Hello, I Must Be Going
The Importance of Working out what you REALLY want to do
I got into watching Marx Brothers films in my early teens with my friend John. Channel 4 played a season of them one Christmas. John managed to record some of them onto his family’s VCR player. They were on late, and the video recorder had to be programmed. And you had to be a fourteen-year-old boy to do that back then, so that suited me and John. So I remember watching Duck Soup, A Day at the Races, A Night at the Opera, and Horse Feathers.
But it took me a while to track down Animal Crackers. (It was the 90s. You couldn’t just get anything you wanted any time.) And that’s when I first watched Groucho Marx sing the song, “Hello, I must be going.” That is the song I’m singing today.
Allow me to explain.
After hitting send on last week’s instalment of The Situation Room I realised something: I did not want to run that workshop I was advertising. Actually, that’s not quite true. I want to run the workshop. I’m good at that sort of thing, especially on the day. I’m experienced. I know what to do. But I don’t want to do all the other things to make that workshop economically viable — which mostly involves writing a weekly blogpost here to continue to advertise it and creating yet another sitcom for training purposes. This takes a lot of mental bandwidth. I don’t have that.
On top of developing new shows for the TV, I’m already writing two other blogs: The Wycliffe Papers and Cary’s Almanac. I’m making YouTube videos and writing books. I’m currently producing an actual hard copy newspaper version of The Wycliffe Papers to sell after my live show, God the Bible and Everything (in 60 minutes), which is touring the UK at the moment. That’s the thing that actually makes money. I need to invest in that.
Over the weekend, I realised I’d like to do the thing I’m really good at: podcasting. I’ve probably made over 600 podcast episodes. 222 of those were Sitcom Geeks. 180 were Cooper and Cary Have Words. People liked them. And I enjoyed making them. And I got good at it.
I’ve always love audio. My first sitcom was Think the Unthinkable. I also created Hut 33. And for much of that time, I’ve been writing with Milton Jones for his Radio 4 show. Twenty years ago, I remember musing that I’d only work for radio if I could afford it.
In Reframe Your Brain, Scott Adams says this:
Go where the energy is.
So I’m doing that. I’m going to start a new podcast called The Stand-up Theologian. It will be in association with my online Bible-joke-blog The Wycliffe Papers and my live touring show. I want to invest in that part of my work, which is a huge part of my life. In fact, it is my life. Which is why I want to do more of that.
What’s the lesson here?
Think about what you really want to do. Not what you thought you wanted to do. Or feel you should do. Or wanted to prove to someone that you could do. What do you want to do?
Then figure out how to do that. And figure out how you can start doing that today.
There’s an excellent book on that called The One Thing. Right now it’s 99p on Kindle which means this affiliate link will make me almost nothing. which helps you focus on doing the small things now, in turn, so that the small things get bigger and bigger. It’s like small dominoes knocking over increasingly big ones. So I’m off to set up some dominoes.
That means I won’t be posting here weekly anymore. If you’ve just arrived here from watching one of my YouTube videos that are actually going quite well:
“Hello, I must be going.”
I might post something here if it occurs to me (and it will) or I have something to share (and I will). But this Friday weekly lunchtime nugget of advice isn’t happening any more. This is the last one of those.
So how am I supposed to write a sitcom?
It’s always surprised me how few resources are out there for writing sitcoms. So my digital video course will remain available for now. I’m really proud of that course. It’s good. I still believe in it. It has all the info you need in the right order to help you write a sitcom:
Would you like me to read your script?
You can also hire me to read your sitcom script, give you notes, and talk about it on Zoom for 45 mins. That includes my cheat sheet on 14 ways to improve your script right now.
You may have some other work for me to look at. Even just a day of thinking about something, writing something or whatever. I’ll consider it. Try me. I like challenges. And I’m quite experienced in a variety of formats. Get in touch via my website.
Until next time, hello. I must be going.
But why don’t you come on over to The Wycliffe Papers?
Good to know this excellent Substack won’t be abandoned, just scaled back to “occasional new stuff, when I get around to it.” And I’m delighted to hear about all the other stuff you’re doing!