YouTube is probably dying BUT THERE'S A TWIST!

 

 Well exactly, Man Carrying Thing.

 

 I think – and this is a statistic I heard before they recently started counting a single frame as a "view" – that YouTube is now more viewed in the UK than the BBC, yet I'm honestly not sure it'll be around in a couple of years. Many of my favourite professional creators like Jenny Nicholson and Lindsay Ellis have long ago been driven to rival, paid-subscription site Nebula by the constant, unpoliced hammering of commenters. The slack, inaccurate, and uncorrected robot-butler-driven demonetisation of other professionals like Yesterworld (as he explains here) proves even the men aren't safe. And, as I found out when I started a new channel with its own fresh algorithm, the most divisive, Ai-faked, "you'll never guess what didn't happen" rage bait dog mess – the exact opposite of what made YouTube such a gift – is now the preferred recommendation. 

 But, just as the party's winding down, look who shows up...

 

 Come in! Come in!

 Given the recent respects paid on this blog to the pioneering Fred Spencer, and my own low effort return to talking to the camera, I felt it would be remiss not to note that the highly lauded, lowly derided auteur M. Night Shyamalan has, within the last twenty-four hours, started his own channel and, to my mind, not put a foot wrong. This isn't a partnership or a strategy, this is someone simply deciding to have a go at the internet, undramatically baring his soul like those dating videos of old, but with the authority of a person who has swung and missed across the world. He's keeping it short. He's found a bench he likes. He's not overthought the thumbnail (although actually – oh, that might change. They do change. A/B testing. I really hope it doesn't change. Is it still just a curvy arrow pointing to him saying "movie director"? I hope so. I've screengrabbed it just in case. Stop tapping that. It's a screengrab, the video's below). Thumbnail aside, it's not funny, but it makes me as happy as something funny might. It's beautifully concise, human scale, unscripted, and promises so much whose passing I mourned with the death of Fred. The innocent and accurate assumption that people care. Gauche as chocolate rain. I'm sorry you often don't feel great, M. Night Shyamalan, and welcome, maestro. Permission to be not great granted.

 

I Demand these Fifity-Four Seconds of Grange Hill be Watched, then Universally Celebrated.

 My strongest memory by far of the time Grange Hill went to Chessington Zoo is of Annette Firman negging a posh, ginger kid from between the plates of a fiberglass stegosaurus in the picnic area. Posh, ginger kids don't forget things like that. This is how I remembered that Series Five: Episode Twelve provides such a valuable record of what is now the "World of Adventures". But I had not remembered just how many other extraordinary moments the episode boasts. After finding it online, I posted the following single take to instagram, uncaptioned. Clickbait superlatives crowded my brain, but I didn't want to give any spoilers, and I still don't, so I must simply insist you watch it unprepared. This is from 1982:

 

 Did Grange Hill – and specifically director Diamuid Lawrence – invent the steadicam chase? Apparently, newer technologies were gifted to the cheaper shows first to play around, so maybe. And what play... Jonah Jones's satchel lands in the sea lion enclosure, and within minutes we're watching young actor and not stuntman Lee Sparke falling bodily from actual rocks and swimming with actual forty-stone pinnipeds. Was anyone working at the zoo that day? I think this episode might also be the first time we hear Janet St. Clair say "I'm only trying to help you, Ro Land", an instant playground banger. I apologise to any demographic reading who has no idea what I'm talking about, but I also immediately rescind that apology because here is the episode in full, and irrefutable evidence that Grange Hill could be – I hesitate before typing this but, yeah, no – as good as anything that's ever been made.

 

 

"Pfff. I want to be an airdresser when I grow up. You know. With proper training."

"Yeah."

"What's the matter with that?"

"I want to do something exciting. Be a trapeze artist in the circus. Something like that."

"You can't be a trapeze artist."

"Why not?"

"Tt."

The sun again but the world will never

 Unlike almost exactly twenty-seven years previously, there wasn't a cloud in the sky when I clicked publish on my previous post with a still-weirdly-minstrel-adjacent white kid glove – (or is it a butler's hand? Is the cursor meant to be my servant's hand rather than an extension of my own? And should I still be using yellow-handed emojis even though everyone else seems now to have switched to their own flesh tone, just because yellow's the colour of the emoji's faces and I'd always assumed the hands belonged to the same guy? Did Harvey Ball ever stop to think what a storm of care he was seeding when he invented the smiley?

 

It looks like he might. Close brackets) – and so when I did indeed leave the laptop and race off to Brixton for the solar rematch, there was no filter this time to shield our glimpses. I use the first person plural because it felt so obviously communal, as it had in '99. And Iceland was still there, and Boots. And I realised as I revisited that intersection of Electric Avenue and Brixton Road where Fin and Jeremy had filmed each other at the last darkening, that this is also where I had Gabbie meet Martin in Time Spanner in 2016. Here's the trip to that spot as I try to desmear my phone.

 

 

 The sun had moved of course, it does that, and was now directly at the end of the road at almost eye level. At the end of every road facing west in fact, and the bus stop opposite Brighton Terrace at the stroke of seven gave you a dangerously uninterrupted view. I shielded my face with the phone, but the eclipse would only show up on my screen as a green crescent glare (see the thumbnail below). Those without special glasses also tried our luck with a reflection in the window of H&M. I wonder if the guy inside knew what we were doing, why so many of us were just standing there, staring into his shop, our backs to an event that wouldn't happen again for another sixty-four years. As I said, really the event was us looking at it though, so that's what I've cut together below.

 In other news, it is midnight in Highbury and finally raining.

