Last week I trawled back through the archive of every major project I completed in my first seven years of making comedy in order to extract a single creative lesson from each one, inspired by conversations with my girlfriend Miranda and my old collaborator Ed. Several of them were things I haven’t really thought about in years, so it was fun going back over them. I was genuinely worried there would be more projects which, no matter how hard I squinted them, simply refused to teach me anything at all other than “I shouldn’t have done that.” I was worried I would have to fill the entire thing with entries like:

Untitled Come Dine With Me Parody (Sketch, 2012) – A sketch I made about a guy who goes on Come Dine With Me but he only knows how to make beans on toast. Lesson – Sometimes you just have to do stuff.

But my fears were unfounded and I actually found it quite hard whittling each project down to just a single lesson. It turns out that you can’t not learn by doing. Sometimes, I guess you just have to do stuff. Hey, wow, I suggested that lesson as a joke, but I ended up learning it anyway! Life imitates art.

Anyway, this week I’m finishing the job by going over the last five years, from 2020 to today, and I’ve found it much harder to do. I came out of the pandemic having had my entire approach to creative work completely rewritten (did anybody else have this? Did anybody else find that the global pandemic caused major things in their life to change significantly? I think it’s only me. I think it’s just one of those things about me that are totally unique and make me endlessly fascinating at parties).

I think and work differently now, and it’s had the effect of making me look at everything I made before 2020 as though it was made by a different person. It’s therefore much easier for me to know exactly what each one taught me, because I feel like the lesson has objectively been learned. The lessons I’ve learned from the things I’ve made since 2020 are, in many cases, still lessons I’m learning, so it’s harder for them to feel as clear-cut or obvious to me. Nonetheless, I’m an obsessional and a completist and I hate to leave a list unfinished (I’m currently seventeen years into making a definitive list of the greatest albums of all time, but it’s taking a long time to finish because people keep selfishly releasing new albums). So here are some creative lessons learned from the projects I completed in the last five years:

Useless Millennials (Radio show, 2020) – My first ever radio show – a sort of podcast-esque chat show in which Roxy Dunn and I discussed the failings of our generation. I loved making it and did hope that we’d get to make more, partly because in the pilot we made, we weren’t 100% sure if what we were making was purely a chat show, or should be something more scripted and authored. I guess it would’ve done us no harm to ask the commissioners for more clarification on which way they saw it going. Lesson – If you’re being hired to make something, even if you want creative freedom with it, it’s never a bad idea to ask for clarification on exactly what the person hiring you wants it to be.

You Build The Thing You Think You Are (Film, 2020) – This was all set to be a new live show following up on my Mr Fruit Salad show, but it was cancelled because of the pandemic. As lockdown dragged on and I found myself unexcited and uninspired by formats like livestreaming or short-form sketch, I just decided to rewrite my show as a filmed monologue that I shot in and around my house. It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was a gesture to myself that I still had the ability to do things my own way, and that I didn’t have to bin ideas I was excited about just because Plan A hadn’t worked out. Lesson – This is a repeat of the lesson I learned from the very first show I made, but I think I’d got to a point where I needed to learn it again. If you look around for the thing you want to exist and you can’t see it, make it.

You Build The Thing was about me moving house and subsequently finding that a Romanian troll creature had moved into my brain because I had accidentally left myself behind in my old flat. It was a bit of a muddle, but there was lots about it I really loved.

Furloughed (Sketch pilot, 2020) – Also during lockdown, Matt Highton and I compiled together every short sketch we’d ever made and put it out online as a self-contained sketch pilot, along with some new bits we wrote to loosely connect them all. It was actually relatively coherent, and there was something lovely about collating together things that were written to be stand-alone and then seeing how they work differently when placed next to each other as a whole. Lesson – An idea isn’t finished when you’re done with it. Go back to it. Put it next to something else. See how they speak to each other. You might be surprised by what emerges.

A Small Talk On Small Talk (Radio show, 2021) – This was supposed to be a live comedy special for Radio 4 consisting of a “Best Of” taken from my last few shows. Post-Covid, the commissioners gave me the option of having a Zoom audience or coming up with something else. My film had taught me that it was possible to invent new formats if the ones I could see elsewhere weren’t working for me, so I scrapped the audience entirely and rewrote this as a narrative sketch show that took place inside my own head. I still really love this programme, I’m so proud of how much we experimented with what you were able to achieve within the broad remit of an audio comedy special. Lesson – Just because something is a big opportunity doesn’t mean you need to play it safe. Take the opportunity to do something different every now and again.

Can’t Keep A Secret (Podcast, 2022) – This was a podcast I co-hosted with Alison Thea-Skot, which we made for Aurra Studios. I had always been wary of starting a podcast because it’s such a crowded marketplace that I felt there was no point trying unless I came up with the best idea in the world, so to be hired to just work in the medium I’d been afraid of was such a wonderful opportunity. It also made me realise that the key to podcasting isn’t having the most unique idea, it’s building a relationship audiences care about and a dynamic they want to be part of. Lesson – Not everything needs to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes just turning up and treating it like a job and doing good work is enough to make something great.

Blink (Live show, 2022) – It makes me laugh to remember that one of our remits for this show was to make something big and broad that could be enjoyed by a mainstream audience. It was definitely big and broad (“broad” here meaning “contained lots of rock music and jokes about shitting yourself”) but it also contained a hell of a lot of complicated theatrical stuff and downright weirdness. Most of the reactions were along the lines of “That was insane.” My one regret is choosing to self-produce such a big, complex show, because it burnt me out and left me exhausted and unable to do any more with it, like a tour, which would’ve been nice. I’d got really good at collaborating with others creatively in the actual making of a show, but wasn’t yet ready to give that show to someone else and let them take the lead on the logistics. Lesson – There comes a time when you don’t need to insist on your own independence as an artist any more. Sometimes finding people who can help you take some of the load off is just being kind to yourself.

