Episode #1 | Nuke The Fridge | Fludded Podcast

The speaker introduces their podcast called "Nuke the Fridge" and discusses the origin of the name. They mention a reference to the phrase in an Indiana Jones film and its connection to a recent Amazon Prime Fallout series. The speaker then talks about their personal mission to call out people who call themselves journalists but are actually activists. They express the need to differentiate between journalists and activists in the current media landscape. The speaker shares their background as a freelance television producer-director and their desire to share their knowledge and experience with others. They discuss their approach to conducting interviews and their perspective on journalism and bias. The speaker emphasizes the importance of presenting both sides of an argument and providing the full contextual story. Hello and welcome to the first ever episode of Nuke the Fridge. Now, I haven't even bothered to check whether there is another podcast called Nuke the Fridge. And if there has been one made, then do let me know and maybe I should change the name. If you don't know where the reference comes from, it was apparently, I believe, in a film. It might have been. I should bother to check these things. But I believe it might have been an Indiana Jones film where he visits a nuclear test village town. And while he's there, a nuclear test goes off, a bomb goes off, and he's going to get absolutely decimated by the blast. So they were discussing, why do we save Indiana? And of course, he gets in a fridge and the director, Spielberg, said, Nuke the Fridge! Is it Spielberg? Welcome to the film podcast, where I know everything about film, clearly. Anyway, if you've seen the recent Amazon Prime Fallout televised series from the game, you might have noticed there was, at one point, a creature in a fridge. I think it was the dog. Was that the dog? There was something in a fridge, in the show, and I'm pretty sure that was a reference to this Nuking of the Fridge. Anyway, I like that name. Nuking the Fridge, or Nuke the Fridge. So I'm going to stick with it. NTF. NTF. Nuke the Fridge. Oh, not NF. That could be National Frampton. We don't like them. So, this is going to be kind of like an unedited ramble by me. And something you can listen to while you're doing your ironing. Or while you are stretching your limbs in preparation for the day. Or while you are tucking into a lovely package of Jammy Dodgers. While you're tucking into your Jammy Dodgers, munching away, exercising your one abdomen muscle, which is doing its very best to maintain the huge girth you've developed around your midriff. Because of too many Jammy Dodgers. And... God, I'm rambling. So, what do I want to talk about? Well, you know what? I think, I think, what I think is, that I might talk about what a journalist is. And I'm kind of on this personal mission to call out people who call themselves journalists, who aren't actually journalists. And everyone's doing it now. And I think we need to be able to decipher the difference between a journalist and an activist. Right? Because, basically, anyone, everyone's, the thing is that things have changed, times have changed. To be a journalist, you would publish things and broadcast things. But now everyone can publish and broadcast things. We can post videos to Twitter. We can write sub-stacks. We can, you know, everyone's been employed to write for everything. And everyone's a writer. And everyone's a TV presenter now. And everyone's a broadcaster. Because of YouTube. YouTube, of course, the biggest, most successful TV channel in the world. And even like activists like Ash Thakur, who is quite definitely just a wondered-out-of-university activist student who's thought, right, she's going to change the world and become an activist and help various parties get elected and change the world to the world that she wants to live in. Which is not actually, I think if the world actually changed to how she wants it to be, she would be horrified by it. But she is now a journalist. And she will not write anything that's positive about a political party that she doesn't like. Or a politician that she doesn't like. She is a journalist though. And from her journalism, we are expected to trust what she says. Because she's a journalist. Now, I've been struggling to define... On the other end of the spectrum, of course, you've got Tommy Robinson who's also calling himself a journalist. Because he's got a camera and a YouTube channel. And even though he doesn't have a YouTube channel, he's been thrown onto... Well, he's got a company called... There's some guy, Snoop News or something, this guy for ex-Daily Express journalist. He might still actually... Or editor or whatever he was. He might even still be at the Daily Express. He now videos all Tommy Robinson stuff. Tommy Robinson wanders around with a microphone with the Snoop logo on it. And basically just acts a bit like a scary, angry man. You know, good luck to you. I'm kind of... A weird part of me wants these people to get what they want just so that we can sort of sit back and watch the world burn. And... As we're sitting there watching the world burn, we can have our very best told-you-so faces on. So, the downside of letting it all just happen is that the world burns, but the good side is we feel good about ourselves for being right. So, if anyone isn't aware of any of the stuff I put out there, my name is Craig. A little bit about me here. My name is Craig and I am a freelance television producer-director, which sounds... Well, it might sound grand to you. It's not grand to anyone who works in the industry. What I do is run around with a camera filming interviews for people for the mainstream media. The stuff I do gets syndicated and sold