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Dear Heidi,

I’m in my office and about to say thank you for my Christmas present. It’s on my desk and already filled with paper-clips and valium. It is indeed a rare piece, enhanced by our mutual affection for the typewriter. I have four typewriters, all identical IBM Selectric 8000s, all obsolete and all worked to death. I have a team of them because they’re part of a rotation - when one quits I begin on another and send the victim for recuperation. There’s only one man on this baleful island who can fix them and he’s a Sekh in a turban (or maybe it’s a circular hat?). He takes one away and brings back the last one he’s fixed. (It’s an interesting coincidence that he comes from the same land as my BCR typewriter ribbon tin)...

Meanwhile my son and his beautiful American wife have just crossed the courtyard below my window heading for the studio (Willow records in one of the barns). They are musicians called ‘Outpost Drive’. Hyper-talented, you can check them out on Youtube, should you care to...

Meanwhile again, accept my sympathy for your woe with French crockery.Despite it I’m still fond of France and wish I could live there. I’ve amended the date on this letter because I can’t stand the date England is in - ceaseless rain and a small oaf in charge. Plus I can’t rid my head of Trump, nor that psychopathic dwarf in Moscow, (or circumcised Twot murdering kids in the so-called ‘Holy Land’. Kindly shove it up your religious arse).

These abominations dominate my thoughts fuelling asthma and making me sick. It’s bad enough being an 0.C. (old cunt) but worse to contemplate transformation into a B.R.O.C. (Bed Ridden Old Cunt). Apropos of that I’m thinking of un-giving-up smoking. I smoked like Satan for 50 years and chewed grit to quit. But given present circumstances, can’t see the point? I’m fully qualified for death and as if to enhance the sentiment this morning the postman delivered me the enclosed invitation to the grave. “Hand Delivery of the Ashes to any Mainland Address in England.”

And there are other advantages, including a “Solid-Pine Eco-Coffin, or Suitable Alternative,” (a sack) and most attractive of all, a “£50 Gift Card” redeemable at most retail outlets. You can get sausages with it. Milk.

I can’t fucking wait, especially as I look worse than the old cunt advertising it..

All Best,

BR

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March 28th I98I

My Dear Mackerrell,

I suppose you’re out drinking yourself to death. You never answer the fucking telephone, so I have taken it upon myself to scratch you a letter. I know there’s little I can tell you that you don’t already know, and anything I do know that you don’t know is no business of yours.

I write simply because I was shoving through Surbiton today in the back of a cab, and I looked out at some particularly unpleasant dwellings and thought of you. Built in the I930’s with pebble-dash the colour of mackintoshes. And green drains. I’m sure men with macks live in these places. And wives with accumulating liquids. The sort of houses doctors visit more frequently than relitives. And with equal expectations of joy.

This dreadful visual caused my senses to reel. For reasons that soon will become clear to you, I approached the peripheries of a swoon. God and imagination saved me. My fancy took refuge in a small romance set on the boarders of wales. A tussled house in the hills. A good library and a good cellar. And a good storm blowing with a good grateful of fire. And feet up on the hearth with a Cuban in the maw. And a glass of good port. And you! At that moment. I could think of none other I would rather be with. Imagine it, old load. The whole of March to talk, and the wine would never run out!

(Forgive these bastard exclamation marks. At the best of times I dislike punctuation, and can quite frankly tell you, I loath exclamation marks. They’re in for a reason. I’ll come to it in a minute.)

No I won’t. I’ll come to it now. They are there because I am in a state of shock. My shunt through the suburbs was initiated by the return from a place called the Nuffield Hospital where a thug with a squint had removed some bastard growth from my right Bristol which I, (and I was mercifully wrong), was convinced was going to be a fucking cancer. I wish to talk only of myself, and will therefore be brief while making reference to you. But I can tell you, I gleaned a little of what you must have gone through during that hellish period in Nottingham. I suppose we’re getting old aren’t we? I suppose every year will bring some fresh crop of terror? Enough! As it transpired this vulgar little lump was a complaint called Gynocomastia - and I couldn’t give a fuck if I’ve spelt it wrongly because the cunt was there and has cost me more money and grief than I care to mention.

