Influences

“I had grown up enjoying very old radio comedies like Hancock's Half Hour, Round the Horne… Which influenced my sort of sense of humour and what I like to write about.”

First Attempts

“Then, at university, our student theatre was doing a radio channel…which didn't last very long. And I didn't really have any ideas except what pretty much every comedy writer does as their first radio comedy …which is a detective comedy. Called Drayton Trench.

Because I didn't really know what I was doing, you end up breaking lots of rules that otherwise you probably would have abided by - lots of visual stuff like a sequence in The Louvre, where somebody comes down in a helicopter, grabs a valuable painting, runs up the Eiffel Tower and has a fight at the top… 

Because I didn't have a producer I also edited it all myself.
        I thought, well, if I ever do this again, I'll need some very talented producers because this is agony, and maybe they will do it instead. But I certainly still went in with this idea of, well, you write the impossible and just see what happens.”

“…write the impossible and just see what happens.”

“And that didn't have a narrator either. So you make sure that people can understand what's happening without having to resort to: “Oh God, you're pointing a gun at me”; “Oh God, you pulled the trigger”; “Oh God, you shot me”...

We then redid it, and re-recorded it, with a new cast -  including Felix Trench, Tom Crowley and Beth Eyre - in London.” 

Read the story behind Wooden Overcoats.
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Photo: Odinn Orn Hilmarsson