“I wanted to be Terry Pratchett”: an interview with Joz Norris
RIP Buttoned Down, Hello Substack: welcome to @jamesofwalsh’ new newsletter
Hello friends!
I have moved to a new newsletter provider, and you are reading this because you subscribed to “Suburb on the Edge of Forever”, via my previous hosts, Button Down.
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Things are going to be a bit different from now on. The focus of the newsletter will be interviews with writers, performers and comedians who a) I find interesting and b) kindly agreed to be interviewed.
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The first interview is with the wonderful Joz Norris, a brilliant comedy person / writer / performer (“I try not to say comedian, because then people expect me to be funny”). His show, Blink, was one of my very favourites of last year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
Why not prepare for it by listening to the BBC Radio 4 comedy he starred in late last year, The Dream Factory, or by reading his website and looking at pictures from his sexy calendar?
The plan is to interview a new person each week until either I forget, the world ends, or people refuse to talk to me any more, so enraged by how badly misquoted they have been.
“Hey, this Joz Norris sounds like a right piece of shit”, says Joz Norris, reading about Joz Norris, unaware that I have changed all the words where he says nice and insightful things to words where he sounds like a right piece of shit.
Of course I have not done that. That would be very silly and ultimately self-defeating. Instead, we had a lovely, discursive chat, during the course of which I learned a lot about comedy, writing, and collaboration. I hope you read it and learn nice things too.
You’ll be getting a new newsletter secreted somewhere in your inbox every Friday morning. Any tips or suggestions, or abuse? All will be gratefully received.
Until then, sit back, and enjoy an interview with Joz Norris.
Who are you and what do you want?
Ooooh that’s a great question, particularly the second part. I’ve been talking to lots of people about what they want…
Now, this is a tangent already.
Good!
Have you ever heard of a psychologist called Mary-Louise von Franz?
No…
Nor have I really. I’ve just learned this one quote, where she talked about something called The Provisional Life - the idea that everyone thinks that life is a waiting room, and that real life is gonna start once you’ve done this. And I just have to get this out of the way.
And I really like the idea, so I’m trying to write about it. I’ve been speaking to loads of people about: “what’s your thing? What’s the thing that you keep coming back to?”
I like making interesting work, work that interests me, and that is maybe a bit different to what people have seen before.
So I tell myself that I just want to keep getting more opportunities to make more of that sort of work, by following my curiosity.
I try these days to have less of an idea of having this really specifical goal that I really want to achieve.
If you get it to a point where you can go: “every day I will do this”, rather than “one day I will have this”, [then great].
So I think what I want is continue making stuff that interests me and hopefully interests other people.
It’s interesting you’ve been asking other people that question - how do they react?
Some come up with something really specific And others say they want nothing.
I’ve had a real mixture. Some people, it’s about health. I spoke to somebody who (it turned out) had a chronic illness and they said “I wish I felt better, but I have to make peace with the fact that I won’t”.
And then other people are: “I want to move to a different country”, “I want to get married and have kids”, “I want to have this much money”, “I want to be famous”, which happens a bit in comedy and which I think is the worst one…
I do fear when people say “I want to do comedy because I want to be famous”…
It’s absolutely terrible. I think it’s because we know that the stuff we make and do has to do well.
This is the thing about sustainable goals, and how every day I want to be able to make work that gives me the opportunity to keep making more work. That’s why I always phrase it like that.
The way that gets difficult is we know that means the work you do has to do well. In order to keep being given more opportunities, you have to show that the work you’re making is achieving a certain level, and gets caught up in all these metrics of, “this many people need to see it, and this many people need to like it…”
I think there’s a lot of that at the [Edinburgh] Fringe. It’s supposed to represent stuff that is counter to mainstream commercial society, but now a lot of the metrics of that have been applied to it - ticket sales and star ratings and awards lists - end up measuring it like a market place, even though the thing it’s supposed to represent is everything opposite to that.
And it becomes very hard to navigate that for your own mental health, I think.
You keep mentioning things I was going to ask you about anyway.
Sorry.
No, that’s good. I was going to ask about the sustainability of Edinburgh and the rhythm of a comedy writer’s year, and what happens if you reject that cycle.
Last year I came out of it and: I’d had a good year. By all the things you can measure it by - the reviews were good and it sold out most of the run, and blah blah blah.
