Tom Crowley
Actor / Writer
Wooden Overcoats (2015-2022), Victoriocity (2019-)
Roles
“Eric Chapman / Series Writer in Wooden Overcoats, Inspector Archibald Fleet in Victoriocity, Creator / Writer / Actor / Sound Designer / Composer in Crowley Time with me, Tom Crowley.”
Bio
Tom Crowley is best known as a series writer and actor in the Prix Europa-nominated podcast sitcom Wooden Overcoats and as the playwright behind the stage premiere of the Rocky Horror sequel, Shock Treatment. Recently he has written for BBC Sounds, Six to Start and Bafflegab Productions. His modernised stage adaptation of Dickens’s Great Expectations was published by Methuen Drama in 2017.
As an actor he has been seen in The Royals (E!/Lionsgate) and has been heard in countless podcasts including The Beef and Dairy Network Podcast, Victoriocity, The Harrowing (Fremantle), on BBC Radio 4 in Ankle Tag and Gemma Arrowsmith’s Sketched Out.
Tom also writes, performs and produces his own one-man sketch comedy podcast, Crowley Time with me, Tom Crowley, available on all good podcast apps and at crowleytime.com.
“…something that had the potential to travel. And the potential to last!”
How did you become aware of Wooden Overcoats?
“I was involved with Wooden Overcoats from its very inception as an idea.
Felix Trench and I met on the Royal Court Theatre’s Young Writers Course in 2012 and, from then, we were constantly putting projects together. Tiring of our experiences in fringe theatre, where shows would eat up enormous amounts of love, talent and work and then disappear forever having been seen by about ten people, Felix suggested that we make a web series to distribute online.
He had the idea of two rival funeral homes, possibly run by feuding brothers and potentially set in Victorian or Edwardian era. I, fearing the expense and time involved in making films, was hesitant.
Later, two things happened: one, Felix and I both appeared in a short podcast series written by his then-flatmate, David K. Barnes, a serialised knockabout detective comedy called Drayton Trench: Great Caesar’s Ghost; two, the true crime podcast Serial launched and was the most popular thing in the world.
Felix suggested that we make the undertakers idea as a podcast and I liked that idea much better. He suggested that we get David involved as a head writer figure and soon after, the three of us were in a room bashing together a premise for the show and a first series outline.
We could only come up with a temporary placeholder title, Wooden Overcoats, but we’ll come up with something better one of these days.”
What was your aim in getting involved?
“We wanted to make something with a bit of scope to it, and something that had the potential to travel. And the potential to last!
Felix and I had previously worked on my stage play Ghost City at the King’s Head Theatre in 2014, and then VAULT Festival 2015. I still love that play and lots of people I know have expressed interest in developing it as a television or radio series at different times, but it’s never come to anything. So, ultimately, if I want it to have a further life, I have to fund actors, a venue, rehearsal space, a tech operator and all the other costs involved in putting on a play.
By contrast, if I want someone new to hear Wooden Overcoats or Crowley Time, I just tell them to punch it into their podcast app. What’s more, millions of people I don’t know across the world have heard some podcast or other that I’ve been in, and far, far fewer have chanced upon the plays I’ve put over the years. I still love live performance but it can be a much more ephemeral and expensive medium to work in.
With Wooden Overcoats specifically, we wanted to make something that felt like it belonged in the canon of British comedy, following shows like The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Steptoe and Son, Dinnerladies and David’s chief influence on the show, Ever Decreasing Circles, without feeling nostalgic or regressive in any way.
We wanted good roles for women, we wanted to feature some queer characters and we didn’t want to lean back on any unpleasant old clichés. We also wanted to present Piffling as a positive image of a Channel Island. We chose an island because it allowed for that classic sitcom isolated community, which is helpful for narrative and comedy in so many ways, but we didn’t want the people of Piffling Vale to be unwelcoming or suspicious of outsiders…except Rudyard.
