I'll be posting topical one-liners on a regular basis.

I will be now be regularly posting some of my topical one-liners suitable for radio presenters, after dinner speakers and comedians on article sites such as Bubblews. Here is a selection based on some recent stories featured in UK newspapers. More to follow...

Topical one-liner suitable for a speech

A study has found that small businesses in Britain are owed £35.3 billion in unpaid invoices. The excuse always used to be 'Your cheque's in the post'; since April it's been 'We're saving up for a first class stamp to put your cheque in the post'. (More details of my topical gags here).

My 1994 BBC TV interview about gag writing

I don't know which to feel more nostalgic about - the amount of open door writing opportunities back then or the amount of hair I still had...

Like the clappers?

The grammar school where I was nearly educated had a Latin teacher who pulled pupils' hair if we got something wrong in a lesson. (As you can see from my picture, Latin wasn't my best subject). I can remember him once telling us how actors in ancient Rome would say 'plaudit' after a performance, which translates as 'applause, please'. (Well, if you have to ask...)

Of course, some audiences don't need to be requested to clap but rather have to be asked to reign in their appreciation. Another memory from my schooldays is of a primary school headmaster informing us that he would appreciate it if the applause at a forthcoming prize-giving where parents and local dignitaries would be present could be more subtle than that at a recent swimming gala. And I once saw a snooker match on TV where an overly-enthusiastic Steve Davis fan clapped in a loud (and lonely) fashion after every single shot his hero played. He was eventually told to tone it down by an official.

(Don't even get me started on the baying mobs at TV talent show auditions...)

But audience response can be stage-managed. Those cheers at the beginning and end of the new-ish, lower-budget version of Countdown don't quite sound spontaneous to me and we are, of course, well into the party conference season with its predictable standing ovations (probably the only exercise some of those delegates get each year).

So what about the applause on radio comedy shows? At my speaking engagements, I often meet people who believe that all the laughing and clapping must be 'canned' or in response to some little bloke frantically jumping up and down holding signs saying 'LAUGHTER', 'APPLAUSE', etc. Some may even have attended tapings of TV shows - some decades ago - where this actually happened.

Having spent some years regularly attending recordings at the BBC Paris Studios and Radio Theatre, I have to try and convince them that this just isn't the case. I have certainly seen producers tell audiences beforehand to be enthusiastic and observed an announcer hold up an arm to signal applause at the end of the opening and closing signatures but that's about it; the lion's share of the response is down to the material, performance - and audience.

For a radio comedy writer it's a great experience when 300 people in the studio applaud an original one-liner of yours. This may be because it makes a point which they agree with or because they simply find it very funny but the most glorious moments are when something subtle gets a laugh which builds into a ripple and then a full round of applause as the penny drops.

But I once wrote for a topical series on Radio 2 which had very little promotion. I didn't attend any of the recordings and perhaps I should have done; judging from the volume of the laughter and applause, this might have boosted the attendance figures by several per cent. It wasn't a bad programme at all but it only ran for one series and I can't help thinking that this lack of audible appreciation helped to seal its fate.

Some of the most enthusiastic responses can be heard when long-running radio comedy panel games record editions away from London, in fact listeners may be left wondering if this is the only live entertainment which has ever been staged in that particular city. How some commercial radio presenters must envy such audience energy when they compare the indifference at their OBs from shopping malls!

Right, that's the end of this column; please feel free to clap. Go on, 'plaudit, plaudit'...

(Reublished from the Radio Magazine, 30 September 2009)

The Right Impression

Once, when I was twelve, I silenced an entire changing room by bellowing outside in the voice of our games master. I then proudly entered to a chorus of 'Oh, Thomas!' If he had been in there, I don't know what would have happened.

As someone who has always had an interest in impressionists, I am rather proud of the fact that the first sketches I ever had used on the radio were performed by Alistair McGowan. Back in 1990 he was a guest cast member on Radio 4's Week Ending but he's done rather well since then.

