The "Horrid Henry" creator gives us an out-take from her successful opera, unpublished articles and some other children's book ideas that despite her stellar international reputation still didn't get picked up.

Clips performed by: Beth Chalmers, Emma Clarke, Leah Marks, David Holt, Rachel Atkins and Keith Wickham.

Francesca Simon is universally known for the staggeringly popular Horrid Henry series. These books and CDs have sold over 22 million copies and are published in 29 countries. Horrid Henry and the Abominable Snowman won the Children's Book of the the Year award in 2008 at the British Book Awards. She is also the author of Costa-shortlisted The Monstrous Child for older readers, and Hack and Whack, her first picture book. To date she has published over 50 books for children of all ages including picture books, early readers and a young adult trilogy based on norse mythology.

Collaborating with composer Gavin Higgins, Francesca recently wrote the libretto for The Monstrous Child turning it into an opera which received rave reviews when it was staged at The Royal Opera House, London in 2019.

For more details about the writer, the offcuts and the actors performing them see the episode show notes:  https://offcutsdrawer.com/francesca-simon

"Friday Night Dinner" writer Popper shares some truly bizarre offcuts including the fake CV that landed him his big break in comedy, a prank community woodland notice and a sitcom about a wasp.

Clips performed by: David Holt, Alex Lowe, Toby Longworth and Lizzie Roper.

Warning: This episode contains strong language.

Robert Popper is an award-winning writer, producer, performer, and bestselling author.  He is the writer and producer of all 6 series of Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner, he co-created and starred in BBC 2’s Look Around You with Peter Serafinowicz, produced the Bafta-winning Peep Show, wrote on season 14 of South Park, and script-edited British TV comedies The Inbetweeners, The IT Crowd and Him & Her. More recently he co-wrote several episodes of Channel 4's Stath Lets Flats.

Under his pseudonym, Robin Cooper, he wrote the bestselling The Timewaster Letters and the follow-up, Return of The Timewaster Letters, and an audio compendium of both has just been released on Audible read by Popper himself and featuring the voices of Serafinowicz and Dawn French. 

For more details about the writer, the offcuts and the actors performing them see the episode show notes:  https://offcutsdrawer.com/robert-popper

A grab-bag of television and film scripts that didn't quite make it including a drama about GI brides and a psychological mystery set in the Scottish Highlands from screenwriter Andrea.

Clips performed by: Kate O’Sulivan, Kenny Blyth, Lizzie Roper, Shash Hira, Emma Clarke, David Monteath, Rachel Atkins and Beth Chalmers.

Warning: This episode contains strong language.

Andrea Gibb is an award winning Scottish screenwriter who has worked extensively in both film and television. Her feature length screenplays for ‘Dear Frankie’ and ‘Afterlife’ won her the Scottish Screen Filmmaker of the Year award and the Women In Film and Television script award in 2005. Her adaptation of classic children’s novel ‘Swallows and Amazons’ (BBC Films) was released in cinemas in 2016 and won the Grand Jury prize at the New York Children’s Film festival and the family film award at Seattle Film Festival. She was nominated for the Carl Foreman award at the Bafta film awards for ‘Afterlife’ and has just been nominated for a Bafta television award and two Bafta Scotland awards for ‘Elizabeth Is Missing’, adapted from the novel into a single television film for STV starring Glenda Jackson. This film also won her the writer’s award at the 2020 RTS Scotland awards.

She has written four episodes of ‘Call The Midwife’ for Neal Street and the BBC and an episode of ‘Sanditon’ for Red Planet and ITV.

For more details about the writer, the offcuts and the actors performing them see the episode show notes:  https://offcutsdrawer.com/andrea-gibb/

The West End theatre version of TV's "The Good Life", the "Toys" musical that came *before* the film... Jeremy's selection of near misses covers both stage and screen.

Clips performed by:  Alex Lowe, Lizzie Roper, David Holt, Beth Chalmers, Toby Longworth and Emma Clarke.

Warning: This episode contains strong language.

