Hello and bonjour everyone.
It is April 2021, and at the start of the month two things happened:
number 1, we hit 200,000 subscribers on the channel,
and number 2, France chose that exact moment to go back into lockdown.
So you’ve hit a subscriber milestone,
I can’t travel anywhere for the next few weeks,
I think we all know what this means:
it’s time for a Q&A.
So I put up a community post asking you to send in your questions,
loads of you did, and today I’m going to try and answer
where are you going?
what do you do?
why are you in Paris?
what’s that music?
who’s this?
where’s that?
Let's roll the intro.
Oh hang on, stop the intro
because we’ve got a question about it.
Samitefan asks “where are the places in your intro?”
Ok we’ll start with year’s intro,
because all of these places are ones that I’ve visited on the channel
and you can find them in my old videos.
That was the legendary Flevoland Mountain Expedition in Urk, Netherlands,
this is a ditch somewhere in Woolwich in London,
that was the Volklingen abandoned ironworks in Germany
and this was the Lartigue Monorail in Listowel, Ireland.
But if you’re talking about the old intro
(and a few of you definitely were)
then that’s another story, because I originally made it for the first ever Tim Traveller video
and of course back then I didn’t have any clips from the channel that I could use
so I raided my old holiday photos to find random bits of throwaway video that I’d
made over the years,
just messing around,
and I used those.
[My mate Andrew off-screen] It's like poetry in motion...
Problem is I kept getting questions about it in the comments,
mostly from distressed Finnish or Israeli people saying
"I can see you visited my country but I can’t find the video, where is it?"
And well unfortunately there is no video.
All those clips are from before I started YouTube.
And what’s worse is it’s not even Israel.
But anyway yes the 5 places are:
Suomenlinna Fortress Island in Helsinki, Finland
Neist Point on the Isle of Skye in Scotland
The Dead Sea in Jordan (but with Israel in the background!)
Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, USA
and finally the spectacular Meteora in Greece.
Right! Onto the rest of the questions now
and Ssmithj3 asks,
“Are there any countries you want to visit, or had plans to visit before the pandemic?”
Yes - so many!
I mean, last year I was planning to do videos in the Nordic countries,
in eastern Europe,
in North Africa
and maybe even further afield if the ad revenue was really coming in,
but well you know what happened,
and instead you got a whole year of videos about France.
Anyway I keep a list on my computer called Tim Traveller Video Ideas
(because of course I do)
and I’ve got 100 ideas on there in about 40 different countries.
I cannot wait to start bringing those to you, but we just have to sit it out for the moment.
Hopefully it will be possible soon.
BWI Aviation asks “So what exactly is it that you do for a living?”
This one keeps coming up and it seems to confuse a lot of you
because I guess it is unbelievable that you could make a living from videos like mine.
But here’s the full story:
I used to have a sensible office job in London and I did that for ten years
until eventually I wanted a break and I quit to go travelling for a bit.
This was end of 2017 beginning of 2018ish.
Since I was travelling and had a bit of spare time
I thought well why don’t I make some travel videos,
best case scenario, they help to fund more travels,
and worst case, no-one watches them but I’ve made some nice memories for when I go back to the sensible office job.
Thanks to you lot
I haven’t gone back to the office job yet.
I do have some other gigs outside YouTube,
I do live work as a musician,
but since the pandemic hit, all of that stopped,
and this is my only job at the moment.
So genuinely, thank you all for keeping me employed!
On a related note, nearly everyone asks “Do you perform the piano music in your videos?”
Yes I do.
And to answer the other two little questions that were in there,
I play guitar as well,
not to the same standard but you’ll hear it in some of my videos,
including one where my b-string was completely out of tune.
And I cannot tell you what all the pieces are, I’m sorry, it would take far too long,
but there was a question about the intro and outro music
and I will answer that at the end of the video.
Ecnivo asks “I was wondering how your Real Life job brought you to live in France.
And how’d your foreign languages get so good?”
So there is no real life job, I moved here really because of this job,
and part of the reason why YouTube appealed to me in the first place
is because you have the freedom to work from anywhere
(and you’ve seen my videos... I really do)
and although I loved London I always kind of missed the adventure of living abroad.
Wait Tim... you lived abroad before?
Is that how you learned French?
Is this about to be covered in the next question?
Jack Elvey asks “Did you go to university? If so which one and what did you study?”
Yes I did – this one!
It's not very well-known,
but the University of London has a tiny little Institute in Paris called
– wait for it –
the University of London Institute in Paris.
You can come here as a British or International student and get a degree in French
and when I was younger that’s exactly what I did.
I don’t know if it’s still the same now but when I went I think there were 30 people
in my entire year,
and because it was so small
- there was no campus, no student accommodation, no student bar in the evenings -
nothing was really laid on for you. So it was a proper adventure.
You’d have to go out and find your own flat
and then your own places to socialise,
and after one week of that your student loan had run out,
so you’d have to find some work as well.
All of that at 18 years old and in French.
It was a great experience
but it was quite tough, you had to grow up quickly,
and to be honest the romantic idea of studying in Paris begins to lose its shine
when you realise it’s a real city, you’re living in a shoebox,
and you’re scraping enough change together to buy a packet of pasta from Leader Price.
But you know, we were happy in those days, although we were poor…
Sorry where was I?
