kleines bad modern gestalten

well, one thing i’ve learned:making videos, easy; live broadcast... a few days ago i was interviewed by a smallcommunity radio show up in oldenburg, and i’ve been given permissionto use the recording in a video. so... this is what this video is. now, we were trying somethingslightly different here: instead of me travelling up to oldenburg,we did it through skype. so i was able to do it here at this computer, with a headset, and it actually soundedextraordinarily good.

there is actually a limitation in skype in thatit only allows one-way communication, so there were several points where i was speaking and i couldn’t hear that the people in the studiowere actually trying to interrupt me. i wasn’t being rude; i simply couldn’t hear them. the other voices you’ll hear are presentersbarrie redfern and alecia banfield. and this is what it was like. alecia: in the old days, it was the boob-tube. these days it’s youtube giving us a wholenew genre of stars, and of course fans. and with us today is one of youtube’srising sensations, andrew bossom.

his topic? german culture, what else? hello, andrew. andrew: hello! i’m very flattered to be describedas a rising sensation, very nice of you. alecia: it’s a valid description, because you havebeen getting more and more hits on your videos. tell us a little bit about your youtube videos. andrew: well, i make them as a hobby:it’s a very interesting thing to do. mostly they’re about life in germany through theeyes of somebody who wasn’t born in the country. as you can probably hear, i wasn’t. alecia: so, you’re british by birth?

andrew: there’s all sorts. i’ve gotlittle comedy things, little satirical things, and more serious travelogues as well. and i just make them because i enjoy making them. alecia: how long have you been doing them,the ones on german culture? andrew: well, i started on youtubeactually right at the end of 2006, which was when youtube was still very young; and i started off with videos about germanyright from then, but i also mixed in a lot of other videoson many other subjects, which i quickly realised was not necessarilythe best thing to do,

because i kind of lost focus, and i’ve beentrying to narrow the focus down ever since. alecia: so you focused on german culture.and what kind of topics? i have watched them, but for the benefitof people out there listening: what kind of topics do you hit on? andrew: goodness...alecia: like, what are the sweet spots? andrew: for a start, anything thatslightly annoys me, like, for example, the phone,how people use the phone in germany. things like the way that germans are terriblypunctual sometimes but when it really counts. alecia: germans are very exact.

germans are very exact about lots of things,there are lots of unspoken rules of society: five minutes before the hour is punctual. andrew: yes!alecia: right. andrew: well, that’s exactly it: you can be...and it’s not just in business either. sometimes for social events, where you’re justkind of gathering together with friends. i had an experience that i recountedin one of my videos, when somebody actually phoned me up because theparty had been underway for 10 minutes or whatever. i’d just got home from work and he wasphoning me up to ask me where i was

because the party had started. this was completely alien to me.alecia: and it was a children’s party, wasn’t it? andrew: not a children’s party, a birthday party.but it was an adult’s birthday party. but the thing is it was a social gathering,it was an informal thing, and i was expected to keep to a timetable. although i have to say,that’s a very extreme example. alecia: did it surprise you, then, thefeedback you were getting to the videos, and what kind of feedback was it? andrew: well, it depends. i mean,there’s lots of different types of feedback,

because there are lots of different peoplecommenting on the videos. and sometimes what’s interestingis that sometimes... andrew: ...the germans particularly...alecia: i was about to ask. andrew: i don’t want to overgeneralise here, but they do tend to misunderstand the point. i made a video about the differencebetween german and british humour, and half the germans who commented misunderstoodand thought i was criticizing german humour. alecia: which in itself makes a joke of humour.andrew: i made a follow-up video to explain exactly this point,

and i was still getting people who werecomplaining that i was criticizing german humour, which i wasn’t trying to do at all,and that slightly surprised me. but i get a lot of other germans writing to say,yes, that’s how we do it, isn’t it strange? alecia: but, andrew, that actually supportsthe joke about german humour: the fact that you made somethingabout german humour... andrew: ...they do take their humour very very...both: ...seriously. alecia: [laughs] which kind of defeats the point. they then played my “surviving germany” videoabout using the phone, which they seemed to enjoy. and...

