Sun, 13 March 2016, 9:44 pm (UK time): I cut my teeth in radio. I’m perfectly fine with projecting my amplified voice to the public. Hell, I’ll let you pipe me in to a global feed across every speaker and earbud in the civilized world to recite PULP FICTION‘s entire script, AND I’ll do all the voices. (“Any of you f—–‘ pr—s MOVE… and I’ll execute every mother f—–‘ last one of you!”)
But video is different. I don’t like the way I look on camera. I never have. I see myself in a clip and ask, is that how I really look? I must have the most polite friends in the world. They’ve never been cruel enough to tell me that my head is so large it blots out the sun. And why does my lip move that way on camera? It doesn’t move that way on the radio.
For me to turn a live camera on myself, at such close range that you can probably count the hairs in my nose (no, I’ve become a diva for this YouTube channel; I have my nose hairs professionally plucked), is honestly more frightening to me than taking this actual solo journey across the Atlantic. But empirical evidence in 2016 shows that potential clients don’t just want to hear a radio show or a podcast about Europe travel. They want a video! They don’t want to simply HEAR about me doing these adventurous things. They want to SEE me doing them.
So, here I am tubing my way from the north of London to my home base on the South Bank. I’m wrapping up an evening of live blues bands and negotiating my way home on the Tube.