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 148 Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes below.
Tape 103: Art & Hope & A Little Life
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 […]
Tape 102: Notes From MachFest
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 […]
Tape 101: 100 Of These Things…
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 […]
Tape 100: Assumptions
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 […]
Tape 99: Just Write
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 […]
Tape 98: Caring And Not Caring
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 […]
Tape 97: Verbatim Online Comedy
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 […]
Tape 96: The Changing Face Of Happiness
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 […]
Tape 95: Old Habits
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 […]
Tape 94: Midpoints
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 […]
Tape 93: Good Boy
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 […]
Tape 92: Creativity Is Just A Job You Can Do
The End Of Magical Thinking In last week’s Tape I wrote about how to deal with disappointment in a positive way in the creative industries, and briefly mentioned that my least favourite thing about working in the creative industries is the “magical thinking” that surrounds it, because I think it gets in the way of the making […]
Tape 91: Rejection! Disappointment! Failure! And How To Move Past Them
Rejection! Disappointment! Failure! And Moving Past Them… As I wrote here back at the start of January, I’ve decided that 2023 is, for me, the Change year. I’d like it to be a year where I attempt to shake up old working patterns which I feel have served their function for now, move away from old mediums and models […]
Tape 90: Two Things To Master
The Courage To Be Disliked & The Courage To Be Happy Over the last couple of weeks I read the books The Courage To Be Disliked and The Courage To Be Happy, by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. Broadly speaking, they were very good – I don’t agree with everything in them, but they form a pretty good overview […]
Tape 89: “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure”-Style Shows
“Choose-Your-Own-Adventure”-Style Shows This week I’ve been thinking about the mechanics and formal decisions behind the recent rise in “choose-your-own-adventure”-style shows, a genre I have recently added to with the first outing of my new show Private Dancer. I’m not plugged into the conceptual theatre scene enough to know exactly where this trend started – I imagine it […]