A couple of weeks ago I went to a recording of BBC Radio 4’s comedy-and-medicine discussion panel show, Best Medicine, hosted by Kiri Pritchard-Maclean – huge thanks to the brilliant Tashi Radha for inviting me along to it! Tashi works on the show and wanted me to come to one particular recording so I could see and […]

Certain corners of the UK comedy community were in uproar last week when it was announced that the future of the Edinburgh Comedy Award (formerly the Perrier back when it had a name that was synonymous with itself, since then, by turns, the if.comeddie, the AbsoluteRadio.co.uk, the Fosters, the Personally-Funded-By-Nica-Burns-This-Year-Due-To-Lack-Of-Sponsorship, the lastminute.com and most recently […]

I’m back! There was no Fruit Salad Therapy Tape last week because I was away in Wales for a couple of festivals – first the BBC Comedy Festival in Cardiff, then How The Light Gets In, a philosophy, music and comedy festival in Hay-on-Wye. I had a lovely, albeit very intense, week at both and have come back […]

In last week’s Therapy Tape I briefly mentioned that in July I’ll be part of a day of comedy show recordings for Go Faster Stripe at Moth Club (tickets and more info here – isn’t it weird that what we call a “comedy show” becomes a “comedy special” as soon as it’s being filmed? The content’s exactly the same. Mad old business). […]

Hello! How are you all doing? Hope everyone’s keeping well. First up – I have moved to Substack! To previous subscribers who only recently put up with my moving the newsletter to Email Octopus, I apologise – this move should be for good, as Substack seems much better at the community-building-and-engagement elements of writing a […]

Notes From MachFest It’ll be a fairly quick and simple Therapy Tape this week as I’ve just got back from the Machynlleth Comedy Festival and have lots to catch up on. But I thought I’d make good use of all the inspiring and brilliant stuff I saw there by saying a little bit about the shows I saw […]

100 Tapes! 100 Years! It’s been brought to my attention that last week’s Tape crossed the threshold of 100 of these emails/essays/bits/whatever these are. It had kind of passed me by without my noticing, despite the number being right at the top there. I like to think that the coming and going of that milestone reinforces what this […]

Rick Rubin On Assumptions This week I’ve been reading Rick Rubin’s new book The Creative Act: A Way Of Being. I like Rick Rubin a lot. For those that don’t know of him, he’s a sort of super-producer who made his name working with acts like Beastie Boys and Run-DMC in the 80s, then became even better […]

Goodbye Mailchimp. Apologies For Short-Term Kinks! Unbeknownst to me, the readership of The Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes has grown to the point where I can no longer use Mailchimp to host it without paying them money, and I’m not doing that, because I write this for free. (By the by, I will never charge for this newsletter, because I do it […]

Caring & Not Caring – Life’s Balancing Act Thanks again for all your replies about happiness and “The Provisional Life” a couple of weeks back – I think I’ve replied to them all now, but please nudge me if I’ve missed yours! These ideas, about deferred happiness and the collective delusion that “real life” will begin as […]

Verbatim Online Comedy First up, thank you for all your replies last week on the subject of happiness. It was the most replies I’ve ever received to this newsletter, and I will get round to replying to them all, this week is just a little bit hectic. They were also some of the most honest and […]

The Changing Face of Happiness Once upon a time in the writing of this newsletter, I used to start every week’s entry by asking you guys, the readers, a question. I’d love to resurrect that element this week if that’s alright, and if any of you would be willing to share your answers with me […]

Habits This week I started reading A Choreographer’s Handbook by Jonathan Burrows (thanks so much to Robert for recommending it to me in this newsletter a year ago, and apologies for only just getting round to it!) and it’s fantastic. As the title suggests, it is ostensibly a book about choreography, but you can easily read it […]

Midpoints – What They Are And How To Spot Them: It’s another newsletter about writing and story structure this week, because I always love the replies I get to those ones and the updates I receive from those of you working on your own stories and writing projects – as ever, if anything in this […]

Good Boy Hope you all had a nice week last week – I had a busy one writing a bunch of pitches for some radio programmes, which went in this week, so I’ll be keeping fingers crossed for them and shifting focus back to my other projects for a bit until I hear some news […]