So here I sit. Recovering. Both bars on and a convoy of milk fleets shuffling through the threadbare rain. Without this bastard tit a wednesday in Wimbledon in winter is like being beaten round the head with a hammer. But I refuse to get angry about it. I’m looking for some sort of mental gear change to bring a smile to your gin-enslaved lip. Alas. I have nothing of cheer to report. I now realise that being 35 years old & wifeless & bratless is a fucking lonely career. But since neither deign to come my way, and since those of the latter who have, have without exception ended up plunging headfirst down some N.H.S. toilet, the less said the better. I hope you are well. I leave you in the state I expected to find you & most certainly find myself. Drinking myself to death. Etc. Etc. Love B.R.

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If I hadn’t wanted to be an actor there would be no Withnail and I. I’d applied to a variety of theatre schools and got lucky with one of them. I can clearly remember the moment when I told my father the good news. “I’ve been accepted at the Central School of Speech Drama,” I said. He looked at me like he’d just been diagnosed with something inoperable, then turned away and walked off in the same direction. I had become accustomed to his enthusiasm for my presence on this planet, but didn’t yet know that he wasn’t actually my father.

But that’s another story for another day. Meanwhile, I was off to London. If you wanted to be an actor Central School was a privilege, but I hadn’t been there long before I realised I didn’t want to be one. Irrespective of that and by great good fortune, I was already unknowingly enmeshed in the genesis of Withnail.

It was the first year of a three year course called C Stage, and in this year were several students who inadvertently would become important contributors to the film. We became friends, best friends, evolving into an exclusive group that called itself the ‘Skins.’ The Skins were like a rock-band with no music. I refer to them, as we did, by their surnames and in no particular order.

There was Dundas, who kept the titled part of his name out of it. When we first met he looked like what was generally known as a ‘rag-arse,’ everything frayed and going about it in disintegrating shoes. I felt sympathy for him, or rather his parents, who must have struggled with the financial where-withal. It wasn’t until later that we found out that his Dad was a Viscount with fifty thousand acres and Rembrants on the wall. Dundas was always bashing out brilliant improvised jazz on the nearest clapped-out piano. Twenty years later he was to compose the inimitable theme-music for Withnail and I.

Next up of the Skins was Elphic, who later flourished with success in film and T.V. Elphic played the tough guy, but it was an act, and that was the act I wanted. Behind the armour he was a sweet kind man, a special actor, and tragic it was that the booze got him. One of his performances, most memorable for me, was naturally as the man with eels down his leg, a.k.a Jake the Poacher.

Skin three was another Michael, this one with the surname of Feast. Micky, as the civilians called him, was a vital ingredient in the gestation of Withnail. It was he and I who took off one winter morning for a remote cottage in the Lake District, where we intended to try and write a screenplay called ‘Private Pirates. Never came to anything, but it was this miserable, damp, ten quid a week hovel on a hillside, where Withnail began to assemble itself in my head.

No boots except carrier bags, and no food except a chicken we didn’t have the guts to kill. Plus we had to burn the furniture for heat. And lastly Mackerrell, who never went anywhere near ‘Monty’s Cottage,’ but upon whom the character of Withnail was flimsily based. Post Central, Vivian and I spent two intense years out of work and living in Dundas’s abandoned house in Camden Town.

He probably abandoned it because we were in it and I shall never forget his rent-free kindness. It was in the kitchen of this house that I wrote Withnail and I fifty three years ago, bashing it out amongst empty bottles and breakfast remains on a fucked Olivetti.

Camden Town wasn’t what it is now, no brass door knockers, and long before the Wankers Caffs acquired a French e with an accent over it. We scoured the litter bins of Camden looking for empty beer bottles, particularly Guinness on which you could get a few pennies refund. They all added up to a bottle of ugly wine which Mackerrell and I would swill between splifs while yakking into tomorrow. These were lean days and when Viv got a play up North they got even leaner. More broke than I’ve ever been, I stole toilet rolls from the Odeon Cinema, and had a single light-bulb that I carried about the house. It was under this flyblown orb that I finally wrote the last line of the novel and as I hit the last key there was an urgent banging on the front door. Ignoring it didn’t stop it. It was late and I opened it with reluctance. A flame-headed muscular Irishman with an equally red face was on the step. Everything about him was red because he’d taken a harsh smack in the chops and held up a tooth to prove it. He smiled, showing me the tooth. “Have you got any glue?” he said, and it seemed a very appropriate end to ‘Withnail and I’.

B.R. August 26.

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PART II

Every history I had read, indeed subsequently have ever read, assumed this “race” with Nazi Germany as reason one for building an allied bomb. To my certain know-ledge, there is no published history that even begins to question this “atom race” as sole initiator of the whole huge Manhattan Project.

Now the light really went on. What if there wasn’t a “race?”

