Making Creativity Pay

“I have to do the fringe because I have to do a show, I'm telling myself it is better that I do like, God forbid, it's better to have a one star show that you do than a show that does not exist that in your mind has four stars or five stars. Like you just have to do the thing. Because otherwise, you know, I'm not a natural jumping off the cliff kind of thing. I'm naturally really r...

“I've gigged at Comedy Nights as the spotlight character, I do a lot of just straight Stand Up nights and I'll be like the character act. And I think often it's great, but there's always an adjustment of , okay, this is something slightly different. And I think if I'm being an inanimate object, it's like, not only is the audience having to go from straight stand up to a cha...

“Everybody says that the best person to flyer your show is yourself. And that's true apart from when it's me. I'm really bad at flyering. I'm someone who wears their emotions on their sleeve quite a lot, people can tell that I'm not enjoying myself when I'm flyering.  When you're trying to get yourself in the mindset for a show and be positive, there are better ways to...

“I was hoping to do [Edinburgh Fringe] and I didn't get anywhere that I wanted. In my mind, I'm like, I’ve got to be at the good venue. It's got to be worth the time and the effort. I'm not doing it for the love of the art. I could go to Droitwich Spa for the love of the art.” Latest episode is with harpist and performer Sam Hickman Sam is currently taking her current show First Wo...

“It started off with a lot of Zoom calls. I was in Sydney and of course TJ is in New York.  I've done two productions in the UK in 2025 and 2024. And both times the way I've kind of approached it was mostly through online Zoom meetings where I would put up a casting call. We'd get a lot of applicants and I'd get self tapes coming in and then I do meetups with them online to get a s...

“I was invited to go to this theatre in Wolverhampton and I'm always a little bit nervous about going to places where I'm not entirely sure how the show is going to land…and it ended up just being such a fun show and the audience was so giving and so generous.  That kind of restored my faith in humanity a little bit because these people who had probably just seen it in a brochure had just...

Latest episode is with Geoff Rowe of the Live Comedy Association We talk about the first Live Comedy Day which takes place on April 1st as well as the wider aims of the Live Comedy Association in both acting as a network for the industry and also acting as a united front for the industry when dealing with the government. We also discuss the Live Comedy Survey conducted by Brunel University on the...

"It's a small town girls misadventures in Hollywood. And it is both poignant and funny. I think of the essays as like crepes. They're kind of like individually snackable, but collectively filling. What I love about the essay format is it's kind of propulsive and you move through it with the momentum that I really appreciate as a reader. And so I wanted to write the book that way.&...

“I'm telling all my artists to go on LinkedIn. It's like a nice frontier.” Latest episode is with Artist and author of 'Artpreneur' Miriam Schulman. We talk about her giving up working in Financial Services to focus full time on her art, we also talk about the process of getting her book Artpreneur made and published as well as The Inspiration Place Podcast which has just had it’s...

Latest guest is David Hoskin talking about his ‘Comedy Horror Mime’ show A Haunted House we talk about taking the show to the Edinburgh Fringe, his upcoming (at time of recording) stints at Soho Theatre and Mumbai Fringe, how to balance Comedy and Horror and his creative career from Illustration to Voiceovers to Film Making. Website: https://www.davidhoskin.com/   Instagram: https://www.instagram....

“  Everyone wants to get involved and it's generating huge amount of work for actors and crew all around the world, which is very hard to find in other parts of the media. So Hollywood is now involved as well, and every major Hollywood studio you can think of is looking or experimenting with this format and sort of seeing how they can bring the Hollywood touch to it. ” Latest guest is Jen Coop...

“ He said ‘[I hate] loud Northern women who swear’ and he’s obviously talking about me ” Latest guest is Martha Pailing whose show ‘Chat Sh*t, Get Hit’ is on at Soho Theatre on Feb 5th and 6th. We talk about developing the show over a number of years and the importance of Arts Council Funding, her Fringe experience, working with a team behind the scenes on her solo show as well as the differences...

