Once a month I am going to post a script that I’ve written that has never been produced.
<reader> Surely that will only last a couple of months, Richard.
You have no idea. We’ll be here for eternity. This is your Hell!
I am putting this one behind a paywall, partly because I might do that for some of the bonus stuff, but also I am not 100% certain about the copyright on this one, as it’s not from a show that is mine. It’s for the brilliant sitcom Man Down. The show finished a long time ago and has all gone out and I am sure no one would care, but just in case,
Greg Davies was on RHLSTP (Listen here) and we got on very well and had some good back and forth, so Greg asked me if I’d like to have a crack at an episode for Man Down. I loved the show and love Greg so it was a bit of a no-brainer and I thought it might be fun. But mose excitingly for me I would get to write lines for my childhood comedy hero Rik Mayall.
Greg had some ideas and a script outline of what should vaguely happen, but I had a lot of leeway to do whatever I wanted within that. This is very much a first draft of the script, but I thought there was some really promising bits and some nice jokes and I was very excited about getting Rik Mayall to talk about his balls (did I curse both him and my own bollock?)
Very shortly after I had written this script I was on the toilet, when I got a text or saw a tweet telling me that Rik Mayall had died. I was despondent and cried on the loo with my trousers round my ankles, which was surely a fitting tribute to the great man. It’s what he would have wanted. Or possibly he’d have wanted to not be dead and for me to have my trousers on. There is no way of knowing.
I don’t know how quickly I also had the thought that Rik would never speak the words I had written. I’d like to say it was after a few days of grief, but I think I managed to make this about me within a few seconds.
I only met Rik once, when I was paying for petrol at the BP on Shepherd’s Bush Green and found him standing and preening in front of me. Not making too big a deal, but also aware he was Rik Mayall and doing his bit for the queue. I was too shy to even say hello, let alone to thank him for all that he had done for me -The Young Ones really made it feel possible that comedy was something that a no mark prick from Somerset could do. Not because it was rubbish, but because the people in it were recognisably like us.
I really regret not saying anything. I didn’t want to bother him, but he wouldn’t have minded being bothered. He was just waiting to pay for petrol. I have no idea if he’d have known who I was. I thought maybe I’d get a chance to thank him on the set of Man Down, but I should have thanked him then.
Anyway obviously Man Down went on hiatus and when it came back, for whatever reason, I was not asked to rewrite the script. Maybe they didn’t like what I’d done or maybe they had more time to work on the scripts themselves… I think some of these ideas did turn up in an episode and I was credited as a writer, but I am not sure that any single line I wrote got into the finished production.
I think I’m a pretty good writer and one of my skills is managing to write in other people’s voices and understand the characters even if I didn’t create them. But I would have liked to have a couple more passes over this. I don’t think it counts as a sacking. One day, when I am strong, I will write about the experience I had working in the writers’ room of a more recent sitcom where I was sacked and so thoroughly humiliated that I almost gave up writing all together (and would have done, I think, if I didn’t have a series of Relativity to finish). Writing is a tough business and whilst producers bend over backwards to spare the feelings of actors, they seem to go the other way with writers. I didn’t do a good job on the one, but there were extenuating circumstances - which we will get into behind a very secure paywall, on another occasion.
Anyway, here’s my not really ever produced script for Man Down. The formatting is a bit annoying, sorry. And you can judge if it might have got made in some form if that complete bastard Rik Mayall hadn’t fucked up my career by selfishly dying.
Please do consider becoming a paid subscriber if you can afford £5 a month. If I can boost that readership a bit then I will have time to do loads more stuff like this and more original pieces too. But will do my best to give you as much value (even for free) anyway.
SCENE 1 THE SCHOOL STAFF ROOM INT DAY