Episode 9 saw us return to school to record. It was by far the closest recording we did to the episode dropping, having ‘burnt out’ a little in the run-up to half term. We both often go into work during school holidays anyway, so we knew there’d be a day when we were both onsite and we expected we’d get a couple of episodes ‘in the can’.

In the end we only managed the one and, after another epic recording session, we only just got the raw material ‘on tape’ minutes before the site team kicked us out. After a few weeks of not having recorded anything it took us a while to find our rhythm and neither of us thought we’d managed to do our best work. But then we’d felt that way about episode 8 too and that one turned out alright.

In fact episode 9 did need a lot of editing, and listening back to the unedited recording, it’s easy to see why we felt it hadn’t been great. There was a lot of soul-searching that hit the cutting room floor, but we had still managed to record a lot of stuff that was pretty good. Indeed it was hard to cut it down to less than 45 minutes, which makes episode 9 our longest episode to date and we’re both pretty happy with the final version.

The biscuit stuff, while seemingly a repetition of stuff that had come before in one sense, really let us lean into a bit of local lore and Reading’s heritage as a ‘biscuit town’.

Quite a long section that we also thought was pretty good had to come out, but we were reluctant to bin it, so actually some of what ended up being episode 11 was actually made up of part of episode 9.

I don’t think either of us really loved the list in this episode. It was a promising title – 10 Challenges Of Teaching & How To Overcome Them seemed like exactly the kind of thing we’d enjoy taking apart, but in the end it was so badly written that it was harder to satirise than some of the equally ridiculous but more earnest and better written lists that had come before. Not a dead loss but increasing evidence that we need to perhaps diversify from the lists and something that directly informed our decision making for episodes 10 and 11.

As to the postcard, Ben was nonplussed, but I quite liked it. At the time of recording I wasn’t sure if it was just some random image or whether the cat in the picture was part of some broader pop-culture reference. I’ve subsequently researched it and it definitely is a pop-culture reference, albeit not one I’m familiar with. I don’t think Ben would be impressed by this but I’m quite pleased with this revelation.