Podcasts about National Football Museum

Hey everyone! We're back with an exciting new episode of “Ey Up Ellis!” and in this episode we blend football with a dash of science to explore the art and physics behind the beautiful game. Are you ready for some football physics? We start by tackling a listener's question about our favourite Leeds United players. From the club's golden era legends to modern-day icons, we reminisce about the players who have captured our hearts and share the stories that make them unforgettable. Whether you're a die-hard Leeds fan or just love hearing about great players, this segment is sure to stir up some football nostalgia! The Big Question! Who Are Our Favourite Leeds United Players? We start by tackling a listener's question about our favourite Leeds United players. From the club's golden era legends to modern-day icons, we reminisce about the players who have captured our hearts and share the stories that make them unforgettable. Whether you're a die-hard Leeds fan or just love hearing about great players, this segment is sure to stir up some football nostalgia! Visiting The National Football Museum Our journey then takes us on a road trip to the National Football Museum in Manchester (Repping Leeds United of course!). We dive into the rich history and heritage of football, exploring exhibits that cover everything from the game's early days to its most unforgettable moments. Introducing Grandad's Science Lab! But the real highlight of this episode is our brand-new feature, “Grandad's Science Lab.” In this segment, Ellis' grandad takes the mic to unravel the mysteries of the football field, starting with the science behind curling a ball. How do players like Messi and Beckham make it look so easy? What are the forces at play when the ball bends around defenders? Grandad breaks it all down, offering insights into the physics of spin, aerodynamics, and technique that might just change the way you see (and play) the game. So, whether you're here for the football banter, the deep dive into history, or a bit of science that could improve your free kicks, this episode of “Ey Up Ellis!” has something for everyone. Grab your headphones and get ready for an entertaining and enlightening journey through the world of football! Hope you like it!

 This is the 125th episode of my podcast with Mr. Paul Whittle of https://the1888letter.com/, @1888letter.For this episode, we interview Dr. Alex Jackson as we discuss English Football in the Interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s. Dr. Alexander Jackson is an independent researcher, Author, writer and a Curator at the National Football Museum. Mr. Jackson is the Author of ‘Football's Great War: Association Football on the English Home Front, 1914–1918' (2022). Mr. Jackson appeared on our podcast previously discussing Football during World War I:https://soccernostalgia.blogspot.com/2020/10/soccernostalgia-talk-podcast-episode-29.html  For any questions/comments, you may contact us:You may also contact me on this blog, on twitter @sp1873 and on facebook under Soccernostalgia.https://linktr.ee/sp1873 Mr. Paul Whittle, @1888letter on twitter and https://the1888letter.com/contact/https://linktr.ee/BeforeThePremierLeague You may also follow the podcast on spotify and Apple podcasts all under ‘Soccernostalgia Talk Podcast'Please leave a review, rate and subscribe if you like the podcast.Mr. Jackson's contact info:E-mail: rossjackson55@yahoo.comTwitter: @DrAlexJack1Link to Mr. Jackson's Book: https://www.amazon.com/Footballs-Great-War-Association-1914-1918/dp/1399002201 Listen on Spotify / Apple Podcasts: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1DAspxqxG81ncKYbVvt9SI?si=OZBtNOsiRHWrl8m4tIwrWg&nd=1&dlsi=1fdf1d35c1fa4ac2https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/soccernostalgia-talk-podcast/id1601074369?i=1000657567442 Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIYbaCGYu_4 Blog Link:https://soccernostalgia.blogspot.com/2024/06/soccernostalgia-talk-podcast-episode.htmlSupport the Show.

Back in March, Chloe and Rachel came together with over 50 young women and dozens of coaches for a very special event with the Premier League at the National Football Museum in Manchester. Their aim? To discuss gender equality, explore opportunities for women within the football industry, and inspire these young girls. The event was all organised by Premier League Changemakers, a programme that provides training opportunities for girls and young women across the country in leadership and – of course – football. So, on today's episode, you're going to hear from some of the people that make that happen. Chloe and Rachel take you inside this inspiring day and chat with coaches and women and girls leads from some of the biggest clubs in the Premier League and WSL, as well as Ruth Shaw OBE, Chief Executive of the Premier League Charitable Fund. From football training for Somali women in Bristol, to young women getting the skills to coach young boys at programmes in Manchester, you'll hear about some of the inspiring work that's going on in all corners of the country. Chloe and Rachel also reflect on the Premier League's No Room For Racism Action Plan, the importance of diversity in women's football, and Chloe's own journey into the sport. There's also the small matter of Chloe's Spurs shirt being installed in the museum! Tune in to hear about that and much more.Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube! Email us show@upfrontpod.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Deploying a white Crème Egg as a game-changer, magazine editor Andy Lyons, writer Harry Pearson and host Daniel Gray discuss Football in Far-Flung Places, from the Naval Frigate Captains' Derby to the Well-Padded Hand of God via a Patagonian mystery and the Bellboys of St Helena. Magazine Deputy Editor Ffion Thomas previews WSC issue 440, Record Breakers brings us a tune from Tokyo, and we continue our sprightly feature The Final Third, in which a guest contributes a match, a player and an object to the WSC Museum of Football. Joining Dan as our visiting curator this time is an actual curator – Dr Alexander Jackson of the National Football Museum, also the author of Football's Great War.Support the showWould you like to hear twice as many podcasts and longer editions of these ones, and support our print magazine? You would? Then join the WSC Supporters' Club! Sign up here: www.patreon.com/whensaturdaycomes

