Hello. You might be reading this as a fully paid-up subscriber to the LMAONaise newsletter, in which case you’ll have heard me bang on about this already. If so, please forgive me – mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! But yes, I am about to bang on about it for a second time.

Or perhaps you’re reading this as someone who signed up to this newsletter in the wake of my post about the decline of TV comedy and the rise of main character syndrome taking off a bit, in which case hello and welcome! I’m so glad you enjoyed my long-form whinge about trends in comedy commissioning that I think are hurting this country’s comedy output. But here at Joz Norris Industries (TM) we like to pride ourselves on being a solutions-based organisation rather than simply being doomsday prognosticators who do nothing but diagnose problems (and yes, it is exciting that you’ve signed up to a supposedly comedy-themed newsletter that uses phrases like “doomsday prognosticators” – what can I say, if I used these phrases in everyday life people would look at me like I’d gone completely mad, so this newsletter is the only place where I get to really cut loose and have some fun).

Anyway, look. If that piece spoke to you then you’re probably well aware already of how difficult it is to get scripted comedy projects made right now – all those things I mentioned last time about shifting sands in the wider cultural landscape, the continual uncertainty about exactly what people are watching and where, and where the money is going to come from and so on and so on, are big barriers to getting ambitious large-scale projects across the line. But my fear is that this attitude of uncertainty and hesitancy is putting people in the mindset of believing that it simply isn’t possible. That as long as the major broadcasters themselves are trying to solve all these problems and work out what direction to jump in, what chance do any of the rest of us have of figuring out the way forwards?

And it’s very easy for that mindset to breed yet more negativity and start turning against the people who are genuinely trying to work out how to invest in and champion the UK’s comedy scene – “Booo! Down with cultural gatekeepers! ¡Viva la revolución! Blood in the streets!” etc.

I’m not really interested in either of those mindsets (who’s going to clean all that blood off those streets when the fun’s over, for a start? Muggins here?). So there’s a big but, and here it comes: (NB “One of us likes big butts and cannot lie. The other likes big tiddies and cannot tell the truth. Now which door do you choose?”) Ok, here’s the big but:

Just because everything is changing, doesn’t mean nothing is possible any more.

This week I’m launching a 3-part making-of miniseries about a scripted comedy pilot that I made with a team of amazing comedians, artists and collaborators a couple of years ago entirely off our own back, funded by our own audience, because in a few weeks we’re finally going to be releasing it online.

I’m not making this miniseries purely as a cynical ploy to drum up more online traffic and buzz and interest in the pilot itself so that when it launches I’ve done everything I can to minimise the chances of it going out to a collective shrug from the internet as a whole, as if to say “Great, well done I guess.” I have done it partly for that reason. If I’m honest, when I first started working on it that was very much the primary motivating factor. But as I’ve been putting it together, I’ve started to get really excited about what I actually want this series to do.

I want people out there who are becoming frustrated, as I was, by the pessimism and uncertainty in the comedy industry, particularly pertaining to TV commissioning and production for scripted comedy, to know that they don’t need permission to make whatever they want. I want to take this one project and document how we made it, and why, and demonstrate what we had in mind when we set out, and what we learned and discovered along the way that we didn’t expect, and hopefully light one very small beacon for independent audience-funded scripted production, because I’m beginning to think that perhaps there’s an exciting future in it.

The first episode of this making-of series is here:

I’m not going to repeat everything it says here, as ideally I’d like people to watch it and maybe even share it if they enjoy it (imagine!), but ultimately the point is this:

When I first started writing the script for what would become The Happiness Chain, I’d had some experience making a few self-contained narrative shorts. I would sometimes save up a little chunk of money and put it into making a one-off thing exploring an idea that made me laugh. But for some reason, I’d got it into my head that making the leap from that to something long-form that aspired to an ongoing serialised arc required a permission slip from somebody else. I had made one full scripted pilot in my life, a crime caper with Ed Aczel called Ed & Joz’s Heist Movie, in which we attempted to pull off an audacious heist in order to steal a single vending machine from an ordinary office:

We did that with the generous support of Tiger Aspect, who offered to cover our costs for making it and asked me to name my price. Inexperienced as I was with filmmaking at the time and having made a handful of very low-budget shorts for a couple of hundred quid apiece, I thought I was giving us plenty of wiggle room when I asked for a grand. Presumably Tiger Aspect had been expecting me to say a much higher number, and probably would’ve been happy to pay more, but quite reasonably took me at my word. How we managed to make a 20-minute pilot for a grand baffles me now, but I’m really proud of it and I still think it’s really silly and good.