Jeremy Sams has written and created countless successful theatre shows including Amour (Broadway), Ghetto (National Theatre and Broadway), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (West End and Broadway), and The Wizard of Oz (West End and tour). He's translated operas and plays such as Indiscretions (Broadway), The Miser and Mary Stuart (Royal National Theatre), The Rehearsal, Don Giovanni, Figaro’s Wedding, La Bohème, The Magic Flute, Wagner’s Ring Cycle (ENO), Die Fledermaus and The Merry Widow (New York), and he wrote and devised The Enchanted Island for the Metropolitan Opera of New York. 

His directorial credits include Die Fledermaus (Metropolitan Opera), The Wizard of Oz (West End, Toronto, US tour), The King and I (Royal Albert Hall), The Sound of Music (London Palladium, world tour), 13 The Musical (Broadway), Donkey’s Years (Comedy Theatre), Little Britain Live, Noises Off (West End and Broadway), Passion (West End), Wild Oats (RNT), The Wind in the Willows (Tokyo, Old Vic) and Spend Spend Spend (Olivier-nominated - West End).

As a composer, he has written, arranged and directed music for over 50 shows for theatre, TV and film, including: The Wind in the Willows, Arcadia (RNT and Lincoln Center), The Mother (BBC), Enduring Love (Pathé), for which he won the Ivor Novello Award, Hyde Park on Hudson, Le Weekend and Persuasion (BBC Films) for which he won a BAFTA.

For more details about the writer, the offcuts and the actors performing them see the episode show notes:  https://offcutsdrawer.com/jeremy-sams

Creator of "Guilt" and "Eric, Ernie & Me" Neil showcases some other shows that didn't quite make it and shares what it's really like writing for American TV.

Clips performed by: Lynsey Murrell, Beth Chalmers, David Monteath, Kate O'Sullivan, Nigel Pilkington and Kenny Blyth.

Warning: This episode contains strong language.

Neil Forsyth is an author and television writer. In television he is a Royal Television Society Award winner, and has been nominated for a BAFTA, a Writer’s Guild Award, and a Broadcast Press Guild Award.

He is the author of seven books: Other People’s Money, the biography of Scottish credit card fraudster Elliot Castor, two well-received novels and the UK bestselling series of Bob Servant humour titles.

Neil adapted his series of books about Bob Servant for BBC Television, with the eponymous role played by Emmy Award winner Brian Cox. The TV show ran for two series, won the Royal Television Society Scotland Award for Comedy and was nominated for the Scottish Comedy BAFTA.

Neil has written four SKY Arts Playhouses and his one-off BBC4 drama Eric, Ernie and Me which told the story of Morecambe and Wise writer Eddie Braben was nominated for Best Short Form Drama in the 2018 Broadcast Press Guild Awards. His original 4 part series Guilt starring Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives was broadcast on BBC 2 and BBC Scotland, received a best writer nomination for RTS Awards 2020 and a second series is currently in production.

For more details about the writer, the offcuts and the actors performing them see the episode show notes:  https://offcutsdrawer.com/neil-forsyth

A sweary Karen Carpenter tribute act, women's rugby and the first black female astronaut - actress/comedian Jackie reveals an interesting range of subjects in her offcuts.

Clips performed by: Lynsey Murrell, Beth Chalmers and Lizzie Roper.

Warning: This episode contains strong language.

Veteran of the British theatre Jackie Clune started out as a drama lecturer before achieving critical success in her first one-woman show about Karen Carpenter at the Edinburgh Festival. She went on to write six more shows, and to star in plays written by other writers - including Mamma Mia, Billy Elliott, Emilia and 9 To 5 - The Musical. She's played Julie Burchill on the West End stage in the one-woman play Julie Burchill Is Away and toured with the all-female Henry IV production that went to New York, and on TV her many credits include Eastenders, Ghosts, Motherland and Borderline.

As a writer she has contributed to sketch shows Smack The Pony and BBC Comedy Nation, she is regularly featured in magazines and newspapers such as The Guardian, The Mail, Red and Top Sante (where she has a regular column), and as an author she has written two books "Extreme Motherhood" and "Man of the Month Club" with her third book, the novel "I'm Just A Teenage Punchbag" published last year, and her fourth "Give A Little Love" due out in June 2021.

For more details about the writer, the offcuts and the actors performing them see the episode show notes:  https://offcutsdrawer.com/jackie-clune/

Comedy, horror, Scottish football and a dog pooing in a bedsit are all to be found in the never-before-heard clips from best-selling thriller writer Chris.

