Hello there. It’s time for this month’s unproduced script and it’s back to 2001 for this one, Jammy Bugger, a script I wrote for ITV as a vehicle for Frank Skinner. I would also have been in this one too, playing Ian, Frank’s tubby younger half-brother.
This is an unusual one because it did actually get commissioned but in the end Frank decided he didn’t want to do it - also reading it back I don’t really think it’s good enough. Or at least, it hasn’t stood the test of time and is a bit too laddy, though does attempt to address that issue, but not effectively enough. It’s not just tastes changing though - I think the characters are interesting, but the bits of business in it are not real enough to be funny - the paperclip suit is a bit surreal, but if it was hot at the end then he’d notice before putting it on and the shower out the window bit just doesn’t make any sense at all.
So ironically the script that I think is possibly my worst one would actually have got on TV if it wasn’t for Frank deciding against it. And I don’t think his problem was with the script but with me personally. But I’ll maybe go into that another time!
The central three characters are based on the leads from my 1999 play “It’s Not The End of the World” and indeed some of the dialogue is from that work (and a little bit of it ended up in “You Can Choose Your Friends”). I had actually written that play with Frank in mind as he’d enjoyed my other Edinburgh plays and expressed an interest in being in one, but couldn’t make the dates work.
I wrote the script and then Frank came up to the Fringe in 2001 when I was doing Christ on a Bike (and I presume he was doing a couple of nights) and when we weren’t working we did a pass over it together in his suite at the Balmoral hotel. There’s some definite Skinner touches in there, like the anal sex allusions and the bit about not eating “all” the pies. I think he probably suggested Tooty Frooties. But most of it is my work!
I hung out with Frank for those couple of days and saw what it was like to be properly famous - he couldn’t walk down the street without being stopped every five feet. He’s a great comedian and I was very excited to have the chance to work with him, so it’s a shame it fell through! The sitcom he did instead - Shane (I think) - didn’t really set the world alight, but there’s a chance that Jammy Bugger might have done and my life could have turned out very differently. I made a potentially very costly mistake!
We did a reading of the script that autumn and I was super excited that Charlotte Coleman agreed to play Annie. I’d loved her since Educating Marmalade and she was superb at the table read and down to earth and as lovely as you’d hope. Tragically she died just a few weeks later. Unbearably sad.
All in all it’s probably a good thing that the show never came to be. We’d called Frank’s girlfriend Tara as a nod to an infamous (at the time) interview with Tara Palmer Tomkinson and her story also took a tragic turn which casts another shadow over it. Looking back at this had made me quite sad - hopefully there’s a few laughs in there to cheer you up if you are (or become) a paid subscriber.