What if this race was manufactured to persuade predominantly Jewish scientists (most on the run from Fascism) to build an atomic bomb?

I must admit to a certain excitement. I accepted the commission and began an investigation that was to occupy and obsess me for the next two and a half plus years.

Because I now knew what I was looking for, and the various archives and government departments did not, I was able to make laborious but sometimes startling progress. Hundreds and hundreds of questions had to be addressed in my effort to prove the Nazis were not, and could not be producing a nuclear weapon, and most importantly, that the British and U.S. authorities knew it.

I believe I conclusively verified this to be the case. Naturally it’s impossible to get into any detail here, but here are a few abbreviated examples of the areas in which I began to re-search. By now I’d discovered that several “virgin” targets had been selected in Japan as potential bomb recipients. As with Truk, these cities had been chosen early in 1943, and throughout the war were spared all bombing, and in fact, any attack at all. They were to be “laboratories” for the gadgets awesome effect. Now I wanted to know what these potential cities might be in Germany?

Where were the “virgins” in Deutchland? Answer, none. There were no contingency plans to attack any German city with nuclear weapons. I established that by 1942 allied intelligence was certain the Nazis had no bomb (Jewish physics Hitler called it), and indeed weren’t even seriously looking for one. Many historians have made much of the Rjukan hydroelectric & electrochemical plants in southern Norway. These plants were responsible for shipping heavy water into Germany, vital in the development of atomic weapons. 120 kilograms a month according to official figures.

The U.S. had abandoned heavy water as a feasible reactor medium early in the war. Why? Now I needed to know how much heavy water was available To the Manhattan Project. Via a FOI request, I established (before they abandoned it) that the U.S. was producing one ton of heavy water a month which, according to Szilard, was simply not enough to use as a viable medium to sustain react-ion. So what were the Germans up to with their piffling amount? They were looking for a possible reactor for their U. Boats.

Germany was fighting a war on two fronts. Bombed, and under continual surveillance day and night. The Uranium plant at Hanford, Washington, covered half a million acres. The plutonium plant at Tennessee contained buildings a quarter of a mile long. Both plants required vast amounts of electricity and water. It would have been impossible for Germany to hide developments like this. (If you’re looking for an atom bomb, check out the rivers and the power stations). Plus their only source of Uranium was at the Joachimsthal Mines, themselves overflown and photographed continually looking for signs of activity or tailings. There was none. From 1939 on, when two German physicists working in Berlin had achieved fission and announced it to the world via a British science magazine (hardly too bright if you’re about to start a war and win it with a secret new weapon), British agents were daily taking water samples from the Rhine and examining it for traces of nuclear activity. To conclude, we discovered that the German equivalent of the Manhattan Project spent on research, during the entire war, what the Manhattan Project was spending each day. We proved the Germans were not building a bomb. And that General Groves, for one, knew it.

Within the restrictions of a screenplay, the essentials of this argument are presented by MERRIMAN in scene 120 of my first script, dated March 1984. (I notice in the “shooting script” concocted by the Director, that this information is now given to some mysterious individual called SHONFIELD). The research that went into this single scene, 120, took almost exactly one year. Every new road had a dozen more branching off it. I made 27 separate applications under the Freedom of Information Act. Some of the material my researcher, Anne Gardner and I discovered, is truely hair raising. Of course by now, in geography of the developing screenplay, the “race” had become of secondary significance. But by questioning it I was led to question the principal characters motivating it, not least of which was General Leslie Groves, of whom more in a moment.

It is simply historically tragic that the Chevalier/ Eltenton incident has been cut from my script because, to my certain knowledge, the Director who took this project over was unable to prove it. My script was originally written for a specific Director. For reasons unknown to me he was paid off and replaced by the current Director. When this change took place, also for reasons unknown to me, I was dismissed from the project.

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One of the toils of a writer is trying to get rid of the words. Particularly adjectives. Killing them off is tedious but relatively easy. Yet on this occasion, and I’ll imminently get into why, it was like trying to get an egg back up a chicken’s arse.

The dilemma I reference was to find a painless approach to the exhumation of Withnail and I. By definition, I’m not talking about the movie, but the long forgotten novel of that title that I wrote over half a century ago.

The essence of the problem was a realisation of something that the novel never had, which I call, ‘The Bomb Under The Table.’ In my beginners innocence of narrative, Withnail is one of the few stories I’ve ever written that ignores it, (and by happy-accident is possibly its greatest asset).

The Bomb Under The Table is basically a device to keep the reader reading and the viewer viewing. There are infinite variations, but here is a primitive explanation of mine.

