Bring Your Own Blockbuster

Murder for Dummies - Pod Special

In this special episode, Jack chats with writer James Hamilton about his latest project, Murder for Dummies, a six-part comedy-horror series that’s as scary as it is hilarious.

James shares the journey of bringing this crowdfunded show to life, now available to watch for free on YouTube. Together, they explore the creative process, the unique challenges of writing for yourself versus working with big players like Netflix (where James has worked previously), and what it takes to make people laugh while scaring the wits out of them.

Tune in for an insightful conversation and a few behind-the-scenes secrets. And don’t forget to check out Murder for Dummies on YouTube or visit murderfordummies.com!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Broadcast on:: 10 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

(upbeat music) - Hello everybody, welcome back to BYOB. Bring your own blockbuster podcast. Very special episode today. As I'm joined by writer, creator, and unfortunate recipient of my Christmas day and other such family gathering type banter. James Houghton, what are you doing? - I wouldn't describe it as unfortunate. I'm doing all right, thank you. How are you doing? It's very kind, very kind. Quite right mate, it's an exciting day. I wanted to, look, I'm gonna use the kind of the, the family card and I thought that I can jump in and grab James while he's. - Epitisms of wonderful things. - So hot right now. (laughing) Look, look, murder for dummies is out today. What is murder for dummies, James? Tell me what murder for dummies. - I feel like in a weird space of having said it so many times and yet I'm feeling nervous that I'm gonna somehow misspeak saying it now. But murder for dummies is a six episode horror comedy who'd done it. It is a series that my comedy group casual violence and I have made entirely independently. The first two episodes came out today, which is the 10th of October. And we're gonna be releasing episodes weekly for the next few weeks. Basically, the premise is, as we all know, back in the '90s, ventriloquism was more popular than Princess Diana, the Spice Girls. We all remember this. This was the thing that definitely happened. Those were the days. And it was all thanks to this one guy, this one incredibly successful ventriloquist called Keith Flap, who gets murdered in his dressing room in the West End in the late '90s and the killer is never found. And so this is a true crime documentary that's being made in the present day. And the filmmaker is trying to, you know, dig into this, find out who killed Keith. But everybody being interviewed clearly has a motive for killing Keith, like everyone from like his manager to like his widow, his son, his ex double act partner, who obviously is a dummy. And I think one of the first things that just appealed to us about doing this is like, oh, it'll be really fun that we get to interview a dummy for this. So that's the setup. And we've got six episodes of this. And then one thing that starts to happen over the course of the episodes is, we do that kind of agatha-christy thing where one by one, the interviewees start getting murdered because the killer has come back and does not want anyone to discover the truth about what happened. So start killing off the interviewees in increasingly theatrical ways. And so you then have this sort of ticking clock documentary kind of unraveling slightly where will the element where the interviewees are getting nervous and that's talking to accuse each other. And it's a question of whether or not we can find out who the real killer is before everyone dies. - I've been, I was lucky enough to be invited to the premiere and jokes about cronyism and everything aside. It's genuinely brilliant. I wanna say that upfront. I've enjoyed the, very much enjoyed the episodes that we were able to see at the premiere. And I guess, I think for anybody hearing that kind of synopsis there, they'd be thinking, "What on earth?" Like a murder mystery, the murder mystery and dummies. Where the hell has that come from? So, I mean, where was the idea first hatched? - Sure, so I mean, if the thing is, I feel like, and I feel like it's been true with all of the comedy that I've made myself. I feel like we've always gotten a version of that reaction. And a lot of the time we've just been like, we just thought it would be funny, but this specifically, the potted history background of my comedy group is that we've met at university. Casual violence is the name of my group. We made this together. We used to do the Edinburgh Fringe a lot. The rest of my group, we developed things together, but they don't write, which is nice for me, because I wanted to be the writer. So, we would do the Edinburgh Fringe. We were a live actor about 10 years. And then we partnered up with a film director called James Roberts, who we make short films with. And then in 2019, I moved to LA for work. And so that obviously put an end to doing live comedy, as well as a couple of the other guys have kids now and like going through this, you know, everyone's sort of becoming an adult and doing other things. But we still wanted to make stuff together. And the theory was that we could just do that remotely because I don't need to be in it. I used to perform, but I don't tend to do that much anymore. I want to write. And I was like, well, everybody else is there. We can figure this out. And God said no, there was a pandemic. And everyone, you know, the fates conspired to try and stop us from making anything. We didn't do anything for a little while. And then when the vaccines got announced, we started having Zoom calls again, just to start brainstorming ideas. And we wanted to do something, obviously I think film was the main thing we were thinking about. We had a bunch of short film ideas. I wrote some sketches. We had a different idea for a series that we didn't go for. And at some point we kind of went back to the drawing board 'cause we had a series idea that was getting too unwieldy and out of hand. And so the conversation that led to murder for dummies was going, okay, back to square one. What do we want to make? We felt like we're making a short film. We've made so many short films already. What's the point? We've done this before. So we wanted to do something that was a series. My pitch initially was that we do something that is documentary format, partly because frankly, that is cheap to make. And the logic was if we wanted to do something that was a whole multi-episode series, you can shoot everybody's parts for the whole series in one day. Like you can have one person sit down and shoot their material for as many episodes as they're in in one go. And so it's quite an efficient way of going about making this. And a lot of it is locked shots, talking heads. So in that way also, in theory, it's efficient. And so that was part of the logic. And separately, when we were brainstorming, one of the guys in my group had suggested making a murder mystery. I think just as like I just did off the cuff pitch. And so for me, I think the thought was, well, then why don't we combine those two things? Because with true crime documentary, excuse me, the thing with true crime documentary is that you have, there's always like one person who it is. It's always did this incredibly suspicious man do it or not. And for us, I think with everything that we've kind of done, we have always wanted to take the approach of like not doing something that feels super familiar. There's a lot of true crime documentary