People who follow my work will know that for every serious pursuit such as my podcast or music videos, I like to throw in something a bit silly such as the photo blogs documenting Skittles or cardboard police officers, and the fact that I have recorded three albums of Christmas songs on kazoo which frankly, nobody ever asked for. Part of me likes to act up and pretend I'm a conceptual artist with these projects although the truth is that I do things like this purely for my own entertainment it does raise the odd smile. As the old saying goes, if you throw enough shit at the wall then some of it will stick. The weekly podcast is a proper legitimate ratings winner while The Random Sessions doesn't exactly set the world alight, it depends on the artist's sharing skills to be honest, but it doesn't matter to me because the series is a delight to do because it means I get to hang out with musicians and drink beer.

Before I get to the main point of this blog, and please be patient because the photograph above will make sense in a minute, I need to provide a small prologue.

It is my belief that instrumental television theme tunes are deliberately arranged so that you can sing along using the name of the programme. The theme tune to Blankety Blank was (according to my own theory) an accident. The demo had the words put over it so that it could be approved as a sing-the-name-of-the-show style tune by someone at the BBC, but due to an oversight the demo was used instead of the instrumental version that we should have heard, and therefore been able to sing along to. Do you think it is a coincidence that Led Zepplin's 'Whole Lotta Love' was picked as the Top of the Pops theme tune when (try it) you can fit the words 'Top of the Pops' into that riff?

A habit I developed a few years ago was singing the Eastenders theme tune over the opening credits, try it with me, here's the music:

Easty easty Eastenders
Eastenders, east end, Eastenders, Eastenders,
Easty easty Eastenders,
Eastenders east end,
Eastenders Eastenders
East Enders, east end

What I then did (and occasionally still do) is sing a summary of what happened in the episode to the closing theme tune. You're at this point either wondering why I'm still single, or wondering how Mandi coped with eight and a half years of this aren't you?

This developed into an idea. Please remember that this was in 2011 before I made my name in radio and I didn't have the profile I have now. My idea was for a four times a week video of a song relating to each day's episode of Eastenders that would be released as soon as possible after the first broadcast (it was repeated on BBC3 at ten o'clock at night in those days). As is always the case with me once I get an idea in my head, all sorts of ideas suddenly swirled around my head. Aside from the video, I was going to get in touch with all the soap magazines and attempt to get some kind of tie-in deal or sponsorship, I set up a Twitter account and followed Eastenders actors past and present that I was going to use to drum up publicity, maybe the BBC would send me advance episodes so that this spin-off web series would properly take off.

What was my idea? The Eastenders Crocodile.

My daughter Emily was staying with us at this time, and Mandi had found online a cut-out crocodile puppet to colour in and mount to cardboard. Emily helped by filming me doing my totally improvised song in front of the television while I laid on the floor operating the puppet and singing in a bizarre high pitched voiced, not how you would imagine a crocodile to sing. We put this mess on YouTube and pretty much forgot about it. These days I can't remember the passwords for any of the accounts I set up, although as I archive everything it will be somewhere, I still have the puppet after all.

Every now and again when Eastenders is going through a strong storyline, I think back to what might have been with The Eastenders Crocodile. At the moment we have had all the saga of Max Branning trying to take revenge on Ian Beale for framing him for Lucy Beale's murder by teaming up with Wilmott-Brown and his company only for Wilmott-Brown to ditch him and leave him skint, the Carter family trying to keep the pub, and an Ealing comedy style attempt at an armed robbery after which someone has stolen away with the money. I am still singing the summary of the episode over the closing credits, but not capitalising on it. Not that I ever capitalised.

Idle curiosity led me to try and find this aborted attempt at a YouTube sensation as I couldn't remember if I had deleted it or not as I had done with another early attempt at a series, Charity Shop Film Guide. First of all, the YouTube channel is still online gathering dust, but a closer look blew my mind.

One video has racked up 17,634 views.
One video has racked up 12,431 views

What the hell? I know they have been up there for eight years but who has been watching this and how did they find this in the first place? Without knowing it I have had high ratings on something so stupid that I ignored it all this time. What really pissed me off was that if I had continued with this then who knows what might have happened. If I had monetised and stuck with it I might be a highly successful creator of a ridiculous cult web series and rolling around in money.

