Tape 183: I Will Keep Playing

Three Things That Might Be The Same Thing

A couple of warnings up top in this post - firstly, I have a feeling this will be a bit of a ramble through a lot of quite messy, disconnected ideas and I’m not all that confident of what kind of sense I’ll be able to make out of them. Apologies in advance if this is impenetrable, or self-involved, or simply meaningless. Or perhaps it will mean something, even just to someone.

Secondly, a content warning for suicide.

I’m writing this in Hay-on-Wye, which is where my mum and step-dad live and is my favourite town on the planet. It’s called the “town of books” because almost every other shop is a second-hand bookshop. I used to come here maybe once a year or so as a kid and was always absolutely enchanted by it. There was a corner of Richard Booth’s Bookshop that had a rack of choose-your-own-adventure books from the 80s and I would buy a new one every time we came and devour it. I was fascinated by them - mainly because they had magic in them and dragons and goblins and things like that that had an unaccountably strong hold over my imagination until the age of 15 or so (we’re talking about someone who not only bought the Discworld Cookbook, but regularly cooked the recipes in it, which I think even Terry Pratchett probably didn’t expect many people to do).

But beyond that, there was something about what these choose-your-own-adventure books did to my imagination that left me with a feeling that I couldn’t really describe, an experience I couldn’t quite put into language. Something about the gap between what the writer had created and what I actually experienced as a reader, and how that gap was filled entirely by the choices I made. Something about how the space between those two things could only partially be mapped, but could be viscerally felt. Something about that feeling was actually tangible. I could sink my fingers into it.

I built up a small collection of these dog-eared things, and Hay-on-Wye became the most special place in the world to me. I always looked forward to my visits. One year I went on a sort of extra-curricular retreat with my school to an activity centre near a village in Wales called Pencelli, where we all had to take part in activities like kayaking or caving or orienteering. I enjoyed it well enough, but none of it was really my thing and I spent the week feeling a bit like I was struggling to figure it all out. I didn’t have many friends at school. One day, the activity was to kayak down the Wye, and we would finish at Hay. I told my other classmates what a great place Hay-on-Wye was, and hoped we might get some time to look around the town and maybe I could show them some of my favourite bookshops. We didn’t end up having time - the course leaders at the activity centre drove us straight back to Pencelli. As we drove through Hay, one of them looked out of the window and said “I’d rather poke my own eyes out than spend an afternoon in this town.”

When I went to uni, I took all my choose-your-own-adventure books to a charity shop. They felt kind of silly to me now. I didn’t think about them again for 13 years, when I suddenly remembered them in lockdown and, in the midst of my own particular version of the breakdown we all had that year, I spent something like £300 buying my own collection back on eBay because in the years since they had become rare collector’s items. I suddenly remembered that they were things I actually liked, and suddenly that felt very important.

*

I’ve spent the weekend in Hay largely doing three things. The first was performing my new show at How The Light Gets In, a wonderful philosophy, comedy and music festival that happens here every year. I had a lot of fun, but the show wasn’t my best. Broadly, I’m really excited about where the show is at and what it’s doing, but there’s always a tricky phase around this far out from the Fringe where you know that it’s “good enough” but you also know you can push through a pain barrier to make it really special, and sometimes that means being bold enough to break what you have already. My director Jon Brittain, and my girlfriend and collaborator Miranda Holms, have been amazing at helping me through this stage.

There were various reasons why Friday’s show wasn’t the best it’s gone - it’s never ideal trying to do quite a conceptual, narrative show in a tent at a festival with lots of sound bleed where people are free to wander in and out - but it wasn’t a disaster. I tried a bunch of new things that went really well, including an entirely new ending which I really loved, but there was a chunk of the audience who I felt just weren’t that into the show. Afterwards, a handful of people came up to me while I was packing away and told me that they were regular Fringe-goers and it was their favourite comedy show they’d ever seen, and that they’d never seen anything like it before. I was really touched and grateful to them, but still felt annoyed with myself - I needed to work harder.

