On Location | The Friday 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?

Firstly, I need to apologise for missing a week of the Friday Update last Friday. It’s been a veeeeeery busy fortnight here which didn’t leave quite enough time to fit in one of these little reflections.

But, we’re back! And, this week has been pretty exciting.

See, on Monday, myself and Georgia, my editor, headed to Dorset to do some filming. This was the first on-location shoot I’d done for quite some time. The last time we filmed a video outside of the safe confines of my home studio was in January or February 2021 when I filmed the video about vaccine nationalism.

The video we’re working on is similarly dark. It focusses on the UK’s hiring of an engineless barge, called Bibby Stockholm, on which to house asylum seekers. Given that the barge is moored just two hours ago, we felt it would only be right to go and film my to-camera pieces in the vicinity.

After many months of thinking about and researching this video, it was quite emotional to go and see it in person. And, just days before the government began populating it with more residents.

The shoot went relatively well. We’re trying out a few new things for this video which I don’t think have all gone perfectly but which I think we’ll be able to learn from in order to make our videos much more engaging in the future.

It’s all coming together now and should be out very shortly. As ever, I can’t wait to share it with you.

And outside of work?

My out-of-work life has been relatively chilled this past fortnight. I’ve mostly just been spending time at home with family. Sometimes, my wife and I have a habit of booking-up lots of trips to visit friends or other activities over the weekend which is always lovely. But, occasionally, it’s nice to have a bit more space to unwind and relax.

In fact, tonight, for the first time in a long time, we’re planning on having a bit of a date night just the two of us. Since the cost-of-living crisis began to bite, we’ve not done much eating out, so I’m looking forward to a nice meal and a film!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

At the moment, I’m continuing my trawl through John Le Carré’s George Smiley novels with The Looking Glass War. This one is perhaps the least exciting of all the novels in the series I’ve read so far.

The prior one in the series—The Spy Who Came in from the Cold—was just so excellently constructed; every chapter was brimming with suspense. And, whenever you reached the end of a scene, it would throw a tantalising cliff-hanger at you.

This one is less compelling. Although, as with the other books, it remains a marvellously morally-ambivalent look at the Cold War. As I think I’ve mentioned, the series is intended as an antidote to Ian Fleming’s James Bond. And it still does achieve that. Where Fleming paints spies as heroic, in Le Carré’s vision, they’re kind of sad weirdos. The characters in The Looking Glass War, for example, mostly seem to be there because they the fact they get their expenses paid for whilst they’re on operations.

While this one’s a bit slower, though, I’m definitely going to be carrying on with the series; it’s one of those where I feel I’m not only getting to experience a fantastic story, but also absorb the structure of feeling of a particular moment in time.

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!!