Howdy! Yowza! It’s been a while. For that, I can only apologise. Did you know there are CEOs now who hadn’t even been born when I sent my last newsletter? (Admittedly their companies are doing very badly as their CEOs are month-old babies). I’ve missed you all, but I have simply been too busy. Every time I felt I might have been able to carve out some time to sit and write a new entry, I could only have done it by failing to hit some other important deadline, and that simply didn’t feel like a smart trade-off. I’m no fool!

Thankfully, I am now back on top of my deadlines, because I am currently on holiday. You might think that choosing to catch up with my work-related newsletter is a bad use of my holiday, but if you think that then you obviously haven’t met me or anyone else in my family (shout-out to the person in my family who once replied to my asking “How was your holiday?” with the sentence “It was wonderful! I got so much work done!”) The truth is, I like writing this newsletter and have missed doing it, so in this specific moment, I can’t think of anything else I would like to do. Hold on, Miranda’s popped her head in. She’s asking me if I want to join her by the lake for a swim and an Aperol Spritz. I’ve told her to buzz off, I’m busy. Now where was I?

Seriously, though, outside of this specific moment I have managed to fill my holiday with lots of exciting new experiences. Last night, for instance, I got a bad headache from heatstroke in a Lebanese restaurant and needed to go home, but the next bus wasn’t coming for an hour, so I decided to run home down a narrow, winding mountain road in the middle of a heavy thunderstorm. I had never done this before, and I don’t think I’ll ever do it again. At one point I leapt out of the way of a speeding car to avoid being tragically killed on the mountainside, but because it was dark I didn’t notice that the trajectory of my jump landed me directly in the middle of an incredibly deep puddle of mud (shout-out to Puddle of Mudd, who pop into my thoughts so rarely it’s worth mentioning it every time they do).

And that’s not all! A few days ago I tripped and fell off an eight-foot-high platform and landed face-first in the lake in a way that has really hurt my neck. I also lay in the sun for so long that the top layer of my shoulders has burned off, and earlier today I walked into a window. So don’t worry about me, I’m having a great time.

But never mind all that. Just what have I been DOING all this time? Well really, it’s been too much stuff to catch you all up on in any detail (and honestly, who would want me to?), so let’s do a speed-run now.

• We did another Eggbox show (it went well).
• We finished off the edit for The Happiness Chain and screened it for the first time ever (it went well).
• I did some more writing on the new series of Horrible Science (it was fun).
• I did a bunch of previews and rehearsals on my show (it’s going well).
• I did a bunch of rehearsals on the shows I’m directing (they’re going well).

It’s enough to fill up a month.

Obviously a lot of this (well, the last two points, which are the ones that have been eating up the majority of the time) revolves around the behemoth sneaking up on all of us, the Edinburgh Fringe, so this week I wanted to share some thoughts on our old friend, Control.

The last time I went to the Fringe to do the whole run, I had made a show that was all about control, because that was what was rattling around my brain throughout the pandemic. We’d all had any semblance of control over our lives torn away, so I personally became desperate to control some aspect of my life – the way I was perceived, maybe. I could quickly see that that desire for control was self-destructive, so I made a show about it in which I could both indulge in and satirise my need to control the way people saw me. It told the story of an egomaniacal magician who believed he could control what the audience saw and thought, and in some way use that power to magnify himself to godlike proportions. Of course, his power turns on him and his desire for control humiliates and destroys him (before the final twist that it was all deliberate and he was pranking the audience the whole time, prompting an ending in which myself and Ben Target pranced around the stage in our underwear to AC/DC, covered in pickle juice and shouting “Get the fuck out of here! No photos! No refunds!”, an ending which a small minority of audiences had a real problem with for being “disrespectful”).

I loved that show, and I’m really proud of it, but with the distance of time, I can now see that there were certain elements of it that were things I needed to get out of my system. That need for control – “If I present myself like this, people will think of me like this” – is such a toxic trait. Admittedly I was trying to acknowledge that and put it onstage so I could destroy it in myself, but I can also still see how that feeling fed my experience of that show. These days I try to maintain a much healthier approach to making things, and to life in general, but I have noticed how closely those feelings are tied to the Fringe for me. As it approaches, I’ve noticed some of the old anxieties and hopes and fears and concerns creep back in, and have had to take a breath and remind myself – “But you don’t care about that any more. You put that out there so you could kill it, and now what you care about is making things you’re proud of and having fun sharing them with people.”

Given my long and complicated relationship with the Fringe, I’ve been very proud of myself for how well I’ve been able to maintain that mindset despite the creeping worries. But here’s the thing about the Fringe – it tries very hard to pull our attention towards things we can’t control. And having our attention drawn towards things we can’t control makes us get very stressed about the idea of control itself. In the talk I saw at the Hay Festival recently by Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse, they discussed how important it is to notice which things your attention naturally moves towards – because you’re curious about it, or excited about it – and which things it moves towards because it has been sucked there, or snagged there, by something that wants it.