There are certainly some very good impressionists on TV (many of whom started in radio) but however accurate the voice and brilliant the make-up, they are often let down by a lack of physical similarity to the impressionee (let's coin a new word, shall we?) I don't think I am alone in thinking that Dead Ringers worked better on radio than television.

Over the years, I have written for a large number of impressionists on Week Ending, for the London Fringe and Edinburgh Festival show Newsrevue, Brighton's Treason Show and many cabaret performers.

One thing I have noticed is that you cannot be in the company of an impressionist for long without them having to prove that they can impersonate the famous - even if you have heard them perform many times over the years. Imagine the scene: the restaurant on the end of Bournemouth Pier, lunchtime, height of summer. The place is packed and I am having a meeting with an impressionist I have known for years about some material I'm writing for him. He's not a household name but he has had numerous TV appearances and he works solidly. He's also a very nice chap - a showbiz/media person who I have never heard say anything negative about anyone (weird!) Halfway through our discussion, he goes into his Michael Jackson impression. No crotch-grabbing, llamas or baby-dangling but enough high-pitched squeaks to have send me sliding down my seat under the table supporting my haddock and chips. I tell you, I earn my money.

I wrote for twelve years for the News Huddlines which mixed impersonations with caricatures. The first 'long' sketch of mine they ever used featured the show's excellent Chris Emmett as a showreel for an after dinner speaking agency offering Derek Jameson, Frank Bruno and Sir John Harvey-Jones. But when a famous person was in the news whose voice was nondescript or not well-known to the public, it was a case of 'How shall we do ---- ----?' Thus June Whitfield's interpretation of Norma Major revisited her Eth voice from Take It From Here and her Queen Mother was a bizarre but much-loved hybrid of Irene Handl and Mrs Bridges from Upstairs Downstairs. Roy Hudd, meanwhile, played Denis Thatcher as Ray Allen's vent doll Lord Charles. Such caricatures continue to this day with Little Britain's baffling but amusing depiction of Dennis 'feme toon' Waterman.

Topical shows often have to feature some newsworthy person, regardless of whether they can be easily imitated or not, so the dialogue in a sketch may need to explain who on earth the actor is meant to be. But what irritates me is when club acts who have total choice over over who to impersonate open with 'Hello, ---- ---- here!' I mean, if you have to explain that you're ---- ---- then why bother at all? Sadly, even pretty good impressionists frequently attempt that one voice too many, the one which is way beyond them.

Another annoying type of mimic simply impersonates other impressionists' impersonations, if you see what I mean, complete with the same invented catchphrases.

Worst of all for me are the 'comedianalikes'. Yes, they do exist, such as the one I saw advertised as 'A tribute to Peter Kay'. I mean, why? Peter Kay is awfully good but he was very much alive the last time I looked (young even) and thus pretty easy to see. It's different when it's a much-loved figure from the past, of course. One act I know does very well as a Tommy Cooper tribute. Now there is a star who is remembered with great affection a quarter of a century after his passing and this chap concentrates more on magic tricks, gags and telling TC's life story than trying to be a perfect copy of him.

But back in the 90s, I was commissioned to write some material for an 'impressionist' whose act consisted solely of pretending to be Harry Enfield's Tim Nice-But-Dim. I just couldn't do it and after several weeks received a furious phone call demanding to know why he hadn't received his gags and threatening to report me to Equity! I returned his cheque with pleasure, relieved to be free of trying to write for a seemingly pointless performer who wanted to get all his laughs by default.

There's art in good impressions but simply copying someone else, well, that's the stuff of the playground - or even the school changing room.

(Republished from the Radio Magazine Issue 851, 30 July 2008 and Issue 873, 7 January 2009)

Review: “Prime Minister, You Wanted To See Me?” - A History of Week Ending by Ian Greaves and Justin Lewis (Kaleidoscope Publishing)

The obvious joke is that this book would be a bestseller even if the only people who bought it were the writers who worked on Week Ending. On just one show, in fact.