parody, there's stuff we like, but a lot of it kind of feels samey. And we didn't want to do it just a parody. We thought that was kind of a bit played out and boring. So the idea of actually making it a who done it, like a proper Agatha Christie, Ryan Johnson murder mystery, and having everybody be very guilty and having it really be a question of like, oh, everyone on this show could have done it. That was very appealing creatively then to us because it felt original. And then coupling that with the ventriloquism idea, that was almost off the cuff in a way because we had a sketch years and years ago that we used to perform on stage where one of the group Alex played the ventriloquist dummy and was sat on Luke's lap and it was about their relationship. And so I think that was just almost like a go-to, it's almost quite a lazy thought for like, oh, this is what it could be for casual violence. And so that's kind of where the concept was born. So it was partly, I guess, out of practicality and partly out of, in a way, creative laziness to begin with. We just reached for like the first thing it kind of would be about for us. And we're like, oh, okay, ventriloquism, that sounds fun. And it all kind of span out from that. - Yeah, well, you say that. You say creative laziness, but I think one of the things that really struck me about a lot of the dummies when I was watching it is it's a very original twist on a bit of a horror trope, right? You've got the dummy, we think of films like Chucky, Child's Play, that type of thing. But the fact you've managed to turn this into, I don't know, I think a very, a very human story in many ways. I love the way in which these ventriloquists have, they've essentially become, they've taken the place of like Premier League footballers in the world. (laughing) Which I think is a lovely touch though, like they're like the very apex of what you can't be in. - Yeah, that was a thing that we thought was really fun with this is just this, I can't remember whether I have that idea or somebody else pitched it, but I think just taking the angle with it that everyone loves ventriloquism and it's like Marvel in this universe. Like it's just one of those things where like, everyone thinks it's brilliant. No one is scared of ventriloquist dummies. Everyone is just like, it's just like this one weird thing about this world where everybody just takes it as red. The ventriloquism is, and has always been, and has been for a long since the 90s, since Keith Lapamour, the victim, started his career just being incredibly popular. And I think they just opened up comedically what we could do with it. Because to be, I think that was just part of the joke. It's part of kind of what makes it funny is that we know the audience watching this. It was probably a bit freaked out by ventriloquist dummies and probably will find them a bit creepy and rightly. I mean, I had to buy all of these fucking dummies. And they, you know, I had to buy them in the light. - Oh my God, I had to buy them. I bought them on eBay. And I said they would come here. And I remember my girlfriend at the time saying, don't let them see our house, which I think was fair. So I barely looked at them. So I was glad they actually turned out all right. And then I had to bring them back to the UK when I was flying back for visits because I couldn't afford to ship them because they were very expensive to ship. So I was taking them in my luggage and I was convinced the first time I did it, the plane was gonna come down and it'd just be the dummy and like the black box, you know. It'd just be that. So everybody obviously has this pre-existing relationship with ventriloquist dummies. And I think one thing that we've always liked to do with our kind of comedy, especially with the stuff we make on film, is play it very straight, is kind of not do it with much of a wink to camera, but just treat the thing like it's real. And from a performance point of view, just kind of buy into the reality of it 'cause we think that makes it funnier. And so just everybody very casually accepting this idea that ventriloquism is great and everyone loves ventriloquist dummies and why wouldn't you to us was like a very funny little spin on it. But I think it gives you, it allows it to kind of be comedic, but then it still already just has that horror edge kind of bubbling underneath it because for the audience watching it, it's like we know what they are. - Well, it really does. And I think one of the other things that really struck me about this is that you've got such an array of characters, but they're all very well developed. Like I think the story is so nicely paced and you get such a lovely texture to the narrative that runs throughout this that when you do sort of, as you say, in the Agatha Christie style, start to amp up the horror or thriller elements towards the end of each episode, you do actually really start to feel that. It's so funny how disarming it can be when you've spent the past 20 minutes cackling about kind of gags about ventriloquists being, like I say, the David Beckham of this world. And then suddenly you are actually on the edge of your seat. I mean, I know, 'cause obviously I know you, but for the audience, your influence is you are very influenced by kind of darker comedy stuff. I'm sure you're influenced by many things, but in that, in one respect, you are influenced by quite darkly comedic things. How did you find the process of balancing the horror and comedy in your writing in this? 'Cause would you say, I mean, this is, you've hinted at things close to this before, but I'd say this is a step for you, right? - Yeah, in some ways it definitely is. I think the thing about me, honestly, is when it comes to horror stuff, is that in terms of actual watching horror, I am, I'm a coward and I'm a total coward. I'm really, really bad with horror movies. I don't know if my sister ever told you, but when I was a kid, the film I was most terrified of and anything was Jumanji, which took a lot of guts to come back and watch as an adult and be like, oh, it's not that scary, actually, but it is a weird film. And I really, watching it as an adult, this is obviously a total sidebar, but I realize what it is that I did find scary about it, which I do stand by, which is that scene where I can't remember whether they're mosquitoes or wasps, but the giant ones and they're flying everywhere, and there's a shot from the inside of somebody's car and you see the stinger come through the windshield and to attack the guy. And then when they cut to that scene later and the cops are there, you seem getting wheeled away and there's a sheet over, he's dead. He's a bit killed and it's the kind of thing that falls into that weird 90s bracket of not even that you could just get away with these things, but just tonally, there was for better and worse in some ways less thought into about the impact of that stuff on kids than there is now. And so I stand by being scared of that as a kid, but I have remained a total horror coward. I watched barbarian under duress and literally the only way I could get myself to watch it was I watched it on a plane. And literally when it got too scary and they're going down that corridor, I like, you could minimize the window in window and I did that, that's how I would get it. - I thought barbarian's a baptism of fire for somebody who doesn't really like horror movies as well. - It's just everyone was saying it's so good, you know? And so I've got to watch it. I've got to see what people are talking about, but as I say, under duress. So I like having