A bonus LIVE episode for you. Live from the National Football Museum for the 2023 Football Writing Festival, recorded the day before Manchester United v Manchester City at Old Trafford. We talk Manchester Derby, Emma Hayes upcoming WSL departure and our view on the season so far! Thanks to NFM and the festival organisers. Proudly sponsored by FotMob

In this special episode, we delve into the Meet Me at the Museum archive to pull out highlights from our visits to the north-west of England, featuring comedian Russel Kane at the Whitworth Gallery, BBC favourites Jane Garvey and Fi Glover at Tate Liverpool, comedian Tez Ilyas at the National Football Museum, and DJ Mark Radcliffe at the Science and Industry Museum in the heart of Manchester. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Outside the National Football Museum, a modern water feature recorded during a tranquil lunchtime in Manchester. Recorded by Cities and Memory. 

It's the annual Month of Action for Football v Homophobia - clubs, leagues and county FAs are stepping up to be campaign champions, while people at all levels of the game are finding ways to celebrate LGBTQ+ inclusion. On this episode, the winner of the 2022 FvH Hero Award - Cheshunt FC Women's Hayley Wood-Thompson - joins Sports Media LGBT+'s Jon Holmes to discuss the stand-out contribution that led to her success. Hayley, a P.E. teacher from Hertfordshire, channelled the power within her own personal story to come out via an assembly, making a significant impact in not just the school she teaches at but more widely as well. The video she made combined LGBT+ History Month with football and was shown to pupils as far away as New Zealand. Hayley's conversation with Jon is full of good advice for teachers and coaches who are either LGBTQ+ themselves or strong allies, and there are plenty of football anecdotes in there too, from cheering on her beloved Watford at Wembley to scoring against Arsenal in the FA Cup! Also in this episode, we recap the launch of the 2023 FvH Month of Action which was held at Leicester City FC. Two of the event speakers - Ramsgate player Jahmal Howlett-Mundle and Wolves' ED&I manager Gurpri Bains - pass on some useful tips that others can draw upon to make a difference in February and beyond. Show your support! Activate the campaign in your football space - just head to footballvhomophobia.com for info, or contact the FvH team. And join us for the 2023 FvH Awards at the National Football Museum in Manchester on February 24! Links Miss Thompson PE on Twitter at @HWT_PE - https://twitter.com/HWT_PE Watch Hayley's original video - https://www.nonchalantmagazine.com/teacher-comes-for-lgbtq-history-month/ Her acceptance speech - https://www.hertsschoolsfa.co.uk/single-post/winner-fvh-hero-hayley-wood-thompson Her op-ed on the Lionesses' Euros win - https://inews.co.uk/opinion/womens-football-explode-euro-2022-generation-girls-talented-1768042 What happened at the Month of Action launch event (Sports Media LGBT+) - https://sportsmedialgbt.com/courage-is-celebrated-as-football-v-homophobia-month-of-action-2023-launches FvH Awards Night tickets - https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/football-v-homophobia-awards-night-tickets-510646215577 Thanks for listening - please subscribe, rate, review and share on socials. We're at @FvHtweets on Twitter; @football_v_homophobia on Instagram; and you can like us on Facebook too. Me & You by MusicbyAden | https://soundcloud.com/musicbyaden Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

