The (in)Complete Lee-Ann's Spare Fridays
Everything you ever wanted to know about goings-on in Upper Wheatley
The last regular episode1 is now available!
You can listen at Apple podcasts, Spotify, or in your browser without having to sign in to anything at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jysaville. If you already have, thank you — much appreciated and I hope you enjoyed it.
If you’ve never run across Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays before and you’re wondering what I’m on about, let me briefly explain. Fortyish Lee-Ann has been moved on to a four-day week at work and wants to spend her Fridays with her portly black and white cat Lord Salisbury, or researching the history of the Yorkshire Dales village she moved to a few years ago to be near her baby niece, Jasmine. Unfortunately her interfering older sister Gina doesn’t think those are worthy pursuits and tries to divert her. Lee-Ann's Scottish neighbour Douglas isn't on anyone's side but his own.
It's structured like a sitcom, but I wrote and performed it as a monologue from Lee-Ann's point of view. It’s about still being under your older sister’s thumb when you’re middle-aged, and procrastination, and contentment vs ambition, and what happens when one sister has tried to ‘better herself’ and the other one doesn’t see what was wrong before.
Here’s everything you didn’t realise you wanted to know about Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays, including crumbs of background history, where everyone’s names came from and why on earth I wanted to write an audio script in the first place.
Why audio comedy?
When I was a child in the 1980s I listened to Goon Show LPs and Hancock’s Half Hour cassettes with my dad. Both of these comedy programmes were on BBC radio when he was a child in the 1950s. He owned two hardback volumes of Goon Show scripts, which I think were published in the 1970s, and I read them cover to cover. Big Brother (mine, I mean, not the character from the Goon Show episode 1985) could do a passable rendition of Seagoon, Eccles and Bloodnok and we regularly whiled away a long rainy afternoon reading one of the scripts aloud for our own entertainment. Young as I was, I understood that these madcap antics only worked on the radio, because we as listeners had to form our own images. Radio comedy, which of course meant BBC radio comedy, became for me the pinnacle of funny and imaginative writing. That idea was only strengthened in the 1990s when I first listened to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy2. I still listen to radio comedy several times a week via BBC Sounds.
I might have been about 12 when I wrote a Goon Show script of my own — sadly thought to be lost, but I hold out hope of a massive tidy-up of Big Brother’s bedroom at some point turning up a typed3 copy under his bed. By then I’d met Friend T, who had been subject to similar paternal influence, and we became the weirdos who wrote scripts together in English lessons, usually about a pair of inept cat-burglars who were our habitual characters for a couple of years as I recall. I’ve still got copies of a couple of our solo scripts from the early 90s, a comedy murder mystery from T and a WW2-set comedy about a custard-tart smuggling ring, from me.
It was inevitable then that at some point as a grown up writer, my thoughts would turn to radio comedy4.
Why a monologue podcast?
Late in 2022 I heard I’d been longlisted for the Comedy Women in Print (CWIP) short story prize (I was later shortlisted and my story is in the anthology). The story I’d entered for that was written using some of the principles I’d learnt on
’s sitcom course the previous year, and when I finished it I realised that it was about the right length to take me half an hour to read out — years of spoken word performances mean I know my average is around 200 words per minute. That set me thinking about writing a sort of monologue sitcom, partly because I’d enjoyed writing and reading monologues on stage and radio before, and partly as a calling card. When the eyes of the comedy writing world were briefly on me5 when the longlist was announced, wouldn’t it be great to be able to show them something like this?This gave me the kick up the backside I needed to go from vague thoughts of showcasing some of my own writing, to producing a finished podcast episode, and it gave me a deadline. Once I’d made the first one I figured I may as well make a series to show I didn’t only have one episode in me, and to be honest I was enjoying it anyway so I just kept going. Realistically, radio comedy still means BBC radio comedy in the UK and the chances of a new writer getting a sitcom script developed for Radio 4 are pretty slim, so making a podcast is actually the most likely way for anyone to ever encounter my script anyway.