...there’s a link to it in the description. and then we continued. [music fading out] barrie: well, there we are. [laughs] three of us in the studio,we were laughing like crazy. alecia: and nodding quite a bit. you definitely hit a sweet spot there,i’ve gotta tell you. alecia: all right.andrew: [laughs] these are things that have actuallyhappened to me.

the coda to the one about answering the phonewith your name and nobody hears that bit: a few weeks ago i decided thati actually wasn’t going to do that any more, i was just going to answer with “hello”. and the very next time somebody called mei said “hello”, i got this silence, and then he said,“so who am i talking to?” we had a bit of an argument about that actually, and eventually he told me:“well, i’m actually the electrician, but you’re supposed to tell me who you areso that i know i’ve got the right number.” alecia: well, you do have—andrew: so i thought, ok, fair enough.

alecia: you do have those sticklers, because i’ve been in germany now for six years and i must admit my brain hasn’t completelyswitched to how things are done in germany 100%. so i do, i must admit, pick up the phoneand go: “hel-looo!” and i tend to sing it,so i don’t know if that throws people off and they go: “ok, either she’s psychoor she’s clearly a foreigner.” i haven’t had that yet, but i have called people socially and businessand gotten “linten!” or “hoffmann!” or “mã¼ller!” and i must admit for me it sounds...

for germans it’s very practicaland straight to the point; but for me it sounds kind of clipped, so i have to remind myself,“ok, alecia, once again, it’s a different culture, and just swing your brain around.” andrew: that’s it, it has its uses,it’s businesslike, it’s efficient, but to some other cultures like the ones wecome from, it just sounds brusque and rude. on the other hand, the british thing of answeringby reciting your telephone number isn’t terribly logical either. alecia: no, it’s not.

barrie: andrew, do you have followersliterally all over the world? andrew: pretty much, yes. i mean, most of my followersi think are in germany, at least that’s where most of my hits come from. but i have a fair sprinkling... quite a lot ofbritish people, and americans as well: a lot of americans for example who werein germany as soldiers, as gis in the 70s and 80s,looking for videos about their old haunts. but i’ve also got a sprinkling from countriesas far away as singapore, australia, india, all kinds.

but that’s just the way that the internet works: you put something up on the internet,and it’s instantly available all over the world. so it’s not really that surprising. barrie: do you get feedback from them? andrew: yes, i get comments on my videos mostly,and the occasional private message. if you look through my videos,you’ll see underneath them people commenting and sayinghow rubbish they thought the video was. alecia: but actually i found,considering where you’re coming from, that you’re an amateur and... i don’t want tobe completely glib and say you did it for a lark,

but you kind of segued into this, not as a mainfocus, but then you hit on it, and realised you were on to something. i found that the video and the audio componentswere actually very, very good; and then it’s just humour. it’s justpure, sweet humour and... you know. alecia: i loved it.andrew: well, thank you for saying so. alecia: i showed my husband and he loves it, too.andrew: i’ve been making videos for six years now. andrew: did i say 6 years? that’s right, 6 years.alecia: six years, yes. 2006. andrew: and i’ve just had a lot of practice. and... but it was... one of those interesting things.

before i got a camcorder in 2006,i’d never used a camcorder before in my life. and i just discovered that it’ssomething that i can do. alecia: ok, well, andrew,we’re going to take a little break now and then we’re going to come backand talk a little more about those youtube videos. barrie: don’t go away... now, by this time there wasa slight panic going on, because there was supposed to be another guestwho was going to talk about the monarchy, and in fact the show was supposed to beprinciply about the monarchy and whether we should get rid of it or not.

but they couldn’t contact the other guest.and so... ...my interview continued. barrie: just a reminder, you’re listeningto the english radio programme on oeins, with me, barrie redfern, and... alecia: alecia banfield.and we are here with andrew bossom, one of the internet’s rising stars, talking abouthis youtube videos on german culture. welcome back, andrew. andrew: hello, i’m still here.alecia: you’re still here, good, with us. so, tell us: we already know you’ve done...telephone etiquette,

you’ve done punctuality, i know you’ve done one on the weihnachtsmann... andrew: christmas, and one on new year’s as well.alecia: right. what other ones can you...? we don’t want to give everything away, ’cause wewant people to go there and check out your videos. but what other kind of videos have you done? andrew: let’s see. well... you’ve been particularly talking aboutmy series on “surviving germany”... alecia: i love that name, “surviving germany”.andrew: ...i did one on public transport as well,

or at least one part of public transport. i have also other things, for example, onewhich i haven’t been able to do much recently, but i have another series where i take a pieceof news from germany and make fun of it, and ask people to write in with their ideas; and also, i said, travelogues:that is, sometimes i go to a place, it might be a place that everybody’s heard oflike frankfurt or hamburg, or it might be some tiny little villagethat’s just fallen off the map somewhere, and i go there and take my cameraand make a video about that. alecia: how do people respond to you when theysee you hanging around with a video camera?

