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 […]

Fringe Debrief! Hello! Welcome back! How were your summers? Hope you all had a blast. I am, of course, back from the Edinburgh Fringe, the first full-scale one since the Great Pause of 2020. I’m well aware that the month I’ve had has given me enough stuff to think and talk about – both in […]

Negative Space This will likely be the last Therapy Tape for a few weeks, because as of next week I’m gonna be at the Edinburgh Fringe with Blink (come along if you’re up there! Have I mentioned that you should come along if you’re up there?) So, in recognition of the fact that this newsletter is going […]

Blink: A Reading & Listening List Many thanks to everyone who’s sent kind words about the mini-documentary I released last week about Blink and the collaborative approach we took to making it, and how and why. I’ve been really proud to try and prod and poke the “auteur theory” that revolves around a lot of Fringe show-making, and do […]

Gardeners & Pie-Eaters It’s getting to the time of year when the atmosphere in the comedy community suddenly pivots either towards hyper-competitiveness, or towards the opposite extreme, one of mutual nurture and support, depending on people’s attitudes to the Edinburgh Fringe. As soon as it starts slouching over the horizon, people either start to nervously […]

Saying What You Mean By Hiding What You Mean Forgive me if I’m sort of repeating myself this week – this week’s Tape will in some ways be a followup or companion piece to this Tape from earlier this year, in which I laid out my thoughts on meaning in comedy, and how to convey it. Although I have […]

Fear of Failure, Fear of Success This week I had the pleasure of guesting on the brilliant Helen Bauer and Catherine Bohart’s podcast Trusty Hogs (you can listen to the episode here!) and a listener wrote in asking us to talk a little bit about what the Edinburgh Fringe actually is, because comedians talk about it a lot but to someone unfamiliar with it, […]

Where Is Your Locus of Evaluation This week I met up with the excellent comedian Barry Ferns to have a big chat about process, and making stuff, and so on, and Barry introduced me to a psychotherapy theory I found really illuminating in terms of how I go about making comedy, and how I think about comedy […]

Notes From A Philosophy Festival I just got back from performing at How The Light Gets In in Hay-on-Wye, apparently the world’s largest philosophy festival. I went there with absolutely no idea what a philosophy audience would be like to perform a comedy show to, and also with low expectations of how many people at a philosophy […]

Magic & Comedy From an Audience’s-Eye View This week I’ve been working with a bunch of incredibly talented geniuses on a very fun, very cool, very secret R&D/workshop project for a magic show. I’m not allowed to say any more than that because we all signed NDAs, but the details aren’t important for the purposes […]

Podcasting: A Learning Curve Some thoughts on podcasting this week! As I said when I first launched this newsletter back in early 2021, its title was originally the title of an abandoned idea for a podcast way back in 2018/19, which I never managed to get anywhere with, despite the best support and hard work and encouragement […]

Strange Grief This will probably be the most personal Therapy Tape I’ve written so far, and I hope it hasn’t crossed any sort of line. In the year-plus that I’ve been writing this newsletter, I’ve tried to make sure it’s more of an open exchange of creative ideas and less of a glorified public diary […]