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.

(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.

Adele: I think it’s a really important thing in life, admitting to yourself that you do things that are not up to scratch and that’s okay. And I think that’s obviously the whole point of your podcast. You know, there are things that we didn’t, that didn’t reach its full potential, and maybe that’s fine because we’re just learning from them.

And learning is all part of life. Everything can’t be perfect straight away.

Laura: 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 here, the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success.

My guest on today’s episode is Adele Parks, MBE, born in North Yorkshire. Adele is the author of 24 novels, including several Sunday Times Bestsellers and her 25th novel. Our Beautiful Mess is published this summer. Her books have sold over 5 million copies in English and been translated into a further 31 languages.

She’s also written for national newspapers and magazines and served as executive producer on a feature film, an adaptation of her novel, the image of you. And added to that, Adele is also an ambassador for the National Literacy Trust and the Reading Agency, and in 2022 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature.

Adele Parks, welcome to the Offcuts Drawer. Hello. 25 novels in 25 years. That is so impressive and must be very organized. Do you have an end plan though? Do you have like a magic number you are aiming for? Do you know?

Adele: I don’t, which I, I, I’ve struggled a bit this year ’cause this year is 25 and 25 and I have been very focused on 25 in 25, and now I’m going, oh.

So now I’m doing 26. And then I suppose 27th, what come, you know, when is the end game? But I suppose at some point there will be an end game. But um, but I feel 25 and 25 years I should be quite happy with. I shouldn’t overanalyze.

Laura: It’s like the wedding anniversaries, isn’t it? So this would be your silver novel?

Yes. And if you make it to 50, it’ll be your golden novel. I’m not very clear about the ones in between things like, well

Adele: hilariously, the proof for this 25th one was this beautiful golden cover and I sort of said, oh, don’t you think it should be a silver cover? ’cause it’s 25. And then we all looked at each and thought.

There’s no way I’m gonna get to 50. So we were, yeah. No, gold’s good. Gold’s great.

Laura: Right. Well, let’s kick off 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?

Adele: This is an outtake from my 2020 novel called Both of You.

Actor 1: At the bar. Everyone had been so shiny and groomed, way more groomed than she remembered.

People being in her day, men in her day smelt their clothes were awful. Checked shirts, red trousers. Still, she had fancy to fair few attracted to their wiffy pheromones. Despite the challenge, sartorial sense, she really resented getting old because amongst other things it meant she fancied no one and was fancied by fewer Still.

Women weren’t as well groomed back in her day then neither her day. Oh my God. But then she thought, and she hoped, this wasn’t just wishful thinking. She thought maybe they talked about bigger things and they had more fun. They were more sincere. Jesus. If that thought ever drifted onto paper out of her head into God forbid her voice box, they’d make mince meat out of her.

The careful emotionally vulnerable. Millennials and Zeds were so easily upset. But they had, it was true. They had more fun and they spoke about bigger stuff. They were their authentic selves, although the wanky phrase hadn’t been thought up, the only time the word authentic was used was in conjunction with antiques.

That’s how authentic they were. This station Waterloo had witnessed some of her most drunken dreadful moments. Some, not all. It would be hard to prioritize and categorize her drunken moments. There had been a few, but then again, too few to mention, sorry, outdated reference. Frank Sin er, if you’re interested.

Hell of a voice. She didn’t believe that talent had stopped. She’d never say they don’t make ’em like they used to because they did. There were numerous incredible singer songwriters, young enough for her to have given birth to. They could hold a candle up to Sinatra if they’d been given years and years of support.

But no one was Nowadays, they weren’t even given 15 minutes of fame, just three or four. It was reflecting on it impossible, probably to find your true, authentic self in three or four minutes. When she was 21, she’d been at no fixed abode. Now they’d call her homeless. They’d say she was sofa surfing at the time.

She just knew she was okay. If she could sleep on the sofa of a friend with more money or experience, it wasn’t great. It did affect her mental health, but again, that’s not how they described it. Then she was just seen as weird, bonkers, highly strung, maybe on a good day, creative.

Laura: This reads very scatterbrained to me. The, the character’s always digressing. Is that the character in the book or was it the way you put down all your thoughts as they occur to you and then you tidy up later? I mean, whose voice is it? Is that yours or is it the character’s voice? Do you

Adele: know this character and the reason this isn’t off cut.

She never appeared. It never happened. No. Um, yeah, she didn’t, this isn’t the character that ends up in the book, but she was my starting point. So yeah, there was so much, so much in that. It’s really interesting to listen to it because. Pretty much none of that gets in. First of all, she sounds as though she’s in her fifties.

That character, both of you. Character is in her forties, so she’s a good decade younger, so a lot of that is irrelevant ’cause she is a millennial. But it was the first. I quite often start writing or think of my book whilst I’m still coming to the end of the book before. And I remember being in Waterloo Station and watching a whole bunch of.

Mostly women. I mean, men were there, but I tend to focus on what women are up to. Uh, saying goodbye to their friends, saying goodbye to their lovers, getting on trains, saying hello to all those people coming off trains. So there was a sort of stream of consciousness going on and I was definitely looking at it, but I.

Was already trying to feel a way into a character who did have some kind of emotional instability and physical instability. You heard straight away that she sofa surfed. In the end, the character and both of you, and I’m really talking around this ’cause I’m really trying not to give a spoiler, but. She’s as mad as a box of frogs in some ways.

Sorry, very terrible thing to say, but I don’t think I’m offending any books as frogs yet. But she has a very deep rooted problem, uh, she goes missing in this book. And there are two women that go missing in this book and, and both of them are very deep rooted problem. I was feeling my way into that.

Laura: So you didn’t have an equivalent of her then?

You didn’t go, well, I’m gonna make her 10 years younger and have a different name. But it’s

Adele: No. Do you know, in fact, she didn’t become Art. She was a management consultant, one of them. And the other one was a sort of woman who’d married well about married a younger man. So didn’t work at all. But both of them were incredibly organized.

