When I was a regular voice on the radio, I found that I put in some of my best shows when I was under the cloud of depression. I can’t explain this although maybe it’s because I was trying so hard to hide my true state with a sense of the show must go on, or perhaps it was the mania that lifted me through it providing me with enough adrenalin to get through, keeping my ‘high’ going for a few hours afterwards before dropping me like a sack of washing back into my depressed state. I experienced something similar last night when I met up with my writing collaborators to do some work on the secret radio script we are writing.

I might as well admit who these mystery co-writers are, especially as I tweeted their names thanking them for a fun night. My partners in this project are my two good friends Gary and Craig Barwell, and as fellow comedy nerds/experts they are a delight to work with.

Although the project isn’t a secret as such, we are keeping our names well away from it simply for reasons of authenticity. When I have seen spoof programmes in the past I am always bothered by the fact that we the viewer has been told in advance that it is a spoof in the first place. When Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge first appeared on television in 1994 I was already aware of it because of the Radio 4 version and the character appearing on The Day Today. My housemates were not privy to this background information and I just told them that a new chat show was on and we sat down to watch it (I even said that Roger Moore was going to be a guest – one for the experts). While I laughed in all the right places at what was a work of genius, my fellow viewers in the room couldn’t believe that such an oaf had been given his own show. Luckily I hadn’t had the sound up for the continuity announcer so they missed out on hearing the show introduced as a comedy. I later tried the same rick with That Peter Kay Thing and even The Office. Surely it is more in keeping with the idea of pastiche if it has to slowly dawn on us that what we are watching isn’t real, in the same way that the newspapers slip in an April Fool story among their pages to see how observant their readers are.

We are writing a radio comedy along the same lines but we are not divulging any more information at present as the finished product will hopefully not come across straight away as a joke. There are some obvious puns in there (at least at this stage) simply because we have given each other so many funny lines that it would be a shame not to. The best thing about writing together is the licence to mess about making each other laugh and hope that we come up with something useable. I couldn’t even read out something I had written because I was laughing at it so much, and I’d heard it.

Spending time laughing with good friends is the perfect use of an evening, and this is work to a degree. We had to occasionally stop to write something down as quickly as possible before another gem appeared before us. At one point we came up with an idea for a sketch that wouldn’t work on this particular project but would be a brilliant visual sketch; out came the notebook to jot down an unconnected idea.

Paul Merton once told of the development of a sketch on his show Paul Merton: The Series in which he was sitting reading in a bedsit and the electricity went off so he put a coin in a meter labeled ‘electricity’. The punch line was a zebra (if memory serves me correctly) appearing and disappearing once Merton put a coin in a meter labeled ‘no zebra’. Apparently this sketch began with a chicken appearing but was dismissed because a chicken wasn’t considered funny enough (besides, their monopoly on the crossing the road jokes means they aren’t exactly overlooked when it comes to their contribution to comedy). Several animals were used until the zebra was eventually deemed funny enough. Something like that happened with me when I wrote a passage that I am extremely proud of, even more so once Gary and Craig laughed their approval. The punch line to my piece of writing is the word ‘Londis’, a reference to the chain of convenience stores dotted around the country. I tried every shop name possible ranging from the big names right down to Premier Stores and Spar before Londis won the day. Trust me, Londis is funnier than Spar; remember that next time you run out of milk at midnight.

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This week’s edition of The Sunday Alternative is here.