John Peter Sloan

Thanks to the massive success of his language course, Instant English, John Peter Sloan has become a media sensation in Italy. But, he sportingly admits, Speak Up has played an important role in his success. For the last two years he has written a monthly column in the magazine about his Italian adventures. This stars characters like his terrible girlfriend Conci, their baby Salvo and John’s so-called “best friend” Dave.

The complete series is available in the Speak Up Anthology,  John P. Sloan’s Italian Adventures. In this  interview John reveals that his relationship with Speak Up began in 2007, when he was trying to promote his play, Culture Shock:

John Peter Sloan (Standard British accent)

I wrote the play Culture Shock, which was my first play, and Zelig were kind enough to… to… have it on in their temple of comedy. I’d been doing Zelig for a while, and… but we had no budget, we had no money to advertise it and I… I believed we… I believed in what we were doing and I believed it was important, but we couldn’t get it out there and it was thanks to Speak Up because Grant Benson, who many people know from RTL (radio), said: “Well, I’ve got a friend, Mark Worden, who works in Speak Up.” I knew Speak Up anyway because of… of… of… I’d been teaching with it. It was one of the few… magazines, or, in any case, I didn’t use much material that wasn’t my own and… but I did use Speak Up for… I liked some of the stories. Anyway, so Grant got in touch with Mark, and Mark came and advertised us. He interviewed me and they… you had two pages about us and I was very… and I still am very grateful for that because we got some people in and then the word started to spread.

We then asked John Peter Sloan the big question: Does Conci really exist?

John Peter Sloan:

She does and she doesn’t because Conci is a Frankenstein of past experiences with my past… partners, Italian partners, but she’s the worst part of Italian women, and Italian women love her! And I still don’t understand that. I mean, she’s… she’s a monster, you know. She’s supposed to be terrible, and she’s more popular than John or Dave or Salvo. I mean, she’s… they love her and it wasn’t… I didn’t intend that at all. She was supposed to be the bad guy and it totally backfired. But no, Conci, thankfully, is no more!

(John Peter Sloan was talking to Mark Worden)

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