The only thing they had. In common with this character is they had, as I say, some emotional instability in their early part of their lives. So they were still reacting to that, and I would say that was the only thing they had in common really.

Laura: So are you not tempted to maybe sort of put her aside and then drop her into another?

Adele: Do you know? Many, many of my characters in my books are. Slightly bonkers. And I think that was, Hmm. Uh, well, you know, it makes a good psychological thriller to have a, a unstable narrator. I mean, it does. And I, I think at the time with both of you, I wanted to move away from that. But I have written a woman since that I think could be this woman.

I don’t think she is to be abandoned. I think there’s a lot of ideas and a lot of people in my head that may or may not come out in the future. And, and I like her. I like that stream of consciousness. She’s like a, a sort of slightly mad, low down at heel Mrs. Dalloway, isn’t she just out there saying her thing?

Laura: Well, I was reading it going, this is like everyone I know Yeah. People, people of a certain age. Um, just go, yeah, that’s basically, that could be me. Well, time for another off cut. Now. Tell us about this one, please.

Adele: Well, this one it’s called the warning and it’s a short story I wrote when I was 12 in 1981.

Actor 2: Don’t be daft. Chris, you don’t want to go in there. Yes, I do. Why? I wanted to read my cards. You know, tell me if I meet a tall, dark stranger. They began to giggle. Then as Chris was so headstrong, she went along in inside the stage green caravan. It was dark. In the center of the room, there was a round table with a green and white spotted tablecloth.

At the back of the table, a woman with jet black hair sat. She frightened. Chris, sit down child. Don’t be scared. The fortune teller spoke in a clear voice. I’m not scared. Chris tried to be as confident as she sounded. The fortune teller chuckled. Chris, how’d you know my name? Chris asked. Again. The fortune teller chuckled, but did not reply.

Child, the fortune teller continued child. I cannot answer your question because all I see on the cards is one thing. What is it? Death Chris let out a whimper despite herself. Your death where when? I can’t say exactly, but child, be careful of the number. 8 0 1 and the color red. This is my warning. Chris didn’t listen to anymore.

She ran. Ran out of the caravan. Straight into Sue. Hey, what’s the hurry? I’ve just been on the eggs with You’ll never guess who? Steve Carter Sue walked briskly in the night air. Hey, is there anything wrong? What did the fortune teller say? Oh, nothing much. Just that I’d meet some guy. It’s probably Steve.

He’s asked us around his house tomorrow to play some records. That’s nice. Hey, I thought you’d be thrilled, ecstatic, or at least pleased. I’m said Chris, and normally she would’ve been. The next day was Saturday. Chris woke up and looked at our clock, nine 20. Heck, she’d have to hurry. She was meeting Sue at 10.

Chris dashed out of our house, bang, splat into Sue. Hi. Hi. I’m sorry I’m late, but don’t worry you’re not. They walked and talked as they set off towards Steve’s. This is, it said Sue with a grin. Chris looked up the steps at the red door with a brass. 8 0 1 hung above the letter box. The fortune teller’s warning came back to her.

Beware of the number 8 0 1 and the color red. Chris began to run. Chris, come back, Sue, yelled, frantically, look out. But Sue’s yelling could not be heard above the noise of the traffic. The young girl had no chance. The driver of the red bus number 8 0 1 couldn’t stop

Adele: laughing so hard right now.

Laura: Um,

Adele: yes. I didn’t really get the brief on this. I really, that’s not showcasing my best work is it? That is just giving everybody a big giggle. But

Laura: this is really important ’cause this is what you were writing at. 12, there’s not many 12 year olds that will be able to write something quite as coherent and complete and, um, with a twist at the end, or two twists as it turns out.

Very, I impressive that double twist. Double twist. I’m always,

Adele: I still do a double twist. Uh, maybe Do you think I read it squirming because I’ve always thought. I was a good writer and always thought it was my thing at school, and I found this in an excise book, and I just thought it was really funny because I didn’t think it was very good.

When I look back, I think my 12-year-old son probably wrote better. He’s not 12 now, he’s 24 now, but I think when he was 12 he was writing way better than that, but I might inflated ego with the distance of past. I thought I was great and looking back at it, no, not that great. Average.

Laura: Oh, I dunno. Well, I think you’re probably comparing your 12-year-old self.

Thank you. And what you know today to be good writing and, and you can pick out points that are maybe false with a, a weakness maybe. I mean, my only issue is it with, it was possibly that you’ve never been to a fortune teller before, because that’s not generally how they operate. Sense. They don’t tend to say things like, I see one word death and can you imagine?

Adele: So adorable. Dramatic, isn’t it? You know, it’s got everything in there. There’s a romance, there’s a bus, there’s a fortune tell of everything’s going on. I mean, that could be, that could be several short stories, really, couldn’t it? Yeah.

Laura: I was impressed with that. I thought you, you sent it to me to go Look, look, see how clever I was when I was young.

Adele: Oh gosh. No. But I suppose it did point out that I always wanted to be a writer. Yes. Well, I was gonna ask you. I really always did. Yeah.

Laura: What were you like at school? Were you really good at English, et cetera?

Adele: I was. I was good at. I tried. Yeah. And

Laura: were you good at everything or just was English clearly the way forward?

Uh, well

Adele: even English wasn’t clearly the way forward ’cause I’m dyslexic. Oh. So I think I had lots of imagination and I had a fair amount of confidence and I liked school and I liked my friends and we had a good giggle, but I think it came back over and over again ’cause I hid it very, very well. You know, I was clever enough to be able to hide it, so I did hide my dyslexia.

I didn’t even know I had dyslexia. I just thought I was really, really rubbish at spelling out. My di dyslexia wasn’t um, diagnosed until I was 21, about a month after I’d graduated. Oh, right. So I just. Spent a long time thinking, why doesn’t it stick with me the way it does with other people? And I just put it down to my northernness that people would say, spell it, how you say it?