Technicalities
I wrote a whole post about the technical aspect of making the first episode, from choosing a font and theme music to editing the audio file and beyond.
Basically it takes a lot longer than you probably think it does; I estimated the equivalent of a couple of weeks of full-time work to get that first episode written, recorded and distributed. Of course once I had the artwork, incidental and theme music, intro and sound effects I re-used them for subsequent episodes. On the other hand the first episode was adapted into monologue form from an existing script, whereas each of the other episodes has been written from scratch — some from a long paragraph of notes, some from a fragment of an idea like ‘hapless birdwatching’ (episode 10) — and devising a satisfactory plot then fleshing it out is not a quick job. I do sometimes still write dialogue as though it’s a normal script; sometimes it’s just easier to figure out how Lee-Ann would report it if I know what was ‘actually’ said.
I also wrote a post about getting the voice right after a gap, and how Lee-Ann’s voice and vocabulary are not exactly the same as mine:
The first episode took about an hour at the microphone to get a usable 26 minutes, but with practice I got that down to more like 35 minutes at the mic for a 25 minute episode. Editing still took me a good hour, every time — if you want to check every minute of audio for unwanted extras (clicks, loud intakes of breath, chair creaks, the sound of a mug being drunk from or put back on a coaster) you need to listen to every minute of the audio at least once. I record at the desk in the study which is also mainly where I write. Lest you envision stately mahogany, it is a black ash effect flatpack that my other half’s parents bought him 30 years ago when he was doing his A-levels — surprisingly sturdy.
Who listens to this nonsense, anyway?
If the Spotify dashboard is accurate, Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays has been listened to in 29 countries, though more than half the listens have been in the UK. I added it to a couple of audio fiction directories I found on Twitter; I don’t know if anyone found it there but I did have a nice message from a listener in Germany who’d run across it in a list of new podcasts on reddit that I wasn’t aware of.
If you browse the comedy fiction category on Apple podcasts it only lists 60 programmes (some of them feature proper professionals like Mark Benton and Kevin Eldon!) but amazingly I have spotted the familiar Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays artwork on there a couple of times.
A few people who know me in person, follow me on Twitter or have run across me on Substack or at in-person events and enjoyed my writing have tried the podcast and liked it. It makes sense that there would be some crossover audience with my other writing, but enjoying the dreamier end of my flash fiction or even the radio dramas doesn’t mean you’ll want to listen to eleven half-hour-ish episodes of monologue comedy.
Various friends who are also writers spread the word among their Twitter followers and writing groups. James Cary6 gave it a mention on his Sitcom Geeks podcast. Mike Kelly at the local BCB radio station has been an enthusiastic promoter, playing excerpts from most episodes on his Pick of the Podcasts programme, after someone apparently recommended it to him (if that was you - thanks!). Friend T told her colleagues about it and turned at least one of them into an enthusiastic listener; my other half told our ballroom dancing class (much to my embarrassment), some of whom enjoyed it, became loyal listeners and told their friends and family.
Somehow or other, word has spread. Total strangers have taken a chance on my home-made project. Even the sadly underappreciated episode 8 has been listened to more than fifty times, and I assure you I don’t know anywhere near fifty people who would feel obliged for the sake of friendship or kinship.
Naming the characters
When I was about 7 there were two girls in my class whose names sounded the same but were spelt differently, though I can remember nothing else about them now — it is nearly 40 years ago. One of them spelt her name Lee-Ann.
About fifteen years ago I worked in an office in Leeds with a lovely lad called Lee who was from a former mining village in Yorkshire and had the sort of accent that might lead you to expect — to my delight and his line manager’s despair he often answered the office phone with ‘Ey up’. At the same time in Scotland, my friend T worked with a woman from that very same former mining village and her name was Leanne. She also had a strong accent and from what I heard from T, would never fade into the background in a group.
