Tape 192: Features Creatures
I missed a week! I can’t believe it. I’ve opened Substack only to find my dashboard now inhabited by a little blue owl avatar, wings broken, one eye swollen shut, lying sprawled in its own piss. “You broke your Substack streak!” it croaks. “Kill me! Kill me!”
“I don’t even remember Substack having a streak function,” I said to the owl, dumbfounded, “or a little cutesy avatar guilt-tripping me into track my progress.”
“Well we introduced it the day you wrote your last post, and now I’m sick,” the owl coughed. Some blood came out of its beak. “I’m sick and I’m in love.”
“What’s that got to do with whether or not I write a Substack post?” I asked. “I don’t care about your personal life.” The owl took a phone out of Hammerspace and looked at it, then emitted a pathetic sob.
“She’s not texted back!” he wailed. “Just put me out of my misery!”
“What happens if I write a post?” I asked. The owl brightened up.
“Oh, then I’d be ok,” he said.
“Ok, fine, I’ll write one,” I said. “Maybe something about adapting ideas into different mediums, and tackling the idea of writing a feature film script?”
“Yeah, sure,” said the owl, now not even looking at me, fully absorbed in a game of Candy Crush. “I don’t care what you write about, just don’t break your streak again.” I sighed. Back to the grindstone.
The scariest thing about coming back home after the Edinburgh Fringe is the cliff edge of not knowing what to do next. You invest so much time and money and effort in this concept that it coming to an end can be existentially horrifying – I’ve written a lot about how badly I dealt with it last time back in 2022. This time I’ve been lucky enough to not experience the cliff edge, but instead a sort of gentle slope leading back down to the pleasant lowlands of everyday life. We had a Soho Theatre run to celebrate everything we achieved with the show with lovely London audiences, I’m putting together a tour for the new year which will mean I get to continue celebrating that show with other audiences around the country (news on this soon!), I’ve got a fun job coming up that gives me something to focus on in the short-term (more on this later!), and I’ve been having various conversations about nebulous “next step” scripted projects, as you always do after the Fringe.
Many of these conversations have hovered around the assumption that my show itself can’t really be adapted into a different medium, so it’s more a case of exploring some new ideas rather than discussing how we translate what worked about the show into a TV format. Broadly, I agree with this, for two reasons – firstly, You Wait. Time Passes. was explicitly a live show that existed as a live show. It was about making live shows, and a lot of what made it work came from the fact that it was happening in the room in front of its audience. The central game, of me repeatedly refusing to do what I was telling the audience I was going to do, and playing with the tension and expectations around that, doesn’t really work in any other medium. So that’s one thing.
Secondly, the actual narrative of the show is inherently a narrative that has to end. The show’s main joke (which, remarkably, every single review and audience reaction managed to preserve without spoilers) is the reveal of what “my life’s work” actually is, and it’s the discovery of this that retroactively changes the meaning of everything that’s come before. TV comedy tends to be all about resetting the status quo at the end of an episode – there might be some sort of narrative arc in the background, but broadly speaking TV comedy ideas are expected to run and run for multiple series, particularly at the moment when “returnable” is a key quality that commissioners are very much prioritising. In that landscape, an idea where the ending is the most important bit that makes the rest of it work is obviously not an attractive proposition.
“Unadaptable,” they said. Photo by Miranda Holms.
So I’ve been very happy to chalk up You Wait. Time Passes. as a successful live show that worked well as a live show and has opened the door to other opportunities, and to embrace the idea of exploring other ideas. I’ve got a couple of pre-existing ones from earlier this year that I could dust off and do something with, or I could have some fun working up something completely new.
And then it occurred to me that actually, I could really see it working as a film. Films are supposed to end, after all, no matter what the architects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe may tell you. So, rather than just putting it away as “unadaptable” because the ending is an integral part of how it works, I could instead explore how to hold onto the narrative and the structure of it but shift the content to be less explicitly focused on the live experience, and think about how a film audience might respond to the same ideas. While the actual content is very much about stalling for time in a live setting – I’m not ready to do the thing, so let me just call my wife/show you my new invention/tell you about myself etc etc – the narrative is about a workaholic artist whose obsession with a secret project has led him to neglect his family, isolate himself and go insane. That actually sounds like quite an exciting blueprint for a feature film, with all of those relationships and developments becoming things we could actually see rather than things we infer from what’s being said or not being said in this live moment.
Those who’ve seen the show might also agree that the ending in particular could be a really funny final act for a film. It’s one thing to see it as the payoff to a shared experience of postponing the inevitable over the course of an hour, and potentially quite another one as the endpoint of an entire film’s worth of build-up and heartache and embarrassment. Maybe the Mayor could be there or something, for added high-jinks. I could have invited the Mayor – nay, the entire town – to come and watch me unveil my life’s work. And then that ending happens, but in front of the Mayor. I’m just spit-balling here.
So I’m kind of nursing the idea of doing something I’ve never done before and committing to writing a feature film script adapting this story in some way. Because all of my contacts in scripted development have been primarily focused on TV, it’s kind of become hard-wired into my brain that the half-hour TV format is the obvious, and only, format you have to write for when it comes to working up scripted ideas, so this feels like there’s a bit of unlearning to do. The world of feature films feels kind of overwhelming to me – I don’t really know where you begin, other than that, as always, you begin by writing something. And as much as film development feels like a bit of a Wild West, it also in some ways feels like there’s more opportunity than in TV, where everything ultimately has to come back to how well it fits in with a commissioner’s current brief. In film you’ve just got to find one rich lunatic who goes “Yeah, what a brilliant idea, here’s a million pounds,” right? There must be loads of those guys. Running Eggbox with Miranda, and making short films together, has given me a better understanding of the pipeline from shorts to features, and while there’s far less of a clear process or protocol to follow as there is in TV, it’s also made me feel that bit more confident about taking steps in that direction and giving it a go.
So we’ll see. I’ve no idea where it might lead – it’ll be quite a long feedback loop project, and I doubt I’ll have anything to show for it for several months, and I’ll enjoy developing other ideas more in my comfort zone of half-hour TV things in the meantime. But I’m quietly excited to realise that actually, this show isn’t something I fully have to put behind me once the tour has finished, and that there are seeds of something in there that could potentially also flourish in different soil. Perhaps I’ll use this newsletter as a place to periodically update my progress on it! After all, if I’ve written about it then I have to do it.
PS If anybody knows how to actually get feature films funded and made, please let me know, I am kind of taking shots in the dark here by even imagining it might be possible. Anyone out there got a spare couple of mill? Give your boy a call (it’s me, I am your boy).
A Quick Plug – I mentioned a fun job coming up! In October I’ll be playing Gregor McGregor, the world’s greatest conman that you’ve never heard of, who sold a country that didn’t even exist, in Sam Went’s play The Wolf Of Poyais, which is coming to the Golden Goose Theatre in Camberwell from the 21st to the 25th of October. I’ve always wanted to do more acting in other people’s projects as well as my own, so I’m really looking forward to this. Come along if you’re free and it sounds like your kind of thing!
What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – My friend’s son’s has invented a game called “Stinky” where you sniff a sock and then shout “Stinky!” in the most dramatic way possible. If he disapproves, he shouts “No, more stinky, more stinky!” and I’ve gotta be honest, the entire game was very well-tuned to my sense of humour.
Book Of The Week – I just finished The Psychology Of Success: A Practical Guide by Alison and David Price, which is actually much less cringe than it sounds. I thought it might be a useful bit of prep for playing a snake-oil salesman confidence trickster in The Wolf Of Poyais, but actually it contains a lot of really good psychological exercises for helping you to get the most out of life and I really enjoyed it.
Album Of The Week – async by Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of his last albums that combines really beautiful ambient pieces with really disturbing experiments in asynchronous sounds and unsettling field recordings. He was one of the greats, he can do no wrong. I don’t even mind the really annoying track that’s just a bunch of out-of-sync triangles.
Film Of The Week – Rewatched both the Terminator movies this week (there are only two). Spent several days hyping up Terminator 2 to Miranda as “one of the greatest films ever made” and insisting that all her reservations about it would be immediately forgotten when she saw what a masterpiece it is. Having seen it, I maintain that it is a masterpiece. Miranda’s opinion is that it is “a film for boys.”
That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you think and if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, I’d really 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 and creating, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated!
PPS Me oh me, my oh my, I got real close to a dragonfly:
