student. I mean after all the serious po-faced navel-gazings of real thespians that we were told to read this was an absolute blast me and my friends were obsessed with it. I have to ask you was it inspired by anyone in particular?

(2:55) No it was inspired by everybody including ourselves really and we were warned against doing it by older professionals who said not that they were worried about being insulted but because they thought it was too much of an in-joke and that sort of we thought well what’s wrong with an in-joke? It’s funny, it’s funny. And there was a sort of spoof acting book that was published I think in the early 60s sometime called the Art of Course Acting and it was much broader than than Nicholas and it was sort of aimed at a wider readership.

(3:34) It was more about amdram? Yes it was really yes and so we were told oh no there’s already a book you know and we thought well that’s that’s got nothing to do with the the world that we observe which is everybody going on about how incredibly dangerous and tough acting is and we just thought it was so funny. Yes.

(3:54) And especially as the people who went on and on about how tough and dangerous it was all seemed to be so so comfortably off and very highly paid. Yes I think Simon Callow’s book had just come out at that point and I remember reading that nodding sagely at it but then when your book came out it was just oh my god it was absolute blindingly fun. Yes I think he slightly took offence and we had to reassure him that it wasn’t his book in particular.

(4:23) The whole bunch of them came out around that time but I don’t think we really we really targeted anyone in particular. As I say it was that you know it was it was sort of against ourselves as well because we’d been actors for you know we’d both been doing it for quite some time 12 years or something I think and I’d done quite a lot of the sort of lower end of the repertory career path and Nigel had done it worked at a sort of slightly more elevated level so we had the whole acting profession pretty much covered really between us. Okay well we’ll talk more about it and Nicholas Craig later in the show but in the meantime let’s get started with your first off-cut can you tell us please what it’s called what genre it was written for and when it was written?

(5:11) This is a scene from The Scarlet City which was written around the late 90s 97 I think and it was a TV pilot script. Hair and Beavis at the dining table. Mrs. Bracewell clears up. Nellie the skivvy enters. Beg pardon sir but it’s one of them girls at the door sir. One of which girls Nellie?

(5:35) You know one of them girls as is all wet and bedraggled what fetches up on the doorstep not knowing however it was they got here sir. Not again I’m sorry sir I’ll get rid of her immediately. One moment tell me Nellie does she wear a velvet trimmed cloak and beneath her hat a cascade of auburn tresses?

Speaker 2

(5:54) Yes sir.

Speaker 1

(5:55) And in her hand a pathetic strap of paper? Yes sir. Forgive me Mr. Hair but we’ve had this so many times whenever we let one in it always leads to trouble. Thank you Mrs. B I think you’ll allow my instinct in these matters is without equal. I have a suspicion that this young woman’s plight is in some way connected with a network of enemy agents. Extraordinary deduction Hair.

(6:17) Is this the same reasoning process that led you to the conclusion that Jack the Ripper is really Mrs. Beaton? It’s by no means as clear-cut as that at this stage. Show her in will you?

(6:28) Very well sir. Emily enters. Mr. Hair thank goodness I’ve found you. Well well what have we here? Proper little pre-Raphaelite wet dream. Forgive me for calling on you but I believe I am in great danger.

(6:42) That is quite all right my dear. Pray sit down and compose yourself. Oh thank you.

(6:46) Perhaps you would be good enough to tell us in your own time how we may be of assistance. An anonymous well-wisher gave me your name and address on this pathetic scrap of paper and I have this strange feeling that you’re the only man in the world who can help me. That is more than likely child.

(7:01) Oh my threadbare cloak has slipped from my shoulders. Sir isn’t this rather predictable? Mrs. Bracewell be good enough to put this pathetic scrap of paper with the others and allow me to conduct this interview in my own way. Now tell me Beavis have you ever beheld such a heart-rending picture of defenceless maidenhood? No indeed it is quite pitiful. The sodden hair, the trembling lip, the tears like mourning dew on an unopened bud.

(7:28) Mrs. Bracewell we need some towels and a change of clothes immediately. Oh for you or her? Her of course.

(7:34) My child I suspect you are in unfortunate circumstances. Give me a break. Is it by any chance the case Emily that you have become the unwitting tool of a group of foreign agents embarked on a plan to attack London with a secret weapon in all probability a large submarine with brass instruments and red velvet upholstery?

(7:56) No I was running away from home. Yeah I apologise for the somewhat devious means by which I was obliged to tease out your true story. I would have told you anyway that’s why I’m here.

(8:08) Then pray continue your narrative girl we are wasting valuable time. This script was commissioned was it? Yes it was it was a sort of intended as a sort of Holmes and Watson parody except that the two men commit crimes rather than solving them and they do things like they go around stealing things on behalf of the British Museum.

(8:37) I seem to remember that I wrote a sort of outline for some other episodes and I think he invented a time machine and there was that sort of territory and it was commissioned by the producer the late Andrei Tichinsky who produced an earlier sitcom that I’d had done on BBC2 called Tiger Road and it was well it didn’t get a second series but Andrei kept faith with me and commissioned me to do this Scarlet City script and the idea was I think we had Stephen Fry in mind for the the sort of Sherlock Holmes character and Joe Brand for the housekeeper Missy Bracewell. I can’t remember why it was turned down or indeed who turned it down but it was it was fun to do anyway.

(9:25) I bet it was were you going to play a part in it? No no I wasn’t actually I didn’t start to sort of interfere in my own scripts until some years later. All right well this was a TV script which is interesting because I suppose what you’re most known for recently probably is radio with your beloved curmudgeonly character Ed Reardon as I mentioned before having just completed his 16th 16th series on Radio 4, 100 episodes in the bag.

(9:54) That is extraordinary for a radio sitcom I mean that’s the sort of numbers you expect from like an American TV show with a room full of writers and you know 22 episodes a series, a hundred episodes. Yes it’s it is unusual. There were shows in the in the 1950s that I think did rather more episodes but that is you say they had teams of writers but I think possibly one of the reasons it’s it’s kept going is that Ed Reardon reacts to whatever’s currently in the air not so much actual events it’s it’s more fashions in the arts or TV or sport journalism politics and so there’s always something new for Ed to be annoyed about and he’s he’s certainly written more than I have and he’s probably earned more but but I think what what makes him a more interesting person than me is that he never feels sorry for himself. Most writers moan on about how hard done by we are but Ed never does that and maybe that’s what’s allowed him to keep going as a comedy character.

(11:00) Well he does bitch about other people though I mean he’s he may not say I’m doing badly but he does resent it when other people do well. Oh yes yes and he’s driven by extreme jealousy for other writers. Has he changed much over the years do you think?

(11:15) Well he sort of has to, he reacts to whatever’s in the air. But none of his attitudes have changed would you say? Well I would like to say no but I suspect they have.

(11:27) I suspect there’s stuff that he said in earlier episodes that I wouldn’t I wouldn’t allow him to say now. You know it’s not like mind your language or anything like that. You know it’s been going for 20 years and I think fashions have changed.

Speaker 2

(11:41) Yes that’s true.

Speaker 1

(11:42) The show I think has changed a little bit because in recent years the budgets everywhere you know inevitably shrank a bit and so we had a jazz band to begin with. Ed used to play in a jazz band. We had a writing class.

(11:58) Ed used to teach creative writing and they sadly have had to go for purely budgetary reasons and you know it’s just what everybody’s had to put up with. And so I think the effect that that’s had is it’s made the stories a bit tighter because there aren’t so many other characters and it takes a bit longer to construct the stories but I think on the whole it’s it’s worked quite well. I mean the latter two series which have been done in this sort of slightly new way and so these sort of recent ten or so episodes are more like plays really, farcical plays rather than topical sitcom that it was when we first started.

(12:40) But it’s hard work but I love writing plays so it suits me. Okay time for another off-cut now. What’s this one?

(12:49) Right this is a play called Oedipus at the Crossroads of Motel. It was written in the early 90s. Your parents are both other men now Martin but their accident could have been much more serious and it made me realise that you should know it was me who first brought you to them.

(13:06) I was adopted? Yes. What so are you my real father?

(13:12) No my dear. He’s entitled to know. He’s over 18.

(13:16) You are aren’t you Martin? Yes. Thank goodness for that.

(13:20) 19 years ago I was directing the Sheffield Panto, Aladdin and Felix who ran Bolton Rep had just done Chinese Bungalow so let me have the drapery in exchange for a favour. Felix Sheppard? Who ran Bolton yes.

(13:33) He’s in the cast of our programme. The Motel? No.

(13:37) He’s Gaston, the chef with a past. Well isn’t that typical of this business? It really is just one big family.

(13:44) And how often do we say that fact is so much stranger than fiction? Not very often at all on this show. We had two fires and a plane crash last week.

(13:54) Felix we need you to answer a very important question. Did you give this man my baby? Your baby?

(14:00) I remember giving him some costumes. Green satin I think. The fabric is immaterial.

(14:06) Felix you told me the baby was sent to Loveday and Latouche’s orphanage in Streatham where he subsequently died. They sent me a lock of hair. Loveday and Latouche was a firm of wig makers and parookiers.

(14:17) I used the moniker to throw everyone off the scent. I thought it was an odd name for a church orphanage. It came off the top of my head.

(14:24) The idea not the hair. So who am I exactly? You mean there was no orphanage?

(14:29) No polio epidemic? Call it a white lie for the greater good. So you two are my real parents?

Speaker 2

(14:36) No.

Speaker 1

(14:37) Your father was the actor whom you replaced as the motel’s likeable barman. He was at Bolton too. The old bloke who killed himself when he was given his notice?

(14:46) Not your fault. Not directly but I was a cause of his death. I wouldn’t go that far.

(14:52) Unknowingly perhaps but I was. This calls for an ad in the stage. You may be cheeky waiter and charming chatelaine to 18 million viewers but in real life you are mother and son.

(15:03) It’s almost like one of the motel’s own more sensational storylines. God this is terrible. It’s alright.

(15:09) No it’s not. It means I’ve killed me father and slept with me… Don’t worry about Dennis.

(15:14) He was going to be written out anyway. And as for the other thing darling I told you it doesn’t count on location. Well that’s quite the punchline.

(15:26) Oh gosh that was… Is this the end of the play? That was complicated wasn’t it?

(15:32) No I don’t think it was. I think it… It went on from there?

(15:36) Yes. I think I did finish it actually. I couldn’t get anywhere with it.

(15:42) My agent said it was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. It was rather sort of complicated how it came about because I was actually in Crossroads when I was about… I think I was 18 when I went into it and I played a cheeky waiter.

(16:01) They gave me a trial three weeks to see how… And then at the end of three weeks they said right you can stay on. We’ll make you the waiter and then they realised they couldn’t make me the barman because I was too young.

(16:17) So they gave me a birthday so that I could serve behind the bar. And I had a party but I was only 17. So then a few weeks later I had another birthday.

(16:30) No party this time and then I was able to go and serve behind the bar. And I was in it for a year and a half or something. And the other sort of inspiration for this I suppose was that I was an only child and for a while I was slightly unsure about who my father was.

(16:47) When I was very little anyway I had a stepfather. But that was a pretty standard upbringing. But I think only children often feel they’re doing things wrong all the time.

(16:59) I did especially when I started working in theatre. And then when I was surrounded by all these older more experienced people when I went into Crossroads I sort of felt I was doing something wrong the whole time. Many years later really when I read Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy I was struck by the way that Oedipus believes everything he’s told about his origins.

(17:21) And he never questions anything even though he wants this terrible history not to be true. And my instinct is to see comedy in any situation. It seemed logical to set the Oedipus story in the Crossroads motel.

(17:35) I thought it would be quite fun. Obviously having heard that I think I’d been probably reading a lot of Joe Alton when I sat down to write it. But I think what you’ve just heard was a bit too big for its boots really.

(17:49) The general idea is quite funny but then when you get right to that punchline you go oh this is potentially a little darker than we previously thought. But this is the earliest offcut that you sent and you mentioned your parents just now. They both worked in entertainment.

(18:05) But what about you? Did you know you wanted to act because you were following your parents? And all this writing, did you do writing at school?

(18:12) Were you good at it? Where’s that come from? Well yes all three of my parents worked in theatre and then in television.

(18:22) So the first paid writing job I had or the first thing I got paid for was on a game show called Huey Green’s Double Your Money. I think it was 1964. And I got half a crown for sending in a question.

(18:36) And I think the question was which of the following heavenly bodies is closest to the earth? Is it the moon, is it Mars or Brigitte Bardot? That tells you when it was.

(18:52) How old were you when you wrote that? At the age of eight or nine. I can’t imagine that was original.

(18:59) I must have got it from somewhere. But anyway I got paid two and six for it. And then I progressed to writing, helping to write questions for the TV game show Mr and Mrs, which my stepfather directed and for which my mother wrote the questions.

(19:16) So in school holidays I used to help her write the questions. Oh wow. I remember Mr and Mrs. They had a child writing the questions. Yes they did, yeah. Well I only sort of helped, I suggested things. It was actually my first experience of literary rejection, with my mother telling me that the questions weren’t good enough.

(19:34) And then I sort of followed their lead. I left school when I was 15 and sort of went to work in theatre. And one of my first acting jobs was playing a Christmas turkey in Mr and Mrs. So I had to run on the set, do something mischievous, I can’t remember what. And then as a punishment I was sent into the soundproof box. And when I went into the soundproof box in my turkey outfit, having got my laugh, I remember that, I could still hear the show’s host talking to the audience. I thought, well if I can hear that, all the people who go on Mr and Mrs must be able to hear the questions and the answers that their spouses give.

(20:13) So I thought all these years, and nobody thought to cheat. They just, well maybe some of them did. But there’s something quite moving about that.

(20:22) Yeah, well unless of course there was some kind of music or something played in there.

Speaker 2

(20:25) Ah, maybe there was.

Speaker 1

(20:26) Yeah, you see, maybe something else. But it was quite shocking to me at the time. But the writing thing, I mean, I don’t mean to in any way dis your writing at a young age.

(20:35) It’s not really the same thing as writing plays. Were you writing much at school? No, I mean, I left school with very few O-levels and I had really very little education at all.

(20:49) And I did manage to write a play when I was quite young. I’d been working as an actor for some years by then. And when I was in my early 20s, I did manage to write a script which I tried to sell as a film script and couldn’t get anybody to read it.

(21:04) And so I sent it to a radio producer. The play was about cricket. It was about a cricket tour in the 1930s called the Bodyline Tour where the English team were thought to have pushed the boundaries of sportsmanship or cheated, as the Australians saw it.

(21:18) Anyway, this script, the producer I sent it to, Jane Morgan, she was mad about cricket, I’ve been told that. And she wanted to do it. And we got it on.

(21:29) It was 1980, I think, so I was still quite young. And then after that, having tried to sell it as a film script and then it becoming a radio script, then David Putnam bought the rights to it. And I thought, oh, great, this is the ability.

(21:43) The film was never made. But I got commissioned to write the biography of the leading character who was a man very well known in cricket circles but had never had a biography written, a man called Douglas Jardine. And so writing this book became my education.

(22:02) So I hadn’t learnt very much at school, but I learnt an awful lot over the year and a half or two years to write this book. So that was my education, really. It was an odd way of going about it.

(22:13) But that was where I sort of learnt to write, really, at that time. Interesting. Well, moving on now, let’s have another off-cut.

(22:21) What’s this one? Well, this is from a radio pilot script. It’s called Nicholas and Lysander and it involves Nicholas Craig and his son, Lysander.

(22:36) Dad, have you seen my lucky scarf? Are you in for supper tonight? No, don’t worry about me.

(22:44) I’m not. I’m worried about parting with significant sums of money at Morrison’s for food which gets wasted because you don’t turn up to eat it. Yeah, that’s why I’m saying don’t worry.

(22:52) Really need my scarf. It’s got an 8 out of 10 strike rate. Right.

(22:57) But what tends to happen, Lysander, is that you say don’t worry, so I don’t, and then you appear with a pitiful countenance and I have to divide my meagre past in two, which is more than a little vexing. So are you complaining a do turn up or a don’t? Because it can’t really be both, can it?

(23:12) Maybe I left it in Chiswick. Oh, got to stop sleeping with models. They always nick your clothes.

(23:17) Where is it? Lysander. Why don’t you make one of your favourites, like kidneys, brains, then you won’t have to share it, will you?

(23:25) Or get vexed. No, I’ll have to leap to the AGA and make you a Spanish omelette while mine goes cold because that’s all there is in the house. Well, don’t.

(23:33) A house, moreover, which is falling down and whose running costs have just quadrupled. So sell it. Don’t worry, dear, it’s going on the market this morning.

(23:41) Cool. Cool? It’s too big for you.

(23:43) You fall asleep drunk on the sofa every night. You don’t even need one bedroom, never mind five. Sell it, Dad.

(23:49) You wouldn’t think it was very cool if I turned around and said we’re moving to Bounds Green. Well, I wouldn’t mind because I’m getting a place with Max. Max appears in feature films he won’t want to share with you unless he needs someone to wait in for the drug delivery man.

(24:01) Might get somewhere on my own. Depends if I get this job. Running another club night at the Hubbly Bubbly Bar is not a job.

(24:07) I told you, I’ve got an audition for a movie. That’s why I seriously do need my scarf with the silver threads running through. Corporate training movie?

(24:17) Or don’t forget to turn the gas off movie? It’s a short. Oh, the creative activity of choice for the latter day layabout.

(24:24) Has Orlando got a job yet? No, he’s making a short film. Is this the gilded youth who’s directing it?

(24:31) Dad. Lucy Bunting. Why do they always sound like characters from a nursery rhyme?

(24:36) Give it back, I need the address. 48 Hoxton Square. Who’d have thought it?

(24:40) Lysander snatches the paper. Thank you. I was in a short film once.

(24:45) I had to be a ludicrous farm labourer with lines so fatuous I spoke them precisely as written just to confront them with the evidence of their own imbecility. Good one, Dad. Can you tell me where my scarf is so I can actually do something with my life?

(24:56) Like take part in a Tosspot Trustafarian Vanity Project? Dad. Which scarf?

(25:01) It’s like Liberty’s in our understairs cupboard. The one Max got me from Turkmenistan. Darn.

(25:06) You’ve taken it to go to your Russian lesson again, haven’t you? I have not. Just because she recognised you from an old episode of Middlemarch don’t kid yourself you’re cougar prey.

(25:15) Lysander starts something about in the cupboard. What’s delusional, Lysander, is to suppose you will not be out on your arse or indeed flogging said orifice up and down the award-winningly restored Regent’s Canal towpath unless one of us gets a paid job. Where’s my scarf?

(25:31) And talking of rental, I’m charging £100 a week from now on. Good. I’m charging you for ruining my life and being a smug, self-obsessed, poisonous, gay-arsed, alcoholic, scarf-stealing, criminally inadequate father.

(25:44) So we’re quit! FX Front Door Slam. Then the sound of a drink pouring.

(25:48) Nicholas dials on his phone. Hello, Miriam Medeiro. Geriatric client here.

(25:54) You may want of a person called Lucy Bunting. Not as would be reasonable to assume a character out of Motherfucking Goose but yet another Whitechapel wanker squandering her parents’ money on a short film. I know we said never again, but it might be worth a nudgelet.

(26:14) Nicholas Craig moved on a bit there, hasn’t he? He did that very well, didn’t they? Yes.

(26:19) Yes, I remember we had a… It didn’t get anywhere, but we did have a reading of it. I think we had a reading at Attrick and it’s mentioned, isn’t it, the short film job and I think Lysander, he tries to start a festival of short films and his father’s very sort of dismissive of it, but because they live in Primrose Hill, hundreds of people come round with their short films wanting to enter the festival.

(26:46) They charge, you know, a £500 entry fee and so it ends up with Nicholas on his wonderfully large dining table with about £5 million in cash just moaning about, all I’ve got is this endless, endless admin to deal with and he’s just being given all this money and he’s still moaning about it. I thought it was quite funny, but obviously nobody else in power did. You wrote it with Nigel Planer.

(27:17) How did you meet the two of you? I’d known him for quite some while, I think, through Andrew actually, through my late writing partner who had a wonderful office just off Charlotte Street and he used to write Agony with Stan Hay and there were two cartoonists he shared the front office with and everybody just dropped in for lunch. It was one of those central London places that just became a bit of a meeting place and I met Nigel there and then, you know, we’d sort of see each other’s shows and so we’d become friendly by the time we started on Nicholas.

(27:54) And had you started with the view to let’s invent a good character for Nigel or did you just start writing something together and then go, oh, do you know what? Nigel could play that. No, it was his idea.

(28:04) He said, I think there’s an actor character. That’s all he had really at that point and then we just started reading around it and realising what sort of… He was a bit young to do it, really.

(28:14) He was still in his thirties when we did it and he should have sort of been a bit older because he was sort of on the way out, as it were, but he was terrific. And the character got richer as Nigel got older and we did a lot of shows, a lot of Nicholas shows.

Speaker 2

(28:32) Like what, theatre and TV?

Speaker 1

(28:34) Yes, yeah, we had a stage show that we did and we’d sort of get that out of its box and take it out on the road. But we began on TV by doing the Late Show unit and they wanted a sort of 20-minute piece from Nicholas and a sort of master class type thing and because BBC obviously had all the rights to the Wogan show, we did a master class on how to be on Wogan. And I remember I had two old VCR machines and just a pile of VHSs of Wogan and I’d be on my hands and knees putting these cassettes in and watching this stuff over and over again.

(29:12) Now it was just such an easy job to do but it took me weeks to do this 20-minute piece. And then we did two series and then quite a lot of single hour-long shows for BBC Four, so we did a lot of shows. Excellent.

(29:27) Well, he deserved it. He was a brilliant creation. I speak on behalf of me and my entire generation of drama school graduates.

(29:34) Oh, thank you. Loved it. Anyway, time for your next off-cut now.

(29:37) Can you tell us about this one, please? This is from an unfinished novel called Ghost Story. I wrote it in 2007 and this is the first page.

(29:49) I had been expecting this particular death for some years and given the peculiar closeness of my relationship with the dead woman, it was going to be a busy few hours.

And given the peculiar closeness of my relationship with the dead woman, it was going to be a busy few hours, possibly days. News of a celebrity demise often comes to people in my trade as a welcome excuse to set aside the task in hand, put the kettle on, perhaps have a hunk of low-fat mature cheddar and think about composing an apposite soundbite. Almost invariably the holiday mood sours once it becomes clear that no one is much interested in what a freelance writer has to say about the late national treasure or the time when our professional paths crossed.

But last Tuesday morning I knew it would be different. Not long after the turn of the century, I spent 15 intense months inhabiting the role of Joy Adams’ analyst, flatterer, collaborator and, somewhat resentful, servant. She, in turn, proved to be my tormentor, victim and financial saviour.

You’d have to go back to the days of Nelson’s Navy to find an enforced intimacy between two people so wholly out of sympathy with each other. Joy and I were yoked together by a publisher and set to work to money. A truckload for her and a much-needed Nissan Micra for me, Mike Green, the anonymous ghost.

When the news of Joy’s death popped up on the screen, I hardly needed to think about which would be the best stories to toss to which particular hacks. Nobody else alive has more facts at their fingertips about this woman. It’s not something I’m in any way proud of.

In fact, I would much rather not have had so much show-business trivia cluttering up my memory. As I sat at the computer, braced for the first wave of demands for information, Twitter threw up the usual inadequacies. R.I.P. Joy Adams, drivelled, a million-pound-a-year television executive, truly spelt T-R-U-L-E-Y.

An incredible comedy genius, her split-second-timing was amaze-five-ays. I know, of course, that criticising the spelling of a tweeter is widely considered to be a cheap shot and, in all probability, a criminal violation of a stupid bastard’s personal journey. So I confined myself to observing that you can always tell when someone doesn’t know what to say about an actor if they resort to commending their split-second timing.

The overpaid executive’s lame eulogy received 80,000 likes and 14,000 retweets, plus several compliments for his beautiful words. Out of the radio came the voice of a footballer remembering the day Joy paid a presidential visit to the lad’s changing room and he found himself shaking her hand while wearing no shorts. A stand-up comic said she was a game-changer.

(3:48) An actor who was the last but one Captain Birdseye said she was incredibly down-to-earth. By the time the Director-General of the BBC appeared on Newsnight to deliver his tribute, Joy’s timing was crafted to nanosecond perfection. I realised that they were probably not going to ask me for my recollections.