A couple of blokes enjoying a pint in a pub discussing whatever they feel like, but basically something of little merit, like Nigel Farrage or ping-pong. The more mundane the better, trash-yak escalating the tension. Because what the audience know, and they don’t, is that there is a terrorist bomb under the table, half a kilo of gelignite, ticking away with but minutes before it goes off.

There’s a bomb under the table and with a bit of luck the audience will be on the edge of their seats. Such a device is found in different guises all over the movies, which brings me back to Withnail, because it hasn’t got a bomb ..

One of the best reviews I ever read of the film was a slick critique of its non-existent plot. “Here, There, Here, “ it said, an assessment predicated on Uncle Monty’s, “Here, Hare, Here,” and the fact that little happens except the characters travel from London (Here) to Penrith (There) and back to (Here) again. No car chase, no violence, no sex.

So here I am, back at the beginning of Once Upon a Time in Camden Town. The reason I’m unexpectedly in the Omska over Withnail is there is now an interest in publishing the original novel, and seeing as I’ve never made so much as one penny out of the cheats at Hand Made Films, I persuaded myself to give it a shot.

It came out of the attic in a cardboard box, munched by insects called silver-fish and pissed on by mice. I took it downstairs and read what was readable, and my immediate headache was whether I should tart it up? In other words, how much should I rework its adjective splattered innocence?

I sat staring at it for a variety of hours, and finally got shafted by another one of my rules, ‘Aim at two targets with one arrow, and you end up missing both.’ So I decided to leave it alone, serve it raw, so to speak, and stay true to the radishes .. except for “Here” .. and maybe “There”..

B.R. July 2026

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Of all the screenplays I’ve written I must own to a lasting affection for the Silver Palace. There’s a whole menu of reasons, primarily I suppose, because it was the first screenplay I ever got money for (two thousand five hundred quid), coughed-up by the second reason for my fond memories, and that was Mr David Putnam.

Since those distant 1970’s days, Putnam has gone up like a Thor-Missile, Sir David, Lord David, but then he was just Putnam and the most exciting film producer in London.

A young Welsh chap by the name of Keith Williams had sent him an idea - ‘A Kid with a Magic Ticket, working out his war-time woes in a fantasy world of cinema.’ Somewhere around this time, Putnam had read some story I’d written, didn’t care for it, but sent Mr William’s idea on to me. It was right-up my Yellow-Brick and although the picture was never made, two great things came out of it. One was the joy of writing comedy, and the other the beginning of a relationship. Putnam was like a Geiger-Counter for new talent, kicking off the careers of some great names - Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson, Ridley Scott - and somewhere in their wake, me. Had it not been for the Silver Palace I would never have been commissioned by Putnam to write The Killing Fields. It was an amazing time, for the first time my writing was taken seriously by an amazing producer, allowing me to junk the acting and just about imagine myself as a writer.

Plus, I learnt a golden-rule apropos of movie budgets. The Silver Palace ends with its lead character, Siddy, riding into town at the head of a convoy of carnival elephants. When Putnam read it he said, (and I’ve never forgotten it) “Fuck me, can’t we have one elephant?”.

B.R. July 2026

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Part 1

Early in 1982 I was asked by Warner Brothers whether I would be interested in writing a screenplay about the atomic bomb.

I was. But what’s the story? There wasn’t one. The Producers and I agreed I would spend twelve weeks researching available material to see if I could come up with an original approach. At the end of three months I had read everything I could, assembled a large amount of material, but still had no motor-drive for a screenplay.

At least, I had nothing original to say that hadn’t already been covered in literally hundreds of histories and on television.

I was about to refuse the commission when I stumbled over an obscure document in the library of Santa Fe. This paper refered to another source (LA 1161), which apparently discussed modification of a B. 29 bomber for use with nuclear weapons.

By chance, a week earlier, I had been reading a deployment manual of U.S. aircraft operational during the second world war. A low volt lamp went on. Something bothered me here. Why a B.29?

The B.29 was a Pacific airplane, never intended for use in Europe. So why wasn’t this contemporary paper referring to the adaption of other large bombers operating in the European Theatre? After all, the race for the bomb was with Germany?

This anomaly over the B.29 intrigued me. I wanted this document. I made my first application under the Freedom of Information Act. Meanwhile I was still struggling for a last shot at an idea. Aim at two targets with one arrow and you end up missing both.

The story of the bomb has literally thousands of possible targets and it was very difficult finding an incisive way in.

