In an outrageous turn of events, Joz Norris Is Hugh Jackman Is The Phantom Of The Opera just won Best Show at the Leicester Comedy Festival, despite it being a show I have only ever performed twice which remains, in my opinion, in an extremely embryonic state. I half-suspect that the reason it won is because its performance in Leicester was the one where I fell off a skateboard and really hurt myself, which might indicate that that has to happen every time I do it “From Now On” (LOL, get it? That’s a song that Hugh Jackman sings). My girlfriend is strongly against this idea, but you gotta give the people what they want, broken bones be damned.

Anyway, since it won I’ve had a few messages from people saying “So, has this made you think you will be taking it to Edinburgh this year after all?” Weirdly, it’s done the opposite – it’s confirmed to me that my current plan to develop it over the next year and a half and then take it to the Fringe in 2027 is the correct plan for it. Some people have found this an interesting approach, so I thought I’d dig into it here and explain why I think that’s the right thing to do.

The received wisdom seems to be – hey, this show has really early buzz, don’t let the momentum drop! Get it to the Fringe and capitalise on its success while you’re still the current holder of the “Best Show” accolade! Keep the ball in the air! I get all of this. It makes sense. By the time the show does actually go to the Fringe, there will be a different current winner of Best Show at Leicester Comedy Festival. My trophy will be gathering dust on my shelf, the glorious highs of LCF 2026 already becoming a distant memory. “Y’know, I won that once,” I’ll mutter when the news goes out across British Comedy Guide, Beyond the Joke and Chortle that I have lost my crown, but nobody will hear me because I’ll be in my flat on my own drinking cheap gin from the bottle and watching Babestation because everyone has abandoned me due to my being last year’s old news. But I don’t actually think any of that really matters.

I think when you’re trying to build buzz around a project, the most important thought you want to incubate in people’s minds is “Oh, I’ve heard this is good.” The thought “I did hear that this is good, but since then I’ve heard that something else is good, so I’m no longer very interested in this” is something that I don’t think really happens that much. Liz Kingsman’s incredible One Woman Show was a good example – before it went to the Fringe it had been talked about as a really exciting new show for a good couple of years, and had already played multiple acclaimed runs at Soho Theatre. By the time it got to Edinburgh, it didn’t matter that other shows had been winning recent accolades and building buzz of their own, it had become an established fact that that show was worth catching.

Now obviously I’m not predicting, or planning, or trying to engineer the same level of success for this show as the phenomenal success of the truly brilliant One Woman Show, it’s just an interesting example of a show that took the time to lay the groundwork rather than rushing to fit the usual model of the Edinburgh Fringe being a rolling annual deadline for presenting new work and maintaining visibility. Obviously I think it’s important to have some presence at the Fringe most years – the one year I wasn’t there at all I did feel like I was missing out and that I ended up spinning my wheels a bit that year – but I don’t feel like that necessarily needs to be a full run of a new show every time. So rather than making me think I’d better rush to Edinburgh to capitalise on the early buzz, the Leicester win has confirmed to me that I might be onto something with this show that could do quite well, so I’m best off taking the time to get it right. Here are the main reasons why I feel that way:

1. The Reason It’s Good Is BECAUSE I’m Not Planning To Take It To Edinburgh This Year

I used to make a brand new finished show for the Fringe every year and in hindsight, every single one of those shows wasn’t as good as it could be. The three shows I made over a two-year period are the three I’m most proud of, and that achieved the most success. So this year I told myself once again that, while I will probably end up at the Fringe doing something in 2026 – a WIP of the new show, perhaps, or there’s talk of a few Barry & Tony specials – I wouldn’t be bringing a new show for a full run until the year after. As a result, I’ve been able to make this new show while experiencing zero anxiety or worry about it whatsoever, and the result of that is that it’s good. The two times I’ve performed this show, I haven’t been up there worrying about how it’s going to go, or hoping I make enough breakthroughs in this performance to keep the show’s development on the right track. I’m not even thinking about the show’s track. I’ve just been having a good time – playing around, trying things I think are funny, being an idiot. I think a large part of why it seems to have struck a chord with audiences and quickly become something people are really enjoying is because I’ve been totally free of concern up there, and that’s something I’m really trying to do more of these days.

Somewhere in the development of You Wait. Time Passes. I started to realise that what I really wanted to do was to find more ways to feel calm onstage (a funny thing to say for such a frazzled nervous breakdown of a show, but weirdly calm and stillness and the confidence to be patient were real watchwords for it while I was working on it). The thought of suddenly putting Jackman/Phantom on a track for this year’s Fringe, and fast-tracking all the creative work that goes into designing a poster, developing a PR and marketing campaign, and everything else that goes hand-in-hand with doing the Fringe properly, at the same time as trying to continue developing the show itself, fills me with horror. Right now, the best thing I could do is stick to my guns and maintain the level of fun and relaxation I’m finding in this project, I think.

2. It’s Actually Not Good Enough At The Moment

Honestly, I’m kind of surprised by how well this show is doing so far. Like I said, I’m having an enormous amount of fun with it, but to me, that’s very much all the show is at this point. It’s a guy goofing around and singing and occasionally falling over for an hour. Don’t get me wrong, that sounds like a good time to me, but it’s clear to me that there is much more I can do with this show. The narrative can be sharper and leaner and richer, the writing can be beefed up, and I have such big plans for the ending. I’m really glad people are already enjoying it as much as they are, but the version of the show I’ve been performing so far is not my vision for the finished show. There’s a lot more that can be done with it, and I’d be letting down that vision if I sacrificed the version that exists in my head in favour of rushing to capitalise on early buzz.