Still, as the title suggests, it ended up slightly straddling the space between being a stand-alone film and a proof-of-concept pilot (it ends with the vague tease that the second episode would involve us launching a small business that involved getting people to pay us to invent time travel, then when we invent it, travelling back in time to immediately give them their money back), and despite Tiger Aspect’s committed championing of it, it never found a home and we never got to make more. Maybe that experience, through no fault of its own, boxed my thinking into a corner a little bit and made me believe that in order to ever have another crack of the whip at telling a more long-form open-ended story, I would need to wait until someone else gave me the go-ahead for it.

So when director Ben Kent read The Happiness Chain and said “Why don’t we just make this?”, it was like it fired an old synapse in my brain that I’d forgotten was there.

The Happiness Chain was a much less absurdist and more personal script than Ed & Joz’s Heist Movie, and it had gotten a lot of really lovely feedback and a few accolades here and there. I’d been feeling sad about putting it back in a drawer and not doing anything with it after a few attempts to pitch it for TV hadn’t ended up going anywhere. It had grown out of a time in my life when I was feeling very lost and spent almost a full year trying to make an incredibly convoluted podcast about happiness in order to try and work out how I could feel happy myself, while at the same time being a bit head-in-the-sand about other things that were going on in the lives of people I cared about. I didn’t want to tell the story of exactly what happened between me and my friend, because I’m always wary of creative projects that intentionally recreate events as they happened – I think they can inadvertently cause a bit of hurt.

But as I crawled out of the hole I’d been in that year (at one point I got up at five a.m. and walked across London from Camden to Cannon Street, recording the sounds of dawn in the city before catching a train to Ramsgate to interview a guy who’d made an organ out of Teletubbies, then recording myself walking into the sea while trying to sum up what I’d learned, I’d gone completely nuts to be brutally honest), it had left me with a different story I wanted to tell that was adjacent to the truth. Something about two friends whose lives had been moving in opposite directions and both suddenly reversed direction at the same time, so that the one who was lost was suddenly stable and the one who was stable was suddenly lost. And there was something vaguely cathartic about pairing that story up with the initial format of the podcast I had tried and failed to get off the ground in a way that generated story-of-the-week episodes that also allowed the overarching narrative to progress.

When Ben said “Let’s do it,” I initially thought that what we were making was another blueprint for permission – something we could then show to people to help them decide whether they would give us some money so that we could make more of it. I also had no idea how I was going to find the money to make it in the first place (apparently it was going to have to cost more than a grand this time, what the hell???)

When I went to my own audience with a crowdfunder to see if anyone would chip in and support us, all my thinking on this started shifting, and has continued shifting to this day. So many people donated. We doubled our target, I think. So it was no longer something we were gonna have to make super cheaply and on-the-fly. We could actually pay people for their time – not loads, but a bit. It wouldn’t be something everyone did begrudgingly as a favour. Instead, it would be something everyone did begrudgingly for a small amount of money. We could make it look really beautiful and intentional in the way the visuals helped us tell the story. We could feed people proper food (I think this was the biggest game-changer on the shoot, actually, God bless the good folks at Apka Catering).

Huge Davies and Rosalie Minnitt both doing really good acting here, and giving performances that exist at diametrically opposite ends of the classic “I’m inside a cupboard” dramatic axis.

It made me realise that the way I’d been developing my scripted projects had been very inward-looking. Many of them had only been read or seen by a couple of dozen people before eventually being filed away. And there was a whole community of people out there who wanted to actively support and engage in more of these kinds of things getting made. Making The Happiness Chain felt like my first step towards working out how to involve those people more directly in my work, and make more stuff directly for them.

I still feel like I’m in the early stages of figuring it all out. Making scripted projects and films and pilots is really hard – it takes a huge amount of time and effort and resources to put together and I don’t feel like once we’ve released The Happiness Chain I’ll be in a position to just dive right in and start making the next thing. I’ll need to spend some time working out what that is and how it’s going to work.

