How To Come Up With A New Idea – Making The Philosophical Literal I’m back with a quick creative prompt this week, which might be of interest to the fellow writers out there. As I’ve been documenting in these newsletters lately, I have been spending the last few weeks: A. Winding down from a period of […]

User-Generated Entertainment As I mentioned in last week’s Tape, I’m crawling back into Input Mode, where I start to take in ideas that might eventually turn into Output projects, having just put two big long-form projects to bed. As such, the Tapes are probably set to become a bit more free-wheeling and all over the place […]

Returning To Input Mode First up, a confession – I’ve been conscious over the last few weeks that the Therapy Tapes had slightly morphed, seemingly against my will, into something they were never intended to be, in that they felt to me like they were coming to resemble a traditional newsletter concerned largely with letting […]

Plot Holes & Nitpicks Last week I mentioned that I’d been to see Don’t Worry Darling and thought it was really good and I didn’t really understand why it was getting such bad press. I won’t expand on that here, because I’ve now heard from plenty of people who hated it and don’t understand how I could […]

Targeted Priorities As any readers familiar with the inner workings of the comedy industry will know, the comedy year tends to run on an academic calendar, with September being the end of the yearly cycle and the start of the next one, thanks to the significance of the Edinburgh Fringe within comedy. This September, I’ve […]

Dinner Time! In last week’s Tape I briefly mentioned a new collaborative project/night from myself, Miranda and Ben, called Dinner Time! (you can book tickets here!) so I thought this week I’d say a bit more about it. In August I was lucky enough to be offered a monthly residency by VAULT Creative Arts (the organisation behind VAULT Festival, among other things) at their new venue, […]

The Dream Factory: Part 2 So, where was I? In last week’s Tape I started taking the wraps off The Dream Factory, the sitcom project I’ve been making with Miranda Holms (co-writer) and Steve Doherty (producer) for BBC Radio 4 over the last year-and-a-half and haven’t yet said that much about in this newsletter as I wanted to wait until its existence […]

The Dream Factory Good news! It’s finally time for me to stop sending newsletters on the theme of “Things the Edinburgh Fringe made me think about this year!” (Although I’ve realised I’ve not done a run-down of recommendations of my favourite shows I saw, so maybe I’ll do that at some point). But today I’m […]

The Edinburgh Comedy Award & Short Runs I mentioned last week that some of my more scattered thoughts from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe might bleed out into subsequent newsletters, and I also mentioned that I had a lot of thoughts on the discussion of short runs that followed on from Sam Campbell’s Edinburgh Comedy Award win. So […]

Fringe Debrief! Hello! Welcome back! How were your summers? Hope you all had a blast. I am, of course, back from the Edinburgh Fringe, the first full-scale one since the Great Pause of 2020. I’m well aware that the month I’ve had has given me enough stuff to think and talk about – both in […]

Negative Space This will likely be the last Therapy Tape for a few weeks, because as of next week I’m gonna be at the Edinburgh Fringe with Blink (come along if you’re up there! Have I mentioned that you should come along if you’re up there?) So, in recognition of the fact that this newsletter is going […]

Blink: A Reading & Listening List Many thanks to everyone who’s sent kind words about the mini-documentary I released last week about Blink and the collaborative approach we took to making it, and how and why. I’ve been really proud to try and prod and poke the “auteur theory” that revolves around a lot of Fringe show-making, and do […]

Gardeners & Pie-Eaters It’s getting to the time of year when the atmosphere in the comedy community suddenly pivots either towards hyper-competitiveness, or towards the opposite extreme, one of mutual nurture and support, depending on people’s attitudes to the Edinburgh Fringe. As soon as it starts slouching over the horizon, people either start to nervously […]

Saying What You Mean By Hiding What You Mean Forgive me if I’m sort of repeating myself this week – this week’s Tape will in some ways be a followup or companion piece to this Tape from earlier this year, in which I laid out my thoughts on meaning in comedy, and how to convey it. Although I have […]

Fear of Failure, Fear of Success This week I had the pleasure of guesting on the brilliant Helen Bauer and Catherine Bohart’s podcast Trusty Hogs (you can listen to the episode here!) and a listener wrote in asking us to talk a little bit about what the Edinburgh Fringe actually is, because comedians talk about it a lot but to someone unfamiliar with it, […]