MONDAY BLOG: HEAD LICE, BOOKS & ERASURE

Happy Monday, gang.

Hope you all had a good weekend. Ours was… uneventful. I mostly played Star Wars Outlaws, which is much better than the reviews would have you believe.

We did however make the mistake of going to Watford for lunch on Saturday, not thinking there might be a game on. It was hell. I swear I can’t do crowds anymore.

The biggest news of the weekend is that we found out last night that my mother now has head lice!!! How she could’ve possibly got them in a nursing home is anyone’s guess, but we’re all going to have to check.

I’ve only ever had them once, when my kids were little – they seem to not like my hair, which is strange, because fleas and mozzies love me.

At least somebody does!!! Joke.

THINGS

So, a few things. We were talking these past couple of days about something that has been rumbling at the back of my head for a while.

This came about in part because I’ve been editing the next video – the voice-over bits, which I’ve stupidly decided to make really ambitious – and because I’ve felt the last few vids have lacked Sanja and I doing our nonsense.

They’ve been pretty heavily scripted, and I miss us talking off-the-cuff more. I miss that connection with the audience.

Also, the new videos are so involved, it’s a challenge to get them out as frequently as I’d like. At the moment we’re managing two a month, but I’d like us to get back to weekly, if possible. Or more frequently at least – it just has to be done in a way that’s achievable.

So… we’re bringing back sofa videos – the two of us talking to camera. Very lo-fi and unplugged - to run alongside the more in-depth out-and-about videos. It’s not a complete return to what we did before; they’ll still be about something a touch more substantial, but will probably be a bit more personal and informal. More chatty.

We still need to have a little think about them, but hopefully you should get one of those this week. Next week at the latest, followed by our big City of London video.

We’re also going to do an Ask-Me-Do this week. We’ve got some questions already, but if you have any others please post them below. We’ll also record a new Writer’s Club, and hopefully have a Biffo’s Brain on Thursday. Mark it down.

BOOK

We’ve priced up the Man’s Daddy joke book, and think it’s doable, if we can do it via pre-orders. We’d need a minimum of about 100 to make it worthwhile, so we might have to launch that alongside the return of Digi Level 2, as we can no longer rely on social media to get the word out.

I – sorry, The Man’s Daddy – also needs to write some new jokes.

It’ll likely just be a softback, nothing too fancy – mainly, because that’s the default kind of format for a jokebook. I like the thought of it being a bit of a scrappy little thing.

Unless… would you prefer something that’s hardback, and a bit glossier? We can price that up too. Let us know!

ADDRESS 

One last thing I do want to address… we saw we’d had a few hits on the latest video from Reddit, so we went to take a look.

Amusingly, somebody started up a Toilet Squad sub-Reddit! But also… Sanja found someone asking why we’d deleted the old videos. We’ve had a few people ask this – but for the record, they haven’t been deleted, but they have been made unlisted and put into a playlist. 

This isn’t because, as some arse on Reddit suggested, that I “want to erase the past”, but because – yes – we’ve finally found a format that we want to stick with, and apparently when you pivot a channel it’ll push your old videos out to new subscribers… they see the format is radically different… and then unsubscribe.

We saw this happening. Making the videos unlisted takes them out of YouTube circulation, but they’re all still accessible via our playlist on the channel homepage. There’s no way we want to “erase the past” – but hopefully you understand us wanting to give the new vids their best chance of being seen.

Making small changes like that are having a positive effect on our subs and views. The UBI one is at about 4.5k since Thursday, with a really healthy retention rate and loads of subs coming from it. it was rare we ever used to get that before. It’s slow but steady.

Righty. Work to do, and got to check my hair for creatures. Talk soon.

Paul