At Chelsea's first three games of 2023 - and in the Manchester United vs Everton tie in the FA Cup - some fans have been heard singing a chant that's depressingly familiar - "Chelsea rent boys". The Football v Homophobia campaign is determined to help dismantle this discriminatory chant. Helping host Jon Holmes of Sports Media LGBT+ to kick it into touch on this episode of the podcast are: Jake Williamson, who has previously shared his experiences of being a Chelsea fan, wanting to be a professional footballer, and coming out as gay Jim Dolan, the founder and former co-chair of West Ham's LGBTQ+ and allies fan group, Pride of Irons and Delwyn ‘Sheep' Derrick, the founder of FC Bellevue in Wrexham whose outstanding allyship in Welsh football has been widely recognised Jake, Jim and Sheep discuss how this chant and other instances of homophobic language have affected them and their friends in football down the years, and offer their thoughts on how to tackle the problem. There's advice for the authorities and for fans - whether LGBTQ+ or allies - who want to play their part in making the atmosphere at our stadiums more inclusive. The first section of this episode does contain some homophobic words and phrases used in context as examples of discriminatory language. Additional notes - Episode 20 of the FvH Podcast from August 2021 with Tracy Brown (Chelsea Pride) and Paul Amann (Kop Outs!); 'What is the 'Chelsea rent boy' chant and why is it homophobic?' by Will Stroude for PinkNews (Jan 2023); and 'Chelsea rent boys' chant has no place in modern football - homophobia must be treated like racism' by Emma Smith for Goal.com (Feb 2022) We need YOU! The nominations window for the fourth annual FvH Awards is open until 20 January 2023, with 11 categories in which to show your appreciation for the clubs, fan groups, county FAs and 'heroes' helping to make the game more LGBTQ+ friendly. Jake, Jim and 'Sheep' discuss why it's so important to recognise and celebrate our communities - including, of course, our allies - and they select some of their own personal standouts from 2022. Don't forget to nominate! Awards Night will be at the National Football Museum in Manchester on February 24, 2023. February is also the Month of Action! Get involved! Thanks for listening - please subscribe, rate, review and share on socials. We're at @FvHtweets on Twitter; @football_v_homophobia on Instagram; and you can like us on Facebook too. Me & You by MusicbyAden | https://soundcloud.com/musicbyaden Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

Ofcom teamed up with The Alan Turing Institute to analyse more than 2.3 million tweets directed at Premier League footballers over the first five months of the 2021/22 season. Our research found that while the vast majority of fans use social media responsibly, hundreds of abusive tweets are sent to footballers every single day.  Seven in every ten Premier League players are targeted but twelve players in particular face a barrage of abuse with half of all abuse directed towards them. This is a live recording of an event held at the National Football Museum in Manchester in August 2022, with a panel discussion hosted by Jules Breach (BT Sports), and features Gary Lineker, Aoife Mannion (Manchester United), Maheta Molango (Professional Footballers' Association), Sanjay Bhandari (Kick It Out), and Richard Wronka (Ofcom's Online Safety team). 

FIFA records show that the first Women's World Cup took place in China in 1991, but many are unaware that Mexico saw crowds of 90,000 pack into their Azteca Stadium to witness a Women's World Cup back in 1971. The story of the English team that took part was lost to the nation for over four decades and is absent from official records. Leah Caleb, one of the English women who went out to Mexico with the team, reminisces about the incredible experience with Sports Gazette reporter, Ruby Malone, in this atmospheric, story-telling podcast. Narrated by: Ruby Malone. Main excerpts from a one to one interview with Leah Caleb and a small excerpt taken from Chris Lockwood's interview with the National Football Museum.

This episode we talk about kits! We start off with the oldest womens kit in the museum's archive, and go on to talk about the role of kits in the present day with collector Chelsey Downing, and sports apparel entrepreneur, Grace Vella. We touch on the aesthetics of kits, but go far deeper than that, as we reflect on kit symbolism and the role of the kit within football communities. Guests Chelsey Downing Grace Vella Vox pops recorded at the National Football Museum. Special thanks to Vic Turnbull, the National Football Museum and the Quite Unsuitable For Females co-producers. SFX Credits SFX used is licensed under a Creative Commons 3 license from freesound.org and freesfx.co.uk - full list and links here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zGiH0598srvgx6MRKrkNvHr92EWZMYWACqzcSsOlEBM/edit

 Inspired by a picture of the Dick, Kerr Ladies (a popular women's football team in the 1920s who drew large stadium crowds), this episode delves into the interest, perception and atmosphere of the modern women's game drawing similarities with the game of the past. England International Toni Duggan and historian Fiona Skillen to name a few share their knowledge and experiences affirming that the women's game is one that has always had interest. Guests Dr Fiona Skillen Harley Mitaros Mabe Bueno Yasmine Hilmy Toni Duggan Special thanks to Christian Allen of the National Football Museum, Vic of Mic Media, Everton Football Club and the co-producers of Not Quite Suitable For Females.  SFX Credits SFX used is licensed under a Creative Commons 3 license from freesound.org and freesfx.co.uk - full list and links here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zGiH0598srvgx6MRKrkNvHr92EWZMYWACqzcSsOlEBM/edit

We kick off the pod with an episode inspired by the statue of Lily Parr, England's first female football star. Lily's groundbreaking career began in 1919, but her impact on the game is still felt over one hundred years later. We find out what it means to be a football legend today, and the importance of role models and representation for women and non-binary players and fans. Guests Holly Grimes Moyo Abiona Vox pops recorded at: The National Football Museum and Academy Stadium. Special thanks to all the fans and players who kindly shared their stories with us. SFX Credits SFX used is licensed under a Creative Commons 3 license from freesound.org and freesfx.co.uk - full list and links here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zGiH0598srvgx6MRKrkNvHr92EWZMYWACqzcSsOlEBM/edit

What happened to English football at home during the First World War? Dr Alex Jackson from the National Football Museum in Manchester is my guest. He has a new book out on this topic - class, gender, politics - they all feature...

