Alex Garrick-Wright is an improv performer and comedy writer, whose credits include BBC’s Newsjack, DMs Are Open, The Now Show and The Social. Winner of the David Nobbs Memorial Trust award for comedy writing 2023 with his writing partner Rebecca Bain, he’s based in Shetland.
Q: Hello Alex, thank you for this interview! Can you tell us how you got started writing comedy?
I met my writing partner, Rebecca, at a workshop during the first Edinburgh International Improv Festival. Up to that point, writing comedy wasn’t on the radar. We did a scene in a workshop (2 horny gazelles at a watering hole) and hit it off. We had a compatible sense of humour so when we stayed in touch, we eventually began trying to write sketches together. We got our first radio credit on BBC Radio 4’s Newsjack later that year and it just took off from there.
Q: Moving on to the present day – what can a typical week look like, in the life of a (literal and figurative!) remote comedy writer?
Lots of little writing sessions wherever I can fit them in! What I’m doing week to week varies greatly; if there’s a show I regularly write for (like BBC Radio Scotland’s Breaking the News), it’ll involve Rebecca and I writing pages and pages of topical gags on Tuesday and Wednesday. If I’m in a writers’ room for the Now Show or the News Quiz, it’ll be 2 intensive days writing jokes and sketches. And if there’s nothing broadcasting, it’s evenings developing our own ideas; sitcoms for pitching, spec scripts, sketches, whatever. Sometimes all of them at once.
Q: Scottish humour can be incredibly dry and deadpan compared to other parts of the UK – do you ever encounter culture clashes in the writer’s room?
A lot of broadcast radio comedy is very London-centric, so a Scottish perspective is a bit of fresh air. It also gives shows a licence to make jokes about Scotland with an authentic voice, rather than a couple of blokes from Chichester ripping the piss out of Scots from an ivory tower. In the last series of the Now Show, I got referred to on-air as ‘The Scottish Writer’ when they felt the need to clarify that a gag about deep-fried food was written by an actual Glaswegian, just in case the audience felt it was a bit iffy.
Q: How would you describe your comedy style – and does it change depending on the medium involved?
It definitely changes for the medium. My default is dark and a bit silly, and all the writing I do by myself and with Rebecca I think definitely falls into that. For topical shows with some teeth like Breaking the News, it’s fun to go for quite sharp gags that really punch up. For shows that don’t really go for the jugular, I’ll often get whimsical with it and that’s always fun. Scottish comedy often has a really surreal edge so I’m always happy to go a bit weird.
Q: Who are some of your comedy inspirations?
A very prominent inspiration is Consolevania, a scrappy comedy webseries about video games. It’s so old that you used to have to message the creators on a forum and ask them to send you the episode on CD-R(!) It was a side project of Rab Florence, who went on to do Burnistoun and The Scotts, and it’s actually still going on Patreon. Just a handful of guys with one camera and zero plan, fannying about and filming around Glasgow, doing whatever they wanted.
Next to that, it has to be the League of Gentlemen (both the series, and the troupe of the same name). It’s dark, scary, daft, emotional, brutal, ridiculous, and memorable. It’s nearly the perfect comedy series. In addition, of all the post-League projects, Shearsmith and Pemberton’s Inside No 9 stands out as maybe the best television of the 21st century.
Q: Tell us about the Kickstarter project you’re involved with, what drew you to this project?
I’m currently writing a story for the Wish Upon A Star anthology, for Irish comic publisher Limit Break Comics. I wrote a story called The Doom That Came To Midgard for the previous anthology, which was a horror/Norse mythology mash-up, taking the legend of Ragnarok as Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
Wish Upon A Star is a sci-fi/fairy tale mash up and I was excited to write a grand space-faring tale that covers the last hope of mankind. It is also a fairy tale (but I won’t spoil which one). The previous anthologies have been fantastic works with a wide range of talented authors and artists (and me) so I can’t recommend this one enough.
Q: You were recently in Edinburgh, performing at the Edinburgh International Improv Festival – what else should we look out for in 2024?
Oooh hopefully a bunch of stuff, which I can’t really talk about much at the moment! Currently it’s a lot of development work and a couple of time-consuming projects, so it’ll be some time before there’s any good news, but we’ll be working hard to make people laugh.
Kickstarter (runs until 31 March 2024) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paulcarroll/wish-upon-a-star-0/
Wish Upon a Star is the brand new anthology from Limit Break Comics, the publishers behind Turning Roads, Down Below, and Fractured Realms. With this project, the focus is turned towards modern mythology, to fairy tales, with a far-future sci-fi twist!
Editors Paul Carroll and Gary Moloney are teaming up once again to bring 22 short stories into the world from creators from all over the world, for a total of 88 pages of comics. Rediscover your old favourites, turn your attention to the limitless possibilities of the future, and never forget to make a wish upon a star…