Seventy-Eight Thank Yous comes to Brighton Fringe: what happens when grief meets gratitude

Always positive and upbeat, Val Pretlove was 78 years old when she filled a rucksack with bricks, drove to the Thames in Reading and walked into the water. Anguish followed for James Pretlove but the chinks in its armour began to fill with his thank yous, and once they started, they didn’t stop.

When he had trouble getting the memoir he went on to write published, he found himself doing something totally unprecedented, and saw a psychic. With kindness, she told him to stop hiding behind his computer screen and to find ways to engage with the public in-person.

Terrified, Pretlove did public readings and then undertook an intensive three-month residential storytelling course at Emerson College in Forest Row which enabled him to develop both the story, and his ability to step in front of a crowd.

It wasn’t long after the course finished that Pretlove started to perform Seventy-Eight Thank Yous all over the UK, from the Universal Hall in Findhorn, north-east Scotland, via the Oxford Storytelling Festival to St Stephen Walbrook in the City of London. This was one of his mother’s favourite churches, and as it was where the first Samaritans telephone calls were taken, it seemed like a very appropriate venue.

The piece has a deep impact on those who see it. “It was an absolutely superb performance,” said Dorota Owen, “intimate, uplifting, funny and sad. A rollercoaster ride of a single human experience with universal themes.”

And it’s quite a rollercoaster for Pretlove himself, one that works far outside his performances. In fact, doing this work, he can now look death in the face and often finds himself having those conversations-less-ordinary in our culture: ones about death in general and suicide in particular.

Rather than running away from talking about our mortality, Pretlove now loves engaging with people on this taboo subject and realises that this is simply one more thing for which he is grateful to his Mum.