Meg visits the National Football Museum in Manchester, we're prepping for an out-of-this-world space party, and there's a whole list of events from across the UK, including a holographic tour! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Latest up from Spoken Label (My Author / Artist / Poetry Podcast) from Great Sankey, Warrington is the briliant Terry Caffrey. Terry is / was poet in residence at the National Football Museum, Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, National Coal Mining Museum in Wakefield and Citadel Theatre in St. Helens Terry was commissioned to write by the Roald Dahl Foundation and had the lyrics to one of his songs chosen to be one of the official children's songs for the 2012 Olympic and was wrote numerous poetry books including 'It wasn't me, miss'.

The football: In front of a live audience at Manchester's National Football Museum, we discuss whether football does a good job of curating its own history. Also includes extras! The food: The live show offers the four of us our first opportunity to eat together since March 2020, until Chinch bails early because he's eaten too many of the hula hoops in the green room. We have another live show coming up, and this one's to celebrate our 5th anniversary! Join us at the Courtyard Theatre in London's fancy Shoreditch on Thursday 16th December. Tickets available here: https://myticket.co.uk/artists/set-piece-menu-live MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/en-gb/stores/set-piece-menu-podcast EMAIL: setpiecemenu@gmail.com

Paul and Charlie are joined at the National Football Museum by comedian and Man utd fan Danny McLoughlin, former Sunderland full back Micky Gray, former Manchester United full back John O'Kane as well as Andy Jacobs and Geoff Peters for another chaotic Birthday Spread! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The football: After the last round of the EFL Cup (yes we were organised enough to make a plan then and save it for this week's round) Pep Guardiola talked of his young Manchester City bucks benefiting more from playing Wycombe every week than taking on someone their own size. We cycle through the possible solutions to the conundrum Pep poses, some of which Pep won't like. The food: Steven has been showered with gourmet gifts from his kindly neighbours during his forced period of Covid-related isolation. The descriptions of home made beef pie, lamb curry and M&S-made Colin the Caterpillar cake make the other three wish they had friends like Steven. ***LONDON LIVE SHOW ANNOUNCEMENT*** Join us for a 5th anniversary SPM Live in London on Thursday 16th December at the Courtyard Theatre - tickets are here: https://myticket.co.uk/artists/set-piece-menu-live ***MANCHESTER LIVE SHOW REMINDER*** We're live at the National Football Museum on Thursday November 4th - tickets are here: https://t.co/gTGwN5BynX For anything else, email us at setpiecemenu@gmail.com

Tranmere Rovers 0-2 Northampton TownHaving beaten Stevenage at Sixfields in midweek, the Cobblers made the journey up to the North West to face a Tranmere side who sat 5th in the table and held the record for the most clean sheets in the entirety of English professional football this season. After 45 minutes of sizing each other up, The Cobblers came out of the traps with a purpose after half time and quickly seized the initiative through a Kion Etete strike before Paul Lewis was felled by Tranmere's keeper in the box and Sam Hoskins made it two from the penalty spot. Charles' Match Day ExperienceBeing a fairly local game, our Charles made the journey to the Wirral and provided us with some insight that those following on the radio won't have seen. Firstly, Etete's goal was a direct result of what the Cobblers' front four were practicing during the warm up. Ball goes out wide to Pinnock, cross is hit early into the box and Etete meets it at pace. Then there is the legend that is Adam Morton scoring in front of the travelling Northampton fans to much fanfare. Off the pitch there was noticeable attempts to get the fans to the stadium early with a supporters' Trust ran marquee (or fan park as they called it) outside the club shop that was hosting an Oktoberfest beer festival. With the resurrection of The New Hotel End team on social media this weekend, maybe something like this would be a good starting point? PostbagThanks to everyone for answering our call to arms last week and getting in touch after a win and not just when we lose. We had lots of messages sent to us at @CobblersToMe on Twitter and a couple of emails too. Our main email this week comes from Robert Salmons about the future of the match day football programme. NTFC Women Win In The FA CupThe women's team did us proud once more by overcoming Tamworth Women to reach the 1st Round proper of the Women's FA Cup. The game finished 1-0 with the goal coming from It's All Cobblers To Me sponsored player, Abbie Brewin! We are so proud of the whole team but especially our Abbie. The next game for NTFC Women is on Sunday at Harpole Playing Fields in the league against Lincoln United WFC. Please do go and support the team if you can. Meanwhile, the Cobblers have been drawn at home to National league side Bedworth United Ladies in the 1st round. Surely this needs to be a Sixfields special?! Cobblers NewsElsewhere this week: Congratulations to Tom Cliffe for winning the election for the supporters representative position on the NTFC board. Walter Tull was inducted into the National Football Museum's Hall Of Fame. The New Hotel End project team have become active once more on Twitter by explaining what it is they're looking to do and how they will need the help and backing of both the football club and the NTFC Supporters' Trust. _____ Hosted by Charles Commins, Chessie Coleman, Neil Egerton-Scott and Danny Brothers. Produced by http://vibrantsoundmedia.com/ (Vibrant Sound Media). Become a member of our Fan Club and support the podcast to receive extra content and be invited into our community Slack channel. Go to https://www.patreon.com/cobblerstome (https://www.patreon.com/cobblerstome) CONTACT IACTM Visit our websitehttps://cobblerstome.com/ ( https://cobblerstome.com) Tweet ushttps://twitter.com/CobblersToMe ( https://twitter.com/CobblersToMe) use the #IACTM Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/itsallcobblers ( https://www.facebook.com/itsallcobblers) Email us itsallcobblers@gmail.com Support this podcast

