I recently had a bit of luck getting a couple of my one liner jokes on BBC4 Radio Extra’s ‘Newsjack’ (if for any strange reason you don’t believe me check out the credit list! http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kvs8r/features/series-8-2 and http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kvs8r/features/series-8-6).

Anyway – Newsjack is an open submission programme, so basically you have a deadline each week and can send in your jokes or sketches, cross your fingers and hope they get chosen out of the hundreds of submissions. So although I got two jokes in (praise the lord of media), I wrote dozens more that didn’t get in. Quite simply they weren’t good enough for the BBC. They may well just not have been good enough in general, it was my first attempt at writing weekly topical gags after all.

So, I’m going to treat you to some of the rejects. That’s right. Content doesn’t get much better than this! All the bits the Beeb didn’t want. Not all at once mind, that would be a waste. This is part 1 – some one liner attempts from the first two shows. By the way, these were topical about two months ago.

This joke about Swedish parenting habits was probably a little too gross…

“It emerged this week that it is common practice for Swedish parents to leave babies outside in freezing temperatures for their evening nap. This has raised health concerns, not due to the sub zero conditions, but because of defrosting them in the microwave afterwards.”

– One of the things I learned as I went along is that they have to be ‘snappy’. The wording’s a little clumsy in this, and the joke may be too crude for Radio 4!

Some of the most fun things to write about were the many “scientists have found…” stories that pop up almost everyday. Both the jokes I got on air were in this format. This one didn’t get on air, but hey…

“Scientists have found that female golden moles choose a mate based on the size of their penis, but being blind they have to do this by touch and smell. In a separate study, male golden moles have been found burrowing into warehouses and stealing pepperami’s”

Again – could be snappier. I am trying really hard not to edit these for this blog as the whole point is that these didn’t get used for a reason! Maybe not funny enough or maybe jokes about Mole penises just don’t hit the mark.

Okay, one more. I wasn’t able to resist temptation when the horse-meat scandal broke. I knew that everyone in the world was making jokes about it, so I was trying to avoid it, but then this little quote from Nick Clegg came up during the by-election and I just had to…

“Nick Clegg has said that the Eastleigh by-election is a two-horse race, or as it’s better known, the Tesco family-sized frozen lasagne, race.”

Not the best horse meat joke in the world! It was just that it brought two stories together into one pun, which I guess must massively increase the chances that you are writing something unique. If you just write plain gags about the biggest news story, you are unlikely to come up with something different from the rest. As it happened, this wasn’t sufficiently different or funny enough to get used.

So there we have it! My first collection of BBC rejects. I will post some more at some point, but not all. Having just gone back over them for this post, there are some that are so poor I can’t believe I sent them in, but then, writing is about finishing things, even if you aren’t happy with it, get it finished at least and then re-draft or move on if it’s that bad. Just don’t never write or send anything because you don’t think it’s good enough – how will you get any better if you don’t finish anything? Eh?!! Yeah. You heard.

Garry