The pivot to Pure Hokum

It's weird out there in the film and television world at the moment. And not the good kind of weird. Netflix are buying Warner Bros, then Paramount are, then Netflix are, and then Paramount again. One buyer is apparently bad for theatrical exhibition (although worth noting that Warners themselves tried to move away from theatrical a while back, and then suddenly sold a bunch of tickets and moved back again), and the other is bad because we don't want a major media company owned by people who bend the knee to MAGA. Of course, if you only want to do business with US corporations who don't bend the knee to MAGA, you have pretty much no one to do business with.

Good movies are still getting made in Hollywood, but no one seems to be able to tell you how. It's like a magical pathway opens up, allows one good movie through, and then closes forever. Television is absorbing itself with elongated remakes of 90s movie thrillers, designed to be viewed with one eye on your phone. Very little of worth is being produced, because the audience will settle for anything diverting enough to take its mind off the world burning.

Good times.

Closer to home, the UK film industry is no more an industry than it ever was. Again, good things do make it through; people are carving their own path, but the trail usually evaporates behind them. In television, the industry is chasing that elusive 18-24 demographic by inexplicably rebooting shows that their grandparents liked. UK television is a clown car without a steering wheel from which a show like Industry or Small Prophets occasionally spills, the success of which is then deemed somehow anomalous, despite the more obvious conclusion that these shows do well because they are both original and good.

Nevertheless we persist.

But maybe persisting is no longer enough. Maybe the landscape, especially in the US, is fundamentally collapsing. That is not to say that the demand for good stories, well told, is fading, rather that the mainstream industry is increasingly incapable and disincentivised to meet that demand. You can't cover the costs of your corporate behemoth with a Sentimental Value or a Marty Supreme. To keep the lights on requires back-to-back Avengers movies.

That probably seems obvious, but it wasn't always. It used to be that studios would make twenty movies a year, knowing that some would be flops, some would do fine and a few would do well enough to cover the losses and pay the bills. For lots of, mostly dumb, reasons that model changed and now the money goes into a handful of expensive movies every year that need to be "sure things".

It is still possible to write a good script and get some big name actors attached, and an A-list director (which nowadays usually means someone who recently had their hand held through the making of a franchise movie), take it into a studio and have half a chance of getting it made. But the number of places you can take that are dwindling, as are the chances of it ever making it into production.

It's not that any of this is impossible, it's just very hard. I don't think it should be easy, that's not the argument (If you can only survive in this industry when it's easy, then you can't survive in this industry). The argument, or at least my argument, is that maybe navigating this quagmire does not need to be my sole focus.

Right now, I have two TV shows trying to get financing in the US, two movies trying to get financing in the UK and Europe, and two movies packaging in the US. The temptation is to add to the queue, to write another pilot or another show to push into the pipeline, because you can never have too many balls in the air. And that is a strong argument, strong enough that I am in fact, doing exactly that.

But it's no longer all I'm doing. I've spent a lot of time looking around and thinking since the beginning of the year, and I have realised that, much closer to home, I have a bunch of stuff that I really like doing, that has an audience, and that could exist outside of all this craziness.

2025 saw the successful launch of the Crowley Kickstarter. We hit our target hard and fast on that and have since written and produced the Crowley audio series and a new episode of Mythos (both will be released in March). At the same time, and partly as a result of the crowdfund, the audience for the Pleasant Green Universe has both grown in size and transformed into something of a community, largely via the Cartoon Gravity Club.

To facilitate the Kickstarter, I activated a company that had until then just been a container for the Pleasant Green and Cartoon Gravity sites. It's called Pure Hokum, and if you're a subscriber, you might have seen it before on your bank statements. Now it is becoming something more...

Welcome to Pure Hokum

Pure Hokum contains multitudes. More literally, it comprises five story universes. Two of them you know about; Pleasant Green, and the Kaleidoscope Universe, which is where the Aldrich Kemp stories live. You might also be vaguely aware of The Origin Universe, which is where Forsaken McTeague hails from. If you've been reading the De Kliek serial on the Pleasant Green site, then you have also been overlapping into the European Sinister universe, which is an off-shoot of Pleasant Green, born from the Melusine Ritual and centred around the Levesque Institute in Paris. The Tillinghast family, long time antagonists from the Pleasant Green stories, have a branch of the family that has been ensconced in America for a couple of centuries. They are the bad guys in the Albany Universe, which explores the supernatural history and mythological foundations of New York City. At the last count, there are nearly a thousand notes spread across these five universes; characters, organisations, places, ideas... The Pleasant Green stuff has obviously been exploited the most so far, but the others are equally busy and growing.

Pure Hokum will be the umbrella for them all. A company that builds story worlds, creates audio, movies, TV, novels and prose serials.

The BBC provided the cornerstone on which the Pleasant Green Universe is built, but there won't be any new Pleasant Green or Kaleidoscope-related material via the BBC for the foreseeable future. That frees us up to make more Lovecraft Investigations, more Mythos, more Aldrich Kemp, and a whole host of new shows on top. We can crowdfund audio productions, publish fiction serials across the universes, develop movies and TV, build out the subscriber base, look into micro-streaming, make our own films, create merch...

For a long time, I have viewed film and TV work as my main job and the other stuff as a side hustle. Now, though, I think the polarity has shifted. Within the Pure Hokum universes lie stories, ideas and characters that I love, and the possibility to build something outside of the mainstream, alongside a community of people that is enthusiastic, supportive and open-minded. I'm not ditching the other stuff, far from it. I would simply prefer to be spending more of my time within these story worlds, with an audience that is already there and already invested, than adding another spec script to a pile that may never move.

Which is not to say the other work stops. The pipeline keeps moving, because you never know, and because all of the projects I have out there genuinely excite me. But the day-to-day focus has shifted. Now Pure Hokum gets a much bigger claim on the working day.

What that means in practice: Crowley and the new Mythos episode land in March, and they will be followed by more Lovecraft Investigations, more serialised fiction, more Aldrich Kemp, more... Things I haven't even thought of yet. Holding it all together will be a new Pure Hokum site, which will launch very soon and which will serve as the front door to all of it, providing the overview of what is happening.

The Pleasant Green site is going to grow, and The Attic, the universe's wiki, is now being built out properly. And this Cartoon Gravity site continues, because this is where I think out loud. And there is rather a lot to think about...