Cut to January 2021 and I’m trying to write a radio sitcom pilot for a rare open call from awe-inspiring production company Pozzitive7. Interestingly I came up with the name Gina first and I have no idea why — there is a note on the first page that refers to ‘Gina and [heroine]’. But then I wanted a slightly cheeky, very Yorkshire-sounding character and I thought of mine and T’s colleagues, and I wrote on the next page ‘We have Leeanne Leanne Lee-Ann and Gina Jade Gina, sisters.’
At this stage, Lee-Ann had a cat called Ponsonby. I don’t know where I got that name from either, but it’s there at the first mention of a feline companion. However, by the second mention we have ‘Ponsonby (who should prob. be called Lord Salisbury)’. Lord Salisbury (as I'm sure you all know) was a Tory prime minister of the late nineteenth century, and according to HCG Matthew in my Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, 'the last Prime Minister to wear a beard'.
Lord Salisbury also turned out not to be the name of the black and white cat who used to live round the corner from us. My other half once caught a glimpse of its identity disc when he was stroking it, and said he’d seen S..y so it probably said Sooty, and he promptly started calling the cat Sooty. I suggested that was a bit presumptious, and since these were quite posh houses it could well be something a bit less common, like Sotheby or Sainsbury, or even Lord Salisbury. So Lord Salisbury he became, and we kept calling him that even when we found out his name was Snoopy. Somehow he lent himself to the script, though he was about half the size of Lee-Ann’s namesake mog.
Douglas has always been called Douglas. When I wrote in my notes that Lee-Ann lived in the top floor of a house, I added ‘Is the man on the floor below a character?’ Half a page later I’m referring to Douglas participating in the plot with no explanation of who he is and no other names suggested. I have said before that he’s played by Dougray Scott in my head, so it’s possible that’s also where his name came from (because honestly, how many people are called Dougray?).
I’m not sure why Richard is called Richard, he just is. It’s a nice solid middle-class English name suitable for a man whose parents own a ride-on lawnmower. Jasmine was the name of one of my cousin’s cats, but works just as well for a precious only child. Miss Harding is named after a lane in Wharfedale, as is fitting for her character (only the lane would surely have to be named after her family). Most other character names, your guess is as good as mine — except for these two…
Dr Shah is named after the late husband of one of my mum’s many cousins. Unlike Lee-Ann’s friend who was born in Bradford, however, my mum’s cousin-in-law was born in India and came to Yorkshire as an adult in the 1950s.
With apologies to any lovely readers whose name (or favourite brother’s name) happens to be Todd, it just felt right as the name of the awful literary novelist that Gina went to university with. Every surname I tried, mostly from glancing at my bookshelves, seemed to be a real writer when I googled it with the first name Todd. Who knew there were that many Todds in the world or that they all had literary pretensions? I guessed that my friend and erstwhile storytelling collaborator Alice Courvoisier would love to have a character named after her, and that it was probably unusual enough a combination for there to be no existing writers with that name. I couldn’t find any, so Todd Courvoisier he became. It’s a lovely long surname for Lee-Ann to inject withering scorn into, as well.
Background
In those early notes I have these slightly contradictory points:
Gina married well (is she a solicitor?), lives a middle-class life with her middle-class friends and in-laws, in a detached house somewhere leafy. Our heroine lives in a flat, the top floor of a house.
class mismatch — not as extreme as Hyacinth and Daisy in Keeping Up Appearances but along those lines
Gina has ‘bettered herself’ and is both faintly embarrassed that L hasn’t, and exasperated that she doesn’t seem to want to.
I had an idea L has an MA in local history. She did her dissertation on lands owned by Nostell Priory
Or rather, while the first three are consistent, they don’t seem to go with the idea of Lee-Ann having an MA in local history. In the sitcom as it’s developed, Lee-Ann did not go to university and has been known to wonder how come her dimwit sister is the one with a degree.