The football: After Benjamin White revealed he'd never watched a football game that he wasn't a part of himself, we ask Chinch how a player's relationship with the game can run so counter to what many of us assume, and what many more expect. The food: Chinch is home alone, and without the chef of the family has reduced his diet to crumpets. Only crumpets. Emails to setpiecemenu@gmail.com And tickets to our live show at the National Football Museum can be found here: https://t.co/JOw261zNKy?amp=1

Hello, Im Craig and welcome to another episode of Football Kit Memories - the football podcast that gets under the shirt.In today's episode I am joined by Author, Football Historian and Former Director of the National Football Museum Dr Kevin MooreDuring our chat, Kevin shares his memories about the conception and opening of English National Football Museum, which he ran for its first 20 years. Theres the history, the artefacts and a number stories Kevin shares about his life in football. I learned so much on the call and I could have spoken with Kevin for hours.Later I asked Kevein to pick out three of his favourite football shirts and tell me a little bit about what they mean to him. Each of these shirts either is or has at one point been on display at the museum as we cover Maradona's Hand of God away shirt from 1986, the England shirt Bobby Moore swapped with Pele in 1970 and we finish in 1872, with the woolen jersey England wore in the first ever football international versus Scotland.***You can follow me and my own collection on Instagram, or get in touch via Twitter or email. footballkitmemories@gmail.com https://Twitter.com/FKMPodcasthttps://instagram.com/footballkitmemoriesWatch on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7ZkbjUVvh2YmgH6knIvOAwMake sure you follow Kevin on socialhttps://twitter.com/doctorkevinmoo1Check out his book - What You Think You Know About Football Is Wrong on Amazon herehttps://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Think-About-Football-Wrong-ebook/dp/B07T3KF1D4The music you heard was produced by Evil Ed check out his music on Bandcamp https://eviled1.bandcamp.comAnd… finally thanks for listening. If you have enjoyed it please do spread the word, give me a follow on social and subscribe to Football Kit Memories on your podcast player of choice. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The football: After Julian Nagelsmann talked about football potentially introducing an NFL-style playbook we ask if that's completely preposterous, or if in fact we're already headed in that direction. Plus Hugh gets very defensive about how to say the word defence. The food: Steve (kinda) shares a sausage sandwich on sourdough at a café in Sale with a former Manchester United manager. The rest of the group are embarrassed when they can't guess which one. ***LIVE SHOW ANNOUNCEMENT*** We are doing a live show as part of the Football Writing Festival at the National Football Museum in Manchester. It's on Thursday 4th November (7pm) and ticket details are here: www.nationalfootballmuseum.com Email: setpiecemenu@gmail.com Merch: www.teepublic.com (search for SPM or set piece menu)

Episode 7 chronicles Newcastle United and the Great War, 1914-18.Matt and Paul are joined by Dr Alexander Jackson who not only works as a Curator at The National Football Museum, he is also a Newcastle United supporter as well. Alex is in the process of writing a book entitled ‘Football's Great War' which is due out in 2022.For further reading on NUFC and WWI, seek out 'To The Glory of God. Newcastle United & The Great War' by Paul Joannou which was published in 2018 to mark the centenary of WWI's conclusion.Theme music by Tom Ramsey.For more on the history of Newcastle United visit https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/all-about/newcastle-united-fc-historyFollow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/ChronicleNUFC and sign up to our daily NUFC newsletters dispatched directly to your email inbox https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/newsletter-preference-centre/If you have any feedback on the podcast, or have a NUFC history question for Paul Joannou, you can direct those to theEIBWpodcast@reachplc.com

