Got myself another broadcast credit.

Fifty-eight seconds of sublime topical satire in this week’s Newsjack flowed from the very same fingers currently being used to brag about it.

If I’d only made it a few seconds longer I could have doubled my fee.

Get the podcast here.

This episode actually got reviews too. At Total Politics and Comic Timings.

Mine’s about dowsing rods doubling as bomb detectors, starting at about 15 minutes in. Or here’s an MP3 of the relevant bit.

The Iraqi government are already reeling; it will take them a long time to recover from this.

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Topical comedy sketch show Newsjack starts again in a few hours on Radio 7.

I’m not in it.

This is one of the sidesplitting works of staggering genius that they rejected.

*

FX: AIRPORT ATMOS

SECURITY GUARD:
Step through now, sir.

FX: METAL DETECTOR BEEPING

SECURITY GUARD:
Step to one side, sir. Could you empty your pockets please?

FX: POCKETS CONTENTS IN BOWL

SECURITY GUARD:
If you wouldn’t mind removing your shoes.

MAN:
(SIGHS, MUTTERS TO HIMSELF)

FX: SHOES ON TABLE

SECURITY GUARD:
And if you could just loosen your belt buckle.

FX: BELT BUCKLE. TROUSER FUMBLING.

SECURITY GUARD:
Now turn your head and cough.

MAN:
(COUGHS)

SECURITY GUARD:
Great. Thank you very much.

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“It sounded better in my head.”

Probably not the best first thing to come out of your mouth after having watched a troupe of trained professional actors graciously perform your script aloud for free.

The actors, to their credit, didn’t seem to take the comment personally. I would have.

My faux pas immediately zoned me into an embarrassed funk.

Listening back to the MP3 of the occasion, as the assembled comedy writers and actors perform an uncomfortable autopsy on my sitcom effort, I note that I could have stammered Hugh Grant into epilepsy.

I probably had unrealistic expectations.

The only other time I’ve ever heard my own script read out by actors was when they were being broadcast on the radio. It was Lewis McLeod performing words I’d put in Gordon Brown’s mouth, so it sounded just like Gordon Brown, just like it did in my head.

Not being an absolute idiot, I’m aware that there is a massive gap between what a writer sees and hears in his head and what they eventually see on stage or screen, but the crashing reality of that gap, that yawning chasm, that deep-throating chasm, didn’t really hit me until that reading.

To be fair and to be absolutely honest, these weren’t bad actors.

Before they got to my script they’d more or less cold-read four others and done, I think, a blinding job of it. Characters that seemed dead to me on the page became hilarious. Jokes I didn’t get suddenly worked.

But when it came to my pitiful little sitcom effort, pretty much every gag seemed to fall flat. The characters sounded nothing like I had expected. Nothing like how I thought I had written them.

Later, a fellow writer in attendance told me it wasn’t as bad as I thought, and that some people were in fact chuckling. Fuck him. Idiot. What does he know? Leave me in my funk.

What to make of all this? Can I not write characters? Was it just a bad reading? Is there some knack to making characters instantly actable?

Three weeks later, I still have no idea what I’m supposed to have learned from this experience.

So I’m just going to pretend it never happened.

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Just found out that my sitcom pilot will not be getting a reading in front of an audience of BBC producers in Edinburgh this month.

Another chap with a better script (I’ve read it, it’s good) won the coveted spot.

Bummer.

On the upside, Graham Linehan just retweeted me.

That’s possibly the most exciting thing that happened all week.

Pass the breadknife.

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What was I doing when I found out Michael Jackson died?

Why, I was listening to this sketch on the radio, my first broadcast credit.

MP3

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Last night, somewhere in London, some actors stood in front of an audience, on a BBC radio sound stage, and said some words what I wrote. Out loud.

Hopefully, the audience laughed.

Hopefully, the words will be broadcast on topical news comedy Newsjack tonight at 11pm on BBC Radio 7.

Apparently, it’s normal for them to record more material than they can fit in the 30-minute slot, so there’s still a chance it may get cut.

Frankly, I’m happy that somebody saw fit to record something I wrote. That’s never happened before.

The show is podcast, if you fancy checking it out at a reasonable hour.

I’m not sure whether they recorded the sketch I submitted (about a very special maths teacher) or one of the one-liners. I hope it’s the sketch.

Fingers crossed.

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I’m told this is on page three. I sincerely hope they didn’t use any of the photos.

Ian La Frenais to mentor North East comedy wrting trio

“It’s a great opportunity, no matter what happens,” said 32-year-old former journalist Kevin, from Darlington. “I’ve been writing like a lunatic… the deadline for the first draft is Monday.”

Speaking of which…

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I’m writing a sitcom pilot for the BBC at the moment.

Well, that’s a lie, obviously. I’m writing this blog at the moment.

(I’m learning that prolonged periods of agonising procrastination are virtually a prerequisite for people who write things with deadlines later than a few hours from present.)

But I am writing a sitcom pilot. And the BBC are paying me to do it.

Don’t laugh, those are true facts.

Admittedly, the cheque will be of a value more suitable for framing than cashing.

It would barely pay the porn bill. I could make more money in an afternoon’s freelance.

But it will be a real cheque. From the BBC. To write something.

There’s a vanishingly small probability that what I’m writing will ever get on the telly.

I assume that’s true, anyway. I’ll have a better idea when I’m actually more than halfway finished writing the fucking thing.

A few months ago, I sent 12 pages of a sitcom pilot to the Beeb.

Mainly arse jokes, truth be told. I count seven anal insertions in those pages.

Somehow, those 12 pages allowed me to join eight other wannabe sitcom and sketch show writers, many of whom seem to have been hacking away at this kind of thing for far longer than I, onto a thing called “Northern Laughs”.

