Engaging audiences in heat pumps through comedy
www.nesta.org.uk/project-updates/engaging-audiences-in-heat-pumps-through-comedy/
www.nesta.org.uk/project-updates/engaging-audiences-in-heat-pumps-through-comedy/
As grantees of Nesta’s Greener Homes Content Catalyst, Parents For Future UK produced three comedy sketches for its digital platforms. The aim was to boost awareness of heat pumps, other home decarbonisation technologies and the support available to help households adopt them by also offering supporting information on the Parents for Future website
Pablo Neruda said, “laughter is the language of the soul”. It’s a quote you may have heard before, perhaps because you’re a fan of the Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet and diplomat, or perhaps because it was in an episode of The Simpsons. Laughter has an incredible power to make things stick.
According to Robert N. Kraft PHD of Otterbien University, remembering an instance of laughter can help us create neural pathways that draw information from our integrated memory and into our primary memory. This makes them more vivid - as if we are actually living them again, rather than simply remembering. It makes us more open too, releasing us from habitual thought patterns. Even better, according to Dr Robert Provine’s, the world’s leading scientific expert on laughter, if we can find some people to share a laugh with it can foster a sense of community.
An open mind and a sense of community are important things to foster when attempting to convey the benefits of electrification in heating and powering our homes. This was our aim when working with Parents for Future UK - not to create precisely-focused strategic communications with a direct call to action, but to utilise the skills of this comedy network to create funny, memorable and ‘memeable’ sketches. In doing this, the work can come to viewers within their routine viewing behaviours. It is consumed as a piece of content, rather than a public service announcement or advertorial. This in turn boosts the shareability of the posts, with shareability being a factor that has led to the success of multiple comedians in Parents for Future UK’s comedy network.
On 3 December 2025, Parents for Future UK and a handful of talented comedians and comedy writers found themselves at Nesta for a writer’s room where they would begin work on making heat pumps funny.
After a quick rundown of Nesta, the arts team and the sustainable future mission and a heat pump explainer, it was in the capable hands of the comedy writers in attendance. Led by climate scientist and comedian Matt Winning they were: Rose Johnson, Seán Burke, Huge Davies, Matt Riley and Naomi Petersen. After a lot of chat, coffee and snacks the ideas began to emerge and, in a flurry of post-it notes and whiteboard scribbling, they took shape.
The best ideas were worked through by the group, adding gags and ideas until they were ready to be taken away and written into proper scripts. By the end of the writer’s room we had our three sketches and few spare ones too. We also had a palpable sense of relief: heat pumps could be funny.
Come January the scripts came flooding in, and after Nesta gave some notes (on home decarbonisation rather than gags) the incredibly nimble and resourceful team at Parents for Future UK and Warming Up Comedy got to work shooting them. This was supported with a little help from Nesta’s visit a heat pump scheme, with one very generous host lending their property as the location for our first sketch.
Once shot and edited, Parents For Future UK then released the sketches on a monthly basis from February to April 2026. They were released on multiple platforms, with Instagram being the key focus. There, Parents for Future UK could collaborate with the comedians and share the sketches directly with their loyal audience of followers.
The three sketches were:
‘A Heat Pump Saved My Marriage’
Nesta’s Greener Homes initiative is focused on enabling compelling on-screen stories about how the way we heat and power our homes is changing.
In partnering with Parents for Future UK, Nesta has been able to work with talented and popular comedy content creators, including:
As a result of this collaboration, we have created the conditions where talented storytellers like these can demonstrate home decarbonisation as a viable narrative entry point to characters, story and even jokes.
We also wanted audiences to see this work to improve their perceptions of heat pumps and other home decarbonisation technologies. Our hope is that by making audiences laugh with these sketches, the idea of heat pumps might just stick with them.