horror stuff in comedy, but I was saying all of this, I guess, because horror, specific horror movies weirdly and they're not that big an influence on me because I don't watch them because I'm scared. So for this, in terms of like thinking about those sequences and thinking about the drama of that, I think the thing that does appeal to me about comedy in general, and this sort of goes back to what I was saying about not trying to make the show a parody, what I really like is being able to kind of play with the tropes of different genres, like I'm being able to kind of bring those in and use them kind of with the comedy, just sort of blend with the comedy, rather than use comedy as a way to sort of remove yourself and point and laugh at them. Like it's quite nice to be able to borrow from lots of other different genres and lean into stuff. I don't know if a dummy is a big example of that, but I think, you know, when I'm applying for other jobs and when I'm writing other things, I think the way I kind of pitch myself as a writer a lot of the time is not specifically that I'm a comedy horror writer, although I am and do that. But more than what I like is being able to kind of play with other genres and bring them into comedy and use comedy to find ways to keep them feeling fresh and like subversive and surprising, because comedy relies on that subversion and you can play like a horror thing, horror obviously relies on subversion as well, of subversion of expectation, but you can play it kind of quite straight and it's true for a lot of genres, there are tropes that you expect to be there. And for me, it's not about undermining those tropes and making fun of those tropes, but just finding a way to then come out of them in a slightly different way is always kind of cabinet to me. So with the ends of those different episodes of "Mead of the Dummy" is, I think similarly, you know, in a way like that, you know, I don't want to get too deep into spoilers, but the first person who dies at the end of one of the episodes, it's kind of quite straightforward, you know, it's like, you don't necessarily expect it 'cause it's the first time it happens and if you haven't been following the, you know, the promotional stuff about it, you wouldn't know it's necessarily going to be there, but it obviously then sets up the expectation that this is going to happen. And so part of the way that we had to try and work with that was, okay, we obviously want to build the theatricality, find ways to, if we're going to kill off different characters, then we're going to want to do this in a way that feels like it's still going to surprise people. And sometimes that's just kind of by upping the theatrics of it and kind of making it maybe gory or in some way or pushing that boundary. But in other times, like in later episodes, it's changing things like when it happens, like so it's not necessarily happening at the end of the episode, like you think it's going to, or catching people off guard with how it's going to happen. So you get to a place where it's like, okay, I know somebody is probably about to die, but I don't know how they're going to die. And finding a way to kind of pull the rug under them. And I think the nice thing about the premiere when we were there and I was, it's my first time watching it in front of an audience is hearing gasps, hearing that kind of shock, hearing those moments land. Because even in a show where we had a few episodes of setting up the expectation that characters were going to die, they were still getting caught off guard and still getting surprised. And that was really exciting to me. So I think we wanted to try and, you know, borrow from other genres as much as we can and just find creative ways to, just, I guess, play with it. Because I think that's that kind of lends it an extra thing. I think the thing we felt doing comedy even when we started was it's all well and good just making somebody laugh. Like, that's great if you can make people laugh and we don't want to undermine that at all. But if you can pull in other emotions, if you can make people feel a lot of things, if you can make people feel sorry for those characters or worried for them, if you can build that tension and play with those sorts of stuff, then you've got something that feels really memorable. And so I think that was something that I learned really early on from doing live comedy and then trying to find ways to execute that and other things as well. - I think a lovely example of that, it's not a spoiler 'cause I believe you reference it in the trailer is the main character who the story built around Keith Flap having his own personal live-in butcher. (laughing) It's really great by Greg from casual violence. And he had such a brilliantly sinister and gory undertone to it without it being, I mean, it is explicit gore in a way but it's not, you know, it's not... - Yeah, it's an action movie gore, it's... - No, but I mean that's a way of getting some in. - That's one of the first obviously like big kind of sort of comically gory things. And that came from, you know, like the first thing we would do before I wrote anything, we were having Zoom meetings where we were bouncing ideas around and I was sort of providing a structure for us to kind of bounce ideas around, talk about characters, think about who we wanted, who the potential suspects could be in this and assemble our kind of crew. And I don't know, you have watched the jinx, right? The HBO series. - I believe so. - I mean, okay, well, whether you have or haven't, like the jinx, I mean, jinx is amazing but it's also like an incredible, I guess it's the true crime series and it's like a, it's a real classic of the genre and what's fascinating about it is the guy who is kind of the main suspect really early on agrees to kind of sit down and be interviewed by them regularly. So he's in a lot of the episodes and there's a lot we kind of took from the jinx but one thing in particular was that the guy, the murderer, 'cause he so blatantly is the murderer in that and he's just, he's just incredibly creepy. He's like, he's the most sinister man and I feel like in a lot of true crime documentaries, you get this, you have this element of like, whoever it is they're talking about, whether they actually did it or not, they're trying to play that ambiguity but they seem so creepy. And so even though we were already doing this thing of, oh, everyone in the show is guilty, my question to the group was, well, I remember this really specifically, it's like, what do we, how do we do that? What is a character we can have who seems as menacing as Robert Durst does on the jinx? Like Durst has got these like black kind of shark eyes and he's like burping a lot and he's weird, he's like a creepy man. And I wanted to sort of see if anyone had any pictures and I think Alex from my group suggested live in butcher. So that was his pitch and it's such a big laugh immediately and so I'm like, right, okay, we'll put that character in because it's not just that he's creepy but saying there's a Durst in the jinx, everyone's going, well, miloi, no, no, it couldn't be him. Like, he's just the nicest but he would never do anything like this. That to me was, I think, really funny watching the jinx and I wanted to kind of put that in this. And then the way Greg plays him, to your point, I think, as well. It's like, he seems incredibly menacing and when you see him, he's covered in blood and he's cutting me and he's seeing all these creepy things. And then you get into like the second episode and I think, you know, you talk