ROAD TRIP!! | The Friday(ish) Update

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.

What have I been up to this week?

The past week has been a rollercoaster!

At 4am on Monday morning, Georgia (my editor) and I met in a car park in Plymouth in order to embark on an epic adventure around England.

Our objective was to shoot my next video, which focusses on how (and why) British cities keep going bankrupt.

The original version of this video was going to be fairly standard for my channel: a video essay with maybe some aspects of the video filmed on location in one of the cities which has recently gone bust.

While we were planning it out a couple of weeks ago, however, I asked the question: is this the best version of this video that could possibly exist?

The answer was no.

So, we began to discuss what the best version of this video would look like.

The result was a mega-plan involving a four-day road trip to multiple bankrupted cities across England.

From Monday to Thursday of last week, then, Georgia and I drove around the country, on a whistle-stop tour of cities which have run out of cash.

We visited Birmingham, Northamptonshire, Nottingham, Liverpool, Preston and Woking.

It was a jam-packed journey featuring some very long days and many hours of driving (not my favourite thing to do!).

Despite the sleep deprivation, I think we both had a decent amount of fun. And, the footage we got is great.

The road trip aspect of the video lends a real sense of scale to the project (or that’s the hope anyway!).

Alongside pieces-to-camera, the video is going to include Vox Pops and in-person interviews; which feels like a real step-up in our work.

I’ll share a sneak-peek of the intro section to the video shortly!

And outside of work?

Given how any hundreds of miles I drove towards the beginning of last week, you might not be surprised to learn I didn’t do a huge amount over the weekend.

In fact, I spent most of Friday in bed catching up on sleep!

Nevertheless, a relaxed weekend is always to be appreciated.

The weather has begun picking up a bit here in the UK over the past few days, which meant I was able to sit and read in the park for an hour or two on Saturday.

I’m someone who really struggles with the darkness and cold in the winter, so having a bit of sunshine to spark a bit of warmth is lovely!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

I’m currently reading Bruce Cannon Gibney’s A Generation of Sociopaths: How the baby Boomers Betrayed America.

Some of you will know that I’m working on a film about the Baby Boom and the ways in which it changed politics and economics in the advanced capitalist nations.

A Generation of Sociopaths is one of a whole pile of books I’ve read over the past year or so which try to weigh-in on debates surrounding the Boomers and inter-generational conflict.

The central argument of the book is a little bit of a stretch. Rather than the title of the book being metaphorical, it is quite literal: Gibney seeks to argue that Baby Boomers, en masse fulfilling the DSM-V definition of sociopathy.

This argument can feel a little silly at times. Which is a shame. Because the historiography of the Boomers which is contained within is pretty decent.

The book explores the various ways in which the Baby Boomers have, throughout their lives, voted in ways which have defended the interests of their generation, at the expense of those (in the past) older and (now) younger than them.

While I was very familiar with a lot of the history it covers going into the book, I’m finding it’s been full of little details which will likely help influence the film.

At the very least, it’s helped point out a couple of aspects of the American Boomer experience that I maybe hadn’t fully thought about yet.

Finally, at some points, the silliness of its argument actually makes it kinda fun! I read a lo of very couched, careful academic books for wok, so sometimes it’s nice to read something that fully goes for it!

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

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