About

A long time ago, a Radio Times critic wrote a review of something I had made for television and described it as "pure hokum". I don't think it was meant kindly, but I really liked it and the phrase stayed with me.

Since then, an awful lot of the things I've written and made, in a career that has spanned film, TV and audio in both London and Hollywood, have certainly been pure hokum. Over time, a lot of those projects started to knit together, quite organically, into a series of overlapping and intersecting story universes.

Pure Hokum is my attempt to build an umbrella over those universes. It's a story development and production company dedicated to building out those worlds and developing projects in all media from within them.

In other words, it's a personal playground where I get to make stuff up, do deep dives into all sorts of esoteric nonsense, and come up with stuff that is fun and interesting and exciting.

Because the worlds, like the Pleasant Green Universe and the Kaleidoscope Universe, came first, the audience is already growing. That puts Pure Hokum in a fairly unique position. The Kaleidoscope Universe has already been exposed in three series of Aldrich Kemp adventures on BBC Radio 4 (now available as a collection on Audible), and the Pleasant Green Universe has been the subject of a number of award-winning radio plays, three Mythos audio dramas, four seasons of the alarmingly popular (and also award-winning) Lovecraft Investigations podcast and a feature film screenplay (Bad Memories) that made last year's Blacklist.

Thanks to that fan base, we also broke a bunch of records with our Kickstarter for Lovecraft Investigations: Crowley, a series which launches in March 2026.

Between crowdfunding, independent finance, and a healthy subscriber base on the Pleasant Green website, Pure Hokum is able to do its thing without having to worry too much about the vagaries of the media industry. We are here for the audience; they pay our bills so long as we keep making things that delight them. I have always liked that deal, and the relationship I have with our community, via the Cartoon Gravity Club and the various websites, keeps us all honest.

So this is our shelter from the storm - Pure Hokum, home to five universes at various stages of development: Pleasant Green, Kaleidoscope, Albany, European Sinister, and The Origin. Some have been more exposed than others, but part of the job of this place is to balance that; to build out what we're doing, to undertake more and more projects, and to involve the community every step of the way.

I'm going to kick off with the Kaleidoscope Universe, where I will be serialising the first part of a novel, exclusively to subscribers, one chapter at a time over the next few weeks. That subscription will be free, to build our community out a little more.

So sign up, click around the site, and I'll keep you up to date with what's going on. If you're a Pleasant Green fan stumbling on this place for the first time, know that there is a whole world for you to explore at the Pleasant Green site. If you're interested in the life and times of a writer-director (or you have a penchant for notepads and nice pens), Cartoon Gravity is my online scrapbook/journal/etc. You're welcome everywhere.

Pure Hokum is independent, audience-supported, and built to last.