A BIT ABOUT ME
What gets me writing every day
I’ve always written comedy sketches and jokes, starting as a kid when I spent hours in my bedroom writing radio scripts inspired by my Dad’s Goon Show records.
During Lockdown I kept myself sane* by posting a new comedy video short every day for two years as Quest Now Time! and carried on writing and recording sketches and serials for my twice-weekly radio show Comedy Lovers Guide from my hastily modified spare room. In the last few months I've been working on writing more for others and contributed successfully to four episodes of the Radio 4 show The Skewer – a career high for that kid writing radio sketches in his bedroom.
Dyslexia and ADHD meant school wasn't much fun, but when I escaped to performing arts college I carried on writing, started making comedy films and doing stand up and did a bit of late-night radio as the now safely forgotten Ethel Butteridge Says Monks Aren't Transparent. When college ended, I moved to Norwich to live in a terrible bedsit, started up a couple of impro comedy groups at the Arts Centre and Playhouse and scribbled sketches in the evenings, until finally I made the big trip down to London and started writing for sketch shows at the Canal Café – where I met a writing partner (and future best man) in Mark Keegan when I gave it my all in his play Apocalypse? Wow!
Between working as a horror performer at Madame Tussauds, meaning for a while my face was plastered across every bus in London, and selling Barbies and magic tricks at Harrods, I carried on writing sketches and putting together a group of performers. As Freak Weather Conditions and then Aroused and Confused we put on shows in every pub venue in Kilburn and north London that would have us. A couple of stints as Santa at the Millennium Dome and Selfridges to pay the rent, and I was now married with a baby, back at Uni in Kingston studying film and television production, writing the comedy play Sex, Lies and Superheroes and getting involved in Camden Obscura and the Camden Fringe at the Etcetera Theatre.
A few more more years of impro comedy shows mixed with sketches as the ImproPunks and Dr Who's Line Is It Anyway, and a brief sideline running comedy-based away days for the Home Office, and I decided I'd had enough of late nights in pub back rooms and joined Wandsworth Radio as part of The Anti Duhring Battalion Radio Show, before moving on to hosting my own show Wandsworth Sunday Roast. For nearly three years I hosted, wrote and produced Sunday Roast as a weekly chat, music and live sketch show with regulars and guests, as well as editing and creating the serials, Screamarama: The Horror of Wandsworth, This Was Planet Earth and the grim Victorian spoof Bloody Awful.
I wrote professionally for Moxie Creative on concepts and pitches for funny adverts for companies like Money Tailor for a while, then 2017 I moved back to Norwich to do up a house and promptly got sidetracked into some BBC New Comedy workshops with other local writers to develop material that was then broadcast on BBC Norfolk.
From this I became involved in Norwich's Future Radio FM station and after a bit of time as a broadcast assistant, emergency breakfast show DJ, and the world's worst traffic and travel announcer, I started my current twice-weekly show Comedy Lovers Guide, featuring classic comedy songs from film and TV, visiting guests, local performers and new pre-recorded sketches each week from me, plus a couple of long-running adventure serials including The Inner Limits (a horror anthology spoof), Space Between the Ears (a homage to 1950’s space adventures) and the much-loved Dr Witch with all its many contributors and performers.