around the world after it's been broadcasted in the UK. And I used to just do everything and anything I could and then I decided that I didn't want to do that anymore as I entered my, like, 20th year of doing it and I only apply or make myself available for travel-based work so I can disappear by myself to another country and live in hotels and film people's stories, which I find very enjoyable. And I enjoy meeting them. I enjoy the one-on-oneness of it. I enjoy managing my own day, if you like. I enjoy driving and travelling in other countries. So that's what I do. But when I'm not doing it, I do this. I won't be doing freelance producing and directing forever. I'm aware of that as I drift into my more seasoned years. I decided that I want to start sharing what I know with the world, what I've learned over the years. I know a lot of people, younger people, don't hold a huge amount of respect for people who have got experience. They're fuddy-duddies. They're old-fashioned. They're written off. But I never did that when I was learning. I had massive respect for the people who had sort of gone before me and picking up their skills and their traits and quite often I avoided mistakes, learning from them of the mistakes they had made. But we all make mistakes and we will continue to do so. So that's what I did. I did lots of TV shows. Garbage stuff in the UK. A lot of it was garbage. But I wasn't really snobby about what was going into my camera and into my microphone. I was more into how good a job am I doing at gathering that information. I used to really enjoy, particularly when people were not, before everyone had cameras and their phones and TikTok and all that, we used to enjoy people who weren't very comfortable being filmed. I used to enjoy using my, I know it's a trick there, but using techniques, shall I say, to help them feel relaxed in front of the camera so that we get the best out of them or I got the best out of them in terms of what they were saying. I used to learn how to conduct an interview, like make sure the conversations, interviews were essentially just conversations. And sometimes if people are a bit sort of flat or not really animated in a conversation, I would use a little trick. I'll nearly say tricks, but what I would do is I'd start an interview, rather than ask a question, I would make a statement. Well, it might be a question. I'll put an isn't it at the end usually. So I'd say, so you're fixing this, you are renovating this vehicle. That's quite easy, isn't it? All you got to do is put a roof, let's say a house, you're renovating a house. That's quite easy, isn't it? All you got to do is put a roof in it and immediately they'll respond with their raised eyebrows and renovating a house is not an easy task. They'll give it like an energy they wouldn't have given it before. If I just said, can you tell me how difficult or how easy it is to renovate a house? They'll just say, yeah, to renovate a house what you have to do is, so if you ask it like, it's quite easy to renovate your house, isn't it? They go, it gets them going. So there are things like that that you learn in terms of conducting interviews and that is our job. So that's me and what I did. Journalism, these days, is kind of, as I said, something that anybody can do. And I argue that you can't be a journalist and an activist. Now, I've got nothing against biased writers, if you're a writer or a presenter or a broadcaster, which is a word I don't really like, a broadcaster. A broadcaster, to me, sounds like it should be like a metal box, like a gadget. Broadcaster, I don't know what that means. But, you know, if you are somebody who's like politically biased, you know, go make entertaining, you know, political shows. That's absolutely fine. I don't care if Sky is biased, I don't care if GB News is biased. I don't really care. What I do care about is if people are trying to win credibility and are presenting themselves with the totally deluded sense of self-respect by giving themselves a title, which I think has a little bit of kudos, which is journalist. Because I come from a journalist family. I know that journalists of yesteryear, yes, they had a lot of power. But for me, it was a job that people had where they had the duty of care to present both sides of arguments, both sides of everything. And certainly, we're not in the business of misleading people by sort of misdirection, really. You know, you can be somebody who tells the truth. But if you're not telling the full contextual story, are you really telling the truth? And what I mean when I say that is if you say something like, oh, St. George's Day turned to chaos in central London today as some patriots were arrested by the police while they were simply trying to celebrate St. George's Day. There you go. There's a... There's nothing... Is that factually correct? Yeah. So let's say that people wearing St. George's flag turn up in London on St. George's Day and they turn up and they're walking through the streets and then the police start holding them back. And, oh, look at that. There's also a protest going on for Palestine and these two people are clashing because the true context of that story would be, because this actually happened, would be that a group of people on Facebook who identify themselves as being what they call the Football Lads Alliance, say, who are a group on Facebook organised to go to London. Everyone was told to put a scarf around their necks and we're going to march through London and walk through the Palestine protests. I don't really think they're protests. I think these marches are racist, by the way. And deliberately to cause a disturbance, cause problems. Now, I don't necessarily have an issue with that happening, but I think we should know that is what was happening. Instead, the