But I do know that that project helped me connect to an attitude that feels so much more positive and hopeful than the one the TV comedy landscape had been making me feel for a while. I’d love it if documenting that project might encourage other people to find the same positivity and make more of their own ideas, and tell their own stories. That’s my hope, anyway – that we’re on the cusp of an explosion of long-form scripted comedy funded by and made directly for its own audience.

So look, if you like the sound of this, or you enjoy the first episode about where the idea came from and why I wrote it, then I’d love you to subscribe to the Youtube channel and follow the whole series, or give this a share to help spread the word! I loved making it, and I’m proud of what we ended up with, and whatever I get to make next, I hope it makes me feel half as happy and proud as making this thing did. Looking forward to sharing it with you all. xx

A Quick Plug – We’ve just announced the guest cast for our next Eggbox show on November the 10th, and it’s a doozy! (Is that a phrase?) Bringing to life brand new comedy scripts by Emmeline Downie, Kari Hall and Miranda Holms, we’ve got the multifarious talents of Jack Shep, Em Humble, Noah Geelan, Ayo Adenekan, Emmeline Downie, Matt Winning and me! The show’s starting to really fill up, so do book your tickets ASAP!

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – Speaking of people making ambitious long-form scripted comedy projects directly for their own audience, this Friday I’m guesting in the latest live instalment of Tom Crowley’s award-winning Crowley Time! podcast alongside Operation Mincemeat’s Natasha Hodgson, in a story of political intrigue called Citizen Shinbone. It’s such a funny script and I get to play Christopher Walken and an evil Russian ambassador, among other things, and it’s playing at the Cheerful Earful Podcast Festival at the Bedford in Balham on Friday night. Maybe see you there!

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – This week I was so shit at Codenames that I was reduced to a gibbering wreck. I attempted to link the words “Plot,” “Luck” and “Lawyer” using the clue “Gunpowder” because, in my opinion, the perpetrators of the Gunpowder “Plot” would have required a lot of “Luck” to get away with it and, after being caught, were in need of a good “Lawyer.” I’m told this is a dogshit way to play the game. I’m also told that linking the words “Poison,” “Laboratory,” “Iron” and “Flute” by using the clue “Scientist” because I expect someone to think about “The scientist making poison in his laboratory with his iron flute” is similarly bad.

Book Of The Week – Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood. I love her so much, Priestdaddy and No One Is Talking About This are two of my all-time faves. This new one is about someone whose mind and identity are collapsing and disintegrating in the wake of a long-term illness, and I think has taken a bit of flack from people because it’s much less plot-centric and more abstract and experiential than her previous books, but she has such a wonderful mind that it’s still an amazing place to spend time in, even if it is splintering into a million pieces.

Album Of The Week – Loud City Song by Julia Holter. I’ve been trying to get into her for a couple of years now and something has always slightly held me back, and then this album really clicked for me. I went back to Have You In My Wilderness and it really opened up to me as well, having got my head round her via this one. It’s about being surrounded by noise and it’s strange and magical and scary and great.

Film Of The Week – Digger. Oh my God we don’t have time to get into this here. Is it a masterpiece? Is it an insufferable self-indulgent mess? Is it both? I absolutely love what it’s saying and doing, and what it all means. I also felt very annoyed watching it, and don’t know if it necessarily did any of those things particularly well. And then at the end I thought “Ohhhhh, wow, that’s really great actually.” Does that make it good? Or rubbish? Would it have worked better with a different lead actor? Maybe! Will we all be talking about it forever? Feels like it!

That’s all for this week. If you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage someone else to subscribe, I’d hugely appreciate it.

Take care until next time,

Joz xx

PS Alongside the free-for-everyone version of this newsletter, I’m going to be serialising my comedy murder mystery novel The Last One You’d Expect for paid subscribers! Chapter 1 will be going out for free next week as a teaser, but if it sounds like your kind of thing and you’d like to follow the story, feel free to upgrade your subscription!

PPS Once again in the spirit of people making great ambitious stuff off their own back, it was such a joy to be at the world premiere of my old pal Matthew Highton’s feature film Lost On The Road last week. It’s such a funny, heartfelt, inventive film and you should keep an eye out for it wherever it ends up next!

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