Photographer Greg White has published a picture book of our trip to Chernobyl (for Wired), which includes an introduction by me. We spent a few days over there with the people building a new shelter and we had unique access to the site and reactor. The pictures are staggering and not hacky like a lot of Chernobyl pictures. Also, we got to go inside the control room of Reactor No. 4, which is pretty rare.
THIS IS A BIG PICTURE OF ME BECAUSE… The Independent bought the Comedy Cellar piece on syndication and it went in as a double-page feature, which made me very happy, but it also went in their mini-edition, the i, as a double-page feature and the above picture of me flagged the piece up on their front page, which made me even happier - I was on the front of a national paper. I also did an Irish national radio interview for it and was terrible live as usual.
This was an interview with Noam Dworman, owner of the Comedy Cellar, for the Financial Times Weekend Magazine. It’d be nice to write a longer piece about him some time.
This is a feature about the Comedy Cellar, which I wrote for Highlife, BA’s inflight magazine. I had been pitching a story about the Cellar, a New York comedy club where Louis CK, Chris Rock and many others work out their material, for a year before Highlife gave me the go-ahead - their condition was that I had to do stand-up there. I loved them for it, I loved the Cellar for letting me do it, and I was really happy with the piece. The photographs were by Michael Turek.
This was a piece about the cuts in Newcastle for The Spectator. I wrote it after senior Labour politicians got involved and the Council rethought some of its proposals. I also had a look through some of the spending commitments.
I interviewed architect Yu Jordy Fu for this extremely yellow book, which is being published by her firm, Marques & Jordy, prior to her appearance at TED 2013. The book cover is the same colour as their office carpet.
A piece for the New Statesman about the cuts in Newcastle after the city started to attract national media and political attention - the phrase ‘doing a Newcastle’ has taken off, and it’s not meant in a good way.
A T-Shirt I wrote about in The Guardian is being displayed in the British Museum for the next six months. I wore it in 2007 to support my mum, who worked at Northern Rock at the time. Lots of people wore them, not realising T-Shirts probably wouldn’t be enough to prevent the economic collapse still to come. The exhibition is called Bubbles & Bankruptcy and the champagne bottle on display belongs to my mum - they were given to Northern Rock workers to celebrate demutualisation in 1997.
Another nuclear piece, this time focussing on efforts to clear up Britain’s catastrophe, Windscale, which is still ranked by the International Atomic Energy Agency as one of the top five nuclear disasters.
I spent a few days at Chernobyl writing about a huge new shelter being built over the top of the Sarcophagus, which is falling to bits. It took a year of pitching before anyone commissioned the piece but Wired went for it and we were given unconditional access by project managers Bechtel and Battelle.
Me standing in front of the Sarcophagus at Chernobyl. Half an hour after this picture I was inside Reactor No.4’s control room. An hour later I was buying a souvenir mug which my wife immediately threw out when I got home.
I wrote a piece about Marc Maron for GQ’s comedy special and asked for the whole transcript to go online, so here it is. Click-through on the picture above for a long interview that possibly only I’m interested in. I’m not even sure Marc read the whole thing.
I interviewed Oscar Corral, who helped Tom Wolfe research his new book, became Wolfe’s friend and made a documentary about the experience.
This is me receiving a UK Northern Writers’ Award 2012 (click on the picture for details) for a book I’m writing. This picture persuaded me to get a haircut and stop being so fat.