about the characters, the guys are truly playing them in far more, you know, everyone in the cast is playing like how it doesn't far more dimensions than I wrote them in because Greg playing miloi, you get into the second episode and you're like, I really like this man. Like, I think he's very charming and I don't think I wrote him charming but Greg plays in charming. And there's a joke that I did write that's in the second episode where Greg, where miloi says my therapist has got a lot from his plate now, I can tell you because I pay him with meat. And we thought that was like really funny but just funny is a line but then the fact that he is in therapy, for some reason you buy that he is in therapy because the way Greg is playing him is like weirdly has this depth and has this nuance that again, I truly like, I wish I could take him from me. Similarly, Dave plays a character called Dicky Rolex who is this sort of extremely bitter rival ventriloquist who accuses Keith of having kind of stolen his act, stolen his ideas like kind of his whole shot at the big time, he was gonna be a famous ventriloquist and Keith screwed him over. And I didn't expect to feel sorry for that character in the way that we ended up feeling and it is all down to the way Dave played him because I think there's bits where even though what he's saying is so silly and sometimes so angry and he is so bitter, he really brought that vulnerability into it. And I think that does come from just the fact that as a group, that has been what we've been pushing with our comedy. We like having big monstrous characters and then making them vulnerable, finding a way to humanize them, taking somebody that seems grotesque and ridiculous and then making me go, oh, like, is it weird? I felt sorry for this person and all the cast did phenomenally but like those two, you know, I mean, I'm obviously very proud of casual violence as a group for their roles in this and those two examples are ones where it's like they brought a dimension to their character that I didn't necessarily write in as much as I would like to say that I did. - I wanted to sort of take this back to the start if you like 'cause you mentioned that this was a crowd funded project and I recall a while back, you'd written a really interesting piece on your sub-stack essentially about the convergence of as a creative as having, you know, writing for your profession and writing as a passion and where, you know, doing it for a job is great and it's brilliant but also it is still a job and it can take away from that passion if you like. How have you found the experience of going this route, going the crowd funded route, being your own boss of essentially, you know, calling the shots on a creative project, bringing it to life like this? - Yeah, well, it's been, it's been a weird one and in a way it's like, murder for dummies is a much bigger thing than anything that we've ever made independently. So in that way, it was kind of a real step up. It was, but it was, in terms of that experience of it, I guess it was a conflation of a lot of things that I had already done. Like I've been running casual violence and leading the creative of this group for a long time. So like I, you know, I know how we do things and we're building on that. And also I've been, you know, working as a writer now for, you know, like full time for like a few years weirdly and it doesn't really, like it doesn't want to kind of quite add them up because that will be depressing. But I've been doing this for a while and when I moved here, it was to be head writer on like a six to 11 like kids animated series called Dogs in Space. And so I've done that and I did another show that is coming out later this year. And both of those kind of, you know, I wasn't show running either of those. I was in the, I was in the head writer role. So I was in that position of okay, like running a writer's room, having a kind of broad strokes kind of view like, okay, we've got to figure out the story and then really get into the details working directly with not just the writers, but working with the artists and kind of the showrunner and everybody else to try and you know, put the series together. So by the time we was working on Modaford Dummies, I tangibly had that experience that I could kind of bring to it as well. And I think that really helped like enough professional experience to kind of filter into making this. But, you know, on that subject of making your own stuff as opposed to working for other people, I've found both Dogs in Space and Gentry Tower versus the underworld, the one that's coming out later this year really rewarding to work on. I used to think all I wanted was to kind of make my own show and actually I've been very happy working in that position on other people's shows and making them good and collaborating with those people. So doing this was less about, oh, I want my own thing and kind of more about, you know, as part of my job, I'm trying to pitch things a lot and trying to pitch ideas for shows or pitch on IP for other people and you can have shows in development which I have done that can take years and years and then far longer than they need to. And then by the time you pitch it, the streamers and the studios are kind of going like, oh, well, you know, that's great. But we're not really making shows that have chairs in them and we can see this one does. So we're passing and they're like, well, we can take the chair out. And they're like, no, so once a lot of what I have to do is, and maybe this is just me, but I don't think it is just me unsuccessfully pitch or develop and, you know, so I've pitched it. I've successfully got it in with a smaller studio, but then actually getting it over the line into, oh, this is the show is going to be green lit. Just needing permission, permission to make something, this job, when you're doing it, like full time requires you to put a lot of, it requires you both to invest a lot of yourself into it, but then be completely cool if it doesn't work out. And that's a very hard thing to do. And so-- - Well, don't you? There's a level of vulnerability for putting your creative vision out there for somebody to pick apart and say, as you say, well, no, you know, it's zombies now, not vampires or whatever, you know. - Yeah, and sometimes you can spend years on it. There's a development project I had that I was doing for two and a half years, I still think is a really good show. And I just coincided with a big industry downturn and that kind of meant I couldn't make the thing. So with this, honestly, part of the motivation for making it was not wanting permission to make something. I think part of that as well is I learned a lot doing gentry, I learned a lot doing dogs in space because those are shows where it's like I was working on them for a long time and they're in production. So I was definitely growing as a writer through doing those. But when I do development, I don't feel like I'm necessarily progressing creatively or getting better at what I do because you're doing the same thing. You write a Bible, you write a pilot and pitch it and they say, yes or no. And the way I learned to write whatever level of good I am at what I do came from doing stuff with casual violence because we were doing Edinburgh shows, we were putting stuff in front of an audience, we were iterating and actually creating stuff rather than just pitching things. And we were learning what worked and what didn't. And I think the only way you actually can learn what works and what doesn't is by seeing things through to completion