Arts Council Funding For Blink

I'm absolutely over the moon to have been awarded Arts Council funding to make my new show, Blink. Huge thanks to Lee Griffiths, Grace Gibson and a bunch of others for their help with the application, and their support in helping me to push myself in new directions.

Can't wait to start working with them and Ben Target and Alex Hardy on making this thing.

I lived with Grace for 5 years and used to think it was crazy that she pretty much always made sure she had funding in place before making creative work. I was used to working entirely by myself, scraping together the funds, doing it all for peanuts. It seemed like theatre was just a completely different world to comedy, and I doubled down on a DIY approach, largely stuck in my own head & looking at my work from the inside-out. Then in 2019 I wondered what it would be like to approach a comedy show like it was a theatre show.

So I started inviting people into the process, and collaborating, and just taking more pride in what I did, and it resulted in my best work, and it won some awards and stuff. Battersea Arts Centre liked it and offered me an artist's residency, and I just kept following my nose, really. Then Covid, obvs, etc. But I thought if I was gonna go back to live comedy then maybe I should take a step further in the direction I'd been moving in, and try to do things more professionally, and see if I could pursue funding. Had enormous doubts about it, but gave it a shot. Long story short - there is a lot that comedy can learn from theatre. There is a lot that theatre can learn from comedy. We don't have to follow any particular path just because we tell ourselves our work belongs in a genre. All we need to do is to believe in the work.