I say “thing” because I’m not entirely certain what the word for whatever it is is

But what it means is that for the next few months I get notes on my draft scripts from some BBC comedy producer types and comedy writer Ian La Frenais.

(You may never have heard of him unless you’re seriously into British comedy, so make sure you check out his IMDB page, just to get an idea of how impressive this is and how much praise you should be lauding upon me.

Seriously, him and his mate wrote The Commitments, for real.)

I met him in London last week, where he generously tried not to gloat too badly that Newcastle beat Middlesbrough in a crucial relegation derby the night before, before tearing my script a new arsehole. In the nicest possible way.

It only lasted thirty minutes, but as is the case for so many things that only last thirty minutes, it was a beautiful experience.

I’m obviously no stranger to the blue pen, but having one of the guys who wrote Porridge giving me pointers on a comedy script what I wrote… I felt like I should be paying them.

At the very least, following our first encounter my script has a new arsehole into which I can insert things. With hilarious consequences.

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Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

Indy has just hooked up with Marion in her bar in Nepal.

Marion slaps Indy. It’s clear they have a romantic history.

INDY: I never meant to hurt you.

MARION: I was a child! I was in love.

INDY: You knew what you were doing.

MARION: It was wrong. You knew it.

INDY: Look, I did what I did. I don’t expect you to be happy about it.

I’d never really considered the implications of this scene before. If I had, I would have assumed that “child” was probably an exaggeration.

But no. It wasn’t.

Kasdan’s screenplay calls for: “MARION RAVENWOOD, twenty-five years old, beautiful, if a bit hardlooking.”

She tells Indy: “I’ve learned to hate you in the last ten years.”

Indiana Jones was banging a fifteen-year old.

Wow.

It gets worse. Via Linehan, today I found a transcript of the story conference where the three principle creative minds behind Raiders bashed out the ideas that when into the film.

While it’s impossible to judge the humour in which the comments were made, it’s pretty clear they wanted Indy to be a sucker for jailbait.

Lucas initially wanted to go much, much younger.

G is George Lucas, S is Steven Spielberg, L is Lawrence Kasdan.

G — We have to get them cemented into a very strong relationship. A bond.

L — I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don’t have to build it.

G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

L — And he was forty-two…

G — He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.

S — She had better be older than twenty-two.

G — He’s thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve.

G — It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.

S — And promiscuous. She came onto him.

G — Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he…

S — She has pictures of him.

Bloody hell, George.

“Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore.”???

Almost impossible to believe, but the creators of some of the most enduringly popular kid-friendly action films of the last thirty years actually conspired to make one of their most enduringly popular kid-friendly action heroes a person who, in 2009, would be burned at the stake as a dirty paedo.

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I sent some Letterbocks and Top Tips into Viz over the weekend. Kudos to them for telling me to (politely) fuck off within 48 hours of submission.

“Whilst they are not suitable for publication feel free to send us anything you think will make us laugh.”

Ouch!

Here they are anyway:

• They say: “Once bitten, twice shy”. Too true. My three-year-old granddaughter was already quite shy before she was mauled by the family rottweiler, and I haven’t heard a peep out of her since either.
• Whatever happened to the lovely Lily Savage? I haven’t seen her on daytime telly in years, and she used to be on every day.
• People say that “beauty is only skin-deep”, but do any readers know if that’s true? I only ask because my Page 3 model girlfriend has just been diagnosed with leprosy.
• Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were allowed to carry on releasing albums and films for many years after their deaths. But when Harold Pinter dies, nothing! It’s political correctness gone mad, I tell you.
• I know you’re supposed to strike while the iron is hot, but, in my experience, a cold iron has never left that big of a mark on her face.
• As an American evangelical Christian, I believe that love conquers all. Oh, wait, did I say love? I meant the United States Marine Corps.
• They say: “Dead men tell no tales.” Oh really? Tell that to somebody who, like me, has just watched an old video of Denholm Elliott on Jackanory.
• They say: “Beggars can’t be choosers”. Rubbish. Outside the off license tonight I gave a pound to a Big Issue seller, then watched him spend five minutes trying to decide whether to spend it on Special Brew or Tennants Super.
• I hear they’re going to remake ‘Predator’. What’s wrong with Hollywood nowadays, always trying to remake classic movies? Why can’t they just endlessly piss out unwanted and inferior sequels, like they did in the good old days?
• They say: “No man can serve two masters.” But I’m working at a pilchard-packing factory in the day and driving a minicab at night, and I’m still drawing disability. Technically, that’s three masters.
• I keep hearing that “rats desert a sinking ship.” If anything, I think this proves conclusively that rats aren’t as stupid as we thought they were.
• It’s so very nice to see hunky 80s heartthrob Mickey Rourke back in the cinemas, and extra nice to see that all those years in the wilderness haven’t hurt his looks.
• I’m very surprised that no bishops have come out saying that the Australian wildfires were God’s punishment for Aussies throwing so many shrimp on the barbie, despite the Bible very specifically telling them not to. (Deuteronomy 14, 9-10)
• Isn’t Twitter fantastic! How did I ever survive before I discovered I could receive an email every time Jonathan Ross takes a shit?
• MEXICAN restaurants. Save money on lard when cooking re-fried beans by simply frying the beans once, but for twice as long.
• FELLOW vicars. Do not always practice what you preach. For twenty years I preached that Lot out of off of the Bible got drunk and had sex with his daughters, and now I’m in prison on a ten-stretch.
• BUSTING-for-a-piss alcoholic boyfriends. Not enough time to make it to my kitchen sink? No problem. Simply slash in my bin, instead.
• CELEBRITY Twitter users. Get your office-bound followers to really warm to you by announcing you’ve just got out of bed at 11.30am and have to rush off to a three-hour champagne lunch meeting, every day.

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