But in that parallel world, I didn't release three kazoo Christmas albums.

Oh, The Eastenders Crocodile YouTube channel is here. Lower your expectations.

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Not my desk

Given how fastidious I am about tidiness, I somehow don’t suffer this when I am in my office at home. The room I work in is, to use estate agent language, a shithole. In one corner boxes of Christmas decorations balance precariously on top of each other, occasionally breaking into a noise that is part festive chorus and part cry for new batteries. The stairs leading up to my office are lined with piles of dormant video tapes of films and programmes I will probably never watch but don’t want to part with, a few of them are unwatched and unused films I bought as material for my abandoned series Charity Shop Film Guide. Books, CDs, records, and cassettes take up a huge amount of space, as do boxes of demo/promo CDs and my archive of Nottingham music that encompasses most of the songs released over the last (when I started collecting properly) five years. My work archive and lever arch files of various items of paperwork are stacked up with other loose bits of paper waiting to be added (I even keep the receipts from cash point machines in a box just in case I have cause to query something happening to my account). There is also a suitcase with a fleece and a couple of jumpers inside that Jack uses as a bed when I am working. My desk is a mess of newspapers, notebooks, USB sticks, blank CDs, pens, sweet wrappers, dirty cups, and other assorted flotsam which as I am typing the description of my surroundings even I can’t believe I manage to work in such conditions.

As part of a work avoidance exercise I decided to do a bit of tidying up today, despite this being a task up there with painting the Forth Bridge. Although my audio archive is slowly finding its way onto CDs, they still aren’t in any kind of order as I am randomly pulling podcasts, radio shows, interviews, and music sessions from USB sticks and copying them to CD before I delete them from the USB stick. Thanks to some meticulous diary keeping and notebook logging of my work I have been able date everything, but after dating them I have simply been dropping them in a filing box. Sorting this collection out was something I couldn’t be bothered with today, but I have tidied up quite a lot of paperwork. I’m not entirely sure why we need to keep such items as bank statements although I suppose they might occasionally come in handy. I know that you are advised to keep financial paperwork for six years but how many times in six years have you ever needed them? Surely the bank will be able to retrieve this information should you need it rather than sending you a statement in the post in this environmentally friendly day and age? If they are needed then I have them all in order right back to the Abbey National and through Abbey before settling on Santander. In fact, a lot of them will be useless now as I closed my original account when it was hacked and opened my present one, so my claim to have had the same bank account for twenty years (I am a wow at parties) is no longer true. Could I bin the statements from the dead account or should I still keep them for six years? Also, if I bin the old statements, should I destroy them so identity thieves can’t retrieve them from the recycling bin or would they be as useless to the thief as they are to me?

My office recycling bin (a cardboard box) now contains several instruction books and papers regarding a range of electrical equipment that I no longer own so I felt safe throwing it away as even the most dedicated identity scavenger is frankly more than welcome to the instructions to phones and cameras that I no longer own.

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February housekeeping

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steveEoliver@gmail.com
@SteveOliver76

In addition to a list of projects to tackle next year, I have also written a longer list of ‘loose ends’ that can be tied up and also count towards having done something creatively productive. These aren’t exactly work as such, but things that I can’t find the time for and is better than having done nothing; editing my old blogs so that dead links are replaced and Photobucket photos removed (so that I can delete my Photobucket account – has anyone used it since MySpace died?), replacing lost radio shows and podcasts by downloading them or recording them from the websites they were uploaded to, or simply organising my archive a bit better are all included. Of course actual work takes priority but at least by doing these little jobs if nothing else I can at least mark the day off as having been useful.

