Doubleday • Modern fiction

They say that writing is a form of therapy and occasionally when I was writinig this novel I felt like I should have been lying on a couch dictating it to a psychiatrist. My eldest child was coming to the end of his time at primary school and we found ourselves infected by the panic sticken mania that consumes parents choosing the right secondary school for their child. They were saying things like 'We've found a marvellous school in Calais although it will mean Timothy getting up at 4.30 every morning to catch the Eurostar.' I became aware that there was a certain type of pushy uber-parent that I hadn't seen in a modern novel and I thought this was a character ripe for satire. When I landed on the idea that the mother disguises herself as her daughter to take the school entrance exam it seemed like a perfect way to illustrate the concept of the over-controlling parent, to put the heroine under pressure and expose her to the sort of exhausting tutoring that her own kids had had to endure. Having written The Best A Man Can Get - a book about a man not spending enough time with his kids, I also thought it might be interesting to look at the subject matter from the opposite point of view. The subtitle of the book in America is 'A novel of extreme parenting'!

Who or what has most influenced your writing?

I know the answer to this really ought to be a list of great Russian novelists like Dostoyevsky, Doshstoyevschki - Tolstoy. But the first writing I really loved and wanted to emulate came from the sit-com writers of my childhood such as Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, Galton and Simpson and the like. Also I don't think I would have written Things Can Only Get Better unless Nick Hornby had written Fever Pitch. I was recently introduced to Hornby under a scheme set up by the Metropolitan Police were writers are made to come face to face with authors whose genres they have stolen.

What do you love most about writing?

It's the best job in so many respects. As Bill Clinton said about being U.S. President; 'You're indoors and there's no heavy lifting.' But I can also choose my own hours, where I work and the subject matter I write about. But I also really enjoy the process of constructing a story and creating characters. Comedy writing in particular so depends on careful sentence construction and I love it when a joke is improved by endless rewriting until the words are just perfect. You start with an inexplicable feeling that a phrase isn't quite right and you keep staring at the problem like a cryptic crossword clue and it is that moment when the solution comes from somewhere in the back of your brain that still gives me a buzz every time it happens. Mind you the last time was in January 2001.

What do you consider most difficult?

Just as a good TV or film writer has to trust the actor to convey much of what is between the lines, a good novelist has to trust the reader to understand what lies underneath the text without ramming it down their throats. One of the edicts of good writing is 'show, don't tell' and I have to keep making myself believe that it's enough to write "2 + 2 =" and trust the reader to work out the last bit. It's '4' by the way.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

I would say give yourself the best chance of having your stuff produced without completely compromising what it is you want to write about. So starting with an epic Hollywood screenplay might be too ambitious, while a letter to the local paper about mobile phones masts might not be quite ambitious enough. Be prepared to rewrite and cut your own material mercilessly, and if you can find someone to offer constructive criticism even better. Don't keep rewriting the opening chapter - get to the end of a draft even though you know there are major problems that you are going to have to go back and tackle. As Ernest Hemingway said 'The first draft of anything is shit.' Mind you, a lot of final drafts are shit as well, but that's another problem.

How did you first get started writing?

I came out of university with a degree in English and Drama so it was a natural transition to spend eighteen months working on building sites. But gradually I got to hear about places where uncommissioned comedy material might be accepted. I went along to meetings for Radio 4's Weekending and met another writer there who I teamed up with and soon Burton & O'Farrell (dubbed the 'Piranha Brothers' by the other writers) became the main contributors to the show. From there other producers offered us commissons and after a couple of years we made the transition to television, working on shows such as Spitting Image, Have I Got News For You, Smith and Jones and Murder Most Horrid. I never planned to be a book writer; in fact when the idea for Things Can Only Get Better popped into my head, I thought it would be a great idea for someone to write, it took me a day or so to realise that person was me.

How did you first get published?

It was easier for me on two counts - firstly that I already had a CV as a professional writer and secondly I had an idea that was so completely of-the-moment that it sort of pushed itself to the front of the queue. The first chapter and treatment landed on the desk of various literary agents on the Monday immediately after the general election of 1997 - and there was such a buzz about what had just happened that there was an auction for this account of the previous eighteen years. I told a Conservative acquaintance how pleased I was about this competition to buy my book about the Labour Party and he looked at me and said witheringly 'It's called capitalism, John'. I had written much of the book while I was still working on Have I Got News For You but gave up the day job once it was published. In fact I think the last thing I ever wrote for Angus Deayton was his quote on the back of my first book.

How often do you write?

I escaped the rat race to end up writing from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. I even commute to my place of work sometimes, taking my laptop to the British Library or London Library when I need a bit of space away from phones and emails. I do my best stuff in the morning, and the afternoons often are spent rewriting or trying to recover everything that I have accidentally erased from my hard-drive. May Contain Nuts took longer to write as I struggled for a long time to pin down the central idea, so I worked on holiday sometimes, getting up really early and doing a couple of hours before the rest of the family was awake. Then I was free to spend the rest of the day with the kids with them kicking me and saying 'Dad, wake up, you said you'd play with us.'

What would you be doing if you couldn't be a writer?

Perhaps I would be involved in politics in some way or working for a pressure group or something. The trouble is that as I get older the issues that really consume me are increasing petty - so I'd probably be working for the 'Campaign to Abolish Local Weather after the Main Weather' or the 'Anti-UHT Milk League'.

Where did you grow up, how did this place influence you?

One of the drawbacks of growing up in the cosy commuter belt is that you rather lack a cultural identity. You don't get many folk songs about the contraflow on the M4 Spur at Junction 8/9 Maidenhead. So I eventually decided to head into the problem and one of the central jokes of Things Can Only Get Better is the fact that I am a Labour supporter from one of the most Conservative un-radical places in the world. In 2001, I thought it would be interesting to go back and stand for Parliament in my home town - to go back and be rejected en masse by the people I grew up with. In a perverse way there was something rather theraputic about it. (I made a documentary about the experience entitled 'Losing My Maidenhead'.) I suppose my upbringing must have affected me, though I think family is more important than location. My father wrote a novel once and my mother's family were quite driven, so perhaps I have the Irish literary bent combined with the Protestant work ethic. But when I was a kid growing up in Maidenhead there were only two ways out of the Home Counties ghetto. Crime or Boxing. Crime, boxing or writing semi-humorous novels. Crime, boxing, novelist, accountancy, law, medicine, the City, journalism, business consultancy or becoming a database developer for one of the emerging software companies springing up all along the M4 corridor. So you see I had no choice.

What can we expect next?

May Contain Nuts is the first half of a two-book deal, and I will have to start the new novel as soon as I have finished this interview. So how can I make this answer last about 80,000 words? I do have an idea for my next book which I think I had better keep to myself until it is fully formed. There are screenplays being written of both The Best a Man Can Get and This Is Your Life, but I'm not buying the tuxedo for the premiere just yet. A TV adaptation looks likely for May Contain Nuts which has a better chance of actually getting made. I have been doing my Guardian column for over five years now, so I think it may be time to retire from that sort of writing for a while. A final collection of columns will be published in 2006 under the title I Have a Bream. This is the last part of the trilogy in which John O'Farrell discovers that Margaret Thatcher is actually his mother...