Ten years ago, I did a Masters in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College London, and my main motivation was to improve my sketch and play-writing.  As it turned out, the focus of the course was prose-writing, and I was extremely pleased about that because since then, I have produced two and a half novels and more than a dozen short stories.  But I have always loved writing dialogue, particularly if it makes people laugh, and I have written a lot of (I hope) funny sketches over the years.

My main output in this area are the hundred-plus sketches that I wrote with Doug Case for the English Teaching Theatre.  About half of them never made it onto the stage, and some of them were only performed for a few shows, but others became classics and were published and used by teachers all over the world.

The books they were published in are now out of print, so the following ones are here for free download.  I hope you get the chance to use them with your students.

Back in the 1980s, I wrote sketches for a show called Newsrevue, which put on a completely new show every week based on events in the news. Writing for the show was a brilliant opportunity, and I mixed with some wonderful people who went on to great things, including John O’Farrell and Mark Burton, who were part of the team behind the Spitting Image TV show, and Alistair MacGowan, who became more famous as an impressionist.

The Middle of Nowhere is a play I wrote as part of my Creative Writing course at Birkbeck College.  It’s a three-hander for two women and a man and lasts about twenty minutes.  In 2025, I was lucky enough to be able to stage part of it at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith at the Riverscribes new writers’ event.  My 16-year-old grandson Senan played the part of Daniel.

Feel free to stage it with my blessing.  No fee, just an acknowledgement of me as author.