So instead, I’ve decided to set down for my own satisfaction the true story of what passed between Joy and myself. This is a record of 15 unpleasant months in the life of the nation’s favourite nan, who was also, although the nation is not yet aware of this, their favourite murderer. Ooh, that sounds so intriguing.

But this is based on your real-life work, isn’t it? Well, very loosely, yes. I mean, not with a murderer specifically. I spent a year and a half, I think, as June Whitfield’s ghostwriter, around 1998-99, and we actually got on pretty well.

But for the purposes of this story, it works better if the two characters are at loggerheads. Yes, of course. I say we got on pretty well, but she could be quite hard to please sometimes.

And I think it was Chapter 5 went through dozens of, literally dozens of drafts, and we had a big argument when she insisted that the height of the popularity of the Beatles was during the Second World War. So we had sort of rather circular arguments like that. And I developed a strategy.

I invented the Museum of Social History. So anything that she challenged, I said, well, no, I have actually had that fact-checked with the Museum of Social History. No.

Which she accepted without question. And the trouble was, though, that she then thought the Museum of Social History sounded so interesting that she wanted to come with me to go there. So I had to say it was a bit sharp for refurbishment or something.

But anyway, in the novel, I made the National Treasurer, I gave her a different name, made her a murderer. And of course, June didn’t murder anyone. But the idea did seem sort of good fun because she was at the peak of her National Treasure status.

And I’d say that sliding into June’s character there, because Andrew Nickolds and Nick Newman, who I also worked with, they worked with me on a proposal for a film script sort of based on this novel idea and the real experience called Killing June Whitfield, in which June murders her arch rival in order to And we took this to June, who was very keen on the idea of being a master criminal, but she didn’t want to murder anyone. So we thought, okay, so how can we make this way? She said she’d much rather be a great train robber or something like that. And then she decided that she didn’t want to be a criminal at all, because people would think she really was.

And she had a good point there, because I’d read some of the fan letters that she received. And, you know, fan mail is very odd. And she might have had to spend, she feared she might have to spend hours on chat shows and local radio explaining that she wasn’t a murderer.

So that was the end of it, unfortunately. But you actually wrote, you ghost wrote her autobiography as well. Yes, that’s right.

(7:19) They actually did get written. And it was on the whole, you know, absolutely fascinating experience. And she kept so much, I imagine he’s gone to the Theatre Museum now or something.

But this sort of vast archive of scripts, Hancock scripts, and, you know, absolute sort of milestones of comedy that she had in her sort of attic room. Yes, well, she did work with everyone, didn’t she? Oh, yes, worked with everyone. And at a time when it was quite difficult for women comedians to get work.

And she didn’t particularly see that as an achievement. But I think she was aware of how good she was, obviously. And yes, I mean, she worked with, you know, Arthur Askey, Noel Coward, Tommy Cooper, you know, just about everybody.

(8:07) So what’s with the recent fashion for cosy murder stories? I don’t know if you’ve noticed it on television casts of older actors playing detectives. And in fact, the Thursday Murder Club, the success of Richard Osman’s book now made into a film where the lead characters are pensioners. In fact, a lot of TV detectives are now middle aged, if not older women as well.

(8:32) I’m wondering, is it worth possibly reviving this? I know that she’s the criminal in this. But as a cosy character in a cosy murder story, is this something you might consider? Yeah, that’s a very good idea. It’s such an obvious connection.

Honestly, it hadn’t occurred to me that. But yeah, that’s a good idea. Okay, let’s move on to the next offcut.

What have we got now? This is a clip from my adaptation of Tristram Shandy for Radio 4. It’s an ad for a donkey charity. And I’ve chosen it because the director cut it. Graham’s slow pastoral music or melancholy piano.

(9:11) If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not save a donkey from dying senselessly? By donating just three pounds a month, you could relieve the suffering of donkeys abroad who are hungry, thirsty, and struggling with loads that are far too wide. Text SAVE to 0007 or call 0800 099 0774. Or why not adopt an ill-treated donkey? I’ve chosen the perfect donkey for my husband and two for my best friend, Linda.

(9:40) They’ll love their adoption pack with pictures of their new donkey friends. Visit donkeyaid.org and click donkeys in your inbox now. Thank you.

(9:49) The music ends. Oh, it’s lovely to hear that. Yes, the director cut it, so I was very pleased.

Thank you. Oh, excellent. Our pleasure.

Now, this was an interesting play. I heard this, Tristram Shandy in development. It wasn’t Tristram Shandy, to be fair.

It was Tristram Shandy in development. It was a play, if I remember rightly, about a production of Tristram Shandy. I can’t remember if it was a film or a play that it was being produced.

(10:14) Well, the idea was that it was a sort of rather pretentious radio drama workshop, and it was broadcast as though it was a podcast. But yes, it’s not as wide of the mark as you might think, actually, because Lawrence Stern, when he wrote Tristram Shandy, part of the joke was that he needed money to subsidise the writing. And so he peppered the text with adverts and appeals for money so that he could keep writing, rather in the way that podcasters do now.

(10:47) We don’t, by the way. Well, that’s why I hope to sneak that clip on there. So just as Stern sort of satirised the world of publishing, I put the boot into radio drama.

But, you know, you could really, it’s so malleable, this story, you could sort of set it… That’s Tristram Shandy, you mean? Yes, you could set Tristram Shandy anywhere, really. Frank Cottrell Boyce did a wonderful film version about 15 years ago. It’s set in the film world and, you know, you could set it in the world of publishing or the world of theatre.

The beats of the story work equally well, I think. Well, we’ve heard from that and earlier Off Cuts that you sort of like a bit of historical comedy because you spoofed the Conan Doyle and similar style detective yarns we heard earlier, and this is taking a well-known 18th century novel as its subject matter. Have you always had a love of historical literature? Are you particularly well-read? No, no, I’m not.

Not at all, really. But I suppose, well, there are adaptations that are out of copyright. I see, it’s a financial issue.

(11:57) No, I think actually I’ve sort of, rather than being inspired so much by English comedy or literature, I think that I probably learnt more from theatre and from American sitcoms, actually, than from British ones. I taught comedy for New York University for a few years and I thought, there’s no point in teaching American students about British sitcoms, telling them about Heidi High or Hello, Hello. So, I watched a great deal of Frasier, Seinfeld, Simpsons, Roseanne and so on.

(12:28) And I learnt a huge amount from them. The main lesson being that you can’t keep more than three plots running at the same time. You can just about get away with three.

Two is better. Best of all is one. Really? I thought best is three, isn’t it? The ABC plot system.

(12:45) I just think, if you can do without them, and if you think that. Well, it’s a way of involving all the characters, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s the thing. Sometimes you can’t do it in one because you’ve got too many characters, absolutely, as you say.

But if you think of your favourite sitcom episodes of a particular favourite sitcom, they’re often the one that just has one plot or one plot with two very slight digressions. But, you know, it’s 28 minutes or in the States, 22, 24 minutes. You know, it’s not that long.

(13:16) You have to keep the narrative quite simple. Right. But you’ve never been tempted to write a sitcom in the way that Americans do.

Your style seems very British, whatever American influences you may have picked up. Is that true? Yes. I’m very envious of the American system.

I’d love to be involved with it, the writing team, I think, because, you know, they take it so seriously. There’s a lot of money in it, so they take it very seriously. And so there’s a show I particularly admire at the moment called Hacks, which has a team of writers and, as do all the great American sitcoms, but they’re also in it, some of them.

And I think that’s a very good system. I’d love to work in that. But I think it’s that we can’t afford to do it in this country.

I’m pretty sure it’s that. But when you talk about the technicalities of plotting, particularly, to execs in this country, they often just cover their ears and hum. They just really don’t want to know about it.

(14:19) They just want you to get on with it and finish it as soon as possible. And maybe they know that they can’t afford a writing team, so don’t even think about it. Right.

Time for your final offcut now. Can you tell us what it is?

Yes, this is called Rum Bum and Biscuit, and it’s a radio sitcom pilot written by Nick Newman and myself in 2003.

Interior. War-room of HMS Indubitable, 1804. Captain Francis Peckham scratches out his ship’s log as the ship rolls and creaks.

I, Francis Fairfax Peckham, captain of His Majesty’s ship Indubitable, do hereby commence the log of today’s action upon the island of Rhodes on this first day of June in the year of our Lord, 1804.

(15:06) The engagement cannot, in the strictest sense, be termed a naval battle, being more of an argument in a restaurant. It is nonetheless another valiant chapter in the career of HMS Indubitable. Exterior.

The main deck. FX distant battle. Another famous victory, Francis.

Thank you, Septimus. I’ll wager that Taverna will think twice before trying again to seat a captain of His Majesty’s navy at a wobbly table. The waitress was doing her best with a folded-up napkin, and it was the poor girl’s first day.

And her last, I fancy. But what of my wound, Septimus? Is there any hope that your medical skills might staunch the blood and save my arm? It’s only a paper cut from the menu. Septimus, my old friend, I bleed.

(15:51) Oh! Oh! Have you removed the limb? No, just drawn a smiley face on your sticking plaster. Ah, then once again I appear to have cheated death. Well, you certainly cheated the restaurant.

You didn’t even pay for the retsina that we had at the bar. Ah, Mr. Runkle. Um, aye aye, sir.

Captain, matey, whatever. You appeared to relish your first taste of combat. Yeah, it was a really good laugh.

(16:17) It’s like being back in the sixth form at Stowe, basically. Perhaps that explains why you went into battle flicking a wet towel rather than a cutlet. Quite so, Septimus.

I see nothing escapes the keen eye of the scientist. Mr. Runkle, how many enemy diners did we dispatch? Yeah, so I reckon we slotted, like, about seven of them. Does that include the German tourists whom I ran through with a kebab skewer? Oh, for sure, yeah.

And the guy with the guitar? I de-bagged him first. That was quite a laugh, too, actually. And our own losses? Probably about a hundred, sadly.

Our guys got so tanked up waiting for a table, they just, like, fell off the quayside and, like, drowned, basically. Oh, that is, I suppose, the terrible price of war. Give those impertinent Greeks a broadside of grape for their trouble, Mr. Runkle.

(17:10) Right. Okay, so you want me to throw some grapes at them? Oh, damn it, man, I’ll do it myself. FX fires a big cannon.

(17:20) Excellent shot, Francis. You flattened most of that ancient Venetian fortress. Let us not waste time on the idle exchange of compliments, Septimus.

(17:27) We must set sail for mainland Greece with all dispatch. Excellent. Are we going to, like, nick some more archaeological treasures? Francis, we haven’t got room for any more temples and statues.

(17:38) I desire some assorted marbles which will look exceedingly well in my dear wife’s new bathroom. Way anchor, Mr. Runkle. Raise the gallant yards and set a course for the Argolid.

(17:50) Okay, for sure. Yeah. So it’s probably going to be quicker if I write to my mum and get her to do what you said, yeah? Uh, right.

So this, according to the notes that came with it, is based on the novels of Patrick O’Brien and is about Nelson’s navy. Where was this going to go story-wise? Um, well, I think we hoped we could involve an audience, actually. A bit like doing Mrs. Brown’s Voice, because it would be very difficult to build a convincing early 19th century man of war.

And if you film it, it’s just ruinously expensive. So we thought it’d be quite fun to do it in a sort of slightly Heath Robinson way in a studio. As a TV pilot, we intended it.

(18:37) So it’s going to be an audience show? Yeah, an audience show, yeah. And we had for many years, both the shows that I’ve done and done with Nick and various other people, we’ve had a very good sound effects technician called Alison, who arrives when you’re going to record with all these strange bits and pieces that make the noise of something else. And when we have done live shows or audience shows, when Alison sets up her table, the audience just becomes absolutely transfixed by it.

(19:10) And we thought, well, actually, it’s Alison who’s the star of the show. So we made Alison a character in this nautical yarn so that she would actually make the noises of the battles as they were going on in the studio and you would see her in vision. It’s an idea that I noticed becoming adopted everywhere.

I sort of nicked it from myself in my Tristram Shandy adaptation because it was the sound effects technician who ends up having to play Tristram Shandy. And when Nick Newman and Ian Hislop wrote a stage play about Spike Milligan, there’s a sound effects technician in that as well. So I think if we did it now, we’d have to sort of find a slightly different way of serving it.

But you asked me earlier if I’d read a lot of historical novels and stuff. And I thought, well, no, I haven’t. But then I thought, well, actually, Ed Reardon is based on the anti-hero of George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, which Andrew introduced me to years and years ago, 40 years ago or something, a novel that we both loved.

And the leading character, he’s actually called Edwin Reardon. And we were going to call him that Edwin. But right at the start, Sally Hawkins, who plays Ping, Ed’s agent, she improvised a line down the phone calling me Edward.

We didn’t have time to re-record it. So I’ve had to sort of avoid the issue of what his name is for 96 episodes or something. But there was a serious purpose to basing Ed Reardon on Edwin Reardon because Edwin is sort of the archetypal ill-used writer.

He lives in a garret, he gets very badly paid and very badly treated, and he’s a terrible failure. But in recent times, he’s become to seem less so because I’ve written a bit about George Gissing who based the novel largely on his own experience. When he wrote this novel, he got 150 quid for it.

And in today’s money, that would be enough to build yourself a house. I mean, you’d be lucky to get a fraction of that for a novel. I think you sometimes don’t even get any money at all until a novel starts to sell.

So Ed Reardon started out as being a reflection of Edwin Reardon, the Victorian ill-used writer. But yeah, but now it’s sort of, it should be the other way around. And Ed is quite unusual in that he actually earns his living from writing.

And very few jobbing writers, jobbing hacks of his level, managed to do that. The same with jobbing actors, they mostly have a side hustle of some kind. Although Ed was doing teaching, which is what a lot of writers and actors do as well.

(21:52) That’s right. Yes, we had to do away with that. But yes, yes.

(21:56) So that’s the thing. Now you mentioned when you sensed the rum, bum and biscuit, but I must ask why rum, bum and biscuit? I get rum, possibly could get biscuit, but what’s bum? It’s an old saying about the Navy and I can’t remember who first used it, but it’s just what life in the Navy is. It might have originally been rum, buggery and the lash.

(22:23) I think it’s Winston Churchill actually. Oh, I see. And then it got sort of shortened to rum, bum and biscuit for some reason.

(22:30) Oh, okay. Well, that’s an education. Yeah.

When you sent it to me, you mentioned that you had had a project on a similar subject turned down by the BBC last year. What was that about? I get so many, I have so many offcuts. I’m reminded of them every time I wake up the computer and there’s a folder saying, it’s like a sort of writing necropolis saying, BBC drama proposals.

This vast collection of rejected stuff. So I can’t actually remember, there’s so many of them. Oh, I know.

There is a similarity. The crew of this Man of War, they go around stealing stuff. Again, more thieves.

(23:13) Like the Elgin Marbles. And so I wrote that sort of Holmes and Watson parody where that’s exactly what they do. And in fact, I got another one turned down just a few months ago about the man who was accused and sort of convicted of defacing the Elgin Marbles in the 1930s.

You know, the British Museum over-cleaned the Elgin Marbles and this man took the rap for it. He’s completely innocent. And I thought there was an interesting subject for a radio play, but no, it’s not to me.

But yes, you’re quite right. That thing keeps popping up. Hmm.

Interesting theme to have. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show. How was it for you, Christopher Douglas? Yes, it was nice to hear those things that I thought were dead and buried come back to life.

(24:00) So that was lovely. But I suppose it’s a bit shaming in a way just for the sheer, vast quantity of rejection. But I don’t think they’re terrible.

But yes, I have to acknowledge that they didn’t hit the spot with the commissioners. Are there any that surprise you? Anything you might wish to go back and perhaps redevelop? Yes, I think that the sitcoms, there were a few in there, weren’t there? I think some of those could work still. Yeah.

(24:31) Yeah, because obviously there’s a turnover of staff at the BBC, just like anywhere. So somebody who turned you down once may have come. Yes, we once got a Dave Podmore show on because there was a, I think there was a new commissioner or the person who was responsible for commissioning.

And I knew, didn’t greatly like or understand cricket. And I said, well, we want to do another Dave Podmore episode this year, because as I’m sure you know, it will be the anniversary of exactly a thousand years since cricket began. And fortunately, this person believed me and commissioned it.

So you can get round it sometimes. Excellent. Well, it has been lovely to talk to you, Christopher Douglas.

(25:18) Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcut straw with us. Thanks very much. The Offcut straw was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Christopher Douglas.

(25:35) The Offcuts were performed by Nigel Pilkington, Jake Yapp, Beth Chalmers, Christopher Kent, Emma Clarke and Helen Goldwyn. 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.

Louise: When I think about poor Miss Marriott, who was my English teacher, she used to get sort of 12, 15 page stories from me. And you know, and I, I’m never considered for a moment that, you know, it was gonna take her time to, to read them, that she must have seen my little green exercise. Sick and thought, oh no.

Laura: Hello, I’m Laura Shaven, and this is the Offcut Straw, 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 for this episode is novelist Louise Candlish. She’s the author of 17 novels including Our House, the Other Passenger, and The Only Suspect With Her 18th. A Neighbor’s Guide to Murder published this month. Her 2018 novel, our House won the British Book Award for Crime and Thriller book of the year in 2019, and was adapted into a four-part ITV drama, which aired in 2022, starring Tuppens Middleton and Martin Compton.

And since then, she has written across genres including domestic suspense, psychological thrillers, and earlier in her career, romantic fiction. Several of her novels have been Sunday Times bestsellers, and her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Louise, welcome to the Offcut Straw.

Louise: Thank you for having me.

And may I say straight away that I wouldn’t describe any of my books as romantic fiction? Oh my God, I’m the anti-romantic author, if anything. Really? Not even the first one. No. Well that was, it was, you are right. It was, it was marketed as a rom-com. But it was, it was actually a stalking story. It was a sort of, I would just.

Describe it as a sort of stalking comedy. So there were a couple of comedies in the early days, and then there were, there were sort of family dramas. I would describe my sort of middle section.

Mm-hmm.

Louise: Um, and then they segue very, very naturally into darker suspense stories. Because I had never been writing, um, stories of hope and, um,

Laura: nobody could accuse you of being too positive.

Louise: Sadly not. So it was all too easy to get darker and darker and darker. But I think I’ve always retained that, um, that satirical element, you know, that sort of comic element. And I think. That’s the kind of counterpoint to it, because actually if an academic sat down and analyzed my message, they would say that I was extremely pessimistic about society.

To, to, I mean, I kind of do it naturally. I’m making it sound as if it’s all deliberate, but I quite naturally do include some comedy in my, in my tone and my voice to, um, you know, to counteract, you know, that sort of slightly more pragmatic message. Do, do you know why you lean towards bleakness? I dunno. I, I guess I always have, and I think it’s, you know, it, maybe it’s to do with my background.

I mean my, my parents and um, family are Geordie, so, you know, you’ve got that kind of very modern sense of humor that Geordies have, and I think that’s in there. I grew up in the Midlands, which has another kind of, you know, characteristic that has the certain kind of understatement and pessimism. Now I live in South London, so you’ve got this kind of trio of influences, but it’s really hard to know.

I mean, it could be, um, you know, all the books I’ve read and all of the, the TV drama and comedy that I’ve watched over the years, just being Gen X. Yes. You know, I, I feel like I’m very typical of my generation. You know, we are. Um, sarcastic and sardonic and, you know, I think all of that comes through and, you know, we’re very much a sort of bantering generation as well.

You know, all of the things that you are sort of, you know, in inverted commas not allowed to say anymore. Gen X will say when the, you know, when we’re all together. And I think all of that comes through in, um, the voice of my characters.

Laura: Okay, well let’s get started with your first off cut. Can you tell us please, what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Louise: So this is a prologue I wrote in around 2022 for an as yet untitled thriller.

Beth (Actor): We have an excellent view of the scene from up here. Our faces are turned as one to the monstrous Atlantic to the figures gathered on the shore, shrunken by the high tide plen. The search and rescue boat has departed, but Isaac says it’s too dangerous to launch the helicopter.

To be honest, the bad weather is preferable to the grinding heat of previous days, but I do worry about my plane taking off safely into that horrible churning sky. I hope my flight won’t be delayed. I say, I are so egocentric. Isaac says laughing. What about the poor bastard lost out there? I hope his flight won’t be delayed either.

I say. And I flare my eyes at him. Playful. Flirtatious in a different context. We might have hooked up Isaac and me, but I’ve had bigger fish to fry, to catch and kill. First it was a hostile manager, Teo, who tipped us off about the crisis, letting us know one by one as we trooped through reception and we’d scurried up to the roof to watch like good little rubberneckers.

The alarm had been raised an hour ago by some rich Honeymooner at the Pale Hotel whose new husband was missing. No one was too bothered until his board washed ashore, but by then it was surely too late. The wife’s in a right old state. Apparently Isaac said you would be. I said agreeing. He should never have gone out alone.

He’d only had a few lessons apparently. Apparently this, apparently that. This is what happens when you run before you can walk. He added, yeah, you drown before you can swim. You are completely outrageous. Taxi for Viv, someone yells from the stairwell, and that’s me. I call back, I smile at Isaac and the others as I depart a proper goodbye gift of a smile.

I’ll never see them again. I’ll never think of them again. Serves me right that their heads turn back to the action even before my beam fades. Beyond the swell rises and grows. It’s a beautiful place. Spirits a savage place. Strange, but I felt a profound sense of belonging while I’ve been here.

Laura: That’s a very satisfying, apposite way to start a podcast about writing with an offcut called prologue.

I want some extra points for that. So we were just talking about generation X and it seems very much like that character is exactly as you described, a Gen X lady. Where was this story going to go?

Louise: Hmm. Well that was actually, um, the prologue was in fact quite a long way into the story. So it’s one of those structures where you sort of see a catastrophic moment and then you go back and discover how the character, who’s called Viv Uhhuh, um, why she’s in Bears.

And, um, you know, what havoc has she. Wrought there before she makes her a rather blithe departure. I love the, um, the reading of it sounds so clipped in 1930s and it’s actually making me think and making me remember one of the reasons why I didn’t take it on and I did something else instead. And it’s because it was very much a sort of old fashioned kind of vibe.

Ah. And the plotting alone would’ve worked a lot better before mobile phones and, you know, all of the, the various sort of apps and things we have now to track everyone. And so, you know, I was thinking, actually, this is gonna be quite tricky because I, I need to make this historical, I need to set this in the sixties maybe, or the very latest, the eighties.

And so I abandoned it. But yes, she’s quite a typical. Sort of Noirish character of mine. There’ve been a few of these 20 something girls who are on the Make.

Mm-hmm.

Louise: Who, you know, come from nothing and, um, need to find a way to better their circumstances. And this book, which I seem to remember, I was going to call the Sun Trap or something like that.

I had a few titles. This was inspired by Henry James is the Wings of the Dove, where a couple. Target a wealthy sort of res type in the hopes that the male will be able to marry her and she’s ill. And it’s a kind of, um, you know, pre prenup era. So all of these kind of elements did lead me to abandon it, but I actually hit the voice very quickly, loved the character, and also could see how easily it could be structured as well.

So, you know, maybe I’ll go back to it one day, but I think it does need to be set. Pre phones, pre-mobile phones,

Laura: do you not write novels that are set in a different time period to the present? Not

Louise: really. The only one I’ve done is the only suspect, which is partly set in the nineties. And again, that was chosen.

I went back, I kept it as close to the present days, I could, but before mobile phones would’ve had an impact on the plot. Mm. And, and the only suspect has occasionally been described as historical, which really makes me laugh. Because I think of that as extremely recent. So do I, but of course, it was 25, 30 years ago.

1995 was the year that I set part of the action. There was a heat wave that summer. I remember it very clearly and you know, it proved to be a really successful novel and is in fact going to be the next one on the, on the screen. So, Ooh, I know that you can do it. I know it’s okay. But I think the further back you go.

The more research you need and the harder it will be ultimately, if it’s ever adapted for the screen as well, which is, you know, sort of always on my mind, you know, in a hopeful way.

Right.

Louise: Um, so no, I haven’t, but maybe I

Laura: will. How much of it did you actually write? ’cause you said this prologue is not actually at the beginning of the book.

