Whilst I don’t think I’ve harmed myself or others too much during the making of this episode, I have learnt that things really do have to get worse before they get better. Everyone around me and therefore also me, because every person you sample produces a self portrait, is slowly losing their mind in a more entrenched and complex and way than I previously suspected. I am struggling to see whose story is whose anymore due to widespread confusion and the ridiculous assumption that one story is in fact exclusive to only one person, and not mirrored 25 times across a community affected by the same social and economic conditions.

This episode is about multiplicities of inconsequential stealing; low level shoplifting, ‘borrowing’ anecdotes, bootlegging song lyrics, and filming people in secret. My friends are still playing my friends, but this time – they don’t know that they are doing it. Which says something about complicity of the actress in the four women formula on screen – so – I’m hanging onto that conceptual thread.

After Episode 1, I realised that coming down off ketamine lying on top of a butterfly duvet from primark, and then taking a photograph of the results, really does smack of a life lived under the radar. I am living my own groundbreaking and ever-so-underground yet high street web series, and it really is worse than anything BBC Three comes up with. I’m concerned this sounds a bit too KNOWING, if you know what I mean, but I’m just really fucked off at the moment.

If you hadn’t already worked this out – I’m making a series too. The idea is to end up with a legitimate sitcom. The theme of each episode will be about something vaguely illegal, but illegal in a way which doesn’t really pose a threat. There is a lineage between receiving a court summons for not paying the council tax, and scanning an avocado as an onion through the self scanner in Tesco. This episode will still reference the failure of making what you want to make, further episodes will eventually showing a ‘neoliberal’ climb towards a ‘successful’ piece of work.

This particular stage documents learning the lesson that you really do have to hit a low point, in order to snap your psyche into some form of aspirational making.

Emily Pope (b. 1990, UK) is a visual artist based in London, working in film, printmaking, radio, creative writing and publishing. Her research explores a history of experimental contemporary broadcast media with a focus on humour and satire, feminism, political rhetoric + class politics. Recent presentations and performances include Fluid festival, Birmingham (2017); HAHA Gallery, Southampton (2017); NAWKI Film Festival, South End (2016); Ladette Space, London (2016); Turf Projects, London (2016); and The Royal Standard, Liverpool (2015).