Myrrhy Christmas Everyone

I hadn’t intended to end the year with a Final Flourish and a Big Gesture but the decision to take my teaching and comedy chat off Twitter happened to coincide with a few other plans that mean it makes no sense to stay. I still call it Twitter. This isn’t a passive-aggressive attempt to stick […]

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How Do You Write A Topical Joke?

I mentioned earlier this week that some of the top comedy writers began their careers writing one line jokes for BBC Radio. We do still have a BBC Radio Comedy office (now incorporated into BBC Sounds) but there are half as many producers and fewer shows. Decades of cuts, underfunding and bullying have made it

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Conference Calls

Great news! The British Comedy Guide have announced they’re running another conference, which will take place in the last weekend of September. Meanwhile on the 21 and 22 May you can catch Steve Coogan and Lisa McGee at the BBC Belfast Comedy Festival. https://www.comedy.co.uk/pro/opportunities/318 I always recommend you go if you can, quite simply there is

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What Is A Joke?

What do the following top writers have in common: Georgia Pritchett (Succession, The Thick Of It), Simon Blackwell (Back, Breeders, Private Life of David Copperfield), Mark Burton (Madagascar, Shaun The Sheep), John O’Farrell (Chicken Run, Mrs Doubtfire The Musical)? The answer is they all achieved their first professional credits writing one-line topical jokes for BBC

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Dear Bill…

On a day when the news got a whole lot worse I was already reeling from hearing about the death of Bill Dare. I was about to write “radio producer” because that’s the way most people knew him – and indeed, a huge amount of my time spent with him was in the world of

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Lion, The Pitch and Wardrobe

Sixteen reasons why Horrible Histories was such a hit On Friday 29 November I’m off to BAFTA with a legion of writers, performers, costume designers and history experts to celebrate the Honorary Award for Horrible Histories. I wrote around 100 songs over ten years from 2009 and saw close-up how it evolved from just another

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