WRITING plays for a living sounds like a lonely job but Melling's Len Pentin says hearing a packed theatre laugh at your jokes is the greatest feeling.
 The 43-year-old playwright started life as a civil servant but now his latest play, Slappers and Slapheads, written with writing partner Fred Lawless, was one of the biggest hits of this year's Liverpool Comedy Festival. Len said: "I started writing 10 years ago when I was asked to write sketches for a review at my teacher training college and I got the bug from there. "I met my writing partner Fred at Liverpool Playwrights Group, we got on really well and were approached by Radio Merseyside to write a soap/ sitcom called Paradise People which we got a Sony nomination for. "Our first play was Slap-pers and Slapheads which took six months to write but I've been living off my writing for over two years now. "We work by getting together for a day to plot the story and then we write half an act each and email it back and forth to each other. "When it was finished Kevin Fearon at the Comedy Festival heard about it and put a contract in the post. "Now we're re-writing Slappers for a national tour and working on our new play, Natural Born Losers. "It is bizarre to have a whole theatre full of people laughing at your jokes, especially when it's a line we were going to cut and it ends up getting the biggest laughs every night. "For such a long time your script is your baby and then it seems half the city is watching it. Very flattering but very odd. "I work best in the mornings and I write for three to four hours a day. I still do a bit of teaching and I do consultancy work with the Arts and Cultural Industry Development Fund. "I love my job because there's no boss breathing down my neck telling me what to do and it's wonderful being creative and getting money to do what you enjoy. "The best thing is the audience reaction when you see them laughing at something you've written but our greatest compliment came from a woman who came to see Slappers and Slapheads whose husband had died from cancer. "One of the characters in the play has cancer and she said she was really touched how we'd handled the subject with delicacy and feeling. That was lovely and the biggest kick of all." | 