One of the themes of the series is the class difference between aspirational older sister Gina and contentedly rooted Lee-Ann; a bit like childhood friends Terry and Bob in the fantastic 1970s sitcom Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. Despite the sisters both having white-collar jobs and living in the same village, they have different outlooks on life because of that class difference (Lee-Ann happens to be bisexual and Gina isn’t, but I don’t think that makes much difference at all).
Gina is about the same age as me, which makes it easy to think about what the world was like when she was a child or when she went to university. Of course when I started writing the pilot script I was 42 and now I’m a few years older whereas sitcom characters aren’t supposed to age, but I’ve been deliberately vague so she still grew up at the same time I did. Lee-Ann is a couple of years younger. I did have a wobble about her not going to university and having the sort of admin job that required a degree by the early 2000s, but when I worked alongside the aforementioned Lee there was a woman a couple of years younger than me who had left school at 16 and worked there ever since. I figure Lee-Ann did the same.
The original script I sent to Pozzitive doesn’t mention where Lee-Ann used to live, only that it was a terraced house that was a train and a bus away from Gina and Jasmine. In the first proper draft of the monologue version I have the phrase ‘We’re not in Bingley now, Toto’. It’s in the context of the village of Upper Wheatley being much more Gina’s kind of place, very much not Lee-Ann’s world at all. Bingley probably just fit the rhythm of the phrase to be honest, but it has the benefit of being a West Yorkshire town with mills and terraced streets, and I did live there for a bit in my twenties.
But what does it all look like?
For Upper Wheatley I’ve borrowed a bit of Addingham and some hazy childhood memories of Kettlewell and blended them in a real area of the Yorkshire Dales that I’ve stretched a bit to make it fit. It’s within easy reach of Skipton for shopping, and a commuter train away from Leeds, where Gina and Lee-Ann work — whereas Addingham station closed in 1965 and Kettlewell never had one, as far as I’m aware. There’s a bakery down by the bridge over the River Wharfe, allotments next to an ancient church, a small branch library, a primary school, a village hall and a station. Lee-Ann and Douglas both live in a 3-storey terraced house more or less opposite a small Co-Op supermarket round the corner from the library; Gina lives in a detached house with a garden in a modern development on the outskirts of the village.
I’ve mentioned already that Douglas is played by Dougray Scott in my head (though my other half imagines the voice of Bill Paterson), and I think Gina bears a close resemblance to Jan Francis if you took her as she was in 1980s TV sitcom Just Good Friends8 and added a couple of decades on. Lee-Ann is a blend of me and Sister Number One, as we could have been aged 40-ish; we both had blonde ponytails in our youth and never used to wear glasses, but had short brown hair and specs by the time we actually got there. At a pinch though, say for the 99% of you who don’t know my sister and I well enough to make that extrapolation, Jodie Whittaker could be a reasonable stand-in. Kelly from the Co-Op is a young Joanne Froggatt, no doubt influenced by her portrayal of the work-experience girl in Victoria Wood’s incomparable dinnerladies.
Formulaic references
I realised at some point that although you get more out of the series if you listen in order as there are references now and then to previous events, it should be approachable at random. So if someone stumbles across the podcast and hits Play on the latest episode to see what it’s about, or they revisit an episode after months away, they can’t be left wondering who is who or why they matter. As James Cary is so fond of saying, confusion is the enemy of comedy.
In my early twenties I volunteered in an Oxfam bookshop alongside a chatty early-retired chap in his late 50s. No matter that after the first conversation or two we all knew his wife’s name was Annie, months later he was still saying ‘Annie, my wife, said —’ or ‘I was out with Annie — that’s my wife — and…’. He was the sort who’d strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere, and I assume it was a habit he’d acquired to drop in quick explanations to new acquaintances.
