REVIEW OF THE YEAR

Here we are then. The end of another year. Time to reflect and all that (plus stay tuned for my film, tv, music and gaming recommendations!). 

2023 was… overall… a better year than 2022. I mean, it would’ve had to go some to top 2022 in the awfulness stakes, but all we wanted at the end of last year was to have a better 12 months. Overall it was a step in the right direction, for sure, but it still had some major room for improvement. 

We’re ending the year with lots to be grateful for. We’re surrounded by love. We’ve amazing and supportive family and friends. A great channel and podcast, both with a wonderful community. Work isn’t as bleak as it had been. It has been a step in the right direction overall, but… it has still been a slog at times, and still feels transitional.

The first few months were the toughest. My dad dying finally hit me hard on Christmas Eve last year, and that feeling kind of carried through until about March. I really struggled. I mean, it’s to be expected, and I was expecting it, but it was still tough going for a while. 

It’s weird. My dad loathed Christmas – yet I once again find myself missing him terribly this time of year. The little rituals and traditions; him bringing our presents down on Christmas Eve, choosing him the perfect gift – always a book, that he hopefully won’t have read before… I dunno. I’m tired, so emotions tend to be that much closer to the surface anyway, but today has been wobbly. 

I’ve started to think of grief as a tsunami. You know how a tsunami starts with the tide going way, way, way out? That’s how it feels at first; dry land. A kind of calm that isn’t entirely normal. You’ve got this weird grace period right after someone you love dies, before the wave slams into you and washes you away. 

My dad died on September 20th 2022, and… I was okay for a while. The wave crashed into me on 24th December last year, and it took me almost three months to find some scrap of solid ground. It has been up and down since – I won’t pretend there aren’t still days when I remember things from his final months, flashes of how badly he suffered – it was genuinely horrific, and I’m still processing it – but it’s getting better.

During that first wave of grief I didn’t really have the luxury of stopping work. I’m not sure if that was a good or bad thing, but at least it forced me out of bed. We still managed to get you Digi vids, and I was still able to earn money. 

I kept putting one for in front of the other until the stagger became a walk.

FIVERR STAR

Fiverr continued – and continues – to be the lifeline we needed. I don’t know what we’d have done if I hadn’t chosen to sign up to it in summer 2022. I really, really enjoy working on there, and I’ve now begun taking private commissions outside of Fiverr as a result of the contacts I've made. A couple of the scripts I worked on did well in script competitions, which is a nice feeling, and one or two have had interest from producers.

I don’t get paid as well as I used to, but it comes without many of the dramas and stresses that working in TV did/does. If we can get on top of our covid years debts, I’d be earning enough for us to live comfortably. I get to write, and people are grateful for what I can do for them, and there’s none of the pressure of having to please 50 different producers. 

I feel, most of the time – apart from one guy in South Korea – appreciated. I don’t have the ambition to get things made anymore – I’ve got Digi for that – so I get to just enjoy the craft of writing again. It's a joy to help other people realise their ideas.

So… of course I got offered an absolute ton of TV work in March.

It all came at once, and because I’d had barely had any TV work in the previous two years, I said yes to all of it. Some of it was fun, but mostly it reminded me how stressful and debilitating TV can be. It was good – in some ways – to spend time in a writer’s room again, but mainly to remind me how TV just tears chunks out of your soul.

While producers might now be looking for different sorts of writers than the likes of me… my fellow writers – younger, more diverse – knew my name and reputation, and were shocked I’d been struggling to find work. At the same time, I saw their ambition and felt alienated by it. I’d been like that once, and I no longer need or want to do that. It made me feel like I belonged to a different time.

I read an interview with the comedian Limmy recently, who talked about how he’s retired from TV work forever because it was bad for his mental health. I’ve read other things in the last year – likely not a coincidence – from other people in the industry who have found work hard to come by of late, or harder to deal with than it used to be. All are around my age. Things have changed, the rules have been rewritten, and I’m not alone in dealing with the consequences.

Nevertheless, that has been the silver lining of all this; realising that TV wasn’t doing me any good. It meant we weren’t living hand-to-mouth, and could afford nice holidays, but I hadn’t realised – until I’d had a break forced upon me, and then returned – that I’d been paying a steep price. If I’d continued at that pace I don’t know what could’ve happened. My work stress in the year pre-Covid was insane. I was heading for a brick wall until Covid not only took away the work, but all the walls.

