I felt very lucky to spend the last week in an Alpine chalet in Switzerland teaching on Alice Fraser’s annual writers’ retreat. What a week I had: slowly grooving around my room to the sound of cowbells in the valley, a tankard of pellets in my hand which I would periodically shovel into the pellet stove to keep the fires burning. And occasionally I would do some writing and/or teaching as well!

Alice has been running these retreats for the last 3 years and it was such an inspiring, nurturing space to exist in for a few days. Honestly, I could fill up multiple newsletters by trying to write up every insight it left me with, but fellow teacher Amy Brown Carver has done a great job of writing up some brilliant fragments of the week already on her Substack. Also I was roundly sassed by writer and all-round excellent human Tom Craven during the retreat when he recommended my Substack to the other writers, saying he’d really been enjoying what I wrote about on there before adding “Sometimes they’re a bit long.”

This is an entirely fair assessment of my writing style for these newsletters, which roughly amounts to “Write until I’m bored, then stop. If I’m bored then that probably means they got bored a while ago, so go back, delete 15% and press send.” So I won’t go into detail about everything, as fun and inspiring as the retreat was. Instead, I’m going to reflect on one specific thing the retreat encouraged me to reflect on which feeds directly back into a lot of the stuff I’ve been writing about here recently.

I tried to take a selfie on top of an Alp but I have very sensitive eyes and struggle to open them in bright sunlight, so the brightness of the snow just made me sneeze.

Speaking of, for those who’ve been enjoying the making-of series for my indie pilot The Happiness Chain and have been absolutely jonesing for the latest instalment and don’t want to read a whole essay about Switzerland before they can enjoy it, I’ve just released Part 3, in which I chat to the cast about, among other things, whether there is such a thing as an inland Fatface, and whether we all have permission to tell ourselves we have a fantastic ass. You can watch it here if you like:

Anyway, this writers’ retreat.

As I’ve written about here a few times before, I’ve recently made the decision to step away from TV scripted development, at least for a while. The TV landscape in the UK doesn’t currently feel like a healthy enough place to continue investing huge amounts of time and energy into, particularly considering, as this excellent note by Katy Brand details, it’s still in large part an industry built on the principle of people working for free because they can afford to. That’s not a dynamic I can continue allowing myself to just go along with in the hope that my project might end up being one of the lucky ones.

So instead I’ve been splitting my time between three parallel projects – a live show (Jackman/Phantom), and another story which I’m writing as a feature screenplay and a novel at the same time (The Last One You’d Expect). I’ve been enjoying them all so much more than I enjoyed the years I spent trying to develop and pitch TV projects, even though only one of those three is something I know how to take towards completion – I’ve made plenty of live shows before and know what the process involves. Writing a film and/or a novel involves a lot of unknowns for me, and may well become stressful and frustrating in various ways I can’t anticipate, but for now, I feel like the work I’m doing on all three projects is really serving me, rather than trying to serve the imagined expectations of someone else.

When I chatted to Alice about this shift of focus in Switzerland, she managed to express the core shift in energy I’d been feeling really neatly.

“Trying to develop stuff for TV inherently forces you into this position,” she said, reaching up towards the ceiling of the chalet with her arms in supplication, “and that’s never a nice position to be in.” I thought that was a really efficient way of expressing everything I had become exhausted by over the last couple of years – the sheer exhaustion of constantly reaching upwards and pleading for the scraps of someone’s attention.

Now obviously, the worlds of feature films and publishing have their own crop of gatekeepers, and I’m sure that the more you become enmeshed with them, the more you get pushed back into that position. But over the course of my time in Switzerland, it became clear to me that what I was dealing with in navigating this shift in my attention and focus wasn’t something inherent to the formats I was working in. It’s not that writing a feature screenplay or a novel is inherently more enjoyable than writing a TV script, it’s just that both are a better fit for the kinds of stories my brain comes up with when left to its own devices. It’s not that the gatekeepers in TV want you to supplicate yourself any more than the gatekeepers in film or publishing do, it’s just that the comparative lack of paying opportunities there means you feel like you need to adopt that position more quickly. My work so far on the feature and the novel, by comparison, hasn’t felt like it needs to come from a starting point of “What might get made at the moment?”, it’s emerged entirely naturally from the starting point of “What story do I want to tell and how?” which is also where all my live work starts from.

At Amy’s workshop with the group, we ended up discussing what we want to ultimately achieve with our writing, and what practical steps it would take us to get from here to there, and which of those we actually require some kind of external validation or approval for, and which are things we can actually do for ourselves if we give ourselves permission. In this workshop, Alice pointed out that the current cultural landscape traps artists into thinking they have to make a choice about exactly who we’re writing for:

Gatekeepers or algorithms?

This, Alice pointed out, is a false choice. Because reducing our options as artists that binary, it eliminates the third option of who we might tailor our writing for: our audience.

I think it’s very easy for people to decide to go all-in on making online content because they believe it’s a way of circumnavigating traditional gatekeepers and going directly to their audience, and then they get stuck in thinking “What content should I make then?” I’ve found myself stuck in this position so many times – agents or producers or whoever telling me I should “post more reels” so that the problem becomes “What am I going to do in this reel I need to post?” rather than “What do I want to make?” Thinking like this doesn’t serve the audience in the slightest, because again, you’re adopting this position [reaches up towards the ceiling of the chalet in supplication]. You’re making content because you think something will come towards you as a result of posting content.

