OK, so I'm still catching up on this blog! The last one ended at the end of You Can't Do That On The Internet Episode Five...we've 'lost' Ella (plot-wise) and now have a new host Rebecca-Jane.

But 'behind-the-scenes' buffs will be more interested in the changes in location between episodes five and six. In fact, all our studio-based sites (TopGunge, JustPied, JustSlimed, JustDunked, GungeTankGirls and GungeTankGuys, as well as probably some others I've forgotten...) have moved about 100 yards across an industrial estate....

Whilst the last commercial video shot in the old studio was YCDT Ep 5, the last actual shoot was a custom in aid of Liz and Jo's charity mountain climb . Although we'd already started stripping sets and equipment before this, as well as cleaning and polishing what was left behind, we then encountered a massive diary issue!

We'd left ourselves seven days (albeit over Christmas and New Years) to strip out the remaining equipment and move it into the new studio.....then in the early evening of the 22nd December I got a phone-call....

"...can you provide around 700 litres of gunge for a TV show that's being filmed on Christmas Eve...?"

My answer....

"...er...maybe? I'm out at an event tonight and won't be home until 7am - at which point I'll have to pass the request onto a colleague to see if we can source the ingredients on the 23rd Dec at about 12 hours notice..."

Well I got home and passed the request on. Leon and Lisa then ended up travelling halfway across the country to get the ingredients (whilst I slept) and when I woke up I went and got the paint, before trying to get to sleep ahead of leaving on Christmas Eve at 4am to get to where the show was being filmed...with me in the van was Liz, and close behind in a Fiat 500 were Leon, Lisa and Lola...

So positives - it was a great day out, we got to meet loads of TV people (famous and behind the scenes too). Negatives include us all getting freezing cold and standing around for hours on end doing nothing.....welcome to the world of TV! Plus the fact all our staff (except me) got to go home, whilst I had to go and run a nightclub event on Christmas Eve in Kent! :s ! By this point it's now 5am on Christmas Day, I've been awake for 26 hours and have a 3-hour drive home, and (directly related to this blog) we've lost three people for two days on the studio-move project.

Even worse, at 8am on the way home on Christmas Day my van suffered catastrophic engine failure! Still on the plus side it was Christmas morning so the recovery service was pretty quick! However this hampered the rest of the studio move, as I personally lost another 12-24 hours and as a team we lost the van....

...so everything went onto pallets, which our landlord could shift quickly and easily to the new studio with his fork-lift. All the nightclub equipment and all the studio equipment and props were then moved in the space of three days between Christmas and New Year! Thankfully the new studio is literally less than a minutes walk away from the old one, so although there was a lot of stuff, the move wasn't too painful!

And it turns out this blog is a bit of a placeholder....the next one will be the new studio-build and the filming of Episode Six of YCDTOTI!

Stay tuned!

Big Dave