If everything's a dream,

By this point, I've stopped even pretending to think about other fandoms. Have ten more tiny Goes Wrong Show ficlets for the threesentenceficathon. Most of these are actually three sentences, at least!


( Assorted ficlets for the Goes Wrong Show, mainly Chris and Robert, 1,100 words total. )


Poking through bits of the script for the stage version of Peter Pan Goes Wrong, I was intrigued to discover one particular tiny segment. Robert, playing Nana the dog, is trapped in the dog door, meaning he's nowhere near the human characters when they start complaining that he's getting fur on them. Naturally, they come up with the sanest possible solution:

Chris: Oh, you useless animal! You've got dog hairs all over my trousers!
(He goes over to Robert and rubs his trousers over him.)
Sandra: Silly hound! You've got hair all over everyone.
(They all rub themselves on Robert.)

Tragically, this did not make it into the television cut! HOWEVER, I'm delighted to find there is a three-second 'Robert on his hands and knees while Sandra rubs herself against his beard' clip from rehearsals floating around, which you can find here on Tumblr if you're as normal about Robert Grove as I am.

My housemates read Educational Experiences, my 'the Cornley Drama Society have an orgy' Goes Wrong Show fic, in the wake of which we had an incredible discussion on the subject. The fic itself fades to black, but we had a lot of ideas about how disastrously a Cornley Drama Society orgy might actually play out, all of which delighted me!


( Discussing the hypothetical Orgy That Goes Wrong. )


For something non-orgy-related, I saw a poll on Tumblr asking 'Would you give your blorbo a gentle kiss on the forehead?', and I'm surprised by how few people are saying no! (At the moment, with around 1,000 votes, it's at 92% yes to 8% no.)

As I noted in the tags of my reblog, I'm not sure a gentle forehead kiss would be received well by most of my blorbos. Squall would find it unbearably awkward. Light would hate it and, moreover, would not deserve it. Robert Grove would in theory be fine with a forehead kiss, but he would interpret the gentleness as weakness; he'd probably start trying to coach me on giving a more powerful and therefore objectively better forehead kiss. A proper forehead kiss should ideally knock your opponent to the floor. ('Wait, the person I'm kissing is my opponent?' Yes. The forehead kiss is a power struggle that you must win.)

Having slid rapidly from 'enthusing about my new favourite show' to 'outright propaganda', I've written a Goes Wrong Show primer for tv_talk. I thought I'd crosspost it here, in case anyone wants a general overview of my latest obsession, although I suspect my posts over the last month have already conveyed a lot of this!


If anyone's in the mood for something silly and fun, I'd like to recommend The Goes Wrong Show, which I discovered recently and absolutely fell in love with.




What is The Goes Wrong Show?

If you've heard of The Play That Goes Wrong, this comedy series is from the same theatre company, Mischief Theatre. Every thirty-minute episode is a new short play, performed by the determined but deeply unfortunate Cornley Drama Society. Every play goes as wrong as humanly possible.

In addition to being very funny, the plays are startlingly impressive technical achievements. These are genuine stage plays being filmed in front of a live audience, and making things 'go wrong' convincingly requires incredible pinpoint timing. So much hard work goes into messing everything up; it must be so much trickier than performing a play that goes right!

If you like Taskmaster, you might also enjoy this; they have a similar sense of people desperately struggling on with their mission while everything falls apart around them.


( Character overview below the cut. )


Where can I watch The Goes Wrong Show?

There's a good chance you'll be able to watch it at no cost! If you're in the UK, it's on BBC iPlayer (or DVD, if you don't have a television licence).

If you're outside the UK, I believe The Goes Wrong Show is officially available for free on the Lionsgate YouTube channel. As the videos are blocked for me, it's hard for me to check (let me know if it doesn't seem like the right link!), but I think this YouTube playlist should have all twelve episodes. I've heard from a couple of people based in the US that it's also on Amazon Prime there.

If I only ever watch one episode of this show, which would you recommend?

I love the whole show, and I think the first-listed episode ('The Spirit of Christmas') is a solid starting point. If you only ever watch one, though, the episode '90 Degrees' is a genuinely insane, extraordinary feat of performance. If you're wondering, they're not using CGI; they actually did that.