So presumably you didn’t just start in the middle or, or do you do that? Oh

Louise: no, I did. Yeah, I did. I did do that, but I had plotted out loosely what was going to happen. And then I thought, what’s an interesting way to, to enter the story? And I love entering a story at the end or in the middle. And then, you know, seeing, you know, something often fatal, um, but certainly catastrophic in some way.

And then going straight back to show. The character before it all went horribly wrong.

Laura: Have you planned it in advance? Do you plan it and then go, I’m gonna start in the middle and then go back and forward or whatever? Or do you go, I’ll start in the middle. I’m guessing it’s the middle. Who knows? We’ll see.

I dunno what’s happened before. I dunno what’s gonna happen afterwards. ’cause that seems extremely confident.

Louise: Yeah, I think I’m, yeah, I think I’m quite confident I just plunge in. Um, because for me the most important thing by far is voice. Mm-hmm. I even really fundamental important things that other authors will cite as the most important thing, like plot, character and setting.

To me, voice comes before those, obviously, voice and character are very strongly linked and they, I guess they’re the same thing actually. Um, now I’m talking about it. Mm-hmm. And generally I will, I’ll be writing from the point of view of a character or several characters. I won’t be a kind of overarching narrator.

Mm-hmm. I don’t tend to adopt. That puppeteer mode ever. Mm-hmm. So you get straight in the head under the skin of the character. So with this one, I honestly can’t remember. I certainly knew that it was going to start in London and that Viv, the character, was going to work in a department store, and that probably will be the next scene that I would’ve written, but I only ever wrote the prologue, which is after she’s done tremendous harm.

To the other two characters in the Love Triangle, and she’s making her her exit from the hostel where she’s been staying. Sounds intriguing. Do write it. Please, please, please.

Laura: Anyway, time for another off cut Now. So tell us about this one.

Louise: So this was written in 2018 and it’s a deleted scene from my novel, which at the time was called the Victim and later became our house.

Emma (Actor): Allison and I were the last to go to bed, clearing up the party debris, stacking the dishwasher, draining the ends of the Prosecco. At the top of the house. The kids were asleep, or at least resisting in relative peace and quiet. She put on the soundtrack to Betty Blue, and I lost my thoughts to the mournful sacks, the pleasurable mood of doom.

I remember seeing this at the cinema. I said we were well under age. I dunno how we got in. I’d never seen a French film before. Wonder what she looks like now. That actress. Oh, I expect she’s a middle aged crawl like us Allison said, pouring the ends of blood colored drinks down the sink. Canna, just say how well you’ve done this weekend, darling.

It’s been a tough time for you this whole year. It certainly has. I picked it a pat of green icing that had hardened on the floor tile like concrete. A suburban life goes on, doesn’t it? The Trinity Avenue hole is greater than the sum of its parts. Aristotle, she said, though, I don’t think he knew about Trinity Avenue.

The street was a true home. I thought with a gust of sentimentality. I wasn’t prepared for. Weekends like this might begin as an escape from older eyes, but they tended to end as a reinforcement of its gravitational pull, the unalterable correctness of our place at its center. Did you, oh, you made me jump Kirsty.

She stood in the doorway in spotted pajamas. I just remembered. She said the clocks go back tonight. So it’s not one, it’s only midnight. Me’s gone to bed. She says goodnight. One for the road. Alison offered pouring, cursing a drink without waiting for an answer. You know, I’ve always thought that this will be a great time to commit a crime.

When everyone’s confused about the actual hour, it’d mess up a bys. Witnesses had forget whether the time had gone forwards or backwards. An autopsy is pretty accurate regarding time of death. I said, I love how you assume someone’s gonna die. Allison laughed. It was an odd thing because we were only doing what we’d done for years, a nightcap after the Halloween party, the finale of the holiday.

But the scene had an end of an era mood about it, as if tomorrow we had to surrender ourselves for a witness protection program or less. Melodramatically. Allison had announced plans to sell the cottage to next year. I raised my half empty glass, and when Allison looked up, her agreement was too simple, too immediate to be sincere, and I thought with complete clarity, we won’t do this again.

The sense of loss was briefly unbearable.

Laura: So why was this cut?

Louise: Oh my God. Well, I don’t know. I, well, I kind of know and um, I’m now thinking it sounds so familiar to me because deleted scenes are just as familiar as the ones that stay in the book. So I’m now thinking, have I got this wrong? And was that cut? Because it feels like it’s almost. The profound sort of center of the novel.

And for those who’ve read it, they’ll immediately know who all the characters are. I certainly know that I, I had to do some cutting because the book was quite long and, you know, that was very much establishing the mood and the character. So this is from the early part of the book, is it? It’s got, it’s actually from, it’s the middle section, which again is, you know, it’s hard and you know, sometimes.

Can can be thought to drag by editors. So I’d imagine there was that element, you know, let’s move on. Because while they are basically on a mom’s holiday during half term, and they do it every year and it’s Halloween and they have a Halloween party, but while this is happening, something criminals going on in fees.

In London. And so it is a really, really important time. And so maybe I thought that that conversation about a crime being committed when the clocks change, maybe I felt like that was being too obvious about telling us what was happening. The other thing I remember is that, um, and this happens a lot with me, is I’m really bad with timelines.

And this came out in the edit and I remember thinking, oh, no. Again, this is me putting myself into the book because I remember Betty Blue and I remember going to the cinema to see Betty Blue, and then I had to remind myself that I was older than the characters I was writing, and that they would’ve been just far too young to have gone to see Betty Blue.

They would never have got in. They would’ve been under 10. And so, um, so rather than changing the movie, I obviously, um, just deleted the whole scene, but, but to me it’s really special to hear it because the Betty Blue soundtrack was. The music I listened to when I wrote our House. Oh. So, um, you know, it really set the, the mood for the book, which is full of melancholy.

You know, it was, as you mentioned in your intro, won prizes for Thriller of the Year and crime and Thriller book awards. But for me it was a tragedy. It was a love story, gone horribly wrong, wrapped in a, in a crime novel.

Mm.

Laura: Uh, but do you have one particular, like the Betty Blue, uh, music was what you listened through throughout the writing of that book, and maybe you have another piece of music or another selection of music, there’s a mood background to the writing of a particular book, or do you just generally listen to music and it could be jazz one day or classical next day or whatever.

This isn’t the Betty Blue Book.

Louise: No. No, and I, and actually I don’t really listen to music when I’m writing. It’s. More when I’m thinking or in, you know, the off hours with the, the new book, A Neighbor’s Guide to Murder. That’s probably my first book where music isn’t incredibly important. Normally, you know, the kind of music, the characters, like the only suspect, which I mentioned, um, set in the nineties, you know, that’s got a, a playlist.

Mm-hmm.

Louise: That’s very easy to follow. Of the nineties classics and

Laura: But you don’t listen to them yourself as you are writing. They don’t, they don’t inform the mood or they do. Yeah, they

Louise: do. They do. I might do. Yeah. Absolutely. And, um, thinking about Our House, I think that there’s one scene where Bram is listening to Portishead Sour Times, and I would’ve ly listened to that.

And it, it does inform the mood, absolutely. But it’s not every book and it’s, I don’t really have a process that I follow with every book. And as I say, my most. Recent book, I’m not associating with music at all. Mm-hmm. I did have a whole subplot where the narrator Gwen, who’s a 70-year-old retired woman, had a Rod Stewart obsession.

And so, you know, I had a whole scene planned where she goes to the O2 to see him with her 20 something friend Pixie as the book’s about an age gap relationship, an age gap. Friendship. Mm-hmm. Among other things. But in the end, I just thought, well, actually, I think this is for my own amusement. I’m not really sure what that’s going to add to the reader’s understanding of Gwen.

So, you know, it begins a self-indulgence and sometimes it does pervade the whole mood of the book, and sometimes it’s just for me, and then I’ll just, I’ll just ditch it. Interesting. Let’s move on now and what’s your next soft cut? Oh my goodness. So this one is an excerpt from a story I wrote in 1981 when I was at school called Murder in the Alps.

Beth (Actor): Marella smiled happily to herself. She loved life in the Alps. The sky was blue, the snow glistening in the sunlight, and everything seemed perfect. Everything except Livy. That was. Glanced at her sister and felt worried Livy was sitting on a ledge, readymade from the rock looking the picture of misery.

Marella had had enough look, she shouted, making Livy jump. I dunno what’s got into you this week, and frankly I don’t care, but I wish you wouldn’t try and ruin mine. And Dan’s holiday as well as your own. Livy looked up at her with pure hatred. I’m so sorry. She replied sarcastically. Am I upsetting you? I had no idea.

You are jealous, aren’t you? More shouted. You can’t bear me to love Dane and him to love me. You are pathetic. Really pathetic. Livy unkempt her skis from her boots and said defiantly. Well, since I’m so pathetic, you can go on your stupid walk on your own. Morela sighed an exasperation. They were getting nowhere standing on the top of a mountain shouting at each other.

She too sat down and gazed at the snowy slopes below her back to Livy. Livy looked up seething with jealousy. Her sister was only about five meters away, sitting still and silent. Livy knew this was the moment. There would never be another as good as this. She picked up a ski and stood up without making a sound.

This is it. Then, Marella, she thought, gritting her teeth. You’ll never see your darling Dane again. She crept up behind her sister and lifted the ski over her shoulder. Suddenly more turned and gasped with surprise and horror. No, Livy, please know you’re crazy. The ski came down and hit her on the head with a terrific force.

She gave a pathetic groan, then fell slowly into the snow. She was without doubt dead for a moment. Livy felt no emotion. She just stood like a robot, staring at more’s limp, lifeless body. Then she thought of Dane and felt happy. Now she could have Dane and Marella couldn’t again. She looked at the dead body, lying in the snow you’ve had all you deserve.

Dear Marella, she said aloud. Suddenly the sound of an approaching cable car caught her attention quickly. She came to her senses and began kicking snow over Marla’s body. She then attached her skis to her boots and set off down the mountain. She didn’t feel in the least bit guilty. Just terribly pleased and satisfied.

Leah (Actor): Grade a teacher’s comment, very well written, but avoid melodrama.

Laura: Um, do you have a sister by any chance?

Louise: Oh my God, I’m crying with laughter at that. That is absolutely hilarious. Um, I do, yes. My sister Jane and, um, yes, she’s not,

Laura: she’s not your, uh, your muse for this in any way. Your inspiration.

Louise: I dunno. I mean, maybe she was, I don’t think either of us had boyfriends ’cause I was 12 at that age when she’s only 18 months older than me.

But um, yeah, for those who haven’t gathered the motive for this, this grizzly murder is just that one. One sister’s got a boyfriend that the other one wants. Oh my God. That is just hilarious. And also, I should tell you that I’ve got the book in front of me, that exercise book, and it comes with an illustration of You did an illustration.

Yes. Oh my word. I did an illustration of mountains and then there’s a cable car. That runs between these two peaks in my little illustration and the ca, the cable card does, um, come up later in the story when there’s another death.

Laura: Oh my God. That was quite a long story. It was almost self-contained.

You’re telling me It’s sort of

Louise: so it’s a little novella. Oh, that’s, yeah, that’s an excerpt. This was about 10 pages long. I mean, when I think about Poor Miss Marriott, who was my English teacher, she used to get sort of 12, 15 page stories. From me and you know, and I, I never considered for a moment that, you know, it was gonna take her time to, to read them, but she must have seen my little green exercise book and thought, oh no.

Oh, I bet she was thrilled.

Laura: It sounds like you were an amazing child to have in class looking under a novelist there. And then, although I had say my favorite line there, she was without doubt dead. That is, I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard, like in any of the off cuts we’ve ever done.

Louise: It’s just so funny, isn’t it?

And the fact that she’s. She’s only pleased and satisfied. Yes. Not guilty, not ashamed or in any way traumatized. Just immensely pleased and satisfied.

Laura: Yes. Well, I mean, it’s, it’s obviously it is a very simplistic, you know, it’s a 12-year-old view and there are obviously things that are stated that, that are obvious and wouldn’t be stated by you as a novelist, but still it’s very much got the bones of a thriller novel.

Louise: Totally. And what’s really, really funny and fascinating for me is. Seeing the influences because my influences at that time would’ve been Agatha Christi. So you can see the kind of death on the Nile mm-hmm. Type melodrama, yeah. In there. But also, um, you know, the glamor of shows like Dallas and Dynasty.

Right. ’cause yeah, because I lived in North Hampton, which, um, you know, isn’t a terribly glamor. Place, and it may be more glamorous now, but certainly in the early eighties it was a Midlands industrial town and I don’t think we even had any restaurants at that time. I’m sure it’s very different now. And so all of my access to glamor was through books and tv.

And so even their names, there’s no way I would’ve had a more in my school or a, or a Livy. You know, they’re all kind of American sounding names. Ah, yes, yes. So, yeah. And Dane. I mean, there would not have been a Dane that is very American in my circle. Yeah. It’s so for me, I can see, I can really see the, um, the influences and, you know, and also I hadn’t traveled at all.

I don’t think I’d left the country at that point. Mm-hmm. Um, so the Alps would’ve been to me impossibly glamorous. Oh,

Laura: so this isn’t based on any kind of memory of having gone skiing? No.

Louise: It’s not a school trip. No. No. Gosh, no. I mean, I, I don’t ski now. I mean, I have been skiing, but No, not until my twenties.

You know, I had a very, um, small town upbringing where I didn’t really leave the, the area even to, to go to London until I went to university. So, yeah, it’s really fun to imagine 12-year-old me watching Dallas and then, you know, turning to my English homework. Do you know what the prompt was

Laura: for the homework?

Did they give you the title? What I did on my holidays? For example?

Louise: No, no. Any prompt that I was given, I would turn it into a story of murder and melodrama.

Laura: How brilliant were you actually? Did you become a goth or an when you were Oh, a teenager. Oh my god, this

Louise: is so hilarious. No, the um, my aforementioned sister Jane, was the queen goth of Northampton.

She was a goth, but I was a tennis nut, so we used to walk to school together and I would wear tennis. Kit and she would wear a wedding dress dyed black. We were quite a famous pair of sisters.

Laura: Goodness, that sounds like the beginning of a novel in its own right. That’s incredible. So your sister looked like she had the dark side, but you all dressed in tennis whites and bouncing around with no doubt.

Your hair in a ponytail. Yeah. You were the one that was secretly planning murders. Yes. Underneath it all. Isn’t

Louise: that interesting? Because I actually think that that is true. I think I’m a much darker person, but she looked very dark. She, you know, she had all the appearances of being, you know, sort of returned from the dead and you know, was in a big gang of goths.

And I seem to remember her boyfriend, who wasn’t called Dane, had a coffin. He had a coffin in his, in his flat.

Laura: That’s just brilliant. No, that’s very funny. Oh my word. What an interesting family you have. Louise. Oh my goodness. Um, right then. Well, let’s move on. Next off Cut please. What’s this one?

Louise: So this is called the Gurs, and it’s from 2022 and it’s a pilot for a TV drama,

Leah (Actor): Mitchell Flat Day Saturday.

And Mitchell, middle aged, low key, casually dressed. Rings Sarah’s doorbell, tradesman’s van at the curb. He glances about him. Obviously not familiar with the street. The door is opened by Sarah in jeans and a t-shirt. Makeup free

Emma (Actor): Ewen. Hi. Come in.

Marcus (Actor): I’m sorry I’m late. Traffic was horrendous on the ring road.

Emma (Actor): Oh, you should try

Marcus (Actor): not having

Emma (Actor): a

Marcus (Actor): car.

Emma (Actor): The morning bus I sway. You could walk on your hands faster.

Leah (Actor): She wraps on Evie’s door as they pass calls out with classic divorced parent cheer

Emma (Actor): Dad’s here. Sorry. It’s a bit of a mess. We’re still getting sorted.

Leah (Actor): They enter the tiny dim living room and Sarah opens the curtains to reveal a cozy, colorful space.

Only one or two unpacked boxes remaining. She sits but you and stands,

Marcus (Actor): how did she get on

Leah (Actor): this

Marcus (Actor): week? She hasn’t answered my messages

Emma (Actor): really well. Already slaving over the textbooks every night.

Marcus (Actor): Sounds like a laugh a minute.

Emma (Actor): Ah, she’s off to a party tonight though. The cool crowd. Since When’s

Marcus (Actor): Evie been in the cool crowd?

Emma (Actor): Well, this is the whole point of moving to a new town. You can reinvent yourself. Okay, so maybe I know the mum of the cool kids.

Marcus (Actor): There it is. In like Flynn. What’s that supposed to mean? It’s just you’re on a mission, aren’t you? You won’t stop till she’s at Oxford or wherever.

Emma (Actor): I don’t think going to a party gets you into Oxford.

Come on. You know how clever she is. Why shouldn’t she aim high?

Marcus (Actor): Of course she should. I just don’t get why you want this over what you had, what we had.

Leah (Actor): Is that school really worth it? They look accusingly at each other. The civilized veneer has well and truly cracked. Don’t do this ewen. What

Emma (Actor): make out like the school is why we split up.

It’s not fair on Evie and it’s also not true.

Marcus (Actor): Look, if she’s happy, I’m happy

Emma (Actor): she is. You know this other mom, we were friends at school. It’s a bit of a shock seeing her again. What’s she called? Nikki, the American

Marcus (Actor): girl. Isn’t that a bit awkward?

Leah (Actor): Well, I’m hoping it won’t have to be. No. I’d be careful if I are you.

Hi dad. Evie enters and Yuen wraps his arms around her sensing how much his daughter needs this hug. Yuen catches Sarah’s eye, quizzical exterior, more cliff common and interior. Uber night, Saturday as night darkens. The common empty and unsettling a taxi crawls along the west side. Sarah and Evie both dressed up.

Peer out in search of the Walden residence.

Emma (Actor): 35. This is it. Bloody hell. Evie. Look at it. It’s like selling sunset

Leah (Actor): as the cab pulls up a security light flicks on illuminating a grand electric gate to the side of the house. A pair of Gulliver students are tapping at the entry pad.

Beth (Actor): Oh, that’s my entrance.

I’ve got the Cobra. Martha, want me to come in with you?

Emma (Actor): Make sure it works. No, you mad

Leah (Actor): fine.

Emma (Actor): Go Have a great time.

Leah (Actor): Evie scrambles out and Sarah watches her head up the drive before the cat falls away.

Emma (Actor): You too, mom.

Leah (Actor): You too.

Laura: So this is interesting. Tell us about the premise. Is this a thriller as well?

Louise: Um, yes. It’s, it’s a drama. So this was, um, a TV project that I worked on for a long time with a TV company called Red who are No More. Um, and it was inspired by the, everyone’s invited. Sex scandal in the schools that blew up around that time and led to a, you know, extremely shocking Ofsted report.

It was a huge story where it was discovered that boys in quite young boys, but certainly sort of senior school had been. Treating girls in a sexually inappropriate way, sometimes assaulting them, asking for nude pictures, and basically just making the atmosphere extremely uncomfortable and at times criminal.

And so there were a number of investigations in the schools, some of them quite high profile schools. And, um, and the government got involved and like so many other things it, it didn’t really go away because it’s all linked to porn. And, you know, the age at which. Boys start watching it. And the nature of porn now, which is very different from back in the day, uh, much more violent.

Um, and so, you know, I was really shocked. And also just sort of, you know, I, I, I felt unusually interested in a current affairs story. And so when, um, my agent suggested that I built a drama around it, an original drama, it just. Felt completely right. And so I did, and it came together very quickly. All of the characters.

I planned eight parts. I worked very closely with a development executive who was absolutely brilliant because I was so lucky I’d never written a, a script before and I had a kind of one-on-one tutor.

Hmm.

Louise: And it was really, really good fun to do and such a fantastic learning experience. But like so many.

Other TV projects, nothing happened and it hasn’t been made. So, you know, so it’s a, that was a lesson in itself with a, when you are writing a book, you know, when I write a book, I have a contract. I know there is going to be a project at the end of it and, you know, it might be a bestseller or it might not, but the story is shared and it’s there for people to access.

But with a TV project, it’s speculative. You know, I put in easily as much work into the gulls, um, as it was called. As I would’ve done a novel during that period, and yet, you know, there’s nothing. This is all, there is your lovely recording, which is so interesting to, to see which scene you’ve picked from the, the pilot, um, between the two estranged parents rather than the kids.

Part of the issue with selling it was that I had a 50 50 mix between the parents’ lives and the teenager’s lives, which kind of placed it a little bit too much in a gray area. So, you know, some broadcasters would say we love it, but can it be more kids, more like euphoria? Mm-hmm. And then others would say, Ooh, you know, can we minimize the teens and focus on the adults?

Like big little eyes. So it kind of fell between two camps, but I’m still very proud of it and I’m hoping actually to, if, um. We can get past the legalities of it. I’m hoping to be able to take it back and transform it into a novel.

Laura: I was about to say, surely that’s the obvious next step, isn’t it? Yes,

Louise: I think so.

The, but I think that the problem with being inspired by something very current and zeitgeisty, which everyone’s invited, you know, this campaign for, you know, school survivors of peer abuse. That’s old news now. You know, five years old now. And so I think what I would probably do is structure the community.

I’d keep the community in the characters, and I’d probably structure it around a different crime and possibly relegate the peer on peer crime to a subplot. I have to have a think about it, but it does. As someone who could only previously. Written things that had then been published. I’ve never had any novels sort of sitting in a drawer that haven’t been published.

Mm. It’s, it was actually quite hard for me to find off cuts because everything I’ve written has been published. So this is the first time I’ve done a huge project that hasn’t seen the light of day. And so, you know, it was really character building. I was very disappointed. Mm. And, um, you know, and had to sort of try and bounce back from that.

So it’s been, it’s, it’s a good one to include because it’s a re it really does show you that, you know, it doesn’t matter how successful you are, um, you, you get rejections all the time. And also writing this script came very easily and I now think, well, you know, had this been in the hands of an experience, screenwriter, you know, maybe it felt easy because it.

It wasn’t quite good enough. I just don’t know because I think the idea was very sound. Mm-hmm. But it was really lovely to try another format, another form of writing. And I always love writing dialogue and I always believe in, you know, showing through dialogue rather than telling what’s going on. And so, you know, TV is the perfect way of doing that.

Laura: Or you could break yourself in gently and do radio.

Louise: Yes. Yeah. Oh, I’d love to write a, a radio play. I love radio. Dramatizations of novels is one of my favorite forms. Um, I absolutely Could the Gallers be

Laura: a five part or I, I dunno, I dunno what the format are these days.

Louise: Yes. Or

Laura: an afternoon play.

Louise: Yes. Maybe. I mean, I only wrote the, it’s an eight episode.

Um. A series and, and I only wrote the pilot. I only wrote episode one. And you only write the rest if it’s commissioned and it wasn’t commissioned. Yeah. But all of the planning is there, all of the plotting. If this was a novel or anything else, I wouldn’t have to do any relotting. It was. Really interesting compared to my novel process.

My thriller writing process is very much kind of loosely plan it, know what the crime is, who’s done it, all the mechanisms sort of in my head, and then I just get going to find the voice. But with this, every single minute of every single episode was plotted. Well, hopefully, hopefully it’ll be

Laura: resurrected in one or multiple formats going forward.

I hope

Louise: so. I hope so. It’s an important story and you know, it hasn’t yet been told in, you know, any, any depth I don’t think. Well time for another off cut. Now what have we got? So this is a book idea I called the residents and I wrote it in around 2020.

Leah (Actor): The residence is an aspirational collection of Riverside apartments where city meets suburb.

Where domestic bliss has been curated to the last detail where you can’t fail to live your best life, they say nothing when you sign up about the threat of murder in a cafe across the road from a West London coroner’s court, three witnesses share a table. They are linked by their association with the residents, the development that promised dream living, but delivered a nightmare.

Just three months after the first renters moved in, a woman named Marina met her death in one of the apartments, and the police have been asking questions ever since. Lois is the neighbor whose husband’s erratic behavior derailed her hopes for a new start, for their young family, and placed her at the scene of the tragedy.

Bridget is the building manager. A former police victim advocate whose attachment to her work and interest in Marina was starting to blur lines even before the fatal event. And Tom is the accidental player, all his worldly possessions in the bag at his feet. He’d moved into the unit next door to Marina only two weeks before her death, and was the last person to see her alive.

