Hello everyone,
It’s an early email from me this month to give you all a chance to dash to Edinburgh for Saturday 8th August.
Got that? Saturday 8th. 14:30.
The occasion is a screening of Melt It! The Film of the Iceman at the beautiful Cameo Picturehouse. Tickets are available here.
These screenings have live components and are a lot of thought-provoking, anarchic, kind-hearted, ancestor-worshipping fun. We’re still losing money on this, so we really want people to come along.
This said, if you’re in Edinburgh and would struggle to pay the cost of entry, please let me know and I’ll get you a free ticket, no questions asked. The theatre have generously released twenty comps to us and we’ve only given a few of them away to friends, wives and press. So let me know.
Edinburgh will be the ninth time we’ve screened the film. The premier was in Wolverhampton back in February, then we took it on tour, and now there’s Auld Reekie. The tenth and eleventh (and possibly final for all we know) screenings will be in North London and Kendal.
Sorry. I’ll stop talking about Melt It! now.
Oddie
Friend of feathered friends Bill Oddie sadly died this week and I like what Stewart Lee said about him today:
So sorry to hear of the death of Bill Oddie, a towering polymath who could have been a great jazz musician, but settled for being a brilliant comedian.
The brutality of some of the Goodies‘ skewering and surreal social satire makes some episodes of their innovative and inspirational TV shows all but unbroadcastable today, and there, always chugging away in the underlay, are Bill’s brilliant jazzy funky scores.
A superb musical parodist – his pastiche of Joe Cocker singing the folk song On Ilkley Moor B’ah Tat is pin sharp and hilarious and joyously absurd – he is also responsible for one of the great British funk singles, Funky Gibbon.
Often described as ‘spikey’ by the public, I suspect Bill was in fact a sensitive man who sometimes found the endless presidential air he was required to sustain by members of the public approaching him a hard act to keep up all the time. Bill, in whatever context, was never anything else but himself.
Heavens to Betsey
LONDON: Saturday 22nd August 2026, 2:30pm, The Betsey Trotwood.
I’ll be providing the voices of Derek Jarman, Samuel Pepys and Joe Orton for Dickon Edwards’ salon about diaries. Victoria Redfern is bringing the Woolf. Travis Elborough hosts. FREE TICKETS.
Greer
The comic novels I love are books that could just as easily have been tragedies. It is simply that the author has decided it’s funny.
If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s advice about writing, especially funny writing. I’m not interested.
But I’ll make an exception for Pulitzer-winning author Andrew Sean Greer.
Actually, no. Fuck him too. But! There are some comforting and thought-provoking gems in this piece of his in the Guardian today.
the job (as a novelist now and not a diarist) [is] to get to the hardships and frustrations of my characters. Because, to me, comedy is only great fun if it is about something hard and true.
and
First, I work out the hardships and frustrations of the characters as realistically, even tragically, as possible. People die in comic novels. Sometimes the world ends, or sometimes just the world we thought we knew, and I have to consider the real reactions of my characters because, after all, they don’t know it’s a comedy. Second, I begin to write it as if it’s all just a funny story. That takes a great deal of struggle and sometimes feels impossible.
I relate to that last part. I don’t do much to promote my comic writing because I’m slightly embarrassed by it. It’s closer to my soul than, say, Melt It! or New Escapologist. Promoting my comic novels feels like sending a dick pic. I imagine. But my being able to relate so readily to the above makes me think I’m at one with a Pulitzer novelist. I’m not being arrogant: I have travelled that very path, made those same decisions.
So, I dunno, maybe I should stand by my comic novels a bit more. Maybe they’re good. You decide. They’re called Rub-A-Dub-Dub and Tether.
life is a vale of tears, and there’s no fixing it, but just for fun let’s fix this one small piece. Let’s decide, briefly, to lift the weight of being. You can’t successfully do that, I think, without being honest about it first.
Substack Fame
What the heck is this?
Moore, Moore, Moore
Alan Moore recites the pantheon in his new book.
Munnery must be in the rest of that crew.
People of taste will buy Dowie’s recent book and one-man play.
New Escapologist 19
Edited by Yours Truly, New Escapologist is the magazine for pleasure seekers, dreamers, shoestring iconoclasts, tinkerers, skivers, believers, and dilettantes. We’re for those who don’t like conventional employment, unthinking consumerism, meetings, marketing, and default mediocrity. Join our mass exodus and be free.
In this edition, we ask if “Do What Thou Wilt” could ever be an adequate moral system. We also take off our clothes for money, escape into Virtual Reality, reject the Return-to-Office mandate, write our wills, and explore marital politics through the writings of Sayaka Murata.
We present new columns from Tom Hodgkinson, Apala Chowdhury, Dickon Edwards and McKinley Valentine, plus interviews with Stuckist Ella Guru and signmaker-musician Rob Glover. Reader, the escape valve is open and it whistles a beguiling tune.
Available in print and digital formats from the online shop.
There’s also a free New Escapologist monthly Substack you can join.
Mailbag Thee Fyrst: Wet and Wild
Friend Joe writes:
Hey Rob,
Greetings from the wilds of Canada.
We came upon a waterfall during our camping trip this week and thought it a perfect occasion to tuck into a few pages of Tether — falling water being, of course, a central theme of this fantastic book.
Hope your summer has some wet and wild experiences in store also.
Mailbag Thee Seconde: Hotcakes
Bookseller Martin texts me from a bookfair to say:
Escape Everything! is selling like hot cakes. Three hot cakes to be precise.
Current Reading
Since returning from the tour, I went insane and read three books in as many days. There were the so-so brand new Red Dwarf: Titan (RIP, Rob and oh dear, Doug), Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) as part of a mad project to read aaaaall the Kinglers, and Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing (2025) which is good for summoning old men who want to talk to you if you read it in the pub. Why not see how many you can trap?
I’m currently the brilliant Mrs. Bridge (1959) about which Dorothy Parker said “I only wish I knew how it was done” and will soon move on to The Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919) by W. N. P. Barbellion. You just try and stop me.
You can see what I’m reading at any given minute here.
Physical Form
This is me (on the left) with Steve Sullivan at Chapter Arts in Cardiff last week. He directed Being Frank: The Chris Sivey Story and he came to see Melt It! “Fantastic!”
State of the Desque
Friend Landis ends each of his Substack newsletters with a “state of the desk” update. I have nicked that idea. Here’s what it looks like today.
Thanks for reading, everyone. By which I mean thanks for reading this newsletter but also for reading in general. Don’t stop.
Yours equilaterally,
Robert Wringham
www.wringham.co.uk
PS: See Melt It! in Edinburgh this week.