and putting things in front of an audience. So for me, doing murder for dummies was about not needing permission to go and make something. We didn't expect the show to be quite as big scale as it turned out to be. We thought it was like, it definitely grew in ambition and it now feels like we made an entire TV show, which I think if you'd asked us in 2021 it was not as big as we saw it getting. But even so, just being able to see that through, I'm really proud of. I think it feels like such a big accomplishment for us to have gone and done that. And I, on a personal level, obviously it'd be nice if it becomes a big success, but really the bar for me is I wanted to have a non-embarrassing amount of views on YouTube and be able to function as like a calling card for me as like, you know, I wrote this and a calling card for, you know, the guys who were performing in it and the director and for everybody else who's kind of been able to put their name to this, it's got something for them to kind of help their careers. And beyond that, just, we've made a thing. And then this job, it's really hard sometimes to actually go through and make something and actually see it through and get it finished. So I think that all of that is kind of why we embarked on this and it has been a big ambitious process. And I think in some ways I knew how to do a lot of it to answer your question because I had done versions of all of these things previously. But as the scale of Motifid Dummy's got bigger and bigger, this is certainly been, I mean, I have, you know, with the rest of my team and with everyone involved, like we've produced a thing, an entire show by ourselves. And even though we did that in a way where we could afford to do it and we did a Kickstarter and we have each other and a lot of us, you know, our core group and our director were working for free. It's still a really gargantuan thing to do. It's just still going. We've still got a couple of things left to do on a couple of the episodes. So we're not even out the woods yet, but hopefully soon. - I mean, crowd funding isn't a new concept, you know. Today's probably been, you know, we're talking 10 to 15 years now. But I think you'd probably say it's the past few years, maybe 2019 onwards where the tools have really started to hit a point where they actually seem to function. They're quite commonplace. People understand what the proposition is now. It's even starting to branch out into things like Patreon subscription type services. - Yeah. - I mean, do you think this is a good thing for independent creators? And do you think that the landscape at all is just shifting even for people such as yourself, who are, you know, you are a professional in the field, but you're still kind of, you know, embarking on your own individual products like this? - I don't know, man. I mean, I hope it is. I hope it's going that way because I feel like it needs to because, you know, at the time we're recording this, a couple of days ago, Netflix announced our counseling struggle chaos. That was the Jeff Goldblum thing. It was written by the person who did end of the fucking world. And it's been out for five weeks. And, you know, I didn't, it was a show that was like, oh, it's on my list. I want to get around to watching that. And it's dispiriting to hear, oh, it gets canceled before, you know, like you have that chance to kind of get invested in it. And if you were one of the people who got invested in it in that five weeks, you're probably looking forward to there being a season two. And it, you know, there's just one example, unfortunately, of many of just a lot of shows not being given the chance to kind of flourish. Industry on HBO, I haven't watched yet, but a thing that I've observed about it that's been interesting is people are suddenly talking about it a lot as its third season has come out. And fewer and fewer shows are actually getting to make a third season of anything. - I would say we're similar with succession as well, which I think was a similar one too. - A hundred percent. I think it had its audience, but it took time to build and it requires time to build. And so I think we are in an environment at the moment where the people who make shows, the streamers buyers, like they're getting, they're very risk averse. They don't want to spend money. They want to kind of make sure that according to their shareholders, there is a big enough gap between the money they've made and the money they've spent. So if they can find ways to spend less money and therefore make less shows or work with less people, they will do that. But so, crowd funding on the one hand, I think it's great if you can do it. We were in an odd position, like there are some, there are some crowd funds I see where people have really figured out how to turn that into a career. And like they can do a crowd fund and they've got such a built-in audience. There's a guy I know who has a podcast that's very popular and they've got like a million through crowd funding. It's insane what, excuse me, what some people are able to do with that. We had nothing like that. We were able to get a total of about 10, 11 grand, which is not nothing, but that was still huge for us. And we were able to get that because friends, family, like a few casual violence fans came up the woodworks to support us. And sorry, excuse me, and that made a big difference. But the thing that we're struggling with, I think literally right now because the day we record this, the first two episodes of "Murder for Dummies" just come out. So it feels especially pertinent. On the one hand, yes, it's great that those options are there for creators to kind of build their audience and make their own work. We did a Patreon previously. We were successful with our Kickstarter. But actually getting your work out there is harder than it's ever been. Especially if you're independent, you don't have any money. And frankly, if the studios themselves are struggling to figure out how to promote stuff because the algorithm bottlenecks so many things on social media and not to be like it in my day, but when we started out doing live comedy in 2010, we were posting things on Facebook and we could just let everyone know what we were doing for free. And now no one lets you do that anymore. And this is true for everyone. You have way more followers than you actually have reach. And so for me, not crazy amount of followers on Twitter, but about five and a half thousand. And I'm lucky if I can reach 500 of those people. And that is really frustrating. And they obviously want you to pay money to try and reach more people. But then you've got to kind of understand how all of that stuff works and then you might not have the budget for those things if you're independent. We don't have the budget for those things. So on the one hand, it's easier to make the things because you can build an audience that way. Patreon in particular, I think is incredible for that because you can then build an audience who are bought in and subscribed. But it is hard to actually find an audience in the first place to get your work out there. And I think it used to be easy and now it isn't. And I don't know what the answer is to that. We are doing everything that we can with murder for dummies in terms of how we're posting about it on social media and how we're sharing it with people to get it in front of as many people as possible. Because at the end of the day, it would be great, obviously, if somebody wants to go ahead and like, oh, we want to buy this show or adapt it with the US or we'll put it on BBC