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.Download our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Doubling Your Visitor NumbersIf you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcastIf you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this episode.Competition ends August  27th 2021. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references:www.twitter.com/bernarddonoghuewww.linkedin.com/in/bernard-donoghue-0aa9b97www.twitter.com/alva_ukwww.alva.org.uk/index.cfmBernard Donoghue is the Chief Executive of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA), the umbrella body for the UK's most popular, important and iconic palaces, castles, museums, galleries, heritage sites, stately homes, cathedrals, churches, gardens, zoos and leisure attractions. ALVA is a powerful advocate for the sector to Government, the media and business; it organises events, benchmarking, training, commissions research and the sharing of best practice for members across marketing, visitor experience, fundraising, public engagement, security, education, retail and a variety of other areas.In May 2017 he was appointed to be a member of the Mayor of London's Cultural Leadership Board and is the Mayor's Ambassador for Culture. He has been a member of the UK Government's Tourism Industry Council since 2014. In January 2021 he became Co-Chair of the London Tourism Recovery Board, to plan and deliver the strategic recovery of London's visitor economy and sits on the GLA's COVID Business Forum and various London Mayoral cultural and business recovery taskforces.Bernard has been Chair of the award-winning London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) since 2010, having been a Board member since 2005 and Deputy Chair between 2007 and 2010. In June 2021 he became Chair of the Board of the Bristol Old Vic, the oldest continually operating theatre in the English-speaking world. He is a Trustee of the People's History Museum – the Museum of Democracy, in Manchester, and will take over as Chair of the Board in November 2021.He is a member of the Cathedral Council of St Paul's Cathedral, London, and a member of the Exhibition Advisory Board for Two Temple Place and the Hoare Trust. He was Chairman of WWF-UK's Council for 10 years, until 2020, and is a former trustee of WWF-UK. He has been a trustee of Centrepoint, Kids in Museums, the Museum of The Home and the Heritage Alliance. He has been a judge for the Museum and Heritage Awards since 2003.In October 2020 Bernard was named by Blooloop, the world's leading online resource for professionals working in visitor attractions, as one of the world's 50 most influential people in the museum sector. Transcription:Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. In today's episode, I speak with Bernard Donoghue, CEO of ALVA. We discuss what the fast-approaching end of restrictions mean for attractions, how to balance digital engagement with an overseas audience and what these past 15 months have really been like for Bernard personally. If you like what you hear, subscribe on all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue. Kelly Molson: Bernard, I am so happy to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for coming on and joining us.Bernard Donoghue: It is my absolute pleasure. It was a choice between you and a meeting with four MPs so here we are.Kelly Molson: Well, I mean, I have to say, I'm clearly the better choice here. Thank you. Okay. As ever, we're going to start off with our ice breaker questions. If you had a time machine and you could travel backwards or forwards, what year would you go to and why?Bernard Donoghue: Oh, good lord. Sorry, by the way, this reminds me of the brilliant line by Sandi Toksvig. She was in a café in York once and there was a sign saying we serve tea at all times so she asked for a tea in the Renaissance, and they didn't understand her.Bernard Donoghue: I don't know. Wow. I don't know. I think possibly in the 1920s because you're just at the cusp of so many things. You're at the tail end of the Edwardian period so you've got all of that and then you're at the cusp of electricity and technology and radio and aeroplanes so probably then.Kelly Molson: We're hearing a lot about it being like the Roaring Twenties as well, aren't we? Once we get through all of this too. It's probably quite current that you've chosen that as well. Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. Kelly Molson: Obviously, flapper dresses because all of those were completely beautiful. I mean, I would be down with that.Bernard Donoghue: No. Seriously, I do look good in beads. It's true.Kelly Molson: I could see that about you. You've got that look. Great. Okay. If you were a WWF wrestler, which I can see actually, I feel like you've got the look of a wrestler about you as well, maybe not in beads, what would your entrance song be?Bernard Donoghue: For years, by the way, I used to be a trustee of WWF UK and all of my friends just assumed that I had a sort of parallel existence in spandex somewhere and I had to remind them that actually, no, it was about conservation. What would it be? Something from RuPaul's Drag Race actually because they're always fantastic. Yeah. When they come back on the stage at the end, that's the music.Kelly Molson: Okay. Something really flamboyant I feel like.Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. You know, you can strut ... I mean, I know strutting is not necessarily a WWF thing but presence is all.Kelly Molson: Absolutely. We can make it a thing. It can be whatever we want.Bernard Donoghue: Thank you.Kelly Molson: Okay. If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be?Bernard Donoghue: If I was 20, I think my advice to my 20-year-old self would be to make the ... This sounds a bit professional. Just make loads and loads of connections, network, network madly, even though, and this will come as a bit of a surprise, even though, I'm an introvert, get out there and network because it suddenly dawned on me in the last few years, when I was in my twenties, I was a campaigner, I was a young lobbyist and I worked for disability charities and all the people who did the same kind of job as me then, are all chief executives like me now. Bernard Donoghue: Of course, that makes sense because you grow through the ranks so now I've got a peer group of lots of chief executives in lots of very