To describe this remarkably detailed guide to a topical, satirical programme which was broadcast most weeks on Radio 4 for 28 years as a labour of love is too much of an understatement, especially as its authors, Ian Greaves and Justin Lewis, never actually contributed to the show themselves. They are, however, established and respected historians of broadcast comedy and have produced a work which not only begins with an extended article about the show’s history but also gives an episode guide to every broadcast: 1,132 regular episodes plus specials and compilations. Then there are the tables of the most prolific writers (apparently I am number 31 based on the number of shows I had material used on: 149), wavelength shifts, broadcasting timelines, the spin-off merchandising (remarkably little for such a long-running programme), the stories behind the four signature tunes, details of documentaries about Week Ending and even of the parodies that were done of a show which so often spoofed others.

Week Ending was first broadcast in April 1970 with a budget of £150, a frontman in the form of Michael ‘Nationwide’ Barratt and one writer, Pete Spence. It was taken off a few weeks later, not as a result of the atrocious reviews it attracted but because topical comedy could not be broadcast during a general election (although as the first producer Simon Brett points out in his introductory essay, satire was pretty unfashionable at this time anyway).

When the show returned, the anchorman idea was dropped and a regular cast gradually formed. Most significantly, a weekly spot by a guest journalist entitled ‘Next Week’s News’ was altered to a collection of snappy one-liners. Soon listeners were sending in their own gags for this feature, the writing credits grew longer and so began the ‘open door’ policy for new writers which Week Ending became famous for (although it wasn’t until years later that producer Griff Rhys Jones introduced open meetings for writers).

It’s well known that the show was a starting point for dozens of famous scriptwriters and performers: David Jason, Andrew Marshall and David Renwick, Guy Jenkin, Rory Bremner, Mark Burton and John O’Farrell, Rob Newman and David Baddiel and, during my time there, Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, Andy Parsons and Henry Naylor, Al Murray, Harry Hill, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins, etc, etc, but I had no idea until I read this book that in Week Ending’s early days, it benefitted from help supplied by the already-established Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Willie Rushton.

Many of the producers who worked on it have died in recent years: David Hatch, Harry Thompson, Jonathan James-Moore, and, just weeks ago, Geoffrey Perkins, who in 1976 took the show in a more hard-hitting direction. Amazingly, it wasn’t until the following year that the first female cast member, Sheila Steafel, joined (before this, it fell to an understandably reluctant Nigel Rees to supply the Thatcher impressions!)

It’s interesting to note how little some things change at the BBC. Bob Sinfield is quoted bemoaning the lack of typewriters in 16 Langham Street in the early 80s; I found myself taking my own on the train with me up from Bournemouth in the 90s and only last week I noticed a Facebook group called Can We PLEASE have New Computers in the Writers’ Room at Henry Wood House?

The book actually serves as a mini-manual for aspiring writers. Take this timeless advice given in the 80s by the show’s producer Paul Spencer: ‘Start small...Don’t try and write massive sketches, do quickies: Someone does this/Why do they want to do that?/Bang – Punchline’. The title, incidentally, is from what was considered the most clichéd way to open a Week ending ‘head-to-head’ sketch (formats were usually preferred),

In 1990, a new producer, Sarah Smith, deciding that the show was ‘heavy-handed s---‘, changed the style to make it faster, sillier – and funnier. She was the first to use any of my own sketches and her episode to mark the resignation of Margaret Thatcher was stunning. Other producers, such as Armando Iannucci, Jon Magnusson and Gareth Edwards also chose this style while more traditionalist producers reverted to slower versions in between.

This lack of consistency may have contributed to Week Ending’s eventual demise in 1998 but, as the book points out, it was probably more to do with increasingly inexperienced cast members and producers, the growing fashion for writer-performers in comedy shows and the appointment of a new Radio 4 controller, James Boyle, who was determined to scrap it.