Just hours later, the coroner delivers a verdict of accidental death and the police investigation is closed. Life for the residence resumes, but Bridget won’t let go. It’s her job to pay attention to detail and the details in Marina’s death. Don’t add up. Instinct tells her the answers lie with those fellow witnesses, Lois and Tom.

But no sooner does she try to reconnect with them, then they’re gone. It soon becomes clear that whoever warned them off intends the same disappearing act for her because something’s going on at the residence so monstrous that it makes people like them expendable. It makes murder look like child’s play.

Laura: Ooh, this is a document that book I did. Who is this for? Is this to inspire you or was it as a treatment to sell

Louise: to a publisher? Yeah, this was for me, so I am before all else an ideas person, so you know, I would love to spend my day just generating ideas. And not actually completing the projects. And so I’ve got, over the years, there’ve been lots of these to the extent that when I was looking for them, I’ve thrown lots away.

Some of them it was like I’d never seen them before. I couldn’t remember them. It’s um, I always start a new novel with a blurb and I think it’s the former copywriter in me that I just like to crystallize. The main plot theme, you know, the mood, just how is it gonna be, the elevator pitch, you know, just a couple of paragraphs.

And so I’ll often start that way and then just abandon the idea. And this one is really interesting and the reason I chose it because it’s a classic case of it just being all style and no substance. I didn’t know what the monstrous crime was, um, going on behind the scenes and obviously you dumping.

Yeah. Yeah. Or Cass under ING one of the two. Yes. Yeah. Well,

Laura: it’s called the residence.

Louise: Yeah, it was, it was just an empty shell of an idea and it wasn’t going anywhere. It didn’t ignite that kind of feeling that gets ignited when I know something’s got legs. It just didn’t have legs. But having said that. I did know what it was going to be built around, and it was going to be built around a particular Hitchcockian trick that I had wanted to try for a while, and I didn’t give up on that element.

I actually used that in my novel, the Only Suspect. So I think that this must have been around the time that I was thinking about the only suspect, because I used the trick that I’d planned for the residents and I also. Took the character name of Marina. So it must have been how my mind was working before I decided to write the Only Suspect.

So it’s actually quite, you know, for any writers listening to this or creative writing students it, you know, it just shows you that it’s well worth putting those early ideas down because they lead you to the right idea. And I’ve always found getting it on paper and trying to crystallize it in a blurb or a short synopsis is very helpful.

Even if I then go straight onto something else, somehow it just kind of solidifies the idea a bit. So yeah, I mean, it sounds great, but there was nothing behind it. I think. I love the idea of a kind of Ballard style, you know, sinister apartment block and a way of drawing the characters together, but ultimately it wasn’t going anywhere.

Mm.

Laura: That’s an interesting idea that you write the pitch for it before you actually have the substance. It’s normally the other way around.

Louise: Yes, it is. And it does help you kind of see if it’s a strong enough idea. Mm. Because you know, in publishing and, and tv, the hook is everything. You know, sometimes book order will, will take place on the basis of the hook because not every retail buyer is going to be able to read every book before deciding which ones they’re going to stock.

Mm-hmm. You know, book sellers need to be intrigued and they know as well that. They’re gonna be hand selling books and they need to be able to say in a couple of lines what it’s about. And so that’s how I approach it. And then I sort of build around it. You get the first, yeah. Yeah.

Laura: Property is quite a theme in your books.

I noticed that when I read our holiday. And then the other passenger. Yes. Um, I thought as a middle class, middle-aged woman, I was going, she’s speaking to me. Property prices, property values, people being priced out or not. And then of course, the residents comes up. Property seems to well people’s home. I suppose it makes sense.

But your latest book that is out, I believe any day now, is called A Neighbor’s Guide to Murder. So that also has a kind of property implication there if you’re talking about someone who lives next door to you. Yes, absolutely. Does it have

Louise: a property element too? It does, yes. And in fact, um, how interesting that we’ve, that you’ve just said straight from the residents, because this is an apartment block.

So obviously it was, it’s been sitting there in my mind, but this is a Mansion block in a Neighbor’s Guide to Murder. It’s one of those swanky, you know, Edwardian mansion blocks, um, full of people who care deeply about rules and restrictions and service charges, et cetera. And this is where, where the, with 70-year-old narrator Gwen.

Lives and meets the, um, young girl Pixie who’s renting a room from her neighbor, Alec. So this is, again, it has a property theme and this is the first time I think I’ve tackled the rental crisis. I mean, I’m doing so through the eyes of someone who does own their own property, but Gwen has in her circle, pixie, who falls into an extremely.

Unpleasant rental arrangement with Alec. Mm-hmm. And she also has her son who is in his thirties and he’s boomeranged back. So he’s living with her rent-free and has a right old pain and she doesn’t know when he’s going to leave. She’s also got a daughter who has abandoned her. Sort of former activist instincts to become a trad wife.

So she’s sort of, you know, living off this rich banker boyfriend. And then there’s also in the building, the Nepo baby daughter of Gwen’s friend Dee, to whom everything has come easy through connections. And you know, she’s the only one of the young people featured who doesn’t need to worry about where her rent’s coming from.

Emma (Actor): Right.

Louise: So yeah, this was the first time I wanted to, to think about how it feels to be in your twenties and, you know, ’cause I love, I love generational conflict stories and I love those kind of age gap relationships and friendships. And so regular readers of mine will see some of my pet. Peeves and my pet subjects cropping up, but in I think quite a different tone for me, this book has got a real sort of notes on a scandal vibe to it with this sort of slightly odd narrator who has got some murky stuff in her past that she’s atoning for and you know, her interference in this 20 something neighbors.

Life is, you know, deeply inappropriate. And she, you know, she puts two and two together and makes 25 and scandal erupts in the building. And eventually as the, as the title suggests, a murder takes place. So, yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff going on in this book, but there you’ve only got one narrator. So, you know, let me just warn readers that, you know, there, there could be other sides to the story that you are not hearing.

Ah.

Laura: Right. Well, we’ve come to your final off cut. Tell us about this one, please.

Louise: So this is another excerpt from a story I wrote at school. It’s called A Long Walk, and was written in 1982

Beth (Actor): when the Ress roughly awakened me. At first, I didn’t remember for my thoughts were in drowsy disorder. Then it dawned upon me today was the day, the last day.

The day when after 19 years and four months, my whole existence would come to a slow, painful, and merciless halt. I felt a strange, calm flood my body as I stretched my filthy limbs clad in the once beautiful white gown, which had now become indecently torn and stained and ugly. Brown. All good things must come to an end.

Mocked the ress, watching me with a crooked grin. My eyes were focusing on that hideously disproportionately large head with its wild eyes, but my thoughts were elsewhere remembering, almost understanding why Celia had done it, but not quite. My face didn’t betray a flicker of the emotion, which the twisted mind of the ress would’ve gleefully, pounced upon, but my mind lost its calm and suddenly became desperate.

Surely, surely Celia would never be able to live with such intense guilt with the knowledge of having murdered one and convicted another. Surely she would never live as a free, happy human being again. The hours passed cruelly slow, and throughout the same thoughts occupied my mind. Celia, standing with a pistol in her gloved hand, her eyes flashing and her face contorted with jealousy as she regarded the glittering ring on my finger.

Then Roderick drawn and white falling to the floor as the blood steeped into his sandy hair. Celia screaming, hurling the pistol into my hands and sobbing an endless stream of tears onto roderick’s lifeless face.

Leah (Actor): Grade A minus. Teacher’s comment. Avoid allowing your style to become as melodramatic as your subject matter.

Laura: Well, this is positively, uh, Barack. I, I feel like I need to know what led up to this imprisonment and why is her dress presumably a, a white wedding dress stained brown, or do I not want to know? I don’t.

Louise: Why use one adjective when you can use two, three, or four? Is, is my takeaway from this. I can’t remember, um, whether it’s a wedding dress or not, but she has been framed for the murder of Roderick

Laura: Roderick.

Great

Louise: name. Yes. Another great, great name and another jealous act. From a sort of pubescent child who had never met a boy, probably let alone had a, had a romantic encounter. Very funny. Her, her rival wasn’t a sister again, was it? No. No, it wasn’t a sister. Just checking. No, but I’m now seeing in this. Um, this is a whole other anecdote, but very briefly, when I was 12, I got in trouble with the police.

I was in this sort of little crime ring. Exciting. Yeah. And my parents found out the, the police came to the house actually to caution me, and I was grounded for a whole summer. And, um, the, you know, the whole school summer holiday, which is six weeks, I wasn’t allowed out except to go to the library with the goth sister.

I don’t think she was a goth yet then, but she had to accompany me and supervise me, right? And so that summer I read the complete works of Aha Christi and. Maybe not the complete works, but certainly at least 40 Barbara Cartland. Oh my word. And so, yeah, so I think that there’s some Barbara Cartland in this one, don’t you?

I’ve

Laura: not read a lot of Barbara Cartland, I’m afraid. I hope my hands up there. No, but I was thinking more Duchess of mouthy, to be honest.

Louise: I probably was studying the Bronte’s. Maybe at school by then I might have been doing Jane ey or something. So there is a sort of gothic feel to it,

Laura: right? I mean, I dunno how violent Barbara Cartland gets.

If she gets violent, then possibly,

Louise: yes. Well, they’re historical romances. So Roderick sounds like a Barbara Cartland sort of name.

Ah.

Louise: To me. And then you’ve got the death on the Nile type influence in there as well. You know, the glittering ring and the gloved hand. And you know, I loved all those sort of costume details.

And as you mentioned, the filthy brown dress

Laura: stained, the stained brown dress st. It was white stained brown. That’s the specificity of that. Maybe my eyebrows hit the top of my head when I read that. And the drowsy

Louise: disorder. And nice phrase, the disproportionately, disproportionately large head.

Oh my God. Was there a

Laura: happy ending? I mean, I dread to ask, but there have been a happy ending for this. Of course. Yes. Because

Louise: again, this is only a small fragment of a 12 page story for Miss Marriot. Mm-hmm. And, um, yes, she’s freed. She has a last minute pardon,

Laura: changes her dress, I hope. Yeah,

Louise: I think they might bring her a, a new dress and say, come, you can take those filthy rags off now.

Laura: Wow. And what I really liked about this, and the other one was the teacher’s note. Yes. Miss Marriott, I presume again, is it? Yes.

Louise: Miss Marriot? Yes.

Laura: Would you say Miss Marriott had any particular influence on your writing style? I mean, she, she feels like she’s a constant throughout this program. If nothing else, she’s my English

Louise: teacher for years and years and, you know, we haven’t been in touch since my writing career began, and I have tried to google her, but it’s very hard with misses because they tend to marry and then change their name.

So I haven’t been able to track her down. For whatever reason, she’s not felt that she’s wanted to contact me. She probably fears I’ll start sending her stories that she asking, asking for an A.

Laura: I’d like to read her notes in the margins. It,

Louise: yeah, I think she was an amazing influence because, not in terms of, you know, I didn’t read any of her work, or she didn’t really, I mean, she tried to reign in the melodrama, but she wasn’t successful.

I continued to, you know, get more and more melodramatic, but she was just. Very encouraging and obviously allowing me to do these ridiculously long stories for when she probably only asked for a couple of pages to get people to use adjectives. And you know, she never said, look, this is too long, or this isn’t what, what I wanted, wanted.

Well, I imagine she

Laura: would’ve been delighted. Delighted to have a child that is that interested and is that imaginative and is that committed to, to creativity? I imagine there weren’t many kids in your class

Louise: doing that. No. Oh, there definitely weren’t. I mean, this is. Just the tip of the iceberg. There’s loads more.

There’s one called The Mirror of the Future, which we, which I, what’s a

Laura: great title?

Louise: Oh, my word. And again, there’s an illustration for the title and the two Rs in mirror are back to back, like ab, like the bees in Abba.

Laura: Very clever. Yeah. It’s all there. Oh yes. 12-year-old Louise. She was a, a bestselling novelist waiting to happen there.

She was. Fantastic. Right. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show. How was it for you?

Louise: Oh, it was so much fun. I mean, I’ve literally cried with laughter, so you know, it doesn’t get better than that. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.

Laura: Well, it has been fabulous talking to you, Louise Kish. Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcut straw with us.

Louise: Thank you for asking me to.

Laura: The Offcut straw was devised and presented by me, Laura Shaven. With special thanks to this week’s guest, Louise Kish. The offcuts were performed by Leah Marks, Emma Clark, Beth Chalmers, and Marcus Hutton. And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcut straw Do com and please do subscribe, rate and review us.

Thanks, listen.

I had an agent at the time, she’d say, darling, it’s not so much a draft as some used pieces of paper. And sometimes I’ll say that to myself. When I’m writing something, I’m like, this is bullshit. And I go, well, you know, the worst idea written down is still 100% better than the best idea never written down. So even if it’s just like used pieces of paper, that’s still okay.

Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this episode is the brilliant Lynn Ferguson, writer, performer, story coach, occasional stand-up, and yes, the voice of a certain plaster scene chicken. You might know her from her writing on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, her award-winning solo shows, or her work with Pixar on the animated film Brave. Originally from Scotland, Lynn first moved to London to pursue her wonderfully varied career before heading stateside in 2008, when TV and film writing took her to Los Angeles. She’s done everything from serious theatre at the National to glorious chaos at the Edinburgh Fringe, and she has a real gift for uncovering truth in stories, whether she’s writing them, performing them, or helping others shape theirs. When I asked Lynn for her offcuts, she sent me loads. And honestly, I’d love to have included more, but we just didn’t have the time. So naturally, my first question to her was, how easy was it to find them all?

Everything’s difficult to find. I think the thing that was, it was such a brilliant task, Laura, I have to tell you, because it made me realise how many things I write and don’t really finish.

Oh.

Yeah, I do. I write a lot. Well, I write less now because I have, I do a weekly blog that has to go out every Sunday. So it’s meant that writing bigger projects, I’m much more picky about what one I pick up. So it was interesting, really, because I found all these things and I was like, I totally had forgotten I even wrote that. And some of the stuff that I’ve given you as well was, it’s fascinating because, well, it’s fascinating for me. Because there was, before I moved to America, there would be things that I would write that I was all passionate about. Right. Like, so I wrote a sitcom for BBC Four, right, Radio Four, which I did three series of. And I was really passionate about it. And the reason I did the sitcom was because I cared about it and it mattered to me and it was all about the stuff, right? And then I moved over here and there’s a whole thing in America about stuff you just have to do. And so like a whole load of stuff was like pitches that I’d forgotten, that I’d written. And one of the things that I nearly sent you and then didn’t, because I was like, that’s just too weird, was something that I wrote for, it was a musical for, I know, a musical for a bunch of Christians from Middle America. And then I was like, oh no.

So you were commissioned by them?

Yeah. Yeah.

They said, Lynn Ferguson, please, you’re the woman to create a musical about our religion. Is that what happened?

Yeah. Well, you know, they were in a band and they did stuff and they were devout Christians and they needed something to promote their band. So they wanted this thing and I wrote a pitch for it. And I think it went quite well. And then I was like, no, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to give you that because it was too weird.

You withheld it from them after that. No, you can’t have this now.

I think they felt it was too populist. I don’t know. Right. But it’s in a sort of haze of… I’ve done a lot of work in America where I just… Someone says, can you do that? And I go, yeah, okay. It’s one of the things that I really, really wish British writers would understand about themselves. It’s how incredibly flexible they are and how skilled it is. The way that America works, not now because things have changed, but… So when I first went into a writer’s room here, people had trained at Yale and Harvard and stuff like that to write jokes. And I was like, whoa. I mean, basically, when you’re writing a joke, you’re looking at two sentence, three sentence structure with a return in there somewhere. It’s like not rocket science. But yet they’ve, you know, they trained at it. And if you ask those people to write a play, they’d be like, oh, well, I don’t know. Don’t know that I could do that. Whereas British people, you’re sort of expected to be able to take it from the beginning and take it right through to the end. I mean, having said that, I do think it’s a good idea for writers to work in a writer’s room even just once because it does something to the speed of your writing, which I didn’t have before. Like now, if someone says, can you write something? If I say yes, then it’s done. I don’t really do a thing where I’m like, but can I write it or can I not write it? I’m like, OK, you want that? When do you want it for? Yeah, OK. Well, I don’t know what it’s that fantastic. It just changes the way you are. But that’s what a writer’s room does.

Well, let’s get started with your first offcut then. So can you please tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

This is ridiculous, proves my point. This is The Real Duck Dynasty and it was written about 2013 and it was originally a pitch for a Nick Jr. animation series.

Real Duck Dynasty is an animated series full of intrigue, double dealing, sex, power and jokes of animated ducks in the oil industry. Drake Mallard’s family have been in the oil industry since his great-great-grandaddy flew over from Ireland. Though it may have started with humble beginnings, Mallard Oil is now a billion dollar business with thousands of employees. Drake may have been born into riches, but his life is far from perfect. He has two ex-wives, his present wife in therapy, trying to work out why she’s unable to lay an egg. He has six children, countless grandchildren and the weight of the Mallard business on his shoulders. And in business, a crisis is looming. On one side, the inevitable dwindling of fossil fuels and the constant struggle to find new supplies. On the other side, environmentalists constantly harping on about destroying the planet. Main Characters Drake, the head of the family.

Distinguished, elegant and refined. He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty when the situation arises. He tries to live his life with strong moral principles, but sometimes he has to do the wrong thing to make something right. Now in middle age, he knows he should retire, but he has had the business for so long, he wouldn’t know how to let go. And besides, there’s no one he can trust.

Ariel, a beautiful Scandinavian white-crested duck, a former model, she’s the envy of many, but she is emotionally fragile, having discovered that she for some reason is unable to lay an egg.

Shirley, Drake’s ex-wife, glamorous, scheming and devious. She’d do anything to take Drake’s fortune and get him to come crawling back to her on his knees.

Bill, Drake’s younger brother, smooth, handsome, a playboy, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, though that depends on what kind of bush it is, of course. Though a partner in the firm, Drake has stripped him of most of his responsibilities because of his gambling issues. He receives the equivalent of an allowance rather than have any active involvement in Mallard Oil. Of late, his realization of his lack of involvement, smoldered by the poison from Drake’s ex-wife, Wendy, is fueling a burning resentment for Drake.

Joey, Drake’s 25-year-old son from his first marriage to his late wife, Patty. Patty was the love of Drake’s life and an idealist. Joey has inherited both his mother’s looks and belief that there could be a better world. Joey has become more and more involved with the environmental movement. His efforts could destroy the very foundation of the Mallard Empire.

Drake says, You don’t understand, Ariel.

Every day is just about keeping the wolf from the door.

Drake opens the front door. On the doorstep stands a wolf wearing a suit and holding a clipboard.

Excuse me, sir, we’re conducting a survey about…

Go away!

Drake slams the door shut.

So, tell us what happened to this, the Wealduck Dynasty.

Well, firstly, if I’d had those actors, if I’d had them, maybe it would have gone through. No, the point is, it was originally a pitch for a Nick Jr. animation series, right?

Picture Nick Jr. Picture the three-year-olds who might be watching this.

They were like, yeah, she can’t lay an egg. Oh, wow, they keep the wool from the door, I think. This was within a kind of cluster of things I was asked to write about at the time, these pitches. And I found it, I found it that I was just trying to do what they wanted me to do, but I couldn’t quite nip it in. Like at one point before the Realduck Dynasty, which was the one that I fleshed out, I had an idea for cheese and crackers was the thing I was going to do. And cheese and crackers was a double act. That one guy was a cheese and the other one was a cracker.

Quite literally, cheese and crackers.

Yeah, yeah, because it’s animation, right? But crackers had schizophrenia and cheese was like, was an alcoholic. And I’m like, I don’t know that this is going to work for Nick Jr. So like, there’s a thing with the writing where sometimes you just can’t stop yourself. But also, around 2013, what I realized at the time was a whole load of reality shows were completely like animated shows. And that also reminded me of the whole kind of stuff of actual dynasty that happened, Dallas and dynasty and this stuff that they used to do in the, I guess it would be the 80s and 90s. And that actually, that what they had done in entertainment was they’d taken kind of real life people and placed a narrative structure on top of them and were presenting real life as something that was like dynasty or Dallas, you know. So I was into it in that and then I also just, the characters in reality shows at the time and even still are so ridiculous. I was like, it should be animation. It could be animation.

Not for very small children.

No, for very small. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go through. It didn’t. They were concerned about the real Duck Dynasty. They were concerned about it. And it was generally agreed that probably Nick Jr. was not a good market for me. And I had a similar thing with Disney, actually, where the people at Disney were lovely, lovely people. But I was like, it’s not something that I can write. I have a little bit of darkness in me that seems to not fit for Nick Jr. or Disney that well.

But this is animation and it’s about poultry. And it’s fair to say that you’re probably best known to the general public for your work on a specific poultry animation. Do you see how I did that segway there?

I did. I did.

Chicken Run in 2000 and its sequel, Chicken Run Dawn of the Nugget, 2023. You voiced the character of Mack. How did that come about?

It was quite simple, really. I was in London at the time and my agent said, will you go up for this thing? And I went up for it. And I met Pete and Nick at the audition.

Nick Park?

Yeah, Nick Park and Peter Lord. But there was a group of people there. I just did the read for them. And then I said, you know, the thing is, is there’s a problem you’ve got in your script. And they were like, oh, shut up. And I said, no. The thing is that if it’s a Scottish chicken, you’re going to have to put in hen because Glaswegians particularly will say, are you all right hen or is everything right? And they pissed themselves laughing and looked at me like I was making it up. I said, I shit you not, honestly. Like, Glaswegians will say, are you all right hen? Like, check it out. I said, you don’t even need to give me the job. I’m just telling you, for a matter of detail’s sake, hen has to go in.

Do you think that’s what swayed them towards you?

I do not know.

Did you get involved in the writing at all?

Not in one, but I did in two. Yeah, I did in two. They asked me to come in and look after my own voice in two. I polish different things. I polished on Brave, Pixar’s Brave and stuff like that. I polish on other people’s movies. I do a lot of writing where nobody ever knows that I’ve written on it. I’m okay with that because as long as they pay me cash, what does it matter? With Pixar, it was quite heavy polishing that happened. It got a little closer to actually being a writer, and then we did stuff. But at the time I was working on Brave, I was also working on The Late Late Show. It was like a weird thing because late night writing is basically the two sentence return thing, like you’re writing jokes, and animation is almost like it’s polar opposite. Because you are doing jokes, but you’re really thinking about, I guess maybe, as I talk about that, I’m like there’s a lot of similarities in the sense of economy is a similarity and that I would take sentences out and stuff like that.

Yeah, brevity is very important for gags.

Yeah, it’s important for gags. But in animation, it can be a joke about stuff in Chicken Run 2, where I take stuff out and go, have I saved you a small car? Because like a sentence from a character in stop motion can cost as much as a small car to do.

Well, moving on now, let’s have your next offcut. Can you tell us about this one?

I am cringing, just so you know, I’m cringing. This is pretty much the earliest thing I remember writing. It’s a poem called The Fox Hunt and I wrote it in 1973.

The hounds, the hounds, they’re coming now, with a bark and a woof and a bow wow wow. Got to get to water, because it’s I they’re going to slaughter. The cubs, I can’t go home. They might get the scent and the cubs might moan. Got to get to water, because it’s I they’re going to slaughter. The hounds, the hounds, they’re coming now, with a bark and a woof and a bow wow wow. Got to get to water, because it’s I they’re going to slaughter.

This was prize-winning, I believe.

Oh my god, I am mortified.

You were seven.

I was seven. I was seven, right? But technically I am still. Do you know that thing when it’s, you can sort of remember writing this. I can remember doing it. I wrote it in the class. It was a teacher called Mrs Doctor, who got us all to write poems and entered them into a competition. And none of us knew. And the first thing I knew about it is I won a Bobby Brewster book, Bobby Brewster’s Balloon Race or something like that. And I got to meet the guy who wrote Bobby Brewster. And I was third prize in the area, or I don’t know, Glasgow or something like that. I don’t really know because I can’t remember the thing. I remember it was a very big deal, but I didn’t. The thing I remember about it most, and God bless that actress for doing it, is that it taught me how to write there, there and there. Because I had to handwrite it out. And so the hounds of hounds of there coming now is T-H-E-Y apostrophe R-E. And I have never forgotten that. And so I can judge people really harshly on their there, there and theirs.

