“What goes on tour?”, they say. You’ll have heard them say it. It’s one of those great imponderables. “Is the Pope a Catholic, and if so, would it be fair to call him their leader? Do bears shit in the woods, and do they enjoy it?” But the greatest of them all is the age-old “What goes on tour?” Finally, we’re able to furnish this age-old question with a real, solid answer – it’s Joz Norris. Joz Norris goes on tour. He’s doing it in 2026 with his award-winning, multi-award-nominated, 5-star critically acclaimed, sellout smash hit show You Wait. Time Passes. and you can find out more about it and book tickets here!
Hold on, sorry, ignore me, I just googled “What goes on tour” to make sure I’d got it right and it turns out it’s not a question, it’s the first half of a statement usually invoked to sanction infidelity. Oh well, I’m going to tell you about my tour anyway.
I’ve never done a tour before. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve schlepped around the UK doing shows since time immemorial (2014-ish), but those shows were usually work-in-progresses. My shows would usually be officially launched at the Edinburgh Fringe in August, transfer to a London venue in October, then stagger out into the street, stare around themselves in wide-eyed awe at the London nightlife, and then immediately collapse and die. In 2019, when I finally made a show that achieved significant success to justify trying to tour it, I managed to get through two tour dates before a global pandemic caused my ambitions to hit the skids.
The first was a delightful outing in Sheffield, the second was a cursed finale in Hastings where the audience enthusiastically and drunkenly shouted throughout about how much they were loving the show that they were actively ruining. The highlight of the trip was Ben Target filming me eating a pickled egg for the first time, and it breaks my heart that I can’t find that video anywhere. It seemed a fitting way to close the lid on that chapter of my career – a show that achieved breakout success but nonetheless died in ignominy at the edge of the land as I tried to make content gorging myself on pickled eggs, then struggling to entertain an indifferent crowd before a deadly virus temporarily killed my industry.
In 2022, Ben and I had a crack at touring again with Blink, and we managed a single tour date in Aberystwyth, but my stepdad had built the show’s set seemingly out of railway sleepers and the show also involved a giant rabbit costume with five-foot-long arms that had caused at least one audience member to have a panic attack during the Fringe run. This might not have been a problem if I’d ever learned to drive, but in my teens I had suffered through a series of uninspiring driving instructors who struggled to make me give a shit, culminating in one who fell asleep throughout my lesson and left me to drive around Salisbury on the ring-road for an hour before eventually waking up and saying “I thought I’d just let you do your own thing this week.” I decided driving was rubbish and never took the test. Years later, I cursed my foolishness as I attempted to get two magical cabinets and one giant mutant rabbit onto a train to Wales. By the time we’d covered our various costs, we found that we’d exhausted ourselves trying to convey all this stuff to the opposite edge of the land for around £40 each. I decided I could not be bothered to tour the show.
So now, having finally made a show that, at its worst, requires me to get on board a train carrying a wooden box and a foldable paper plinth in a large IKEA bag, it’s time for me to discover the joys of travelling to beautiful venues around the UK to play to wildly unpredictable audience sizes before retiring to the cheapest hotel I can afford or returning home at around 2am in order to ultimately, hopefully, break even, or at least not lose too much. This is a noble rite of passage which, if I play my cards right, may lay the groundwork for my eventually being able to tour to fairly consistent audience sizes and actually make money from the shows I make, rather than being locked into a constant death spiral circling around the fear of eventual ruin. I can’t wait!
Also Nottingham on November the 8th for the Wormhole Weekend! But that’s sort of pre-tour, I guess. Touring is confusing.
Needless to say, as this tour is entirely self-produced, self-managed and self-funded, I’m hugely reliant on word-of-mouth to help get the shows nice and busy. So, please enjoy this short quiz to work out how you can help:
- HAVE YOU SEEN THE SHOW? If yes, proceed to Number 2. If no, proceed to Number 3.
- WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE IT AGAIN? If yes, proceed to 4. If no, proceed to 5.
- WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE THE SHOW? If yes, proceed to 4. If no, proceed to 5, but know that you’ve made me sad.
- DO YOU LIVE IN OR NEAR LEEDS, OXFORD, NORWICH, BRIGHTON, BRISTOL, CARDIFF, GLASGOW, EDINBURGH, LONDON, SALFORD OR CANTERBURY? If yes, proceed to 7. If no, proceed to 5.
- DO YOU KNOW PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN OR NEAR LEEDS, OXFORD, NORWICH, BRIGHTON, BRISTOL, CARDIFF, GLASGOW, EDINBURGH, LONDON, SALFORD OR CANTERBURY? If so, proceed to 6. If no, proceed to 9.
- WOULD YOU LIKE TO RECOMMEND THE SHOW TO THOSE PEOPLE IN ORDER TO DO ME A MASSIVE FAVOUR? If so, proceed to 8. If no, proceed to 9, but know that you’ve made me sad.
- YOU SHOULD COME AND SEE THE SHOW AT A TOUR DATE NEAR YOU! Also, go back up to 5.