varied, different spheres and realms. It's been brilliant because we've all come through the ranks together and in good times and bad and now we've got a ready-made oven-roasted peer group that we can all rely on. There's about six of us. I think that.Bernard Donoghue: And B, take your job seriously but don't take yourself too seriously.Kelly Molson: That's good advice. That's really good advice. The networking thing is really interesting, somebody asked me a couple of weeks ago what has been the thing that ... What's been the one thing that I've invested the most in over the last few years that has made the biggest difference to my business and I completely agree with you and I said it is about building your network and it's about getting out there and making those connections because such incredible things come from knowing such a variety of different people in all kinds of sectors. You just never know what kind of opportunities and doors are going to be open for you from doing that.Kelly Molson: Also, you just can't grow a business on your own or do anything on your own. You need that peer support around you. Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. You're absolutely right. The key to that is knowing people who are not like you and in businesses that are not like yours. In ALVA, for example, I hear it time and time again that museums and galleries don't actually learn much from other museums and galleries because they're all kind of in the same boats and cathedrals don't learn much from other cathedrals, but they will learn things from Zooms or Harry Potter or Warner Bros, so places that are very different to them and, therefore, come at an issue from a very different perspective. That's where you learn most.Kelly Molson: Absolutely. I completely agree with you on that one as well. That might come up later actually in our chat. Okay. Last one but it's your one, what's your unpopular opinion?Bernard Donoghue: I hate the phrases going forward, and very much, as in, "I am very much looking forward to it" or, "I am very much committed to this." I hate those phrases with a passion whereas it's clear other people don't. They would be capital punishments when I take over the rule. Bernard Donoghue: What's another unpopular opinion? I cannot see how people can watch Jeremy Clarkson. I don't get it. Absolutely don't get it at all. Oh, oh, here's one actually and it's only because it was his birthday last week, I have never understood Bob Dylan and his popularity.Kelly Molson: Wow. Gosh, that's quite a strong one.Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. I don't get it. Kelly Molson: Okay. Bernard Donoghue: Glad he's around, glad he's there, not for me, thank you.Kelly Molson: I like that. Bob Dylan and Jeremy Clarkson was not a mix I was expecting to get on the podcast today.Bernard Donoghue: They're not a duo that has ever performed together as far as I'm aware, or likely to. It's probably just as well.Kelly Molson: It wouldn't make either of them even more appealing to you, though, would it? Not really.Bernard Donoghue: No. I think I would have to take out a restraining order if they decided that they wanted to come around.Kelly Molson: I love that. Well, let's see what our listeners think, Jeremy Clarkson fans out there? I don't know. It's not my cup of tea. Tweet us and let us know what you think about that. Kelly Molson: Now, Bernard, I don't even know where to start with this list so Mayor of London's Cultural Ambassador, CEO of ALVA, Co-chair of the London Tourism Recovery Board, Chair of LIFT Festival and Trustee of People's History Museum. Quite an impressive list that you've got going on there. What I want to know is where did it actually begin, though? Where did your connection with cultural heritage and attractions organisations start?Bernard Donoghue: I've always absolutely loved ... I'm kind of being paid for all the things that I would do at a weekend. Kelly Molson: Nice.Bernard Donoghue: You know, when I was a kid, my parents would take us around National Trust properties and English Heritage properties and stately homes and places like that so the first place that I went to was Waddesdon Manor, which if people don't know it, it's the maddest, most beautiful Loire valley style chateau but in the vale of Aylesbury, just outside Aylesbury. Built by the Rothschilds as kind of an entertaining pad. Absolutely beautiful, absolutely stunning.Bernard Donoghue: My first stately home ... Well, that's kind of a stately home. The first stately home is Blenheim Palace. I just got the bug. I just have loved history, heritage, visitor attractions since I was a kid. I went off to do political jobs and then back in '97 I joined Visit Britain as their first-ever head of government affairs, not quite a lobbyist because it's a government agency and so you're not allowed to be called a lobbyist, but it was all but a lobbyist. That just opened my eyes to tourism and then visitor attractions. Bernard Donoghue: On the culture side, the theatre side, the theatre has always been a complete passion so I stepped down this year as chair of LIFT London International Festival of Theatre after 11 years and I'm just about to go onto the board of the British [inaudible 00:09:15]. My theatre passion continues.Kelly Molson: I love that. I love what you said, I get paid to do all the things that I would love to do on the weekend. What a fantastic role to be in. Bernard Donoghue: It's absolutely true. I should show you my wallet actually. My wallet is full of membership cards, as in 30 of them, so occasionally I'll look at my wallet and think, "This is money laundering essentially." I'm being paid and I'm paying them back in return. This is just a circular economy.Kelly Molson: That's one of the things that you've done really well throughout the pandemic is you've been so supportive and you've been really proactive on Twitter about saying to people, "Look, if you want these places to still be around when we come out of this, buy the membership, buy something from their shop when their shops are open, or buy something from them online" and I think it's been such a positive message to send out the whole way through, so not money laundering, supportive. Being very supportive in your role.Bernard Donoghue: You'd have to talk to my bank manager because some days it was like money laundering.Kelly Molson: There are loads of things that I want