CHRISTMAS EVE BLOG: 2024 IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR

Happy Christmas Eve!

I’m not going to go over most of our year in any great detail. You’ve suffered enough through these Patreon blogs! But the main thing is… we got through, and we’re ending it in a better place.

I mentioned yesterday to the upper tiers how we’re having our most peaceful and relaxed Christmas in years. It’s the longest time I’ve had off in forever, and a much needed recharge of the batteries. Genuinely feels like we’re on holiday, rather than running a hotel. Who’d have thought?!

I thought I’d have been hit harder by the sale of my mum’s house – and the run up to it was difficult, but weirdly… now that it’s done I just feel relief. I feel lighter than I’ve done in a long, long time. My mum continues to break our hearts, but she’s safe and looked after in her nursing home – and we’re no longer constantly worrying about her falling or hurting herself.

Her dementia is, in its own way, a bit of a bittersweet silver lining; if she had her wits about her I don’t think she’d have coped with the house sale at all. It’s still hard to see her, and deal with that loss, but when she was more lucid over the past couple of years her emotions were difficult to bear. Is that selfish? I dunno. Probably a bit, but it’s the truth.

The year has been pretty fundamental for me; transformative in ways I didn’t see coming. It brought up a lot of buried stuff that I didn’t know was there, but I’m glad it came to the surface.

It feels like, after a long few years of being on a treadmill, we’re finally getting a bit of our own lives back. Pretty sure I speak for all of us when I say we were at the very bottom of our energy reserves. Looking back, I’ve no idea how my sisters, Sanja and I got through it.

We’ll be starting 2025 with a momentum, energy and optimism that we’ve not felt in a long, long time.

ALL THINGS DIGI

We’ve nothing definitive planned for next year – apart from finishing Digi Level 2 before the end of January, then getting Drong’s Challenge done, and sending out the Kickstarter backer rewards - but we actually feel like we can, potentially, plan stuff, and that we can get things done.

What that’ll be… I dunno yet, but we do have things we’d like to do. A small live show of some sort maybe – not on the scale of past Digi Lives, mind. We would both like to find a way to get videos out quicker; we’ve been batting around ideas for ways to make smaller videos that go in-between the epics, which still fit but don’t require a ton of traveling and money.

However… first thing on our ledger will be to make use of the cheap flights and hotels to do a bit of overseas filming. We’ve not booked it yet, but we think we know where we’ll be going – and what we’ll be doing - for the first one. Yes: the first one. We hope there’ll be others.

The channel, as I’ve said before, finally feels like it’s ours again. Yes, it probably deserves to be bigger, but we’re happy enough that it’s doing better than it was before we changed direction. The goal for this year was to reclaim it as ours, and we have. It meant losing some supporters, but the pain was necessary.

We started the year with under 16,000 subscribers, and we’re now heading for 22k. Views remain up – UFOs could be doing better (and definitely deserves to), but it’s still doing way better than our videos used to get. We see all the videos as long-term, evergreen, content. Look how Milton Keynes took off almost a year after it went up! We’ve had so many vids get to five figures this year, when most of our older ones haven’t even reached that even now.

It's also satisfying feeling that we’re getting better at making them. We’re still pretty guerilla in our approach, but on a technical level, on a storytelling level, each one is better than the last. The balance between our deliberate shoddiness and comedy and the facts – actually going to the places we’re interested in talking about – is what makes us unique. Still can't nail the SEO though.

The only real disappointments from this year are the Aldermaston and Eyam videos, which both feel like they deserved more views. I think we could’ve improved the presentation, but they’re nevertheless mind-blowing stories.

Go watch them if you haven't.

BYAMPOD

I hope BYAMPOD will return, but I need to be in the right frame of mind to do it. I didn’t want to stop it – and it’s entirely on me that it did. Yes, life got frantic and upsetting earlier this year, which contributed to it all, but we also had a bunch of things happen Marillion-wise towards the end of 2023, which meant that I’ve barely listened to Marillion at all this year.

Firstly, we managed to upset Fish and his rabid fans! I mean, I don’t regret that. I stand by everything we said. We also had a horrible gig experience (not the band’s fault)!

And yeah… a rival Marillion podcast started up, but only after certain people involved in it had messaged criticising our own approach to covering the band. It wasn’t a great message. It was literally something like “Don’t EVER do that again” – because we’d criticised the bass player’s other band, Transatlantic.

We tried to play nice – I mean, for god’s sake, I tried SO hard, because the last thing I wanted was some inter-podcast rivalry. I mean, I’m not 8 years old… but I don’t take well to being told how to do what I do, and it ate away at me. The more I tried to ignore how I was feeling, the angrier and angrier I got about it. I can’t be authentic – which is more important to me than anything else – if I’m being policed.

I couldn’t shake that sense that they were only doing their show to demonstrate the “right” way to do a Marillion podcast. And it didn’t help that we’d been the outsiders, and those guys were kind of inner circle. I felt like we didn’t stand a chance, given they had direct access to the band (I mean, heck, they’ve just been on Marillion monthly interviewing the keyboard player, so…).

The final straw was our plan, in the spirit of Glasnost, to do a crossover ep with them – a quiz – and beforehand we were given a bunch of rules about how to behave. I dunno. It all just left a bad taste in the mouth, and I felt like I’d had something I absolutely loved taken away from me. “You don’t deserve to play with these toys”…

Again, that’s on me – some weird thing got triggered, that I’ve tried to understand but can’t fully. I do know that I can’t get back to BYAMPOD while keeping it bottled up… so – hey – I’ve finally written about it now. Even though they “ordered” me not to FFS…

On the plus side, what we learned doing BYAMPOD has directly influenced how we approach our Digi videos now.

WORK

Work-wise… this year was good and bad. The TV industry – especially kids – remains effectively dead. Ethan Lawrence – who starred in Horrible Histories (plus Cheapshow and Digi) – came out and spoke about it earlier this year, and got called a privileged actor and all the rest of it.

But he spoke the truth of the situation; everyone I know is struggling to find work. It’s just bizarre – and hardly anybody is talking about it. Why has it happened? It’s a myriad of things, that I won’t go into, but it has been a perfect storm.

I did get some development work earlier in the year, and last month I wrote a pilot that we’ll hopefully hear about in the new year. But most of my day job has been Fiverr.

For the most part it was an alright year – despite Fiverr penalising me over the summer thanks to a disgruntled customer, which meant a barren couple of months. It’s hard work because I have to take on so much, and I’d like to be earning more, but between that and Digi we can scrape by.

The fact we found a way to survive – when two-and-a-half years ago it looked so bleak and hopeless – does take the pressure off.

I don’t miss the stress of working as a lead writer – or the politics of working in the TV industry – but I do miss the money.

AND THAT IS IT

So, we may have something for you before new year – we owe you more regular content – but if we don’t, because we’re too wrapped up in a food coma… we’ll see you in January. Have a brilliant Christmas. Hope it ends up being whatever you need. And, as always, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You’re all brilliant, and we appreciate every single one of you.

Stay safe.

Paul (and Sanja)