3. Timing Is Much More Important Than People Think

This is the big one. If I were to put my hand on my heart and speak really brutally honestly, there is less and less point in doing the Edinburgh Fringe these days. It’s so expensive, it’s so competitive, it’s so stressful. It’s not worth doing unless you honestly think you’re in with a good shot of achieving your stated aims for it, whatever they may be. I also think that I have less that I need to prove at the Fringe these days, both to myself and to other people. Last year felt like a moment where the critical appraisal of my work shifted a bit and people went “Oh hang on, this guy’s good,” and audiences started to show up en masse and get excited about what I was doing. That had happened once before, back before Covid, but last year felt like the moment where I was able to consolidate it. If I were to go back with another show that was fun and imaginative and solid but a bit ramshackle, sometimes coasting on goodwill and sheer vibes, then I’m not really proving anything there. I already know I can make shows like that. But part of the reason I’m making a show about Hugh Jackman and the Phantom of the Opera is because I’m interested in trying to make something bigger than I usually do – less inward-looking, less intricate, less meta, less wrapped up in the inner workings of the creative process. Instead, I’m excited to make something punchier, splashier, dumber, sillier, and more connected to things that other people know and care about.

Of course, it is still a show about the creative process and what it means to make stuff, because I am who I am, but I’m really enjoying smuggling that stuff inside a shell that is easier for people to wrap their heads around and get excited about. This year I’ve been really enjoying discovering the ways in which touring a show after its Fringe run can build an audience much wider than the Fringe bubble ever allows. Next year I’d love it if working on something a little more outward-looking that has half an eye on its own marketing hook from the off perhaps enables it to capitalise on that wider audience. Maybe it could even become something that goes beyond the confines of a “Fringe hit” and actually becomes something that lots of people all over the country are genuinely excited to see. Ambitious maybe, but at this point in my career I don’t see the point of not setting my sights high, and consciously trying to level up with each new thing I make.

Because this show represents a conscious shift of focus in that way, the timing of it is more important than ever. As I said before, there’s no way I can actually engineer or guarantee a “big outcome” for the show just because I’m trying to make a “bigger” show. All I can do is to hit my own internal goals for what I want the show to do creatively, and then create all the favourable conditions I can to give it its best possible chances of being a success. Creating favourable conditions takes time, and involves pushing on multiple different fronts, rather than just blindly making a show and hoping it hits. I’m having some conversations around this show already which are very exciting, and which potentially pave the way towards doing it the way I imagine it in my head, but it’s early days and I want to let those conversations take the time they require. So while I can’t guarantee that the show will end up succeeding on the scale I hope it might, I can certainly do everything I can to give it its best chances, and doing that involves holding my nerve and not rushing.

So that’s my thinking. Perhaps I’m being naive, or overly ambitious, or any number of pejorative descriptors you might choose to lob my way. But I’ve never made a show that has generated buzz this quickly before, and I’m personally really excited about the idea of keeping my powder dry for a while, and trying to build the narrative of this being a big show people should see in 2027. Let’s see if I manage it, or if in the time it takes me to make the show I end up being sued by Hugh Jackman.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – Well you didn’t need me to tell you that both Last One Laughing Series 2 and SNL UK launch this week, but it’d be silly of me to claim that any other comedy news was worth paying attention to right now. I’m really excited to see them both, it’s a big week for exciting TV formats actually getting people engaged in comedy again! I really hope they both do really well.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – An old schoolfriend came to see my show in Cardiff at the weekend and so did my mum, who once judged his band’s performance in the school music competition and told them they didn’t rock as hard as they think they did, and he decided to confront her about it twenty years on to resolve an old trauma, and it was a delight to behold.

Book Of The Week – Molloy by Samuel Beckett. This is fucking weird, but it’d be naive to expect otherwise. It’s about a guy called Molloy who’s trying to visit his mum but keeps getting distracted by sucking sixteen stones one at a time, or by beating up a random guy in a wood, or by accidentally running over a dog with his bicycle. Then a detective called Moran tries to track Molloy down but fails because his leg hurts so he just has to give his son an enema instead. It reminds me of Beau Is Afraid, but if it were remotely good.

Album Of The Week – New World In The Morning by Roger Whittaker. I love this guy so much. He sings old-timey folk songs and he whistles like crazy. He’s got one album where he just whistles in the style of every country on Earth or something. I think this music was already incredibly old-fashioned even when it came out in the early 70s, but I reckon things have now come full circle and this stuff is timeless again. There’s a song called “He Starts Below” that has the catchiest fuckin’ melody I’ve heard in months. I can’t get enough of the guy. “If a man has gotta eat, gotta live, gotta reap, gotta sow – he starts beloooowwwww!” Give it a listen, seriously.

Film Of The Week – The Bride! This is a real mess. I guess it’s interesting, and I’ll always applaud films that are bold and weird and hard to categorise, but I really couldn’t get a handle on what it was trying to do, and I didn’t feel that in a fun way. I felt kind of exasperated by it. Jessie Buckley gives a performance that’s like something from the wilder end of the Nicolas Cage playbook but totally sincere, and Christian Bale spends the whole film going “UUGGGHHH WUUUUUHHH NOOOO WUUUUH WHAAAA.” Deeply odd.

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

Joz xx

PS Feel free to send me a tip on Ko-Fi if you enjoy my work and would like to support me to keep making it!

PPS The tour continues to be an absolute delight. Thanks so much to everyone who’s come so far! Here I am in Cardiff:

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