In a very happy beginning to the year, Wooden Overcoats has come away with five gongs at the Audio Verse Awards, held each year to celebrate the best in free audio drama around the world.

As well as a Best Writing award for myself and the Season 3 team (Tom Crowley, Rosie Fletcher, James Hamilton, James Huntrods, Alex Lynch, Molly Beth Morossa), we've picked up awards in Engineering, Music, Performance and Production. I'm very proud of my production team today!

We'll be performing material at the PodUK convention, Birmingham UK, on February 2nd, where we look forward to mixing with other podcasters and their listeners. Hope to see you there!

My second audio drama for Big Finish Productions follows on rapidly from the last with Breach of Trust, one of three stories in the UNIT: Revisitations anthology. The action-packed adventures of Kate Stewart and Osgood - whom fans of television's Doctor Who will remember from the 50th Anniversary special The Day of the Doctor, amongst other episodes - continue in this latest box set, starring Jemma Redgrave and Ingrid Oliver. 

An alien vessel arrives on Earth, its occupants seeking refuge, and Osgood takes them in. But there is reason to mistrust this cry for help. The files show that UNIT has faced the Kalvyri before. What else they reveal will set Kate at odds with her most trusted friends...

At a brisk 60 minutes, Breach of Trust is my first attempt at contemporary military thriller sci-fi; quite the far cry from funeral-based comedy in the Channel Islands! Also starring Ramon Tikaram, James Joyce, Lizzie Stables and Richard Earl, and directed by Ken Bentley, you can nab the full box set - also containing Hosts of the Wirrn by Chris Chapman and Open the Box by Roy Gill - on CD & download from the Big Finish website. 

Directed by Lisa Bowerman and with superb sound design and music from Toby Hrycek-Robinson, I'm really pleased with how my Doctor Who debut has gone - and it seems, thankfully, that the fans are too! I've read some extremely kind words on various blogs and forums, including this thoughtful post about the story's political themes (warning: spoilers!), and the website reviews are boosting my ego no end:

"If you're looking for a story that doesn't go the way you expect it to, then this really couldn't come recommended any higher."
​- Blogtor Who

"A triumph on many levels... There's a strong dose of realism in this story, and it avoids easy answers. It's one that will stay long in the mind and is a great start to this new run of adventures."
- Cult Box

"A bleak yet enigmatic tale that means more than simply another another two hours of Doctor Who."
- Digital Fix

"The Dalek Occupation of Winter is an absolute belter... Feed it into your ears and begin to shiver."
​- Mass Movement

"A stunning debut on the range and one of the best Dalek stories for some time. 10/10"
​- Sci-Fi Bulletin

"This particular story is an essential one to add to your collection."
- Sci-Fi Pulse

If you fancy nabbing a copy for yourself, head on over to Big Finish where it can be purchased on CD and download. My next adventure in the Whoniverse is released in November as part of the UNIT: Revisitations box set, featuring Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) and Osgood (Ingrid Oliver) from the Steven Moffat seasons of new Doctor Who. And crossed fingers, I may well have more Who stories on the way...

Wooden Overcoats is back at the London Podcast Festival for the third year running! Pop along to Kings Place near King's Cross Station on September 16th to catch us performing two of our favourite episodes:

Antigone in the Spotlight - Funn Funerals in the theatre, with the manic Marlene Magdalena... 

Rudyard Ruins Summer - Desert island adventures in our Summer Special, performed live for the first time!

Starring our leads Felix Trench, Beth Eyre, Tom Crowley and Ciara Baxendale, with special guests Emily Stride, Peter Wicks, Susan Casanove and, erm, me. Tickets are already selling fast, so book here to reserve!

Up until now, I've been a fully independent freelance writer, operating all on my tod. However, I'm very pleased to say that from now on I'll be represented by Micheline Steinberg Associates literary agency. Looking forward to working with them!

This means that I'll be directing most professional enquiries direct to them, at info@steinplays.com 

That said, if you would like to engage me to do some one-on-one dramaturgy, it's probably best to contact me directly via the Dramaturgy or About Me pages.

It's been ages since I've written anything new for the stage - so a big, big thank you to James Huntrods for inviting me to participate in the 69th edition of The Miniaturists next week. Performed at the Arcola Theatre, London, The Miniaturists curates five short plays and performs them twice within a Sunday evening. I'm lucky enough to be sharing the bill with Poppy Burton-Morgan, Glyn Cannon, Eve Leigh and the National Theatre's resident dramaturg Stewart Pringle, so it should be a pretty awesome show!

My play Classical Studies is about two retired men who have their rigid outlooks changed by a chance encounter with an old and entirely unloved schoolfriend. Starring David Whitworth and Andy Secombe (who Wooden Overcoats fans may recognise as Reverend Wavering!), the play is directed by the utterly fantastic Will Maynard, whose methodical and enthusiastic approach to my writing has entirely swept aside all my usual anxieties and encouraged me to begin some other projects I've been meaning to write. I'd recommend him to any writer looking for an exciting new director, except I want him for myself, so bugger off, he's mine! 

The Miniaturists 69 is on July 8th at 5pm and 8pm, Arcola Theatre. Pre-book tickets here.

It's part of the Revisitations set in Big Finish's exciting UNIT: The New Series ​range, and you can nab a copy on CD or download in November - or pre-order it here!