Well, they didn’t win a prize for it as well.

No, right.

But I have to ask, as a seven-year-old, that does seem quite a bleak and frightening tale. But, you know, most people go, I’m going to be a princess. I’m sorry to deal in cliches, but, you know, in a little, and with a unicorn and all my favourite puppy, or maybe I’m going to go horse riding. No, I’m going to be ripped apart by a pack of dogs. Well, did your Mrs. Doctor, fabulous name, by the way, did Mrs. Doctor say, you know, what’s your worst nightmare? Right about that, seven-year-old.

No, I think that, you know what, Laura, I think it’s something that I found while looking out these offcuts for you is like, the real duck dynasty was meant to be for three to six-year-olds. Evidently, it wasn’t going to work that way. Even the fact that I had to, like, abandon cheese and crackers because schizophrenia and alcoholism aren’t great for preschoolers. I suspect because of the way that if, if someone else had written this and I was reading that, I’d be like, you have entirely written this around the fact that you discovered that water and slaughter rhyme and could conceivably be within a thing. So I suspect it’s more like that.

But even so, the word slaughter, not a usual part of a seven-year-old girl’s vocabulary. That’s all I’m saying. But we’ll move on from that. So what were you like at school? Were you very good at English? And did you dream of being a writer at that age?

You know, I guess looking back, I was good at school, but I am the youngest of four. By the time I went to school, my mother was tired. So she started doing teacher training college as soon as I went to school. So she didn’t have an awful lot of time to kind of deal with that stuff really. So I don’t know, but I do remember in primary seven, so maybe what’s that, 11 or 12? They had three people, four people, they used to take out a class and we would talk about greater things like philosophy and stuff like that. It was like special needs, but the other way around, you know.

And the school had chosen you, as in they’d gone, you four, you’re going to this class, or had you volunteered for this? Did you go on that?

No, there was no volunteering. It was no, there was none of that. No, they’d chosen us. They took us out to talk about it.

But what was your dream? When you were a child, what were you thinking? When I leave school, I’m going to work in a factory, be a writer, be a princess, marry a horse. What was your dream?

Well, you know what I think’s interesting just in this is that I think I had more, there was more things that I didn’t want to do than what I did want to do. I knew I didn’t really want to be married, which is ridiculous because I’ve been married now for 25 years. So there we go. But I wanted to see the world. I wanted to see outside. But I really, I didn’t see my first play until maybe, I saw half of one when I was maybe a bit 12. But in Cumbernauld at the time, and all praise to Cumbernauld and local theatres, there was a theatre in Cumbernauld and it was part of a community and there would be people coming round to the schools. I guess they were doing plays, doing theatre and education. And I did think that those people were kind of my tribe, but honestly, I never really did have an idea of what I wanted to do. And I still really don’t. And I’ve spent most of, like, the Chicken Run thing, like turning up and going, look, it’s totally up to you. I don’t, whether you give me the job or not, it’s entirely your thing, but I will tell you, you have to put the word hen in there or it’s not going to work, right? Like a whole load of my life has been that, like literally just turning up to stuff.

Well, time for another Offcut now. What have we got?

Ah, now this is called Memory When It Suits You and it was a novel. I started writing in 2005.

Nobody noticed the women crying. It was 9.35pm and the people on the bus had places to go to, people to see. Thursday 16th December and the number 12 squeezed through the busy streets of London, through the maze of shoppers and traffic and decorations strung all around, proclaiming Joy to the World and Peace on Earth. The passengers had days of their own that they might have wanted to sit there crying about and didn’t, as the bus made its valiant trek from Marble Arch to Forest Hill on an already ambitious timetable. Not a sob or a snivel or even a dewy eye from any of them, and none of them paid the least bit of attention to the woman. In the double seat across from her, slumped somewhere inside a massive hooded sweatshirt and oversized jeans, the puffy teenage boy, eyes closed, a bag full of undecipherable revision notes in a bag beside him, rage against the machines screaming through his earphones. Four rows in front, the 56 year old lady in the pink designer anorak she had ecstatically bagged on the first day of the Debenhams sale 2001, believing when she first put it on that people might treat her with respect, might listen to what she had to say. Now when she puts it on, it only reminds her that it takes more than a designer anorak to change a person’s life. On the disabled seat just behind the driver, the wiry man in his early thirties, his forehead prematurely wrinkled, his fingers nicotine brown, his spindly legs defiantly sporting tracksuit trousers. Six rows behind, the bald man in the cheap pinstripes, face like a baby, simultaneously devouring a Mars duo and a copy of Sue. And at the very back of the bus, the painfully thin girl with big eyes, wearing summer clothes and wringing her hands together, willing the air to swallow her up. None of them noticed the woman in the smart clothes, her dark hair a perfect cut, a diamond solitaire on the fourth finger of her left hand, who sat looking out on a London night with tears silently trickling down her pretty face. She reached into her fendy handbag. There was the envelope. She wasn’t going to think about the envelope. What else? Lipstick, wallet, mobile phone, handkerchiefs, paper for emergencies. The thought forced a watery smile. Dabbing her eyes and putting her hankies, for emergencies, back into her handbag, she remembered her mobile phone. She cradled it in her hand, staring at it as if she’d find an answer. There must be someone. Surely there was someone. Was it really too late? Suddenly the bus jolted to a halt, and the painfully thin girl was flung forward in a flurry of cheap polythene bags and embarrassment. She landed halfway on top of the crying woman, and stammered various apologies in an Eastern European tongue.

This is a bus lane, you wanker!

The driver yelled through the front window to a cyclist, who was far enough ahead to breathe both a smile and a definitive hand gesture. You want to drive on the road, you fucking tosser? You can pay the fucking road tax! The lady in the pink anorak tutted. The man in the tracksuit sucked air through his teeth, and the bald man with the face like a baby ate another mouthful of Mars bar, still engrossed in his copy of Sue.

So presumably this didn’t get finished, this novel.

Do you know what? No, it didn’t at all. And it’s one of those ones that periodically I think I’ll pick it up again, and then I pick it up again, then I do a bit. Maybe I’ll do a day or two days work on it, and then I go, yeah, whatever. What made me laugh as I was listening to it, as I was like, yeah, because the voice of that writer there, that’s the voice of a writer where you’d go, you know what, you should write a series for Nick Jr. That would be awesome.

Yeah, it’s all coming together now.

It’s like totally, why would you even think that? The thing with Memory When It Suits You and it’s what is problematic about it as a book and what is problematic, I think, about my own writing is that I, when I lived in London, I guess from maybe 1996 to 2008, something like that. And London is just full of story. It’s like full of it. You walk down a street anywhere or go on a bus and you can feel it all around like all these people are running a story all at the same time. And with Memory When It Suits You, what happens at the end of that chapter is that she leaves the bus and she goes to Waterloo Bridge, I think it’s a bridge anyway. And she stands at the end of the bridge and thinks about what is possible. And then she holds her hands out and like Angel of the North or whatever and she jumps, right? And then the next chapter is a party boat and it’s these guys who work in insurance. And they’re on this boat going along the Thames. And it’s all about just work politics and the same kind of shite that’s happening on the bus, really, with all these blustery people of having their own story and not listening. And this guy is out, the main guy Ronan is out in the boat having a cigarette and he looks up and he sees the Angel of the North. And as she jumps, she lands on the boat of all the chances. And so then it’s a whole story, a kind of dance between him and her trying to work out how they go to where they go to and whatever. But I’ve written too many characters and the story gets too rich. And I feel like there’s a danger with writing. Don’t fall in love with your characters because when you fall in love with your characters, everything that they do seems too interesting. And actually sometimes it’s not that interesting and you have to thin it down. It’s funny, I’ve been watching a lot of Morse recently because the world’s going crazy. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that. And so like periodically what I do is I’ll binge watch something to kind of keep my head out of other things. And I’ve been watching Morse and it’s interesting one as in how miserable it is. Because he’s quite a miserable guy. But two, how much of the stuff they don’t tell you about him. And as I was listening to Memory when it’s… Your actors by the way are just brilliant. So thank you to them. When I was listening to that, I was like, yeah, you know, as a writer, I could really do with thinning it down.

Somebody to come and clean it up, perhaps.

Yeah, a polish.

I wonder who could do that. Do we know the one who does this?

But it’s to do with the thing of sometimes with writing, you need to be a little bit brutal. And I think I like these people too much, or I care about these people too much. And so, and actually I like London too much.

Yes. Well, you were there for quite a long time, weren’t you? And then you left in 2008 to, you went to Sunny LA to join the writing team on your brother Craig’s late night TV chat show. What was that like? I mean, what was it like writing for your own brother?

Doesn’t really make any difference. You know, like the thing with Craig is he’s incredibly talented. Like he’s, I know that people do praise him for being funny and all that stuff. And I know that I’m biased, but he’s like super smart and really talented. He’s a really clever guy. And so really what you’re doing is you’re just feeding it. That show that he did, we, you know what, we were like moving cushions around because most of the lifting, virtually all of it came from the jungle that is his head. And so I feel like, like I knew how to supply the kind of bricks to make the machine, you know, operate or whatever. My metaphors are all over the place. But basically, I knew enough to put enough coins in the machine, if you like, because you’re delivering two sentence, three sentence things. Yeah. But really, really it was him doing all that. And what it did is there’s not really any time to think about relationships. And I know that sounds mental, but there’s really not. So I had to go in it. The first meeting would be 10 o’clock in the morning. And then we’d have, I guess, maybe 15, 20 minute meeting on a rough idea of what topic we’re taking for the day. And then you go off to your office and you’d have two hours, maybe, till lunchtime to write jokes, two pages of jokes on that topic. And then after lunch, you’d have half an hour for lunch and then you’d write, you know, topicals, evergreens, you know, like so anything that was let say that, I mean, I’m glad I’m not doing it now because it’ll be Trump, right? Because that’s all that seems to be reported in the news. But there was a time, one that I do remember was there was a plane that landed in some river somewhere. So we had written everything and set out for the day. And then this guy, Sully Sullenberger or something like that, landed.

There was a film that Tom Hanks played the part in the film of his life, Sully Sullivan or something, his name was, I think.

So we were writing, we had written the topic that day and then that happened. And then we had to rewrite the topic that day. And then we still, everybody’s called back in, you had to rewrite it. And then you’re, you’ve got like topicals like about, I don’t know, Beyoncé or Jennifer Aniston or whatever, like just random shit. And and then the show is recorded at five. Right. And you’re doing that for, you do it Monday to Thursday and there’s two shows on a Thursday. So like the show isn’t written, it doesn’t start getting written until ten in the morning and it’s recorded in front of a studio audience at five. There isn’t any time for any of that shit. It’d be lovely to be wandering about going, yeah, well, you know, he’s my brother. It’s like, you’re at the coalface. Yeah. And the pressure is quite heavy because even if you don’t really feel like doing it, there’s still a show that’s getting recorded at five o’clock that’s going out that same night. So you don’t have any space for your feelings. It’s a little hardcore. But like I say, he is amazing. I don’t know how he did it for as long as he did. I guess it sort of fits with his rhythm really, which is that he likes to be fast in and out, you know.

Right. Another Offcut now. Tell us what we’re about to hear.

Now, this is from 2016. It’s called Red Riding Hood and it’s part of an idea for an adult storybook.

The front door stays shut. That’s the rules. The doorbell rings. Some idiot knocks on the door. You stay put. Sit in that chair and you do not make a sound. Do you hear? Or there’ll be trouble, big trouble. Because when there’s someone out there, that door must never open. Not ever. Rules, order, avoidance, restraint. Get that? Stop whimpering. Rules, order, avoidance, restraint. R-O-A-R. I call it roar. Made it up myself, you know. Yes. Amuse myself, no end. Piss myself laughing for days. What exactly are you whimpering for? Oh, I see. Oh, funny. You think that someone could rescue you? No, no rescue. It’s far too late for that. The doors are locked. The windows are nailed shut. And we’ll get on just fine. Cozy. 2008 was the last time that door opened when the bell rang. 3.37 on a Thursday afternoon. I saw them through the spy hole. Girl scouts with cookies. Tasty. Tempting. The kettle was on the gas hob. 3.45. I have tea. I would not answer the door. Not right. But I wanted one. I could almost smell them. Ding dong. I should not. I would not answer the door. The water started to bubble in the kettle. I could hear them chattering outside. If we sell this box of sediments, then we’ve only got these two to go. Like chirping little birds. Like you used to like to chatter. Once upon a time. The water in the kettle began to hiss. I’d ignore them. Maybe the bell’s not working. Let me try. The doorbell rang again. Persistent. I had to give them that. Let’s just go. There’s nobody in. Yes. Go. Run away. We’ve only got a couple of boxes left. My mouth was watering. Let them go. This will pass. But then the kettle started to boil. A long, lone wolf whistle. Did you hear that? There’s somebody in there. I turned off the gas. The house was silent. Maybe there’s an old lady in there. Maybe she didn’t hear us. Maybe she’s fallen and can’t get up. Maybe she’s in trouble. Then the unmistakable tapping of ten-year-old knuckles. Knock, knock, knock. Knock, knock, knock. It was out of my hands.

Stories. Now, you said this was for an adult storybook. You’re very much, as you mentioned, stories are your thing, aren’t they?

Yeah.

You worked a lot in the storytelling space. How did you get into that? I know you mentioned The Moth, which is a great podcast where people go up on stage and tell real life stories, things that happened to them in front of an audience. Were you at the beginning when The Moth started or you just stumbled upon it? How did all that happen?

You know, it’s well, I’ve always been interested in stories. I’ve always, it doesn’t really matter what I write. There will always be a monologue in it. I like people to get a monologue. And maybe that goes back to my acting days or whatever, but I like to give a character a monologue, particularly if they’re the one that I’m in love with most of all. The thing that I was doing, I did a thing in Edinburgh. I don’t know if it was the one before I came to America, but I did a project called Biographies in a Bag, which was solo shows where each actor, each solo show was half an hour and the only set was a chair. And each character had whatever props they needed. They could have it in one bag that they would carry on, sit in the chair, do their play, then leave. And as they left, the next character would come on stage with their bag and do their play. And they were basically just monologue stories. So I’ve always been into that. Then when I came over to America, it was complicated because I was working really hard. Like I was at The Late Late Show for two and a half years and there really isn’t an awful lot of room to do anything else. And then in the middle of that, I started working for Pixar at the same time. So I was doing…

On Brave.

Working on animation. Yeah. So it was just a lot. And there’s a friend of mine, Kemp Powers, and he wrote Soul. And he wrote One Night in Miami and he did Spider-Man and stuff like that. And he’s just a top guy. And we had both done an event where we were doing, I think we were doing readings at the event. And we just hit it off. We became friends, me and Mark and him and his partner Shannon, we just became mates. And they were around at my house one night and he had done The Moth where The Moth do this thing called a slam where in essence you sort of audition your story. And I was objected to that even as a stand up, I would never do an open spot because I was so fricking argumentative. So we get into this argument about it where he said, well, you know, what other way would you do it? And I said, well, you should just be able to just deliver a story. And he went, how many people do you think want to do a story? And I said, but I’ve done a lot of stories. I know how to do them. And he said, so nepotism, would that work? Would that be the way that you would do it? Or you would take your resume to do it? Or would you find it easier just to do the, you know, the slam? Because he had done the slam, right? And I was like, fuck it, I’ll do the slam to prove you wrong, right?

The proof being that you would pass, you mean?

Well, the proof being that I wasn’t so anti-rules that I couldn’t fit into anything.

Right.

I mean, I do have a natural resistance to things. So the thing that he had a point with was he was like, it’s fine to disagree with something if you’ve had the experience of doing it. But if you haven’t had the experience of doing it, you’re just being a cantankerous old bastard. And I was like, fuck you. So then I went to do it and it was funny because, you know, you get voted in that slam. I did told this story and you get voted in the slam. And the people who vote are like friends in the audience. So it turns out if you turn up to do Islam and you’ve brought 10 friends with you and they become the judges, then you will win even if your story’s shit. So I did the story and it went fine and I lost. I came third or something. And there was like a riot in this thing. It all went crazy. People were standing up. There was rage about it. Like people were really angry about me not winning the story thing.

Really? They were all arguing going, this is an injustice, Lynn must win.

Yeah. No, it was crazy. And so like I left because I’m like this. When I’d had the argument with Kemp, this wasn’t what I’d planned. So Mark and I did it sharpish. And then the moth called me the next day and said, do you want to do this main stage? And I did a main stage.

Same story?

Yeah, yeah, no, it was the same story. And then so I ended up doing that story like the town hall in New York where I think the recording is, which is, it’s like maybe 1,500, 2,000 people. I did the Albany, did it all over the place, actually Portland, Maine, loads of really Martha’s Vineyard. I worked with the moth for quite a while doing different stories and different things. And then from that, one of the people at the moth called Meg Bowles, who is just a sweetheart, she said, you know, you do know an awful lot about story. You might want to consider teaching people. And so then she helped me set up a story, kind of teaching block. And for a while, I did do that. I would do, I had a theatre and I would do four three hour classes with complete strangers. And we would pick stories from their life. And then on the fifth class, they would do, deliver their story without notes or cheat sheets to an audience, a live audience. And then I was kind of hooked because I realized that people are, the thing that’s problematic with people is not that they don’t have stories to tell. They are just one, not entirely sure that they’re allowed to tell those stories. And two, don’t really have the structure in place to be able to do it. So that when you can get people to tell you what’s really going on, and that takes a while, then you can help them structure it to be in something that’s wonderful. So like I had a guy that used to guard, he was a head of the Marines at Guantanamo Bay. And then it kind of lost it at one point. And we did his story about how he’d come to Guantanamo and why he was there. And he said about the reason that he lost it was he said, I stood looking out into the darkness for so long that the darkness started looking into me. And he said it without any kind of mystical, poetic thing. He just said it as in, that’s the truth. And I had another girl who’d, what story that came out was that she, well it was a horrible thing about being waterboarded and raped. And everybody in the class was freaked out by her telling it. But she was so reasonable when she was talking about it because she hadn’t really thought about it for years. And then it came out that what had happened. And I said, what’s the thing? What would be the message that you would wish me to understand from that event? What is the thing that’s clear in your head about the story? And she said, the sky looks so very blue when you think you’ll never see it again. And it made me really think about how story matters.

Right. Okay, now we’ve come to your final offcut. What’s that, please?

This is an amended scene from a theatre play I was commissioned to write in 2017, and it’s called The Weir Sisters.

Margaret and Grace are preparing a little party for their long lost sister Dorothy. But there are a couple of flies in the ointment. One, the person Dorothy desperately wants to see can’t come to the party. Two, Margaret and Grace are dead. Lights up, a Christmas tree, three old fashioned chairs, a buffet table, an old fashioned phonograph, a room decorated for a cosy little tea party. The recorded version of Vera Lynn singing We’ll Meet Again. Grace, early twenties, slight, gentle, dressed in the style of the 1940s, sings along with Vera as she fixes last minute details for the party. A solid older woman, Margaret, dressed in distinctly 1980s style slacks and blouse, enters carrying a stepladder. She walks over to the record player and pulls the stylus off.

Oh my god, Grace, change the record. This is a party, not a bloody wake.

But Margaret, it’s Vera Lynn. Dorothy likes Vera Lynn.

Nobody likes Vera Lynn, especially not at a party. And Dorothy is ninety-seven. She won’t even remember who she likes.

Vera Lynn was very much the thing in our day.

In your day, Grace, in your day, after you threw off your mortal coil, music changed, thankfully.

Grace takes Vera off the turntable.

A lot of things changed after you died, actually. They put a man on the moon. They invented the contraceptive pill, which, to be honest, if men had been the ones getting pregnant, they’d have invented a couple of centuries earlier. And they not only built a wall through the middle of Berlin, but they also knocked it down again.

Having positioned her ladder, Margaret exits through the stage left door.

It’s just, I remember Dorothy and I used to sing along to Vera Lynn at the dancing. She wrote a letter to me once saying, I looked like Vera Lynn.

And was that meant to be a compliment?

Of course it was. She was the Force’s sweetheart.

There’s an inspiration for you.

It is an inspiration. I don’t understand what you have against Vera Lynn.

Margaret returns carrying a fold-up banner.

Nothing personally. What I object to is being the Force’s sweetheart. I mean, is that really what women are supposed to do? Be pretty and sing songs, inspire the boys as they set off to war.

Is that not a nice thing?

Nice is exactly what it is. Nice means you don’t question anything. Nice means you sit in a corner. Nice means you sing pretty little songs and don’t demand to know why the boys are being sent off to fight in the first place. You know what I think, Grace? I think that if you’re the one deciding to have a war, then you should be the one fighting it on your own. Think on it, Grace. Hitler, Churchill, Stalin in the ring, bare-breasted, and we all stand around taking bets. Stalin, without his high heels, stands a mere five foot four in front of Churchill, who knocks him flat with his whisky breath. Then, fresh with success and a great gust of cigar halitosis, Churchill turns to Hitler and yells at him, Wagner’s Persian, your watercolours are shite, and Hitler runs off greeting and depressed and gobbles up one of his cyanide pellets and he’s gone before you know it. And millions upon millions of lives are saved. But that isn’t what happens and you know why? Because year after year, humans hand over power to those who have no other discernible skill than to claim they’re entitled to it.

She turns back to hang the banner.

Really? When you think of it, it’s much easier just being dead.

So, tell us about The Weir Sisters.

The Weir Sisters, there’s a theatre in Glasgow, Lunchtime Theatre that was run by the magnificent woman called Morag Fullerton. They do these one hour plays that go on for a week. She asked me to write a play and I came up with one, which was this, The Weir Sisters. Actually, during the process of writing this, which I knew it was these two sisters waiting for the other sister to arrive and how they would communicate and whatever. During it, I got diagnosed with breast cancer. So actually, I couldn’t see, I didn’t go and see the play because I was here going through surgery and a lot of unpleasantness generally. So my sister, bless her, who had been over here nursing me for a bit, had gone back and seen The Weir Sisters and found it very difficult as you would, I think. So it was an interesting thing to be writing a play about what is death.

But you’ve got breast cancer, you got diagnosis after you’d finished writing or while you were writing?

While I was writing, while I was commissioned. Yeah, no, it was intense. But you know, it was kinda, because at one point I had to say to them, I’m putting the draft in, I’m giving you this first draft, it’s not finished properly, but just run with it because I’m going to fund my mistake to me this Friday. It was like a weird kind of thing going on. It’s fine, I’m fine, you know, I went into remission, I’m a lucky person. If you do get breast cancer, you know, it isn’t the death sentence it used to be and it comes from me. Anyway, but it was interesting to write this because it was about death. I wanted to write a play about death that was really about life and the way that we choose life and that actually, I think that there is something maybe up until The Weir Sisters that hadn’t entirely considered was that, you know, death is not an option. That will be the one that comes for all of us. That’s just going to happen. But how you choose to live your life and how you choose to allow other people to affect your decisions is an option. There is power in it. And so the play itself, how it exists, once you die, you go to this place that is neither up nor down and you get to choose, once you remember how you die, you can choose where you felt at your best, right? Where you felt that you’re most defined. So that’s why Grace is young. She did die young, but she has a secret, which is why she’s based around that time because she’s got something she has to reveal. Margaret dies a bit later than the way that she is set, but she appears and lives at the time that she felt that she was most powerful in her life. And then Dorothy, when she appears, the challenge is to get her to remember how she died because she felt she died so many different times, right? So it is a thing about sacrifice, this play. It’s interesting. And the reason it’s amended is because it was an hour long play that I never got to see, but it did pretty well. And what reviewed well as well, people were saying it was like this movie The Bishop’s Wife. Oh, yes, yes.

With David Nevins.

Yeah. So it has the same sort of feeling. And so then I was like, OK, well, I can’t really do anything with it as a play play. So what I’ll do is I’ll amend it into being two half play, you know, so two act play, so with an interval. So I’ve done that. And then I’ve never done anything with it since then because I’m like, maybe it’s a movie. Maybe I want to do it as a movie. So like part of all of this stuff with all my offcuts is how much I realized I’m not a completer finisher. I think that’s what you’ve taught me, Laura Shavin. I am totally not a completer finisher.