I remember when I started out in comedy, it was enough to tell myself that only a few people need to like it each time, because all I was trying to do was make something that connected with someone else, anyone else. These days, I’m trying to be more ambitious and more strategic with what I do, because this isn’t just my hobby any more, it’s what I do for a living. Of course it’s enough when someone connects with it, and of course I’m always proud and happy when that happens. But I also want to make work I can feel truly proud of, that connects with audiences on a wider level, that touches more than just a handful of people. So I needed to work harder. Maybe I needed to be really ruthless with myself about quite what I was trying to say with this show - just what did I want to achieve with it, exactly? And how could I best go about doing that?

*

The second thing I spent this weekend doing was watching talks, both at How The Light Gets In and at the Hay Literary Festival at the other end of town. I watched Massimo Pigliucci talk about what the Greco-Roman philosophers can teach us about the pursuit of the good life. I watched Paul Dolan talk about how we can learn to not hate the people we disagree with. I watched Adam Phillips talk about the importance of giving up. I watched Michelle Terry and Myriam Francois talk about the philosophy of performance. I watched Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse talk about the purpose and function of art. I watched Jeremy Corbyn and Sophie Scott-Brown talk about the philosophy of listening to strangers and giving everyone a fair chance to surprise you. I can’t remember the last time my brain was fired up so intensively in such a short space of time by so many brilliant ideas.

Michelle Terry talked about the nature of live performance, and the gap between what you can create as a performer and what an audience can interpret. Both she and Brian Eno talked about the way art gives us a space in which to experience feelings in a safe environment. Eno and Adriaanse talked about the fact that there are some experiences which we can feel that have nothing to do with language, and that lose some of their potency when we try to put them into language - the experience of seeing a Mondrian painting for the first time as a child. The way in which the kinds of art we see as a child can teach us something about how we feel, and where we sit in relation to the world. (Am I comparing choose-your-own-adventure books to Mondrian? Maybe. I don’t know what I’m saying with this, really. I’ve not even got to the difficult bit yet).

Adam Phillips, when challenged on whether we have a duty to talk people out of suicidal ideation, replied that he would never try to talk anyone out of suicide, only try to talk to them about whether they were doing it for the right reasons. He said we must remember that there are some people for whom living is enormously painful, and it is not for us to decide that we have a responsibility to deny them the opportunity to do something about it, if that’s the only thing they feel they can do. We’ll come back to this one. Eno and Terry talked about how well-documented it is that children learn through play. They take on different roles, they explore their imaginations, they make things very naturally, they rehearse imaginary scenarios and feelings, and that’s how they learn how the world works. They talked about how, despite the way society deprioritises it, art is not an indulgence or a luxury, it’s a key quality of how our imaginations and personalities are formed. Eno said, quite simply and brilliantly, “Play is how children learn. Art is how adults play.”

The one thing that came up over and over again was how vital it is to actually pay attention to what you want to do. To what you actually like. Eno said that we’re told 12,000 times a day what we ought to like, but there is a little voice inside us that says “But I like this,” and you must protect that. You must fight so hard for it. Nearly everyone talked about what a disaster it is that children these days are being told that imagination and creativity are not worthwhile qualities or pursuits or values. There’s a wonderful quote I’ve treasured for many years by R. Buckminster Fuller which goes “The real job of a human being should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before someone told them they should earn a living.” I thought about it many times this weekend.

All these ideas suddenly made me feel incredibly excited about my show. It hadn’t fully taken off on Friday, but I could suddenly see what I needed to do. It wasn’t just to work harder. It was to be true to myself. It was to keep listening to that part of me that first got excited about doing what I do - about exploring ideas with an audience, and doing it in the particular way I learned to. Not to worry about what I might have done differently, not to worry about what I might one day do. Only to take joy in what I want to do now. There is a gap between what you as a creator can intend, and what an audience member can interpret, and in that gap is all the excitement and all the magic. And it’s where I’ve always most loved to play. And it’s where I think this show can do something very special, if I can just keep being true to my reasons for doing this in the first place.

*

The third thing I did this weekend was learn of the loss of my god-sister, who was my first ever friend. I won’t be naming her here, because it’s not my place to tell her story. I am not the custodian of that story. We barely knew one another as adults. I saw her only once as an adult. One day she came to one of my shows, a ramshackle preview in a comedy club above a pub in Camden which I remember as being chaotic but a lot of fun, and we had a drink afterwards. I hadn’t seen her since the funeral of a family friend when I was about fifteen. Before that, I hadn’t seen her since the summers when we grew up together. Our families would spend these summers together, and our parents would do whatever parents did in the 90s (Boggle?), and we would run off and have adventures. My brother would run off and play with her older brother, and I would run off and play with her. For many years, she was my best friend.

