Oh! The deadline stage is always a bit of a pain...

It’s appropriate to paraphrase a lyric from the musical Calamity Jane when writing about deadlines because their approach often carries the fear of impending calamity, such as a producer using another writer’s material, a DJ having nothing to say, or even (by far the most alarming) an empty page in the Radio Magazine!

I find that fitting writing deadlines around a busy public speaking schedule can be an interesting challenge, although the acquisition of a Blackberry has made emailing topical prep gags a lot easier. In the past, I have faxed material from copy shops, libraries and hotels in various parts of the UK. After speaking at a lunch in Winchester, I dashed out and asked the staff on the reception desk if I could send off a handwritten sketch. It arrived at the BBC bang on the 3pm deadline, was typed up at their end and got broadcast.

The trouble with deadlines is that they have a habit of changing. It’s bad enough when a new radio comedy producer suddenly decides to bring a long-established deadline forward by an hour without them also having a watch that seems to be ten minutes faster than mine!

Mind you, the pressure of a deadline can be very good for creativity. When I write topical material, I study various news sources and make brief notes about any items which I feel could inspire a joke or observation. Sometimes an idea comes to me straight away, fully-formed. Or there might be the germ of an idea which I will develop later. Then there are stories which are just crying out for a gag but nothing occurs to me – until the deadline.

In 1994, I was in a dressing room at the Paris Studios, Lower Regent Street, writing last-minute gags for the live recording celebrating the News Huddlines becoming the longest-running audience radio comedy show in broadcasting history. I’d submitted a number of items to Tony Hare, the script editor, and I knew that several would be used, but there was one news story that just kept nagging me to come up with something.

It was about a gang who had nicked all the pizzas from a delivery man. I read the details again and again: nothing. Then, just as Tony was completing the Stop Press script, this came to me:

‘A delivery man was devastated when his entire vanload of pizzas was stolen. He even tried topping himself – but the cheese kept rolling off his head’.

Yes, it’s a pun – but Roy Hudd loved it and it got one of the biggest laughs of the night. The Pebble Mill cameras were in filming and they showed it in their piece about the show, giving me a sort of TV debut, and the clip was also used when BBC TV South did a feature about my work. So thank you, Dr Deadline.

But I must go because the deadline for another day’s prep is looming; in other words (with further apologies to songwriters Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster):

Setting up jokes, setting up jokes, setting up jokes...

(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 766, 13 December 2006)