Clips performed by: Christopher Kent, David Holt, David Monteath and Emma Clarke.

Warning: This episode contains strong language.

Chris was born in Glasgow and worked as a sub-editor at Screen International, the Scotsman and the Edinburgh Evening News before his first novel, Quite Ugly One Morning, won the First Blood Award in 1996 for the best first crime novel of the year. Twenty-three novels followed.

In 2006 he won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing. In 2005 he was named Glasgow University Young Alumnus of the Year and in 2007 he won the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award for writing. In 2016 his novel Black Widow won the inaugural McIlvanney Prize for best Scottish crime novel of the year. In 2017 it was named the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year.  His latest novel The Cut will be published imminently.

Also under the pseudonym Ambrose Parry, he has collaborated with his wife, Marisa Haetzman, to produce the historical crime novels The Way of All Flesh and The Art of Dying, which depict life at the cutting edge of Edinburgh medicine in the Nineteenth Century, and a third novel is in the works.

For more details about the writer, the offcuts and the actors performing them see the episode show notes:  https://offcutsdrawer.com/chris-brookmyre

Michael Gove humiliating himself at university, a KGB-supplied sex manual and tales of derring-do in warzones around the world from foreign correspondent Luke.

Clips performed by: Christopher Kent, Lynsey Murrell and Nigel Pilkington.

Luke Harding is an award-winning British foreign correspondent with the Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and has also covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya and Syria. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief; the Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war. He is the author of Mafia State and co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (nominated for the Orwell Prize) and The Snowden Files and his latest book The Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia's Remaking of the West was published earlier this year.

For more details about the writer, the offcuts and the actors performing them see the episode show notes:  https://offcutsdrawer.com/luke-harding

Presenter and columnist Jay knows about food. But he's an acclaimed novelist, journalist and musician too. Hear his unusual play with music, the novel that never was and his celebration of Welsh drag act Lady Ding.  

Clips performed by: Keith Wickham, Toby Longworth, Christopher Kent and Rachel Atkins.

Warning: This episode contains strong language.

Jay Rayner is probably best known as being the regular food critic for the Guardian and Observer newspapers for the last 20 years. But he has also written extensively across the British and international media as both feature writer and columnist on everything from crime and politics, to the arts and fashion.  

On radio he has presented BBC Radio 4's The Kitchen Cabinet since 2012, on television his many appearances include being a judge on multiple series's of Masterchef and the resident food pundit for The One Show, and he now presents his own podcast called Out To Lunch, in which he interviews celebrities in fabulous restaurants.

He's published 11 books to date, including 4 novels, and his latest work My Last Supper has just come out in paperback.

For more details about the writer, the offcuts and the actors performing them see the episode show notes:  https://offcutsdrawer.com/jay-rayner

A film script written with the young Hugh Grant (yes, that one), a TV show about The Sex Pistols and a romcom based on his real-life relationship - just 3 of the top notch offcuts from the writer/producer of the multi award-winning TV drama Unforgotten.

Clips performed by: Toby Longworth, Lizzie Roper, Christopher Kent, Leah Marks, Nigel Pilkington, Emma Clarke and Rachel Atkins.

Warning: This episode contains strong language.

Chris Lang has created over 100 hours of original prime-time television drama since he cut his teeth on established favourites like Soldier Soldier, Casualty and The Knock more than twenty five years ago. Most recently his projects have included Dark Heart – a 6 part series for ITV, The Hook-Up Plan (known as Plan Coeur in France) – a French 8-part romantic comedy for Netflix and Innocent – a 4 part drama whose 2nd series will start filming later this year.  Other acclaimed dramas he’s been responsible for include: Amnesia (2004), Torn (2007), A Mother’s Son (2012) and Undeniable (2014) which was remade in France in as Quand Je Serai Grande Je Te Tuerai which was broadcast in France in late 2017 to an audience of seven million,

But it is for his multi-award winning detective drama Unforgotten, starring Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar, that he is probably best known and after three highly acclaimed series its fourth will hopefully be returning to our screens soon.

For more details about the writer, the offcuts and the actors performing them see the episode show notes:  https://offcutsdrawer.com/chris-lang