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 […]

Over the last year or two I’ve been expanding my identity from the admittedly broad and vague perameters of “someone who makes things” to the slightly more specific and compartmentalised “someone who makes things, and also helps other people to make other things.” This sounds a lot like nothing, so let me elaborate. In practise, […]

As I said last week, I’m gonna have to write about my trip to see Starlight Express because otherwise I’m never going to process it. And again, as I mentioned last week, Zoe Paskett has already explored this territory on her Substack incredibly well, so anything I write will merely be a pale imitation of what she wrote […]

An old housemate of mine used to get really annoyed with me whenever I uttered the words “Make a thing.” Every time I said “I’m making a new thing,” she would sigh and tell me I was being obnoxious again. She would remind me that my co-opting of the use “make,” with all its connotations […]

My girlfriend and I recently attended the BBC Comedy Festival in Glasgow, where the BBC organises various panels with legends and experts talking about the current TV comedy landscape, helping to demystify elements of it for other creatives finding their way through the industry. By and large, the legends (Armando Iannucci, Jennifer Saunders etc) would […]