And I thought, well, I have, I just have said it. But it said, uh, how I speak was different to a lot of other people. I was then meeting who had sort of queen received English, and I absolutely didn’t because there was all of that going on. And actually, the other thing about dyslexia, people think, oh, it’s about bad spelling.

And it, it’s that it’s not, it’s not just about that. It’s so complicated and so confusing, and you don’t know why you’re not like anyone else. And you don’t understand why you might have known something the minute it was being taught to you. You really got in, you really understand it. And then when you try and write it down or explain it back to someone, you can’t.

Laura: Mm.

Adele: And that was all part of it. Um, and my left and right was very bad and lots of things were confusing for me. But on the other hand, I do to this day now believe that my dyslexia. Helped me think around things more creatively and made me who I am. So I’m actually very grateful that I had it. But going back to the question of how did I do at school, I would say I was a mixed bag.

’cause I could go. To one exam and get the highest mark in the class quite comfortably, and I could go again to another exam and get the lowest mark in the class quite comfortably, depending on how stressed I was and Oh, really? Okay. How the dyslexia was kicking in and Yeah, so I wasn’t. Particularly consistent, but I tried so hard that it tended to get me quite far, you know, the kid in the class that underlined everything and put borders around everything and drew little pictures and um, you know, and I did that with all my English story.

I really liked art as well. So I did that with all my English, uh, homework assignments. It was illustrated. I tried so hard. I actually am quite good at. Mass. Mm-hmm. Um, sport was a real letdown for me. I hated sport and I was really bad at that. But you know, I was at a local comp where sport was sort of two hours a week and nobody cared.

So you could get away with not being good at sport in my school.

Laura: Well, listen, 25 books in 25 years, we are not worried about whether you’re good at netball. Exactly. That’s not an issue. Right. Well, moving on now. Let’s have your next off cut, please.

Adele: Uh, this is from 1988 when I was at university, and it is a clip from my second year dissertation.

Actor 3: Seduction is a theme which recurs in literature. Psychoanalytic and feminist critics argue that in literature, whether the woman is the seducer or seduced, she’s portrayed as more sinful than the male protagonists. Critics suggest Adam and Eve precipitated a literary tradition, which mistrusts women. The female seducer Seducable is condemned as unnaturally, aggressive, and simultaneously ruined.

Where did these stereotypes originate from? What is their purpose? I have decided to carefully examine four female literary characters who were subjected to the temptation of seduction. The characters are Middleton’s Beatrice from the Changeling. 1622 Milton’s Eve from Paradise Lost 1667 and Richardson’s Pamela 1740 And Hardee’s Tess from Tess of the Villes 1895.

The genres play epic poem. Epistolary novel and novel are unified by the aspects of the archetype seduction, which they have in common. Seduction is physical and spiritual. To seduce is to lead astray, tempt into sin or a crime. Corrupt persuade a person into abandonment of principles, especially chastity or allegiance, persuaded by tempting ness or attractiveness.

All the women are seduced either physically or spiritually. They are all part of a triangular relationship of one female, two males. All texts depict several seductions. The texts are written by males primarily considering a female point of view. I wish to consider if surface similarities justify the claim that the Biblical Eve as archetypal seducer is perceptible in all sexually subverting females, and why these common elements reoccur in the fallen woman myth I.

Laura: Fun stuff there.

Adele: Yet again, I’m cringing. As I say, I didn’t realize the brief was to put me in a good light. This is definitely not doing that.

Laura: No, no. This is, again, it shows that you have a serious academic background. You gave it some serious thought. Were you doing English at university? It sounds like you were.

I was, but English was your degree. Where were you? Where did Le you go? Lester? And how did you find university? Were you very social or were you sort of cloistered away being academic? What kind of teenager were you?

Adele: Uh, I was very social. I was very, very social. Yeah, I was very, very social until the final year really, when I thought I better do some work.

But I’m laughing a lot at the ambition of that, you know, four genres, three centuries, all the great works. Oh, I’m just gonna, I’m gonna do them all. I’m gonna do them all. I think, um, what that shows is I didn’t know how much. I didn’t know. And I think that was quite interesting about me ’cause I, you know, first generation university and all of that.

So I really didn’t know what to expect And um, I actually, and this is, I’m just telling you all my failures all at once, but I had applied to university the way everybody does through uh, you know, through in those days cca. Mm-hmm. And I’d have five rejections which nobody could understand because I was, you know, I dunno, I’d done gold dv You predicted to

Laura: get AS and stuff I imagine?

Yeah, and I’d done

Adele: gold DV. You know, done, um, a student, sorry, gold Duke of Edinburgh. Yeah. Who did the gold Duke. Oh. Oh goodness. And I did student governor and I was, I was as swaty as they got in our, in our little comp, you know, and you

Laura: got five rejections. How did that that happen? And I got five rejections.

Adele: Well, how it happened, well, first of all, if you remember back, you, in those days, you hand wrote your replication and I’m dyslexic, and they didn’t know. So it will have been littered with mistakes. Mm-hmm. You know, we didn’t pick up on. Mm-hmm. But secondly, because I had no idea how university worked, I thought she went there to learn things.

Now I understand that’s not necessarily always the case. So I knew I wanted to do English, but I thought, gosh, this would be a great opportunity to learn something new as well. So maybe if I went to York, they’re really good at music, I could do English and music, and if I went to Warwick for example, I could do.

English and acting. And if I went to East Anglia, I could do English and art. And so I applied for five very different courses, which obviously we all know shows a lack of focus, which actually I do have, um, lack of focus. So, you know, fair, fair that I was pulled out on that one. Um, and so they just said, God, this kid doesn’t know what she wants.

Or, or you know, maybe it was the spelling, how

Laura: wrong they turned out to be. How wrong? 25 books in 25 years. Hilarious. They, they have no idea. I

Adele: mean, I think it’s quite fun. I mean, it wasn’t fun at the time. It was heartbreaking at the time. Everybody else was getting offers and my headmaster and to his credit said, well, you’ll get the grades and then you’ll be able to have your pick.

