Interview with David Quantick: Chance meetings, mutual connections…a writer's tale

Abstract

ABSTRACTDavid Quantick is a comedy writer, a music journalist, an author and a broadcaster. He claims to have written for over 60 publications: ‘most of them just once’. He reflects on his career as if it has been a complicated sequence of chance meetings, mutual connections and plain old fate. A degree of modesty might be at play, but there certainly has not been a Grand Plan in operation since he wrote to NME editor Neil Spencer in 1983 telling him his music paper was crap, only to be invited in to see if he could do any better. Quantick's list of collaborators suggests that his success is not down to good fortune alone. His CV includes writing for The Day Today, On The Hour, Brass Eye Jam and The Thick Of It. He was part of the writing team behind Harry Hill's TV Burp for over a decade. In 2013, his adaptation of Ian R. MacLeod's short story Snodgrass, in which John Lennon is found alive and well and living in Birmingham, was broadcast as part of the Sky Arts Playhouse series. He also self-published the novel Sparks on Kindle. Quantick is writing for the 2014 series of acclaimed HBO series Veep, created by Armando Iannucci and starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He was born in 1961, in a mother-and-baby home in Wortley, Yorkshire. His mother lived in the Midlands and went to stay with an aunt In Derbyshire to conceal the fact she was pregnant. He was adopted by a family, who were living in Sheffield at the time and then moved to Plymouth. He recalls one of his first memories seeing his father walking towards him and feeling really happy.