After last week, it has become increasingly clear that Twitter/X is a binfire that no longer offers the least benefit whatsoever. It’s awash with hate speech and is now playing an active role in the rise of totalitarianism across the world, and my old arguments of “Oh, but I built up a decent-sized audience there […]

The reason I ended up doing comedy is because I once did theatre. When I was a kid, I joined a youth theatre called Stage ‘65 in Salisbury and learned to love performing, and making stuff. I played “Nasty Man At The Fair” in The Elephant Man, a role which required me to berate and terrify a group of […]

First up, a huge thank you to everyone who’s donated to the crowdfunder for The Happiness Chain, the sitcom pilot I’m making with Ben Kent at the end of the year. I was also really happy to read how many of you connected with the things I talked about in my last newsletter, namely the idea of taking ownership […]

So here’s the thing. I spent a lot of last year in the grips of an unshakeable despair. I handed over a lot of my power to things I couldn’t possibly hope to control, you see. It was my year of really trying to break into the TV and film world, access to which is […]

Thanks for all your lovely replies about last week’s Tape! I was pleased to hear that my story of humiliation and idiocy struck a chord with so many of you. Isn’t it great that we’re all really stupid? I promised that if people enjoyed that story – my favourite from my time spent thinking that […]

Miranda has recently been writing a script about dating apps and dating agencies, so we’ve been talking a lot about what our respective experiences of dating apps were (to cut a long story short – awful). I spent about a year really making dating apps a core part of my personality because I was quite […]

Every now and again my mum sends me Instagram videos of things you can do in London. I find it very endearing that she still does this despite the fact that I’ve lived in London for nearly fifteen years. Broadly speaking, the videos fall into three distinct categories, with more or less equal distribution. The […]

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 […]

This week I’m going heavy on the “reflecting on creative process” side of this newsletter’s remit, because last week I leant heavily on the “writing dumb stories” side and talked at length about dropping my phone into a pile of shit and it lost me quite a few subscribers, so I just want to right […]

Since I got back from Green Man Festival a couple of weeks ago, there is a story about me that my girlfriend, my sister, my mum, various other friends and God knows who else, are gleefully spreading around the place, all of them delighted at how stupid it makes me sound. The story is that […]

I’ve finally decided to get into Gipsy Kings. I’ve loved Gipsy Kings since I was about six years old, but only in a sort of “That live album by Gipsy Kings we used to listen to in the car is an absolute classic” kind of a way. I’ve never listened to any of Gipsy Kings’ […]

Well firstly, hello to all these new subscribers! There’s quite a lot of you this week, and after a bit of digging it seems that most of you are here on Richard Herring’s recommendation. That’s a little awkward, as I plan what each newsletter will be about a couple of weeks in advance, and this […]

A few years ago John Kearns and I invented a game. The way the game worked was that you ranked the years of your life from best to worst, then used their position in the ranking as numerical data points to plot them on a graph. You would then plot a line between all the […]

In a classic case of forgetting that the rest of the world does not always operate following the exact same rhythms of my own brain, it has reached my attention that the Edinburgh Fringe has somehow begun, despite the fact that I don’t get there until the end of next week. The nerve! Anyway, many […]

I am currently in Berlin, which is very nice, and I had an absolute ball bringing my new show You Wait. Time Passes. to the Comedy Cafe last night – thanks to all the good folks at the Berlin Fringe for having me! Because I’m here for a few days, this week’s newsletter will be a film […]