three. It'd be amazing when any of that stuff happens. But it doesn't need to do that for us to be successful. We just want it to find an audience because we think we've made something that deserves an audience. And weirdly, that feels like a much bigger ask than it ought to be given how much has gone into this. - You mentioned at the top that you working with James Roberts, director on this. I think you could call him a long-time collaborator, couldn't you? - Yeah, yeah. We met in 2012, I think he came to see one of our number of fringe shows the year before and then reached out because he, you know, I think he thought, oh, this is, you know, these guys are going to get on TV and he was wrong. But, you know, can't fault the enthusiasm. - Yeah, well, I mean, given that, you know, you have crowd funded this, it is a, like we say, a passion project of sorts. And I think that can kind of, you know, that can be used as quite a sort of a deriser retirement. They don't mean it in that way at all, you know, when people think that they're a hobby or something. - That's totally what it is, yeah. - But I mean, was it important to work with people, you knew people that you could trust in that way as opposed to say, look, let's say bring someone in else from the outside who might be able to bring something different to this? - 100%. I mean, we have, we have that shorthand with James Roberts. So we've made so many short films with him in the past. We're like, we know how each other works. We know how to collaborate with each other. And the same is true, not just for me and him, but you know, for casual violence collectively and him. Like we have that shorthand there already. Similarly, I think for us, because it's sort of why it's a casual violence project rather than like a James Hamilton project, is because it's us creatively as a unit. We, you know, the five of us who are like group, we have that shorthand with each other. The people, a lot of the people that we reached out with to be in this are people that we've worked with before. Because we again have that relationship with them. And also, and this might sound bad, but it's like, it's also because frankly, like we couldn't pay people very much. So it's very hard to be able to be like, hey, you know, to reach out to somebody who's a big name or somebody that we don't know. And there were some people we didn't know who are in this. I'll talk about them in a second, but it's a hard ask to kind of say to people, hey, do you want to be in this thing? We can only give you 100 quid a day or like 50 quid a day or depending on what we're asking them to do to be in this. And, you know, to have our budget kind of be that slender. So we frankly needed to have the existing relationship with everybody else in a lot of ways so that at least they know, hey, okay, we know these guys aren't messing around. Like we know that they are trying to make. We've seen the stuff they're trying to make before. We know that if we do this, even though it might not be financially, especially worth anyone's time, it'll be worth our time creatively, hopefully. So I think that was really important just to be able to, you know, have those relationships be the basis of what we made. But then also we did work with a lot of new people on this. Particularly Sean, who plays Keith, was such a lucky find because he is a ventriloquist. He is spectacular and he's a ventriloquist in real life and I was just having to come up. So yeah, so he taught the other actors who needed to use the puppets, how to operate them. And that's why we wanted him in the first place. Like because I was trying to find someone who could do that, who could teach a couple of the other cast members how to do this. And I was talking to a friend of mine and saying exactly that. And then she went, oh, I know a ventriloquist. And so she put us in touch with Sean. And so Sean not only taught Dave and Beth in particular how to operate the puppets, but then it occurred to us that he'd be a really good option for heave because we haven't cast that role yet. And so he sent us like a little audition tape so that we could kind of see how we'd play it. And we went with him and like, it's the best decision we made. Like he is so believable as that character and really, really kind of gets the, gives him, again, gives him those kind of dimensions. Like everyone else in the cast of like, you can see where that character would have been quite cruel and quite heartless, but you can also see the side that would have made him a very popular entertainer in the '90s. Like you buy him as that very readily. And so for him and like Amy Roxon, who plays Madison and like Claire, who's from Operation Mincemeat, she's in that and she's playing Annabelle, who's the widow, in those sense of being well-working with some really exciting new people. But I think if we were trying to kind of do it a little bit more from scratch, it would have been, we wouldn't have been able to make it. I think we were able to make it because we had those relationships already. - That would have been a great documentary in its self-dome, seeing the rest of the cast learning how to, I quite like the idea of seeing Dave trying to learn how to. - I'm not trying to promise it, but we might have footage because at some point, I mean, James Roberts deserves a break very tangibly, aftermath of the dummies is all out 'cause he is still working on the last couple of episodes. But we are going to probably, as a Kickstarter award, we promised we're gonna do like a making-of documentary. I'm sure there is at least a little bit of mobile phone footage somewhere of either Bethel or Dave having to learn how to operate both dummies. - That's good. I mean, you were spoken about casual violence, just a little nod to the core group, Dave, Luke, Greg, Alex, you've worked together for a long time now. I've seen you several times on stage. - I know, lucky you. (laughing) - I'd like to have been at the last ever one. - Yeah, it's nice to sort of get confirmation that we're dead. - Yeah, exactly. I just want to see them in the ground. - How have you guys found that transition from stage to making more of these, you know, I was going to say visual things, but it's not like the stage is visual, is it? - Yeah, no, but of course, yeah, no, I know what you mean. Well, again, it's like, I think this is, you know, we've been making a bunch of short films sort of not completely throughout, but more or less throughout our 10 years as a live act. So we, on the one hand, that wasn't unfamiliar to us, but doing something like this, we never made a series, and we didn't even imagine when we started making a series, that the one we would make has the scope of literally being at six, 22, 25 minute episodes. It's a show. So that was definitely a weird experience on that front. And obviously, I think honestly, the bigger thing is we used to get together and rehearse in a room and figure stuff out in person. And now we're all, you know, we're doing stuff on Zoom. We're all doing it very separately, and even when we were filming it, we were filming it separately. You know, Luke was brilliant, and he actually was there for almost every shoot because I think casual violence have a very specific idea of how we want the characters to be played. And Luke is not just a very good actor, but he is a very good director of actors. And so, you know, James Roberts is the director. Like Luke was kind of going in, working with the actors, helping them with their characters, helping them kind of really nail what we wanted in a very short space of