DISTANCE LEARNING

The distance made me realise a lot of things, while coming back made me aware how out of place I always felt in the entertainment industry. It was all the more acute now, because I *am* out of place.

Walking into those rooms I felt I was being sized up, like there was an automatic assumption that I was a misogynist, a sex pest, a relic, and that I had to prove otherwise. I felt really uncomfortable, and it also reminded me how horrible writers rooms can be; they’re a competition to be the loudest person around the table, a scramble for crumbs of acknowledgement from the lead writers and execs. 

“Like me! Like my idea! Give me another script!”…

It’s kind of ugly, and doesn’t feel conducive to the best ideas getting a hearing. It feels like a competition I no longer wish to be a part of. It's exhausting and soul-flaying.

And then I got the call to write The Dumping Ground. Lovely, more or less. I was brought in because another – less experienced – writer hadn’t worked out. That felt like a win I didn’t know I needed. Then I did a good enough job that they asked me back to write the series finale. Another win. Then, after I’d started work, they told me they’d run out of money, and were cutting the final three episodes.

Like I say… TV: bad for mental health. It gives, but it also takes in the cruellest way imaginable. But at least we had a comfortable few months – financially anyway – in the middle of the year, and I probably wouldn’t be able to turn it down if it came calling again. I’m not sure I want to go chasing it anymore though.

LIVE AID

The downside of all the TV work was that we had to pause Digi and BYAMPOD for a few months around the summer. 

We also had a Digi Live to prepare for, which – being two nights – was twice the work of the previous Digi Lives. By August I was spent, but taking some time off of Digi allowed Sanja and I our first real opportunity to take stock of what we wanted to do on the channel. Life had forced us to neglect it, and it was time to plan for the future of Digitiser.

The live shows were great, and I loved those two days. Absolutely loved them. Loved meeting everyone. Loved messing around with the guests. I still get breathless with laughter when I think about Action Man, and the bit where Beanus accidentally kicked a dog poo bag into the audience. It felt like a real celebration of Digitiser.

It was what I needed after feeling so on the outside in those writers rooms. I felt I was among my own, and that I did achieve something that was worth a damn. Plus, I love doing live stuff. The buzz is incredible, though I still don’t know if we’ll do another.

The ticket sales were down this time, and they’re expensive shows to put on. We made a profit, and the benefit to the soul is definitely a good thing, but I just don’t know if we can risk it again. We’ll see. We’ll take 2024 off, and make a call in 2025. We’re not ruling out doing a couple of smaller shows elsewhere in the country though.

DIGI IT

In some respects, the biggest thing to happen to us this year was finding a path with Digi. I mean, we’re still finding our way – it’s a constant evolution – but the desk videos hadn’t really been cutting it for Sanja and I for a while. It hadn’t been for our subscribers either, which were slowly trickling away. We struggled to come up with ideas, we struggled to come up with a reason for doing it. We didn’t know what our format even was.

As I’ve written before, in the first instance I needed to find my own voice – love Gannon, love working with him, but I was relying on him too much. He’s got such a motormouth that I could at times feel swamped, and would usually be paddling furiously just to keep up with him, rather than have the space to explore and experiment and grow.

Sanja, not being a performer, gave me that space, and heading out into the world – doing something we’d love doing even if we weren’t making videos – had been when I felt we were at our best, and doing more has let us find our voice as a duo. I know Gannon misses being a regular on Digi – and I know some of you miss him too – but at some point I had to reclaim Digitiser for myself. 

As I've said before, for a long while I was, somehow, the only one involved in Digitiser The Show who seemingly wasn’t allowed to have his own thing!

The decision to focus on location over the desk stuff, to bring back elements that were more factual – while keeping the same humour and characters and all that – somehow felt more true to the spirit of Digitiser. It feels more subversive, but also more authentic. There's something a bit punk in someone of our age behaving badly in public.

Plus, simply, we enjoy it more. We love traveling, we love exploring, we love history and research. It gives me the chance to be more creative, and taps into my storytelling side. And… as I’ve said before… the channel is finally growing after years when it wasn’t. So, it’s working.

We’re going to continue in that vein. We’ve already got the next few months planned out, with some bigger trips that’ll depend on our budget.

