Warming Up

Into London today to be interviewed at an Acast event to explain what it's like hosting a podcast to a room of people in advertising. Something I could not have envisioned doing maybe even just five years ago, but which I am now happy to be involved with. I have accepted the place of advertising in the medium I work in (it's just like being on a commercial TV channel but with some actual choice over the ads) and am glad to be using the money raised to fund projects that otherwise might not get made. Plus you get free podcasts as a result and if it really annoys you then you can pay about 38p a podcast to get an ad-free feed by becoming a badger (and that doesn't include the snooker, stone clearing and puppet shows which I throw in for free - and which to be fair, might still be over priced).

Anyway the Acast team are phenomenal people and very good at their jobs, but it is interesting to see how nervous even highly professional people get speaking in front of an audience. It's surprising but endearing. People get self-conscious and mention stuff that they don't need to mention - comedians who have been off stage for a while or who are dying can end up doing the same thing (and I am more than guilty of this too) and allow their internal monologue to be spoken, as they effectively mildly heckle themselves! But there was a very enjoyable slip up when one speaker referred to Acast no longer being “the crappy underdog”, before correcting themselves with a laugh and saying “Of course, I meant to say “scrappy.”” Hopefully Ian Acast sacked them for their accidental impertinence directly after the presentation.

I am joking - it was ace.

I was still struggling with my bug, but had an enjoyable chat with Marvyn Harrison, the incredibly switched on creator of the Dope Black Dads podcast, who have only being podcasting since 2018 but turned his ideas into an empire already. This is what happens when you get a proper brainy businessman behind the mic, rather than an idiot who doesn't care if he's not making any money for a decade and who then spends the money on creating crazy improvised films. My genius move was to start podcasting when no one else was doing it and then managing to corale a few thousand people into my cult. Other people's genius was to wait until the point where podcasting was commercial and start then. 

I am grateful to you guys for sticking with me even now the competition is fierce. It's all pretty magical. 

I cemented my useless business acumen by saying how great Adam Buxton and Katherine Ryan were at doing reads, thus pointing my audience of potential sponsors towards my rivals. But honesty is all I have. So maybe that proved that I am the best person to choose to advertise stuff. 

Let's just say that offers did not start flooding in. In fact the plumbing was so secure that not a drop escaped.

Had a tough evening solo parenting a still poorly and snotty boy, whilst being a still poorly and snotty boy myself (Catie was working - we haven't split up and anyone who says we have is lying).  I tried to watch Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/dec/03/time-travel-beyond-the-infinite-two-minutes-junta-yamaguchi but was interrupted by one kid or another for quite a while. In the end Ernie watched a bit of it with me and grasped it surprisingly well given it's in Japanese and has a complicated plot about a TV monitor that is two minutes in the future (but can get a bit further ahead by being put face to face with the other monitor it's communicating with. “I think he's dreaming” said Ernie, just as the main character and made the same suggestion. But Ernie couldn't know that as he couldn't read the subtitles (or could he? Or was he in touch with a future Ernie who could?) I enjoyed the film and it's even more impressive as it was shot in a week (like our film) and with a £20,000 budget - less than we had. They didn't make it easy for themselves as they were trying to make it look like it was done in a single shot and it involved very precise timing for all the various conversations through time.  Anyway, it's all the better for not following the dull formula of most movies and for its invention and wit. It's a time travel movie that I can thoroughly recommend. And you know how much that means coming from me.