#6: the show I never talk about
why a creative "failure" from thirteen years ago still matters today
I promised you all that I’d send a brief email when our Kickstarter launched - but as it turns out, we raised our initial target of £6,000 in just six hours, so I didn’t feel the need to send you all an extra email! Thank you to every one of you who backed us so far. We’re overwhelmed by, and beyond grateful for, your support.
The Kickstarter is still live. We’re hoping to reach £10,000 before our campaign ends in two weeks. If we do, we can afford to make an extra episode of Murder for Dummies! If you haven’t yet, head here to support us. Rewards start at just £15.
If you haven’t seen the trailer yet - take a peek below!
When I talk about Casual Violence’s past, I usually leave out the first two years. This is mostly because I find what we put on stage quite embarrassing.
But, for the first time in a very long time, I’m going to talk about the show I almost never bring up. Embarrassment be damned.
Murder for Dummies isn’t really the first murder mystery I’ve written.
Finding our style
When talking about our history as a group, I tend to start with our first success: Choose Death, our award winning 2011 “breakthrough” Edinburgh Fringe show.
But before that, there were EIGHT live shows produced under the “Casual Violence Comedy” name: thrown together in the space of just two years by our university student selves. Our productions were various degrees of weird, dark, offensive, intentionally provocative, and all-round immature - as well as occasionally funny. Like all fledgling student comedians, we thought we were being boundary breaking and subversive. Bless our cotton socks.
I produced all eight of those shows, and wrote or co-wrote six of them. We mostly put them on in pub theatres in Brighton. They’re all easily dismissed as our early creative efforts - but maybe too easily, because of course I learned something from each of them. After our first show, my friend Lucy came up to me in the bar afterwards and said “Is it weird I felt sorry for Graham?” It was a bit weird - Graham was an awkward but well-intentioned necrophiliac who insisted on dragging his corpses on romantic dates first - but it sparked a realisation that maybe comedy could elicit a reaction more potent than just a laugh or a gasp.
A year later, Don’t Take Drugs - with sketches from several members of the group - was the earliest prototype for what would become our house style in Choose Death and beyond. We all wore suits (but not yet with black ties), we had Adam providing a live score and singing songs from his keyboard in the corner of the stage, and amid the many sketches rightfully (hopefully!) long forgotten, there were a couple of gems that survived beyond that one show and found a place in our best-of show years later.
But the show that came after it, even though it’s not (quite) the worst offender when it comes to our cringey, bad taste early material, is the one I rarely bring up. It was our first Edinburgh Fringe effort in 2010: a murder mystery play set in a second-hand sex toy shop, entitled:
Dildon’t! - a title suggested by Adam after I pitched him the concept* - was performed by our cast of then-eight (!) performers in our “comedy collective”, including Luke, Dave, Greg and Alex. I wrote and directed - opting out of performing so I could keep an outside eye. Y’know - to make sure the show with a skull and dildo crossbones on the flyer was good.
The very thin plot line revolved around a mysterious someone using famous serial killer Rose West’s dildo to commit a series of murders. Married shop owners Glen and Miriam Garfunkel (Greg, with then-Cas Vi regular Rosie) amiably welcomed in a variety of peculiar characters, one at a time: it was basically a loose framing device for a character comedy sketch show, with a gentle overarching story to give the show (wait for it…) a climax.
Luke played Axl, a shady black market dealer who sold sex toys from an oversized leather jacket. Alex played a forlorn necrophiliac (I love to recycle ideas) who comes in to purchase an inflatable sex doll in the hope of weaning himself off the habit, but ends up singing a jazzy little number about how much he loves having sex with dead bodies. Dave played a con artist named Humphrey Toad, and I can’t remember what he did for the life of me (sorry Dave), but we’d reuse the character name for House of Nostril three years later. Fellow cast member Meg played a decrepit, retired porn star who was a regular customer. Adam was sat in the corner with a strap-on dildo on his head; an artfully painted sign hung from his keyboard labelled him as “The Singing Strap On”. A single throwaway in-joke he improvised during one show, infuriatingly, provided the biggest laugh every time.
Memorable moments from Dildon’t! included a wordless, choreographed sequence where Alex tried to romance his new sex doll, culminating in him being attacked by the killer wearing the sex doll as a costume, wielding the twenty inch, fist-thick black dildo - and later, former Cas-Vi member Dino giving a memorably funny turn as an out of place film noir detective working for Thames Valley police.
Dildon’t! was surprisingly successful, at least by our early standards. We had some rough nights with it, but I recall audiences generally having a good time more often than not. We got mostly four star reviews from various Fringe review websites - a big deal for us back then. We sold out the show every night (but it probably helped that our tickets were about £4).