Big Finish Productions have released the cover art for my upcoming Doctor Who story in their Early Adventures range - and you can listen to the trailer online too! Starring Maureen O'Brien as Vicki and Peter Purves as Steven, two of William Hartnell's companions in the 1960s, The Dalek Occupation of Winter also features Nicholas Briggs as the Daleks, as heard in the BBC TV series from 2005 onwards. As a lifelong Who fan, it's quite something to hear my very own "Exterminate!" 

Looking forward to the release in September!

The British Podcast Awards have now been going for two years. Whilst Wooden Overcoats scooped up a Silver Award for Fiction last year, it wasn't eligible to enter this time as we didn't release anything during the qualifying period. However, I was very happy to see another show I worked on romping home to victory not once, but twice! The Discovery Adventures by Cecilia FM took the Gold for Most Original Podcast and Best Branded Content, picking up Bronze for Best Fiction.

Featuring the acting talents of Hugh Skinner, Alexander Armstrong and Natalie Dormer, not to mention the sound design wizardry of Gareth Fry, it's a really fun adventure serial for all the family. I was very happy to write a couple of episodes and even happier to see the show do so well! You can listen to it here.

The third season of my podcast sitcom Wooden Overcoats has come to an end with the hour long special episode, Putting the Funn in Funerals. I wrote the script in a feverish hurry at the end of November last year, desperately trying to pack everything in before we began recording the very next day. Several months on and the fully recorded, scored and produced episode is now available freely online! I still can't quite get my head around having my own sitcom, three seasons down, out there in the world.

Against a backdrop of a village in celebration, a private tragedy forces Georgie (Ciara Baxendale) to make a difficult decision... Fundamentally, it's a drama about saying goodbye and looking forward to the future. Having ended Season 2 in 2016 with an apocalyptic comedy about burying forty dead clowns, I wanted to ease off the throttle with the end of Season 3 and write a quieter and more reflective script that dealt sensitively with the death of a loved one. For once, there is little active conflict between characters, with the greatest battle raging within Georgie herself: not only the practical consideration of who should provide her grandmother's funeral - her friends at Funn Funerals, or the much more capable Eric Chapman - but also the many mixed emotions we all experience when somebody we love is no longer there. 

The online reaction to this episode has been overwhelming, with a real sense of community as listeners have come forward to tell their own stories of recent bereavements to my production team and to each other. It's been incredibly touching to see how invested our listeners have become in the denizens of Piffling Vale. Regulars Felix Trench, Beth Eyre, Tom Crowley and of course Ciara Baxendale have given their finest performances yet. The episode is also blessed with sterling supporting work from Andy Secombe and Sean Baker as the newly wedded Reverend Wavering and Mayor Desmond Desmond, and I was absolutely thrilled to have special guest star Julia Deakin in the studio to reprise Nana Crusoe in several key sequences. Whilst listeners will catch many other recognisable voices throughout this episode, I'd particularly like to single out Belinda Lang for her impeccable performance as our narrator, Madeleine, not just for this instalment but for every episode we've made so far. She infuses the words with such a naughty, gossipy twinkle and she's never been less than perfect. I'm so lucky to have her in this show. 

Will there be a Season 4? The team will be discussing that in the coming months - but for now we still have one episode left to release! Our Summer Special, Rudyard Ruins Summer, or, A Handful of Sand by myself and Alex Lynch, will be available on Thursday 21st June. This full length episode sees our main characters stranded on a desert island, and will be made freely available to all of our Kickstarter backers, whilst also being available to purchase online via the website (as is our 2016 Christmas Special).

You can find Wooden Overcoats on iTunes and AudioBoom - thank you for listening!

It's been a quiet few weeks of working on scripts I can't tell anyone about yet, but the third season of Wooden Overcoats, my sitcom about rival funeral directors, has been ticking along - and finishes next week! Here's an update on the last few episodes.

It was a lot of fun to return to my roots in amateur (student) theatre for this one, and to bring back one of my favourite guest characters from WO Season 2. The "love triangle" between Antigone, Marlene and Georgie (Ciara Baxendale) was one of the most rewarding things to write in this new season and it seems from online feedback that our listeners really went with it!

I'd planned to give my best John le Carre treatment to Piffling Vale when sketching out Season 2 in 2016 but owing to casting complications I'd had to drop the idea. That wasn't a problem this time round, so I was finally able to write the "Agatha Doyle Investigates..." script I'd always wanted! Mayor Desmond Desmond (Sean Baker), Reverend Wavering (Andy Secombe) and Lady Templar (Catriona Knox) are amongst the suspects in my latest attempt at penning a mystery story - can you guess whodunnit?

Written by Molly Beth Morossa (who gave us The Ghost of Piffling Vale in Season 2), this episode features one of my favourite ideas of the season: what if the eternally confident Eric Chapman got in way over his head? It's also the first time we've really tackled the subject of grief in a show nominally about funerals. A special shout out goes to Pip Gladwin and Holly Campbell who've played the vox populi Bill & Tanya since the first season, usually popping up for a few lines per episode. It's been a pleasure to bring them to the foreground this year, with The Sunshine Treatment giving them their most prominent scenes so far. Narrator of countless audiobooks David Thorpe gives a splendid performance as the stricken Mr Wimbledon, and I'm in this one too, if you like that kind of thing.

As ever you can find Wooden Overcoats on iTunes and AudioBoom and if you're not subscribed to the show already, do make sure to "tune in" next week for our season finale Putting the Funn in Funerals!