I don’t guarantee I’ve always managed it, but the intention is usually to make the first mention of a name in any episode a really obvious signpost like ‘my downstairs neighbour Douglas’, ‘my thoughtful brother-in-law Richard’, and of course the perpetual ‘my infant niece Jasmine’. Since Lee-Ann can, like my erstwhile Oxfam colleague, talk the hind leg off a donkey, I guess she picked up a similar anecdote habit.
The episodes and their points of interest
I wrote a few episode-specific notes in the posts that announced the new episode, but not about every episode — I’ll repeat the good bits here, to save everyone digging around, and augment them slightly.
I started writing the preparatory notes for the very first episode during the Christmas break of 2020, so we were in lockdown again at the time and the sourdough craze from earlier that year was fresh in my mind. Going round to a neighbour to borrow sourdough starter instead of a cup of sugar is something Douglas remarks on as being quite ‘on brand’ for Upper Wheatley. The concept of going round to a neighbour to borrow a cup of sugar as a way of introducing yourself is as outdated as Lee-Ann’s reference to Knock Down Ginger, I suppose.
Pilates, one of Gina’s regular pastimes, was called Contrology until its inventor (Mr Pilates) died in 1967. I have a feeling if it was still called that, Lee-Ann wouldn't be quite so set against it.
Richard Oastler (episode two) was, like Lord Salisbury, a nineteenth-century Tory, this time from Yorkshire. Best known for being instrumental in the Ten Hour Act (1847) which limited the amount of time in a day that children could work, there is a statue in Bradford of him accompanied by sorry-looking children. It's not that far away from the statue to William Forster (not a Tory), whose 1870 Education Act also gets a passing mention. Forster lived in Wharfedale for many years, as I recall.
Robert Owen (also episode 2) was a Welsh mill-owner and famous socialist. Similar to Titus Salt in Yorkshire or the Cadbury family in the Midlands, he had a village for his workers at New Lanark in Scotland and was attempting to improve their health, morals, and general wellbeing. We learnt about him at school, and then presumably because it was a lot closer to get to, went for a day trip to Quarry Bank mill instead.
When I was at university in the late 90s, everyone’s younger brother or sister seemed to appear at least once, for a few days during school half term. Why anyone’s parents ever thought this was a good idea is beyond me, considering what most of us were getting up to. However, it occurred to me that Gina would want to join in the fad and Lee-Ann would be nosy enough to go and see what all the fuss was about, and the mortification that followed would ensure Gina never repeated the invitation. Thus Lee-Ann would have been able to meet Todd Courvoisier just the once. This visit to Gina’s university gets a mention in episode 5 as well as episode 2.
Research for episode 3 included jute production at the Dundee Heritage Trust website, which was a fun way to disappear down an industrial history rabbithole. I lived in Fife for a few years and I must have seen some kind of a display about jute which stuck vaguely in my mind and offered itself up in this context - possibly in Kirkcaldy, which I seem to recall was the home of lino. I am much more familiar with the worsted manufacture mentioned in connection with Lee-Ann's Gran. Both my grandmothers worked in textile mills in the Bradford district, one of them was even a burler and mender, as was Sister Number Two until she was made redundant about twenty years ago. Some of the machinery from her mill ended up at the Bradford Industrial Museum, which is well worth a visit if you're interested in that sort of thing.
I ended up down a 1950s chocolate rabbithole for episode 4 which is why Lee-Ann does likewise. It’s so easily done.
In episode 5 the sisters end up at a creative writing workshop together. Bearing in mind I've attended many and led a few myself, my tongue was firmly in my cheek when I invented Crispin, the tutor. I don’t know why I called him Crispin, but once I had I couldn’t get the cooking oil brand Crisp ‘N Dry out of my head (and neither could Lee-Ann, I’m afraid).
In terms of real history mentioned in episode 5, I did get a theme of Luddites and handloom weavers in there — I'm still trying to perfect my Luddite sitcom set in 1812 but if I get there eventually, you'll be the first to know. Technically, a Hancock's Half Hour episode from 1959 is history, so if you've never heard the episode Lee-Ann refers to (The Poetry Society) I believe it's available to listen to on the BBC if that’s something you have access to.
