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 […]

Dinner Time! In last week’s Tape I briefly mentioned a new collaborative project/night from myself, Miranda and Ben, called Dinner Time! (you can book tickets here!) so I thought this week I’d say a bit more about it. In August I was lucky enough to be offered a monthly residency by VAULT Creative Arts (the organisation behind VAULT Festival, among other things) at their new venue, […]

The Dream Factory: Part 2 So, where was I? In last week’s Tape I started taking the wraps off The Dream Factory, the sitcom project I’ve been making with Miranda Holms (co-writer) and Steve Doherty (producer) for BBC Radio 4 over the last year-and-a-half and haven’t yet said that much about in this newsletter as I wanted to wait until its existence […]

The Dream Factory Good news! It’s finally time for me to stop sending newsletters on the theme of “Things the Edinburgh Fringe made me think about this year!” (Although I’ve realised I’ve not done a run-down of recommendations of my favourite shows I saw, so maybe I’ll do that at some point). But today I’m […]

The Edinburgh Comedy Award & Short Runs I mentioned last week that some of my more scattered thoughts from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe might bleed out into subsequent newsletters, and I also mentioned that I had a lot of thoughts on the discussion of short runs that followed on from Sam Campbell’s Edinburgh Comedy Award win. So […]