time. And so he was present throughout, but otherwise, it was odd to kind of be like, you know, Greg has done his day of shooting, and Luke was there, but, you know, obviously with our crew is there, Robert's is there, but, you know, casual violence aren't there. We're not doing it together in that sense, and that applies to everybody. And so that was very odd, but we've been spending a lot of time on Zoom together. And I'm grateful that I think because we have that pre-existing relationship of having worked together for a long time, it did mean that transition wasn't as kind of awkward or stiff creatively as it could be. I think making something like this is a huge step up for us, and it's been a long project. I think also longer than we anticipated it was going to be to make this, it's a big thing. I don't know. I know this isn't leading one way or the other, genuinely no idea whether casual violence makes something after this together as a unit or not. I hope we do in some ways. I mean, I also need to break desperately from this. So definitely not the first thing we do, but we are in this place where kind of everybody is on their own path. A lot of people are doing different things. And I don't think that means that we're not going to work together again, or that we wouldn't work together again. But people, we started this very not early 20s, we're now in our mid 30s, people are having to balance that with their real lives outside of making very stupid comedy. So that is a conversation we'll have at some point. But what I feel very good about, I think with this, is that if this is the last thing that we make, it is the best thing that we've made by Miles. It is something that I think we're really proud of. It also feels like kind of the culmination of what our sensibilities are creatively. It feels like we've kind of channeled everything that casual violence is and never has been in some ways. All of casual violence is sort of history and creativity, and everything is kind of doved in to murder the dummies. So it feels like if it is the cap on what we do as a unit, then it is a good cap, and one that I would be happy with. And if we leave it there, while that would be a bittersweet thing, then I would be content, I think, with that. But equally, I think in a way, it's like it depends on how murder the dummies goes. And if there is an appetite for more, I don't think there would be more murder for dummies, specifically because a lot of people die. Not to spoil anything, but it can't necessarily bring back your fan favorites. But if there is an appetite for people really responded to this, if we were to make something else, we would have an audience because murder for dummies found an audience. Then I think we would at least have that conversation and go, okay, this is good. People are interested in having more from us. Do we do another thing? And if we do, what is it? How do we go about it? Those are questions where it's like, okay, I maybe have, if you were to ask me what the next casual violence project would be, I'd have an idea that's like, oh, it could be that. But there's no, it's not part of the agenda at this point. I think it just feels like we've made this very big thing. It's bigger than anything we've ever made. How it does is how it does. And either way, like I think, I think we are, whether this is the end of what we do as a unit or not, we're in a really good place, I think, as a group from having made this. And that means a lot to me because the longest relationship I've ever had is with casual violence, you know, is with these four other guys. We've been doing this for such a long time and we did all these rehearsals together and we did Edinburgh kind of literally having to share beds because we couldn't afford like our own rooms to rent this thing and like living in each other's pockets for a long time. So because we have that relationship, I think that it feels, it means such a lot to me that we were able, despite me being here, two of the group having that, you know, families, like whole families now, everybody kind of, you know, one of them living a one in the country, everybody kind of being split up. The fact we were able to still kind of come together and do this, I hope means a lot to them as well. I think it does, but it definitely means a lot to me. - Well, it's really quite amazing that you've managed to have this sort of level of longevity because, you know, it's a bit of a cliche, but the creative personality type is can generally clash, right? You know, history's littered with stories of great creative partnerships that come apart at the seams and you've managed to kind of keep this going all this time and like you say, I don't say this, you know, falsely. It is a brilliant piece of work that you've come up with. - Thank you. - You know, what you say there about having something to hang out on is quite apt, but I'm still, I'm not buying it, James. Like you guys, you said this before. You'll give it a couple of years and then one of you will have that idea. - I would be thrilled if that happens and I, and definitely part of me hopes it does. Like I would, and, you know, like it's the thing. I, you know, like, we've, yeah, we never had like a falling out as a group. Like it's time to know it's been hard and, you know, there's always things that kind of, there's always kind of tensions that can be there or whatever, but we've, we've, I think we've always been, yeah, quite united, I think, in what we want to do and how we want to go about it. And the way that I've always approached things is that nobody, nobody in the group is there because, like, I mean, the thing that's honestly surprised me and this maybe sounds like a damning thing and there's like, every I'm admitting something I don't mean to admit is that they've always come back because every time, when we did this, when we were doing Edinburgh, like we would do an Edinburgh show and then at the beginning of the process for the next one, I'd be like, okay, if anybody doesn't want to, if anybody wants to step off the train, now's the time, now's a great time to do it because we've done one project, we're about to do another one. If you decide you don't want to do this, that is totally okay. And given that some of the groups lives have taken them in very different directions, you know, not everybody in the group is trying to pursue a career in comedy or in acting or anything else, it has always kind of surprised me and they've been really touching honestly that they have always and especially with murder for dummies come in and said, yes, given the demand on murder for dummies, like the amount of time it took, I don't know if everyone will make that decision again, but I think that's kind of what it comes down to is literally do we have time to do it and would do we want to make the time to do it? But then it's one of those things where, you know, not being funny, but if one person says no, but the other four say yes, then maybe we do it because we can still be casual violence in that way. And I think what's nice about that to me is that I think, you know, the stuff that I write that is my stuff and there is stuff that I write for other people and casual violence obviously is, you know, it's written by me so it has a lot of me in it, but there is something very specific about stuff that is casual violence that I feel can only come from them and it's because the jokes of those four guys pitch and the ideas that they have and the feedback they have, the suggestions they have, the way that that kind of all can mean those and comes