How I Accidentally Wrote 32 Episodes of a TV Show Starring Phill Jupitus
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Bottom Knocker Street
Much of my career, it should be said, happened by accident. Here are some of the highlights.
When I was 17, I had a screenplay picked up by a producer from New York after he randomly stumbled upon it on a screenwriting website.
When I was 19, a UK production company who’d read that script asked if I had any thrillers. I lied and said yes, then wrote one in 72 hours, which they then optioned a week later.
A friend of mine I’d met on the screenwriting website mentioned above passed on my name as a potential ghostwriter to a publisher he was working with. I ended up writing over 30 books for them, including 15 Ben 10 novels, and about 40 comics, including Power Rangers, DC Super Hero Girls, Minecraft, and Angry Birds.
I got my agent after I entered a competition in a newspaper. The prize was feedback on a manuscript. They phoned me up a month after the closing date to tell me they were removing me from the contest. I assumed that meant my book was really bad. Instead, they wanted to represent it.
They took it to HarperCollins, who asked if I could write five more in the series. I said, ‘Yep,’ and they said, ‘Great, can we get the outlines for them by 2pm, because we have a meeting about it?’ I said, ‘Yep,’ and wrote the outlines. They took all six.
I emailed the Beano asking if I could write for them. They said no. I emailed back and said, ‘Go on,’ and they agreed. I wrote over 100 scripts in the next two years.
Off the back of a book I’d written, I got to write a script for Adventure Time comic. Unfortunately, it was cancelled before my issue came out. The editor remembered the script, though, and a few months later asked if I’d be interested in writing a comic based on the animated series SuperMansion, starring Bryan Cranston. I said, ‘Yep,’ and wrote it.
The creator of the show, Zeb Wells, liked the comic and asked if I wanted to write for the show. I said, ‘Yep,’ and wrote an episode for the final season (Brokeback Saturn.)
I wrote the first book in my Space Team series in about three weeks, solely so I could learn how to self-publish for a school workshop I’d been invited to run. Within two weeks, the book was outselling all of my children’s books combined, and switched me from being traditionally published to self-published.
A producer randomly stumbled upon my The Sidekicks Initiative audiobook, setting in play a chain of events that would lead to Alexander Gordon Smith and I co-writing DRAGN, our first produced featured film.
So, you can imagine how difficult I find it to answer when someone asks me how they can replicate the success I’ve had. ‘Be really lucky,’ isn’t particularly helpful, but it pretty neatly sums up how I’ve done it.
All of the above pales into comparison with how I landed the job of writing an absurdist CITV sitcom starring Phill Jupitus, though.
It started with a Tweet, back before Twitter became the awful Hellscape it is today. Specifically, this Tweet:
Let me give you a bit of context. Back in 2011, when I was up early with my then two-year-old daughter, she used to make me sit down to watch a show called The Bopps.
It was on one of the more obscure of the many children’s channels available on Sky TV at the time, and took the form of short songs and sketches, often tucked into ad breaks and as ‘filler’ between longer shows.
It featured two middle-aged men in funny outfits playing annoyingly catchy songs about teeth, and little ghosts, and shoes made of jelly. They would mug to the camera, indulge in lots of slapstick, and generally get up to the sort of mischief that makes toddlers squeal with laughter.
And my daughter was obsessed.
The Bopps themselves where Stan and Keith, pictured here in this somewhat low resolution image.
Stan, in the blue, was once the guitarist in The Housemartins. Keith, in the red, was not. I didn’t know much about Keith at all, besides the fact that he looked like Austin Powers, and something about him freaked me out.
I don’t mean that in a cruel way, I should stress. There was nothing inherently wrong with Keith. It was something about his gurning and tomfoolery that, while pitched perfectly for 2-4 year olds, disturbed me on a deep-seated subsconsious level.
I’m not saying I was plagued by recurring nightmares about waking up to find Keith kneeling at the bottom of my bed, his head barely visible above the folds of my covers, but I could have been. It was within the realms of possibility, and that’s all that matters.
That’s what prompted me to write the above Tweet at 7:37am on October 11th, 2011. I typed it out on my phone and pinged it off into the world, thinking no more about it.
And then, a few hours later, Keith replied. Unfortunately, his reply no longer shows below my original Tweet for some reason, but it was along the lines of, ‘You’re not wrong.’
I felt terrible. I hadn’t really expected anyone to read the Tweet, much less Keith himself. I generally aim to be nice to people both online and off, and here was me slagging the poor bloke off on Twitter.
I messaged him to apologise, telling him how much my daughter loved the show, and how she’d forced me to watch every song dozens of times. He told me about his son, who was in the age demographic for my books. I sent him a few signed copies, and he and Stan made a personalised video for my daughter.
Keith, it turned out, was a bloody legend.
We chatted on and off for a while. A couple of months later, he mentioned that he was producing a comedy series for CITV called Bottom Knocker Street. It was a chaotic, absurd concept that was meant to feel like it came straight from the pages of a comic like The Beano.
I loved the idea of it. He asked me if I wanted to try out for writing an episode.
I said, ‘Yep.’
I wrote the script the next day. It’s called UNCONVINCING DAIRY GHOST, it’s surreal as hell, and you can read it below.
As luck would have it, Keith and the show’s creators loved it. They asked if I would write 13 - one quarter of the show’s 52 episodes. I said, ‘Yep.’
For various reasons, some of the other writers they had in mind didn’t pan out, so they asked if I’d be up for writing a few more, and I said… Well, I’m sure you can work it out by now.
In the end, I wrote 30 full episodes, co-wrote an episode with Keith, and then, while down on set in Bristol watching filming, wrote a compilation episode when we realised we were one episode short for the series.
Between the show being commissioned and being produced, I believe an investment deal fell through, leaving the production with about one third of its planned budget. They were faced with a choice - ditch the whole thing, or carry on regardless.
Thankfully, they carried on. While you can really see the lack of budget in the finished production, much of the anarchy and humour remained intact. We leaned into the budget constraints at times, too.
When the production couldn’t afford to keep Phill Jupitus for as long as they needed him, we specified in the script that his over the shoulder shots should clearly be a watermelon with a hat on. If anything, the lack of budget contributed to the madness of it all.
I even got to appear on screen in one of my episodes - KING OF THE PUPPETS - when the town of Lower Mintworth is taken over by an evil puppet king. Here I am in costume.
And here are a few other random photos from the set, including Phill with the titular King of the Puppets himself.
Oh, and look who’s in this last one. It’s only Stan Cullimore out of The Bopps (and The Housemartins.) Nice that it all goes full circle, eh? It almost makes it feel like a proper article I thought about, rather than just something I hammered out while waiting for my dinner to finish cooking.
Anyway, that’s how I ended up writing 32 episodes of a TV show starring Phill Jupitus. Now you know.
That's not luck, Barry... Okay, it's a BIT of luck, but it was mostly you being bloody talented and saying yes whenever asked if you could do something. Don't sell yourself short. That's a winning combo. It's the one-two punch of success.
That's a lot of hustle and talent which made you ready to say yes when a little luck happened.