Enjoy Yourself, Wooden Overcoats
L to R, Ciara Baxendale’s sleeve, Felix Trench, Beth Eyre, Tom Crowley, Kudzanayi Chiwawa, Pip Gladwin
Last week, on Thursday 31st March 2022, the last ever episode of Wooden Overcoats hit podcast feeds across the face of the Earth. This meant a number of things for me, Tom Crowley. Firstly, that my final ever performance as interloper undertaker Eric Chapman had been cut together, exported as an MP3 and released to the world. It meant that a joyful seven-year period of my life* had definitively come to an end. It also meant I spent an afternoon feeling distinctly sentimental, looking thoughtfully out of windows and dabbing at my damp eyes with a silken handkerchief, encouraged by the little Easter egg hidden right at the end of the final episode.
I didn’t feel any regret that we had ended the show where we did, nor was I worried that I’d lose touch with any of the wonderful people with whom I’d worked on the show, as one might at the end of a filmmaking project or a run of a theatre show. After all, we’ve worked together closely for seven years, our lives are somewhat intertwined at this point. I wasn’t even particularly missing the life that I lived when the show was first released, back in 2015, but I did feel an almost unbearable tugging at my heartstrings whenever I thought about this roof:
L to R: Beth Eyre, Felix Trench, Tom Crowley, John Wakefield, Andy Goddard, David K. Barnes, Eoin Hanlon, Alison Skilbeck, Betty Burns
That roof isn’t even there any more. Well, it is, but there’s a cabin on it which houses some sort of marketing company. Back in 2015, that roof was nothing but what you see here: a flat surface with some actors on it. This was the roof on top of Brixton’s ArtSpace Studios (now spruced up and renamed The Octagon, strongly recommended to fledgling bands and upstart podcasts), which served as our green room during the recording of Season One of Wooden Overcoats in June of that year. I thought the above photo was taken after our final wrap on Thursday 25th, but the caption on Facebook tells me that it was only Day Three, Wednesday 24th. The photo was taken by Ciara Baxendale, which is why she’s not in it. Whatever nonsense she’s just said is the reason that Beth, Felix and John are cracking up.
You know those times when you think to yourself, ‘I should appreciate this experience as fully as possible, as this is one of those truly special times that I never want to forget’? Well, the Tom there in the photo is thinking that very loudly. You might be able to hear it if you stare at the photo hard enough. Seven years is just long enough for your life and the world around you to change profoundly, enough that you feel like you’re describing a different world. When we were recording Season One of Wooden Overcoats, the word Brexit had never troubled the ear of a British voter and the phrase ‘President Trump’ was still just a silly throwaway gag in The Simpsons. As for us personally, it’s long enough ago that we still had the energy, the freedom and the devil-may-care ambition to attempt something as insane as writing, casting, performing, recording, editing and releasing an eight-episode radio sitcom for nothing but the love of it.
I wonder if we’d have the will to attempt something so ridiculous today? I imagine that these days we’d all insist that we secure the funding first, so that we can all be adequately paid for our work, before taking on something so vast and difficult. And that’s a good thing, of course. Mind you, these days, we’d be far more likely to get ahold of that funding. We’ve all come along in our careers, making more professional contacts and building up portfolios of hugely varied and exciting work. What’s more, the success of our three crowdfunding campaigns for Seasons Two, Three and Four have made us more gutsy than ever. That tends to happen when you discover that there are millions of hungry, friendly and extremely generous podcast listeners out there and they want to give you money to make things that they’ll enjoy.
Most important of all, back then, there was no Wooden Overcoats. Now there emphatically is. Four seasons, three runs of special mini-episodes and three seasonal specials of it, in fact. It’s an old saw, but when we began making the show, we really didn’t know if anybody would listen to it. We knew it would be good, that our friends and families would be impressed and that it would serve as a useful calling card for ourselves as writers, performers and producers, to be slipped shamelessly into the email inboxes of the powerful, if nothing else.
But Overcoats turned out to be more than just a calling card and somehow even more than just a popular show in its own right: it’s become increasingly clear that it’s been a bit of a trend-setter, first emerging at a time when hardly anyone else was making scripted comedy podcasts in the UK, and ending surrounded by dozens of similar shows. Of course, it’s ridiculous to take too much credit when the podcasting medium was exploding globally in all forms and genres anyway, but there are a number of extremely good podcasts that have cited Overcoats as their inspiration for getting started, including incredibly brilliant Adams-esque alternate past sci-fi romp Victoriocity, which followed our example so closely that they let me and several other Overcoats alumni be in it. The idea that we’ve managed to be some sort of positive example to other creative people is a finer thing than we could ever have hoped to achieve from this whole daft venture.
