Audiences and Sweethearts

Hallo! Currently muddling through figuring out the balance of my work for the year - The Last Post is well and truly launched, and I’m figuring out the balance of fiction, fact, satire, structure, long form news arcs, guests, tone, rhythm and pace... it’s a fascinating enterprise and I love the pressure to deliver an enormous amount of content. I feel like it’ll become more consistently good as the year goes on, and I’m hoping we don’t misstep badly enough early to alienate all the lovely people who are giving us the benefit of the doubt so far.

Ped and Chris who are doing the production have been utterly stalwart and positive, and most of the feedback has been lovely.

The new show, Chronos, is as yet unwritten, so I should probably get into that before my first preview forces the writing process to be generative failure.

I’ve wound up production on the new Audible documentary, which should be out whenever that big behemoth of content decides it’s ready to release, and I’m just about to record the Intro for this week’s Tea With Alice.

I’ve also recruited the lovely Paddy Gervers of Jonny and The Baptists fame to help me write my secret long longed-for-the-time-to-write fantasy radio play project. The reasons for that are manifold and deserve their own post, but the first reason is that he’s brilliant and the second reason is that I’m no good at prioritising things unless I feel like someone’s going to be disappointed if I don’t deliver. A character flaw, not to rate self-disappointment as a motivating factor.

It’s funny. I got a nice email today from someone who had been exposing their friends to me on a car journey in the form of The Alice Fraser Trilogy. They were saying that they sort of took reaction of their friends personally - pleased when they laughed, and disappointed when they didn’t.

I mean, obviously I feel that way when people react to my work, because it’s an articulation of my interest and the way my mind works, so it can’t help but feel personal when people don’t enjoy it, or misinterpret it. (Recent email from someone who took ETHOS as a pro-nazi screed kept me awake a whole night until I could reassure myself that I’m pretty certain I didn’t accidentally obliquely equivocate in favour of fascism in my attempt at balanced comedy).

I was musing on the wildly different vibes and tones of the projects I choose to work on and thought I should probably write a Patreon post about it and see how you all feel. Because it all feels very coherent to me - different ways to push and explore my little agenda/obsession of turning ideas around on my tongue and trying to slide them into other people’s minds through the clumsy medium of words (apologise for tongue to ear imagery, here) but it’s interesting how much pressure comes from professional angles to streamline all the different things into a clear ‘thing’.

I know I’m not for everyone (nobody is, when it comes to art), but I think like all comedians, some part of me secretly thinks that if people don’t like my work they’re just not trying hard enough, or they’re wrong. Ha! I guess you need that delusion to keep trying at this silly job.

It’s fascinating how much other people liking the things we like can affect our enjoyment. That said, it’s not like we can’t be friends with someone whose tastes diverge from ours - part of the fun of flipping though a streaming service with a co-watching friend is that you can find out the Venn-diagram intersection of your likes and dislikes.

More interesting (both to my inner egotist and also more rational mind) is when someone enjoys some branches of my work, but not others. Which I guess feels similar to when you enjoy a friend in certain moods but are annoyed by them in other moods.

A lot of the work I do is sort of surface-ly different from the other work I do, but the people who like more than one branch of my creating-tree seem to be very my-people, more than people who absolutely love one thing and dislike another, if that makes sense?

Mind bubbles, Blep Blep.

Xx

A