She took her own life a couple of weeks ago. As I said, it is not my place to reveal any of the details of her life or situation, only to say that what I’ve gathered from her family is mostly that, while devastated, they’re choosing to look at it as an opportunity to be happy she’s not in pain any more, and so, so grateful to have known her for the time she was here.

I’m certainly grateful for those summers. I find it strange to think that, because we spent so much of them playing together just the two of us, a lot of the places we ran to, and hid, and the ways in which we played, and the things that made us laugh, exist now only in my memory. The one other person they lived in has chosen to leave. I can’t even remember all that much of them myself. I would’ve loved to have seen her one more time to go over the flashes and impressions we both had, to see if we could expand on them and recreate some of what we learned from playing together. I can see a witch’s hut. I can see a lake. I can see a swing. I can see her face. She is smiling.

*

There’s a spot under the bridge in Hay that has long been my favourite specific spot on planet Earth. I always feel very peaceful there. There’s a lovely cafe there now, so you can buy a coffee and sit by the fence and watch the Wye rushing past. Whenever I sit there I feel very far away from everything that causes me anxiety or worry. It’s only as I write this that I realise that it overlooks the exact spot where that kayaking trip ended. “I’d rather poke my own eyes out than spend an afternoon in this town.” I don’t hate the guy who said that just because I disagreed with him. I’m just glad to have spent this weekend remembering how many people there are in this world who want to see their children enchanted by their own imaginations. We need all the imaginations we can get.

On Friday I sat under the bridge and drank my coffee and watched the river and remembered my friend.

Like I said, I don’t know if I’ve quite made sense of any of the things I’ve been thinking about this weekend. But I think these three things reflect each other in some way.

Play is how children learn. Art is how adults play.

I will keep playing.

RIP VK xxx

A Cool New Thing In Comedy - Tom Basden’s new film The Ballad Of Wallis Island, starring Tim Key and Carey Mulligan, is out in cinemas! I’ve not seen it yet, I’m going on Sunday, but when UK comedy people get big, proper releases for their films it’s very exciting and worth shouting about, so get along to it!

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most - I think this was the bizarre Channel 4 dating show Virgin Island, specifically the moment when a participant introduced himself to another participant by asking her if he could throw her in the sea, then if he could feed her to a lion.

Book Of The Week - I’ve just started Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee, which I was excited about because I love To Kill A Mockingbird, although I’ve since learned that it was basically an early draft of To Kill A Mockingbird that she subsequently decided to scrap, and that she was kind of exploited in her final months in order to get it published, and now I feel a bit sad reading it. The big twist is that Atticus Finch is racist now, so reading it you do kind of get the feeling “Yeah, I don’t know if this is what she wanted.” Or maybe she did, and making Atticus Finch racist is an interesting way to challenge our cultural icons. Who knows?

Album Of The Week - MAD! by Sparks, which I actually think is a bit rubbish. I love Sparks, they’re great, but they’ve been in a bit of a rut for a while now. Of all the Sparks albums to be called MAD!, as well. This one’s not even very mad. They should’ve called it “Not Very Mad,” and there’s no way it earns that exclam.

Film Of The Week - Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (Part One). I’ve not seen any Mission: Impossible films since the first one, so I was pretty surprised by how bad this is. Are they all this bad? The dialogue is shocking. Everyone spends the whole film looking for a magic key that is worth 4 billion and controls a rogue AI that can destroy the world, but whenever anyone gets it they start waving it around ostentatiously in the middle of a crowded airport/shopping mall/market. At one point, Tom Cruise does some funny little magic tricks where he makes it appear in one hand, then disappear, then reappear in the other hand. Is his character a magician? Then why does he dress like a Top Gear presenter? Is this guy supposed to be cool? Why do people like these films, other than because he drives a motorbike off a mountain at one point? Or is that the only reason? I thought it was crap.

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 This guy was new. Even after all these years, there are still dragons to be found in Hay: