We're thrilled to have sold out two of our perks. That's all the pies in faces and both our private improv shows.

I'm up at 1am because my brain won't stop and I'm enjoying the irony of that happening on World Mental Health Day.

For our equally kind and sadistic followers, here is the fourth pie instalment, with more being filmed on Monday.

Well, it's turning around a little. We have some big donations in the bank and a lot of promised interest that we're gradually making real.

We have a new script supervisor who volunteered to help, which is amazing because that's a luxury crew member that we couldn't afford to hire!

In celebration of things looking positive, here's Ed getting pied in the face AGAIN. Oh, happy day.

Whenever I read about funding, I always come across the awkward middle slump; the bit half way through the month when you've picked up all the early adopters but you haven't got to the last-minute people yet. It's happening right here.

I'm plugging away at social media and people are helping out like legends, but we have been down on our targets for the last few days. 

Funding takes ages and it's like pushing a full time job into all the cracks where your other full time jobs breathe.

Delightfully, my students were talking about it in the pub last night. It's still on everyone's radar, we just have to make a few adjustments to perks, clear up some filmmaking jargon and double-down.

Most importantly, though, it's Ed's turn to get custard-pied.

As you may already have read, one of our first shows together (I'm sure it was our first duo) was a late night, ten minute bit show where one of us got pied when an alarm went off. The joke was to try and keep playing a regular improv scene without acknowledging it.

As a bit of misguided nostalgia, we've added a 'pie one of us in the face' perk to our IndieGoGo. At the time of writing, six people have already taken us up on it.

Now we are releasing one video a day of the ongoing battle. It's like a hostage situation for our faces.

We did it! Despite the horror of putting an ask into the world, we published our crowdfunder yesterday. It's been less than 24 hours and we're at 5%. 
You can contribute here.

Today we're at the Hoopla Improv Marathon where we perform for the third year running in a custard-pie grudge-match bit show. It's a pretty good reminder that this is all for a comedy show. 

We were more than prepared for a challenge, but I don't think either of us expected it to come this soon.

I came home late from a show and was excited to check out the footage of our crowdfunding video. Ed had made a rough cut. I watched it and suddenly felt a bit weird. It was... disappointing. Some of the visual gags didn't quite work, the camera moved too much in the tracking shot, the lighting was off in the first part and the mic we used on Ed was for shit.
I sat there in the dark worrying. All these friends had come to help us and we'd had a great time shooting it. "It's just the IndieGoGo," I thought, "so that's fine, right?" 

I went to bed feeling strange about how dissatisfied I was. It didn't sit right. I woke up the next day and got in touch with Ed to check if I was being paranoid. It was sub-par, right? We had looked at the footage on site, but only on the camera itself. We couldn't see the shakiness, we only checked the mics were working, not the quality of our back-up mic (we were missing a lead). We were both kind of sad. We gave it another thinking day, then agreed - let's face it - in order to ask people for help and funding we were going to have to put some more work in.

It didn't have to be amazing. The whole point is that we are looking for support to make something professional-looking and we can't do that without money. But we knew we could do this better. 

We rescheduled. Some of our kind cast of extras couldn't free themselves from normal human jobs at the only time we had free. We struggled to get people. We pulled the second attempt at a shoot as we didn't have a cast in time. We desperately wanted Elly because she'll be playing Lindsay (the lead to our Sideliners) in the series and she's damn funny. We changed the script a little and shot the bits with her alone. Two of our industry chums got in touch. They wondered why we weren't calling in their offers for help just yet. We felt embarrassed. There are so many talented and willing people. Amanda Palmer's Art of Asking was singing in our ears.

Time was running out and we were both due to teach and perform at the Maydays Improv Retreat in Dorset the following week. How on earth were we going to get this done any time soon? There. Shoot it there. Borrow some students and friends on a lunch break and kindly ask Rob to shoot it. 

Boom. Now it's clean, it's funny and the sound is much better. It's not perfect, it's still a scrappy freebie and a collection of favours, but we like it and we hope it will inspire our friends to help us make the pilot. And those two friends; one is going to take a look at our IGG edit and the other is our new Director.

Watch this space.

We are both damn excited, but also the anxiety is hitting us gently like a coffee in a tea-drinker. We're only taping a tiny IndieGoGo video, but corralling a cast of ten and a crew of one is still a job that needs to be done well. We both over-thank everyone on set because these kind friends have gone out of their way to help us. They keep thanking us too. We forget sometimes that it is just delightful to be in a stupid video for an hour or two, despite having a super jolly time ourselves.

It is a very rare thing indeed that I can recall detailed information at all, but I can definitely recall when Katy and I first talked about Sideliners. Katy and I like to put together bit-shows at the Hoopla Improv Marathon that happens every year. Katy just got in touch with me one time and just said, “let’s put on a stupid show’. What followed was a soon-to-be three-year tradition of shows where we try to do improvise a scene and slam a custard pie in one another’s face.
I was also playing a Texan in a play elsewhere in London during the lead-up to this first Pie-day Night show, so I was cracking jokes about Matthew McConaughey and his history of romantic comedies over Messenger. Katy asked “What’s your type in a Rom Com?” The phrasing seemed weird to me and, frankly, I had no idea what she was talking about. I responded “something between 500 Days of Summer and Shaun of the Dead”. I’m a big film nerd and I thought she was asking me which ones I liked stylistically. You know… to watch.
She kindly corrected me. She was talking about character types, which in retrospect makes perfect sense and this is a classic example of Fargher-brand awkwardness that my friends know me well for. I guess I just never presumed that I would even factor in to the casting of a romantic comedy. But I said that I was definitely the best friend. This has been my casting type for pretty much every role I have ever gotten as an actor. Even in the junior play at school, I remember cracking jokes about it with my actual best-friend Culum, who was playing the lead and to whom I was also playing the best friend on stage. It’s ridiculous. I was 14 and I was already type-casting myself. Remember that awkwardness I was telling you about? That goes back a way.
Anyway. Katy responded in like, saying that she was either a quirky lead or a best friend. And then the discussion began. “There’s definitely a show in two ‘friend of the lead’ characters.” We riffed on it, then got back to the business at hand, which resulted in me being publicly pie-ed in face late at night on the Hoopla Impro stage. That was in 2017. And we didn’t talk about this idea for the rest of that year.
Now, what I did not tell Katy, or anyone in fact, is that this idea hung around in my mind for months and months. It bothered me. It plagued my creative mind. It was a great idea and it was definitely something I wanted to pursue but I was timid about doing because I was busy, Katy was busy… And when a good idea sinks its claws in to my imagination, it can completely ruin my creative process. I have several scripts written that will never see the light of day (but I wrote) because they were good ideas that were clogging up my mind to the extent that I couldn’t work on anything else until I wrote at least a version of them somewhere! But the concept felt very much like Katy’s and we hadn’t worked together that much at that point, and it felt like something I had to work on with Katy, or not at all.
Spin forward a year or so and Katy and I work together on plays, improv, hip hop shows (believe it or not) and we performed our second pie show, Pie Hard, in which I also ended up getting a pie in the face (Katy is 2-0 on pie shows, but I shall have my revenge). The next day, we also perform an improvised Rom Com and then at the Stroud Theatre Festival, I finally get round to watching Katy’s one-woman show, Schutte The Unromantic. It’s awesome and I found myself thinking there is definitely material in there for a different type of romantic comedy. Now, we have not really talked about our Rom Com idea, but it was still bothering me. STILL! AFTER A YEAR! But I don’t say anything because Katy is an insanely busy person… and basically because Katy wrote the first pages and stuck them on a Google Doc for me to look at!
What followed was an amazing ping pong session of us both writing pages, editing each other’s pages and giving each other equal license to do so to the point that I genuinely can no longer tell who first wrote which pages or whose ideas they were and what edits we made for each other. It was an excellent experience. Then we started meeting for read throughs. Then we started inviting some trusted allies to some read throughs. And now we’ve got one coming up for a 94 page script that is some of my favourite writing I have ever done. Not just the script. The process of writing it has been sublime.
Now we get to make the thing! But we are going to need a little help…
And as for the pie shows. When the next Hoopla Improv Marathon happens… I will get my pieback… payback.. with pie… We may need a lot of help…

I don't exactly remember where Sideliners began, but I remember me and Ed sitting down for a coffee* after a Let's Summon Demons rehearsal and discussing our writing project ideas. I seem to remember that at least two of our ideas were the same. 
*I don't drink coffee, I'm the tea one.
It was on my only ever business class flight to Saudi Arabia that I started researching the idea for Sideliners properly by drinking and watching Zac Efron in 17 Again. In case you get the wrong idea, it was a one time weird improv job that meant I was flying business class. Anyway, once I'd laughed my ass off at Zac getting repeatedly getting slapped in the face I wrote our first scene. None of that dialogue made the script as it is today, but Ed took a look and wrote the next bit. 
We went back and forth for a few months, just working remotely; editing one another's bits and adding our own. It seemed pretty organic and I often can't tell or remember who wrote what in the present incarnation of the show.
We started meeting in person after my 3-month Middle Earth Crisis trip to New Zealand to edit and co-write. We realised that we'd written a feature length script and thought it was probably time to show it to some friends...