Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes
I write a (more or less) weekly newsletter about comedy, art, creativity and other stuff that floats through my mind. It has a really lovely engaged readership who I love exchanging ideas with. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s thoughtful, sometimes it’s just a place to provide creative accountability for a community of other makers! Do feel free to delve in and join us. The community is over at Substack, where you can subscribe to the newsletter and join the chat, but I’ve archived every issue here for the sake of completism.
Browse the 173 Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes below.
Tape 98: Caring And Not Caring
Caring & Not Caring – Life’s Balancing Act Thanks again for all your replies about happiness and “The Provisional Life” a couple of weeks back – I think I’ve replied to them all now, but please nudge me if I’ve missed yours! These ideas, about deferred happiness and the collective delusion that “real life” will begin as […]
Tape 97: Verbatim Online Comedy
Verbatim Online Comedy First up, thank you for all your replies last week on the subject of happiness. It was the most replies I’ve ever received to this newsletter, and I will get round to replying to them all, this week is just a little bit hectic. They were also some of the most honest and […]
Tape 96: The Changing Face Of Happiness
The Changing Face of Happiness Once upon a time in the writing of this newsletter, I used to start every week’s entry by asking you guys, the readers, a question. I’d love to resurrect that element this week if that’s alright, and if any of you would be willing to share your answers with me […]
Tape 95: Old Habits
Habits This week I started reading A Choreographer’s Handbook by Jonathan Burrows (thanks so much to Robert for recommending it to me in this newsletter a year ago, and apologies for only just getting round to it!) and it’s fantastic. As the title suggests, it is ostensibly a book about choreography, but you can easily read it […]
Tape 94: Midpoints
Midpoints – What They Are And How To Spot Them: It’s another newsletter about writing and story structure this week, because I always love the replies I get to those ones and the updates I receive from those of you working on your own stories and writing projects – as ever, if anything in this […]
Tape 93: Good Boy
Good Boy Hope you all had a nice week last week – I had a busy one writing a bunch of pitches for some radio programmes, which went in this week, so I’ll be keeping fingers crossed for them and shifting focus back to my other projects for a bit until I hear some news […]
Tape 92: Creativity Is Just A Job You Can Do
The End Of Magical Thinking In last week’s Tape I wrote about how to deal with disappointment in a positive way in the creative industries, and briefly mentioned that my least favourite thing about working in the creative industries is the “magical thinking” that surrounds it, because I think it gets in the way of the making […]
Tape 91: Rejection! Disappointment! Failure! And How To Move Past Them
Rejection! Disappointment! Failure! And Moving Past Them… As I wrote here back at the start of January, I’ve decided that 2023 is, for me, the Change year. I’d like it to be a year where I attempt to shake up old working patterns which I feel have served their function for now, move away from old mediums and models […]
Tape 90: Two Things To Master
The Courage To Be Disliked & The Courage To Be Happy Over the last couple of weeks I read the books The Courage To Be Disliked and The Courage To Be Happy, by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. Broadly speaking, they were very good – I don’t agree with everything in them, but they form a pretty good overview […]
Tape 89: “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure”-Style Shows
“Choose-Your-Own-Adventure”-Style Shows This week I’ve been thinking about the mechanics and formal decisions behind the recent rise in “choose-your-own-adventure”-style shows, a genre I have recently added to with the first outing of my new show Private Dancer. I’m not plugged into the conceptual theatre scene enough to know exactly where this trend started – I imagine it […]
Tape 88: Arts Council Funding
Access Festival – Thank You! First up, just a huge thank you to NextUp, Impatient Productions, Mark Watson, the audience and especially unwilling but show-stealing stooge Alex Preston for making the first performance of my brand new show Joz Norris Is Your Private Dancer (A Dancer For Money) such a success. I’m really bowled over and proud […]
Tape 87: Private Dancer
Private Dancer Some of you may well have been enjoying Mark Watson and NextUp’s Access Festival over the last couple of weeks, a specially curated online-only festival of livestreamed comedy shows from such heroes as Mark himself, Alex Horne, Tim Key, Bilal Zafar, Sarah Keyworth, Laura Lexx, John Robertson, Stuart Laws, and many more. It’s a lovely […]
Tape 86: Coming Up In 2023
Coming Up In 2023 Happy New Year! I hope you all saw it in in style, and are looking forward to a happy 2023. Thanks so much to those of you who reached out last week in response to my Word of the Year prompt, both to let me know how last year’s Words worked out for […]
Tape 85: Word For The Year, 2023 Edition
A Word For The Year: 2023 Edition Merry post-Christmas, everyone! How was it? How did it treat you? What did you eat? What did you make of Glass Onion? Tell me everything! Mine was lovely, thanks. Pretty low-key, but I sort of wanted a low-key one after I spent last Christmas carrying furniture up and down three […]
Tape 84: The Right To The Future Tense
The Right To The Future Tense Quick pre-newsletter caveat – this one isn’t very Christmassy. I wanted to write a nice festive end-of-year one, but then I finished reading a book about surveillance capitalism and I’d promised I’d put my thoughts on it into a newsletter, and 45% of the reason this newsletter exists is […]