Five minutes with…Jay Foreman, YouTuber

Editor, NLQ and New London Weekly

David Taylor: Hello!

Jay Foreman: Hello!

DT: What have you been up to, these last weird months?

JF: Asking ‘what have you been up to?’ has changed meaning so much in the last few months. It’s become an extremely judgmental question, because it now means rather than a friendly greeting it means: ‘how have you been making best use of all the time available to you now?’. I've been incredibly lucky because the day before lockdown was announced, we finished filming an enormous YouTube project. So I've been spending pretty much all of my time since then sat in front of a lap top editing, which is where I’m happiest, I guess

DT: What is that project, if I may ask?

JF: That project was a video that you watched - it was a summary of why London has 32 boroughs and what's wrong with them

DT: Okay, sorry!

JF: Since then I've been working on another project, which is going to be another series of Map Menwith Mark Cooper-Jones.

DT: Just looking across your oeuvre, you do seem very interested in the built environment and London particularly, and the make-up of cities politically. Mostly London, actually, by the looks of things, and maps. Where has this stemmed from, do you think?

JF: I've always had a geeky interest in maps, and in London in particular. When I was a kid I used to – and even still now – I can glance through the A-Z as if it's an entertaining book and it can keep me interested for hours. So, it's partly that, but it's also because when I started making videos, we chose to tell a story about a London infrastructure project. We made a video all about the unfinished Northern Line extension beyond Edgware. Once I started making that it sort of sent me down a research hole, and I’ve been down that research hole ever since. I find myself, 10 years later, still very deeply interested in that sort of thing.

DT: What do you describe yourself as? In your passport are you ‘comedian’? Are you ‘presenter’? Surely not YouTuber, or is that a thing now? Actually, I know it's a thing now…(laughs)

JF: It’s very unfortunate that YouTuber is a thing, so I find myself quite embarrassed to use the term. It’s a very silly word but it describes what my job is, and, increasingly when I tell people that's what my job is, despite being a very made-up word, people know what it means. I think I've found myself once putting the word ‘YouTuber’ on an insurance document, embarrassing though that was…

DT: …because I think on your Wikipedia it says comedian first. Is there a new order of things?

JF: Well, it said ‘comedian’ for quite a long time before it said ‘YouTuber’ because I started my career in stand-up comedy about 10 years ago. I was doing that long before YouTube made the leap from hobby to main source of employment, so today I still feel like a comedian first. And ‘YouTuber’, because it's such a silly made-up word, even now, despite the fact that it takes up the vast majority of my time, it still feels like a side-hustle rather than a thing I have to describe to the insurance people what I do for a living.

DT: What do all your friends in comedy say about the scene at the moment given that presumably touring is virtually impossible? Are they tearing their hair out?

JF: It's nothing short of a massive disaster, what’s happened to the performing industry. So a lot of my friends who are comedians are now having to find other things to do with their life because there simply aren't shows anymore. There are a small handful of shows that take place outdoors. I'm lucky enough that I can perform shows for kids which means I may have to do a lot of these strange pop-up shows that happen outdoors in tents in the daytime, because a lot of those can still go ahead during Covid. But a lot of the normal gigs that take place in the evening in small, crowded theatres and comedy clubs and rooms above pubs? They’ve just stopped completely. So it's very, very challenging to be a comedian right now. I'm very lucky that I've managed to find something else I can do, which is making videos on YouTube, which is largely unaffected by Covid. But for most people in my industry, yeah, it's really challenging times.

DT: Are they, like you, considering moving over to Patreon as a meaningful way of finding some sort of income?

JF: Lots of them are. The best example of this I can think of is my brother who you may know is a beatboxer who trades under the name Beardyman.

