Work has begun editing The Random Saturday Sessions second series (by 'series' I am calling each location a series so West Bridgford is series two) thanks to my dad who showed me today how it is looking so far. For the Beeston videos we used the group shot as an opener but this time we had two group shots as different people joined in at different times of the day so it would have looked inconsistent to use either one. To get round this my dad has come up with a clever special effects method to open the videos which I think works really well and might carry through into every episode from now on. So far I have a DVD of all the rough footage and there's no immediate panic as there is still one more episode from Beeston to come (Gerry Trimble's set will be released this coming Saturday) and I am putting them out in the order we did them and the first one is almost done. I keep a DVD of rough footage which is everything, fuck ups and all, recorded on the day and another DVD containing the finished videos as they go on YouTube and I enjoy watching them in advance because this project is still in the fun stages at the moment. I also enjoy the anticipation when we know that some of the videos won't be available for ages yet and hopefully those that saw them might have sufficiently forgotten key bits. The final episode from West Bridgford won't be seen until January 16th and that is City of Kites playing in a yard full of Christmas trees, just the sort of silliness I like. We have another tour of Hockley planned for the 19th December but there will be no Christmas mentions due to the timing. On Sunday I am filming the remaining sets (all in one place so neither 'random' or 'Saturday') of Christmas songs and that extended episode is going out on Christmas Eve so by the time Hockley comes round it will be too much pressure to get the Christmas special out. 

Another feature of the new videos, again my dad's idea, is a closing theme song. Given the loose unplanned pitching up of musicians asking to be allowed to play he recommended the song 'A Wandering Minstrel'. There's an old recording of it from long enough ago for it to be in the public domain although as we will only use thirty seconds of it we will be okay that we both decided to go with after one condition. I had to make sure (because even though a minstrel was originally a 15th century singer/storyteller whose descendants are today's buskers and street performers there are other connotations) that the song wasn't suddenly going to become retrospectively racist. It isn't, we're fine.

The Sunday Alternative Podcast #65 is available now from here

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This week's episode of The Random Saturday Sessions is here.