What’s more, as far as I remember, David’s original intention was to use the central rivalry in the show to examine jealousy. By the end, as the characters grew and their relationships evolved, it was much more a show about family.”
“…we didn’t want to lean back on any unpleasant old clichés.”
What was the biggest challenge?
“It’s still a huge challenge for me on many projects, but - even more than now - our biggest challenge in the early days was convincing prospective listeners that podcasts weren’t just people sitting around a table talking.
I even had someone listen to the show and tell me, ‘this isn’t a podcast, this is radio’. To this day, the expression ‘do a podcast’ means ‘talk about something on a microphone, then release it, unedited’. This is not to insult any of those chat podcasts, by the way, that definition describes most of the shows I listen to regularly.
However, when most shows can record and release a new episode in about an hour and a half and reliably get one out every week, and we had to sweat blood to release eight episodes in a year, it did feel like we were a bit hobbled in our promotional capabilities.
Several of us were doing research into digital marketing and podcasts in particular, and we adapted our advertising strategy towards making a shorter but more dense and high-production-value product, rather than one that’s big on quantity.
It was still a huge gamble that the listening audience would be interested something that was only a few hours long, and that they’d have to wait months for more of, like in the olden days.
Luckily, it seems that the listeners understood that carefully honed and designed material like Overcoats takes time, and that small things can sometimes be all the more precious.”
“…carefully honed and designed material takes time…”
What would be your dream project?
“I’ve talked about this quite often, and if huge amounts of money to do it suddenly landed in my lap, I’d take it on tomorrow.
In Britain in the Sixties and Seventies, there was a television programme called Comedy Playhouse that ran for an erratic number of episodes per year. It was an anthology series in which each episode was an original half-hour comedy television play set in a different location with all different characters, written and directed by totally different teams of people.
The series launched dozens of sitcoms and dozens of comedy writers’ television careers, including Galton and Simpson with Steptoe and Son, Johnny Speight with Til Death Do Us Part, and Croft and Lloyd with Are You Being Served?, with one-off plays acting as backdoor pilots for new shows.
Most importantly, regardless of whether the plays became a series, it provided a high-exposure, paid playground for new (and newish) talent to experiment in comedy. I’d love to do exactly that in podcasting, Comedy Podhouse, let’s say, ideally attached to some huge network to get lots of ears on it.
I’d open submissions to lots of new British talent of all regions, races, genders and backgrounds, hire readers to go through all the submissions and pay the writers properly to develop the scripts into finished radio pieces.
Then I’d get a few famous types in key places to help to promote the series and fill the rest of the shows with undiscovered talent, giving everyone involved a credit, a decent payday and the chance to release a fully-produced radio play internationally that they can use to show themselves off anywhere they like, any time they like.
I’m aware that Big Finish Productions are running a competition to try to do exactly this, and I wish them well! There are so few opportunities for untested talent in this country and any attempt to open up those doors must be applauded.
What would be wonderful, though, is if the BBC or some other vast media organisation would commit to making multiple seasons of such a thing, let’s say, three years running, so that it could gain some traction and become a real institution.
Every time a writer gets their first professional commission, a dozen potentially popular future shows are born. The problem for most writers is getting the gatekeepers’ attention for long enough to get that first credit.”
“…make sure you’ve fully taken in the lines and trust them to do most of the work.”
How did you land the role? Any tips for a strong audio reel (or virtual audition)?
“This doesn’t apply for Overcoats, but I can tell the story of how I ended up playing Fleet in Victoriocity, of which I wasn’t a founding member at all.
I first met Jen and Chris Sugden at the Edinburgh Fringe 2015, where I was performing my sketch group’s show Sad Faces Present The Dawn Chorus and they were with The Dead Secrets performing their show Curiositorium.
The Sugdens and I made friends straight away and we stayed in touch about our various projects. When they were looking for the cast for the first series of Victoriocity, they held a workshop session to audition actors in Oxford, where they’re based, and one in London, where I’m based.
I loved the writing, and still do, so it was easy to work out how to play the character and the jokes because all I had to do was think, ‘I’d listen to this show. How would I want to hear an actor play this line?’ When you’ve got good writing to work with, all you have to do is make sure you’ve fully taken in the lines and trust them to do most of the work.
The only advice I’d offer for voice reels is pretty simple, but it’s good to go back to the basics when checking over your work. Keep the clips fairly short and punchy - and vary the energy between clips.
As an example, maybe you could start with a clip that shows a really high-energy and funny or action-packed moment, then cut to one that shows a quieter, more introspective voice - then go from there.
I’d also recommend separating out commercial voice work, voice acting work and character voice work. Recently, my agent even suggested adding a short reel of American accents as its own separate file because so many jobs that were coming through insisted on a perfect US accent..”
“…do it like you’re there and this is happening to you…”
How does acting for audio compare to other media, for you? Any skills or techniques you’d recommend learning for it?
“Audio can be intimidating because it puts such a microscopic focus on your voice, but this can also be really liberating in certain ways. When you only have one tool to play with, you get to experiment with every minor change of inflection and what it does to a line of dialogue.
So, if you’re just getting started with voice work, read the script out loud when you’re first going through it. See how the words sound coming out of your mouth and try to enjoy them as much as you can. You don’t want to rush and you don’t want to be too worried about pronunciation or phrasing when you get to your performance, so get familiar with the material early on and get busy playing with the material.
The most important skill in voice acting, though, is using your imagination.
Perform the part like you’re really there, in the world of the script, and these things are happening to you.
This is a personal bugbear of mine, when voice actors just read the script in a pretty voice. By necessity, your diction and clarity are more important in voice work than on screen, because the sounds are the only way that the audience knows what’s going on.
But once you’ve got used to pronouncing the words as clearly as you need to, the next crucial step is to keep that clarity while loosening up your performance and bringing that naturalism back in.
Even in audiobooks, the best readers introduce an off-the-cuff, conversational tone to their reading, even though they could get away with just reading the words prettily. So please - do it like you’re there and this is happening to you, I promise the audience will find it more engaging.”
“…sometimes it’s worth listening back to your earliest performances…”
If your character was an occasional or guest part, how did you characterise them quickly and memorably?
“Often, if I’m playing multiple background roles in something - and also when I’m making Crowley Time, when I usually play everyone - I find the easiest thing is to push vocal extremes. If one character is very airy and speaks with a high voice, up in their nose, then I make the other one guttural and growling and rough, speaking from low in the throat.
There are also options like different accents, reflecting parts of the world or different social backgrounds, but they need to make sense for where the project is set and the types of characters who are meant to be there.
But don’t forget other tools, like attitude! Sometimes if a character only makes a brief appearance, they’ll only have time for one emotional register, so giving a character a grumpy, low-spoken attitude will instantly differentiate them from someone who has an open, friendly demeanour, even if they otherwise don’t sound all that different.
As you go, you’ll probably discover lots of different voices that you like to do, which are quick and easy shortcuts to creating lots of different characters quickly. You can lean into this and develop a sort of stable of easy-access characters with their own distinct energies, to call on when you’re having to come up with a lot of people very quickly.
As for principal characters, I don’t tend to make such extreme choices. Eric Chapman is me but more confident and Inspector Fleet is me but more weary. That way, to get into the character, I don’t have to contort my vocal pipes too extremely, so it’s much easier to re-adopt their sound and remember their outlook on the world.
Beyond that, I usually find that it’s a case of trusting the writing. If this is a character that’s existed for a long time, then the writers behind them are probably trying to take them to exciting new places too, so you should follow their lead.
But if you’re worried your approach to the character is getting a bit stale, then sometimes it’s worth listening back to your earliest performances in the role. If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably be surprised to hear some things you really like in there, but also cringe at some of your rookie errors.
Still, even if it’s agonising, you’ll be reminded of how you first approached the character but also of how much you’ve come along as an actor and everything you’ve tried to do better since then.”