28 JANUARY 2026

Greetings, lovely people.

Thanks for reading The Pretend Post - a newsletter from me, Chris Mead - improviser, Radio wrangler and co-founder of The Pretend Company.

Here’s what I’m reading, watching and playing this week.

Rule of three

[Book] Dungeon Crawler Carl
Part of me can’t believe this book exists. In essence, it’s a novelisation of someone playing through a computer game, complete with detailed descriptions of menu systems and inventories. The level of thought that has gone into the game-within-a-book is breath-taking and our narrator hero Carl (perpetually clothed in a leather jacket and heart-print boxers despite his attempts to get fully dressed) is extremely charming. And that’s before we even get to Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk.

[Movie] Perfect Days
For a long time, I’ve had the same four movies at the top of my Letterboxd profile - Grosse Pointe Blank, The Way Way Back, Fight Club and The Princess Bride. After watching Perfect Days, I immediately knew I had to update the list. It’s the best film I’ve watched in years. I loved it. And it’s about a man who cleans toilets for a living in Tokyo.

[Puzzle] The Daily Spell
Historically, word puzzles have been a big hit with Pretend Post readers (except that one we don’t talk about). The Daily Spell is a clever & unique addition to that cannon. You construct a headline from scrambled letters but brilliantly those headlines begin to tell a story as the week progresses. And even more nerdily, weekly stories feed into a larger narrative arc that takes place in a persistent world. Wordplay and innovative storytelling techniques? I’m in heaven. Thanks to Arfie for this wonderful recommendation.

Spotlight

It gives me great pleasure to announce our international guests for March.

Ella Galt and Dan Seyfried are bringing their improvised multiversal love story Origami Swan to Pretend Night in March.

Ella and Dan are both legends of the wider Euro improv scene - their shows are always the talk of the festival and their classes sell out immediately. I can’t quite believe we managed to get them across to London.

Here’s what you need to know:

Origami Swan is a bit like an improvised version of the play, Constellations. We get to know a couple and then begin to explore all the fractal variations of their lives - the intertwining and unravelling paths their love could take depending on their choices. It’s a tour de force of improvised theatre. I am in awe of them both as actors, the level of craft they display, and the technical brilliance of creating and mapping so many different variables across the multiverse. It’s a staggering achievement. I hope you’ll join us at the Omnibus on 20th March. Tickets are already on sale and I’m pretty sure we’ll sell out our cosy little room pretty quickly.

Also:

Dan will be teaching a 90 min version of his workshop Playing with No Words before Pretend Night on 20th March. If you take it, you’ll also get a code to get into the show for £5.

On Saturday, Dan will be teaching a full day course called Unplug Your Brain. Which sounds like something I could do with.

This workshop aims at unplugging our brains, to explore what our bodies have to suggest. We will train not to be heady or too rational, to allow your scenes to be silly, to accept and play the nonsense. Let your bodies surprise yourself and embrace their strong propositions, to just have fun, play like kids, discover new places, characters and relations, to follow the inspiration and your instinct.

You can secure your spot by following this link:
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/pretend/2039300

Ella will also be teaching with us but we’re initially keeping those spaces exclusively for people who’ve attended a Pretend Company training course already. If you think you should be on that list, but haven’t had an email to sign up - then do reply to this email and we’ll sort you out.

Longform thoughts

Assumptions are bad in real life but in improv they are the building blocks of a scene. An assumption almost immediately gets transfigured into a fact because there is no objective reality in improv scenes. Therefore wild assumptions (as long as your partner accepts and builds on them) are incredibly useful (and help you avoid questions).

I’ve had the pleasure of coaching a lot of brilliant scene work already this year. I noticed I kept giving variations on the same five notes (plus two affirmations that need to run alongside them). The five:two protocol is my attempt to boil that advice down into a few quick-to-read paragraphs.

Radio contact

Radio is still in his dressing gown and it’s the afternoon.