At Edinburgh station I looked for "Railways and the Holocaust" in WH Smith but it was nowhere to be seen. They had dozens of magazines about railways and a few history ones. But none that combined my two interests of railways and the Holocaust. It's clearly a tactic to make me buy two magazines rather than one and I will be writing a strongly worded letter to WH Smith. I could
buy it online, but that was no good to me. I wanted to now. And I didn't want it in confusing bookazine format. I wanted a magazine.
I was also disappointed that there wasn't a magazine focused on pedalos and King Herod's Slaughter of the Innocents, although kindly Dave Pashley mocked up the front cover for me, though that just made me sadder that I didn't have the actual magazine in my hands. Not a bookazine. Because that's not a thing. It's either a magazine or a book, there's nothing in between. Why are these people trying to shame trains and create descriptions for non-existent reading materials.
Perhaps it was good that I didn't have the bookazine with me as it meant I could get on with some work on the train. No spoon banging kids this time and only slight weariness rather than a full on hangover and I did get some stuff done.
I had to write an article for the Telegraph about podcasts and the future of internet content and I took it as an opportunity to point out the inadequacies of old media. I enjoyed the fact that this was going into old media and so, it seems, did the people working there who enjoyed what I'd written. It's in the paper on Thursday, but apparently they hold off from putting it online to encourage people to buy the physical newspaper (or pamphlozine as I call it), the poor deluded old media fools!
The Mary Beard video podcast
went up this afternoon. It doesn't seem to have created the media splash of last week's show, but it's very interesting and full of laughs. The audio will be up in the usual places tomorrow. I am still trying to find guests for the last two pods, my dream guest turned us down, but very politely. Remember if you buy the series pass you will get videos of at least seven interviews (Chris Addison, Stephen Fry, Mary Beard, John Lloyd, Russell Brand and two more) plus the less professional, but still watchable Pappys video from Machynlleth. So it's under two pounds per show and you'll be funding ever more exciting projects in the future (we've made a modest profit so far, but are dividing the money between everyone who is working on the shows so it's not going to make any of us rich). I concluded in my Telegraph article that the internet is the most exciting development for creativity and comedy since the explosion in cinema that saw the rise of Chaplin a century ago. I think that out there somewhere there is someone who will conquer this medium in the same way as he did, with similar financial rewards. It won't be me, even though I did have the moustache for a while. But I am happy enough if we can keep doing all this stuff without losing any money. I am hopeful that things are taking an upturn for what we're attempting here. It does feel like the Leicester Square Theatre podcasts are going down very well and I am glad the experiment to film them has paid off so well. But many thanks to Chris Evans (not that one) and his band of idiots who have made all this possible and put an awful lot of work into making it happen. And to producer Ben Walker.
I probably got more work done on the train than I would have managed at home and maybe I should take more one off gigs in Scotland just so I can make the most of this traveling office.
And glad to have got the last couple of weeks out of the way as it's been a bit relentless, jumping from one project to the next. Hopefully I can concentrate more fully on the Death show now. I had a good evening off, playing Scrabble, catching up on a couple of weeks of the Apprentice and Madmen and seeing the season finale of Game of Thrones. There may be some life in traditional media after all.