One of the great things about this narrative is that it doesn’t flinch from detailing the behind-the-scenes clashes over the years, such as the rows between the cast and early producers who were frustrated performers themselves: Douglas Adams and Jan Ravens. I loved the anecdote about James Boyle sheepishly presenting actress Sally Grace with vintage champagne and her reply that she’d never seen a P45 shaped like that before. And I laughed out loud at producer Liz Anstee’s description of him as ‘the man with a whim of iron’.

In 1990, in one of a flurry of documentaries to mark Week Ending’s 20th anniversary, Griff Rhys Jones joked that the BBC would always have to keep making it whether they broadcast it or not because of the number of new writers it produced. Since its demise, there have certainly been far fewer ‘open door’ shows, particularly since the end of the News Huddlines in 2001. I think broadcast comedy everywhere is poorer as a result.

One show I would have liked to have seen mentioned was What On Earth?, a shameless attempt to get an immediate replacement for Week Ending on Radio 2 a few months later. The seven episodes were under-promoted (and, from the sound of the studio audience, under-attended) but they gave those of us who knew about them some welcome additional credits and income that summer.

Most of the rest of the book (500+ pages) is taken up by the episode guide which is a fascinating historical document; despite the punning/cryptic titles of many sketches, it is possible to see what was being satirised and when, complete with writing and performing credits and even the running times – a radio comedy anorak’s paradise!

Last year, Justin Lewis interviewed me as part of his research and stunned me by telling me that I’d had material used by 20 different producers over the eight years that I was a regular gag (and occasional sketch) writer for the show, Two hours just flew by as I remembered a funny and exciting time in my life. I’m sure many others will feel the same affection when they see this book – listeners as well as the many writers!

“Prime Minister, You Wanted To See Me?” – A History of Week Ending is available now.





(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 862, 15 October 2008)

Course remarks

Last year, I wrote a series of articles for the Radio Magazine showing presenters how to write their own comedy material but for seven years, I taught adult education comedy writing classes heavily biased towards radio (in those days the most accessible market for freelancers, thanks to the BBC’s ‘open door’ policy).

Daytime courses attracted writers ranging from students to OAPs, with very different tastes in comedy, but we managed to find common ground. Some were instantly successful; a chap now in his seventies, who remains a friend, had material used on Week Ending, the News Huddlines and on TV by Rory Bremner before the course finished (I've never had anything used by Bremner!)

We covered many forms of humorous writing and had some great laughs. One lovely moment was when a lady (sadly no longer with us) with a real talent for comic verse sang a version of My Way on her last lesson, rewritten about how much she’d enjoyed the classes.

But not all my memories are fond ones. My first course attracted a harridan who only seemed to want to write bad taste material, rather like the ‘jokes’ that circulate after major tragedies. She would make disparaging remarks about myself and my clothes or would sit reading rather than paying any attention to what I was teaching. During one lesson, I asked the class to listen to the next edition of Week Ending, adding that I would give them details of how to submit material the following week. There was a sound reason for this: I wanted them to study the show first so that they would not waste the producer’s time with material that wasn’t suitable. My nemesis started loudly accusing me of deliberately holding back information (why would I?)

As the first half-term ended, she got a big laugh from everybody with a tasteless anecdote about a patient dying when she was (worryingly) a nurse. She never returned for the rest of the course; we felt as if a cloud had lifted. I later discovered that she had once made the front page of a newspaper by getting sectioned under the Mental Health Act after reacting in a novel way to a dispute over her housing benefit: by attempting to drive her car through the doors of the council offices. I still sometimes spot her out and about but she doesn’t recognise me. If she ever does, I relish the prospect of saying ‘Hi, ------, driven into any good town halls lately?’ Not that I’ve borne a grudge since 1997…

As the years went on, daytime classes became harder to fill, not helped by the service frequently omitting them from the brochure index. The minimum quota of students required to run courses seemed to increase in tandem with the number of highly-paid administrators being employed so I started teaching evening classes for the local college. These attracted younger students and were fine, provided I wasn’t being bawled out in front of my class by an obnoxious administrator for not noticing that a window was slightly open or being irritated by a caretaker hovering outside ten minutes before the lessons which my students were paying for were due to end.