OK, well, I’m sorry. I hadn’t intended to. Well, we’ve come to the end of the show and I was, you know, my normal question is, how was it for you? It seems that you’ve just answered that by saying, I think you discovered you don’t finish things. But that can’t be true. It’s just you didn’t finish these things.

Oh, there’s a load of other things too that I’ve not finished. I didn’t really think that there was a pattern and stuff. But I can see even just in these offcuts that there is a pattern. And I also…

Which particular pattern is it? Or is it just that you didn’t finish?

I think that there is a… I have a resistance to… I mean, I can write what other people ask me to write, but sometimes I resist it. But that’s definitely ducked in a state. And I think the other stuff is that it’s okay to not know… It’s okay to not know the answer. And I used to have this… Around the time that I got… That I was in Chicken Run, I was writing different things. My first play that I wrote was really successful. And so people thought that I could write…

The Heart and Sole?

Yeah.

I saw that.

Oh, did you?

It was very good. Yeah, I did.

Thank you. Well, it was… Actually, you know what? Heart and Sole was meant to be an hour of stand up, and I forgot that and wrote a play, it said. But after it, people seem to think that what I would write would be brilliant. And it wasn’t because writing doesn’t work that way. It literally is only what you can do at the time. And I had an agent at the time who I loved her, actually, because she’d say, she’d say, darling, it’s not so much a draft as some used pieces of paper. And sometimes I’ll say that to myself when I’m writing something, I’m like, this is bullshit. And I go, well, you know, the worst idea written down is still 100% better than the best idea never written down. So even if it’s just like used pieces of paper, that’s still okay.

Well, that’s an excellently wise piece of advice, that is. So listening to those Offcuts, was there anything that surprised you, anything you expected to hear but didn’t, or maybe vice versa, or maybe nothing?

You know, what was surprising about it was that I get through, you know, like I do this weekly blog, right? So I write a blog that goes out every Sunday, like every Sunday. And at the end of the year of doing a blog, I do a book, right? And my great terror is that I’m writing the same thing every week. And my great terror with writing is that I’m writing the same thing. And I noticed in those things where I was like, they’re really not the same thing. The real Duck Dynasty was about, I’m trying to do something that’s just not going to work. The Fox Hunt, God bless seven year old me and my weirdness. Memory when it suits you is about a love, actually a kind of love for London and don’t forget the good bits. Red Riding Hood I still believe in, but it’s a complicated thing and I don’t know how to do that yet. And The Weir Sisters, it is a thing about, you can write through the most difficult of times. And sometimes writing does make you feel better when you do. I think that The Weir Sisters would be, I think The Weir Sisters as a structure that it was and worked, I think there is a better structure for them. I just have to decide what that structure is. Because what was lovely here in it, because I wrote that what, nearly 10 years ago, something like that, eight years ago. And then listening to it, I was like, yeah, that’s the truth for now though. Like, you could totally see that a bit now. So I’m like, oh, maybe I should do something with that, right?

Yes, you definitely could, yeah. Well Lynn Ferguson, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today.

You too, my friend.

Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thank you for asking me.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Lynn Ferguson. The Offcuts were performed by David Monteath, Nigel Pilkington, Beth Chalmers, Christopher Kent and Gayanne Potter, and the music was by me. For more details, visit offcutsdrawer.com, and please subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer. Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is television writer, Chris Lang. Chris trained at RADA and worked for several years as an actor before turning his hand to writing. After several years working on established shows, including The Bill, Casualty, Soldier Soldier, and Hustle, he created his first original drama, The Glass, starring John Thor and Sarah Lancashire in 2001. He has since gone on to create many, often award-winning, British television series, not to mention a few French ones as well. There was Amnesia in 2004, Torn in 2007, A Mother’s Son in 2012, and two of his series, Innocent and also Dark Heart, started filming in 2018 with Innocent’s second series supposed to start filming this year. But it’s Unforgotten, the multi-award-winning detective drama that he writes and produces that he’s probably most well known for. And in fact, if Covid hadn’t struck, he probably wouldn’t have time for this interview as he’d be filming its fourth series. So British television’s loss is our gain. Chris Lang, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

Thank you very much for having me.

It’s a pleasure. So how did you find getting hold of your offcuts? Did you have them all to hand?

Well, the more recent stuff is all very to hand because it’s all on my computer. But of course, the older stuff was really only in hard copy or possibly on one of those very strange discs that you used to slot into an Amstrad 9512. But yeah, as good as lost effectively. So yeah, I went, I did literally go into a cupboard and pull out a dusty old box from the back of the cupboard, which I had not looked at for sort of 20 years. And there was a stack of old scripts that had actually never even been put onto any kind of computer, let alone an Amstrad.

Were they typed or handwritten?

Well, they were typed, but not by me because in the olden day, well, I obviously didn’t know how to type, but we used to write them longhand and then we send them off to a typist. Which seems just absolutely…

Oh, it’s the 1950s or something.

Exactly. It seems completely absurd that we didn’t. But in a way, you know, you would have had to have learned properly how to type because, you know, now when you type on a computer or a laptop, obviously you can make a billion mistakes and just correct them very easily. If you’re doing it on a typewriter, obviously you can’t really do that. So yeah, I used to send them off to a typist. I was the first person amongst my cohort to buy a computer. And I remember my flatmate walking in and it was an Amstrad 9512 and it would have been in about 1986 or 87. And he said, what’s that? And I said that it’s a computer and I’m going to, I’m from now on, I’m going to write on this. He said, that’s absolutely ridiculous. He said, you’ll never use that. You’ll never use it.

Oh, and presumably you did. And that’s, that’s how I did it.

I wrote 20 scripts of the bill on that computer. And I loved it at the Amstrad. It was the first computer at home computer that everyone got. And I loved it. It had some functions on it that I still miss to this very day, but it was always, I mean, it would always go wrong. And it would always suddenly, the worst thing you could ever see is dis-corrupted. And there was a bloke who lived in Roehampton called Dr. Dave, who, and you got his number from the exchange and marked, and you could send your disc to him in the post, and then he’d send it back, hopefully corrected and uncorrupted and your files would be there. And that happened to be a lot, you know, you’d be halfway right through a bill script, and suddenly the message would come up, file corrupted, and it was just as bad as it could get. And then you’d send it to Dr. Dave, and he would or he wouldn’t miraculously recover it.

Right, well, let’s get things rolling with your first off-cut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for, and when it was written?

So this is a scene from a TV drama that I wrote, first wrote in about 2016, although I came up with the idea many years before that, and it’s called Testament.

Interior office, JB White, London. A large lavatory with numerous cubicles, seemingly empty. But from one cubicle, the sound of someone being quietly and efficiently sick. And then the chain is flushed, the doors open and John walks out, white-faced, thin-lipped, walks to the sink, rinses his face, dries it with a paper towel, and then looks at himself, long and hard, shitting himself.

Help me out here, Dad.

A beat, dry mouth swallow, and then he looks at his watch. Cannot delay any longer, and he picks up his briefcase and walks out. Interior boardroom, Day. A boardroom in which wait maybe 15 serious-looking men and women, and then the door opens and John walks in.

Morning, everyone.

Morning, John.

And he walks to the end of the long table and is about to sit in the chair, just to the right of it, and then suddenly realises and moves on one to sit at the head. He gets his papers out of his briefcase, places them in front of him, takes a second to compose himself, and then…

So I’d like to start, if I may, by thanking everyone for their extremely kind messages. My father would have been deeply touched by the many lovely sentiments expressed in them. He really would.

A beat. He nods. And he nods. He takes a sip of water. A beat. And then finally…

And then he would have stuck all the cards in a drawer…

And he looks up to face the board, to look them in the eye.

Said that was all well and good.

Obviously a stock phrase of Jack’s. Get a few smiles round the table.

But we still have a company to run. Still have over 3000 employees to look after. Still have over 2 million customers to serve. And so… With that very much in mind, I’m going to ask you now to look at item number one on the agenda today. The vote… For myself to take over as CEO of JB White Ltd. With immediate effect. Nothing much to say on this. I believe it’s what my father would have wanted and it’s certainly what I believe as COO would be in the company’s best interests. And so I ask you to cast your vote now, please. All those in favour?

And he looks down at his agenda sheet now, even as he raises his own hand, not quite able to look at the room yet. But we watch the room. We watch as maybe half the hands go up immediately. And we watch as a few more go up, a little less certainly. And then we watch as the last few go up. But only, we sense, as the dalliers realise they might be isolated. Which is when John finally looks up, to now see every hand up and he nods. Tears coming to his eyes. So many emotions, pride, sadness and responsibility. But mostly fear.

So Testament. Tell us about Testament.

Well, I’d always been fascinated with the Testament part of it. I don’t know whether this is self-explanatory or not, comes from Last Will and Testament. And basically it’s a show about the fallout from the death of a fairly sort of patriarchal figure, a very successful self-made businessman and his will and what it says in it. And it’s obviously about a family, but it’s really a show about love and how that’s expressed or not in a will. And it’s just a subject that I’ve always been fascinated by. And it’s a good example of how an idea can sit with you for a very long time before you find the right expression for it. And this one, I guess I’d had the idea sometime in the sort of early noughties. And then I just, you know, I was busy doing other stuff. And then I finally created a document which seemed to land with a broadcaster and they commissioned a script. And then it sort of landed on the desks of various broadcasters just as succession. It came out in the States. And whilst it was very different, this is often the way in my business, this is obviously a very English story. And it was a story that wasn’t really about, you know, insanely wealthy family like they are in succession. It was a story that actually was multi-generational but also multi-class and very diverse family in many ways. So it felt much more sort of, it had a far broader spectrum of characters. But you know, as is often the way, if it feels to be touching a similar subject, you know, broadcasters are quite nervous of that. So yeah, it was frustrating, but it’s just very, very common for that to happen in certainly in drama. We’re all tending to sort of work in the same areas and things are in the ether and they tend to sort of occur to people often at the same time. And I don’t know how long Jesse Armstrong had had his idea for, I’m sure a very long time as well. But yeah, it was just bad timing. But one is often the benefit of good timing, so you can’t moan.

Oh, that’s true, yeah. And talking of bad timing, actually, obviously the pandemic, as I mentioned in the introduction, had disrupted the filming of two of your series.

Yeah, yeah.

The pandemic itself, is that a good thing for you in as much as has it inspired you to, or do you think it will inspire you to create drama around it at all?

No, definitely not. I mean, not that it hasn’t, I’m not saying it hasn’t inspired me, I just wouldn’t. Not just because I think there will be lots of people writing their pandemic drama, but I just don’t think people will be particularly deliriously happy to watch it. I think it’s been an incredibly difficult time for lots of people. And I think, obviously drama’s job is often to reflect the world around you, but I just feel people will need a break from that for a while, maybe in 10 years, people will wanna see their lockdown dramas. But my guess is they don’t really wanna come straight out of lockdown and the first sort of things that start feeding through in the next two or three years are lockdown dramas. But the other difficult issue is as you move forward, how much do you incorporate some sense of lockdown or the fact that a pandemic has happened in the stuff you write. I’m not saying write about a pandemic, but how much do you reflect it?

To acknowledge it’s happened.

How much do you acknowledge it? Yeah, I mean, we’re about to start shooting Innocent in Ireland and we hadn’t even started with Unforgotten, it’s slightly different in that we were 11 weeks into it. So there’s no question that you could even, you know, bow to it at all or make a nod to it at all. You couldn’t because you’ve got to be consistent with what went before. But Innocent, we’ve had discussions, you know, should people be walking into shops with face masks on or whatever? And, you know, we think not, but maybe for some of the reasons that I was saying before.

Interesting dilemma. Anyway, time for your next off cut. Tell us what this is, please.

Well, this, embarrassingly enough, is an extract. I don’t know why I gave you this, but I did. So this is an extract from my diary written in 1983, and I’m going to go read as I hear it read back to me now.

The evidence speaks for itself. Having just seen Paul over the weekend, I now see that friendship is familiarity. The review is now over, although it looks like there may be a chance of doing it at the Donmar warehouse in the autumn, which is pretty good. It’s very interesting reading this diary, as it chronicles its way through my life. When I wrote my last entry, I knew nothing of the future. When I wrote my first entry, it’s now so interesting to read with the hindsight I now have. It’s as if I can almost say hello to the future, as I know that I will read this entry in a couple of weeks and I will be a different person. Still no work, Marron Parg gone away, and by myself, literally, it seems. I’m writing this at 4.30 in the afternoon, which is about the time I go into one of my panics. I am V lonely and depressed at the moment about everything. It’s terrible to come to terms with one’s own situation and realize I can do nothing about it. I’ve been born with a meager talent for writing and I’m eking out a living by it, but I’m not brilliant at it. I’m not brilliant at being funny, just quite funny. I’m not V good looking, just fairly good looking, just quite a good drummer. I’d give anything to excel at just one thing. Mind you, everyone has faults and one could take the attitude that it’s talent, it’s comparative and that I’m lucky to score quite well at it. I’ve just read Oscar Wilde’s biography, an amazing man. I really admire his commitment to his ideals and his genius, both were so perfect. Perfection in anything is something that I would love to achieve. Yet there he was, a genius who had incredible talents, but still had a life dominated by incredible loneliness. It escapes no one.

It escapes neither me nor Oscar Wilde, you see?

Yeah, you had like two peas in the pod.

Two peas in a pod. I love that effortless segue from my meager talent into Oscar Wilde there.

Oh, no, you’re doing yourself down. That’s, I thought that was quite a considered diary entry, considering the self-indulgence of most, I don’t know, were you 20, 21, teenager?

Yeah, 21.

Right, they can be a lot more self-indulgent than that. I thought that wasn’t too bad.

Yes, it did make me go red as I heard it back. It was one thing reading it and it’s another thing hearing it read out loud. I mean, I was surprised when I read it by how low I clearly was at that time. That’s not my recollection, but unless I was playing up for the diary, which I don’t think I was, I obviously was struggling more than I thought. But some of the sentiments, apart from the fairly good looking, I still have today, but I’m completely at ease with them. I never thought I was brilliant at anything and I still don’t. I always knew I was a mediocre actor. I was definitely a mediocre drummer. That was very important to me at that point. I was definitely mediocre at comedy. Okay, but definitely not brilliant. But as a writer, I was okay then and then I worked very, very hard to get quite good. But I’m sort of, I’m happy with that, you know? I know I’ll never be a genius, I’ll never be brilliant, but I’m very happy with being very competent at it.

Fair enough, as you should be. This diary, did you, obviously writing it at 21, did you always keep a diary? Did you have a diary as a child, for example?

No, not at all. I started keeping it when I left home because I guess, you know, I thought it would be interesting and it’s what sort of arty people did. And I only kept it up for about a year. I guess I wasn’t interested enough in expressing my thoughts about my life. I wasn’t quite solipsistic enough, although that diary would suggest otherwise. And in the end, of course, your diary becomes your screenplays because that’s where you find out what you think about things as, who was it who said that? Auden or JB. Priestley or someone, how can I know what I think until I see what I write? And that’s how I often discover how I feel about something.

Okay, time for your next off-cut. Can you tell us what this is, please?

Right, so this is, yeah, this is a scene from my first ever screenplay that I co-wrote with Hugh Grant, who I was in repertory theatre with, my first ever job in Nottingham. We wrote this in 1984 and it’s called Rep.

Interior, stage door area, playhouse, day. Fire doors crash open and Porrick, wild-eyed and dripping sweat, approaches the stage doorkeeper, Derek, who sits in his cubbyhole.

Hello, sorry, do you know where the read-through for A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, please?

Yes, thanks.

Could you tell me where it is then, please?

Certainly, up the stairs and straight ahead of you.

Thanks very much.

He bolts. Interior, rehearsal room, playhouse, day. Tony is still at it.

So what I’m saying is for Christ’s sake, let’s not be in awe of Shakespeare or over-reverent with his text. If we just knock him about a bit and take the knocks, he’ll give us right back. Oh, he’s quite a bruiser, our Will. I think something extraordinary will come out of that tussle.

Smiling nods from the cast.

Politics! He’s got him. Let’s not get into that now. Brackets, I think he was certainly no Thatcherite. Close brackets.

Right on nods from the cast.

But enough of me. Let’s read it. Just before we start, let’s join hands and get a nice gentle hum going and take a moment to make our own magic ring, as it were, our space, where things will happen, things will grow, our enchanted circle.

The actors do as they are bid. Tony surveys them. His eyes alive with magic.

Terrific! Great! Hold that!

At this moment, the door swings open and Porrik enters with his suitcase and plastic bag. He is confronted by 15 humming actors, all staring at him with solemn faces. Close up on Porrik’s reaction. Tony motions Porrik to come in and sit down.

Hold what we have. This is Porrik Kerrigan, ladies and gentlemen, who’s playing flute. So, James, when you’re ready, no acting, no performances, just read it. Begin.

James is an old actor with a big voice and he’s buggered if he’s not going to give a performance.

Now, fair Hippolyta, our napula draws on apace. Four happy days bring in another moon, but oh me thinks how slow this old moon wanes.

Dissolve to interior, rehearsal room, playhouse, day. This sounded like it could be very entertaining. What was the plot line of this film?

It was sort of fairly autobiographical. We’d both gone for basically our first jobs to do six months of rep. I don’t even know if such a thing exists anymore. I’d left the Royal Academy and Hugh had just left Oxford University and we both got a six month contract to play as cast. And we arrived pretty much on the same day and became good friends. We were both the youngest members of the cast and the ones who had to do a bit of stage management and do the very small parts. And we did that for six months. And it was an eye opening experience for both of us and a challenge in many ways, because we both wanted to be doing much, much more. I think we both wanted to have much more control over the way our careers were going. And I think rep sort of came out of that. So it was the story of a person sort of bucking against that sort of system and the company and struggling to fit in, which we both did. I mean, we did fit in, but we struggled with it, both of us.

Was it a comedy, this screenplay?

Yeah, I’d say it probably was. Well, I mean, we thought probably it was very funny, but I hope it had some muscularity and it had something to say as well. It was a rite of passage film, really. It was about whether the antagonist or the protagonist could survive all sorts of vicissitudes, some of which were of his own making and his relationship with his girlfriend breaks down, which certainly happened to me during that six months away and struggling to know how you fit into a company, which both of us found really difficult and struggling to accept that you were the most junior member of the cast. Neither was particularly good with accepting, I guess, our place in the universe at that point. So it was a story about that. There were some tensions there because it was quite, I think it was quite healthy to sort of buck against things, but also we were young and overly confident and thought we were God’s gift. So a lot of it, if I read it now, I think we’d come across as arses. Ha ha ha.

Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a podcast like this. And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. Well, the reason I asked about the comedy was because obviously you two got together and formed Jockeys of Norfolk, which was a comedy group with Andy Taylor. Also the scene that we heard I thought was quite funny. So you obviously discovered that you had the same sense of humour. So tell us about Jockeys of Norfolk.

I mean, Rep was written after we’d sort of started to write proper comedy and was obviously our attempt to be more serious writers. But yeah, we started to write some sketches at Nottingham Playhouse because we were asked to contribute something to some sort of anniversary of Nottingham Playhouse. And we wrote this sketch about Robin Hood coming out as Mary. Now I still think that’s a great gag. And Robin Hood, obviously, a Nottingham character, you see. So it was, it had local relevance as well. And we performed it and we’re astonished that people really did laugh. And this sort of slightly mysterious art form that, you know, you’re a writer or a comedy writer suddenly felt quite tangible. And so we thought, well, let’s try and write a full show, which we did. We wrote an hour and a half long.

Wow, that’s a big leap from one sketch to an hour and a half.

Well, I think we wrote sort of maybe three sketches, four sketches for other sort of slightly smaller things. And then we went into a local art center and did, maybe it wasn’t an hour. Maybe at that point it was like 45 minutes. And then we brought it to London. It was a proper full length show. And then it went to the Edinburgh Festival and it did very well there. And then we did our own TV show and that was not good.

That was not good.

It was not good. No, we didn’t know really.

What was it, BBC? Give me more details here.

It wasn’t BBC. It was made by Tine Tees Television. And at a time in like 85 or something when shows didn’t necessarily all get shown on the network. And I think it’s broadcast was prefaced by the words, and for those of you still with us, the time now approaching 1:30 a.m., and it’s time for a sideways look at life. And when you’re prefaced by that, you know your show’s in trouble. And it only went out in Newcastle and you can find it somewhere, I think, on YouTube, but it’s probably somewhere there because of Hugh. But it’s not a great work of art.

Right, right.

And that kind of did for us. We kind of then, we sort of slightly splintered and I went off and carried on writing. And I don’t know what happened to Hugh.

Yeah, never heard of him again. Disappeared off the face of the earth. Let’s have another off cut now. Tell us about this one.

So, well, this is the script for a radio commercial for Brill Cream, which was written in about 1985, I believe.

Here we are in one of London’s gayest nightspots, home of Britain’s latest dance craze. It’s called The Shake and everybody’s doing it. Hang on a minute, not quite everybody. What’s up with you two? Not dancing?

No, I won’t dance with my boyfriend because The Shake makes his hair so untidy.

I like him to look smart at all times.

Yes, chum, we’re sorry, but your hair’s a mess. Why not try Brill Cream?

Brill Cream?

Yes, Brill Cream, because just a little dab of Brill Cream every time you comb keeps your hair supple and manageable wherever you go, whatever you do. How do you feel now, you two? No more worries about The Shake.

That’s right.

Well, you’re certainly a lucky fellow. She’s a smashing looking gal. Go on, kiss her, you clod. And remember, for the smart, modern look and healthy hair, it’s got to be Brill Cream.

Congratulations, that’s a fabulous piece of copywriting. I really enjoyed that. That’s a shame that didn’t get made.

They did record, we did record it. But the agency, or the client rather didn’t go for it. And I think they played it once in order to enter it into the awards ceremonies. But yeah, we loved writing those ads. They were the first ads I ever wrote. When we came down from Edinburgh, we got picked up by Mel Smith and Griffreys Jones’ company, which at that point was a radio commercial production company called Talkback.

When you say we, it’s you, Andy and Hugh.

Andy and Hugh, yeah. And they asked us to start writing for them and start writing radio ads, which Mel and Griff at that point were just about as successful as it was possible to be in the world of comedy. And it felt such a sort of honor and a big break for us. And we wrote many, many, many commercials for their company. That Talkback obviously went on to become a sort of beer moth of a production company in both drama, but primarily in comedy. Created The 11 O’Clock Show, first company, I think to put Ricky Gervais on the TV and Ali G. And had a long relationship with Steve Coogan. But they started out as a radio production company in a tiny little office in Carnaby Street. And we used to sit there and write radio ads for them, mostly the ones that were made or aired anyway.

You weren’t tempted by the huge amounts of money in advertising to stay in advertising.

Well, we were offered it and no, we weren’t, but it was tempting, yeah. Because we write all these ads for the big agencies of that time. And sometimes, their creative directors would say, guys, would you guys like a job here? And you know, when you were a young actor writer and you weren’t earning a fortune, it was quite tempting. But I knew, again, it was that thing. I didn’t want to work for anyone and be an employee. I wanted the freedom to work with who I wanted to work with. And to a degree, the freedom to tell someone to bugger off if you felt that your creative vision sounds pretentious, that that’s what it was, was being compromised and you weren’t going where you wanted to go.

And you knew at that point that you wanted to be a proper writer, a writer of hour-long dramas rather than 30-second comedy vignettes.

I certainly, yeah, I was beginning to realize that. I don’t know if I knew at that point, but I certainly knew that whilst I really, really enjoyed it, and it was actually very well paid, I knew that it wasn’t substantial enough for me. And I wrote a lot of much more ephemeral stuff and silly stuff for quite a few years more after that. But around about the early 90s, I made a very conscious decision to stop writing sort of sketches, which is what I was doing in commercials and to move into drama.

Another off cut now. Tell us what the next one is, please.

This is the first episode of a TV series written in 2014 called Ben and Jerry.

Interior Bar. Interior Rachel’s House. Interior Nina’s House. Night. And here is Jerry, still on her phone, waiting at a table, talking on Skype to Rachel and Nina, her dating committee. The clock on the wall saying 8.12.

My hair’s gone Brian May and my eyes look like scoops of Raspberry Ripple.

What am I doing here?

Jerry, sweetheart, you look annoyingly gorgeous.

And you’re there because unlike your idiot husband, there are good men out there.

I’m sure there are.

