This month I took over presenting duties on the excellent BAFTA Guru podcast, which is aimed at aspiring producers and filmmakers. The October episode focuses around the 4th annual screenwriting season, and features a round-up of the year's best lecturers, including David Goyer (Dark Knight Trilogy) Hossein Amini (Drive) Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich), Tony Gilroy (The Bourne Series) and Richard Curtis (Love Actually), plus me chatting with some of the industry insiders who made up the audience at the BFI, to get their tips for breaking into the UK film industry.
Am I the new Richard Whiteley?
I spent a very exciting day today at BBC Elstree Studios - the very same studio they shot The Muppet Show, no less - hosting a new gameshow pilot for format creation company Boxatricks, founded by the clever chaps what did Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. I'm not allowed to tell you much more about it, except to say that I had a whale of a time and of course I hope it gets commissioned! Watch this space...
iPhone 5S and 5C launch - ITV Daybreak
There's a new iPhone out today - well, two, actually - so today I got the call to come on to Daybreak and explain exactly why it is that despite technology journalists and speculators complaining about the lack of innovation in the new handsets, Apple devotees were still prepared to queue in the rain for two days to get one...
My new weekly column for Telegraph Men
Telegraph Men has launched, and with it my new weekly column. So far I've written about giving up coffee and Peter Andre's new fragrance, but in future weeks I'll inevitably turn my attention to technology too, and whatever else is on my mind. You can read the archive here.
New voiceover showreel
I'm pleased to say I have joined the excellent London Voiceover agency. If you’ve ever wanted to hear me do an ad for Go Cat, well now you can. Callooh callay. Here’s my reel:
I'm a Top 20 recording artist... eat that, failed musicians!
The sun was out this Summer, and accordingly, so was our Summer ‘album’, Answer Me This! Holiday (due to a quirk of iTunes catergorization, non-Audiobook spoken word downloads – even if they feature just one hour-long track – are still classified as ‘Music’, and therefore eligible for the Album chart).
It’s an hour of us chatting through vacation-related questions from our audience, covering all bases from Brits abroad to the Spanish Steps to Legoland, and you can buy it for £2.49 here. I think it’s a decent product, and I love that we’ve hit upon a way to monetise the podcast without having to charge for the podcast itself (we still put out forty episodes a year for free, just as we always have, but now do a couple of albums too). We’ll probably sell as many copies of it as of the book we wrote, which took rather longer to do… win win.
But the best thing of all is that, upon the day of release, enough of our lovely listeners bought it for it to crack the Top 20 Album chart. Which means I am, officially, a Top 20 recording artist. Eat that, failed musicians!