You’ll go through clearing and you’ll have your pick. And there were two places. In clearing available Royal Holloway and New uh, and New Bedford. And this one, uh, Leicester. And I went to Leicester ’cause it wasn’t as far away. And I went to uni and I met amazing people there who are still my best friends.

Now I’ve got, you know, great people from Leicester University and I’m so. Prior to the friendships I made there, but I think I was very, very, very unprepared for what that experience would be.

Laura: Who were you at 18, 19, 20. What were your, ’cause obviously you’re in between living at your parents’ house and then getting a job and settling down into the rat race.

Who were you at that age? Who did you want to be? Who are you dreaming of being at that point? I was

Adele: definitely dreaming of being a writer. I was quite artsy. I had this. My hair’s actually supernaturally curly, even though I now always blow dry it to a smoother version. But I had this sort of big pre ruffle light hair going on.

I was always in my dunes and my dms. I was quite this sort of. Screaming feminist slash I’m a pre ruff light muse. I mean, what is that? If not a split personality? I didn’t, you know, I was trying everything out, which I think excellent is. Yeah, it is excellent. It’s exactly what young people should do when they go to university.

I was trying out lots of different versions of me. I think I’d like, I mean, you’d have to ask the other people I went to uni with, but I didn’t take myself particularly. Seriously. I don’t think, you know, I tried lots of, I dunno, clubs and things and I, you know, I had

Laura: a gigle. I had Gigle Yes. As we all did.

Yeah,

Adele: exactly. And um, and I had a giggle and it was fun.

Laura: But you dreamed of being a novelist specifically or just. You didn’t know exactly. Maybe you’d be a journalist, maybe you’d be a novelist, A researcher. A novelist. A novelist. You already knew that. Never,

Adele: yeah. Never crossed my mind to, in fact, funny story.

I thought I had kept it a massive secret though, because everybody, there’s 40 people on that English course back then, and I think everybody probably wanted to be a novelist, so I felt slightly embarra. Because, you know, it’s a, it’s a relatively vain thing to think you want to be, that you think you have something to say that other people should read.

And I was self-conscious of it and, and didn’t want to say it. And then many, many years later, ’cause I wasn’t published until I was 30, but when I did get my book deal and I rang up all my friends and told them, I went, you could be so surprised ’cause such a secret. No one ever knew this about me until the last person they said.

No, every time you got drunk you would say a funny in office. Every single time you would bang on about it and you were so boring and you’d tell us your parts and they were really boring and we didn’t wanna know. But you’d do it. And the funny thing is, obviously I blanked that out. The next day I get up smiling, thinking my little secret was still mine, Kar.

Uh, so yeah, funny old days. Yes.

Laura: And you never worry about running out of ideas. Kind of after 25 books that you’ve written, are you still as hopeful and positive about it as you were at 1819? Do you still think Yep. I’ve still got loads to say.

Adele: Uh, well, interestingly, no. Interestingly, I think I’m. I’m in a better place now than I was then, I think 18 or 19.

I desperately wanted to be a writer, but nothing had ever happened to me or nothing I was prepared to talk about. Um, and even if I was prepared to talk about it, I didn’t really have the skillset to, to do that. Um, but the skillset being. Uh, genuine empathy for other people’s points of view. Um, so, which I think is a really important skill for a novelist.

Laura: Yeah,

Adele: so I think now I have more to say. I’ve, I’ve been a mother, I’ve been a, a wife twice. I’ve, um, had friendships come and go. I, I’ve had. Great successes and huge disappointments. I’ve had gains and losses. I’ve more to say now than I did then. So I don’t worry about running out of ideas. I think I’m in a particular situation now where I’m writing psychological thrillers and I am very much known for my twists and my twists and my twist.

So I think people read me waiting for a twist and I keep saying there may not be one. That might be the twist. That’s the twist. Yes. Yes. That might be the twist. I might give you a book that isn’t twisty, turny, because I might decide that’s what I want to write next because not all my ideas are necessarily psychological thrillers.

I know the one that comes out in 2025. It’s a psychological thriller. I know the one that is in 2026 is ’cause I’m two thirds of the way through writing that one. I don’t know. Beyond that, I don’t know if I will keep always writing psychological thrillers. I always say, I think I’ll run outta time before I run out of ideas.

I often have three or four ideas in a in a year, and I have to sort of drill down on them and make sure they’re not just short stories and they’re really genuinely and novel. And sometimes this year, 2020 book was one of those times where I really wanted to do. Two books I couldn’t choose and I, I started one and then I changed my mind and then I went back to it and then I changed my mind.

I could have done either one

Laura: and could the second book be 20, 27 or it might be, yeah, let’s

Adele: face it, that might, it’s sitting there, isn’t it? It’s asking for me to give it its attention, but there was also a reason I left it alone. And actually I’m quite brutal. If there is a reason, if there’s something and even a tiny thing that is a reason I abandon something.

Then it probably needs to stay abandoned. I’m quite the ruthless editor.

Laura: Okay, let’s move on now. Your next off cut, please. What’s this one?

Adele: This is my second off cut called the warning, but this one is a poem and I wrote it in 2002

Actor 3: to disallow the possibility of too much happiness. I married to protect myself from unadulterated pleasure.

I settled to safeguard from unreasonable horror. I paired. To avoid being alone on a dance floor at 40, you’ll marry like a diamond as big as the Ritz. You came along to fill up my tits. I was always so careful and sensible. Licentious behavior was indefensible paid my taxes crossed at the green man. Now I fuck you.

Whenever I can. My lips are sore, my thoughts are raw. Whenever we say goodbye, I just want more. I’m perpetually wet between the thighs. What we are doing isn’t, especially wise, it’s sticky and tricky, but I don’t want it to stop. If ever you ask my knickers, I’ll drop. I love you.

Laura: Goodness me.

Adele: You’re allowed to laugh. I do.

Laura: Yes. Yes. We, we all went, crikey. That was, um, well, I dunno, I’m,

Adele: I, I mean, it’s hilarious that I put it out there for you to have it. First of all, can I just say that there’s this fact that I’ve got two called the warning. I obviously spend my entire life worrying about stuff, don’t I?

