Tape 181: Update On The Happiness Chain

It's Nearly Here...

I’ve been thinking about when comedy comperes say “And now ladies and gentlemen, please go wild and crazy and welcome to the stage…” when they introduce an act. It really makes me laugh. The sentence “Please go wild and crazy” is like the linguistic equivalent of an optical illusion, and whenever I hear it as an audience member I encounter a sort of cognitive dissonance that catapults me into a fugue state. The word “Please” seems to demand a considered, reasoned, rational response, but the next words are an explicit request for wildness and craziness, qualities it is difficult to manufacture on cue. Not only that, it strikes me as utterly impossible to legitimately go wild and crazy but only for the duration of time it takes the comedian to reach the microphone. I imagine walking onto a stage where the audience has actually gone wild and crazy when I come out. I find it difficult to know which moment I would find more viscerally frightening - the initial shock of walking out to see them thrashing wildly in their chairs, tearing the clothes from their backs and the flesh from their bones, bestial howls erupting from somewhere deep within their ancient, lizard hind-brains, spumes of piss arcing into the sky above them, or the moment when I reach the microphone and this behaviour abruptly ceases and they revert to being a polite, attentive audience. In future, I would like it if comperes limited themselves only to requesting things of the audience that they actually genuinely want, because a gig where the audience actually went wild and crazy between acts would be unplayable.

Anyway, this week I’d like to update you all on The Happiness Chain, the sitcom pilot I crowdfunded and which many of you generously supported at the end of last year - I wrote a bit about the initial thinking behind it here. Director Ben Kent and I have been gradually putting the finishing touches to it and last week we finished off what felt very much like the penultimate editing session. It’s off having its sound mix done now, and then we’ll come back together to make a final pass at it before it’s ready to be seen by the world.

Because many of you kindly donated to the crowdfunder that enabled us to make this, I thought you might like to know how it’s looking and honestly, I’m so, so proud of it. It’s always a bit scary diving into the edit for a project, because that’s really when you find out what you’ve actually made. When you’re writing, you’re free to imagine infinite possibilities of what the final thing might end up being, and when you’re shooting you’re so time-pressured that you’re just desperately scrabbling around to do what you can to capture one of those possibilities. So when you’re editing you have to face brutal facts and go “Well, this is what we actually captured, so now we have to make something out of this.” There’s still endless scope for creativity during the edit, but you’re now dealing with concrete facts rather than vague hypotheticals - you have to make something out of this specific footage, however you can. So I always go warily into edits, wondering how closely the actual thing will resemble any of the things I had in my head when I wrote it.

I was so thrilled with how The Happiness Chain turned out - close enough to what I imagined for me to feel enormously fulfilled by it, different enough for me to feel really surprised and delighted by it. Everyone did such a wonderful job - the performances are wonderful, the direction and cinematography are so great, the way the entire crew came together to make it look and sound and feel wonderful is so impressive to me. I can’t wait to show it to the world.

I’m toying with poster designs at the moment. This draft has a sort of old-school 90s vibe and I quite like it.

Incidentally, as you’ll see from this early draft poster for it, we’re considering a title change. The Happiness Chain is the title of a project within the show itself, and was the title of a failed project I spent several months trying to make sense of, so for a while it was important to me that it was the title of the sitcom I created around the remnants of that project. However, it became clear to me that actually it’s quite a vague and unclear title - it makes sense when contextualised by an explanation of what that project is, but by itself it’s a little opaque. We brainstormed Just Be Happy as an alternative title, and I think I prefer it - it’s more easily accessible and clear, and tells you more about what the show is actually about - the pursuit of happiness. What do you think? Do you have a preference? Or does neither feel quite right, but one feels closer to the right thing than the other? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

To go back over some of the initial thinking behind it - I wrote the script for The Happiness Chain back in 2023/4, when I was trying to more concertedly break into writing and acting for TV and film. It was a terrible year to try and do it, and although my script got really good feedback and was longlisted or nominated for a couple of writing awards, I couldn’t find any opportunities to actually do anything with it. I was all set to put it back in the drawer as another script I wrote that nobody ever got to see when it placed me in the top 5% of applicants for the 2024 BBC Comedy Collective. That encouraged me to keep trying with it, and eventually Ben suggested we just shoot it. All across the TV landscape, the thing that was beginning to dawn on me was that opportunities were only going towards people who had essentially gone the extra mile to build a product of value somewhere else - a great taster or pilot or short film, building an online audience, making a successful live show with strong potential for adaptation, or whatever. I couldn’t see a world where my spec script was actually going to get made, but I could see the value in actually making it myself, and making more of the kind of thing I’d love to see on TV.

Now that we’ve done it, and it’s turned into something I’m genuinely very proud of - something with some real silliness and light-heartedness to it, but also grounded with real heart and characters we really invest in and care for - I’m under no illusions about what might happen next with it. I don’t think that just because I’ve made it, it’s likely to get picked up and turned into a fully-fledged TV show. I don’t know what might happen with it. Maybe there’s a world where someone funds us to make more of it online. Maybe it’s actually a proof-of-concept for a feature. Maybe that specific idea and story never gets to be revisited again, but it serves as a really good calling card for everyone involved and helps the people who made it to find other opportunities for acting, writing, directing, DOPing, or whatever. I place no specific expectations on it in terms of what it might lead to or what it might help the team who made it achieve, but I place no limitations on it either. We’ve made something I think is really good, and I’m excited to see what the world makes of it and what emerges in response to it.

Because I don’t know what its future is, I have no immediate plans to actually release it publicly - some TV commissioners said they wanted to see it when it was ready, and who knows, perhaps there’s a world where there is some kind of future for it in TV and people won’t want it to be out on the internet while it’s in development. I just don’t know. But because I don’t want to close off any avenues just yet, for now I’m going to keep its public outings very limited. Those who supported the crowdfunder will get a time-limited link to stream it at home, and it will be screened on a one-off basis at July’s Eggbox event, alongside an amazing line-up of other short films and live script readings from filmmakers and writers including Miranda Holms, Lola-Rose Maxwell, Luke Rollason and Saima Ferdows. Again, crowdfunder backers who chose the specific reward tier including tickets to the screening will be receiving these alongside their other rewards, but for anyone else, buying tickets to this event will be the only opportunity to see the pilot in the immediate future. I’d love to see lots of you there and celebrate it with you all!

For now, I just want to offer a huge, whole-hearted thank you to everyone who supported the crowdfunder and enabled us to make such a wonderful thing, and everyone on the team who helped it to be as brilliant as it’s become.

The final bit of work to be done on it, funnily enough, brings it back full circle to that initial failed project which the entire idea first span out from. In addition to the scripted narrative which is the core of the story, we’d like there to be some elements that bookend the pilot in a reality that’s more tangibly our own, where the characters interact with real people and peer into some of their own approaches to happiness. These are things we can film and insert into the finished project fairly easily, so we’ll hopefully be pinning those down within the next few weeks in time to make a final pass at it in time for that July premiere. Watch this space as we finalise everything, and hope to see some of you at the Pleasance on July the 1st!

A Cool New Thing In Comedy - Clown prince Luke Rollason won a BAFTA for his short film Quiet Life, and made this lovely speech encouraging comedy commissioners to keep taking risks and avoid the familiar. It was a lovely rallying cry, and it’s a great short, so huge congrats to him and the whole team.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most - The punchline of a very short film called A Wonderful Neighbour by Alun Rhys Morgan which I saw at LOCO at the weekend, and which we’ll be screening at Eggbox. The LOCO experience in general made me realise how good incredibly short films with one punchline are, and I’d like to make one. Whatever I make won’t be as funny as this, though.

Book Of The Week - I’ve just started How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. I’m only a few pages in, but it’s already very much my kind of thing - it’s about how doing nothing and allowing yourself to be bored or idle has become a radical act, and that we all have to work harder to connect ourselves to the places where we actually are. I’m gonna love it, I think.

Album Of The Week - Blues & Roots by Charles Mingus. The Jazz Phase continues, to Miranda’s continued annoyance. I love “Moanin’” so much. That honky old sax. “Baaarrrrr-rap bap! Ba-dap baaa-da-dap bap!” I knew that tune, and I didn’t know this was what it was from. Nice to put a face to a name, so to speak.

Film Of The Week - The only film I’ve seen this week was The Uninvited and I’m afraid to say, I did not enjoy it. I’m annoyed with the Odeon at the moment, they keep removing interesting-looking low-budget original films from the app (what the hell happened to The Legend Of Ochi, I can’t find it anywhere???) to schedule more screenings for A Minecraft Movie and Thunderbolts, so when I saw this on there I jumped on it, but I really did think it was really very bad. I genuinely preferred A Minecraft Movie to this. Maybe low-budget original films are just rubbish. All hail our IP Overlords.

That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you think and if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, I’d hugely appreciate it. Take care of yourselves until next time,

Joz xx

PS If you value the Therapy Tapes and enjoy what they do, and want to support my work and enable me to keep writing and creating, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated.

PPS It was my birthday this week! I had a lovely time visiting an underground funfair and then watching my dad play the piano inside a giant clock, like some sort of strange dream.