Here by mistake?
Quick, flee from here to the main page
We're mainly going to talk about the stuff that's seen the light of day here folks, believe me the stuff that hasn't isn't worth knowing too much about.
Saint Francis of Fazakerley
-A black comic monologue about a Liverpudlian undertaker's assistant on a youth training scheme. First performed in the Crucible Studio, Sheffield. The result of far too much research into the processes of death.
No Room 13
-A trip 'round the heads of people living with mental illness in a care home.
Probably my best work. First performed at the
Contact Theatre, Manchester.
Jungle Jeremy and the Atomic Warrior Queen of the Congo
-
A comedy musical for which I provided the comedy but not the music.
Book and lyrics by me, score and additional lyrics by my good friend Simon Kent.
Ego boostingly the show received the first award from the Ken Hill Musical Theatre Trust in the Autumn of 1997, and was first performed in May 1998 at the Bugbrooke Community Centre, Northamptonshire.
Made In Sheffield
A 10 minute radio drama broadcast across the BBC Northern England Radio stations GMR, Radio Lancashire, Radio Leeds, Radio Merseyside, Radio Sheffield and Radio North Yorkshire between June and August 2003. Part of a season called The Spin it looks at an aspect of the North's industrial heritage through a slightly surprising set of eyes.
Irrational Numbers
A ten minute play performed at the Theatre in the Mill in Bradford on May the 24th and at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds on June the 6th, 2004. Non-naturalistic, playful and imagistic, it explores infinity, nothingness, the bit in-between and train etiquette through the eyes of a neurotic commuter.
That Self Possessed Smile
A play I've been toying with for years and have finally written the first draft of! A stage biopic in a Ridiculous Theatre style based on Candy Darling. I was nervous about writing about a real person for a long time, but this story about the creative and destructive power of dreams had been buzzing around my head so long I felt I had to do something with it. Needs more work mind.
Brainspam
Back from a lengthy sojourn on a desk now... I liked it though.
For Entertainment Purposes Only
A radio play about communication, between friends and partners, comedians and audiences and the living and the dead. It had what I thought were two very good jokes in it. It was short-listed for the BBC's Alfred Bradley Bursary Award at the end of 2006. It didn't win but all the short-listed writers are being invited to pitch for upcoming radio drama commissions.
Go back to the top of the page
Again we'll ignore the really shameful stuff and focus just of the -)ahem(- "highlights".
In the dim and dark days of the 90s I wrote an unpleasantly large amount of sketches for BBC Radio 4's Week Ending and a couple of coughs and spits that I might even describe as hacking on the same network's The Way It Is.
In 2000, I contributed to Season 4 of Talkback Productions'
for Channel 4 television. Nothing very big or clever mind, just rapid reaction topical gags and later wrote for and script edited a non-broadcast pilot of
And then got a bit hacked with comedy hacking for a while. Aeons passed, and slowly new jokes gathered, waiting to hit critical mass. Soon there were eight of them and I was ready to re-emerge..
In 2007, I had a series commissioned for BBC7. No Tomatoes, which I like to think will come to be the sketch comedy of choice for a very small part of a doomed and dwindling generation. I wanted it to sound like Delia Derbyshire doing The Burkiss Way, but now it's done you'll know I'll settle for it sounding faintly amusing.
Here 'enjoy' part of the pitch that accompanied the pilot...
"No Tomatoes is a comedy series for radio, that couldn’t transfer to telly if you paid it, because it’s all about creating visual jokes you can’t visualise.
"Tapping into radio’s unique power to get straight
into listeners’ minds, No Tomatoes aims to explore the comedy of
language and ideas, using immersive and sometimes unsettling sound design and
occasionally surprising words. I’m
Ian Potter, the writer and sound designer.
Hello.
"In
No Tomatoes, Radio 4 will attempt to talk to both the regions and dogs,
zero will vanish forcing all the negative and positive numbers in creation to
bang into each other and cancel out, you will be invited to imagine the most
bizarre and dull slide show possible, pompous academics will be found ranting in
the dairy section of the supermarket, children’s TV characters will go on
strike, words will change their meaning and form. There will be jokes.
"No Tomatoes is like Blue Jam only short, clean and without any of the trip-hop solos or sketches with weird stretched voices that help pad the show out.
"It is like The Goon Show in evoking a world in sound, inviting us to picture it and then making the picture shatter before our eyes, only this time there’s no tedious jazz standards or virtuoso harmonica playing going on in the middle and it’s in stereo.
"It is like Quote - Unquote in having words in it."You get the idea.
There's another minuscule bit of footling hackery under consideration for a new BBC3 sketch show at the mo, but you know, I wouldn't get too excited.
Go back to the top of the page
A piece of sound poetry stuff I did featured at the International Symposium of Electronic Art in Liverpool in 1998. It's on a CD too, but only contributors, weird people, or academics who went to the symposium are likely to have one. Since making this noise I've bought a far sexier soundcard which I can make even better noises with. Go here for that minute of noise in full.
To my further excitement- I later produced a further two minutes of maudlin noise for a very similar CD, this time, the theme
was 'Trace' and the event it tied in with was the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art.
It was twice as long and not half as good to be honest.
Go back to the top of the page
My first short story Still Lives was published in December 2002 and I'm still unhealthily proud of the fact. There's a bit more info behind the logo below.
It's a story of people who've fallen between the cracks in time, featuring some jokes, some tragedy, some science that just about works, and some peculiar images I'm quite pleased with. It is also a sequel of sorts...
I had a second one, Apocrypha Bipedium published in 2003.
It's a tale of temporal paradox told by a bunch of very unreliable narrators. I'd like to say it's the silliest and most continuity obsessed Doctor Who story ever written but as fans of the series will know, there's some very stiff competition out there...
A third, Confabula, followed later that year.
A strange tale of a train and a planet in love...
And a very short fourth, Present Tense, just squeezed its way into 2004.
A comic interlude set somewhere in the late '70s era of the show...
And then a fifth turned up in 2006...
In which the First Doctor makes a choice...
The Filipino Army’s Advance on Reykjavik – World-building in Studio D and its Legacy
Poncy enough title for you?
Chapter 7 of the Manchester University Press book Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical Perspectives on Doctor Who. Contracts were signed in July 2006 and it final hit shelves in October 2007! The book's based on a conference held in July 2004, and I delivered my final chapter in May 2005. As you can see, the world of academic fast-track cash-in publishing is a bit of a whirlwind!
You can order it here or here, the first link's for the paperback which is a lot cheaper!
Go back to the top of the page
Go back to
the main page11 O'Clock Show Logo
© 
,
Death Bang Zoo Logo ©
Fit2Fill,
,
Short Trips images © 
.