Wooden Overcoats Returns - for One Night Only!

It’s a brand new episode, folks!

It’s our 10th birthday! (Artwork by ‘Madeleine’)

This year, Wooden Overcoats celebrates its tenth anniversary. Good God. It’s hard to believe, but our first episode - The Bane of Rudyard - was uploaded to iTunes on the 24th September 2015. The response was modest but not vitriolic, and so over the following seven weeks we released the other episodes of our first season. By the end, we’d received some promising coverage in the British newspaper press. Our downloads went up. We decided to fundraise for a second season - and it worked!

We repeated this step a couple more times, with a third and fourth season. The latter was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic - but we got there in the end! Thanks to the generosity of our backers, and the downloads and shares and comments of many, many, many listeners around the world, we got to make four complete seasons of Wooden Overcoats. Not to mention several special episodes for public holidays, and multiple seasons of shorts: Piffling Lives and Funn Fragments.

It was a British sitcom about rival undertakers. We made it ourselves and released it as a podcast, when we realised that getting it made via traditional broadcast routes was impossible. As a result, it took a heck of a lot of time and energy, and we were all financially poorer for it. But we got to make a show on our own terms - and we got to finish it on our own terms too.

Core cast Felix Trench, Beth Eyre, Ciara Baxendale, and Tom Crowley, finishing the show on their own terms

The last episode of Wooden Overcoats was released on 31st March 2022, when we all had to bid ‘A Funn Farewell’ to Rudyard, Antigone, Georgie, Eric, Madeleine, and everybody else in the village of Piffling Vale.

I swore that I would never undo that ending, or take us back there to see how things turned out afterwards.

And I still haven’t.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy one more adventure…

Ta daaaaaaa!

On Sunday 7th September, Wooden Overcoats returns to Kings Place, London, for the London Podcast Festival. But we’re not doing the episodes you’ve heard before. No no no. We’re doing a new episode.

Our first new episode since 2022.

It’s going to be about 70 minutes long and it’s called Rudyard Ruins Everything.

But - doesn’t this mess up the canon? No! I think we’ve earned the right to feel nostalgic on our tenth birthday, and so this episode is set during the earlier years of the series. Likely somewhere in the middle, between seasons 2 and 3. That way we can enjoy one more night of mayhem with Funn Funerals in their eternal battle against Chapman’s - and what a battle it is!

You see, Rudyard is trying to arrange a funeral and celebrate a birthday at the same time. But a chance conversation with Eric sets off a catastrophic chain of events that nobody could have predicted. Will Piffling Vale ever recover?

And is there really such a thing as a haunted kettle?

These events are drawn from an unpublished chapter of Madeleine’s Memoirs of a Funeral House Mouse. “To be honest, this is a story for which the world is not yet prepared,” says Madeleine, “But I’ve got to pay the deposit on a holiday home in Sark, so here we are.”

Ta daaaaaa!

Expect Felix Trench, Beth Eyre, Ciara Baxendale, Tom Crowley and Andy Secombe to dazzle and bewilder you, before your very eyes! And if YOU want to experience the action for yourself, nab yourself tickets at Kings Place right now!

We’re streaming the show online, so you’ll be able to see how Rudyard Ruins Everything no matter where in the world you are. And if you CAN make it to London, we’ll see you there!

If you’re as excited about this as we are, then please spread the word. Tell your friends, your family, your insurance companies - everybody you know! We want to celebrate our birthday in style and we need YOUR help to do it!

Tell everyone! Nab tickets!

Enjoy yourselves!