Oh, don’t do that. Don’t

Laura: do that. From the age of 12 to the age of whatever that was, 20 something. Yeah. Yes. You’re busy warning people about different things. Yeah. But, um, this poem is surprising content aside. To me. It reads like two poems joined together. It’s like you’d written the first. Poem fairly sort of hardened and cynical and, and, you know, realistic about relationships.

And then like somebody called you out and you’d gone off for a drink or something, or possibly something else, I don’t know. But you come back maybe two or three drinks, uh, worse for wear. Yeah. And you’ve completely forgotten about your basic theme and you’ve been distracted by a lovely man.

Adele: I think that’s very possible.

Laura: You don’t remember? I mean,

Adele: I feel that’s my life. No, well, I do. I know exactly when this is written. So I think what happened is it was two parts of my divorce process, so I think it may not have been a quick couple of drinks and straight back to it, but, um. The poem. I mean, oh yeah. It was, uh, it was more that I would’ve written the bitter sad stuff.

And then the very first night I went out after my divorce, I met my now husband, which is unusual. I, I understand that.

Laura: The very first night you went out,

Adele: I had, oh, I had one night being single. Hilarious. Technically single. You are

Laura: kidding.

Adele: I know, I know. Weird. So I, I mentioned that I was, you know. It was a surprise that to me, that I was a single mom and I had a 10 month old baby.

And then when the baby was, I dunno, 13 months, so not much in it, three months. Um, my friend had a birthday party. She said, you’ve got to come out. You can’t still stay in the house. You know you can’t stay in the house forever. And I was like, literally have nothing to wear than maternity clothes. And she said, oh no, you we’ll go out.

We’ll go out, we’ll go shopping. And I remember buying these. Brown leather trousers from whistles. Oh, I still own them. Very lovely. And I had every objection here. I was like, oh, I can’t, because you know I haven’t got a babysitter. She said, oh, I’ve got a babysitter. And uh, so her babysitter sat for both our babies and we all went out.

Six women that had all had babies a year ago, and. All of the others announced their pregnancy and they were all there with the husbands. And I announced my divorce and said, you know, well he left me, you know, a while back and um, and I feel like rubbish. And then I turned around and there was this. Guy across the crowded room and I just thought, no, he’s hot.

Yeah. Oh, word. And I thought he’s hot. I think that will help tonight. And yeah, and everyone And then the romance for want a better term that sort of. Followed. The very intense were months that followed. Everybody kept saying to me, you do know that this is your rebound shag. You do know this isn’t gonna make it, and this isn’t gonna be a big deal.

Don’t lose your head, don’t lose your heart. Don’t fall for him. And I just thought, no, I have fallen for him. This is it. He’s amazing. I, and now we’ve been married 21 years.

Laura: Wow. That’s a story and a half. That one, isn’t it?

Adele: Fantastic. So I suspect there were two poems shoved together. I’ve, funnily enough, never tried to get my poems published and I think No.

Having heard that one broadcast live, yeah. I never should.

Laura: Well, well, you know, I would say don’t, don’t give up the day job. Your day job is doing so well. You so well you. Exactly. Yeah. Don’t really need to. Fun. It’s,

Adele: it’s fun that, um, it’s out there. And, and you know, the, the fact that I obviously was looking for a different way to express myself.

’cause obviously I could have, I could have done prose and actually did go on to write a, a book about mine and Jim’s relationship.

Laura: Oh, which one is that?

Adele: I, so. Oh, it’s called the other women’s shoes. Yeah, the other women’s shoes. It’s almost a word for word account. Yeah. I mean, you will now recognize the night that I’ve just described is, is in that book.

Oh, wow. Um, the only thing I do is split my character into two different women and I give myself two children. I only had one. But other than that, it’s pretty much the same thing.

Laura: Right.

Adele: Um, anyway, that aside, I do think that’s hilarious that that poem has now had an earring and I felt I’ve always wanted it to have an earring to read secretly.

Secretly I have because I was so right about him and everyone told me I was wrong and I was, you know, obviously to start with just a lot of pent up passion. Let’s go with passion. But, um, but it quickly moved on to something very deep and very important to me. So I think it’s quite fun that that’s now had its little moment, even though I accept that it’s, it’s never gonna make it into an anthology.

Laura: Did you write a lot of poetry then?

Adele: Mm. I think I’ve done 12 in my life.

Laura: Oh, I see.

Adele: Yeah. Not a lot. I think he can see that, that it needs some practice. I think I could work on that skill before we, uh, we, we rush out to try and publish them. And I think also I do write them. It’s hilarious that you said you probably went out for a drink and came back.

’cause that is. When I write them, so well done. Good spot. Yes, Ralph.

Laura: Oh, how satisfying that is. Oh, excellent. Okay. Well, right. Let’s move on to your next off cut. Now what’s this one?

Adele: Well, this is an earlier poem, so this is one of the 12. Really getting them out. Yeah, but can I say, in my defense, I think everything else I’ve ever written other than my poems has been published.

If I’ve tried for it to be published, it’s been published, so that’s why the poems are getting an airing. But this one was written in 1989 and it’s called The Ruse. I was at university at the time.

Actor 2: Would I want you if I were first? I would not. The savage satire that you are pulls me in pounding. You are appalling at articulating, expressing.

I deliberately try to confuse. But this is just a ruse as we both long to be understood, and yet it is this coldness, this icy fjord that you are impenetrable aquamarine. So beautiful, so terrible. It is all of these things that I need and want you deliberately try to confuse, but this is just a ruse. As we both long to be good.

Laura: This one’s slightly less shocking. Um, but you wrote to me, uh, when, well, it was, the note I received with this poem was when you were dating an unknowable, posh boy. This was at university, was it?

Adele: Yes. Yes. I didn’t confess far too much.

Laura: Yes. Does the Un Noble posh boy know that he was a subject of a poem?