Jago Hazzard asks “have you ever been really surprised by the way a video has been received?”
I’ve been surprised by the way the whole channel has been received.
But the biggest surprise was the video about Paris’s Fake Facades,
people just keep clicking on that, it’s up to 5 million views now.
I guess for whatever reason it appeals to a wider audience,
I’m not complaining about it.
And on the other end of the scale there’s the follow-up,
"5 MORE FAKE FAÇADES IN PARIS"
which I admit isn’t my best video ever,
it was what we’ll call "lockdown content", I was just making what I could in the circumstances,
but I did hope that YouTube might recommend it to all the people who watched the first one.
It didn’t.
CaesarOct asks,
“as an English speaker who learned French, what is the hardest French word to pronounce?
Are there any words that give you away as not a native speaker?”
Thank you so much for asking this! <\sarcasm>
There are a lot of things that give me away as not a native speaker
but if I have to think of one word it would probably be this...
and instead demonstrating how bad I am at saying it,
I’m going to pass you over to my French cousin so you can all learn it.
A l’eau.
Today we will learn ow to say ze word "frog" in French and it is this:
Grenouille.
G
r
e
nouille.
Grenouille.
We have deliberately made this word impossible for ze English speaker to say.
And zere is a very good reason for zat.
You may insult us in your stupid English;
but you will never insult us in French.
*LA MARSEILLAISE*
Kate Cole asks “Are you going to do a collab with Geoff when corona goes away?”
I would love to,
and I know a lot of you want to see this because there were a lot of questions about it,
but you know, as always with collabs, it’s difficult for me to say
"yes that’s definitely going to happen"
unless you’re Geoff himself asking that question.
Geoff Marshall asks,
“my question would be, when are you coming back to Britain and we can do a Least Used
Station together. Come join me on my channel!”
Well I guess that clears that one up!
I’ve spoken to Geoff and we’ve pencilled in a trip to a Least Used Station,
obviously it all depends on things opening up again, and travel being possible,
but I’m absolutely honoured to be invited
and hopefully we can make it happen some time soon.
Mate Komenda asks “How did you end up in Unfinished London?”
How DID you end up in Unfinished London?
How did YOU end up in Unfinished Lo
sorry
For any of you don’t know, Unfinished London is a brilliant YouTube series by Jay Foreman
that I have sneakily appeared in twice.
And even if you’ve never seen it, I think it’s worth telling the story.
It all starts before this channel even existed,
back when I was... Tim.
I was just some bloke who’s a fan of Jay’s videos.
(Still am, really.)
Jay, as he sometimes does,
put out a tweet asking for extras for a scene,
and it was the other side of London,
it was a bit of a pain to get to,
but I thought you know what, I’m going to do it.
So I went along and little did I know,
I ended up in a scene with Geoff,
and in one evening I’d met two of my favourite YouTube people.
Of course they don’t remember it, I was just some bloke,
but that kind of pushed me over the edge to make my first Tim Traveller video.
No views no subscribers back then,
but Geoff very kindly retweeted it,
20 or 30 people subscribed,
and a Greek man called Steroumel made what I think is the first ever comment.
A year or so later, YouTube suddenly spammed my videos to half the western world,
Jay discovered the channel, invited me to appear in another episode,
and the rest, as they say,
is very silly.
[Jay narrating] "He didn't like it for two reasons"
[My character] "I don't like it for two reasons"
And finally, Breadface asks,
“What are the 2 music tracks that are in nearly all of your videos at the end and the start?”
The intro track doesn’t have a name,
it’s just an instrumental backing track that I originally made for a hiking video.
And then it ended up kind of like everything else in my intro -
I needed something to go in there, and that piece of music was lying around,
so in it went.
And then the music at the end is a piano cover I made of a track called "The Carnival" by Gordon Giltrap,
which is better known in the UK as the theme to holiday tv show "Wish You Were Here…?".
If you’ve never seen it,
it was a peak time evening show that ran from the 70s to early 2000s
and basically every week they’d have 4 presenters and each one would go on a holiday to a different place.
They were forever going to the Seychelles, Saint Tropez,
or some beautiful beach resort in the Bahamas,
they’d file a five-minute report about it
and that was their job.
It was THE best programme
to be a presenter on.
There’s a woman called Judith Chalmers who got the job and held onto it for 30 years!
But at the end of each report they would always tell you how to do it yourself,
they’d say which hotel they stayed in
who they flew with
and how much it cost.
So when I did my first Tim Traveller video,
I thought it would be funny to do the same thing about the kind of places that I go to,
so I made a version of the music partly as a gag, partly as a parody, and partly as a tribute.
If you want to go and buy the original track it’s called "The Carnival"
and it’s on Amazon Music and all the other places.
I’ll link it in the description below.
And that seems like a good place to end today’s Q&A.
Thanks to everyone who sent questions in,
if I didn’t answer your one directly today
then hopefully one of the other answers sort of covered it,
but if not, don’t panic,
I will go back on the community post this week and answer you individually there.
In the mean time I need to set up an account with Amazon Affiliates
but I will try to get some sort of travel video out in the next few weeks.
It’ll have to be something in Paris
or maybe using some old footage,
or just something a bit different,
who knows,
either way thank you for watching
and I will see you soon.