L to R: Beth Eyre, Tom Crowley, John Wakefield, David K. Barnes, Eoin Hanlon, Ciara Baxendale, Betty Burns, Felix Trench, Alison Skilbeck, Tom Gillieron
All of which is to try to indicate just how much water has passed under the bridge since we sat on that roof in Brixton, drinking affordable wine and feeling incredibly pleased with ourselves. So what about the memory of that moment made me ache? Is it perhaps the thought that we were all so full of hope and promise, and now the crushing reality of industry demands has brought our dreams of greatness into sharp focus? If we have since become a template for others to follow, is it the memory of a time when there was no model, no expectation and only the sky as the limit of what this largely unexplored medium could offer to some dedicated youngsters like us?
Perversely, the success of Wooden Overcoats does frustrate me in some ways. In fact, never mind us, over the last decade, an entire generation of young creatives have carved their own path via Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and whatever cooler, newer platform was launched since I began writing this paragraph. Faced with gatekeepers minding closed shops, we all built our own shops and started selling our wares from them to a surprisingly receptive world. This does hint at a more free, egalitarian media landscape in some ways, but I still can’t understand why the conventional broadcasters, living in constant fear of the deregulated online landscape of frighteningly young and popular creators, don’t just invite them in?
We, and lots of others, have made the case for letting the crazy kids do things their own way because that’s how you find the most special and enduring material. The halls of power seem to have noticed this, as far as we can tell from down here. So why, in 2022, is there no visible way for the young, starving, untested but promising creative to ascend to the lofty heights of actually being paid for making something that people eventually see? There are new talent development schemes and writers’ workshops aplenty, but how many of them end with the new intake actually having something made? And shown to anyone? Where’s the excitement? The trust? Why should anyone bother to sign up for these schemes when they’d be better served cadging the loan of some equipment and making their own short film, or TikTok channel or podcast sitcom set on a Channel Island?
L to R: Andy Secombe, Sean Baker, Tom Crowley, Ciara Baxendale, Felix Trench, Beth Eyre, Alison Skilbeck
A lot is made of the old boys’ club of days gone by, when Monty Python, mistrusted by the BBC elite but galvanised by the shiny lacquer of Oxbridge education and white male privilege, were given a thirteen-episode sketch show on Sunday nights. But today, a similar supergroup of six of even the most privileged and well-connected comedians would have to develop and fight for their own show for at least six years to eventually be rewarded with a three-minute pilot on BBC Comedy’s YouTube channel. Meanwhile, the commissioners tell us we’re doing brilliantly to be making our own work as it’s so freeing and we have so much control, seeming to forget that they hold the keys to a captive audience of millions while we advertise and socially network until our fingers bleed in the attempt to attract our first thousand listeners.
So maybe that was it. Maybe, with the door to Funn Funerals closing for the last time, I was saying goodbye to all the impossible dreams that until then were still at least remote possibilities and which, sitting on the ArtSpace roof in the sunshine, seemed like absolute certainties. We’ve made out like bandits through this show. We’ve been paid to make something we love, we’ve won awards, met hundreds of exciting and talented people, some of whom have even gone on to employ us, and we’ve felt the inimitable glow of knowing that there are total strangers out there, and lots of them, who love our silly show and take comfort from it at difficult times. And yet, despite all this, we somehow haven’t completely transformed the value systems and commissioning processes of the United Kingdom’s entire entertainment industry.
No, I don’t think that realisation, devastating though it may be, was why I felt so soppy on the day that Wooden Overcoats ended. Looking back, it seems pretty clear that the reason was simply that things are finite, damn them. Overcoats was over. Every gleeful moment; getting the giggles during the recordings and holding up an already-stretched schedule; going out for coffee during a break in the long days reading through the new season’s scripts; getting to act alongside genuine heroes of mine as well as old friends and startlingly brilliant newcomers alike; all the way back to that very first meeting where Felix, David and I met in a living room and chatted over what sorts of characters could make up this show about these small-town undertakers. What could we call such a show? Maybe a name that’s a slang word for coffins, or something. Google suggests ‘wooden overcoats’. Put that down, that’ll do for a placeholder. We can always change it later. All these joyful steps on a journey that, like all things, didn’t have the common decency to last forever.
L to R: John Wakefield, Tom Crowley, David K. Barnes, Pip Gladwin, Elle McAlpine, Andy Goddard, Andy Secombe, Ciara Baxendale, Beth Eyre, Betty Burns, Holly Campbell, Steve Hodson, Oscar French, Felix Trench, Paul Putner
Wooden Overcoats is a radio sitcom released as a podcast. It used to be the only one. It isn’t anymore. It consists of four full seasons as well as numerous mini-episodes and three pay-what-you-want specials. I play one of the lead characters, Eric Chapman, and also wrote several episodes. You can listen to the whole thing right now and, all being well, you’ll always be able to. The first episode was released on the 24th September 2015. The final episode was released on the 31st March 2022. I’m so glad that I’ll always be able to visit the village of Piffling Vale. But I’m really going to miss living there.
* Actually seven and a half. The earliest email I can find in my inbox relating to the project is from December 2014, meaning that the first conversations about it probably happened in the couple of months before then.