The end of term, as is oft the case, was a busy one and the realities of parenting (plus some much needed work on the house) have slightly derailed the start to the summer holidays. Ben and I have been productive and recorded a lot of stuff in the last couple of weeks and I (for it is always I) have edited and uploaded all of the content we’ve produced. All of which means there will be Ben and James aplenty throughout the summer break.

However, all of this activity has resulted in me neglecting the blog aspect of the operation, and this is why, even though episode 17 has been live for a full five days, I’m only just getting around to doing the write-up of episode 16.

Episode 16 was recorded immediately after episodes 15, which itself was recorded immediately after episode 14. As such we were pretty tired by the time we got to this one and it was a classic case of Ben vs James during much of the recording. It took way longer to get this one done than the preceding two, and there was a lot of soul searching and arguing, particularly around the ‘tea-making’ bit. Albeit we didn’t have any disagreements about the correct way to make a cup of tea, just whether it made for good content.

It does, I think. Some of what made the cut was pre-argument and some of it post, but I think my editing skills have evolved sufficiently that you can’t tell which is which.

Once we found our groove the rest of the recording went pretty well and the laughs are very real. Even the postcard bit went pretty well for this one, although any feelings I may have had that we’re now on the same page with that have been disabused by subsequent recordings.

On balance though, I do think episode 16 came out very well, and maybe some of that creative tension might actually have given this one a bit of an adrenaline boost.

Hopefully I’ll get my write-up of episode 17 out this week too and then we’ll be back on, or even ahead of, schedule for everything, like the well-oiled machine we’d like to pretend we are.