OUTSIDER ART?

Hello, Upper Tier Patrons. Been a while since it was just us, and I thought I’d have a rummage around in my head, and share with you what I find. Been a while.

I’m kind of knackered. I slept until 9.45 this morning – which is unheard of for me. The edit of Digi Level 2 Ep 3 really took it out of me, and it didn’t feel so much like sleep as more shutting down for repairs.

Anyhow… I’m starting work on Ep 4 – the assembly is done, though there’s a new intro still to film – and something occurred to me as I was putting together a section that kind of takes the piss out of some of our peers. 

Ever since Digi has existed – all 31 years of it – I’ve felt like it was on the periphery. It never felt like we were part of the clique, or the establishment, or whatever you want to call it. I say “it”, meaning "Digitiser", but really I mean “I”, meaning "me".

Back then, that establishment was the other games mags. PR companies, and games companies. Sometimes they ignored us completely, or dealt with us in the most begrudging way imaginable. 

Some of this we brought upon ourselves – we never really played the game, we were weird, silly, and all that – but a lot of it was almost self-fulfilling. They more we felt on the outside, the more we did things – like take the piss out of other mags, and even PR people – that ensured we’d stay there forever. 

We were on the outside even in the Teletext office. Nobody seemed to fully trust us, or understand us, and the more all that went on, the more likely we were to do things that pushed us further to the fringes.

CLIQUETY-CLIQUE

Now when it comes to Digi Level 2, I guess the clique – the "establishment" – would be other retro gaming YouTubers. 

Even when we were doing retro gaming stuff in the past we never really felt like part of their world. I say this despite the fact we have a lot of much, much bigger YouTubers than us actually appearing in our show.

It’s not the case for all of our guests. I would class Ashens as a friend, though we only ever seem to speak to each other when we’re doing a thing together. Dan Does is definitely a mate, and we Whatsapp a lot. Gannon and Eli obviously. 

All of our crew – Quang, Jake et al we adore. Sooz we get along well with, but she’s busy, we’re busy, she isn’t a retro gaming person, and it feels like her world of singing and comedy is far removed from ours. Also, we love hanging out with Ash Frith and Ethan Lawrence, both of whom we wish had been in Digi Level 2. Those two boys are LOVELY.

Most of the retro gaming crowd though are, at most, acquaintances. This isn’t a diss to any of them, just a statement of fact. I’m sure they’d say the same about me. Or maybe not even that. I’m glad they want to come and hang out and be tortured by us, but I’m also kind of baffled by it, because I always get the sense they’re wary of us.

I guess it's kind of telling that we feel more at home – more among our people - when we’ve done things with members of our audience. There's part of me that's recoils at the thought of hanging out with the 'popular' kids...

...And if you want to get really psychoanalytic about it, I was never one of those at school. I was forever on the fringes then, making weird jokes, or putting on strange comedy shows at lunchtimes, during which I'd pretend to throw up on stage, and do funny dances. I was very much an outsider, with a weird sense of humour, and people didn't seem to know what to make of me. 

The more things change... right?

I mean, look at the videos on our main channel. 

It'd be so easy to just produce travel vlogs that do well, but instead we have to go and put in weird stuff. In what could've been a nice, informative, video about the Great Plague, there's a whole bit where I'm just spinning around for no reason. We could've just gone to the Lake District and talked about how beautiful it was, but instead you have me on a boat, in a silly hat, drinking water from the lake in order to get magical powers.

I mean... that's BRILLIANT, but it's also - perversely - frustrating to me that I'm like that. 

BYAMPODDITY

Thing is… I kind of feel this way about BYAMPOD too. I’ve been struggling a bit with it since the latter half of last year. Basically, we had the Marillion fan podcast market to ourselves, and then Planet Marzipan came along – partly as a reaction, from what I gather, to how we were doing things (too open, too disrespectful, too flippant).

John and Craig who host it seem like nice guys – they’re even Patrons! - but they’ve also had one foot already in the Marillion camp, being a step closer to the ‘inner circle’ of Marillion than I’ve ever been. 

Consequently, that feeling of being an outsider has risen up in me around our podcast, and I’ve struggled with it ever since. I miss doing BYAMPOD, but I have this voice in my head going “What’s the point? They’re doing it now”.  I hope I can silence it by the time we have a free enough schedule again.

So, I wonder how much of the above is true, and how much of it is internal. How much of feeling like an outsider is because I AM an outsider, how much is because I just feel like one, and how much of it is me subconsciously becoming an outsider because I feel like one? Is there something in me which finds it impossible to walk that straight line?

Does that make sense?  I mean, it’s stupid really – especially with BYAMPOD – because I talk to the band’s manager Lucy from time to time, and I know she LOVES us. She loves that we’re honest. We were even on their YouTube channel last year, so we kind of are part of that world now. But along comes another podcast, and I end up feeling really complicated about it all. Why would somebody want a Marillion podcasts in which one of the hosts does unflattering impressions of the band, or repeatedly paint his wife as an Far Right sympathiser?

It's like I have this tension in me. On the one hand I’m proud that I find it impossible to toe the party line, and keep on the straight and narrow. I think I create stuff that's more esoteric and original and less boring as a result. And on the other I wish I wasn’t like that, and was part of these cliques, and made stuff that was more palatable to a greater number of people. 

I sometimes wish I felt I belonged a bit more. Nobody wants to... actually, I should own this... "I" don't want to feel like the weird outsider guy... while also being proud that I am. 

Tellingly, if I look back... I'm very capable of not being the weird guy, and keeping all that bottled up. In my professional life, I think I come across as capable and 'normal' (whatever that is). It seems to take somebody else to unlock who I really am, and give me the green light - whether it's Tim Moore, or Gannon, or... and this is the big one...  Sanja.

She's as much the reason you've had all this from me in the past decade, because she finds me funny. She has given me permission to be more me than I've ever been, for better or worse,  and she seems to enjoy me being on the outside. 

But - get this - when she first met me, she assumed I was incredibly serious, grown-up and 'normal', and probably liked rugby. Hilariously, I thought she was aloof and intimidating, and very much one of the cool kids. 

And then she made a poo joke. There was no going back from that.

Paul