Dead Drunk Detective: How I Wrote Series One

Every year since 2016, I have written a new series of Dead Drunk Detective, my comedy zombie noir podcast. We usually release shows across October in the run-up to Halloween. However, there are no original episodes this year. You know why.

In lieu of fresh instalments of the zombie sleuth's adventures, I thought I would look back at the first four years. Instead of sharing new episodes, I will revisit the old. 

I do not know what form this will take. It could be personal essays. More likely, it will be episode guides akin to the ones I wrote about my sporadic podcast, The Booth. Whatever I plump for, it is obvious what I must cover first: the origin story.

Dead Drunk Detective is proof that you find a use for all your creative ideas eventually.

The first episode was written on a whim while I was at university, probably in the space of an afternoon and partly because I wanted to see if I could construct a solvable puzzle. My model was the pun-filled parodies which ended each edition of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue (their inspiration can also be seen in the closing ‘well, since you asked me for a story…’ segments of John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme). I often wrote little adventures like these for no reason other than it was fun and had previously started short radio spoofs of Robin Hood, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Wizard of Oz.

This script however did not seek to emulate a preestablished plot, but rather a genre full of tropes I best knew via spoofs on Whose Line. I did not truly have a particular affinity for film noir, horror, or indeed alcohol (although, aptly, I later worked as a bartender throughout the show’s run). Yes, I had, as a child, briefly toyed with being a detective, but that was more because I liked the look of a trench coat and dapper hat. I did enjoy the construction of a good mystery though, albeit initially because I was a huge fan of Scooby Doo.

Anyway, script complete, I duly typed it up and forgot about it. I then rediscovered it when rifling through old work to self-pitying moan about how talented I used to be (“oh, to be as sharp as I was when I was twenty-one!”). Surprised by how well it held up, I decided to try writing more. This was not necessarily because I had the means or drive to do a series. No, I most likely thought it was easier to build on a pre-existing idea rather than have to come up with a completely new one. Writers can be lazy like that.

The entire first series was reverse engineered from that initial edition. It is amazing how many integral aspects of the show come from that original dashed off script. The case of the week structure (which alternates between Johnny verbally sparring with Betty at the office and him investigating a crime) is in place from the very beginning. Hairy and Drac are characters I ended up using again and again because it was a joy to write for them. Johnny visits The Cough Inn, a location I realised in retrospect it made sense for an inebriated sleuth to visit multiple times, so it ended up being the setting for a mystery in episode six (which in turn led to the creation of deadpan bartender Jo, another stalwart of the show).

There is no real reason why there were seven episodes in the series instead of the traditional British sitcom run of six. I worked out the arc as I wrote and found once I was done that I had enough stories to fill seven. As episodes ended up being released weekly across October with the finale landing on Halloween, this meant a double bill to start and end the first season. Most subsequent runs are six episodes, plus a Christmas special in December.

Once the drafts were done, I made the series a coherent whole. During the rewrite, I reverse-engineered setups and added new recurring jokes, so even standalone episodes contributed to the ongoing plot. I now had myself a set of scripts that felt like a show, but what to do with it?

Having edited podcasts in university, I toyed with the prospect of producing it myself. However, these had been lowkey affairs with minimal production values (my panel show, The Booth, didn’t even have a theme song). To think I would have been able to engineer a recording session in addition to creating soundscapes and effects was a tad ambitious. For a start, I only owned one microphone! If this was to become a show, I would need help...