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 who comes to every show regardless of what’s on because you love film/comedy/new writing/me/Miranda/the architecture of the Pleasance main house regardless of what is happening in it (delete as appropriate)

B. A wealthy fool who is cavalier with your money and has a dangerous addiction to frivolous spending, just buying stuff regardless of whether you’re even going to like it, and without even knowing what it is half the time

then perhaps you’d like to just book your ticket now without any further questions. But for those of you who are a little more discerning/hard to get, I thought I’d give a few teases and glimpses of what we’ve got coming up!

For anyone who signed up to this newsletter since I last plugged Eggbox here, a quick crash course – Miranda Holms and I set it up at the end of 2023 because we’d recently completed a short film together and we were both working on comedy scripts that we really wanted to do a live reading of so that we could get a sense of how they were working. We thought we’d combine both those needs into one “super-event” (note that this is different to a “super-spreader event” and we refute all claims to the contrary) and then decided that to make it less narcissistic, we would programme other films and scripts by other writers and filmmakers so it felt less like we were going “Come and see our stuff, aren’t we great?”

Since then, Eggbox has become something we put on two or three times a year at the Pleasance partly as a deadline for ourselves to come up with new ideas we want to try out or screen (though we don’t always show something of ours if we don’t have anything ready), and mainly as a way of showcasing the amazing richness of the UK scripted comedy scene at the moment. Very often, the narrative around the world of scripted comedy in this country, particularly on TV, is characterised by a bleak mood of pervading doom, and yet, since we started programming Eggbox, we consistently see so much evidence of how much amazing stuff is being made all of the time. Not all of it is making it to TV or cinema screens, but there are hugely talented people up and down the country making really brilliant work, and we love being a small part of trying to inject a bit more hope and optimism into that world, and shine a light on some of the things we’ve enjoyed the most.

It’s exhausting and time-consuming and stressful to curate and promote and run, so we only do it every now and again, but it’s always such a lovely, positive night. It brings together a really wonderful community of makers and creators, and we’ll keep doing it as long as we have the mental capacity to do so. We’d really like to eventually find a way to turn it into more of an online platform or engine that helps to not just showcase people’s scripted work, but to actually enable people to make more of it. Once or twice we’ve been in the lovely position of being able to screen films at Eggbox that started life as scripts being read out at it, and we’d like to see that kind of thing happen more often so it becomes its own little cottage industry helping people to make more scripted comedy to counter all the messaging that it’s not possible to do that any more, but this is obviously a difficult mission and we’re still figuring out how we might do that.

But all of that is in the future, and for the time being, we’re very excited about our next show! We’ll announce the full lineup in early October, but we already have loads of really exciting things programmed for our November show. Get a load of this lot!

Films We’ve Found And Loved – We’ve trawled through film festivals, film nights and other little pockets of creativity and found some amazing little shorts we’re very excited to bring together for a live audience. We’ve got:

• An absolutely hilarious/disgusting animated short from Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared creator Joe Pelling which stars Sam Campbell and has one of the funniest takes on parenting we’ve ever heard
• An existentially troubling and very funny short starring Jordan Brookes as a man wrestling with his own self-image, from writer-director Max Clendaniel (who directed this ridiculous short about a sex robot that Miranda and I wrote a few years ago)
• A couple of really delightfully silly animated shorts from Studio Maurinen which really tickled us – we often look for very short animated interludes to screen as palate cleansers between longer films, and Juho Maurinen’s stuff is exactly the kind of thing we love to discover to inject some joyful weirdness into proceedings

Exclusives & Premieres – We always love finding a few things that can’t yet be seen elsewhere, to make the show feel more like a unique live experience rather than simply being a curated playlist of things we’ve found. In the first tranche of things we’ve programmed this time, that includes:

• Stuck! The Musical – In a little peek behind the curtain, there’s a sad phenomenon that often happens when we get sent films that are over 15 minutes long where we think “Oh, that’s a shame, even if this is really good we’re gonna struggle to programme it,” because we only have limited time and there’s so much good stuff we want to programme. This musical extravaganza by Matt Nicholas is one of the few longer films we’ve programmed and it’s the only time we’ve watched one of those and said to each other only a couple of minutes in “I don’t care that it’s long, we have to show this.” Honestly, this film is everything we set up Eggbox to champion – it’s so stupid, it’s so inventive, it’s so high-effort and lovingly crafted. It’s about a doctor in a proctology department who’s forgotten to buy his wife an anniversary present, and I absolutely love it and can’t wait to show it.
• SOS: Earth – I’m told the name of this may change, but this is a short film written and directed by the amazing Tom Bell which I’m filming with him this month, and which we’re aiming to premiere at Eggbox! It tells the story of two UFO spotters who have built a sweet co-dependent relationship trying to contact extraterrestrial life in their shed – except this time, maybe they actually get through to someone, and maybe there’s a very important message they need to send. I love the script for this so much and am really looking forward to filming it in a couple of weeks, and there’s always a really nice atmosphere at Eggbox when we’re presenting homemade stuff for the very first time, so this should be really special!