For each of my major fandoms, I do a short writeup talking about how it fits into my fandom history. A fandom qualifies as 'major' if I've written five fics for it, or ten thousand words across at least three fics.

I don't think the latest addition is going to be a surprise to anyone.


The Goes Wrong Show

I can pinpoint exactly when The Goes Wrong Show first happened to me. It was the sixth of December, 2025; I was thirty-seven. I was at my parents' house to see some relatives who were visiting.

My fifteen-year-old cousin, H, had removed himself from the socialisation and was watching a Minecraft video on the television in the sitting room. I asked if I could read in the room while he watched television; I thought that'd be a nice, low-pressure way for us to hang out. He switched from Minecraft videos to an episode of The Goes Wrong Show: "You'd probably like this more."

I've been aware of the existence of The Play That Goes Wrong for a long time; it's hard not to be if you're a Londoner! If you've lived in London at any point in the last decade, or if a visit has ever brought you to the West End, chances are that you've seen posters for it at Tube stations. I remember the evocative name caught my eye when it first started showing up.

My friend RD had seen The Play That Goes Wrong years ago and said it was hilarious, so it had stuck in my mind as something that was probably good fun, even if I had no actual plans to see it. I'd never heard of The Goes Wrong Show, but I realised instantly, from the style of the logo, that it was related to The Play That Goes Wrong, so I was interested to see what it was like!

The episode H put on was 'The Lodge'. As I had anticipated, it showed actors putting on a play - in this case a ghost story - and that play going wrong in every possible way. My main initial impressions:

a) this is very silly
b) this is pretty fun
c) there's a lot of genuinely impressive effort and skill on display; this is an actual stage play being filmed in front of a live audience, and it must take such precise timing to make things 'go wrong' correctly
d) who is that man?????

The man in question was the creepy owner of the haunted lodge. He was compelling! He was hot! He was loud and weird and ridiculous! At one point he got knocked out by a vase falling on his head, and somehow that only made him more attractive to me; it was such a well-done piece of physical comedy.

At one point H's mother, S, came into the room and saw we were watching The Goes Wrong Show. 'Oh, it's Robert,' she commented, when the man I was so fascinated by happened to be on screen.

S explained that the character of Robert had also been in Peter Pan Goes Wrong, which she had seen on stage. I'd originally assumed that the concept of this show was just 'a play goes wrong' without any kind of story behind it, and I was surprised and interested to discover that the 'actors' involved were actually consistent characters across the different plays.

'He's very good,' I said, enraptured.

After 'The Lodge' had finished, we also watched the episode '90 Degrees', at S's request. It had less screentime for Robert, alas, but it was an absolutely extraordinary technical achievement, improved even further by the fact that S's mother had now joined us and was absolutely losing it laughing.

So I'd now seen two episodes of The Goes Wrong Show! I'd enjoyed them, but I didn't carry on with the show straight away. Shamefully, what drove me to watch more wasn't actually the comedy; it was the fact that I found myself idly thinking about Robert while I walked down the street. I just wanted to see more of that bizarre handsome weirdo.

The show is on BBC iPlayer, and I couldn't watch it at home because we don't have a television licence, so I tried out another episode when I next visited my parents. And then another. And another, and another. And then I ordered every Goes Wrong DVD I could get my hands on, and then I started buying theatre tickets, and that's how we've ended up here. I'm so sorry.

Favourite character: who could it beeeeeeee (it's Robert, of course it's Robert, why do I have such a weakness for a large man with a loud and aggressive persona) (shut the FUCK up, Freud, I don't want to hear your opinion)
Favourite pairing: Robert/Chris. Their dynamic is just so fascinatingly weird. They're friends! They're enemies! They're bizarrely obsessed with each other! Robert has slept with Chris's mother! Chris has kissed Robert's sister! Robert has repeatedly attempted to incapacitate Chris in an effort to steal a role from him! Robert wrote Chris a role specifically designed to humiliate him, but also included a scene in which his own character and Chris's connect and find common ground! What's wrong with them?? I have no idea, but it's great.
Number of words written: 9,763 on my main AO3 account, plus about 3,000 words' worth of fills for the Three-Sentence Ficathon.

Snippet: I've finished most of the things I've started for the Goes Wrong series, but here's a silly little snippet that probably won't go anywhere.

( The Goes Wrong Show unfinished snippet, Chris and Annie, 2026. )