biased media, the biased journalists, inverted commas, you're not a journalist, you're an activist, the biased activist writers, what they would present that as is is that, oh, these were patriots getting arrested by the police. But the fact is, these were activists, right-wing activists, deliberately organised themselves to try and reclaim the streets, if you like. That's what that was about, you know, because they don't like the fact that all these people who were not born in this country are basically Muslims. They don't like people walking through the streets with a flag that's not the Union flag. They don't like the Palestinian flag being flown in huge numbers through people marching, repeatedly doing mantras down through the streets. Those marches will die off, by the way, as all the moderates who have attached themselves to that movement start meandering away. Or when all the students go home to get some more money from their parents. So, that is my thoughts about that. Now, there are, what I would call legacy journalists out there who are enjoying very much, not having to be proper journalists anymore, but still enjoying the gravitas of using that title, and they do not want to let go of it, I can assure you. If you're wondering what the definition of a journalist is, well, if you Google it, it will come up with somebody who gathers news and then shares it with the world, or something like that. And it could be written, video, photographs. But, I go by, and I'm not a fan of unions, by the way, but I do like the definition set out in the National Union of Journalists, which it talks about the ethical element of journalism. And this is sort of also mandated into the BBC's rules about impartiality, which are very easy to follow, you know. I mean, I worked at the BBC, and it's very easy to be impartial. All you've got to do is apply a little bit of critical thinking to everything you do. All these activists know that they're not sharing certain facts. They're not lying, they're just not telling you everything. And they know they're doing it. And I don't know how they, well, I don't, as a centrist, I find it really difficult to see how they are happy to be that unethical. Maybe they don't see it as unethical, I don't know. But I think we do have a duty to share both sides of the story. I don't have to. That's why the thing is, right, I can't, I can't be anyone's ally. That's going to be my huge problem as I go forward with my YouTubing and social media career beyond being a producer, director. It's going to be difficult for me because I can't form any allyships. I can only form allyships with like-minded people who are also centrists, other centrists. People who, I don't trust anything anyone says. Well, I do and I don't. And it's quite easy just to fact-check something. If somebody says, oh, look at this guy, he's being arrested by the police after he was trampled on by a police horse. This picture, and then you just look into it and you find out, no, the police found him, sat on the side of the road. He said he was feeling ill so they called an ambulance and they put him on a stretcher and put him in the ambulance. That would be the, but no, that's not what you're presented with on Twitter. And people just read the headline. Nobody's got the attention span to pay attention to those details. They will see something that satisfies the agenda they have or the narrative that they like to follow. They get that little adrenaline kick to say, oh, more evidence supporting that I am right. And then they hit that like on that post and then they retweet it out. So there you go. That's where I am with journalism and will very much enjoy seeing if I can get anywhere with it. So that's going to be my first, my first ever little podcast, I think. I think. We'll see how it goes. I've enjoyed talking to myself. I wonder if you've enjoyed listening. If you have, then you know what you have to do. You know what you have to click and what you have to do. Help me stop being a freelance producer director and doing this full time by finding any way you can to give me as much money as you possibly can. I'm joking. I do laugh because that is basically what all YouTubers want you to do. I will see if I can as things grow, you know, there's going to be noise attached to it. I'm going to get lots of negative comments and stuff. And I think that I don't really want to engage with those people. The people are just passive. But the people who are kind of like a bit more committed to committed but people who just I hate the word support but people who are just hanging around and paying attention and not giving me grief and want to engage with me that's going to have to be sort of a privileged place that they can access. And in order for it not to be a noisy place, I think I'm just going to have to make it a paywall. But that's either through YouTube memberships, Patreon or something else. But I'll work it out. I keep talking about doing it and I'm so bad at doing it because, you know, I'm working all the time. But let me know your thoughts about this whole journalism thing. Is journalism dead? Am I talking nonsense? Am I just full of crap? Go and look up what the NUJ how they define journalism. It's very interesting. Although, as I say, I'm not a fan of journalists. Not of the NUJ particularly, BECTU or any of the unions. I kind of like the idea of the unions but I think they kind of exploit things these days. I don't know. But let me know your thoughts. I'm always interested. But for now I'll let you go back to your jammy dodgers or whatever it is you've finished eating and have a lovely morning, afternoon, evening. Take care of yourselves. See you again soon. Hear you again sooner if I will ever hear you. Hear me again soon. You're ever-loving. Bye.