Desk stuff won’t be gone forever; we still want to do live streams at the desk. We also have been floating the idea of doing another run of Digitiser Deluxe. Maybe with Patrons rather than other YouTubers. Somehow, that feels like it fits with the on-location videos.

But the good thing is… if you like me and Gannon behind a desk, we finally finished Digi Level 2 filming this year, and so you’re going to get an absolute ton of that nonsense early in 2024.

I also released two albums this year. I wish I knew what I know now about production and mixing. There’s some lovely stuff on those two albums, but the music I’m working on now is far better sounding. There’ll be something new out next year. I occasionally chuck a piece of music I’ve worked on at the end of BYAMPOD.

LEVEL 2

Digi Level 2 hung over us all year. We had three/four good filming blocks (although for one of them I was horribly ill), but I had another block – a mental, possibly emotional, one – around it.

Somehow, Digi Level 2 had become tied up in my dad getting sick and dying, and every time I approached editing it I got this massive knot of anxiety. We’ve finally found our way through though, with Sanja putting together an assembly cut of the episodes, and me going in and finishing them. Which is a relief, because I’ve been feeling terrible guilt over how long it has taken.

(Side note: Geoffrey, I will do your painting… I’m so sorry… I’ve got guilt over that too…)

There are still a few hurdles to overcome with the editing - we used FAR too much smoke in one of the blocks, so the focus is shit- but the content is priceless. It's very funny.

The other big challenge this year has been my mum. My dad always worried about what would happen to her if he died first. She’s blind, she’s in poor health, she can’t walk unaided… She shouldn’t be living alone, frankly, but she flat-out refuses to go into a home. She has always been stubborn, but I think she's scared we'll forget her if she moves into a home.

Consequently, my sisters, Sanja and I are caring for her, and…. I mean, it’d be demanding anyway, but my mum can be a particular challenge. Even if she wasn’t 86 and frail she’d be hard work – she always has been! – but put those two things together and it has been something else that put huge pressure on our time and energy. I love her, and of course I want her to be happy and comfortable, but also… y’know… she’s not always easy.

The best thing this year – aside from making videos with Sanja – has been being a grandad. The joy he brings me is indescribable. As I write this, he’s just gone home after two days, and it’s been an (exhausting) utter joy. He’s brilliant, and chaotic, and funny, and in May next year he’ll have a brother. I can’t wait. Two grandsons! Maaaad.

BETTER

So, as I said at the start, it has been a better year than the last. Right now, I’m exhausted, and a bit emotional. 

Whether it’s the lack of a holiday, whether it’s burning myself out in the first two weeks of this month, so I could take some time off, whether it’s post-viral fatigue, whether I’m anxious about the mountain we still have to climb next year, or whether it’s just… everything together, I don’t know. Sanja’s not feeling well still either. We both feel a bit broken, and can’t wait for the 27th, when we can just stop for a bit.

But… we’ve survived. We survived 2023. We did it! That’s how it feels; we made it through, and we’re still standing. Albeit on wobbly legs. That’s nevertheless something to celebrate.

Next year, we’ve a few ideas of what we want to do. There’s a lot we need to sort out on a domestic level, that have been neglected after the last few years – the house, our finances -  but right now the priority is getting Digi Level 2 done. It will be going onto its own channel, for all the Digitiser video game content, and you should be getting at least two whole series; Digi Level 2 and Drong’s Challenge.

Here are some of the things we’re thinking about doing once Digi Level 2 is out:

• ·  The Digitiser book/annual crowdfunding.
• ·  Found Footage 2 (possibly a limited crowdfunding campaign, or maybe not).
• ·  Six-part Digitiser Abroad series (we’d need to crowdfund it… probably… so long as it doesn’t feel like we’re asking people to pay for us to go on holiday).
• ·  Or maybe we’ll do it as a feature-length documentary/film. Dunno. But there are two ideas I'd like to explore.
• ·  Digitiser Deluxe.
• ·  Three or four small live shows in major cities, which would be a relaxed Evening With Mr Biffo-type thing. Maybe a different guest each show. TBD.
• ·  More live streams! We love doing them.

Would love to hear your thoughts on any of those ideas.

Plus, of course, there'll be more regular videos of us visiting different places – including some new eps of Supernatural World. We know what at least our next six or so videos will be. Some are a bit more serious, some are definitely not. I like mixing it up. It feels like we’ve learned a lot about doing Digi from doing BYAMPOD; it has that same energy, of mixing the real us, with the heightened us, with factual stuff, with nonsense.

