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, […]

Where Is Your Locus of Evaluation This week I met up with the excellent comedian Barry Ferns to have a big chat about process, and making stuff, and so on, and Barry introduced me to a psychotherapy theory I found really illuminating in terms of how I go about making comedy, and how I think about comedy […]

Notes From A Philosophy Festival I just got back from performing at How The Light Gets In in Hay-on-Wye, apparently the world’s largest philosophy festival. I went there with absolutely no idea what a philosophy audience would be like to perform a comedy show to, and also with low expectations of how many people at a philosophy […]

Magic & Comedy From an Audience’s-Eye View This week I’ve been working with a bunch of incredibly talented geniuses on a very fun, very cool, very secret R&D/workshop project for a magic show. I’m not allowed to say any more than that because we all signed NDAs, but the details aren’t important for the purposes […]

Podcasting: A Learning Curve Some thoughts on podcasting this week! As I said when I first launched this newsletter back in early 2021, its title was originally the title of an abandoned idea for a podcast way back in 2018/19, which I never managed to get anywhere with, despite the best support and hard work and encouragement […]

Strange Grief This will probably be the most personal Therapy Tape I’ve written so far, and I hope it hasn’t crossed any sort of line. In the year-plus that I’ve been writing this newsletter, I’ve tried to make sure it’s more of an open exchange of creative ideas and less of a glorified public diary […]

EdFringe Solutions Update I’m back from my holiday! Hi. Hope you all had a great fortnight. I sure did. I made a wish on a magic nose, and met a skeleton, and swam in a lagoon. Anyway, before I left I set up a couple of group-based exchanges-of-ideas, and then left them dangling while I […]

What Do We Do About The Edinburgh Fringe? I’ll try not to write too much this week, because I’m going away on holiday tomorrow (so there won’t be a Therapy Tape next week) and I’ve got lots of things to wrap up before I go. So I’m going to hand over as much of this […]

Digital Declutter: Week Two Last week I outlined my reasons and plan for undertaking Cal Newport’s month-long “Digital Declutter” for April, but didn’t get as far as sharing any of my struggles/findings etc so far. So this week I’ll give a bit of an update on it, though I promise not to write about it every week of […]

A Digital Declutter Quite by coincidence, I found myself starting to read Cal Newport’s excellent book Digital Minimalism on the 1st of April, in which he puts forward the case for undertaking a month-long “Digital Declutter” in order to rethink and reshape your relationship with technology. It felt like a good opportunity to try and do one […]

A Tour, In Theory I’m going to get right in there with a question this week, if you’d be happy to answer it. My question is: If you live in the UK, whereabouts do you live? If I were to come on tour to a city near you, would you be interested in coming? If […]

Looking Out Of My Window Project – Results: First up, last week I said I’d practice looking out of my window at the life of my street for half an hour every morning before doing anything else, with no distractions like looking at my phone, to exercise my muscle for “being in the world,” off […]

Putting Things On Shelves So, first things first, I’m sure you’ll all be relieved to know that as of last week I no longer have to bang on about a Soho Theatre run all the bloody time, because we did the run and it was great and I had a lovely time – huge thank […]

Choosing The Right Space This week I’m thinking about venues and spaces, because there are Edinburgh Fringe deadlines looming, and I’m busy getting all my ducks in a row for that, and it’s got me wondering about some stuff. Yesterday I was chatting to the brilliant Rob Kemp about the Bunka in the Hive, the venue where […]