Have you heard the news?

5:10pm Friday 25th July 2008

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I’M thinking about writing a sitcom.

They say write about what you know, so the setting may well be a newspaper office.

It’s been my privilege to work with some entertaining people over the years and I’ll probably cherry pick the best bits of their characters to use as the basis for new ones.

You also see “all of human life” in this job, so there should be no shortage of inspiration for storylines.

Obviously, the names would have to be changed to protect the guilty and it might be necessary to be flexible with the facts but I do feel, without being arrogant, that I have the basis for something really good.

The end product will, I hope, resemble something like Drop The Dead Donkey, the sitcom based in a fictitious TV newsroom.

Shown on Channel 4 in the 90s, it featured a host of hilarious characters, from the roving reporter Damian Day, a man for whom ethics was a dirty word, to the TV station boss Gus Hedges, a stuffed suit who could only communicate using meaningless corporate gibberish. Hilarious.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Stephen Tompkinson, who played Day, and we had a good old reminisce about what is, for me, one of the funniest sitcoms of all time.

While I’ve seen hundreds of theatre productions, I’ve only ever had one of my own pieces performed, a short play I wrote when I was at sixth form college.

I actually roped in three of my mates to perform it and used a classic piece of electronic music, Back To Nature by Fad Gadget, to set the scene.

The plot revolved around a prisoner haunted by the ghosts from his past and ended with a blood curdling scream as he wakes from his nightmare.

One of my mates nearly got the giggles as it was about to begin, which was probably down to nerves on the night.

But it gave me a real buzz hearing the applause that erupted in the theatre as the house lights came up again. There’s nothing quite like it.