I’m a workaholic and, ironically, I’m trying my hardest to work on that. I think there’s a lot of misconceptions around workaholicism and what it entails, and to people unfamiliar with it, it maybe conjures up very corporate imagery – Robin Williams in the first act of Hook, maybe, someone constantly walking down corridors in sterile office […]

A few weeks ago Miranda and I were walking back from the White Cube in Bermondsey, where we’d seen an exhibition called Finnegans Wake by Anselm Kiefer (very spooky, like Tom Waits had gone mad in an apocalypse and started collecting things and piling them up real high), and came across an artist on the South Bank called Brad […]

Shhh. Can you hear it? Put down your cups and pens and saucers, and put your ear to the wall. Do you hear the rumbling? Coming up from the earth? It’s almost that time again. The Edinburgh Fringe is coming. Yes, in a week’s time artists around the world are bundling off to Edinburgh to […]

It is truly the end of an ear (or of an era, if you prefer to use the original phrase rather than its funnier counterpart). I have performed my most recent two live shows for the last time! I filmed Blink and Joz Norris Is Dead. Long Live Mr Fruit Salad. at Moth Club on Sunday for the […]

Howdy! How are you? No really, how are you? What’s new? How are your creative projects developing? I’d love to hear! In all seriousness, since moving the newsletter to Substack I’ve noticed that post views and subscriber numbers have gone up, but I don’t get as many replies from readers, and I miss the replies a bit […]

Oh boy, has it been 3 weeks? I’m so sorry! I normally let readers know if there’s going to be a period of time without a new newsletter, because I usually know those periods are approaching, so apologies for disappearing into the ether without warning. I didn’t anticipate quite how busy I’d get in June, […]

A couple of weeks ago I went to a recording of BBC Radio 4’s comedy-and-medicine discussion panel show, Best Medicine, hosted by Kiri Pritchard-Maclean – huge thanks to the brilliant Tashi Radha for inviting me along to it! Tashi works on the show and wanted me to come to one particular recording so I could see and […]

Certain corners of the UK comedy community were in uproar last week when it was announced that the future of the Edinburgh Comedy Award (formerly the Perrier back when it had a name that was synonymous with itself, since then, by turns, the if.comeddie, the AbsoluteRadio.co.uk, the Fosters, the Personally-Funded-By-Nica-Burns-This-Year-Due-To-Lack-Of-Sponsorship, the lastminute.com and most recently […]

I’m back! There was no Fruit Salad Therapy Tape last week because I was away in Wales for a couple of festivals – first the BBC Comedy Festival in Cardiff, then How The Light Gets In, a philosophy, music and comedy festival in Hay-on-Wye. I had a lovely, albeit very intense, week at both and have come back […]

In last week’s Therapy Tape I briefly mentioned that in July I’ll be part of a day of comedy show recordings for Go Faster Stripe at Moth Club (tickets and more info here – isn’t it weird that what we call a “comedy show” becomes a “comedy special” as soon as it’s being filmed? The content’s exactly the same. Mad old business). […]

Hello! How are you all doing? Hope everyone’s keeping well. First up – I have moved to Substack! To previous subscribers who only recently put up with my moving the newsletter to Email Octopus, I apologise – this move should be for good, as Substack seems much better at the community-building-and-engagement elements of writing a […]

Notes From MachFest It’ll be a fairly quick and simple Therapy Tape this week as I’ve just got back from the Machynlleth Comedy Festival and have lots to catch up on. But I thought I’d make good use of all the inspiring and brilliant stuff I saw there by saying a little bit about the shows I saw […]

100 Tapes! 100 Years! It’s been brought to my attention that last week’s Tape crossed the threshold of 100 of these emails/essays/bits/whatever these are. It had kind of passed me by without my noticing, despite the number being right at the top there. I like to think that the coming and going of that milestone reinforces what this […]

Rick Rubin On Assumptions This week I’ve been reading Rick Rubin’s new book The Creative Act: A Way Of Being. I like Rick Rubin a lot. For those that don’t know of him, he’s a sort of super-producer who made his name working with acts like Beastie Boys and Run-DMC in the 80s, then became even better […]

Goodbye Mailchimp. Apologies For Short-Term Kinks! Unbeknownst to me, the readership of The Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes has grown to the point where I can no longer use Mailchimp to host it without paying them money, and I’m not doing that, because I write this for free. (By the by, I will never charge for this newsletter, because I do it […]