The box containing my abandoned ideas makes interesting reading, for me at least. Suspended ideas perhaps describes it better, as I do hope to one day be able to return to these projects with renewed interest. Some of them are ideas that I had high hopes for such as Charity Shop Film Guide, which was a good idea but not executed properly. The live spin off idea, Bad Film Club, also has legs (as has been proven by the idea being carried out by the cinema that turned down my pitch for it) but maybe not yet. I had also wondered about a Charity Shop series with vinyl LPs being aired, there’s always boxes of appalling records available but would this idea be of mass appeal to not only attract listeners but also to encourage people towards the PayPal button? It is my aim one day to have the luxury of enough time to pull a piece of paper out of the box and devote as much time as possible to whatever it says. The luxury of time is one thing, but a lot of these ideas need money too. If you don’t feel as if the PayPal button is a good enough investment, then why not email me to tell me what sort of area you’d be willing to pay for. Whatever I do will be given away totally free of charge, so I suppose it’s only fair that you know what you’re paying for. For obvious reasons I won’t tell you about my plans in too much detail, as you could be out to steal an idea, but it would give me some idea of where to start. I want to make documentaries, short films, comedy sketches and continue to provide a weekly podcast, but there are more specific items on the agenda too; a sitcom, a chat show, and all sorts of stuff.

The Indie-Go Go campaign to fund the documentary about The Sunday Alternative didn’t go according to plan, although I did ask for perhaps a bit too much money, I also didn’t really push it as hard as I could have done. I did think of setting up a campaign to simply fund all of my artistic endeavors but I would have to put some limit of time on there and as such couldn’t have a semi-permanent campaign.

Another option is my audio books. The money that they make also goes into the fund, which is why I have set them at ‘pay what you like’, if you don’t feel that 365 free blogs and a weekly podcast warrants a donation then maybe having me read to you will change your mind. I toyed with the idea of putting my podcast on Bandcamp as a payable download (with the option to listen for free as usual on the podcast blog) but that will lead to bother with the artists who might take offence at me earning while they don’t, so I’m not going to do that.

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If you mentioned podcasting to someone in 2006, then only a small minority of people would have known what you were talking about. The audio podcast slowly dripped into the public consciousness thanks largely to Ricky Gervais, and even more so to Karl Pilkington, who became a cult figure thanks to his joining the team of Gervais and Merchant. It was The Guardian who asked them to make a podcast in the first place, which was available free of charge to whoever wanted it. Because Karl Pilkington didn't have a job at the time, they started producing their own podcasts and charging for them, and even that didn't stop them from becoming one of the most downloaded podcasts of all time. By about 2005/6, YouTube was slowly making a name for itself as a place to, to use their tagline, 'broadcast yourself'. The full potential of YouTube was a little while off, but a site called MySpace was also starting to emerge. In short, with the right amount of promotion, singers, comedians, actors, writers, and broadcasters didn't need television or radio as much as they once did. Or rather they wouldn't soon, as like all things to do with the Internet, nobody understands what you mean straight away. It's the same as the downloading singles situation, people didn't understand.

An aborted project of mine, which is the one I wanted more than anything to work, was a show called The Pod. Basically, The Pod was going to be an online thing, chose from one of the following options; Internet television show, visual podcast, vodcast (a compound name for a visual podcast, I personally think people who cut two words up and stick them together as one word are funts), or a word we don't use anymore, webcast. I had a building earmarked as a studio, that's how far it went. The Pod's pitch was as follows:

The Pod combines elements of the best music and variety shows, the only difference is that it isn't on television, it's on your computer! Music, comedy, interviews, for you to watch when YOU like. The Internet is the telly and radio of the future, and The Pod intends to be at the forefront of this revolution. Aside from showcasing the best unsigned talent, we will also feature big name interviews and performance.

Reading that back, I can see how nobody took me seriously, how could you possibly replace the telly with your computer? Although, in my defence, the Internet wasn't quite as portable back then, so you wouldn't have been able to watch it on a phone or tablet, (and of course because the tablet hadn't been invented). I remember agents turning down interview requests because they weren't sure what I meant when I said things like "television, but on the Internet". Such strange times they were, the olden days.

Of course these days things have almost gone full circle; the podcast is an acceptable form of broadcast, YouTube and Vimeo are shop windows for the talented, bands can get into the hit parade without a record label, people can watch television on their mobile phone, and you can even do your shopping this way. While it's nice to have been around in the early days of the World Wide Web, or The Information Superhighway, I'm glad that it progressed into something we all 'do'. In the bad old days of dial-up, Internet television would never have worked. In fact, hardly anything to do with the Internet as we know it now would work; YouTube has a nasty habit of buffering now, imagine spending an entire week and spending a million pounds on your phone bill just to see a dog on a skateboard! In these more enlightened times, we all know that there's something online for everyone.