 

The safest way to watch the eclipse

Is probably just to watch the last one, so here it is. I was ushering at the BFI on August the 11th 1999, and watched the solar eclipse from Waterloo Bridge, but had given my camera to Jeremy and Fin to film it where they were. That's them, Fin with the glasses, Jeremy without. Fin's also made his own cooler cut here. I moved in with him the following year. Brixon, which is where we came in. Actually, I might revisit Electric Avenue for today's. It's crept up on me; I think the next one is in 2090. I won't look directly at it though because I don't have the special glasses. I haven't seen Jeremy in years. (The image above is sort of from here.)

By the Picking of my Thumbnail

Hello friends/fellow students. As anyone who's subscribed to my YouTube channel might know, I've started a second one. And there, for the past four weeks, I've been reposting videos of me from 2020 tearing through the complete works of Shakespeare in lockdown in case giving Simon Goes Full Shakespeare its own channel made them easier to stumble across. I also added little introductions to the introductions, which I shared on my first channel too, which is why you might know. Here's the opener to the opener.

 

 Apart from these fresh intros, the only new material, if you don't count the compilations, or the date stamps (and you are absolutely welcome to count date stamps as new material, by the way... it's been an unhelpful old year for me so far in terms of the old fight-or-flight) are the new thumbnails. Ideally, your typical YouTube thumbnail contains both the presenter's likeness and some text, and after a series of botched cut and pastes...

 

Bold. But rejected.

 

... I realised the easiest – and also quite pleasingly Dave McKean-iest  –way to achieve this was simply to pause the introductions as they fade into the titles, and take a screenshot.

 

 "Ta-daaa!"

 

 The compiled Julius Caesar went out this weekend, on both channels, meaning that for the second time Season One is now done. But another reason I bothered to give this project its own channel is that, this second time round, I hope to get further into Season Two and beyond on its return. I've time enough anyway, and a room. And I'm still very proud of the whole thing... The only reason I haven't plugged it until now is that, as I learnt in my previous post, apparently it helps the algorithm find you an audience if you don't. But that hasn't thus far worked the same magic it did on The Sitting, maybe because that video's only sixty seconds long. I don't know. It's a learning curve.

 As a fat, four course taster then, here are the compiled introductions. The Two Gentlemen of Verona's features a new attempt to explain what I'm doing, plus archival bonus material of me seeing if it will work if I sing the songs rather than just reading them out, which it didn't so I don't know why I've included it.

 

 

 The compilation of introductions to The Taming of the Shrew features no new introduction, but bonus material of me going off into the kitchen to throw some pans around for some sound effects, which I did use.

 

 

 

 More foley work is included in the collected introductions to The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, where I cry like a baby. Donald Trump was President back in 2020, remember. It was a different time. Ha ha ha.

 

 

 

 And finally – inspired by this bit in an excellent documentary about the old BBC2 cult film strand Moviedrome in which Alex Cox reckons he got the gig because, as the only film director not living in London, he couldn't just film everything in his living room and so his Film Club pieces to camera looked much more dynamic...

 

 

...  I head out of the flat for the final compilation of introductions to Julius Caesar, and attempt to explain what I'll do next beneath the green man of Parkland Walk. (Some thumbnails are better than others. Like I said, it's a curve.)

 

 

 

 Now play them all simultaneously! And if you fancy taking your own tour of the new channel, you can like, share, subscribe, scroll, swipe, dive, run, push, bomb, and pet heavy HERE. I hope you're all doing tremendously.

Those Little Grey Cells

 well, A4-sized grey cells

 

 When traditional paint-and-trace animation was explained to me as a child, in arts programmes of old, I was never able to understand how, when the painted cells were placed upon a lightbox to photograph, the brushstrokes showed up flat and brightly coloured as though lit from above, rather than as smeary, backlit shadows. When I was finally given the opportunity to make my own cartoon in Moving Image Class, as a seventeen-year-old foreign exchange student at Milton Academy Massachusetts, I was able to find out for myself.

 

 

 Except I didn't, because I was right. The Sitting looks exactly what you might expect a light shone through a series of increasingly opaque painted body parts to look like. The white patch above, for example – intended to mask the coal miner's legs as he's coughed up by the Gibson Girl – does not match seamlessly with the wall behind, so I guess I'll never understand the properties of the lightbox. But I'm still incredibly pleased with it and proud of it. And, as you can see, I still have every hand-painted cell from it in a box under the bed, so I can always reshoot. 

 See if you think this next bit is interesting. I posted this barely discernible digital transfer of the VHS transfer of the American NotTheSameColour transfer of the original film shot in class to YouTube towards the end of last month, but didn't immediately get round to telling anyone. It turns out not telling anyone is actually what you're meant to do though, because it lets the algorithm get to work unmolested by acquaintances, and within a week I was surprised to see the video had received over six hundred views, which I know isn't much, but it's more than most videos I post. I guess it helps it's short. That number's plateaued however, so I reckon I can declare the accidental experiment over now and let you loyal, ugh, losers in on it without fear of nobbling the stats, therefore enjoy!

 

 

Sometimes this blog will just be me guest reviewing on Collins and Maconie's Movie Club.

 To know this show was to love it but if even you did neither, both Movie Club and "guest reviewer" are pretty self-explanatory, so enjoy as I continue to digitise my teetering VHS stacks. I think to be considered for the gig you had to leave a sample of your work on an answerphone, and I left a review of the Demi Moore version of Scarlet Letter where Robert Duvall dances round a bonfire with his head stuck up a stag – Christ, is there nothing about this I don't remember? Riverside Studios. 1998. Everyone was fun and pleasant. It wasn't paid. I didn't know what to wear so I wore what they wore. They asked if this was my first time on television and I told them I'd appeared in Z Cars when I was three months old. "Did you play a baby?" asked Andrew Collins. Rest in power, Brenda Fricker. Forgive me, Keifer. And that's my Dad and Mum at the end. 

 

 

 

It was the nineties.