EdFringe Solutions Update I’m back from my holiday! Hi. Hope you all had a great fortnight. I sure did. I made a wish on a magic nose, and met a skeleton, and swam in a lagoon. Anyway, before I left I set up a couple of group-based exchanges-of-ideas, and then left them dangling while I […]

What Do We Do About The Edinburgh Fringe? I’ll try not to write too much this week, because I’m going away on holiday tomorrow (so there won’t be a Therapy Tape next week) and I’ve got lots of things to wrap up before I go. So I’m going to hand over as much of this […]

Digital Declutter: Week Two Last week I outlined my reasons and plan for undertaking Cal Newport’s month-long “Digital Declutter” for April, but didn’t get as far as sharing any of my struggles/findings etc so far. So this week I’ll give a bit of an update on it, though I promise not to write about it every week of […]

A Digital Declutter Quite by coincidence, I found myself starting to read Cal Newport’s excellent book Digital Minimalism on the 1st of April, in which he puts forward the case for undertaking a month-long “Digital Declutter” in order to rethink and reshape your relationship with technology. It felt like a good opportunity to try and do one […]

A Tour, In Theory I’m going to get right in there with a question this week, if you’d be happy to answer it. My question is: If you live in the UK, whereabouts do you live? If I were to come on tour to a city near you, would you be interested in coming? If […]

Looking Out Of My Window Project – Results: First up, last week I said I’d practice looking out of my window at the life of my street for half an hour every morning before doing anything else, with no distractions like looking at my phone, to exercise my muscle for “being in the world,” off […]

Putting Things On Shelves So, first things first, I’m sure you’ll all be relieved to know that as of last week I no longer have to bang on about a Soho Theatre run all the bloody time, because we did the run and it was great and I had a lovely time – huge thank […]

Choosing The Right Space This week I’m thinking about venues and spaces, because there are Edinburgh Fringe deadlines looming, and I’m busy getting all my ducks in a row for that, and it’s got me wondering about some stuff. Yesterday I was chatting to the brilliant Rob Kemp about the Bunka in the Hive, the venue where […]

Leicester Comedy Festival I’ve just got back from the Leicester Comedy Festival, which I’ve been performing at as part of the “Weirdos Weekend” more or less every year (pandemic notwithstanding) since 2014. These days, it’s always a bit up-in-the-air whether or not the final weekend of the LCF is actually called the “Weirdos Weekend” or not, […]

Power Sources I’m going to kick off this week’s Tape with a question, because I’ve not asked you guys a specific question for a while and I used to enjoy doing that, I liked the conversations it opened up. So, this week’s question is: What is the source of your power? Is that still working […]

A Writing Lesson Another of my occasional writing-update-newsletters this week, in which I share the latest lesson I’ve learned from my on-the-go scripted projects. I’m currently back to working on the scripts for The Dream Factory, my upcoming Radio 4 sitcom. They’ve been in a pretty decent second-draft state since just before Christmas, and this week Miranda […]

Explaining What Things Mean Last week I said I’d follow up my R&D diaries with one or two Tapes exploring some bigger ideas that emerged from the process, so, as promised, this week’s is about an emergent theme of showing, telling and explaining what things mean. Explaining what things mean is a horrible trope in […]

R&D Diary – Week 2 First up, a huge thank you to all of you for your replies last week. Part 1 of my R&D Diary ended up being the most popular Tape I’ve ever sent in terms of striking a chord with people and receiving lots of replies. I’m very sorry that happened to […]

R&D Week 1 – A Sort Of Diary This Tape is a day later than it usually is, because I’ve been in the midst of the R&D for my new show, which I first mentioned last week. As it turns out (and this is a terrible indictment of what my usual working week looks like), […]

R&D Week 0: The Tempo of Groups I feel I’m in a good position to be writing out these Tapes for the next couple of weeks, as I’ve just started the formal 2-week R&D process for my new show, which I mentioned last week, and it mostly involves just talking to interesting people about fascinating […]