All of this brings me back to the once bizarre concept of the Internet as an entertainment medium. Podcasts are now considered as good as radio shows, and thanks to YouTube (to name one video site), the idea of making something yourself is now acceptable. Today, seven years after I first bashed my head against a brick wall trying to explain it to people, I went to a meeting at a company who make Internet television!

White Collar Zoo is a far more ambitious version of my vision for online entertainment; a whole 'television' network of different dedicated channels showcasing music, comedy, film, and any other aspect of creative arts. This is where I was tonight, at their headquarters on Nottingham's fashionable Hockley/Lace Market border, to talk things over. I had initially been invited by my mate Darren, who runs the online magazine Nottingham Live, (the online magazine being another concept that would have been met with derision and confusion in equal measures in the not too distant past), and now has a channel on the WCZ site. His show is a serious panel based debate programme centred around the music scene, and we were discussing the content, guests, and so on. I was given a tour of the studio (they have a floor in what was probably once a factory, now an office building), and left with a very positive feeling about the whole thing. We film the pilot episode in a couple of weeks, I'm not sure how I'll even be, as I have only ever done radio before, where it doesn't matter what you do with your face as long as your voice doesn't falter. When I recorded Charity Shop Film Guide, I was reading from a script, which is something I have never been able to do, and it showed because my eyes kept wandering away from the camera. I can ad-lib, or memorise a script and get away with it, but give me something to read out loud and I sound like I'm in a hostage video. It'll be fine. Really.

Last of the Summer Ciggie

In a charity shop in Middlesbrough we struck up a VHS bargain.

Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back
Dr No (chosen by Emily)
Men Behaving Badly Series 6
Life’s Most Embarrassing Moments (a video compilation of bloopers from American television in 1984)
A Simple Wish (kids film chosen by Emily, starring that girl who was Matilda and Mrs Doubtfire’s daughter. You know, the girl with the lisp.)
Titanic (another Emily choice)
Like Mike (another Emily choice)
Last of the Summer Wine Series 1

All the above for one pound.

I was annoyed that the Last of the Summer Wine set, which was a double video pack, counted as two videos. This meant that I had to put back the only tape that I had found for Charity Shop Film Guide. When I first thought of doing Charity… (or #csfguide if you mention it on twitter) I thought the charity shops were filled to bursting point with comically shit films waiting for a loving home. This does not appear to be the case and as such, I am finding it a struggle. I have about three films left to review for it and then I will have to start searching.

When Emily and Mandi were asleep, I cranked up the video to watch a bit of Last Of The Summer Wine.

It is criminal that the BBC are axing this show after so long, despite being consistently funny. I settled down to watch the very first episode.

It turned out that this was the very first episode of the series, and not the original pilot that I have somewhere in my archive of taped off the telly programmes cassettes.

It seems strange nowadays to watch a sitcom where the three main characters all smoke (indoors in public places too!), and not actually swearing beyond a ‘bloody'. There is also a faint reference to a husband killing his wife, and you thought it was all rolling down hills in a bathtub!

A new episode of Charity Shop Film Guide is now up to watch on YouTube. Again, I cannot get it to load on FoD, but it will appear there soon. I watched the film Voyage of the Rock Aliens, which needs to be seen to be believed. My review does not really do it justice, as this was a film with no plot, no direction, and no idea.

Do your curiosity a favour and Google the film. It even has a profile on myspace so you will get some idea.

The night I watched Voyage, I conceived the pencil sketch basis of a live version of Charity Shop Film Guide in which I play a couple of crap films with an introduction beforehand. This is something I might try to do next year if I get the time. 

Something I would like to do is acquire permission to adapt Voyage of the Rock Aliens for the stage. The fact that it is woefully piss poor has not stopped many plays/musicals being staged. In fact, it is such a cheap and nasty affair that I hear Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder discussing the financial benefits of staging a flop. But I want it to be one of them things that get the audience turning up in costume.