Live Script Readings – These are often the most fun bit of an Eggbox show, where things get tried out for the very first time live onstage, and writers get to hear how their scripts work out loud, and what a cast of actors brings to the characters they’ve created. We cast some of the best comedians and comic actors in the business and it’s such a joy hearing them discover things in a script that will hopefully one day become another amazing finished piece of work. This time we’ve got:

• Milton Keynes Means… With Gail Summerfield, by Emmeline Downie – I had the honour of co-directing Emmeline’s Edinburgh Fringe debut Gail this year with Leo Reich, which was one of the most brilliantly observed comedy characters of the last few years. Emmeline has been exploring how Gail translates to the world of scripted with a short film that sees her making a documentary about her beloved Milton Keynes along with her neighbour’s son and a Year 10 girl on work experience. I can’t wait to hear Gail thriving in a whole new medium.
• It’s Legal Tender, by Kari Hall – Kari is a Scottish writer and the co-artistic director and founder of Sláinte! Theatre, an Irish and Scottish new writing theatre company which focuses on amplifying the voices of Celtic artists in London. It’s Legal Tender is a really funny, imaginative exploration of living in England as a Scot which plays out as a heist movie in reverse as two exasperated gunmen are determined to try and get people to accept Scottish money from them. It’s such a fun idea and a really characterful script, and again, I’m delighted to be showcasing it.

And we’ve got:

• Something Secret by Miranda Holms – Miranda has asked me not to reveal too much about what she’ll be showing at Eggbox as she’s still working on it and doesn’t want it jinxed by having too much stuff out there in the world about it yet, which is completely fair. But I always love the scripts and shorts that Miranda prepares for Eggbox, which are routinely so inventive, well-observed and characterful, and I can’t wait for everyone to see what she’s cooked up this time!

That’s all for this tranche (is “tranche” the word I want here? Feels weird. Think it’s right, though. It’s like a batch, right? Should I just have said “batch?” Too late, I’ve said tranche. I’ve said it three times now. Four if you include the bit where I mentioned it earlier on but didn’t immediately doubt myself).

There’ll be a few more things added to the programme next month as we pin down a few final components, but that’s more than enough to be getting on with, I think. It’s always such a fun show and it often gets pretty busy, so do book ahead if you want to bag the best seats!

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – David Elms Describes A Room, one of my favourite shows of the last couple of years at the Fringe, is embarking on its biggest run ever with eight days in the Main House! If you’ve not seen it then you must, it’s such an inventive, gentle and beautifully warm show, and if you’ve seen it before then you’ll know that you can go as many times as you like and it’ll be different every time, so you may as well go again.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – John-Luke Roberts and I are cooking up something secret and BIG with Barry and Tony and, if we pull it off, it will be the funniest thing we’ve done with those characters yet. Watch this space…

Book Of The Week – A Passion For Passion by Alice Fraser. This is Alice’s ridiculously extensive compendium of ludicrous romance novels by her alter-ego D’Ancey Laguarde, and it’s so much fun. They’re all joyously silly, and taken all together it’s also a genuinely interesting and well-researched primer on the romance genre/phenomenon, and the different forms it takes.

Album Of The Week – John Barleycorn Must Die by Traffic. Holy cow, the opening of “Glad” is good, isn’t it? I tried Traffic’s self-titled album first and thought it was ok, but this is excellent early-70s prog/folk/jazz-rock and therefore very much in my wheelhouse. It never gets better than its first 60 seconds, sadly, but it’s solid all the way through, and my God that first sixty seconds kicks ass.

Film Of The Week – The Incomer. Please please please go and see this! I knew nothing about it and just went because I thought it looked fun, and it’s one of my favourite films of the year. It’s the feature debut of Louis Paxton, who directed Calamity James, one of my favourite BBC Comedy Shorts of the last few years. It’s a really funny, silly, folk-horror-tinged story about two siblings who’ve lived alone on an island for 30 years and have to deal with a visit from Domhnall Gleeson’s loner council official who needs to evict them. It’s a real breath of fresh air and, in keeping with the theme of this week’s Tape, at a time when British TV comedy is really struggling, it’s exciting to see great filmmakers telling brilliant funny stories in the feature film space instead. Maybe that’s the direction the scripted comedy business will be leaning in now. If it means more films like this, I’m all for it.

That’s all for this week! Feel free to send the newsletter to a friend if you enjoyed it, and see you all 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 A friend who is much smaller than me was getting rid of some clothes and wondered if any of us wanted to take them off her hands, and the consensus was that I managed to pull off this tank-top much better than any of us anticipated. What do you reckon? Should I start wearing this to places?

Click here to go back