Of course, it’s all dependent on money, time and energy. I’m well aware I’m not getting any younger, and at some point I’ll need to slow down, but there’s a lot I’d still love to do before Mr Biffo hangs up his spurs.

And I’m very, very aware that I can only entertain the possibility of the above because of you lot. It still bewilders me that we have such a small audience, that nevertheless manages to support us the way you all do. A number of you have sent us such lovely Christmas gifts - as well as other things throughout the year - and we find it so meaningful that you’d think to do that for us . We don’t do this for rewards, but it does touch us when we get one.

Bottom line: I’m immensely grateful. Every day I give thanks for you all. You were a lifeline last year, you allow us to have the ambition of a much larger channel, and it’s a magical thing. 

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Paul (and Sanja)

PS. BYAMPOD Extra and the Christmas outtakes will be up next week.

THINGS I’VE WATCHED THIS YEAR 

Paul T. Goldman – Insane documentary series from the director of Borat 2. Impossible to describe, but starts out as a sort of true crime thing, and becomes increasingly insane. The way it starts to fold in on itself.

The Traitors – Hardly alone in loving this, but that first series was incredible.

Picard season 3 – Just pure Star Trek: TNG porn.

Colin From Accounts – sitcom rom-com from Australia.

The Last of Us – the best video game TV adaptation ever.

The Walking Dead: Dead City – Like The Walking Dead, but good!

I Think You Should Leave season 3 – The best comedy on Netflix.

Star Wars: Ahsoka – Started slowly, but ep 5 was some of the best Star Wars ever. And Ray Stevenson will be sorely missed.

Loki season 2 – Not quite as good as season 1, but worth it for the production design alone.

Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials – Proper good Doctor Who for the first time in a long time. Did I wish we got a few more nods to the past? Did I wish they’d have brought Carol Ann Ford back? Yes. But great Doctor Who is as good a celebration as any.

Haven’t seen a lot of films this year for some reason, but I’ve loved Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Barbie, Spider-Man: Across The Spiderverse.

We’re saving Oppenheimer and The Creator for next week…

THINGS I'VE WATCHED ON YOUTUBE

In all honesty, we’ve watched more YouTube than anything else. It's just easier viewing.

Favourites this year have been:

• Kinging-It (travel vloggers, but funny)
• Simon Wilson (travel vlogger, but unintentionally funny)
• William Osman (chaotic engineer, who now vlogs, but he’s very funny)
• Dax Flame (beautifully meta comedy – you have to stick with it)
• I Did A Thing (very funny Australian engineering)
• Kurtis Connor (funny commentary videos)
• Drew Gooden (funny commentary videos)
• Abroad In Japan (Japanese life, with a touch of comedy)
• Dan Does (crafts and laughfts)
• The Magic Geekdom (no idea why… just a cosy American couple who travel around the UK).
• Nick Lutsko (funny and bizarre songs)
• Noiselund (he does remix songs of Cheapshow and Red Letter Media, and they’re stupidly catchy)
• Sam The Cooking Guy (good recipes)
• Garrett Watts (uploads once in a blue moon, but he’s funny and lovable)

And honorable mention to Geowizard, who mainly does videos about GeoGuesser, but occasionally does a weird trip – like crossing Scotland in a straight line – and it was bingeing him that led us to do more out-and-about videos.

THINGS I’VE LISTENED TO THIS YEAR

I struggle to write while listening to music these days. Because of BYAMPOD most of what I’ve listened to is Marillion, or Marillion-adjacent. But here are few highlights:

• Bruce Soord – Luminescence
• Steven Wilson – The Harmony Codex
• M83 - DSVII
• Public Service Broadcasting - The New Noise
• Wardrun – Kivtravn
• Peter Gabriel – I/O
• Moon Safari – Himlabacken Vol. 2
• And a whole load of classic rock stuff.

GAMES I’VE PLAYED THIS YEAR

Very few, sadly. Mainly, I’ve played games on Apple Arcade. I’m currently playing Junkworld (it’s a tower defence thing). I finally want a PS5 – mainly to play the new Star Wars and Spider-Man games – but can’t afford one right now. I’ve asked for the new Mario for Christmas though.