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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Small Worlds & Big Worlds Ok, first up, I’m very sorry about the formatting in this newsletter lately. What the hell’s been going on? I’ll bet you’ve all been wondering. A few weeks ago, in this newsletter, Mailchimp seemed to delete all the spacing after I’d sent the email, despite it looking fine in preview. “Yuck!” I shouted […]

Repeating Ideas I joined TikTok. I didn’t want to, but everybody kept telling me I wasn’t allowed to complain about not knowing where the next bit of work would come from, as I did in this Tape a couple of weeks ago, if I wasn’t putting my work out there on every possible platform where people […]

Dinner Time Update   As I wrote about in this Tape a few weeks ago, in October I launched a creative residency with Vault Creative Arts alongside collaborators and dear pals Ben Target and Miranda Holms. We’ve staged two nights of sharings at the Glitch in Lower Marsh. “How’ve they been going?” I’m sure you’re all wondering. Well, I thought I’d feed […]

Your Rhythm; The World’s Rhythm   This week, a few thoughts on creative rhythms, and getting them to line up. In order to talk about it, I’m going to have to allow myself to be more pessimistic than I usually aim to be in these newsletters, or at least to give voice to a period […]

Wilson v Springsteen: A Lesson In Authenticity Firstly, a big hello to all the new subscribers since last week! I’ve been growing this newsletter community for nearly 2 years now, and everything I read online about growing a newsletter suggested you eventually reach a sort of tipping point where the community starts to gather its […]

The Death of Twitter So, it’s finally happened. Twitter is dying. I won’t go into the ins and outs of how and why it’s dying – for anybody reading this who doesn’t know the broad strokes of it, you can give it a quick Google and it should be fairly easy to catch up with […]

How To Come Up With A New Idea – Making The Philosophical Literal I’m back with a quick creative prompt this week, which might be of interest to the fellow writers out there. As I’ve been documenting in these newsletters lately, I have been spending the last few weeks: A. Winding down from a period of […]

User-Generated Entertainment As I mentioned in last week’s Tape, I’m crawling back into Input Mode, where I start to take in ideas that might eventually turn into Output projects, having just put two big long-form projects to bed. As such, the Tapes are probably set to become a bit more free-wheeling and all over the place […]

Returning To Input Mode First up, a confession – I’ve been conscious over the last few weeks that the Therapy Tapes had slightly morphed, seemingly against my will, into something they were never intended to be, in that they felt to me like they were coming to resemble a traditional newsletter concerned largely with letting […]

Plot Holes & Nitpicks Last week I mentioned that I’d been to see Don’t Worry Darling and thought it was really good and I didn’t really understand why it was getting such bad press. I won’t expand on that here, because I’ve now heard from plenty of people who hated it and don’t understand how I could […]

Targeted Priorities As any readers familiar with the inner workings of the comedy industry will know, the comedy year tends to run on an academic calendar, with September being the end of the yearly cycle and the start of the next one, thanks to the significance of the Edinburgh Fringe within comedy. This September, I’ve […]