I just… I don’t have the bandwidth right now. I have too much unresolved crap in my life. Maybe when I’ve sorted that out, then I can…

And she turns to see Ben, sweaty, beardy, filthy, breathless, but handsome Ben.

Yes, hi. Sorry I’m late. Did you get my messages?

Oh, no, sorry.

I’ve been on the phone fairly solidly for the last half hour and I haven’t checked.

Oh, right. God, I’m really sorry. I was trying to get hold of you to say I couldn’t come.

Oh, right.

But obviously I didn’t hear back from you and I didn’t want to stand you up, so…

Oh. OK.

So…

I’m really, really sorry.

No, no, that’s…

A beat. And then she frowns.

So, sorry, I’m confused. Are you just here now to tell me you’re not staying or…?

Er, well, yes, basically.

Oh. Right. OK, fine.

And he can see this hurts. Why would it not?

I mean, I could stay for one drink if…

No, no, I wouldn’t want you to stay just because you felt you…

No, I mean, in the normal run of things, I would want to. I definitely would want to. And, you know, not coming was absolutely nothing to do with you. It was me and…

Right.

Just a very bad few days and…

I know those.

You’re very attractive and your profile was lovely and…

And then, thank fuck, his phone rings. Teo.

Sorry, I have to take this. It’s my au pair. Teo? Ollie has done big wet shit on carpet. Right. It’s Holly, Teo. The cat’s name is pronounced Holly.

I know how cat’s name is pronounced.

Oh, nice. His eight-year-old son is shot on the carpet.

I’ll be right back.

He clicks off, turns to her. She is hands up in surrender.

Well, nice to meet you.

What can I say?

And he could say a million things, but what is there?

Goodbye, though. Nice pic.

Which is so palpably inadequate that he just acknowledges this and then turns and goes, cursing himself as he does. And we stay on her. She picks up her wine and drains it and then fills the glass again.

So is this going to be a romance? Would it have had a happy ending, this series, Ben and Jerry?

Yeah. Oh, it’s absolutely. It was a romantic comedy, and it was totally autobiographical. Yeah, it was how I met my wife, my second wife. And it was the story of that, which was a difficult relationship because I was a widower, she was a divorcee, and we both had a lot of children. I had three and she had two. And Ben and Jerry was the story of two people who meet each other and who fall in love fairly quickly, but then have to navigate their way through myriad difficulties in order to end up being able to properly be with one another and in reality live with each other and bring two different families together. And that was my story. That was what happened to me in 2009. I met my wife on an internet dating site that my brother had put me on. And we kind of fell in love, but it was really hard to bring both of our families together. And we didn’t manage to do that until 2012 when we finally managed to move in and 2013 when we married. So that’s the happy ending. So it was a story of, you know, five series story about how you navigate that with, you know, I had lots of issues with my family and my late wife’s family and my kids obviously grieving their mother and my wife’s kids struggling with a divorce and all of those problems.

So not really the Brady Bunch at all?

Well, it became the Brady Bunch. And in fact, our wedding invite was a mock up of the Brady Bunch photo. So it became that, exactly that. But the story of Ben and Jerry is, you know, the story of it wasn’t, you know, it’s not a love story in the sense that we knew we loved each other. We fell in love. But it’s what do you do when there are all sorts of other things in the way of getting to be with one another. But yeah, we overcame them all. And here we are, seven, eight years later, very, very happy.

You have spoken before about your life being affected by the tragedy of your first wife’s death. Presumably that has influenced your writing quite a lot. It must have influenced everything, of course.

Yeah, it does. It changes everything about you and about how you see the world. In some ways, weirdly, and I always feel nervous saying this because it’s difficult to explain, but there are strange positives that come out of such an awful situation because you understand the kindness that exists in the world in a way that perhaps you didn’t understand it before. And there was tremendous kindness shown to me and my boys in the aftermath of their mum’s death. And also I think it really, really allows you to understand other people’s pain in a way that you didn’t before because you’ve experienced it and you’ve felt it. And I think that’s absolutely fed through into my writing. I think one of the nice things people often say about a show like Unforgotten is that it’s a compassionate show. And I’m not sure if I would have been able to write that show having not gone through something so traumatic and therefore being able to understand what real catastrophic pain felt like. And so, yes, an absolutely awful event, but of course there are always positive things that can come out of even the worst tragedy.

Moving on now, let’s have another off-cut. Can you tell us about this one?

This is from 2010 and it’s a pitch, a three-page pitch for a TV drama called What a Fucking Rotter.

On the 13th of November 1965, the word fuck, as uttered by Kenneth Tynan, was heard for the very first time on British television. It took eight long years for the word to be used again by Peregrine Worsethorn on the programme Nationwide. And then, on the 1st of December 1976, it was heard for the third, fourth and fifth time in a little under two minutes. What a Fucking Rotter tells the story around probably the most infamous television interview ever and how it finished the career of one man, created an icon of another and changed the face of British culture forever. In 1976, Bill Grundy was presenter on Today, a TV magazine show that had been running since the late 60s. With only three channels to choose from, Today was fairly essential early evening viewing for a huge section of the population. As such, Grundy and Eamonn Andrews, his co-host, occupied a place in the nation’s heart that would be hard to imagine today. Of the two, Grundy fancied himself as the more serious journalist. Wearing an almost permanent Paxman-esque expression of slight disdain, he gave off the air of being a man you didn’t mess with. He was a bruiser, a heavyweight. He was a national institution. On that December afternoon, he would have been entirely unconcerned when told by a researcher a few hours before transmission that the booked act, The Rock Group Queen, had had to cancel their appearance on the show. In a new boutique called Sex, at the fag end of the King’s Road, a young entrepreneur by the name of Malcolm McLaren took a phone call from their record label asking if the band he managed would be interested in publicising their act on the Today programme. The band were decidedly lukewarm about the idea, but McLaren persuaded them that it would be a good idea. Perhaps if the Thames TV researcher had done her job a little better, she might have paused before booking them. Aniki in the UK had been released only four days previously and the Pistols had all articulated their contempt for the old order. As Rotten later wryly remarked, affecting bewilderment at the public vitriol aimed in their direction, I don’t understand it. All we’re trying to do is destroy everything.

This sounds like it would have made an excellent drama. What happened to it? Why didn’t it go anywhere?

I don’t know. It actually got commissioned to a script, because this was done through my company, and I didn’t write the script, although I wrote that outline. And a brilliant script was written by a very brilliant writer called Chris Cole. And it just fell foul, I think, of… It was going to be made by BBC Three or Four just about six months before they lost funding. And it was a single film, and those are always hard to get away because the economics of it are really tricky. So, you know, it nearly got there, it nearly got there, and then it fell as often they do at the final hurdle. I think someone did, in the end, make it. It wasn’t off the back of my pitch, but I have a recollection of seeing in broadcast or something someone saying that they did make it. And it’s, you know, why wouldn’t you? It’s such a great story. And that moment was a seminal moment in popular culture and did change the face of music and many other art forms, I would say.

Now, we heard a reference in your diary, and you did mention it yourself, about the fact that you were a drummer and that music was important to you at that time in your life. I didn’t realise as I was just checking something else on the internet, your name popped up as the original drummer of The House Martins.

Yes, it does pop up as that. It’s sort of true. It’s sort of not true as well, though. I mean, in that diary, I say I met Paul for a drink. Oh, is that Paul?

Paul Heaton.

And it was Paul Heaton who I kind of grew up with. And also, I went to school with Fatboy Slim, Norman Cook. And we were all in a band together for a long time when we were kids from about the age of 15 or 16 to maybe 1920. And then just as they were morphing into The House Martins, I played a few demos for them. But I was either at Radar or about to leave and about to go and find my fortune as an actor in Nottingham. And they did say, come up to Hull, you know, we’re going to make a go of this. And I said, no, thanks, I’m going to become a film star. And yes, the rest is, as they say, history.

Oh, shame. What a shame. Mind you, it’s not like you’ve disappeared without a trace.

No. And I went to see Paul at the Royal Albert Hall about a year ago. And I sat next to his mum who I’d not seen for about 30 or 40 years. And it was just so brilliant to see my old mate, who we’d gigged together for years in tiny little village halls, filling out the Royal Albert Hall and everyone singing along to these songs that have been the soundtrack to all of our lives. And it was just a really special moment and to connect with his mum and then see him afterwards. And yeah, I was just so happy to make that connection again.

It’s time for your final off cut now. So tell us about this one, please.

Well, this was written about two weeks ago, in fact. And it’s from the first chapter of a novel that I am starting to write called You Can Run.

As she woke, her thoughts turned immediately back to Nimesh Singh. Nimesh had, like everyone, of course, been struggling for a very long time before he finally gave in. But there was something about his particular defeat that felt emblematic. He’d arrived in the UK in the late 90s to marry a girl from his village, who’d emigrated to Southend the year before. It was just after Labour had been elected, and for a brief period of time it had felt like things could only get better. Blair’s easy charm had seemed to suggest he was different, that here finally was a leader who was smart, emotionally articulate and ideologically driven enough to create a kinder, fairer, more equal society. Hard to say exactly when that particular flame first guttered, but certainly the myriad national and international disasters that had befallen the UK over the following two decades or so had all in some way contributed to where we were now, with each new catastrophe slightly stumbling over the last, hurrying it out of the way so they could get their punch in, their roundhouse kick to the nation’s head. Nimesh’s face had rather exemplified that, both literally and metaphorically, a yellowing bruise on his left cheek, evidencing the vicious blow he’d received a few days before. A local teenager had tried to steal a bottle of vodka from his shop, and when Nimesh had confronted him, he had had the gall to look affronted. As Nimesh then tried to remove the youth from the premises, the lad had flailed a messy fist that had perhaps been unlucky to land, but land it nevertheless did. That night the boy returned with his friends and painted, Pack his go home, across his shop window. Joe was almost as depressed by the redundant apostrophe as she was that a phrase as dated as Frey Bentos Pies should have reared its very ugly head again. It was ignorance of course. It was always ignorance. She did not believe in innate badness and she knew that the kids who wrote it needed her help and understanding just as much as Nimesh and Kuldip did. But sometimes, and yesterday was one such day, that spirit was hard to find because the look on Nimesh’s face was one of betrayal.

So would this be your first novel then?

Yeah, yeah, and it was written, or I started writing it in lockdown. And I hadn’t massively had a yearning to write a novel before, but I had this screenplay on which this was based, which very, very nearly got made last year at the BBC. It was called Flotsam. And then it fell again at the final hurdle. That’s a theme, obviously. And I just didn’t want to waste it. And I really liked the idea. And it was a sort of State of the Nation piece, which had, I thought, a really hooky premise based on a true story that I’d read about a man a few years ago who was running along an Essex beach and came across a bunch of rucksacks washed up on the beach, and they were full of cocaine. And he handed them in to the police, of course, as you should. And when I read it, I thought, wow, I bet there’s quite a few people who wouldn’t, who wouldn’t do that. And that just set off in my mind a story, which is a story about where we are now as a nation. And it taps into some of the themes that Unforgotten tries to address, how we’ve become a slightly compassionless society and how we’ve slightly lost our moral compass, I think, and lost our way and how we need to rediscover that. And it’s a story about a woman who attempts to do that. But I’m only five chapters in and it’s such a different discipline, but really, really an interesting exercise writing in a different way.

Are you very much enjoying it?

I really, really am enjoying it because when you write a screenplay, it’s all about subtext. It’s what you don’t say for the characters, the dialogue you don’t give them that tells the story. Whereas, of course, when you write a novel, it’s all about the interiority of a character. You are literally the only person who can tell the reader what someone is thinking, and you’re allowed to as well. Whereas, it’s the opposite in screenplay. So it was flexing very, very different muscles, and I found that incredibly liberating and refreshing in a way that I was very surprised about, actually. So yeah, that’s an ongoing project. Probably, of course, every single writer in the UK started to write a novel during lockdown. So publishers and agents will be being inundated with them even as we speak, and they’ll all be drivel, including mine.

But yours is actually speculative. You haven’t actually shown it to anyone. Have we got a scoop, basically?

You’ve got a bit of a scoop. I’ve sent the first five chapters to a couple of agents, and we’ll see how we go there. Certainly not going to any publishers. But yeah, and as I say, it may be that they say, do you know what, Chris, you stick with the screenwriting.

I bet they don’t. I bet they don’t. How would you feel about it if they say, yep, we like this, you are now a novelist. What do you think you would choose if you had to, because obviously you only have a certain amount of time in the day, would you choose to write novels or produce and write screenplays?

Well, I think they are for different times of your life. I got a busy few months coming up. Both my shows are going back into production and there’s a couple of other things that might go into production. So if they did say, yeah, we love it and we want it by Christmas or whatever, I’d say, well, I think you might have to wait a little longer. But I don’t want to be working in TV when I’m 70. It’s a really, really tough industry to prevail in and you have to have huge amounts of fight in you. And when you’ve been doing it, as long as I have 25, 30 years, that becomes less attractive as you get a bit older. I’ve done that and I’ve loved it, but there will come a point I know where I’ve had enough of it. And at that point, I think, yeah, the idea of writing novels would appeal.

Well, final question. Having listened to these offcuts, is there anything you’ve noticed that you didn’t realize before, anything that surprised you at all? You could say no, that’s a perfectly valid answer, by the way.

Well, I guess listening to the diary and hearing it read out loud was, it did feel, God, like a little insight to my soul 37 years ago. There’s something different about hearing someone else read your words and made me feel a little sad, I suppose, for someone obviously struggling a little bit. But it all turned out okay in the end. Without wanting to sound smug, God, does that sound smug?

No, it doesn’t sound smug. You’re allowed to be pleased about the way your life turned out. Right, we’ve come to the end of the show. Chris, how was it for you?

It was lovely. It was delightful. Thank you. And thank you very much to your actors who are bringing those things to life, because actually, of course, none of those pieces had I ever heard spoken out loud in that way. And a read through when you go into production on a show is a really special moment, because all of these characters that you’ve only heard in your head and have existed only on a page on your computer suddenly start coming to life. So just to hear those little snippets brought to life by your actors was really a lovely thing to hear. So thank you.

Oh, absolutely our pleasure. Well, Chris Lang, it’s been an honour and a privilege. Best of luck with your upcoming filming. Hope it all gets back on track all right. And thank you so much for sharing the contents of your offcuts drawer with us.

Thanks very much, Laura.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Chris Lang. The Offcuts were performed by Toby Longworth, Lizzie Roper, Nigel Pilkington, Leah Marks, Christopher Kent, Emma Clarke and Rachel Atkins, 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 Dave Cohen, writer, comedian, Edinburgh Festival Perrier Award nominee, and founder member of the Comedy Store Players. Dave has been a constant presence on the British comedy scene for more than 35 years. He’s written for some of the most successful TV shows, including Have I Got News for You, Spitting Image, BBC sitcoms Not Going Out and My Family, and dozens of radio shows, including News Quiz, Dead Ringers, Sunday Format, and the award-winning 15-Minute Musical, which he co-created. After spending 10 years as a standup, he became a full-time comedy writer in the mid-1990s, but continued to perform and in 2000, made the series Travels with My Antisemitism for BBC Radio 4. He’s written nearly 100 songs for the multi-BAFTA-winning BBC hit Horrible Histories, written two books on how to write comedy, and in 2015 began his podcast, Sitcom Geeks with James Cary. Dave Cohen, welcome to the off-cut straw.

Oh, thank you very much. And I’m surprised, I don’t know if there’s going to be any time left for me to talk. Who is that guy? He sounds amazing.

I’ve not had another podcaster on before. You’ve been doing it for five years. I’ve not been going yet five months. I hope you’re not going to judge me too harshly.

Oh, don’t worry about that stuff. I actually am a complete technophobe. And in fact, we are Sitcom Geeks, James Cary and I, but James is definitely the podcast geek. I’m terrible. I’m a bag of nerves before every episode that we record. Not because of the content. I just think something will go wrong technically and it’ll be my fault.

So let’s start with the basics. Do you need to have anything in particular around you to be able to write?

Funnily enough, this is not as stupid as it sounds, if I say a pen and paper, which is something that happened to me about a year ago. I was writing my first ever novel, which we’ll talk about a bit later, but I’d gone away for a couple of days and didn’t take the laptop and suddenly had some ideas and I was on a train and didn’t know what to do. So I didn’t have anything at all. So I had to get a napkin, paper napkin from the buffet car and borrow a pen from someone. And I wrote about 300 words of my novel on this napkin. And I realized in the process of doing it, and I was sort of scratching around here and changing bits, by the time I came to type it, I realized this was almost like a sort of third of draft. And I thought, God, writing with pen and paper. This is fantastic. And I love doing that now. No distractions. You know, when you’re working on your laptop, which is the same place that you can check your email and argue with someone about Brexit on Twitter or, you know, all this stuff. And it just, it’s really freed me up. And I can actually quite famously work anywhere, anytime. I always like writing on the tube, or I can just sit anywhere and write. That’s always been a very helpful skill to have, I think.

But it’s a very good idea. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms.

It’s the future of writing, Laura.

I think for me would be the cutting and pasting, because you read through it and you go, oh, do I want to say and or but? And then, you know, by the time there’s so many things crossed out and scribbled over, that I can never read what I’ve written. That’s why I love computers for that. But then, of course, you’ll write about distractions.

That was the great revelation, was because you get so used to cutting and pasting and editing that, you know, when you look at that clean type that you’ve written, it’s kind of, you think, oh, well, that’s fine, but you’ve probably missed something that, you know, you might have written something in the moment and just kind of erased it. Whereas sometimes when I’m reading back on my pen and paper notes, now I find something that I’ve kind of scribbled over and I’ll just think, oh, actually, no, that’s all right. I can use that and or I can move that bit over there. And there’s lots of lines. It looks like a sort of Leonardo da Vinci sketch pad. You know, arrows pointing everywhere and lots of doodles.

That sounds like a quite interesting and sage advice.

Give it a go.

Yeah, I might well do that. Anyway, let’s get started with your first off-cut, shall we? Can you tell us what this one is called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Yeah, it’s actually a sketch from a radio pilot, a sketch show that I wrote in 2004 called You Are Here.

Thanks very much for coming, John.

No, that was great, John. Thanks, John. Thanks. We’ll be in touch, John. Well, he was rubbish. Capital of Australia, Ramsey Street. Geez, he wants to be in a pub quiz, he could barely answer his name. Where’s my pen? I bet John bloody nicked it.

Shut up, Trevor. I thought he was all right. I mean, I don’t think he was too bad, do you, Professor?

Current affairs, sound, geography, average, pop trivia, weak. It’s all right knowing Madonna, but what if Girls Aloud come up?

He was good at maths, though.

We don’t need maths, I do maths.

What we need is leadership, dedication, inspiration.

And someone who doesn’t mind skipping one night of Big Brother highlights on a wet Wednesday night.

Who are you?

I’m the man who knows everything.

Prove it.

That pen you thought John nicked, it’s on the floor there.

Where are the Basque separatists from?

Spain.

Correct. What is Barbie’s full name?

Barbara Millicent Roberts.

Right again, handsome.

What is 111 squared?

We don’t need maths, I do maths.

12,321.

I knew that.

Who wrote the importance of being earnest?

Oscar Wilde.

Footballs.

Jules Rimet.

God, you’re good.

Faye, please. Who wrote?

John Steinbeck.

All right, smarty pants. Name the three steps to heaven.

You find a girl to love. She falls in love with you. You kiss and hold her tightly.

Oh. Well? You are so in.

Not so fast. This pubquist team is a democracy or it’s nothing at all. Professor?

Well, you are so in. Ha ha ha ha.

Start from the beginning, just explain what the project was.

So this was originally a TV pilot in 2001, which was a little bit ahead of its time because the idea was that we had a multicultural cast. And so the cast was, you were actually in it, Laura, if you remember correctly. But it was Gina Yashere, Omid Jalili, Luella Gideon, Jason Byrne and you. But the idea was, okay, this is a sketch show with multicultural scope, but none of the sketches are about race. It’s just a sketch show. And hence the title, You Are Here. They’re sort of playing on the arrow and you are here, something. But it was also these people live in this country, get over it. Which 20 years ago when we came up with it, it was still kind of a reasonably lively kind of issue. So rather than try and attack people who disagreed with that, it was more an attempt to sort of say, okay, the arguments are over now. These people are here and deal with it. So we did things like the pub quiz. We had some stuff about a local council. I think I remember The Man Who Knows Everything. That was Jason Byrne. And then there’s a sketch that happens later where the husband comes home and finds the wife and the man who knows everything is in the wardrobe. And the husband comes home and he finds him in the wardrobe. How long have you been sleeping with my wife? Since 13th of March 1968. That was something that’s so ridiculous. That was, we didn’t get a radio pilot. We didn’t get a TV pilot, of course.

Do you know why? Did they give you any idea why they didn’t like it?

We had a few kind of problems in the making of it. It was all right. It wasn’t sensational. And I think it just, we kind of lost our way a bit. Paul McKenzie, the writer who I created it with, we had a vision for it, but then the BBC had other ideas about how they saw it. And we were kind of new and naive and just thought, oh, we’re making telly. This is the BBC. They must know what they’re talking about. So we’ll do it. And I think it just became one of those sorts of things that it lost the sense of what we felt it should be. And it was, you know, it was okay. I think it had some really great stuff in there, but sketch shows, you know, they are always incredibly hard to kind of get them right. I think they just thought, okay, well, we’ve had a try. You know, we’ve ticked a few boxes by making the pilot. So that’s it really. And I would never ever say, oh, well, it was just because they couldn’t handle the idea of this multiracial cast. But I think there is a kind of problem at the BBC and it’s still a problem 20 years on from that, which is that they do want to have more diverse people, but it’s a bit of a kind of box ticking thing. It’s like, well, we tried to do that and it didn’t work. Okay, let’s move on. I don’t get a sense that there is like a sort of overall policy. And I think that was the problem at the time. There was a guy who was championing us was Paul Jackson. He wasn’t involved in the day to day running of the show, but he got us the pilot. And he of course was the man who pioneered the young ones. And you know, he got Lenny Henry on mainstream TV and things like that. And he was really good, but I sort of never really felt, he didn’t feel to me like he was running a BBC policy. It was just, oh yeah, Paul wants to do that. Let Paul do that. Great. We’ve made a pilot, got Jeannie Yashere, and I’m a Jellily in it. So, you know, we’ve done what we can to try and get more non-white faces on TV, et cetera.

Right. You never learn. Well, these things happen, don’t they? Yes.

Yeah.

Although if it was on now, of course, probably would be picked up, I would think, wouldn’t you?

Well, I’m not sure because sort of quite soon after that, more shows came in and people like, well, in fact, Goodness Gracious Me had already happened. And that was very much a kind of, this is a show pretty much about, you know, it wasn’t about race, but that was a kind of a strong theme. And the real McCoy before that. But I mean, because people like Sanjeev and Meera were becoming sort of breakout stars and nominated as well. So they started to be in more shows. And so it became less of a kind of, oh, we have a token black person in our show. It became, oh, this is Omid Jalili’s latest show, or this is Sanjeev Bhaskar’s latest show. And so it was happening really, I suppose.

Let’s move on to time for your next off-cut. Can you tell us what this is?

Yes, this is called In Loving Memory. And it’s a novel that I wrote when I was 14. And the reason I know that is I found it looking through my old stuff. And at the end it says, I finished writing this on 25th of June, 1973.

We’re all equal in death, Alan replied cynically. And Leonard felt that his high status had been somewhat deflated. Your credentials don’t matter to me. What was this? He was still Leonard Squire, in mind, body and views. He had his same golfing sweater on, his same drainpipe trousers and even his same socks and shoes. The same pen was in his pocket. And yet his surroundings felt like something totally new. He felt very much like asking exactly where he was. Where exactly am I? he asked. Janice, show the gentleman to the machine, sighed Alan. For the first time in this weird place, Leonard felt happy because he loved fiddling around with machines. Ever since he’d mucked around with the inside of his television, he had had a craving for gadgets, switches and buttons. This machine with a cardiograph, an oscilloscope, 17 switches, 23 buttons and 8 levers, however, could only be operated by Janice Gates herself. Janice switched on the mains, set up numerous circuits and pressed la pièce de résistance, a button which proceeded to make amazing noises. And suddenly a pair of headphones popped out. Put those on, please, said Janice sweetly. Very well, was the reluctant reply. The machine began talking, as if in letter form. Dear sir, stroke madam, what I have to say to you may very well shock you. You may have realised by now that you are dead. It is my duty as a machine to detail you with your position here. You are not in heaven, you are not in hell. These two words constitute an earth type myth, which needs to be exploded. You are dead. You are in the English death country. Heaven, or whatever you wish to call it, is one long road. On either side of the road, you will find blocks of buildings. Each man is put into each block according to his job. So there are therefore more blocks for, for example, packers than architects. On the other side of this road are the blocks containing their wives. This is an infallible method for patching up divorces or separations. You will now proceed to pick up the microphone on your left and you will give me the correct information when asked. Name, Leonard Squire. Job, architect. Age, 64. You may now take your headphones off. Thank you.

