Heard and Invisible!
13 billion years in the making, though to be honest, time wasn't properly up and running for a lot of the early stuff, and I've had a lot of time off since. Now, at last, it can be cursorily dismissed.
No Tomatoes, smaller, shorter and less surprising and funny than the Universe for reasons of space and time.
History
Many years ago I sent a demo of material to BBC producer Jon Rolph who'd used some stuff of mine on Week Ending and called it No Tomatoes after the punch-line to my then favourite joke. I always liked the title and decided to recycle it and indeed versions of five sketches from that original demo have found a way into the current show. How green am I?
Anyhow, I went on to not develop a number of other radio shows with Jon before he became a very big cheese who didn't do radio anymore, by which time my favourite joke had become the one about the sausage and egg in a frying pan.
Later on, Gill Isles, who'd also worked for Jon, ended up as a comedy producer at the BBC in Manchester and looked me up as someone who might be up for doing some of that comedy writing in the North they were keen on commissioning. A number of ideas came to nothing, until I salvaged a proposal for an open show I'd pitched for a Writer in Residence proposal and turned it into a solo show, more recycling.
The concept was quite simply to use radio to make impossible pictures (for example, ones that are both and red and invisible- hence the reappropriated title).
Because I knew how I wanted it to sound and because I think sometimes the way I write looks odder on the page than it sounds in the ear, I started producing demos of material to send to Gill as mp3s. Slowly this grew into a pilot.
The pilot went off to a BBC Programme Development Group on Tuesday the 25th of July 2006, where it got very positive feedback from people called Paul and a chap called Richard whose shows I used to love and was offered to BBC 7 for the next commissioning round! On the 10th of January 2007 I heard it had got commissioned. Now all I needed to do was concoct 6 x 15 minutes of it...
Now read on...
on
Well, how the months zipped by while you read that "on". After commission I gained a new producer, Gill's boss Paul Hardy, which ended up handy as Gill was up to her ears making glamorous TV shows in June when I would have ideally wanted her in her 'patient nurturing of my stupidity' mode.
I was gutted to lose her because I knew without her the show wouldn't be on full stop. However, it did have the advantage of allowing me to sneak back in a couple of jokes that Gill hadn't liked but I did, and Paul pretty much let me get away with most of the murdering I wanted to commit along the way, proving as loyal to the show as Gill had before him. Obviously, he's still a johnny-come-lately, bandwagon jumper, but a good one for all that, and I'll forgive him this once.
On July the 2nd and 3rd we recorded the show in BBC's Manchester studios, after that I spent the best part of a week chopping it up in Pro Tools, the chaps at the BBC sprinkled some magic Troggs fairy dust on it, and it was done..
The final cast was Paul Copley, Helen Moon and me, two of whom I think are really great actors. No names, no pack drill.
The individual episodes are entitled Dog Days, Trash Talk, Train Times, World Weary, Doctor Doom and Retro Rocket, not that you'll hear those titles on transmission, mainly because I thought it'd be easier to know which one we were talking about if I gave them titles rather than just called them 1 to 6. It wasn't in the end.
So there we have it- No Tomatoes- six fifteen minute sketch shows for BBC 7 broadcast between the 24th of September and 29th October 2007.
An everyday story of clothes pegs, cheese spread, alphabetti spaghetti, trees, trains, Jonathan Harker, William Blake, Quetzalcoatl, bees, fridges, coal scuttles and Pope Joan that builds week by week into a great big incomprehensible mess that will steal about 84* minutes of your life away and never return your calls.
*Yes, clever clogs 15 minutes in BBC7 years is really 14 minutes in human years, go figure.