Show Notes
Stand-up comedian, writer and Peckham bookseller Ben Pope answers listener questions in this Q&A episode of the pod
Listeners ask Ben whether inspiration comes in sparks or from hard work, how you know if your joke is original or just unconsciously borrowed from someone you admire, and what the best knock knock joke he's ever heard is. Ben reflects on the years he spent writing material that came out sounding entirely like Dylan Moran, why comedians freely give each other punchlines after gigs, and why sitting in a café with a notebook is genuinely the pleasure of his life.
This is a conversation about creativity, originality, and why the thing that makes your work truly yours is simply that you wrote it — even if someone gave you the ending.
🎥 WATCH the full episode HERE 🎟️ Buy tickets to Ben's Book Club comedy show at the Fringe this year, or his WIP standup also in Edinburgh this summer 📘 OUT NOW Freya's novel: A Real Piece of Work. 💛 Follow @freybromley on Instagram for updates and to ask your questions 📚 Join Freya's newsletter at freyabromley.substack.com for behind the scenes thoughts 🎙️And hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Novelist Jem Calder reads from I Want You to Be Happy in this passage episode of Character Study, a scene about a hundred pages in, as his two characters go on early dates and feel each other out across a pub table by the river.
Novelist Jem Calder joins Freya to talk about I Want You to Be Happy, his debut novel about two people trying to fall in love while everything around them is engineered to distract them. Jem’s writing career started with Sally Rooney emailing him about the first story he’d ever finished and now his debut is on the tote bag of every literary it girl this summer. He tells Freya why he’d rather write a novel than a memoir (he’s a self-described cagey person who doesn’t like giving too much of himself away) and why he thinks of fiction as a gift, something a reader can reach for in their worst moments. They chat about how quickly a good line about phones curdles into cliché, why he keeps thousands of words of notes he’ll almost never use and why writing within the constraints of a genre is a form of respect for the writers who came before. A funny, honest conversation between two writers about connection, cringe and what fiction is for.
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