Both work on the extreme spectrum of human experience, requiring the characters to be tolerant of the outrageous acts of others. The only thing that separates this from a first-class psychological thriller is Hancock’s terror-stricken mug and Sid James guffawing like a loon.īoth comedy and thrillers work within strict structures the gun on the mantelpiece in act one has to be fired in act three, just like the set-up gag in the first scene has to be detonated in the last scene. The build up of unease and fear is brilliantly done the stuff on which first class crime noir is made of. It is just brilliant – one of my favourite thrillers. Finding an outlet for his deep subconscious self-loathing, he is sleep writing letters and posting them to himself. It is Hancock himself! He is sleepwalking. The tension mounts until, late at night, we discover the perpetrator. For example, there is a classic ‘Hancock’ episode where Tony Hancock is gets sent poison pen letters from a mysterious individual. I have always wanted to write one, and, more importantly, I thought I would be good at writing one.Īnd, in my opinion, there isn’t really a lot of difference between comedy and crime. There wasn’t a smoking gun in Finchley library I hadn’t fired. When I was on the dole in the 90s, I devoured them all. I made a cynical calculation that I was passionate enough about thrillers that I could knock out 100,000 words and do them justice.Īnd I really love thrillers and detective novels. Passion is important to me when I write, mainly because I get bored easily. But before I give you impression that I’m a very cynical person (which is a completely accurate impression, by the way) what’s the other big reason why people turn to crime?Ĭan cynicism and passion sit so closely together? Those strangers in a train? Absolutely. It sounds a bit brutal, but then again so is murder. I went to Radio 4 because I thought I’d be good enough at comedy to earn cash, and I wrote a thriller because I thought I could kill people for money. So everything I do, when it comes down to it, comes down to money.
My dad wanted to be a Gamekeeper like his dad, and his dad told him to work in the wood-yard, just for a few months ‘until things settle down’, and fifty years later my dad looks back on a life that defines him as a Lumberjack.īut inside my head, I’m still a writer of stuff, and I’m happy to write anything, as long as it kept me away from that job unpleasantness. I starting working on a satirical Radio 4 programmed called ‘Weekending’, and earned a bit of money, and then a bit more, and then came ‘Dead Ringers’, and then lots of other topical shows on radio and television, and then came ‘Private Eye’, and they still insisted on paying me, and the years passed, and I stopped being a Writer and became a Comedy Writer and then a Satirical Topical Comedy Writer, because that’s what happens - everyone in the world becomes typecast at some point, just because of what fate throws at your feet. In terms of job security in Regent Street, it was about one step up from the guy holding the ‘Golf Sale’ sign. I was writing plays for the Fringe until I realised I was doing a lot of work for no money, so I went to Radio 4, where you could literally walk out of Oxford Circus tube and earn pennies writing topical comedy. So I did all the things I thought I should do, and got nowhere extremely fast. The trick was to find a way to get people to pay me actual money. The trick was to find a way to do this writing thing, and not have things like jobs getting in the way. Children’s books, comics, plays, poems sketches…As long as it involved words in some sort of coherent pattern, I didn’t mind. I know lots of other writers encountered this too: the problem is both simple and insanely complicated: Knowing you were a writer was the easy part working out what you were supposed to write was difficult, because for most of us, that’s the least important bit. I knew was a writer ever since I was seven, when I first put fat HB pencil to exercise book. What is the main reason people turn to murder? Why have I, a comedy writer, turned to crime?
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