- YOU SHOULD SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT THE SHOW TO PEOPLE WHO MIGHT LIKE TO COME AND SEE IT!
- YOU SHOULD DO NOTHING! LIVE YOUR LIFE, BE FREE!
That was fun, it felt like being Sir Ian Livingstone. Anyway, here are the tour dates along with a happy memory I have in each town or city:
NOTTINGHAM, 8th of November – Was given a spider plant by a man who runs a cafe and thinks we don’t have big Sports Direct mugs in London and makes a point of showing me his every time I visit.
LEEDS, 14th of January – Never been, no memories happy or sad.
OXFORD, 16th of January – Played Rob Coombes in a musical about Supergrass which Mick Quinn from Supergrass came to see. He told me he’d never seen anyone play clarinet like that before.
NORWICH, 31st of January – Helped my friend propose to his girlfriend by hiding in her car boot dressed as Jareth the Goblin King and jumping out when she opened it to give her a clue that would lead her to the next stage of the proposal. Was locked in the boot for an hour and when I jumped out she ran away screaming.
BRIGHTON, 4th of March – Watched children’s author Jon Klassen do a live reading of his seminal book I Want My Hat Back. The event had been marketed as lasting an hour but the book can be read in about forty seconds, so he had to read it several times and really pad it out with anecdotes about how he wrote it.
BRISTOL, 13th of March – Stayed up until 2am drinking white Russians with friends listening to “Fall On Me,” Andrea Boccelli’s duet with his son, and going around the group talking about the one thing we were most grateful to our parents for and we all cried a lot.
CARDIFF, 14th of March – Did a gig here once at the Glee Club, back when I was still trying to be a proper stand-up comedian. Opened with my classic joke where I remove my sunglasses to reveal another pair of sunglasses underneath, and remember it being the first time it didn’t bring the house down. Left feeling haunted.
GLASGOW, 19th of March – Arrived at 1am after a 14-hour train journey where the entire TV comedy industry missed the first day of a conference because we were all on the same train. Spent four hours stuck in a field waiting for them to work out if the large piece of the train that had just fallen off was important or not. It was. This one’s not on sale yet, but it will be soon!
EDINBURGH, 21st of March – Can’t think of anything that’s ever happened to me here, LOL.
LONDON, 8th-11th of April – Got my phone stolen by a snatcher on a bike, got it back an hour later because he didn’t like it and handed it into the police to try and get it back to me.
SALFORD, 24th of April – Directed a wonderful show here and got sassed for the entire production team for running around the theatre at one point looking for stickers because running around going “Where are the stickers?” while the audience are coming in apparently “isn’t very director-y.”
CANTERBURY, 20th of June – Did a gig here where my set devolved into a ten-minute negotiation with an audience member over whether or not he’d seen the Cosgrove Hall adaptation of The Wind In The Willows starring David Jason as Mr Toad because he kept changing his answer. This one’s also not on sale yet but it will be!
And that’s it! I’d love to see a bunch of friendly faces at some of these shows, so do please come along if it’s coming near to you, or spread the word among friends if you know people who might like the show! Here’s a little announcement trailer to whet your collective whistles:
A Cool New Thing In Comedy – It’s a big old week for live shows being announced – Leicester Comedy Festival also just launched their programme, and I’m part of the (frankly ridiculous) Liebenspiel lineup for Valentine’s weekend – look how good it is! I’ll be debuting a brand new show called Joz Norris Is Hugh Jackman Is The Phantom Of The Opera and I’m very excited about it.
What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – This man who couldn’t have given less of a shit that he was watching Sting, and five minutes after I filmed that video opened his calculator app to do some sums, and five minutes after that started reading Sting’s Wikipedia page.
Book Of The Week – I’ve just finished Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, a memoir of the years she spent rearing a wild hare. It’s good, I learned a lot about hares.
Album Of The Week – Take The Heat Off Me by Boney M. Why’s this taken me so long? “Daddy Cool” and “Rasputin” are widely acknowledged as two of the greatest songs of all time, why have I deprioritised delving into their albums? These guys are ice cold killers. Masters of funk. Tremble before them.
Film Of The Week – Roofman. The true story of a guy who robbed 45 different McDonald’s and then hid in a Toys R Us for six months. It’s marketed as a wacky rom-com, but it’s quite sad, really – it’s a testament to how brutally the system deals with people who try to mess with it, even when they make efforts to minimise the harm they’re doing and are really just struggling to work out how to fit into society. He made a series of terrible decisions, but I just felt very sorry for him. Really good film though. Please do go and see interesting films about original ideas, they’ve been having an absolute shocker this autumn and it’s got me very depressed about the state of cinema in general.
That’s all for this week! As ever, if you enjoyed this enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, or to recommend the tour to people, I’d hugely appreciate it. Take care of yourselves until next time,
Joz xx
PS If you enjoy this newsletter and want to support my work and enable me to keep writing, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated!
PPS Happy Hallowe’en:
