Hugely flatteringly if that’s a thing, people are actually listening to No Batteries Required on Soundcloud. I only put it up yesterday.
If you’ve got 34 minutes to spare you can listen too. It’s an everyday story of country folk, mostly, with some odd and debatably funny things in it.
Without giving away the ending, or the location of the Prime Minister’s tattoo (for security purposes, of course) it’s about a farmer and a celebrity chef. The funny things happened when I was writing it. I’d been thinking about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who screamingly funnily becomes Pew Farley-Toherstall for the purposes of the play. So far so so. But he really did go to school and then up to Oxford with David Cameron. And if not even David Cameron would be bonkers enough to make Jeremy Clarkson Minister for Transport, there were certainly very strong rumours that Kirsty Alsop was going to be offered a Ministerial post prior to 2010 and turned it down. And she really is Cath Kidston’s cousin. And her daddy really was chairman of Christies. So you can make your own judgement about her career progression dahn the auctions, as she almost certainly doesn’t say unless she’s very drunk indeed.
For me the funniest thing was the pin number on the Prime Minister’s emergency phone. I gave this script to several people to have a look at it before we recorded. A solicitor friend so that the caution was correct, when Tom is at the police station. An actual police sergeant, for some of the procedural stuff. She said she hadn’t been on a firearms job but it sounded about right. Funny. She liked it. Just one thing.
I hate it when a police person says ‘just one thing.’
‘How did you know about the PIN number?’
It’s not really officially secret, she said, but you’re not really supposed to know about it.
And the honest answer is, I didn’t. I made it up. It was the most ridiculous thing I could think of, the most British procedural thing I could imagine, the thing you’d be most likely to forget under stress, which would be the only time you’d need it.
So it’s a fair cop, guv. You’ve got me bang to rights. I’m done up like a kipper. But I ain’t got previous and it was the voices made me do it.
And as she said, in the best Jack Reagan tradition before I poured her some more wine: ‘Shut it.‘