We live in a world that is trying to direct our attention somewhere a million times a day, and the Fringe is another thing that tries to convince us that what we should care about most are external things we have no hope of influencing. It pulls our attention away from the things we love and towards the opinions of a few people. It’s easy to go into the Fringe worrying most about whether your run will sell out, or whether it will get good reviews, or whether it will appear on an awards shortlist, or whether it’s already appeared on a list of must-see shows, or whether it’ll appear on a list of must-see shows after the Fringe is over.

It’s easy to forget about, for instance, what you want your show to feel like for you and the people watching it. What you want them to discover in it, what you want them to go away thinking about, which bit you want them to tell their friends about later, which bits you want them to hold onto like a secret because it spoke only to them, which bit you want to make them hurt from laughing. All those things you can control. They’re also the only thing that matters. All those uncontrollable externals only come towards the people who looked after what they could control, and made the right choices about them.

I was at the launch drinks for the Pleasance’s Fringe programme the other week, and someone said something which could either sound chilling or blissfully liberating depending on what your approach to all this is. “People always go into hyperdrive mode in July,” they said, “trying to apply the finishing touches to their shows to get them ready for Edinburgh. But the truth it, a Fringe show is a juggernaut rolling down a hill. The juggernaut is already rolling down the hill. And you can do your best to steer it, but it will land where it lands.” I must confess, I absolutely loved this.

If you’re a fellow Fringe-goer who’s read that and been sent into a tailspin by it, please don’t misunderstand me – neither I nor the person who said this mean to imply that if your show isn’t already on its way towards selling out, isn’t already on the must-see lists, etc etc, then it’s doomed to not find its audience and make a splash and have an incredible run. The most successful show I ever did at the Fringe, which completely transformed my career, was on very few radars before I went up. I had no idea where my juggernaut was going to land. I was just doing my best to steer it. But people found it and cared about it. This is all you’re really looking for up there – to create something which, when people find it, they’re going to care about.

That you can do. Because where the juggernaut lands is a simple consequence of every choice you made in the lead-up to the run. You have to be very honest with yourself – have I been making good choices? Am I rolling in the right direction? Does it feel like I can do something to nudge it onto a course I’ll feel happier with? If so, do it. Or am I enjoying where it’s rolling? Then sit back and enjoy the ride. But know that you’re at the wheel. That thing you just saw out the window? That review you were worried about, or that sales report, or whatever it might be that tries to snag your attention? Don’t stress. You’re not at the wheel of that. Let someone else worry about that. Drive your show down the hill.

I recently read Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations For Mortals, which is great, and there was a chapter in it about control that really spoke to me. Burkeman talks about how either extreme on the scale of control leads to misery. Abandoning any sense of control over the universe feels miserable – “Why should I try, nothing I do will ever change anything?” But trying to control every aspect of your life also feels miserable – “No matter how hard I try, things don’t go exactly the way I want them to.” The only sane path is to work out what we can control, and then give that all of our attention and hard work. When we work as hard and as positively and enthusiastically as we can on the things under our influence, and take pride in them, and then let go entirely of the idea of being able to predict or engineer the outcomes that will come towards us in response to them, then the world suddenly opens up and feels great. This Fringe, let’s all just try to have a nice time. Let’s all land where we land.

A Quick Plug – Of course, with Edinburgh so close, I am duty-bound to keep plugging the final few previews of the show. It’s coming to Underground at Spring Gardens for the Buxton Fringe tomorrow, Shakespeare’s in Sheffield for Square Hole on Sunday, the Comedy Cafe in Berlin on Thursday, and then the final London preview is at the Pleasance on the 23rd. If you’re not going to make it to the Edinburgh run but are near any of these places, please do come along! I’d love to have some nice busy final shows to send it on its way with a bang.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – We did another Eggbox show at the Pleasance and it was so good! So many awesome short films and a bunch of brilliant new scripts read by fantastic actors. It’s really growing into a lovely supportive community space for scripted comedy, and I’ve had some feedback on it this week from industry bigwigs that suggests it’s really doing its job in getting the higher-ups to feel hopeful and excited about what people are making right now. I’m very proud of what we’re building there. The next one is on November the 4th and will be vaguely Hallowe’en themed – get your tickets early before it fills up!

Book Of The Week – What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory by Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse, the book they were promoting in the talk I mentioned above. It’s incredible, and should be taught in schools. It’s such a simple, unpretentious argument for why art matters in evolutionary and societal terms as well as emotional ones. Everyone both in and outside of the arts could learn a hell of a lot from it.

Album Of The Week – God Save The Queen/Under Heavy Manners by Robert Fripp. Fripp’s second solo album, in which he abandons the collaborative art-rock vibes from his first and reverts to the ambient Frippertronics stuff he pioneered with Eno. The first half is purely ambient, the second adds a rhythm section and David Byrne yelping. It’s great.

Film Of The Week – Not seen any films, been too busy falling into puddles and lakes.

That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you thought, and if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, I’d hugely appreciate it! Take care of yourselves until next time,

Joz xx

PS If you value the Therapy Tapes and enjoy what they do, and want to support my work and enable me to keep writing and creating, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated.

PPS I promise I did actually have fun on my holiday, look, here’s proof:

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