The Dream Factory (Radio show, 2022) – My first ever full-length scripted sitcom, co-written by me and Miranda, in which I played a new recruit at the office that manufactures and distributes our dreams. I loved this show and I’m still really proud of it, and I think it has an amazing premise that I’d love to do more with one day. We also split the cast equally between frequent collaborators and people we’d never worked with before but really admired, and I was so delighted by how amazing that felt. Lesson – Keep changing up the people you work with. Ask people you admire if they’d like to collaborate. They might say yes!

Two-Way Mirror (Short film, 2023) – This was a short film I made with Stuart Laws. I went to him with a weird sketch idea, and he said he thought there was a strange arthouse film in there fighting to escape. I rewrote it and let it grow into something downright odd and let go of all preconceptions about what I thought it was, to the extent that even in the edit we were shifting our own feelings about what we’d made. I really love the end result, and I’m so glad I didn’t cling too tightly to the initial idea I approached with. Lesson – Some projects won’t become clear until they’re finished. Keep actively engaging with it and questioning it every step of the way, and don’t cling onto one version of what it is.

Dog House (Short film, 2023) – This was mine and Miranda’s first proper short film collaboration. I wrote the script and she directed it. I’d made several indie short films before, but always basically for free. This was the first time I made a film knowing it needed to have some money spent on it and, while the budget was tiny, I worked harder as a producer than I ever had before and got some money together for it in order to make it. It’s my favourite short film I’ve made, I think. Lesson – Spend money on stuff. It makes it better.

Make Your Life Good Again (Short film, 2024) – Mine and Miranda’s latest short, which is premiering at Eggbox in a couple of weeks. We had a rough script in place, but rewrote big chunks of it on the day based on what the actors were finding in their characters. Lesson – Trust your instincts, but trust your collaborators more. They’re gonna find things lurking underneath your idea that you hadn’t quite made sense of yet, and that stuff’s really gonna fly.

You Wait. Time Passes. (Live show, 2024) – This is the show I’m currently working on and is very much unfinished, so of course I’ve not learned any lessons from it yet. But I do have a mission statement in mind for it, and I know how I’d like to look back on it. The mantra I’m repeating in my head as I develop it, and the lesson I’m trying to teach myself is – Make it funny. By all means, make it interesting and characterful and inventive, but find out what you can make when you consciously make all of that secondary to just making it funny.

The Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes (Newsletter, 2021-24) – This newsletter started as essentially a series of one-on-one conversations about comedy and creative process with regular readers during lockdown. I’m very humbled and flattered by how much it’s grown, though I do miss some of those early conversations I used to have. If those regular readers ever felt like starting them up again, I’d love to hear what you’ve all been up to, though I know the move to Substack has made it all feel a bit less personal than it once did. But I’ve just slowly stuck at it, and still feel like I’m learning every week about what this newsletter means to people and what they like about it. Lesson – Patience. Do some creative things just because it’s what you’re doing anyway. Let it grow.

And that’s it! 27 creative lessons learned from 12 years of making funny stuff. Some of those projects were things I’m still immensely proud of, some of them are things I cringe at now, some of them sit somewhere in the middle. Luckily, nearly all of the cringeworthy ones are clustered back at the beginning. But I’m glad each of them gave me something to bear in mind for whatever I do next. Here’s to the next 12 years, I guess. May it make all our dreams come true.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – Two things this week! Firstly, the full series of Christian Brighty and Amy Greaves’ Radio 4 sitcom The Many Wrongs Of Lord Christian Brighty is now out on BBC Sounds, and I had an absolute ball guest starring as a disgusting incel in Episode 4. Secondly, Josh Glanc has just released his Channel 4 Playground Family Man, and goodness me it’s made me hope there might be a boom time for big, dumb, silly sketch comedy around the corner.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – A promoter at a gig I did watching a video on his phone while one of the acts was on and accidentally playing it with the sound on really loud. No shade to the promoter or the gig, I had a lovely time, but God it was funny.

Book Of The Week – I’m about a third of the way through Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, and it’s fantastic. My friend who gave it to me cryptically said “All is not what it seems” when I started it, and I’m beginning to get an inkling of what that might mean. I think the mum is maybe not really the mum, or maybe the dad isn’t the dad, or maybe there was no bee, or the mum is a bee or something. Anyway, I’m hooked.

Album Of The Week – Dirty Pearl by Anita Lane. Lane was in the Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds for a bit and died in 2021. There’s an incredible song on the new Bad Seeds album paying tribute to her and it made me go back and listen to some of her solo stuff. It’s great – very Bad Seeds meets PJ Harvey. Lots of grungy weird goth rock vibes. I wish I’d discovered her stuff sooner.

Film Of The Week – Kneecap. This is easily one of the best films I’ve seen this year. It’s the fictionalised story of real-life Irish rap group Kneecap and is so energetic and raucous and has so much attitude. I kind of expected that from it, but it’s also a really heartfelt and well-told story about the Irish language, the importance of indigenous languages more broadly, and broken families. I really recommend seeing it, it was a breath of fresh air in a summer that feels like it hasn’t had many great films in it.

That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you thought, and if you enjoyed this enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, I’d hugely appreciate it! It really helps boost the readership if you give it a like or a share, so that’s enormously helpful too. Take care of yourselves until next time,

Joz xx

PS If you value the Therapy Tapes and enjoy what they do, and want to support my work and enable me to keep writing and creating, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated.

PPS Me and Miranda went to the Ouse Valley Viaduct and next week I will tell the story of going to a place in order to take a photo and then being appalled by all the other people taking photos there:

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