The ads for D’Ancey LaGuarde books with their lascivious synopses became a staple of Alice’s fake ads section in her podcasts. D’Ancey, who is a mysterious online bestseller and romance maven of unspecified origins and gender turns out about one book every four days - usually historical romance novels with a supernatural twist, but occasionally sci fi, fantasy and action novels. These fictional fictions are pumped full of creamy breasts, sweating abs and fingering on horseback, and audiences can’t seem to get enough of them.

“Violet is a sassy suffragette with an anachronistic vocabulary and an elasticated corset... and amnesia. She doesn't need a man, but she can't remember why...”

- The Dim Menagerie, D’Ancey LaGuarde 

Fraser will channel D’Ancey to create the D’Ancey LaGuarde Reader, for fans and haters alike. A book about a joke about books, which will appeal not just to the Bugle audience but also to podcast fans, book fans, joke fans and fans of heaving bosoms in fraught situations. It’s just all so silly.

With a foreword from Andy Zaltzman, the book will include full colour covers, commentary and interviews as well as never before seen D’Ancey excerpts, full chapters and bloopers.

Possibly the daftest way the idea for a book has ever come into existence and over 50% funded on Unbound in the first 12 hours of launch, The D’Ancey LaGuarde Reader will be a joke about a joke about a joke. 

Fraser wrote her Honours Thesis on the narrative rhetoric of romance novels, which makes her uniquely qualified to channel the works of the self-published romance maven D’Ancey LaGuarde. Her comedy spans the satirical, social, philosophical, and personal, adeptly infused with her trademark silliness and clever charm.

Her solo comedy shows have been commissioned as podcast and TV specials on Amazon Prime, BBC and the ABC, as well as being performed at Festivals including the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Sydney Comedy Festival, Canberra Comedy Festival, Perth Comedy Festival, Adelaide Fringe Festival, New Zealand and Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Alice is both a writer and a regularly featured guest on the flagship BBC Radio 4 programme, The News Quiz. She will bring her latest stand up show ‘Twist’ to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2023. Tickets can be bought here

The Podcast

Alice started guest hosting on The Bugle’s post-John-Oliver reboot shortly after it launched. She quickly became a fan favourite and one of the most popular co-hosts, and launched two spin-off podcasts. The Last Post was a wildly ambitious one-year-long daily science fiction satire podcast set in an alternate universe, and when that was complete, The Gargle came into being - a news satire show with no politics.