In episode 6 Lee-Ann refers to mangel-wurzel as a type of turnip — I know full well it isn’t, but I didn’t think that would be the sort of distinction Lee-Ann would be aware of. A university friend’s mum once regaled me with tales of her champion mangel-wurzel hurling as a youth somewhere down south, which is how that came into the story. I also once stumbled upon a welly-wanging competition in a Copenhagen park.
Lee-Ann had never encountered a scarecrow festival before whereas I have, in the North Yorkshire village my parents have lived in for the last fifteen years. It’s an arable farming area, which is weird to me anyway — enormous flat open expanses, very few hedges (no dry stone walls), populated by combine harvesters and potato picking machines. Every year except the covid times, they have a scarecrow festival which both bemuses me, and impresses me with its organisation and enthusiastic community spirit. In an arable area it makes sense, but not in Upper Wheatley. Whereas Cow Pat Bingo — I came across this at a summer fete in my childhood but I forget where — makes perfect sense in a livestock farming locale.
Episode 7, the start of series 2 and also a Christmas episode (with sleigh bells in the theme tune) had a lot of background notes, which you can read here:
In fact I did get more into the background notes for series 2, and episode 8, which contains some of my favourite lines but is the least-listened episode, had a fair chunk about maps, orienteering and Civil War mastermind Fairfax here:
Episode 9 was the Lee-Ann and Douglas episode, which I wrote a bit of background on here:
Episode 10 mentions Cadbury’s Animal biscuits. Having seen the biscuits themselves recently for the first time in years, instead of just a packet in the supermarket, I realise they’ve changed since I last had them. Lee-Ann refers to a biscuit shaped like a rhino but they’re oval with an animal stamped on them these days. I can only apologise for my lazy assumptions of biscuit continuity. I’m fairly confident that the chocolate hobnob of episode 11 is still in the upper tier of biscuits and Lee-Ann would thus still get into trouble for finishing a colleague’s packet:
Since I made up a fictional magazine along the same lines as the real Dales Life for Gina to read in episode 11 (Dales Living), I’ve run across another real one called Live the Dales. I got a free copy through my letterbox but I am very much not their target demographic.
I’ve tried to cover everything in this ridiculously long post, but if you’re left with any questions about Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays, just ask by replying to the email or leaving a comment.
As the Substack content will be free for the foreseeable future, you can always buy me a cuppa on ko-fi if you'd like to fuel my creativity with Earl Grey. And if you want to find out when there’s more from Lee-Ann and you’re not already a subscriber to this Substack, hit the Subscribe button:
I know, I said 2 series of 6 episodes and the 2nd one only has 5 but life intervened and episode 6 was getting postponed for so long that I figured it was best to write it off. I’m fully intending to have the occasional one-off episode, and also to have the odd (written) postcard from Lee-Ann right here on Substack
Have I ever mentioned how much I love the writing of Douglas Adams?
I somehow managed to get away with playing with Sister Number One’s typewriter during this era. She would have been in her twenties and no doubt using it for serious grown-up things
I have also turned my hand to radio drama, in fact I was one of the winners of the Script Yorkshire radio drama competition 2020
The eyes of the comedy writing world were sadly never really on me in the end, because despite asking for social media handles, website addresses and one-paragraph bios ‘for press and our website’, CWIP only published the names of the longlisted writers and honestly who has time to look everyone up?
Big Brother was wildly unimpressed that I’d released an episode of a sitcom, until I told him the guy who wrote Hut 33 liked it; then he was interested
I did enter it and it didn’t get anywhere. It was called A Whole Extra Day, which is a rubbish title.
Wikipedia tells me that Gina was the name of Jan Francis’s rival in series 3. This has no relevance but I found it mildly interesting. I would get out more, but there’s so much writing and reading to do.
Enjoyed this tour of the process! Look forward to following the links to the earlier pieces.