Then the document, LA 1161 arrived. A lot was blacked. But the essence was there. It stated .. the Military Policy Committee had concluded .. in respect of the diminishing threat of Germany .. that the Japanese Fleet at Truk .. would be the most likely target for the first atomic bomb. It was dated May 5 1943.

“Diminishing threat?” In May 1943?

I could hardly believe what I was looking at. This paper would seem to suggest that the military had already written off the threat of Nazi Germany two weeks after the official opening of the Los Alamos Labs on April 15 1943, and two months before they ever began to construct a plutonium production plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee!

If this was true the implications were staggering. If there was no “race” with Germany, why build the bomb? (Certainly there was no atom-race with Japan). Every history I had read, indeed subsequently have ever read, assumed this “race” with Nazi Germany as reason one for building an allied bomb. To my certain knowledge, there is no published history that even begins to question this “atom race” as sole initiator of the whole huge Manhattan Project.

Now the light really went on. What if there wasn’t a “race?” What if this race was manufactured to persuade predominantly Jewish scientists (most on the run from Fascism) to build an atomic bomb?

I must admit to a certain excitement. I accepted the commission and began an investigation that was to occupy and obsess me for the next two and a half plus years.

Wimbledon. London. April 1989.

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^{Julian Broad.}

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Writing is difficult, like trying to remember something that hasn’t happened. I don’t know why I ended up as a writer, but there are two incidents of childhood that kind of kicked it off. One was asthma, and the other my Grandfather’s death.

Hemingway famously said, you need two things to be a writer, a cast-iron bull-shit detector and an unhappy childhood. Although different to my ‘two things,’ I certainly qualify for the latter of his. There were no books in our house, not much love, and endless rage.

The school I went to was a post-war yellow brick eye-sore with a deep commitment to keeping kids stupid. Everything was about addicting us to religion and the Royal Family, everything about making us like everyone else.

But one of the few positive things about my education is that it didn’t fuck-up Shakespeare. I didn’t get to that kind of thing until I was old enough to be ravenous for it.

The school was titled, The Charles Dickens Secondary Modern School, Broadstairs Kent. As far as I recall, the only association it had with Dickens was a plaster-bust of him in the foyer with a piece of blackened chewing gum shoved up one of his nostrils. And that was the end of my relationship with the great writer, as I thought.

When I was 13 asthma put me in bed for about a month. There was a prophetic knock on the front door, and two minutes later my mother arrived in the bedroom with a brown paper parcel. “Your teacher thought you might like this,” she said.

Mr Mann taught English and directed school-plays. I’d been in a couple and acting was the only thing I was marginally good at. Anyway, the parcel. Inside was a shabby looking book in green covers with a title I’d never heard of. It was Oliver Twist.

I read it like it was medicine, and as soon as it was finished I started reading it again. At that age I was a reader of comics, particularly the Beano, and didn’t know stuff like this existed. Oliver Twist had flipped some kind of switch in my head, initiating an obsession with the life and writing of Dickens that has never gone away.

Around this time my Grandfather had died and a sad day it was. They were clearing out his office, throwing a lot of stuff away. My Grandmother walked into the kitchen with an old black box, “would you like this?” she said. Apparently it was about to be thrown out, but became one of the best presents I’ve ever had.

It was a portable typewriter from the 1930s, called an Underwood. This is gonna sound like bullshit, but hand on heart it’s true. I got hold of some paper and started to write a play. It was the first fiction I’d ever written, set in the cell of a condemned man, and there were two Warders with whom he was to spend his last night. One of them was benevolent and the other a cunt and that’s all I can remember of it.

Sixty five years later I’ve got four typewriters, all the same, brilliant I.B.M. Selectric 8000’s that can type faster than I can think. I’m on one now, and they, and me have written over forty screenplays. And though most have never been produced, it still amazes me that that is how I’ve earned my living. But what really amazes is that the greatest writer who ever lived did it with a feather from a Goose’s arse...

I’ve got a quote stuck on my typewriter, not from Shakespeare, but someone of considerable note. It’s a quote from James Joyce, “write it, damn you, what else are you good for?” And that just about sums me up.

B.R. June 2026

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While some of it has appeared in films and books, much of my work has remained in notebooks, folders and boxes, quietly gathering dust. Alongside published works are unfinished thoughts, early drafts, photographs, letters and scripts that have never found a home.

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I’ll be sharing pieces from my extensive archive, new writing when it appears, reflections on life, memories from my career, and the occasional surprise that I think might be worth rescuing from obscurity.

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