Glenn Moore's Almanac

Glenn Moore interview

As Glenn Moore's Almanac arrives on the airwaves, we caught up with the writer and performer to find out more...

First Radio 4 show - how are you feeling?

Kinda cute, might delete later. We recorded the four episodes a few weeks ago, and I'm so used to live radio as part of the breakfast show on Absolute that to be able to go on-air with something I've written, prepared and had edited in advance is making me feel illegally zen. Complacent. Let's put complacent.

Why is it called Glenn Moore's Almanac? What is an almanac?

I fully don't know. We're approaching crunch time and I still don't know what it is. I pitched an idea to the BBC and they were like 'Oh, so like an almanac then?' and I said 'Ok!' and smiled pleasantly. I don't even know how to pronounce it. Is it pronounced like the Alan in Alan Alda or the Alda in Alan Alda?

How did you pick which dates from history you wanted to talk about in Series 1?

So each episode is a look at an important date in my lifetime, and what I was doing on that day. I went through all the days of my life so far, looked up what happened on those days, ruled out any days where something gravely depressing had happened somewhere in the world, and was left with four dates. The dates are December 31st, May 5th, April 29th, and September 11th.

How did you find the process of writing the show?

It was fun thanks; I started off trying to make it a reworking of my first four stand-up hours, and then adapted it accordingly for radio, so crucially dropped both the inappropriate elements and the visual elements (we all remember Radio 4's disastrous adaptation of Puppetry Of The Penis).

The main rule I learnt in writing this was (and let this be a lesson) at 6:30pm on Radio 4 I was limited to a maximum of two 'shits' per episode, with shit being used only as an adjective, not a noun or a verb.

How did the recordings go?

Ahead! My parents came to the second recording and my mum said afterwards she always hopes the audiences at my gigs are nice and said really happily "you'll be delighted to know, I looked around and 99% were enjoying it," so I'll be thinking about that 1% for the rest of my life.

Did you listen to much radio comedy growing up?

The first time I really listened to radio comedy was when I was about 23 - I was doing any open mic night I could in the evening, and any generic temp job I could during the day. One of them was folding letters to go into envelopes for that medical trial place that had the elephant man incident (God that could have made a decent episode), and because it was so mindless I'd spend all day stuffing envelopes while listening to every famous comedy show I felt like I probably 'should' have ingested, so mainly On The Hour (great, hugely influential for me) and The Goon Show (old, impenetrable).

What's next for Glenn Moore?

Well I'm coming towards the end of my first semester at Stanford (go class of 2026, wooo!), and after that I'm hoping to take over my father's business Chuck's Trucks, one of the leading tyre replacement companies in the tri-state area. And my episode of Live At The Apollo is out December 12th, please include that and not the American bit.