The Person Behind the Studio
It started with hand-me-down comic annuals from my older cousins. Dog-eared, well-loved, passed down without ceremony. Robot Archie. Rogue Trooper. The Spider. That was my introduction to the idea that a story could build a whole world and drop you into it. That you could invent new scenarios and adventures out of thin air.
On my first cinema trip I voted to watch The Black Hole. I was outvoted. We saw The Empire Strikes Back instead, which turned out to be one of the greatest films ever made. I want it on record that I thought The Black Hole title was cooler for the science. What I took away from the cinema was the same thing the comics had taught me. It is not just the story. It is the sound of it, the look of it, the feeling of sitting still and being taken somewhere else entirely.
One Christmas holiday, alone in the front room, I watched Castle in the Sky for the first time. It was the first time the anime had aired on British television. I had no idea what I was about to see. By the end of it something had shifted permanently. Here was a story told with a visual language and an emotional weight I had never encountered before. It was the moment I understood that the way you tell a story is itself a creative choice, and that the possibilities were much wider than I had imagined.
Every week my mum took us to Jesmond Library. We browsed as a family and my reading grew with me. Henry Treece brought Vikings and Romans to life. Tom Holt made gods and mythology absurd and human. Iain M. Banks built science fiction universes with real moral weight. Philip Reeve showed me that adventure could be genuinely inventive. China Mieville proved that weird was a genre worth taking seriously. What all of them share is a world so complete you forget to notice you are reading. That is still the standard I am chasing.
I got an Amstrad CPC 464 computer when I was eleven to develop useful skills. I used it to play The Wild Bunch, a text based adventure game. It was the only game my sister would sit down and play with me. Music came next. Grunge got into my bones as a teenager and rewired something permanently. In sixth form I was the lead singer of Cosmic Tree. We played rock classics like we owned them. Great Balls of Fire featured heavily. Looking back, I was already doing what I do now. Finding the story inside the system. Getting other people invested in it.
I am Philip Gray, founder of Pleased Reader Studios, based in Newcastle upon Tyne. First Class BA in Writing and Publishing. Multiple creative worlds in progress. Audio and video on international platforms. Audio dramas. Concept albums. Comic books. Work selected for film festivals. If you have a story worth telling, I would love to help you tell it.
Pleased Reader 