Ditched! was written during a very strange time in my life, one night, in the early hours of the morning, I encountered a man walking alone on a dark country road. He’d been stranded after a friend left him behind, and something about that moment — the loneliness, the absurdity, the quiet humour of it — struck me. It stayed with me. And it became the spark that lit this film.
in the finished product "Ditched!" Is a comedy, about friendships stretched to their limits, and how far people will go when they’re convinced love is slipping away from them.
At its centre is Harry, a man whose determination to fix his relationship sends him spiralling through the most disastrous twenty-four hours of his life. Beside him is Tom, his loyal best friend who manages, with great enthusiasm, to make almost every situation worse. Their journey carries them from pubs to woodland roads, through mistaken identities, misunderstandings, emotional confessions, wildly misjudged grand gestures, and one accidental kidnapping that becomes the beating heart of the film.
And then, of course, there's Ritchie, who walks into this story like a drunken philosopher from the wrong century. Misquoting “Archemedies,” stumbling into accidental wisdom, and somehow becoming the big complication of the film.
The tone of Ditched! carries a little of the spirit found in comedies like Porky’s but with a more british edge, like a sitcom, the sort of film where one mishap tumbles into the next until the characters don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or run.
Tom Walters didn’t just help title the film — he became the script doctor who gave it its unique voice. His instinct for rhythm, banter, and character chemistry helped shape Harry, Tom, Sophie, and Ritchie into a proper ensemble. His fingerprints are everywhere in the emotional side of the film.
With all of that stitched together, Ditched! grew into a lively, messy, heartfelt picture — the kind of film where characters make fools of themselves in the most loving, honest, human way possible. Beneath all the chaos, it’s the kind of "night out" story I used to have with my friends back when we were teenagers and is a bit of a time capsule in that way.
How Ditched! Came to Be
(The true story behind the film’s creation)
The film has one of the most uncanny, perfectly cinematic origin stories I’ve ever experienced.
On February 20th, 2020, at 2:04 in the morning, I was on the phone to Tom Walters. We were talking about movies — dreaming, scheming, wishing we could make another one. And I said:
“The next film the universe tells me to make… I’ll write.”
Not even a minute later, I turned a corner in my car and saw a man in a high-viz jacket walking alone down a pitch-black country road. Thinking the road was about to be closed, I slowed down. Instead, he looked at me and said:
“Excuse me mate, which way is South Godstone?”
I told him it was ten miles in the opposite direction.
He explained that he’d been walking for four hours, from Horsham because his friend
had gone home and ditched him, leaving him stranded in the middle of nowhere.
I drove past, picked up the phone, and immediately told Tom.
“You won’t believe what just happened…”
Then I stopped the car, wrote down every detail in case this really was the sign I had asked the universe for, circled back, and took him to Crawley station.
And that was it.
The tone, the characters, the comedy, the theme — it all arrived right there on that quiet road at 2 a.m.
The working title was originally Any Tom, Dick and Harry, but Tom Walters said the line that stuck:
“Call it Ditched! — everyone gets ditched at some point.”
And that became the film.
It remains one of the clearest moments of creative fate I’ve ever experienced — the universe handing me a story at the exact moment I promised to listen.