It works in other directions too – I know people who are very good at making and posting content and have built up really good followings from it who now feel stuck about how to strong-arm that following into getting a foot in the door of scripted comedy as a writer-performer. [Reaches up towards the ceiling of the chalet in supplication].

I think this industry is constantly trying to force artists to tie themselves in knots and get themselves back in that position, to second-guess what they have achieved with the work they’ve done and measure themselves according to what they haven’t yet been able to do. When really, this industry should be empowering and enabling its artists to ask themselves just one question:

What do you actually want to do?

If you really know the answer to that question, then it becomes much easier to look at what you’re actually currently doing and ask two questions of it:

1. Is the thing I’m doing the thing I want to do?
2. Is the thing I’m doing tangibly and meaningfully moving me towards the thing I want to do in ways I can measure and understand?

I really like framing my work to myself in this way now, because it puts me in total control of what I’m doing, and it also doesn’t take anything off the table. I know in my bones that I don’t want to spend my life making content because it’s not a particular aspiration of mine or something I feel strongly about. But I also understand there’s a value in it and there are things to be learned and gained from engaging with that world provided that I’m doing it in a way that services what my audience wants, and that helps me make progress towards the things I actually want to do.

I’ve spent the last month making a mini-documentary on Youtube, which isn’t something I’d have thought I might end up doing, but I was excited to do it because it meant I got to tell the story of the pilot we made, and how we did it and why. I got to use an online format I don’t know much about or have much experience in to tell a bigger story around something I really do want to do, which is make my own original scripted comedy projects.

The screenplay and the novel may well end up bringing me back into the orbit of more traditional gatekeepers who I need to persuade to take a chance on it in order to help me get it made. But I no longer feel like I’m reaching up towards the ceiling with my arms outstretched, because I’m just writing the story I’m excited to tell and which I want to spend the next few years building towards in one medium or the other if I possibly can. I feel like I have so much more power over what I’m making than I used to, and I think a lot of that power doesn’t come from a material change of circumstances, it comes from changing how you allow yourself to think about what you want to make.

The Happiness Chain project has helped me sense the outline of a practical model for making things that I’d like to explore over the next couple of years, where perhaps making and touring live shows enables me to keep building and expanding an audience and making stuff that I can take directly to them, then as that audience expands, perhaps every couple of years it might be possible to crowd-fund another more ambitious project like a short film or a pilot, and scale up what I’m able to achieve with it each time. That feels like a model I’d actively enjoy which is directly anchored by projects I actually want to make and which I know how to deliver directly to their audiences, and which benefits from an approach that combines traditional creative models with the opportunities offered by online platforms.

Like Alice, I don’t think we need to choose between gatekeepers or algorithms and I think the endless discussion over whether everyone in comedy has to pivot to become a content creator, or whether TV needs to move onto Youtube, and so on and so on, are obscuring the more exciting questions that comedians and writers and artists would most benefit from asking themselves right now:

What do I actually want to do?

And once you’ve got an honest answer for that one, then the really exciting one:

How do I do that?

A Quick Plug – As ever, I will continue to plug the same couple of things until I don’t need to any more. Eggbox is back at the Pleasance on the 10th of November, and Jackman/Phantom is doing a short run there from the 17th-19th of December.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – The Independent Comedy Festival, rising majestically from the ashes of the Leicester Comedy Festival, launched its incredible programme today, and it’s full of so many amazing shows. I’ll be there on the 5th of February with John-Luke Roberts for a Barry & Tony show, and on the 13th with a special reprise of Jackman/Phantom, which let’s not forget was the last-ever Best Show at Leicester Comedy Festival. But there’s so much other amazing stuff too, do check out the whole programme!

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – The bit in Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie involving a gun. If you’ve seen it you’ll know.

Book Of The Week – Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie, because I continue to go back to the OG to help me immerse myself in the world of the classic whodunnit. This one is about Poirot attempting to solve a murder that happened 16 years ago by comparing five different people’s memories of what happened, and as ever I’m having a whale of a time with it so far. I love Poirot, he’s such a cute funny little guy.

Album Of The Week – A Day At The Races by Queen. I’m still slowly making my way through Queen’s discography, and was expecting this and A Night At The Opera to be the undisputed power couple of the whole thing, but the quality dropoff from ANATO to this is really quite steep. “Somebody To Love” is good, obvs. Everything else is fine. I’m beginning to get the sense that Queen aren’t actually much of an albums band and I was actually fine just sticking with the greatest hits. Would that be fair? Or do I have many more riches yet to uncover?

Film Of The Week – Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie. The amazing Emmeline Downie recommended this to me earlier this year and it sounded so good, so I jumped at the chance to see it when there were a handful of London screenings. It’s by far the funniest film I’ve seen this year, or maybe for a few years. It’s also an amazing example of people just going out there and committing to the thing they want to make no matter how stupid it gets, because some of the things they do in order to get this film over the line are frankly insane. I urge you to see it if it happens to be showing near you any time.

That’s all for this week! Hope you enjoyed it, and if you did and felt like sending this newsletter to a friend or encouraging others to subscribe, I’d hugely appreciate it. Take care of yourselves until next time,

Joz xx

PS One last Swiss-pic. Here’s me enjoying some mountain air:

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