If Episode 22 (or S2E1) was a fairly successful foray into the world of vodcasting, then Episode 23 (or S2E2) highlighted the very real challenges of the medium.

We recorded the first two video episodes back-to-back, signalling the change of episode to ourselves with a quick costume change. We recorded both episodes in the school’s newly refurbished drama studio. However, we made sure we removed anything that might give a clear indication of where we work.

We really don’t want to make the identity of the school explicit. Our SLT have been broadly supportive of our endeavour into the world of podcasting. Nonetheless, as our Executive Head pointed out to me, it would be really easy for anyone to work out which school we work at if they were interested.

I don’t think anyone would be that interested in reality, but if anyone is, it’s incumbent on us to make them work hard to find out.

In the 21 audio episodes that preceded our move to video, we’d been pretty careful about keeping work and school separate. You could argue that would be almost impossible to do, given that we are notionally making a podcast about secondary education, but we’ve hardly ever managed to live up to that billing.

By this point, it should be fairly clear that what we’re actually doing is a podcast in which education is only notionally the central premise. Even when we try to make the episodes about education, we deviate wildly off topic. And frankly, some episodes don’t come anywhere near our supposed central premise.

Hopefully that’s where most of the funny stuff comes from.

So the last thing we’d want to do in our move to video is mess all of that up, particularly as the school site is quite a useful place to make a video podcast.

One drama studio looks like any other, so we should be on safe ground, but even so, we did have to configure the room in a particular way to make it as anonymous as possible.

We set up pretty well for S2E1, but somehow, despite very little changing bar our T-shirts, Ben has gone from being central in his shot to somewhere off to the left.

Which he won’t like at all.

It doesn’t make much difference to the bits of the episode where we’re sharing a split screen, but it is notable in the bits which are just him. Unfortunately, I had to alternate quite a bit between the shared screen and the solo screen in order to minimise the impact of the jump cuts.

I did this fairly effectively in S2E1, but less so in this episode.

Because significantly more editing was required.

Even after the edit, this episode comes in at 51 minutes, which is too long in my view. If it were an audio-only episode, I would have been more brutal in the editing. The switch to video does highlight how much more difficult it will be to erase the bad bits, though.

We’re going to have to get better at doing these in a single take as much as possible.

That should be easier with the new format we’ve introduced, which essentially breaks the whole thing into five parts. If each part can be done in a single take, or as near to a single take as possible, then it’ll work pretty well, but that is going to take some more forethought on our part.

Forethought is not our strong point.

There are bits of S2E2 that work really well.

The middle part of the episode, when we talk about Ofsted, is as near to ‘on brand’ as we’ve ever managed. It is, I think, some of the funniest ‘off the cuff’ stuff we’ve ever come up with.

The magic seems to be when we’re riffing off each other and on the same page.

When we’re not on the same page and one of us ‘dominates’, then it’s much clearer that the other person isn’t engaged, because now you can see our faces.

Unfortunately, that largely happens at the start of this episode, when we’re clearly not synched up. Ben spends too long talking about something which it’s fairly clear I don’t think is all that funny.

In Ben’s defence, it’s happened the other way round plenty of times, although he usually just interrupts me. Unfortunately, I let this one play out and then was left with a mess of an edit.

I think I have largely managed to edit out my obvious disinterest. I’ve also cut out some of the more self-indulgent parts of Ben’s narrative. The premise as a whole managed to survive, but I think the edits are more obvious.

It’s not a bad episode by any means, and the template for future episodes is definitely there.

But it’s clear that, even if we deviate wildly – and the deviations are the best bit, so that’s fine – we’re going to need to be on the same page going into the episode.

And actually, if there is going to be a ‘bad bit’, it really can’t be the opening bit.