I still came out of it and thought I can’t do that again for a while, because I’m exhausted, and tired, and sad, and it was hard.
I kept thinking this *used* to be what I do. It didn’t feel like I was thriving about it or happy about it any more. It felt hard.
But when I spoke to younger people and asked them the same thing, they said yeah, we’ll be back next year, we’ve started working on the next show. I think it’s just they’re young and they’re new - “I’m building my audience and learning my craft so I want to keep coming back.”
Whereas I feel like I’ve learned everything I need to learn from this place now. So either I keep coming back and repeating myself for no clear gain, or I start to change the rhythm and challenge the rhythm a bit, which is what I’m trying to do this year.
So usually it’s make a fringe show then, when I have time, write a script for a film or a sketch or a tv show or whatever. I think I’m trying to turn that around - doing that work, and then in my spare time: have I got an idea for a live show? That could become something next year?
[Building up to an Edinburgh hour] becomes quite automatic. Whereas now, I don’t really know *what* I’m doing!. Which feels scary but also more exciting in some way.
You might hate me for doing this…
No!
You don’t know what I’m going to do yet.
Oh yeah. I was far too accommodating.
I’m going to quote your own words back at you…
Ok.
… from when you did my fanzine. You gave some really useful advice:
“The two most important things you can do is pay attention to what your curiosity moves towards, and where your enjoyment comes from.
“Pay attention to how your body feels after you see someone or do something, and pay attention to where your brain goes when you’re walking by yourself or listening to music or looking out the window. Let those two things be the poles you move between.”
I quite like that.
How are you getting on with that?
I’m still doing that. I think that’s how I operate in general, and has been how I always build shows.
I read something recently called “A Choreographer’s Handbook” by Jonathan Burrows, where he includes fragments of creative advice and things.
He mentions that you spend a lot of time trying to unlearn your habits, or challenge your habits, and then eventually one day you realise your habits are the things that enable you to make your work. And that you’ve benefited from them all this time.
When he realises that all he’s going to do is the same old habits over and over again, that relaxes him. And then when he’s relaxed he’s able to do something new.
It’s that thing of acknowledging that this is always going to be how you work, then it enables you to grow in terms of how you work.
I think I am still the same in terms of trying to work out where my brain is going, and trying to work out what makes me feel good is the anchor of everything I do.
By practising that thing of curiosity and enjoyment, that’s a way of making sure that everything I make comes from a genuine place. So that if I do something that does happen to succeed, it feels like that happened naturally because I made the right thing, rather than because I was really smart and careful and positioned it in that way.
I’m sure a lot of people work in that way too, by reading the landscape and then responding to it, but that’s not how my brain works.
The Dream Factory, your Radio 4 Sitcom. How did that come about, and was the process of getting to the point of sitting down and hearing it on the radio enjoyable, or was that arduous?
I loved it. It came about because I made a comedy special with the same producer, Steve Doherty, from Giddy Goat Productions, in 2020. It was supposed to be just a live standup special, with me recording it in the radio theatre, and it was going to be half an hour of my best routines from the last year, or whatever.
And then Covid happened. And the producer said you can either do it with a virtual audience, or you can not have an audience at all and figure out another way of doing it.
I much preferred the idea of that, as a challenge. I didn’t enjoy virtual audiences at all at the time. They sounded kind of tinny and there was a delay, so you couldn’t gauge how you were coming across at all.
So I thought what I’ll do is get rid of the audience and rewrite it from scratch, and it became sort of a sketch show / hybrid thing set inside my brain as I tried to figure out what to say to somebody.
Which meant bits of it were standup routines and bits of it were surreal internal sketches, and people really liked that and enjoyed it. Steve said I’d love to do something that is similar to that but a narrative thing, because I think what was most exciting about that is it sort of told a bit of a story.
Miranda Holms, who co-wrote the sitcom with me, and I came up with the Dreams concept as our story reason for going into people’s heads and having these interior strange worlds come to life there. But we populate it with characters and with a story.
My live shows tend to be half live theatre shows anyway, it’s not “I’m comedian Joz Norris and here’s what I’ve been up to this year”. There’s kind of a story to it and my character fits in to that story. - and serves the concept of the show rather than just being an hour of me talking about stuff.
I think I’d always wanted to end up doing stuff that was more narrative and character driven like that. So I just loved working on The Dream Factory. The two days we spent recording it were two of my favourite days ever working on something.
This is going to get a bit existential… is the version of Joz Norris we hear in that show close to the Joz Norris that’s real?
It’s fairly close. It was interesting when it got to actually recording it, realising what an unpleasant character it is. In the process of writing it I thought I’ll base him on me, but he’s the most flawed version of me.
So it’s all my flaws brought to the front without any of the work that I’ve done on myself to try and modify those flaws. So he’s very self-obsessed, and likes to think he’s a good friend and is looking out for people but is actually is completely hapless, careless, thoughtless. And all these are impulses that exist within me that but that I’ve tried to work on.
The main characters in sitcoms are always flawed monsters. So the fact he’s doing all these terrible things is fine because hopefully he’ll be fun and entertaining. And then when it came to recording it all the other acts were like, “this guy’s a piece of shit”. I really don’t like this character. I’m feeling slightly called out by it.
There’s a certain everyman arseholeness to it, if that’s a thing…because we’re all horrid.
We’re all terrible, occasionally.
While we talked about that, in my head I went to all my worst traits…
Yeah, same. When working on this I was thinking, surely this will be relatable and then people were like, “this is relatable, but we don’t like him!”
Did you have a “oh god, is it just me” moment?
Yeah, and that was the thing. I started to think this character is entirely based on myself, so the reactions people are having to it must be in some way reactions to me.
And then remembering wait, I haven’t done any of the things this character has done, they are just extrapolations of what I might do if I had total license to be an arsehole.
Free rein to those impulses….
Yeah.
I feel bad now for suggesting he was close to who you are.
No, I think it’s all in there.
I read somewhere that you said collaboration makes you a much better writer.
I think I used to be very protective and I was a bad collaborator. And I attempted to do it sometimes and it didn’t work, and all my Fringe shows were things I made basically entirely by myself, behind closed doors. I was: “I have to do it my way, because then that means it’s very authentic and true and from me.”
There’s just something about having to convince someone of an idea. Like when you’re in total control, and somebody says “what about this?”, then you can dismiss them and go “well no, you haven’t understood it”. And I think I’ve done work where if the audience weren’t fully on board, I would go “that’s their fault for not understanding what I was doing”.
Eventually I got to the point of realising when someone comes to you and says “there’s something about this I don’t understand, could you explain it to me?” it doesn’t necessarily mean the solution they suggest is going to be the right solution and you have to do what they say, but what they are doing is opening you up to the idea that your idea isn’t communicating itself as clearly or as well as it possibly could.
I think that becomes a muscle, the collaborative muscle, where you just keep flexing.
Blink was a collaborative project. It started with an hour of material I’d written, so the content of it was still very me which is why it had “Joz Norris” written at the top.
But then over the course of it I got much better at sitting and listening and looking at what wasn’t working, and hearing about how it could work better.
Which is why I tried to make as much noise as I could around collaboration around that show, because it wouldn’t have existed without the ideas other people brought to it.
And now I’d like to go into something where I’m even more collaborative from the outset, where I go in with some outlines and sketches and things, and we all build together.
I’d love to keep building that ability.
Was there ever a eureka moment when you realised writing and comedy is what you wanted to do?
I think it was just always there.
I’ve learned that so much of what you end up doing is based on what you were allowed to do when you were young.
I know people who where their parents were harsh or critical or fearful of them doing creative stuff. That’s people who are now doing it but who had to battle through a lot of perceived prejudice in order to do so.
My dad and my mum were both in classical music, were both in the arts, so as a kid I was told that this was a model that existed, and that you could do that with your life.
And so when I was a kid I was going to be a novelist, I wanted to be Terry Pratchett. And then I wanted to be an actor and I wanted to write plays.
And there was never any doubt about it, and I'm hugely grateful to them for giving me that belief.
Thanks Joz!
And there we have it, the first interview of this new era. Thanks for reading my newsletter! If you made it all the way down here, you’re going to be treated to some bonus links.
Joz performed at Next Level Sketch this week, the aka the London sketch thingie I co-produce. I wrote it up here.
I am trying to visit every County Cricket ground this “summer”. So far I have made it to Lord’s, The Oval, and… Hove.
The Brighton Folk Choir are singing in Hastings for May Day at the Jack In The Green festival, which involves lots of folk, a troubling number of Morris Dancers, and the murdering of an enormous green man so that summer can be unleashed,