Adele: I very much doubt it.

I don’t think the un noble, posh boy would even still know my name. Um, oh, well he must now, I suppose he may now, he might have got, yes, I think you rings bell. Uh, but I don’t think I was very important to him at all. I think I had a phase, definite phase sort of thinking, oh, I’ve gotta get out there and.

Meet posh boys. ’cause I never had, I’d obviously, you know, as I’ve mentioned, I went to a comp and all my boyfriends had went from there. And I found them fascinating for a while. And then I literally found them unknowable. Couldn’t get through to them. They wouldn’t talk to me and they, they wouldn’t tell me how they were feeling.

And, but at first, I think there was a stage where I found that. Fascinating. It’s probably a thing to do with self-confidence and lack of when you’re quite young. ’cause I think as you get older you should be able to say, gosh, if you can’t tell me what you’re thinking and feeling, perhaps this isn’t for us.

Mm. But uh, uh, in 1989, I did not have that in my vocabulary.

Laura: You’ve sort of gone on, haven’t you? The unknowability of others seems to be something you write about a lot in your novels regarding sort of truth and fidelity that seems to come up. I do quite a lot. I think

Adele: there’s, I think all of these. Um, off cuts.

They’ve got something of that. Even that crazy, terrible dissertation, which can I say, I’ve got a two one in all my life. I’ve always been shocked at that two. One thinking I should have been a first. I’ve now listened to that dissertation. What can I say? I’ve noticed that dissertation. I was like, look, it wasn’t a third girl, uh, because it was shocking.

Uh, so all of this, this sort of recapping it. Very good for me. But yes, I think I am interested in fidelity and infidelity. I think it’s one of the few things that we have. That we select as a moral code for no other reason than we select to do it. There isn’t really anymore, there isn’t really a sort of evolutionary path that tells us that this is what we should do.

I can see where there would’ve been in the past, but I think most of us would still opt for it if we can.

Laura: Yes, of course we would

Adele: still opt to know and to be known and to remain faithful. And yet nearly all of my books are about people. The struggle with that.

Laura: Oh, I suppose that’s the interesting part of conflict, isn’t it, the Unknowability.

Mm-hmm. Of others, but that was the subject of a lot of your books, but your 17th novel, the Image of You where one woman tries to discover the truth about the man that her twin sister’s fallen in love with. Mm-hmm. That definitely seems to be on that subject. That particular novel has been made into a film.

Adele: Yes.

Laura: Yeah, tell me about that. You didn’t write the screenplay for this one, did you? But No, I

Adele: didn’t, but I worked on it. I worked with, um, Christopher, who was fantastic and we worked on it through, uh, lockdown, which was great to have a project. And I worked very hard on. On the exec producing. So getting it made, uh, exec producer can be anything, as I’m sure loads of your listeners know, it can be anything from, you know, you throw in money.

I didn’t do that. You throw in time. I absolutely did do that. Mm-hmm. Because the producer that had opted the book in the first place, I remember sort of talking to him through lockdown saying, oh, every. You know, nobody’s doing anything and everybody’s locked down and it’s gonna disappear. And he said to me, well the thing is, Adele, nobody will ever care about this as much as you, everybody’s got lots of projects on, you are the one that can make this happen or not.

And I found that really empowering.

Laura: Mm-hmm.

Adele: And it had never crossed my mind that I could be the one that could make that happen or not. Which is odd. ’cause actually, if you think about being a novelist, all you do is make something from nothing. Exactly.

Laura: Yeah.

Adele: Um. But I really enjoyed the process and, uh, and I’m proud of the film.

It’s a, it’s, uh, a fun popcorny version of a. Psychological thriller. It isn’t a dark, nasty, psychological thriller, although arguably really nasty things happen. But they happen in a relatively tongue in cheek way, which is, is the vibe of the book and trying to get that. So sort of

Laura: romcom as far as films are concerned, would you say?

Uh, well,

Adele: interestingly, you see, this is interesting because the image of you was. Uh, the crossover book from romcom to psychological thrillers in terms of the genre, when I was writing and I had written quite a dark ending, and at the time, my publisher at the time said, oh, we feel that’s a big jump from where you are at now.

Can you soften your ending? And I did. And then when it, the book was. Being turned into a film, I said, oh, don’t read the book. Here is the ending, and, and pitch the ending that I’d I’d originally wanted, which is much darker because you need to have a genre. If you’re going to go into film, you can’t say, oh, it’s a bit of a hybrid.

You can do that in reading and writing because. People give you their time, their undivided, 15 hours, 20 hours, however long it might take them to read a book. They’re giving you the undivided time. But in a film, you’ve got, you know, an hour and a half. So you need to be able to say to the producers, it’s in this genre.

So I, I shoved it quite firmly into psychological thriller, but with a bit of fun. Twists and tongue and cheek and, and I think, I think it’s successful. I like it.

Laura: Why was that novel, the one that you chose? ’cause you’d written 17 up to that point. So what was the particular draw of turning that one into a film?

I

Adele: think it was a relatively commercial decision, actually, that I knew psychological thrillers were being bought up by producers. And at that time that was me going into psychological thrillers. I had a couple that were very new, still one read, written one that. Just come out the week I was approached. So this one had a little bit more of the sales behind it, and I was able to say, look, it’s sold x amount of books already.

Um, it, it’s, it’s this idea. Off we go. And actually, it’s a really strong idea, isn’t it? I think everybody loves the idea of our identical twins and we’re fascinated by them because, you know, they can. You know, spoiler boat, not spoiler. Uh, they can play each other and they can, uh, they have things in common.

They have differences that are, you know, this whole going back to the knowability and not knowability of a person. And if you, if your twin doesn’t know you, who does, you know? So I thought there’s a lot of mileage in it. And actually it took. Three years from, from being sold as an option to getting it made.

So, you know, there’s always that. By then I was three years done. Maybe I would’ve chosen something different by then. ’cause I had other books out with other sales records. But at the time it was just a sensible choice.

Laura: Okay. Right. We’ve come to your final off cut. Tell us about this one please.

Adele: This is an off cut from my 25th and most recent novel, our Beautiful Mess, which is published in 2025.

Actor 4: At first he’d been scared of it. Yes. Actually fucking scared of the money because they called it a reward. They said it was a thank you for not calling the police. That was bad enough. He didn’t spend it, at least not at first, but the second time they found him, they said it was a loan. He tried to hand it back then it was still in the envelope.

They laughed and said there was interest on the loan. But I never borrowed anything off you. You have our money. You’ve had it a month, now you’ve given it back. What do you call that if not a loan? I never asked for it. They just shrugged. You owe 800 pounds. What? That’s stupid. Where am I gonna get 800 pounds?

What’s the interest rate you are charging? But the question was idiotic. He knew that they said he could clear things if he delivered something for them. Started talking about interest rates. If only he’d done that in the first place. Taken out a credit card to think. He used to think 24% was too much interest to pay.

They said he owed them more than 10 times the original sum. Now it kept going up. No matter what he did, he had no idea how they calculated the interest. He doubted there was an exact rate, a hundred percent fucked 30 times over. Wasn’t a processable mathematical formula. He wasn’t a fucking idiot. He knew that he wasn’t going to be delivering pizza for the sort of money they’d loaned him.

But the first job was a message, something that can’t be sent in a text. The second job was a document. Papers. He decided not to open the envelope even though it wasn’t sealed. He thought it was a test. Could he be trusted also, he didn’t wanna look. What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him. Right. He’d assumed it might be dodgy accounts or something.

The next package he was instructed to pick up was different. No instructions as to where it should be delivered. Were texted. The package had the words open me, scratched on with a blue biro, all in capitals, uneven letters that looked like they were scratched out by someone uncomfortable holding a pen at school, but happy to carve their name on the desktop with a pen knife.

He didn’t open the envelope, not straight away. He dipped into a coffee chain, went into the Scuzzy Lu that was supposed to be for customer’s use only when the door was securely locked behind him. He looked inside the packet. The notes were dirty, used. He counted them 2000 pounds, A lot of money. His instructions were to take this and bring another package back.

If he did, as he was told he was buying drugs, he was a dealer.

Laura: I thought we’d add some, uh, testosterone to the reading team there. Just, uh, excellent. There’s too much estrogen flowing through this particular episode, but this passage, was it just this passage that was cut out or the whole idea of this character becoming a drug dealer? What, what’s the story behind this offcut?

Adele: Well, this is an off cut that I did myself. I quite often, um, I mentioned I, I self-edit a lot. I think by the time I. Give my book a I’m, I’m pretty much hoping it’s, it’s done deal. So at the beginning I sort of overwrite and I might have ideas and I quite often get as far as sort of 50, 60, 70,000 words and then could reduce it by as much as a half, which does horrify some people.

But for me it’s just the way I get into it. So this is a character called Zach. Zach is still in my book. He is really important. And it’s funny though, you’re right, we are talking, um. From a female point of view a lot in this, uh, podcast, but in fact I actually often write from a male point of view, and I often have male characters, but he’s a, he’s quite a young one.

He’s only 20 and. He in the actual finished book Our Beautiful Mess. He is a character that has a secret that is life-threatening. Uh, he has got himself involved in something way above anything he can deal with, and it is to do with drugs, but it’s nothing to do with alone. I decided that was all too complicated and I just even hearing it then I was like, oh, thank God I cut this.

So, yeah, so, so it was just, there’s, there’s some nice bits in there. You know, I can’t remember the numbers, but he, he talks about the mathematical formula that he can’t do, which is how fucked he is. Yeah. And I think that’s a nice concept and that, that carries through with Zach. He is out of his depth and he’s struggling, but it isn’t a sort of small turn loan.

He. Gets in something much more vicious. And actually I can’t tell you what, but he gets into something much more vicious, much faster into the novel where this all seemed a bit slow burn. And I thought like, I don’t really care. If I don’t care, nobody else cares. Um, so yeah. So that’s the only reason that this was taken out.

Laura: Now this is a belated sequel. The book Our Beautiful Mess. ’cause if I’ve got this right, um, this is the sequel to the first book you ever wrote. Is that right?

Adele: It is in a way, I suppose. So the very first book I ever wrote was, um, about a woman called Connie. And at the time she was nearly 30. And all my audiences, as you can imagine, were women of about that age, or some men, but mostly women, and the book’s called Playing Away, and it’s about a woman who.

Uh, falls madly in love with somebody who shouldn’t. And it, um, it wrecks her, her marriage, a very, very new marriage. And it’s about her struggling back from that. And it was, it came out in the year 2000. It was a huge hit. It was the, uh, biggest selling debut of that year. Um, and Connie set me up without Connie.

I probably wouldn’t be sat here talking to you. You know, she was amazing for me. And in the book at the time, in playing Away, she had four best friends who were really good fun and they were in the background. They all had their own problems and they own their own backstories in one thing, in another.

And I always resented that really quietly, that it eventually got put in this sort of Chiclet banner. Mm-hmm. Because when it was published, it was originally published at Penguin and the the editor at the time, and I. I swear this is true. This is an absolute true story. He said to me, would you like this published as a commercial book or a literary book?

And I said, what’s the difference? She said, A literary book will probably sell about 8,000 copies, and a commercial book will probably sell about 80,000 copies. And I thought, I’ll have that then. But it’s um, but it’s interesting, isn’t it, because it was a matter of how they were going to publish it, not the content of the book, which by that time was signed, sealed, and delivered.

Laura: So how they package it and what the cover would look like and that sort of thing.

Adele: Yes. And who they would reach out to and you know, and all that sort of thing. Interesting. Wow. Isn’t it fascinating? So it could have

Laura: been either, you could, you could could’ve been a literary author or a bestselling novelist at

Adele: that time.

I don’t think that would happen now, because I think I would’ve been edited slightly differently to be distinctly one thing or another, Uhhuh. But at that time there was a little bit more flexibility in everybody’s world and, and we weren’t quite as. Welded to genres as we are now. Anyway, at the time I wrote that book and I had all these characters and.

Over the years, I’ve sometimes gone back to pick out the best friends that were sort of the subplots and brought them forward and given them their front story. So there was a book called, uh, young Wives Tales, and that had two of the characters, Lucy and Rose in it. And then many years later, I think my 19th book, there was a book called Lies, lies, lies, which was a full on psychological thriller.

You know, prisons, murders a lot. Very, very different to my initial playing away, and yet it had those characters. I just moved them with me. I thought you can come. You are fantastic. You are complex, interesting humans, you can come with me And lives, lives, lives was actually my first number one. And so it was 19 years before I got my number one.

I was a 19 year overnight success, which I like to, you know, point out. Uh, so it was really, those characters have always been so exciting for me ’cause they were my debut and then they were my first number one. And going back to that story of. Originally, you know, she was in her thirties. I wanted to look at Connie.

Now, where is she in her midlife? Did she mature? Did she hang on to that relationship? Did they go off and you know, have a family. So I sort of wanted all of that, but I really wanted a psychological thriller. So I put. Lovely Connie’s poor family in huge jeopardy. This poor woman there, she was bouncing along in a romantic comedy.

Here she is like fighting for her life and fighting for the life of her family.

Laura: Right. And this is book number 25? Yes. Which is. Our beautiful mess. Yes. That is due out any minute now. If you happen to be listening to this podcast at the time of its initial broadcast. Yay. Well, we have come to the end of the show.

How was it for you?

Adele: I loved it. Lots of fun. I feel I haven’t really talked about my books. I just think everything I’ve told you about my like off cuts, there’s so random. Who talks about the 12-year-old writings? But it’s been so much fun to do that.

Laura: I’m very glad. I’m very glad you enjoyed. I’ve enjoyed it tremendously.

I suppose I should ask you one more question. Let’s think. Are there any offcuts that you’ve still got that you haven’t shared with us today that you think you might should have done? I actually

Adele: have a process when I write every single book I mentioned that I quite often can cut anything up to, well, my worst ever is cutting 80,000 words once.

Oh wow. But I can cut. Anything up to, you know, 5, 10, 15, 20,000 words. Uh, when I’m writing a book and what I do is I take them outta the manuscript that I’m writing and I stick them in a file that’s very creatively named bits. Um, and I just pop them in there thinking, oh gosh, if I really panic and I want them back, they’re just there.

And you know what? Over 25 years, I’ve never gone back. Pulled anything out of the bits file you never do. If it needs to be cut, it needs to be cut. Mm. So I suppose I have 25 bits files if ever you really want to dig through them. Um, but yeah, I can’t think there’s anything really great in there. So

Laura: it sounds like almost an idea that you should put them all together and see if you can make a book out of them.

Just see

Adele: what happens. You’re gonna be a really average book, wouldn’t it? Because there were all the things that didn’t make the grade. And I think it’s, I think it’s a really important thing in life. Admitting to yourself that you do things that are not up to scratch, and that’s okay. And I think that’s obviously the whole point of your podcast.

You know, there are things that, that we didn’t, that, that didn’t reach its full potential. And maybe that’s fine because we’re just learning from them and, and learning is all part of life. Everything can’t be up. Yeah.

Laura: It’s all part of the process. Yeah.

Adele: Everything can’t be perfect. Straight off. Yeah.

Laura: Yeah.

Well, it has been wonderful talking to you, Adele Parks. Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Adele: Thank you so much, Laura. I’ve loved every minute

Laura: the Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shaven with special thanks to this week’s guest, Adele Parks, MBE. The off cuts were performed by Emma Clarke, Beth Chalmers, Helen Goldwyn, and Chris Pavlo. And the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit Offcuts Drawer.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us.

Thanks for listening.

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

Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this episode is the brilliant Lynn Ferguson, writer, performer, story coach, occasional stand-up, and yes, the voice of a certain plaster scene chicken. You might know her from her writing on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, her award-winning solo shows, or her work with Pixar on the animated film Brave. Originally from Scotland, Lynn first moved to London to pursue her wonderfully varied career before heading stateside in 2008, when TV and film writing took her to Los Angeles. She’s done everything from serious theatre at the National to glorious chaos at the Edinburgh Fringe, and she has a real gift for uncovering truth in stories, whether she’s writing them, performing them, or helping others shape theirs. When I asked Lynn for her offcuts, she sent me loads. And honestly, I’d love to have included more, but we just didn’t have the time. So naturally, my first question to her was, how easy was it to find them all?

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

Oh.

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

So you were commissioned by them?

Yeah. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drake says, You don’t understand, Ariel.

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

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

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

Go away!

Drake slams the door shut.

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

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

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

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

Quite literally, cheese and crackers.

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

Not for very small children.

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

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

I did. I did.

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

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

Nick Park?

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

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

I do not know.

Did you get involved in the writing at all?

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

Yeah, brevity is very important for gags.

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

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

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

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

This was prize-winning, I believe.

Oh my god, I am mortified.

You were seven.

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

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

No, right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a bus lane, you wanker!

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

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

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

Yeah, it’s all coming together now.

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

Somebody to come and clean it up, perhaps.

Yeah, a polish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

On Brave.

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

The proof being that you would pass, you mean?

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

Right.

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

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

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

Same story?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vera Lynn was very much the thing in our day.

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

Grace takes Vera off the turntable.

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

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

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

And was that meant to be a compliment?

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

There’s an inspiration for you.

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

Margaret returns carrying a fold-up banner.

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

Is that not a nice thing?

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

She turns back to hang the banner.

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

So, tell us about The Weir Sisters.

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

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

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

With David Nevins.

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

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

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

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

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

The Heart and Sole?

Yeah.

I saw that.

Oh, did you?

It was very good. Yeah, I did.

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

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

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

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

You too, my friend.

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

Thank you for asking me.

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

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