alecia: because....andrew: mostly they ignore me. i think video cameras are actuallyquite common these days: most people with a modern smartphone have afairly decent video camera actually in the phone, so i think the sight of somebody pointing acamera at something is quite normal. alecia: what i find hereis that you need to be a little more sensitive. well, this is just my personal experience, because for example in the states,where the interest in everything is so... almost on the point of being invasive, it’s almost expected that you whip outyour camera, stick it in some person’s face,

and it’s almost, the right to personal spacehas now gone. if you are a celebrity and you sneeze, john public will walk up and sticka phone in your face and take a picture. but here in germany there’s still that boundaryand that respect for privacy. so for example, they’re a lot more aggressiveon internet privacy issues. like, for example, i rememberi friend of mine went into a caf㩠and there was this beautiful display of cakesand pastries as only germany can do it; and she’s from america, so she just wantedto take a picture and send it to her friends, and actually, the people behind the counter,they didn’t... they didn’t take it in stride.

it was like... there was the frown and... ...it was only after she explained,oh, you know, she’s a tourist, she just wanted to take this pictureand send it to her friends so they could see what they were missing, that they understood. have you found that as well? andrew: yeah... i’m very careful about filming onany kind of private property anywhere: i haven’t had any major problems. i was shooting a crowd scene at one point,

and somebody put their face up...uh, put their hand up to their face; that’s fine, i just didn’t usethose three seconds of video. i’ve not had any big problems. but you’re right,i am kind of careful where i point my camera, so they know i’m not trying to stalk somebody. barrie: i have to say, andrew, that— andrew: yeah, privacy is an issue that isvery, very important in germany. barrie: actually, andrew, ’cos i’ve worked intv and video as well as radio, i have to say, i have had a few problems. alecia: you have? what sort of problems?

barrie: there was one, for example, where we werefilming outside a nightclub in liverpool. i won’t mention the name of the club, but as soon as we got the camera out and put iton the tripod, this man came out, barrie: a rather big man...alecia: the bouncer, i.e., the bouncer. barrie: ...told us what we should go and do. barrie: and things got—andrew: well, i mean, i once... ...took my camera out on the munich u-bahn, and i got my camera out and i was stoppedby a very friendly security guard, who reminded me that technically, this is privateproperty and the house rules say

you can’t film without permission, but also said a big problem is that peoplemisunderstand what’s going on: they’d had problems with people puttingsmartphone cameras up women’s skirts, andrew: that sort of thing.alecia: ah, yeah. andrew: so, there are some...barrie: but you know, andrew, a lot of people don’t realisehow much freedom they have to film in the street. now, i don’t know much about german law, but i do about the media as regards britain,something about it having worked in it. and i had a tactic. like, outside that club

i had a junior producer with me, and we had a little pact, you see.so i said, “well, if there’s any problem, i’ll keep anyone engaged in conversation, barrie: and you carry on filming.alecia: [laughs] barrie: and believe me, it always worked. andrew: the law in germany is that if the personis deliberately the focus of your video, you need to get their permissionbefore you film them, and you also need their permission before youbroadcast it by uploading to youtube or something. crowd scenes or people randomly walking inand out of shot is usually perfectly fine.

barrie: well, we had the same trouble again,in amsterdam. exactly the same thing,and i was with a colleague again, we used the same tactic, it worked. but actually, we found in both those cases,in britain and so on, there was an element of... ...illegal substances, allegations thatillegal substances might have been used barrie: in those places,alecia: on those premises, yeah. barrie: which is why i didn’t mentionthe name of the club. andrew: well, i know that the security guardon the u-bahn in munich told me that there are some people who mightaccidentally walk into shot

who were actually not supposed to be there, because their wives thought they werein cuxhaven or something, alecia: exactly.andrew: and that there could be problems there. alecia: yup, basically. are you thinking, concerning now the successof these youtube videos, because even though they’re donein the spirit of humour, they do strike a chord, clearly,from the response you’ve been getting. are you thinking, or has it occured to you, to take this whole idea anddo something a little bit more with it?

