Courting Controversy (Accidentally...) | The Friday Updarte

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

Hopefully now most of you will have found the time to sit down and watch my latest video: Wetherspoon: Inside Britain’s Most Controversial Pubs. Which has been oddly controversial itself…

Okay, it’s not been that controversial, I’ve simply been watching the comments come in since the video has gone out and have noticed some really interesting responses.

The most interesting of which have not been so much about the content of the video as its form.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve been experimenting quite a lot with the form the videos take.

We’ve introduced a bunch of new tools to our toolbox: including interviews, on-location filming, and even (in the case of our Just Stop Oil piece) reporting on events as they take place.

As those of you who have watched the latest video will know, this time around, we decided to take this a little further. Alongside more “explainer”-y bits of the video, we decided to include a “road trip” element.

This wasn’t random. It was designed to add a more embodied element to the video which articulated how widespread Wetherspoon pubs are, and their variety, in a way which showed that on screen, rather than just with animated text on screen and voiceover.

It was also designed to be a bit of fun. I’m always cautious that explainer videos about politics, the news, and current affairs have the potential to be a bit heavy; and so we thought it would be a way of making it a bit more fun.

Most people seem to have really loved this. There are a lot of people happy to have seen their local pub on the video, or who just generally seemed to get something out of the mild chaos of the trip.

There were, however, also a few hold outs. A handful of people were quite clear that they’d much prefer the video to just stick to explaining the topic at hand!

Both perspectives are completely fair. We’re still learning how to make these videos (and always will be!). I always say that one of the things I love about this job is that I’ve never quite felt like I’ve mastered it, and don’t feel like I ever will. There’s so much to improve on and get better at.

We also aim to make fairly “middle brow” stuff: videos which push beyond the very basics, but which are hopefully accessible to a wide range of people. One of the challenges of that is that it’s easy to sometimes thread the needle in such a way that a video is “boring” to more casual viewers and also too surface-level for the hardcore.

I’m also aware that YouTube commenters are a very self-selecting sample and there are a lot of people whose feedback we’ll never get to hear!

So, regardless of if you thought this one was a bit too fun or a bit too boring, hopefully the next one will swing back in such a direction that it hits the spot.

It’s been really fun to continue experimenting with how to elevate the videos we make; something you’ll be seeing a lot more of in the next couple.

Which I’ll perhaps share a little more about in next weeks’ Friday Update!

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!