together in what we do, is like to me, there feels like there is something very specific about something that is casual violence as opposed to something that is James Hamilton and I value that a lot. And frankly, I think it's better than what James Hamilton does by himself. So that is the part of me that's like, I hope we get to do something else, whatever that looks like, or at least even if it's not, you know, the full unit, find other ways to collaborate and make things. I'm sure one way or another, that's gonna happen. - I mean, this is such a lame question, so I admit that upfront, but, I mean, what would you like audiences to take away from murder for dummies? You know, is there any particular theme or message that you're trying to convey here or is it just simply to entertain people? - Honestly, it's, I mean, yeah, the theme-wise, it's interesting. I feel like, honestly, I do think it is mainly to entertain people. I mean, the thematic ideas in it, I think, you know, you can, it's very easy to kind of be like, oh, there's nothing in there, it's just a good time. But I think any writer, there's themes in it whether you mean them to be or not. And I think you always write into theme and good writers recognize where the themes are and what they're writing and then call them out and build the rest around them, I think. But like, there's, but I think honestly, the thing we wanted to do is just make something, there's a kind of comedy that we grew up on, stuff like sort of Garth Meringy and, you know, League of Gentlemen, obviously up to Point and things like that. And there was that kind of era of like 2000s to 2010-ish British comedy, like, I'm not a biggest Mighty Bush fan, but Mighty Bush kind of fits in that bracket as well, where you got these kind of very creator-led, idiosyncratic kind of ideas. These shows that were getting made that were very exciting. This is a very, very specific one. I don't know if you'd have watched it 'cause not a lot of people did, but did you ever watch Schnapp books? It was Matt Berry and Rich Folcher who met doing the Mighty Bush and then they made this very weird little, one season of The Sketch Show where they were playing there was this loose narrative arc in that they were to hang men for the government and every episode, it starts out with them walking down and it's like pure white corridor and to begin with, you don't know what there is or why they're there. And they're just having a casual conversation about something really stupid and then just walk into a side room and keep chatting while they're about to hang someone. It was very funny and weird. And it was like an early, you know, Matt Berry's schtick bless him. He's been doing it for a very long time. And so there's a lot of that in there, which at the time, no offense to Matt Berry at the time was very fresh to me because, you know, now everybody is one of those things I've been following, Matt Berry for ages. But so stuff like that, there was a lot more of that kind of stuff happening. And I think for us, we just wanted to make something that felt like us, that felt very specific, that was funny to us and kind of represented that. And I do think funny to us is funny to other people as much as people go, "Oh, it's really, you know, you get a lot of it. It's so weird, blah, blah, blah." But I think that's almost kind of what it is. I think comedy in a way is just that form of expression, even if it's not kind of pushing a major theme in the thing, which as I say, there are some themes in there. I don't know if there's like a core message of what we're trying to say with murder for dummies, except for, I think, this is something that we know we find funny. I'm also really proud, honestly, that aside from it being funny, it's a genuinely, in my opinion, hopefully, people will feel the same. Satisfying murder mystery. The last episode, when I watched it for the first time, I obviously knew what was going to happen, but watching the rough cut of the first episode of the last episode of the show, it's tense and it's dramatic and it's performed so well. And it got me so excited about this. I am really pleased that just in terms of being a murder mystery, I think, and hope it works really well. And so that was like a first for me to make something like that. I'm really proud of that. I hope people like it on that level. I think that's the other thing. Other than finding it funny, I would love for people to get invested in the mystery of it, want to try and figure out who killed Keith and who is killing everybody else, 'cause that's half of the fun. - Domes, where, how, when can we watch Murder for Dummies? How can anybody who watches it and enjoys it help you, obviously, I know, like and subscribe and all that. - Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, isn't it? Like, there's that, but obviously, like we're a tiny little channel. We've got 1,000 subscribers, which sounds like a lot, but it sounds like a lot to me, but in real, and we've just gone over that hurdle today, but in real YouTube terms, obviously, it's not the big boys, and we're only making six episodes of this. So it's not like we're doing the kind of regular content where we can just build and build and build. So for us, it's, yeah, there's a few ways. Obviously, youtube.com/casualviolence is where all the episodes live. If you're not particularly YouTube savvy, the easier thing to do is go to murderfordummies.com. So we're just gonna come call the episodes on there, 'cause it's just a nice, easy thing to say to people. And then you can go there, the episodes are right on the front page, and then there's more info about the show. You want to read about it. And the best way to support it is to watch it. And if you watch it, recommend it to other people. 'Cause I think that's the big thing, go back to what it's saying before, because we don't have any marketing behind us at all. No PR company, no money. We, all we have is word of mouth, and that does mean, yes, we want people to post it on social media. That's nice, but again, algorithm, it's screwed. So honestly, what works better is, I think we've made a good enough show that if you like it, you can get other people to watch it, send them the link. If you personally recommend it to somebody, that goes a really long way, and that's much more likely to get someone to actually sit down and watch it, than just posting it on Instagram will. So that's probably the big thing. If you like it, recommend it. That's the most helpful thing you could do for us. - And work in anybody and everybody, keep up with you and your-- (laughs) - I did not well, I am sort of vaguely struggling to keep up with me, but there is, I despite myself, at least for now, I'm still on Twitter @JamesHamilton, also Instagram @JamesHamilton. My sort of writing website portfolio, pages, JamesHamiltonwriter.com. And yeah, I guess the only other thing I have to plug is other than murder for dummies, gentry channel versus the underworld is coming out on December 5th on Netflix, and that is gonna be very good. And I would like it to get more than one season. So please watch that too. - Watch that too. James, it's been a pleasure, mate. - Really appreciate it, this mate. Thank you so much. - Absolute pleasure. I'm so glad you liked the show. Hopefully you'll listen as well too. - No, it really is, it's brilliant. It should be all very proud of yourselves. It's a really remarkable achievement. @BYOB, pod on all the socials. Check out Murder for Dummies, watch it, share it, and get involved. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]