Jane Bussmann

Jane Bussmann is an award-winning British comedy writer and author who has written for South Park, the Emmy-winning Smack The Pony, The Fast Show, Armando Iannucci’s Friday Night Armistice and legendary news satire show Brass Eye. (Bussmann was 'Named and Shamed' in the News of the World newspaper as one of the writers behind Brass Eye Special, the most complained-about program in British television history). She has worked on over fifty shows and developed for NBC, HBO, the BBC, ITV, Granada and Channel4 among others. She began her writing career at the age of nineteen for the Guardian newspaper, writing a column ‘On the Razz’ before becoming a comedy writer for the BBC at the age of twenty-two. Jane also works as a newspaper columnist, writing travel pieces for the Mail on Sunday. She wrote the Hollywood columns ‘Letter from America’ and ‘We Love Los Angeles’ for Red magazine and The Face, and celebrity features for the Sunday Times, Independent, GQ, Esquire, Glamour and InStyle. In 2006, her live comedy show Bussmann's Holiday, about her adventures following peacemaker John Prendergast to a Ugandan war zone, was a four-star hit at the Edinburgh Festival with a subsequent sold-out London run at the Soho Theatre, going on to play in New York, Sydney, receiving rave reviews. Bussmann's Holiday was nominated for the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Awards and won Best Comedy at Perrier rivals the Tap Water Awards.
The show tells the unlikely story of how Bussmann grew so fed up with interviewing celebrities in Hollywood that she went to Uganda to investigate someone she Googled as 'the most evil man in the world', Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony, wanted on charges of rape, murder and the kidnapping of ‘somewhere between’ 20-64,000 children.
This is a lie. Jane went to Uganda to impress John Prendergast, a very attractive American peace activist. When she arrived, for reasons too irritating to go into here, Jane was forced to actually investigate Kony. The resulting show shone new light on an appalling war crime. Bussmann's Holiday became the book The Worst Date Ever. Jane is currently adapting it as a screenplay for Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim producers Big Talk with Slumdog Millionaire producers Film4.