“ The mission is to educate and promote mental health through the arts, mostly through Comedy and for people to talk about mental health and difficult subjects through comedy ” Latest guest is Charlotte Laidet who is Festivals and Programme Director for Leicester Comedy Festival which is running from the 4th to the 22nd February. We talk about what it takes to put the festival together, why Leices...

“ I'm very keenly aware of the whole, reliving my life thing in different forms and having that replace my real memories sometimes, and that can be a kind of a scary thing because it is this thing that happened to me that I didn't talk about for so many years and like in public, like never, you know? And now I've spoken about it in so many forms and you know how memory works, you tell...

“  I am a jack of all trades in the comedy industry and also don't make much money, so that's why I do it all, my main sort of thing is that I'm a writer of funny stuff that most of the time I perform. I'm getting really used to calling myself a stand-up now which is terrifying.” Latest guest is Comedian Hannah Morton, we talk about her experience at last year’s Fringe with her sho...

“ I would like to destroy the biggest myth right from the off, which is that working in production isn't creative. It absolutely is…what I do on a day-to-day basis is I actually make huge decisions for any production that I work on that directly influence the content that is on screen.” On this episode I spoke with Fliss Williams who has experience working on a range of film and television pro...

“It’s written, performed, directed and produced entirely by women and there’s something ridiculously refreshing about that” - Claire Rafferty On this episode I spoke with some of the writers and performers of Gobby Girls: The Afterparty which is on at the Soho Theatre from 20th-22nd November We talk about their sold out Edinburgh Fringe run and how it went from idea to performance in just a matter...

“I’ve basically walked backwards into having a day job” - Latest guest Stand-Up Comedian, writer and podcaster Milo Edwards. Milo has been a stand-up for over 10 years and has regularly performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and has released a number of specials on YouTube. We talk about his tour show “How Revolting! Sorry to Offend” that’s working its way around the country in 2025 and 2026, writing a...

“ So we have a main rule at comedy club that there's no toilet humour because it's too easy, I can make a fart sound and the room will explode with giggles. So we try and really emphasize that it's about being clever. I want you to go home to your grownups, whoever's looking after you. And I want them to be like, I'm genuinely impressed that you've come up with that joke or...

“ I used to tell people at primary school I was gonna be a film director when I grew up. I don’t know what happened in my childhood that made that happen but it was just a very strong determination and I think when I went to secondary school and people started sort of talking about their careers, I just had this feeling that, if I didn't try, I would always regret it." Ashley Catherine Di...

“  We've done a couple of boat cruises with Brian Blessed called Overboard with Brian Blessed, which was great fun 'cause people just love being in the room with him. The first one we did on the Thames, we'd written this beautiful script about all of the facts about this, that and the other when we passed them on the river and he sort of had the piece of paper and went, what the fuck i...

“ So it's full on promo, just trying to get the word out there. We are a non-for-profit festival. We don't get any funding, so it's pretty much just on myself and Jessica who's the director of the festival. getting out to all the cafes and putting the brochures out,... just kind of getting the city hyped up about the festival.” - Aimee Perry who is the Programmer for the Women In C...

This episodes guests are Comedian and Author Laura Lexx and Dr. Oliver Double, Reader in Comic and Popular Performance at the University of Kent. We talk about their new YouTube show and podcast "The Comedy Bureau" described as "set in afictional-but-familiar academic department within UNI - The University of Niche Interests. This dusty, underfunded - yet somehow still operating - d...

“TikTok is great for testing out new ideas really quickly and seeing what sticks and having those seeds of an idea, but writing an hour is completely different. So I'm able to build on those characters that I've tested out on TikTok but I've really enjoyed having a whole hour to carve out a whole story and weave in an arc and all of these kind of storytelling things.” Comedian Zara Gla...

" I just wrote 40 pages, booked in a preview in October last year at the Bill Murray, knowing I didn't have an ending I was like, just do it, perform it, then chat to the audience. I even sold it as like, please don't come, to really thin out the people who were gonna go. So, I think we had like 30 people at the Bill Murray who were gathered, who were like the hardcore and wanted to s...