John Osborne

Written by: Si Hawkins
Published: Friday 18th February 2022

Not to be confused with Joan Osborne, the histrionic warbler of '90s soft-rock anthem One of Us, or indeed Norman Osborne, the histrionic stalker of enduring '60s web-spinner Spider Man - John Osborne is pretty much the opposite.

The thoroughly agreeable writer and talker has a more serene body of work, from the Sky sitcom he co-wrote, After Hours, to his latest one-man theatre show, which is on in London and Wales soon (see below for details). Osborne's stuff is hard to classify, but easy to love.

"My Car Plays Tapes is my new theatre show about what happens when you're unexpectedly reunited with your old cassette collection from the 1990s," he explains. "When I was a teenager I was constantly taping things from the radio. I'd fill blank cassettes with bits of the Top 40 and Mark Radcliffe and things like Blur recorded live at Glastonbury on Radio 1 in 1998.

"It was those tapes that gave me a love of comedy. There's an old Paul Merton tape in there, lots of old Just A Minutes I'd taped off Radio 4 and stand-up I'd copied from CDs - Eddie Izzard, Sean Hughes, Billy Connolly.

"I drive a lot with my job. I'm a support worker for adults with learning disabilities, and when my car broke down and had to be scrapped I was forced to get the cheapest car I could find. In the end, I found a Polo that the previous owner refused to even take any money for because it was so old.

"There were no electric windows, no CD player and the radio didn't work... but it had a tape player. My show is about life as a support worker, on minimum wage, listening to those old tapes."

Now let's rewind back to the mid-noughties, and the wilds of East Anglia.

First gig?

It was in Olives Café in Norwich, in May 2006, organised by my friends Hannah Walker and Joe Dunthorne. I'd never planned on being a performer but they put this night on and there was never a conversation about it, I was just on the bill. I remember really looking forward to it and I've not stopped doing gigs since. It's easily the most important thing that has ever happened in my life. It was one of the few times I've found something I enjoyed doing and was good at.

Favourite show, ever?

I made a show for Radio 4 called The New Blur Album; tracing someone's life by where they were the first time they heard each Blur album. It was almost a Blur musical, and working out which Blur songs to include was as good as any creative project could ever be.

It was broadcast on Radio 4 on a Sunday evening, which was an incredible experience, but completely out of the blue it was repeated a couple of years later in the 6.30pm comedy slot and so many people got in touch to say they'd listened. Graham Coxon tweeted about it too and sent me a nice message and Miranda Sawyer reviewed it in The Observer.

It was just surreal, being allowed to write a show about Blur for Radio 4.

Worst gig?

I did a show in a pub in Kent. When I got there the landlord said 'I'm really sorry, we've only sold 12 tickets.' That wasn't a problem for me at all, I'd been doing gigs for ten years and small audience numbers were never a surprise. Ten minutes after the show was supposed to start there were still only three people in the room. I went to find the landlord and asked if he knew where the others were and he said 'Yeah, that was a lie, there aren't 12 sales... there's three.' It was such a weird lie.

But what made it worse was that he kept turning up every fifteen minutes with people he'd grabbed from the bar who reluctantly had been cajoled into being an audience member. Even when there were only a few minutes left of the show he turned up at the back, beaming with pride with two new audience members he'd found. I just kept thinking 'please let this finish so I can go home'.

Which one person influenced your creative life most significantly?

I wouldn't say a person, I'd say a place and it might sound a cliché but the Edinburgh Festival has been one of the most important things in the world for me. The amount of friendships I have purely because of Edinburgh. I went up there with my friend Paddy to do a show on the free fringe in 2008 and I've been going up there every year since.

This new show exists purely because of a desire to keep going up to the Fringe and during the lockdowns it was the thought of future trips to Edinburgh I really clung onto as my 'one day things will be better again' happy place.

And who's the most disagreeable person you've come across in the business?

I've been involved in hundreds of projects and I can only really think of three times it's been genuinely unpleasant. I know that's not the normal ratio, so I feel I must have escaped some of the really bad people.

Is there one poem/line/joke you loved, that audiences inexplicably didn't?

I wrote a poem called The Daughter Of Two Busy And Successful People Reminds Her Parents That Tonight Is The Night Of Her School Play.

I genuinely thought it was this incredible piece that I couldn't wait to read at gigs. When I performed it for the first time there was complete indifference from the audience. I didn't understand it, I thought people would be so emotional and moved by the picture I'd painted of this girl looking at the two empty chairs on the front row of the stage as the school play started.

I performed it again a couple of weeks later and it was the same. I couldn't work out why there was such a non-response. It was much later when I read it back and it wasn't very good. It went on for so long and people were just bored.

What do you describe yourself as, when pressed? And has that evolved over the years?

I like being called a writer. I've done lots of things - theatre shows, poems, a sitcom, storytelling shows, but ultimately it's all down to a love of writing. I love being at my desk. It's all just writing, really.

Any reviews, heckles or post-show reactions stick in the mind?

In the early hours at Latitude Festival I was walking back to my tent, maybe 3 or 4am, stumbling around, full of rum, as I've done so often in life, and someone brushing their teeth in the front of their tent shouted me over.

He said 'I saw you earlier in the poetry tent. I really like your poems but you use too many cultural references.'

It was something I'd never realised about my own work and immediately realised he was right. I was overdoing it with trying to get an easy laugh by mentioning Neil Morrissey or someone from Big Brother. It was excellent late night editorial advice from someone with Colgate dribbling down their chin.

How do you feel about where your career is at, right now?

I can only say positive things really. My new show is all about ambition and accepting your own limitations so this is something I've been thinking about a lot. I think that when I was a teenager, sitting in my room taping songs off Radio 1 and comedy from Radio 4 I'd have been so, so confused to have been told of some of the things I'd end up going on to achieve.

It's so easy to wish you had done more, or for things to have gone differently, I just feel very happy right now that I've managed to make my own work that people read, watch, listen-to and like.

My Car Plays Tapes is at The Space in London 1st - 5th March; at Machynlleth festival 29th April; and is available as a book via Broken Sleep Books.