So, there are so many bits in that that just made me laugh. It’s such a sweet little piece.

A lot to unpack there, I think, isn’t it?

Yes, I feel like I ought to ask you about your childhood after listening to some of that. Do you remember writing that?

What I remember was that I was obsessed with architecture. I really wanted to be an architect. And one of the reasons was there was a guy at school and his friend of mine and his dad was an architect. And I just thought this guy was really cool and amazing. And then a horrible story, but there was a really bad fire at a place in the early 70s. A lot of people died. And this man had designed the building, this man that I knew. And I went to see him 50 years later or something. I said, you know, I really want to be an architect. What advice can you give me? He said, don’t be an architect. It’s terrible. It’s the worst thing. But I discovered that you had to be very good at maths to do it. And in that moment, I knew that I was never going to be an architect. But yeah, I used to love kind of designing rooms and things. You know, I’ve completely forgotten all of this until you just asked me the question. Even having re-read the book, which made me cringe there. Quite apart from the slightly dodgy sexual politics there, and the husband’s all a one in. There’s a little bit of that, yeah. It sort of reminds me now, listening to it, of The Good Place. Ted Danson’s character is an architect, isn’t he? He’s sort of created this universe. And people are being dead, it’s not enough. I think I was obsessed with death, really, and I don’t know why.

Well, the heaven and hell thing, is that some kind of religious, were you brought up quite religiously?

I was brought up with a fairly orthodox Jewish upbringing. Of course, we don’t have heaven and hell, but I went to a school which was very sort of Christian school, so there’s a lot of heaven and hell comes out of that. And although we don’t have heaven and hell, we have good and bad kind of drummed into you. You mustn’t be a bad person. I was a bit of a bad person, I think. I was a bit naughty. In what way? I was a bit of a rebel, really. I was cheeky to the teachers. I smoked, actually, and got caught. I know, shocking. They were all in them days.

That was quite a serious crime in those days for young people listening, by the way. It was a big deal. You might get suspended or expelled.

It was quite funny. I was given a 500-word essay that I had to write on the dangers of smoking and cancer. This was in the early 70s when people hadn’t made the connection, apart from science people, and it was a science teacher who caught me. But yeah, I suppose I was a bit of a rebel. I grew up in a very provincial Jewish upbringing and very, very sort of claustrophobic, but it was also very sort of moral. And so in order for me to kind of justify the fact that I wanted to get out as soon as possible, I had to know in my mind that I wasn’t an evil person, that actually I had good reasons for wanting to break out. And I think I did, probably.

So as a child, you were fairly creative, or was this a one-off? Did you do a lot of writing? In between your smoking?

Yeah, I did. Again, something I’d completely forgotten about. But I’ve always written songs, song lyrics, and a little bit of music, but mostly songs. And in fact, I do remember the song that I first wrote when I was eight years old, which went something like, Nobody loves me. Oh God, I’m so embarrassed just remembering this.

Interestingly, that does bring us nice and neatly into your next off-cut, talking of your songwriting career. Can you tell us a little bit about this one?

Yes, this was a song, as well as the kind of being obsessed with wanting to escape. I did have self-esteem issues in my teen years. I had sort of quite a low. But I always found that comedy was a way out of that. And I wrote this song soon after I’d written the novel about the heaven and hell. And it was a song about me. And we had a show at school. We put on a kind of charity show for Oxfam or something. And this is the first time that I ever performed in front of an audience. This was a song. I wrote this, yes, in 1974. I was 15.

I’ve those precocious virtues that attract girls at the dance. And in my dreams, you’ll find Paris, the centre of romance. I’ve been through all the pages, read all of the books. There’s just one thing that’s lacking. And of course, you’ve guessed, it’s looks. I was a bouncing baby, 18 pounds to be precise. When mummy first saw me, she thought that she’d been pregnant twice. As they held me up to slap me and caress me upside down, imagine their surprise and fear, for I was right way round. The face that launched a thousand ships was Helen’s, that is true. The face that sunk those thousand is now looking out at you. Remember though that crocodiles are not such sexy creatures, unless they’re worn as handbags which bring out their special features. The Lord God made us all, they say, and that’s how showbiz goes. At least like you, I’ve got two eyes, two ears, a mouth and nose.

It was a very upbeat song, and it kind of…

Oh, was it?

It sounds like a kind of serious poem there, but it was a sort of… And it got big laughs as well, so that sort of launched my performing career, really, that song.

That gave you a taste for it, did it for audience approbation.

Oh, God. I mean, you know, when you sort of go in front of an audience for the first time and you say something and they laugh, it’s just like, why did nobody tell me about this, you know? This is it.

But this song doesn’t have a title.

I can’t remember the title. There was more to it as well, actually. And I just couldn’t remember the rest of it. That was the only bits that I could remember.

And so you were singing that on stage. Were you playing guitar?

Yeah, yes. Basically, I always wrote the words first. And then I sort of taught myself how to play guitar. And I learned just enough to teach myself to write some really basic songs, very sort of Bob Dylan style, almost, you know, three chords, and that was it. And in fact, I don’t think my guitar playing improved from 1974 through to 1994, which was when I stopped performing stand-up. And I’d used my guitar for 10 years at the Comedy Store and Jonglers and all those places. I never really developed as a music writer. So all my songs are basically funny poems with sort of not very imaginative tunes.

You were a punk though, haven’t I got that right?

Yeah, I was totally swept away by punk. You know, punk really paved the way for alternative comedy. You know, if it hadn’t been for punk, I would not have had a career as a comedian. I’m absolutely sure of that.

You. Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a podcast like this. And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. But you actually did work for a bit, or you were a bit of a mover and shaker in the music world, around about that time, weren’t you?

Yeah, I was living in Bristol in the 1970s. I was a student there. And then we had a sort of jokey thing, which was in 1978, the BBC changed the names of all the radio stations. So Radio 4 used to be called something like the Home Service, I think, and Radio 2 was the Light Program. And they changed it, or they introduced Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4. And we, for a joke, and this was around the time of Rock Against Racism, we set up a thing called Rock Against Radio Wavelength Changes, and got a few bands together to play this gig. And off the back of that, we set up this thing called Wavelength Records, and we were terrible. We had a couple of quite good bands, but then the guy who I was running the record label with, he was obsessed with Genesis, which was not a thing you admit when you’re a punk, but what happened was Peter Gabriel had left Genesis, and he lived in Bath, just down the road from us, and he’d set up this recording studio. So we went and we recorded all our stuff at Peter Gabriel’s studio, which bankrupt us completely. But the guy I was running this with got to meet Peter, and sort of befriended him, and I left at this point, and I went on to become a journalist elsewhere. But this other guy managed to persuade Peter Gabriel to take an interest in world music, because he already had an interest, obviously, but Peter had the interest, but this other guy just said, well, let’s put on a festival of world music. And so out of Wavelength Records, this thing, WOMAD, was born. And I’d already left, as I say by then, but about a week before the first WOMAD festival, another guy who worked with the company said, oh, Dave, would you like to come to the WOMAD festival? We just need a bit of help. I said, yeah, okay, that’d be fantastic. And little did I know that they already knew that the festival was gonna go bust because they haven’t sold enough tickets. There was a rail strike and they weren’t gonna sell enough tickets. And they knew they were gonna lose a lot of money. The only way that they could get round it was get somebody who didn’t know how bad things were, i.e. me, and put me in charge of giving money to the people not knowing that the money I was giving them wasn’t worth the check it was printed on. So I was kind of walking around this festival for two days paying all these acts with these checks and gradually learning that actually, oh, this is gonna go really, really badly. And so at the end of this festival, going round giving people money, people threatening me and take my knee cups out and all this kind of stuff. And then at the end of the whole thing, I was sort of sat calmly in the little booth with Peter Gabriel’s accountant. And he said, okay, this has been a complete disaster. We’ve lost quarter of a million pounds. Peter’s gonna have to sell one of his houses. Dave, you’re probably gonna go to jail for fraud for five years, blah. And obviously that was the bit I heard and nothing else. Oh God, you know. So I went back to my work on the Monday morning, having spent this weekend at this festival, thinking I’m gonna go to jail. But then I was saved. My saviour was a man called Phil Collins. Phil Collins said to Peter Gabriel, okay, so what is this quarter of a million? All right, let’s organise a one-off Genesis reunion gig at Milton Keynes Bowl. And they did that and they made all the money and they made a bit of money for themselves as well. And I was spared jail by Phil Collins.

Phil Collins saved your ass, so to speak. That’s a peculiar but interesting claim to make.

Yes, it is. I always felt really guilty because obviously being a comedy writer in the 1980s and the 90s, Phil Collins was the go-to gag really for everything. So even as I was doing gags about Phil Collins, I had this dirty secret that actually I owe Phil Collins, my freedom, really.

Let’s have another off-cut. Tell us about this one.

So this was a book that I started, which was like a sort of comedy book. I suppose it’s called Slops, A Portion of History. That was from 1983.

Walking through Piraeus one day, I chanced upon Socrates and begged his good time to discover where to for he was bound. The great philosopher raised his head, his gentle features shining with tranquility and replied with succinct clarity. I’m off to Beredemus’s. Would you care to accompany me? Honored by this request, I hailed a winged chariot and we sped forth to the house of Beredemus without further ado. A maidservant ushered us in and we were informed that today the great Beredemus would muse upon the state of the nation. Anxious to discover his views on this vexed subject, I begged his opinion on the use by lower citizens of arms. But he seemed more interested in examining the contents of his nostrils, excavated by the second digit upon his left hand. Relax, young man, he bellowed. There are a thousand days and nights to ponder such imponderabilities. Today, I may proclaim that the bearing of arms is a good thing and a young blackguard may seek to terminate my existence with such. Or I may oppose the bearing of arms, then find myself in the far beyond being attacked by a lion with only arms to protect me. So, relax, a toss will not be rendered by any human participator in society for my preachings. Will you require chili sauce on your Donner kebab? During our past, I was graced with the good fortune to have recounted to me a wise and worldly fable by the great man. This garnished pig’s intestine with cream and sorbet pickings brings to mind the ancient tale concerning the pauper and the chicken leg and bread crumbs, he recounted. A lowly pauper was walking amid the thoroughfares when he has spied in the distance a lowly chicken, desperately picking at the few bread crumbs scattered around the courtyard for sustenance. Unable to contain his own great hunger, the pauper rushed across the courtyard, snatched the chicken by the throat and proceeded to consume the animal, taking care to pluck the meat off the bones. There was a brief silence as the gathered guests waited with bated breath for the great orator to continue. You see, if only he had thought to douse with the bread crumbs before consuming of it, he would have encountered a meal of considerable relish far superior to that of which he partook. Truly the words of Berendimis were the words of a master among men.

You didn’t finish this then?

I don’t think I did, or if I did, I did and just didn’t do anything more with it. So it was one of those books that you sort of see in somebody’s toilet that they got for Christmas, basically that sort of thing. The idea was to have cartoons with it as well. So, but I was working during the day as a journalist and I would sort of come home and just write a thousand words. I was really, I was so desperate to get away, you know, that I was doing whatever I could do to get away, I think.

Was it around this time that you started doing standup?

Yeah, I think what happened then was that the Young Ones was like a huge success and I knew them through various ways. And I was working in Pontypridd and they came and they did a gig in Cardiff. And it was incredible. It was like, they were like rock stars. And I was just amazed. And I went and chatted to them afterwards and they said, oh, come and join us for a meal. So I went out with them for a curry after this gig. And they were just saying, oh, you gotta come to London. You must come. There’s all these gigs, there’s all these places. And they gave me a list of all the names of places where there were clubs. These were places that they used to play and then they become big TV stars. So they stopped. So I just thought, oh, I saw that I’m gonna do that. I planned to leave and I worked out what to do. And I got really, really lucky because when I moved to London at the end of 1983, there were all these gigs, but there weren’t enough comedians to play them. So my generation of standups were able to be not very good, but we could learn on the job. And so, you know, they were just grateful for anyone really. So there was a few of us who stopped at the same time, myself, Jeremy Hardy, John Sparks, Mark Thomas, I think, round about then as well, Mark Steele, Paul Merton. So we were all kind of not very well formed performers and we were able to get better. So, yeah.

And you got into sketch writing as well. Do you remember the first sketch you got paid to write?

I was trying to remember this actually. Again, we start-

What show is it for? Do you remember what it was for?

It would have been Weekending, which was a sort of topical comedy show radio form. And there were a few of us who all start at the same time, which was myself and Jeremy Hardy and Pete Sinclair. Pete, I ended up writing with a lot. So it’s amazing that there’s not friendships you made then, but I think I wrote a sketch about something to do with Hong Kong. Oh yes, there was a guy called Percy Craddock, who was this sort of guy in Hong Kong. At the time there was this famous cooking show starring a woman called Fanny Craddock. So I did a sort of Sir Percy Craddock’s cooking the books in Hong Kong or some terrible thing like that. But then Jeremy and I got some stuff on the spitting image around it. It’s just started up. And the first sketch I remember we got on was a thing about Tomorrow is World. And I still have somewhere a check payable to me and Jeremy for 29p, which was the Hong Kong royalty payment for that episode.

Excellent. Okay, another off cut now. What’s this one?

This is from a screenplay, which I wrote in 1994, which didn’t get made funnily enough. The film was called Thatcher, The Last 10 Minutes.

Interior Milltown Conservative Meeting Room, early evening. A black and white photograph of Margaret Thatcher in a frame under glass fills the screen. The picture is slowly and deliberately spat on, then wiped with a cloth by the cleaning lady. This is the local headquarters of the Conservative Party in a small market town in the middle of England. The room is large and reeks of faded grandeur, wooden panels, some tattered flags of St. George and old paintings of former prime ministers. It has been more recently decorated with publicity for the next election. Large photos of smarmy, spiv-looking, manically grinning Simon Charles adorn the room, next to slogans such as Your Current and Future MP, Family Man, Working for You, Kay. The cleaner spits venomously on one of these photos, thinks about wiping it, but doesn’t. She walks away. A few chairs are set out in two sets of rows towards one end. The cleaning lady jumps as she hears a strangled snort. Colonel Surrey sits slumped at a large table at the end of the room, glass of port in hand at an angle. He is in his 60s, bald with a moustache. A copy of the telegraph lies open in front of him on a page featuring models in bikinis. She walks over to the table and studies the Colonel for a moment. She gently jolts the port holding arm to see if he wakes up. He doesn’t. So she places her mouth under the arm and tips the hand more so the port pours into her mouth. She gets up, spits on her cloth, polishes the Colonel’s shiny pate, then shakes a bottle of liquid by his ear and he wakes with a start.

So, that’s obviously a very political title. So would you call yourself a political writer?

Yeah, I think what happened was in the 1980s, because the Conservatives were so dominant, really, they dominated kind of every sphere of life. In terms of comedy, which had grown out of punk, naturally, most of the people who did it were left-wing or against Margaret Thatcher. I was a bit of a politics nerd, which helped me for writing topical comedy. And I think that’s always been an element of what I’ve written, I suppose. A thing that I haven’t spotted as well is that that colonel reminded me of the architect, actually. I haven’t thought of that at all. But yeah, I’ve always sort of… I know it changed after the 90s, but there’s this sort of Tory general type people with handlebar moustaches and the Daily Telegraph and worshipping Margaret Thatcher. I was sort of always quite interested in them as characters. You know, character has always been the thing that’s the number one thing for me. But I happened to be quite interested in politics as well. And you know, I was interested in architecture, so I wrote about that. But that was also… But that was character as well, now that I think about it. But it was actually about the people in that local town. It was about people who have basically lost out through the Thatcher years. But I think that’s what always fascinated me about Margaret Thatcher, was the people who voted for her despite the fact that she made everything about their lives worse. And so that was really what interested me, rather than it being about a particular political story.

Right. OK, let’s have another off-cut. Tell us about this one.

Yes, this is a piece that I wrote actually earlier this year about writing comedy. And it’s a piece that I wrote for a blog for my podcast, The Sitcom Geeks.

When you’re creating a new person, a good place to start is your copy of Roger’s Thesaurus. By the book cheapskate is so much more satisfying than the online version, and it helps broaden your vocabulary in the process, although proceed with caution with regard to verbosity, loquaciousness and, like, using too many word thingies, where you can get away with not using too many word thingies. If you have a rough idea about the kind of person you want your character to be, it will be helpful to look up a key word you might use to describe them and see where this takes you. For this experiment, I’ve looked up the word rigorous. It comes in a block of words headed by accurate and includes the definitions precise, exact, detailed, meticulous, scrupulous and even perfect. Nothing too bad yet about this person, wouldn’t you say? However, included in that same small block of definitions are the following words, pedantic, hair splitting, nitpicking. Already you can start to create a picture of this new character. They see themselves as thorough individuals with a sharp eye for detail and an ability to arrive at the correct answer. You and I see them as the kind of irritating, controlling perfectionists who make our lives a misery when they’re not annoying the hell out of us.

So you’ve now become a sort of teacher of comedy now. You’ve written books on the subject and of course your podcast, Sitcom Geeks, is all about the skill and craft of it. How or when did that happen?

It kind of happened by accident, I think. I was kind of tootling along in my comedy career perfectly well and then my wife, we had one child at this point, and I was getting enough work and then my wife said, well, it turned out that she was pregnant with twins and I suddenly thought, ah, right, okay, we are a family of three and we’re about to become a family of five. Am I earning enough from what I do to kind of support a family of five? And the answer was, I don’t know. And so I started to think about things that I like around comedy and things that interest me. I mean, I did also try to get quite a lot more work as well, but I was kind of getting to the age by then where they were starting to look for younger, cheaper versions of me. So I began doing this kind of teaching and script reading just became something that I really loved doing. I just love reading people’s scripts much more than my own scripts. I’m a pretty bad judge of my own, but I can read someone else’s gut. Wouldn’t it be great to do this and that? And then I kind of got to know James Cary, and James is the original Sitcom Geek, and he started running these evenings at the BBC where he’d get like a video in of a show like Father Ted, and he’d get a bunch of comedy writers. We’d all sit there and discuss them, which probably sounds like hell for most people. But James and I just lapped it up, and we realised that we love talking about comedy and about writing, and so it’s become one of the central things that I do now.

And the teaching as well.

Yeah.

Do you think that’s the way your career is going to go now? Do you find teaching especially satisfying, more satisfying than writing?

I find that actually it’s one of the things that I like most about it is that from a purely selfish point of view is that I’m teaching myself. Because when you’re writing and you’re writing stuff for deadlines and you’re writing to someone else and things, you know, you kind of, you tend to forget the basics. And every time I teach a new class or every time I do a thing where I sort of get people to write a sitcom in eight weeks, somebody does something and I think, ah, oh yeah, that’s a mistake I make. That’s a really basic error. So I sort of think it’s made me a better writer in some ways, but it’s also allowed me to take time off to do other things, really develop my own projects. So it’s been quite good from that point of view.

Okay, time for your final off cut. Can you tell us about this one, please?

Yes. Well, it hasn’t got a title yet. It had a provisional title, Edinburgh Diaries. I think at the moment it’s called How I Invented Alternative Comedy and Other Self Delusions. It’s my first proper completed novel and I finished it a few weeks ago.

Harriet Fink was tall, serious and Jewish. She didn’t look like the pale skinned waifs who glided through the pedestrianised precincts of Leeds Polytechnic in their oddly stitched denim jackets and brightly flared loom pants. She dressed like my mum, sensible pleated skirts and plain white blouses. And she was talking to me. That was quite funny, Barry, said Harriet, I didn’t know you were a poet. Yeah, well, it’s, you know, stuff I think of. I said, painfully aware how clearer my words were on the page than those that came out of my mouth. She laughed, the faintest tinkle, with me or at me. I wasn’t sure and for a moment wondered if this might be it. It was the fact that I hadn’t previously found her attractive because I’d already convinced myself that no one from her stratosphere was ever likely to enter my dreary orbit. All I’d wanted for as long as I could remember was a woman to love. Someone who would look past my crippling shyness, accept me for who I was and love me back. A soulmate to live with in contentment for the rest of my days. Friend, lover, companion, mother to our children. Time was running out, I was getting old. Next year I’d be 18. How would I find this creature? Here was a starting place. Poetry reading. It was like a door opening into another universe, far from the boorish monsters and hectoring bullies of the school rugby team, with their self-assured swagger, abbreviated necks and graphic songs of sexual prowess among the girls of Inverness. I enjoyed the moral superiority of my pioneering attitude towards women for a 1970s Leeds teenager, silently weeping myself to sleep each night at my inability to ask out the ones I fancied. I hadn’t planned to perform as part of the Theodore Herzl Youth Club team at Chapel Town Community Centre that afternoon, but had been encouraged by mum and dad, who had guessed, correctly, that the only way they might inveigle me into Leeds Jewish life would be through arts and culture. I studied Harriet. Maybe her proximity demanded further investigation. What were teenage hormones for, if not to reduce the complexity of all human relationships to first impressions of physical appearance? When I’d said tall, had I meant elegant. For serious, thoughtful. And by Jewish, did I mean life partner that my parents would accept. What are you looking at? She laughed again, this time enough to produce a gentle smile. I had never seen Harriet smile. Oh, nothing. Sorry. Sorry for what? I had no idea. Saw the time. I have to go. Bye. See you. She said and stepped away.

You’re not supposed to go, are you? You’re supposed to go, oh, that’s hilarious.

Well, now it’s quite a touching little scene, isn’t it?

Yeah. I’ve kind of swapped it around a bit now. So that was the very beginning, but it’s now sort of tucked away a little bit. So it’s a very fictionalised autobiographical novel, I suppose. And I’ve been wanting to write that since about 1980. So it only took me 40 years.

Is this the one that has Rik Mayall in it?

Yes, that’s right. It’s about… The true story was that I met Rik in Edinburgh in 1979. In fact, I already knew his girlfriend, Lisa Mayall, because she lived in the same house as me in Bristol. She was a student at Bristol, but I was in a sort of different flat. So I knew her and I got to know Rik. And also, there were some people that he was at college with who were school friends of mine from Leeds. So we had quite a lot of people in common. So I saw them in 1979 doing this show called Death on the Toilet, which of course was like a year after Elvis Presley had died on the toilet. And they were called Twentieth Century Coyote. And it was as seeing that show was like a life-changing moment, really. I’d never seen anything like it and it really sort of blew me away. So this book isn’t actually about that, but it’s kind of trying to capture that moment of when alternative comedy was born, really, I suppose.

Well, final question. With your teacher hat on, what have these clips we’ve been listening to, what have they told you about the writing? What would you tell yourself if you were your student?

God, I wish I’d thought of that beforehand. I guess that there are themes, some themes have never gone away, I’ve noticed. I think whatever you want to do, I think, you know, whatever the form is that you want to write in, just do it. I don’t think I’ve ever been as happier as a writer as I was writing that novel. It was just a really nice place to be. If you can find your nice place to be as a writer, then just sit there forever.

Well, Dave Cohen, we’ve come to the end of the show. How was it for you?

It’s kind of reminded me that I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age and that everything else has just been a bit of a distraction. There’s so many adventures in there as well. I’m kind of quite pleased that things worked out the way they did, really. They could have gone seriously wrong at other times.

You could have been in prison for five years in order to meet Mr Collins.

I could have, yes.

I owe everything to Phil Collins. That makes me a little bit sad.

Well, it’s been fascinating to talk to you and thank you so much for sharing the contents of your offcuts drawer with us.

Thank you for having me.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Dave Cohen. The offcuts were performed by Keith Wickham, Rachel Atkins, Emma Clarke and Chris Pavlo, 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 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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