Simon Mayo on new novel Black Tag and pitching to Hollywood directors: "I have done so occasionally"
"If I was interviewing Spielberg, would I tell him about my latest idea? No, absolutely not. But if he asked, 'Do you have any ideas?' – well, I have a copy of Black Tag in my rucksack."

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
It started in the middle of the night. “I get insomnia sometimes,” explains broadcaster and author Simon Mayo. “I think it’s a residue of doing the Breakfast Show [which he presented on Radio 1 from 1988 to 1993].
“I had a bout a while ago, so I got up in the night and tried to soothe myself down by reading a magazine while supping my chamomile tea. Then I started reading about a ‘grab list’, which is what the fire brigade have when called to museums and galleries. It lists the works of art that, in the event of fire or flood, fire-fighters try to rescue first. And I thought, ‘OK, that’s quite interesting.’
“By the time I went back to bed, I was wondering, ‘What if the fire service saves the wrong painting? What if someone had altered the grab list? So I’d stimulated my brain and didn’t get back to sleep.
“But I did get the idea for my new book, Black Tag, because that’s where its story starts: a gallery burns down, a body is found in the basement, the fire brigade rescue what they can… but they save the wrong paintings.”
Mayo is clearly a compulsive writer: he’s squeezed in this (his eighth book) around his weekday drivetime show on Greatest Hits Radio, Sunday slot on Magic Classical, and high-profile weekly movie podcast with Mark Kermode. (How does he do it? “I have been known to get up early on Christmas morning and write a few paragraphs.”)
Fortunately, his books are just as compulsive to read, with Black Tag as grippingly taut as his previous bestselling thrillers.
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Presumably, then, it would always be the manuscript of his latest meisterwerk topping his personal grab list? “No, increasingly all the valuable stuff is digital, so it’s the personal stuff you’d reach for.” Surprisingly, given that several characters in the book ask themselves the grab list question, Mayo doesn’t have a ready answer of his own.
“I’m not sure,” he stumbles, “maybe a mug given to me for Christmas by my two-year-old grandson, Oscar, which has this fantastic two-year-old artwork on it.
“Next to that on my shelf is a Monty Python ceramic foot given to me by Eric Idle for helping to get Always Look on the Bright Side of Life into the charts when I started playing it on the Breakfast Show – so I’d take that next. And then there’s the MBE, though maybe they could give me another if that burns. I don’t know how it works.”
The MBE was awarded in 2021 for services to broadcasting, but Mayo doesn’t always get such plaudits from his near and dear. He’s not sure how many of his three adult children have read the new book, and he’s doubtful about his broadcast colleagues too: “I don’t think Ken [Bruce, his Greatest Hits station-mate] has read it, and I suspect Mark [Kermode] hasn’t either.”
So much for friends in high places. But with directors like Ron Howard, Ridley Scott and Denis Villeneuve (not to mention actors Cate Blanchett, Hugh Jackman and Michael Douglas) all appearing on Mayo and Kermode’s movie podcast, isn’t he tempted to slip them a tome or two? “I have done so occasionally, when I’ve interviewed someone I thought might be interested.
“For instance, I wrote Mad Blood Stirring, which was a fictionalised version of the true story of the first black production of Romeo and Juliet, which took place in Dartmoor Prison in 1815. I gave [12 Years a Slave director] Steve McQueen a copy of that.
“I interviewed Chadwick Boseman – who was clearly very ill at the time, because he died about six months later – and we’d been talking about Shakespeare, so I gave him a copy. He was utterly charming, and as he left, he walked across the newsroom and turned and saluted me with it.
“But you can’t take the mickey. If I was interviewing Spielberg, would I tell him about my latest idea? No, absolutely not. But if he asked, ‘Do you have any ideas?’ – well, I have a copy of Black Tag in my rucksack.
“I don’t ‘cross the streams’ professionally, but if you bump into someone and they show an interest, then sure. In fact I was on the Tube the other day, and Danny Boyle got on, and we had a jolly good conversation. If I’d had a book to give him, I’d have said, ‘Hey Danny, would you like this?’ ”
So simply because Mayo didn’t have a copy of his book on him at the time, audiences are to be denied a big-screen adaptation of Black Tag? Well, not necessarily: “I expect I’ll be seeing him fairly shortly when his new film 28 Years Later comes out…”
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