DT: Yeah

JF: He was resisting Patreon for years, but now that it's become a necessity, rather than a cheap bonus, he is embraced it with aplomb. He's now doing the majority of his performances on his webcam where he does live streams, and he's found a new way of reaching his audience. He’s one of many people that used to do lots of their performing on stage and have now found a way to do their performing online. We’re very lucky that Covid happened in an era when Patreon and working online and performing online is a thing. I often wonder what the hell we would have done if this virus had hit 20 or even 10 or even five years ago. It’s almost like all the technology has been building up to make us ready for this.

DT: How do you do your research for your stuff? For example, for that Boroughs piece? How long does it take you to put something like that together?

JF: It depends on how geeky the subject is. For most videos, most of our research I'm sorry to say comes from Wikipedia. At least, that's where we start doing our research. And then if something looks a bit fishy or contradictory, we’ll just spend a lot of time reading, and if we if are very finickity, we might find an actual book or two. In the case of the videos we made about Boroughs, there's no way we could have made that video without the help of this guy called Ian who runs a website called www.lccmunicipal.com, which is a website dedicated to nothing but the extremely geeky and specific history of the London boroughs both pre- and post-1965.

DT: In the Boroughs video I've got a freeze-frame on my computer at the moment with you standing over the London model at NLA – who are essentially my main employer. Was that cool? Did you like the model? Was it the first time you've seen the model, and what did you think of it?

JF: I’ve known about that model for quite some time. The model in the Building Centre first came to my attention in around about 2012-2013, or thereabouts. Someone made a YouTube video called Top 10 quirky interesting sites in London, and they included things like the tank in Lambeth, the model of Saint Paul's cathedral off the side of Vauxhall bridge, and then one of their things was this amazing free-to-visit model of London. I'd never heard of it until I saw that video, but as soon as I saw it I went down to visit at the next opportunity and I found myself popping in every time I was in the area, just to have a look at the model and see what had changed. Even more geeky than that, I found myself drawn to the stuff on the walls surrounding the model more than the model itself because that's how much of a London infrastructure geek I am. So when I finally found an opportunity to use that model in one of my videos I was delighted and I'm so pleased that the people in the Building Centre let me in!

DT: The last time I went to London – I live in Brighton which is quite close to Shoreham, where I think you're doing one of your kids talks coming up in April – the last time I went last week it felt a bit empty in the centre and a bit sort of sad around Chinatown etc. What are your general feelings about the city at the moment, and what are your hopes for the next six months for London? Big question!

JF: Well, the first thought that comes to mind when you hear about all of these city centres emptying and commuting suddenly overnight becoming not a thing anymore – you know, just in time for Crossrail not to be finished – is that this is a massive disaster and we're going to have to, probably quicker than we ever have in living memory think of a new way to make city centres work and to keep them busy and keep them thriving. I think London is going to be better than maybe any other city in the world at figuring out how to be resilient and how to make itself future-proof, probably because of the nature of the way London was built and the way it was designed – the word ‘designed’ being in massive inverted commas. I think that's going to make London more flexible, and I can imagine a city centre like London being able to redesign itself for a post-commuting world better than a place that was designed and built a lot quicker.

I visited London quite recently - I was in Soho to do a bit of filming - and there was part of me that felt a bit naughty, because you know you’re not supposed to do journeys unless it’s absolutely essential. And yet Soho was looking more crowded than I've ever seen it. They had closed off a lot of the roads around to make it Covid-safe and to make more space for pedestrians, which I happen to be massively in favour of, and was hoping they were going to do that anyway. But by trying to make it car-free they seem to have accidentally turned Soho into a completely unrecognisable area where you now have tables and chairs stretching across all the street. It feels and looks like a festival and I've got mixed feelings about it, because on the one hand, what a great use of the streets! This is fantastic! This is the future! But on the other hand, there’s supposed to be a pandemic on right now. This feels incredibly naughty!

DT: Well, I've come up to the end of my allotted 5 minutes - let's call it 5 minutes - so thank you very much again for your time!

JF: No worries, it was a pleasure to talk to you.

DT: And you. See you!

JF: Bye!

Check out Jay Foreman's YouTube channel.

David Taylor

Editor, NLQ and New London Weekly