There were crushing lows along with the highs. Dildon’t! got a one star review in The Scotsman, written by then-notorious comedy reviewer Kate Copstick: my first review in a national newspaper. The following two years, we would successfully market Choose Death and A Kick In The Teeth by printing her review on our flyers beneath all our four and five star review quotes, but at the time it really stung - especially when a guy in the street turned down my flyer with a “No thanks mate, I read your review in The Scotsman”.**
It’s fair to say that Dildon’t! is not the show I want to be remembered for. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, because in retrospect it was - both creatively and practically, for a twenty-one year old writer and nine of his friends - a hugely ambitious piece of live comedy.
Despite the lowbrow setting, we genuinely made the effort to avoid the gags being more varied than a litany of sex jokes. We worked to give every character humanity: an empathic or striking moment, something audiences would connect with them over. We made the show as theatrical, elaborate, and (relatively) elevated as we knew how, resisting the temptation to always go for the cheap laugh.
It was also the first “full length” play I had ever written and produced, and while it was structurally very simple, we chose to take a punt on making something more interesting and marketable than a “standard” sketch hour. We wanted to stand out from the other comedy groups in Edinburgh, and… well, we definitely checked that box.
Being at the Fringe and seeing what other acts were doing heavily informed our next steps. I vaguely remember making the decision to do Edinburgh again the next year with the group, in a pub near our rented flat. What we learned up there refined our creative direction, leading us to our first real success with Choose Death.
Fail better.
There’s a couple of reasons I want to talk about Dildon’t! publicly for the first time in a decade.
I was talking to someone last week who struggles with anxiety about putting their writing out into the world. Their fear of rejection and failure regularly prevents them from creating. Encouraging them to make something anyway, and to recognise that failure and success are rarely a mutually exclusive binary, made me look back on Dildon’t! and remember how big an impact that studenty little show - that show I have been ashamed of - had on our creative path. It (thankfully) wasn’t the direction we continued to pursue, but it still heavily informed our next steps. Without making work I’m not proud of, I wouldn't have made the work I am proud of.
A couple of weeks before that, I was reminded of Dildon’t! for an unexpected reason.
The evening we launched our Kickstarter for Murder for Dummies, I was with Dave and Luke, coordinating our promotional efforts at a bar in London. We had more backers and higher pledges on that first night than we could have possibly anticipated (THANK YOU AGAIN IF YOU PLEDGED! THERE IS STILL TIME IF YOU HAVEN’T!)
We were on track to reach our minimum goal of £6,000 that night. By 9:30pm, we were around £250 away from that threshold. We started joking about how pissed off we’d be if we didn’t reach our goal before 10pm.
The person who put us over the line and helped us reach our goal gave us £200 at around 9:55, while Dave and I were heading to the Tube. We raised six grand in six hours. We were over the moon: thanks to our backers, we get to make Murder for Dummies a reality.
When we checked Kickstarter to find out who backed us, I recognised the name. It was a Scottish writer who had favourably reviewed Dildon’t! at the Fringe thirteen years ago - in a way that made us feel truly seen for what we were trying to achieve with the show - and then returned to give us our first Edinburgh five star review for Choose Death the next year. To us at the time, this felt like our first major acknowledgment of our creative progress as Casual Violence. Thirteen years later, our first murder mystery has helped secure the future of our second one.
Knowing something Casual Violence made when we were a gaggle of barely-twenty year old students made enough of a difference to someone that they would support us today makes me feel proud of that early, immature, deeply flawed and over-ambitious half-success for the first time.
Thank you, Craig - and thank you to all our fans old and new for supporting Murder for Dummies. We’re immensely grateful to all of you for helping us continue to do what we love.
Speaking of which…
Murder for Dummies shoots continue!
Last week, we shot a bumper amount of material for Murder For Dummies over the course of two days! We don’t want to give too much away, but here’s a sneak peek at what we were up to. We’re thrilled to welcome Amy Rockson, Susan Harrison, and Kathryn Bond to the cast, as well as herald the return of Sean Garratt and Lucy Farrett! If you look closely, you might be able to spot my own, much-awaited acting comeback nestled among these photos too…
Wondering why Lucy’s wearing a camera mounted on her head? Why Sean’s in chainmail? Why our DOP Chris Stone is so goshdarn handsome? You’ll have to wait until the show comes out…
* We wanted to call it Toy Story, but got worried Disney would sue us. And yes, the show had an exclamation mark in the title. “Casual Violence” also used to have one at the end of it (Casual Violence!). A copywriter friend regularly chides me for overusing exclamation marks in my communications - she has no idea how far I’ve come.
** Two years later, Copstick reviewed A Kick In The Teeth and gave us a very favourable write up, describing our show as “creative, strange, brilliantly performed stuff”. We were terrified about her coming to the show. I spoke to her afterwards; she didn’t even remember reviewing us before. That’s probably on her, but also: we were barely recognisable as the same act by then.