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Joz Norris

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Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes

I write a (more or less) weekly newsletter about comedy, art, creativity and other stuff that floats through my mind. It has a really lovely engaged readership who I love exchanging ideas with. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s thoughtful, sometimes it’s just a place to provide creative accountability for a community of other makers! Do feel free to delve in and join us. The community is over at Substack, where you can subscribe to the newsletter and join the chat, but I’ve archived every issue here for the sake of completism.

Browse the 164 Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes below.

Tape 134: Writing About Real People

  • Tape 134: Writing About Real People

Let’s start with the plug, because this week’s Tape is at least vaguely connected to it. Those readers who’ve been enjoying the Mr Fruit Salad show on Youtube over the last couple of weeks might be interested to know that I’ve put together a little bonus feature for the Go Faster Stripe store in the form of […]

Tape 133: Absurdism Is A Language

  • Tape 133: Absurdism Is A Language

Hello! Hope you’re all doing well. Just a quick Tape this week, as I’ve actually been moonlighting, writing for a DIFFERENT publication! Sacrilege! Betrayal! How could I do such a thing? The good folks at Psyche Magazine, which commissions writers to explore the intersection between their own fields and psychology and mental health, approached me at […]

Tape 132: New Comedy Special

  • Tape 132: New Comedy Special

Hello! I hope you’re all well. May God bless you and keep you (what? What am I on about? I dunno.) I’m going to get right to it this week, because I’m doing a lot of scurrying around plugging stuff, and am scribbling this down on the back of a napkin in between bouts of […]

Tape 131: My Osteopath

  • Tape 131: My Osteopath

I’ve started seeing an osteopath, because my neck and shoulder have been hurting for about a year and I’m worried if I don’t do something about it now I’ll end up as one of those old souls who can’t raise his head above the level of his navel who you see feeding pigeons. It’d be […]

Tape 130: Wheels Not Ladders

  • Tape 130: Wheels Not Ladders

Hello! Hope you’re all doing well. Apologies that it’s been a few weeks since the last Therapy Tape – January was a busy month of getting the ball rolling on various projects for the year, and I’m only now clawing back the time to sit and write about what I’ve been thinking about! First up, […]

Tape 129: Action Creates Action

  • Tape 129: Action Creates Action

Dog House is out! The short film I made last year with an assortment of legends including director Miranda Holms, DoP Matt Riley, actors Anna Leong Brophy, Nat Luurtsema, Tom Bell and many more, was released online on Monday and I’m so proud of it. I’ve written about the journey and the process behind Dog House in this newsletter […]

Tape 128: Coming Up In 2024

  • Tape 128: Coming Up In 2024

Well, we’re off. It’s happening. 2024 is all go. People have started to frown and look disappointed when I say “Happy New Year”, and rebuke me by saying that I now need to come up with something else to say. We are passed the point of no return. I’m having a nice one, so far. […]

Tape 127: Word For The Year 2024

  • Tape 127: Word For The Year 2024

Happy New Year! I hope you all had a delightful Christmas and saw out 2023 in style. Here’s to a happy and fruitful 2024 for all of you. To celebrate the New Year, it’s that time again to delve into the Word For The Year initiative, which Miranda introduced me to when we first met. […]

Tape 126: This Day Would Come…

  • Tape 126: This Day Would Come…

Father Christmas awoke with a start. There was somebody moving around downstairs. Still only half-awake, he swung his arm wildly out over the bedside table, let it come thudding down like a wrecking ball on the assorted odds and ends he stored there – the book he was currently reading (Sedaris’s latest), his deodorant, his […]

Tape 125: Dog House

  • Tape 125: Dog House

Right back at the start of the year I shot a short film which at the time was going to be called Good Boy (it is no longer called this, for reasons I’ll explain). It had emerged out of some work-in-progress script readings at a monthly scratch night called Dinner Time that I was running with Ben Target and Miranda […]

Tape 124: Elf On The Self

  • Tape 124: Elf On The Self

Warning – this newsletter has nothing to do with elves. But Christmas is coming, and it IS about selves, so the title was inevitable, really. Anyway. On we go. They got me onto The Now Show to pretend to be Jeremy Clarkson and a Dalek and Boris Johnson and Professor Brian Cox, among others. I had such […]

Tape 123: Deep Void

  • Tape 123: Deep Void

I was working in the cafe of a large public building. I had just met my dad for lunch. We had been trying to find an Italian restaurant we had eaten at a few years before, but it was no longer there, so instead we ate a fry-up at a very nice greasy spoon on […]

Tape 122: Filming Live Comedy Differently (Part II)

  • Tape 122: Filming Live Comedy Differently (Part II)

Mea culpa. Mea culpa. (This means “My apologies” in French). It has come to my attention that last week I used this newsletter to announce EGGBOX, a night of comedy short film screenings and script readings I’m organising at King’s Place in early December, and failed to actually specify in the body of the email what the […]

Tape 121 – Eggbox

  • Tape 121 – Eggbox

“I’m back!” he cried, tumbling out of his spaceship with gleeful abandon. “Did you miss me?” All around him, people were smashing in the windows of Games Workshop, of Curry’s, of Gregg’s, of Gwen’s Nails (a fancy nail parlour he didn’t remember being here before takeoff), of every place that had a window to be […]

Tape 120 – Why Make A Show?

  • Tape 120 – Why Make A Show?

Thank you all for your responses last week about the possible expansion of this newsletter into a two-tier system, one for free subscribers and one for paid, and your ideas for the various different things you might like to see in an “evolved” version of what this newsletter offers for you all. It was lovely […]

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The Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes