#1: why are you doing this?!
the potted history of a sketch group that refuses to die, and the ideas we scrapped before we landed on our new show
This newsletter is going to document the creative process of making MURDER FOR DUMMIES - a dark comedy murder mystery I created and wrote for my sketch group Casual Violence, and am co-producing independently with our director J.W. Roberts.
In future issues, I’ll be talking through creative influences, deep diving into the writing process (spoiler free), sharing behind the scenes content from early production, and chronicling the challenges of making a whole “TV show” entirely independently. But first: motive!
October 2020
“I miss Casual Violence!” I wailed down the phone. I was five and a half thousand miles from London, living in a new city I’d barely seen, and whinging at James Roberts: the man who has directed all of our short films to such a ludicrously high standard that the most common compliment we receive for them is “it looks so good!” instead of “it’s so funny!”
“We could start planning something?” I remember James suggesting. “There’s no point”, I grumbled - “it might be another six months before they announce a bloody vaccine.”
A couple of weeks later, they announced a bloody vaccine.
Two months after that - right at the very beginning of January 2021 - Casual Violence, James and I convened over Zoom to begin brainstorming a new project.
When I moved to LA at the end of 2019 to work on Dogs In Space, I assumed I could keep my then-ten year old comedy group going in some capacity or another. I’d probably be popping back to London every few months anyway, right?
Shockingly, Casual Violence didn’t end up making anything in 2020. But what was surprising, at least to me, was that when I reached back out to Dave, Luke, Greg and Alex, they were all immediately ready to get back together.
We’re all firmly in our thirties now. The days where we gave up every Sunday to rehearse are in the rear view mirror. I didn’t think they would all say no, but I definitely didn’t think they would all say yes.
This wasn’t the first time I’ve been wrong about that.
——
October 2012
As we were transitioned from being a student group to a professional(ish) outfit - I realised I had to begin explicitly offering everyone an out before we started making each new show. Doing the Edinburgh Fringe annually meant investing a lot of money, time, hope and dreams into a cycle of constant exhilaration, frustration, and (thanks to its heavy drinking culture) dehydration. I wanted to keep the band together, but I knew I couldn’t force them to stay if they didn’t want to.
Our first musician, Adam, left the group in early 2013, before we made House of Nostril. It was a blow we saw coming: he had pulled out of two of his other creative ventures earlier in the year. His musicianship and unique comic voice had been integral to every show we’d made together. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to fill the creative gap - and that the group might continue to drift apart one at a time.
January 2021
In our first Zoom call, I pitched an anthology where everyone set each other an anonymous new year’s resolution, like a cross between a dare and a Secret Santa. Each short film would follow one of us trying to fulfil our resolution: starting out grounded, and becoming increasingly absurdist.
Ever over-ambitious, we also decided to make some standalone sketches to release while developing Resolutions. We set meetings for every two weeks to develop our ideas, which I would then write up and bring back to the group for discussion.
September 2015
House of Nostril was our biggest live show success (sorry Adam, didn’t need you after all) and it solidified the five of us as a group. But our 2014 follow up, The Great Fire of Nostril, was an overambitious show that put too big a strain on our creativity.
We needed a break - something I was nervous about, but I knew to push on together would probably break us up.
In 2015 I made a solo show for Edinburgh, and relished the freedom that came with it. I remember wondering if Alex, Luke, Dave and Greg would all begin to focus on other things too. But, almost as soon as I came back from Edinburgh, we began rehearsing our first narrative-free sketch show in six years.
Eschewing an ambitious, story driven show was an intentional choice. After we had been burned by The Great Fire (ho ho), the way to regain our creative momentum was to cut loose both from the pressures of both Edinburgh, and of making something that had to achieve more than simply be funny.
With this change in strategy came relief, but also a change in identity: I wasn’t sure whether we’d begin petering out as our priorities moved away from the routine that had kept us together.
July 2021
After months of meetings, we were beginning to hit a wall. Resolutions proved too ambitious in scope, and our sketch ideas felt a little unsatisfying. We had some pleasingly ridiculous new material: I wrote a sketch about an assassin being taken advantage of, and a man who didn’t know what ham was; Luke wrote a script where a man not washing his hands in a pub toilet takes an elaborately stupid turn.
But all of these films would have taken a lot of time, money and effort: was it really worth it for these sketches? I began to worry that none of the things we’d been developing for the last several months were the right things for us to be making.
December 2017
In 2016, our change of direction had paid off. Slow Fade To Bleak became an award winning live show; we shot three “Violent Night” Christmas themed shorts with JR, and made a seven part podcast sitcom in Hector Vs The Future, co-written by James Huntrods.
After that, we went back to narrative with 2017’s The Grot In The Grotto - a show we were really proud of, but the one where we began to feel the impact of skipping Edinburgh. It was getting harder to sell tickets and build our audience. Even organising rehearsals had become a logistical nightmare. As we had gotten older, making live shows as Casual Violence had become untenable.
September 2021
Over Zoom, I took us back to the drawing board. I didn’t have a new idea for what we should make yet, but I proposed a documentary format: simpler and cheaper from a filming perspective, and a showcase for us as character comedians.
But of course, documentary parody has been done to death - and I remember insisting that we find a twist on it that would make it feel fresh and specific to us.
Blue-sky pitching continued, and Alex off-handedly suggested a murder mystery. Off the back of that, I pitched fully blending the ideas: what if we went full Agatha Christie with a true crime documentary? Not only should everyone being interviewed have a clear motive for the murder… but one by one, the interviewees themselves could start getting murdered on screen?
October 2019
In 2018, Casual Violence had launched a Patreon with James Roberts: delivering a new short film once per month for eighteen months. But, by summer 2019, it had become increasingly likely that I would be moving to Los Angeles. This felt like the kind of progress I had been working for ever since starting the group - but it meant literally leaving them behind.
Our ten year anniversary felt like the right time to stage one last, celebratory performance of our best live material. If there was a perfect moment to officially call time on the group as a creative entity, it would have been then.
But then, we’d probably have been more successful if we’d ever had good timing.
December 2022
Right now, Murder for Dummies is in production. Five blokes who had little in common at first - I don’t think we’d have stayed in touch without the group - have been making stuff together for almost fourteen years.
What kept us together at first was ambition. After that, bloody-mindedness - or maybe pride in the slicker, smarter work we were making, both on stage and on film, every passing year.
And now? We’re doing it for the love - or at least, for the Stockholm Syndrome. A decade of our lives was defined by what we made together. I don’t want to let that go, and I don’t think the others do either. This year, we even reunited on stage to perform at Dave’s wedding - with a custom set to celebrate how he first met his wife at one of our shows. We became brothers through what we built.
This show feels more creatively fulfilling than everything we’ve done because, for the first time, we’re creating something that feels purely motivated by the sheer bloody joy of making comedy together.
That’s why I’m doing it, anyway. Greg’s still in it for the money.