I finished teaching for them after they paid me (public money!) to attend a meeting to arrange the timetable for my next courses – and then simply reproduced listings from the previous year, thereby advertising some on days when I wasn’t available and omitting others altogether. I sent my boss an email expressing my opinion that he couldn’t organise the proverbial distillery-based celebration.

So can you teach people to be funny? Well, you can certainly sharpen their talents. Adult education employers, on the other hand, just seem to be unintentionally comical.

(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 833, 26 March 2008)

Continuing on this theme of teaching comedy, I must just add that I thought the booklet about writing comedy which came free with the Guardian last week was excellent. There were a number of big-name contributors, the majority of it being a tutorial by Richard Herring. (and yes, it was mostly written by Richard Herring!)I predict numerous 'Wanted' appeals and copies of this freebie changing hands on eBay in the months to come. On the other hand, you could just read it here!

For those who prefer something longer, I think this is the best British book:



And here is a good US comedy writing manual:

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)

Cracking over the papers

Since the previous posts first appeared in the Radio Magazine, I now spend rather less time in cafes and a lot more researching news stories for topical gags at home on the internet. This more recent piece describes this (often mind-numbing) process...

During my brief spell as a stand up comic there was a fellow comedian at London clubs who would begin his act with ‘Which do I use: HP, Daddy’s, Lee and Perrins? I’m not telling you; a good comedian never reveals his sauces’. Confidently delivered, this Tim Vine-style wordplay got a laugh.

But I thought I would tell you about the endless daily news sources I have to trawl through to come up with the quota of (generally pun-free) show prep that I write for radio presenters.

It’s not so bad when I’m on my way to speaking engagements; I just buy a Sun, Mail (and, if it’s a long journey, a Telegraph as well) at Bournemouth station and hop on the train. I block out the chattering of Brockenhurst College students and announcements from overly descriptive buffet stewards and just concentrate. Ideas seem to form pretty rapidly; gags and observations are noted down and then sent by Blackberry before or after my talk.

But if I’m at home in front of a screen with access to ALL the news sources… You’ve heard of Parkinson’s Law that work expands to fill the time available? Well, so do newspaper websites!

I start with Ananova. Now, I know there are those who say it’s overused by presenters but it is irresistible, especially the Quirkies. The majority of these stories seem to come from either China, where, let’s face it, there are a lot more people available to take part in peculiar activities, or Croatia, a significantly smaller country where they just seem to do weird things anyway.

Then I look at showbiz news on Digital Spy Wire which takes entertainment stories from all the UK and US media. The trouble is, the headlines only include surnames so you have to click on them and investigate the story further. Take today, for example: ‘Lloyd dates businessman in Paris’. Which Lloyd? Emily Lloyd, the award-winning actress? Wendy Lloyd, the DJ-turned-singer songwriter? Surely not a misspelled Loyd Grossman? No, it’s Danielle Lloyd. Not even interesting. But I usually get the odd idea from somewhere on DSW.

The Daily Mirror site has a strange new habit of putting people’s names in headlines there, even if they’re not well-known, so I will read something like ‘Bill Bloggs leaves wife for postmistress’ and wonder whether this Bloggs chap is an important public figure who I’ve somehow missed hearing about rather just some randy vicar.

Where next? Oh yes, the Daily Mail. If only they wouldn’t distract me with their serialised books or the furious readers’ comments under some item about political correctness/petty officialdom.

Next stop: the Sun. Always good for a broad range of stories but I can’t help noticing that by now I’m taking ages longer than when I write on the train using just a couple of hard-copy sources and I’m still nowhere near my daily quota of material!

After this, I’ll look at the Evening Standard which posts new, mostly London-based stories – but I have to wait until around midday for them.

Nearly there. I love the Telegraph’s current (and perhaps, for them, surprising) in-depth reporting of men having sex with inanimate objects: a bicycle, a Henry vacuum cleaner, a lamp-post... (Mind you, one of the dodgiest gags I ever had broadcast by the BBC was about a story I once saw in that paper in 1995 about a man in Ghana caught having sex with a cow because he didn’t want the health risks of having sex with a human. Punchline: he’s now UHT positive…)

The quota has, at last, been reached but I can exceed it if I also read the Times, Guardian, Independent, Sky and BBC News online. Then there’s Reuters, Associated Press, Exchange & Mart...

Perhaps I should just buy a few papers each morning and get on a train – regardless of whether I have a talk to go to or not!

(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 831, 12 March 2008)

An excellent article about topical monologues

Many comedy fans in the UK will be familiar with the Tonight Show with Jay Leno or Late Night with Letterman but may well have missed this superb article by Sam Anderson in New York magazine about their different approaches to the recent writers' strike in the United States. It includes some acute observations about the daily grind of producing a quota of topical humour.

Preparation, Preparation, Preparation (Parts 1 & 2)

I think a good way to start this blog will be by posting the first two Radio Gagster columns I had published in the Radio Magazine. These were all about the daily show prep service of topical gags which I have been supplying to commercial radio presenters for fourteen years. The only real change since this two-part article appeared is that the material is now delivered by email from home or Blackberry when I am out at a speaking engagement rather than leaving gags on a presenter's voicemail.

Part 1

Every day, a shortish, balding man goes to a café and sits leafing through a pile of newspapers, occasionally stopping to scribble the odd hurried note. From time to time, over the past twelve years, intrigued fellow diners have asked him ‘What exactly are you doing?’

So I tell them: ‘Writing jokes for independent local radio presenters’.

That was one of the first things I learnt. Commercial radio disc jockeys are presenters. (Unless, of course, a club owner calls and says ‘I need a DJ tonight – it’s good money!’ Then they temporarily become jocks again).

But whatever you call my clients, or my service (Prep? Programme Support? Link-writing?), it’s what I’ve done since August 1 1994.

It wasn’t planned. I’d spent years working on national topical shows like ‘Week Ending’ and ‘News Huddlines’ and I’d seen some of my BBC colleagues get head-hunted to write for Simon Mayo on Radio 1 (very lucrative!) but I hadn’t considered presenters as an additional market for me. Instead, I was advertising in the ‘Stage’ to write speeches for weddings, routines for comics, etc.

Then, one Friday night, I got a call from a presenter on a tiny station I’d never heard of. Between rushing his tea before hurrying off to one of those club gigs (busy lives, presenters, second thing I learnt) he told me that he wanted eight daily topical gags or observations. He was using another writer but I could supply him on alternate days.

I faxed him the first selection the following Monday. A week later, he asked me to write for him every day. He was livid because his other writer’s entire quota had been about mass-murderer Fred West – totally unbroadcastable!

Since then, he’s gone from graveyard to primetime (the presenter, I mean, not Fred West), and from that small station to one of the majors, always using my material as well as his own original ideas. But he needn’t have a seizure reading this because I’m not going to identify him. That’s the important thing about this service: confidentiality. No-one has ever known that he uses my writing, we’ve never even met (in fact, I have never met any presenters I’ve written for).

It’s been pretty cloak and dagger at times. Nowadays, I mostly send material by voice or email but for many years it was a case of waiting for a phone call with the loudly whispered ‘The fax is clear, put it through now!’

And not just from him but from others because the service grew, due in no small part to an ad in the ‘Radio Magazine’. Within eighteen months, I had four clients in different parts of the country, so I was able to syndicate material without any overlap (digital/internet radio makes such total exclusivity impossible nowadays but it’s still assumed that most listeners only tune in to local stations in their own regions). And when additional presenters contacted me in areas where I already had a client using daily topical humour, I was able to provide them with alternatives, such as Birthday and Anniversary or Golden Hour/Hits and Headlines gags.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve learnt a great deal over these past twelve years; I used to think that ‘reach’ was a toothbrush, ‘demographic’ was a diagram of a protest march and ‘swing presenters’ only played Count Basie tracks (the jokes I write for radio are much better than those, honestly). In the next article I’ll tell you about the highs, lows and funny side of being one of radio’s hidden humorists.

Part 2

Last time, I wrote about how I came to supply comedy for ILR stations. But what sort of life is it?

Precarious, certainly. Presenters who use my service tend to stay with me for years but it’s still possible to lose them, not through a decline in the quality of the material but because shows are never static. The introduction of phone-ins, requests or banter between on-air crews may leave no room for scripted links.

Cash flow is also problematic. As I’ve mentioned, presenters lead hectic lives. Invoices must go out well in advance as cheques may take weeks to arrive. It’s much worse when I’m paid by stations themselves and have to deal with infuriating, centralised accounts departments who say they’ve had nothing from Programming while Programming say it went off weeks ago…paperwork ping-pong. I actually once had some accounting minion making typing noises down the phone as he pretended to send off a furious email to a station.

Some presenters can’t really afford the service. I wrote for years for a lovely chap who had taken a massive pay cut from a top industry job to work in radio. We had payment problems for months before parting company, with me having to write off hundreds. The last I heard, he was a Programme Controller!

I’m not always kept informed. I was dictating daily gags on a presenter’s voicemail before he rather sheepishly called to say he’d actually been on holiday for ten days. He paid up anyway.

Writing for breakfast shows is tricky as we don’t get the papers early enough here in Bournemouth but I have found that items from the previous day’s ‘Evening Standard’ and news programmes become national stories the next morning.

Then there are stations who only want jokes about their own areas. It’s amazing how ingenious I can be at crow-barring in the relevance of a story from the Orkneys to city life hundreds of miles away!

Slow news days are easier now we have many sources in addition to the papers, particularly the web. At one time, if there was no inspiration in the press, it was a case of desperately searching for something from Welsh Headlines on Ceefax! And if the news is full of tragedy (e.g. 9/11), my services are not needed as stations cut back on humour.

What do I write about? It helps to know demographics, but generally, topical gags about current events/personalities, inventions, surveys, trends, pop culture (for a heterosexual man in his forties I have a surprisingly detailed knowledge of boy bands) and timeless, observational humour about everyday life.

Subjects to avoid are politics, the politically incorrect, drugs, anything too risqué (although I wrote for years for one breakfast presenter before finally hearing his remarkably rude show. The material he could have had if I’d known…) and gags about a station’s advertisers.

And what do I get from this, besides payment? Well, since the demise of ‘Week Ending’ and ‘News Huddlines’, it means my material continues on the radio. No audience laughter, no mention in the credits, but still the knowledge that a six-figure audience is hearing my jokes.

It’s become an unbreakable habit. I write on holiday, I even wrote for a show one Christmas Day.

One last thing. Dictating gags in public is hideously embarrassing.

So if you see a shortish, balding man getting odd looks from elderly ladies while bellowing something about ‘Chantelle’ into his mobile in the only part of the street outside the cafe with a signal, well, in the words of that song by Sting and Eric Clapton: ‘It’s Probably Me’.

(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 728, 29 March 2006 and Issue 730, 12 April 2006)

Over time, I came to discover just how frowned-upon radio show prep services are in some quarters - despite the fact that all I'm really doing is augmenting a programme in an 'additional material by...' capacity, just as I did for BBC shows for twelve years. In the end, I wrote an article in defence of show prep services. You can read it here.