I felt very lucky to spend the last week in an Alpine chalet in Switzerland teaching on Alice Fraser’s annual writers’ retreat. What a week I had: slowly grooving around my room to the sound of cowbells in the valley, a tankard of pellets in my hand which I would periodically shovel into the pellet […]

Firstly, a huge thanks to everyone who’s already signed up to follow along with this serialised novel project! I really appreciate the early support off the back of merely a handful of mysterious letters and sten do invitations, and I hope the story will continue to entertain and intrigue as it unfolds! For any readers […]

Hello. You might be reading this as a fully paid-up subscriber to the LMAONaise newsletter, in which case you’ll have heard me bang on about this already. If so, please forgive me – mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! But yes, I am about to bang on about it for a second time. Or […]

I’m doing something a bit different with the newsletter this week – I’m excited to share the prologue to a novel I’ve been working on over the summer! It’s a comedy whodunnit called The Last One You’d Expect and over the next year or so, I’ve decided to serialise it in this newsletter for paid […]

This Sopranos meme did the rounds on a lot of comedy writing/directing Whatsapp threads a couple of weeks ago, as Channel 4 announced that they would be combining their comedy and drama departments as part of a drive to cut 25% of their workforce: Now, I don’t really want this newsletter to become a place […]

I’ve mentioned it briefly here before, but as we ramp up further into full promo mode, this week I’m going to talk a bit more about the lineup for our next Eggbox show, which returns to the Pleasance in Islington on the 10th of November! Now, if you are either: A. A dyed-in-the-wool Eggbox fan […]

I decided that I wanted to write a newsletter about directing three comedy shows for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and what I learned from it, and what I’d like to do going forwards with that kind of work, but I wasn’t really sure how to approach it and every time I sat down to try […]

Well I’ve completed another Edinburgh Fringe, this time from the enviable position of only needing to be there for ten days. So I thought I’d better do some sort of comprehensive debrief from it before we all drown in the deluge of even more comprehensive Fringe debriefs at the end of the month from people who […]

This was written in haste in a cafe on Monday afternoon before the Fringe kicks off. A snatched moment of productivity in the calm before the storm. But I do hope it might be useful for a few people bringing a show to the Fringe – their first, their third, their twelfth – who at […]

Long-time readers of this newsletter might remember the story about the time I dropped my phone in a chemical toilet twice within one minute. That story remains an in-demand hit at social occasions to this day, I think because it makes me come across as so colossally stupid. So I’m thrilled to announce that I return […]

Tomorrow I’m flying to Berlin to spend five days in that fine city of lakes and abandoned airstrips to perform two shows for the Berlin Fringe. So what with today being a busy prep day, I thought I’d make writing this newsletter easy for myself by just making it a list of 101 shows you should […]

As I write this, I am enjoying the feeling of having just completed the first draft of my first ever feature film screenplay. I’ve never done that before – it’s always been one of those “I wonder what that would feel like?” question marks in my career, and I’m very proud of having done it. […]

I’ve had a few people recently ask “So what’s the deal with this Hugh Jackman show? Is it for this year’s Fringe? When are you doing it in London?” and variations on that kind of gubbins. And to answer the last of those questions first, very excitingly, I’ve just booked in a couple of work-in-progress dates […]

Last week a friend of mine told me about a thought exercise she’d been doing with her partner where they both had to go backwards through their lives and narrate a memory that came to mind for each age, going as far back as possible. I forget what the point of the exercise was, but […]

I’m gonna do everything I can to not let this week’s newsletter turn into a rant, because it could definitely go that way. I’d like it to just explore some ideas rather than moan about them, but let’s see how I get on. Apologies in advance if I don’t quite stick the landing. Over the […]