andrew: yeah, i actually have hada couple of commissions to actually make actual videos,actual dvds for people; it’s only a couple. alecia: along the same vein,or a whole new topic? andrew: it’s something i’d like to takefurther if i possibly can. i’ve just not had much time to concentrate on that: we’ve just spent a year building a houseand moving into it, so i’ve been busy with that. but it is definitely something that, if ittakes off, will be a very nice thing to do. alecia: are they on the same vein, or a completelydifferent vein, these two commissions?

andrew: it was actually competely different. one of them was a video i did for theanniversary of a church. another one, i filmed a musical production,you know, a musical, which was a challenge, but i actually managed it. alecia: okay!barrie: well, andrew, um... andrew: quite different stuff, but it was myyoutube work that led to it in the first place. alecia: all right, andrew! barrie: well, andrew, don’t go away,because in a moment we’re going to have the news, and i have to tell you, we were going to havethis feature about the british monarchy,

and should we have royal families or not? but it looks like our guy from republic hasgot problems and we can’t link to him. so... that gives us an opportunityto carry on talking, because i find the idea of your videosextremely fascinating. i’ve thought about doing the same myself.not on the subject of culture, but... i think it’s great, youtube opens so manyopportunities and i’d love to ask you about that a bit later on, yeah?so stay with us, andrew, okay? so, the presenters and the newsreader hada short discussion about the royal family and whether we really needed it or not,

i was able to chime in in a few places, but then the show was practically over. alecia: ...form the skeleton of the society. now that the society is established, do we thensay, “ok, right, we’ve got enough of you now, you know... get lost”? barrie: let me just... because we have a guestwith us, in case you’ve just joined us: andrew bossom, and he’s not actually in thestudio, he’s down in bavaria, andrew... whereabouts in bavaria? whereabouts in bavaria are you, andrew?

andrew: in the extreme northwest corner, soactually not very far from frankfurt. barrie: oh, right. and andrew, as we were discussing earlier,is the maker of many, many videos, funny videos about german culture,on the internet, on youtube. presumably, now you’ll going away and makingsome about the royal family, now, andrew? andrew: [laughs] i don’t think so: that’s rather a long trip, and i’m not surei’d be able to get an audience. barrie: a long trip? well, with greenscreen...you use greenscreen, don’t you? andrew: i would have to set up my greenscreen.

i haven’t done that yet,because i’ve only just moved house. but... alecia: are there any other topics,with respect to german culture, different aspects of german culturethat you’d like to cover in a youtube video? andrew: we’ll see what annoys me most next. i’ve just made a video about the catastrophethat is the berlin-brandenburg airport. but other things... whatever. maybe buildingregulations, but that seems kind of boring. alecia: oh, okay. and what particularlyabout the airport? andrew: goodness, well...alecia: where to start? andrew: what can i say? it’s massively overdue,it’s massively overbudget,

and it looks like large parts of itwill have to be torn down and rebuilt. andrew: what more can i say?barrie: but apart from that... alecia: maybe you could do something more social,like the dating culture in germany or something. andrew: i’m very happily married, soi don’t have any experience of that. alecia: okay, all right. okay. all right. so we’ll keep you out of trouble.we’ll keep you away from that one. barrie: so, finally, andrew,what’s your website? what’s your...? andrew: i think the best way to find meis to go to rewboss.com: that’s r-e-w-b-o-s-s.

my website is www.rewboss.com and there arelinks there to my youtube videos and so on. barrie: ok. well, andrew, thank youvery much indeed. barrie: that’s andrew bossom, from the youtube site.andrew: thank you. barrie: and our production team today:alecia banfield, anna hahn, john goodyear, and myself, barrie redfern. in our next programme, a very special invitationfrom a young lady promising to give everyone a good timein oldenburg. we’ll be out on the streetsto find out exactly what she means. and on that note we leave you. goodbye!

and there it was. i was only supposed to be on the airfor about ten minutes, but... ...unexpected things happened, andplans had to be changed at the last minute, and i had to keep talking for longerthan i’d expected to. but... ...that’s just the way it goes, that’sthe problem with live broadcast, it’s something that you don’t geton youtube videos... ...thank goodness for that.

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