to talk about going forward, even though you don't like that but what I want to go back to is a little bit in the past as well. I really want to talk about what it's been like for you personally. I think you have been a real kind of pillar of strength to the sector and huge support and I think that as wonderful as that's been, that can bring its own challenges on yourself as well. Kelly Molson: Ultimately, you're the person that's putting out this kind of positive message all the time and being really actively encouraging but I could imagine that's had a lot of pressures and challenges for you personally as well. What has it been like, the last 15 months? How have you motivated yourself to be upbeat and positive throughout all of this?Bernard Donoghue: Well, that's very kind, first of all. Thank you. I think I divide it between last March until Christmas and then sort of Christmas onwards. Last March until Christmas, there was a sense of really being able to cope because the adrenaline was getting you through. It was all novel and new and I've always thrived in crisis management. In all the roles that I've had over the last 20 years, crisis management has been at the heart of that, whether that's about actively managing crises or the corporate PR response or being a spokesperson or whatever.Bernard Donoghue: In some ways, I sort of thrived on all of that through adrenaline. It's been much, much more draining and exhausting since Christmas and I think that's probably the same for everybody actually. We've gone through it again and actually, it's no longer new and it's no longer novel and now it's just sapping.Bernard Donoghue: I have often felt on an almost kind of daily basis, and this is just honest, I'm not exaggerating, there's quite a lot resting on my shoulders and it feels quite lonely because the advice from the government has been so inconsistent and so unclear and often contradictory. There's a small group of about three or four of us in the tourism sector who have had to daily unpick all of that and interpret it for our respective sectors.Bernard Donoghue: I know that if I weren't doing that then it just wouldn't get done ... It would probably get done somewhere at somehow at some point but, as you know, I do a daily bulletin so it goes out every evening at six o'clock with the latest information. There's a real sense of I need to get this out and get it done every day. Bernard Donoghue: I've made a rod and back really because there was nothing that I would love more than stop doing these bulletins. That's not possible while we're still in a state of flux. It's been a bit lonely. It's been odd working from home when normally I would be a consummate traveller and visit loads of my members around the country. There's been a lot of pressure but the feedback from people about the vital nature of the information and the advocacy and all the rest of it, and the achievements actually, has been extraordinary.Bernard Donoghue: I don't think myself, my work has ever been more exposed than it has in the course of the last 15 months. Sometimes that felt scary and sometimes that felt brilliant.Kelly Molson: I think as well it's never been more celebrated as well because you have had so much support from the sector. There are a lot of people looking for you. Like you say, you're delivering daily bulletins, you've been doing incredible webinars with ALVA so regularly, you've opened those up to non-members as well so everybody can benefit from the knowledge on them. There's a lot of eyes on you as well. That's a lot of pressure. I think from a positive perspective, what I see being delivered back to you is nothing but encouragement. Everybody has been so incredibly supportive of what you're doing and so grateful for the things that you're doing for them. I think that's been really lovely to see.Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. It absolutely has and, in particular, from those organisations and businesses who, as you say, are not members of ALVA, I mean, I took the decision on day one that although ALVA is a tiny organisation and people will probably be really surprised, there's me and one other member of staff.Kelly Molson: Wow. I'm surprised.Bernard Donoghue: We're just two people. Lucy is brilliant. She's our finance and business manager. She's living in Norwich and I'm here in London. It's just the two of us. It's a tiny organisation so we're spread very, very thin. But given the nature of our members and my role of years in getting high-level meetings with government and all of that, I just thought we're in a leadership role here, we should use that for the benefit of everybody, let's be generous, let's not be parochial.Bernard Donoghue: We made the decision to commission all the research and give it out for free, and that visitor sentiment research has just been vital. It was one of the best things that we did. Open up our webinars to everybody. If anybody wants a bulletin, they could go on the mailing list. Whether they're members of ALVA or not because there was the analogy, it's been used a lot of times but I think it's true, we're not actually all in the same boat. We're all in the same storm but we're in very, very different boats and some are bigger and more stable than others. We happen to be in a relatively stable, well-structured boat so I think it's beholden on me and us to try and help everybody as much as possible.Kelly Molson: I am absolutely gobsmacked that it's just the two of you. I did not know that myself and I think that's an incredible achievement, what you've been doing, just the two of you to organise all of that. Wow. Hats off to you both there.Bernard Donoghue: It's exhausting. I mean, look at me. I'm actually 47 in real life.Kelly Molson: Yeah. Me too. That's what I tell to everyone, Bernard. Gosh, that really has surprised me. Just go back because you said about you're a big traveller, you would be out and about all over the place and up and down the country, I'm sure, what do you think that you'll take away as a positive from the time that you spent working at home? Are there any kinds of changes that you'll make to your working habits? Kelly Molson: For example, I would commute to my office on a daily basis, I would often be out in London or all over the place doing meetings. Now I start to think, well, some of them I'm really missing but some of them are actually probably a bit unnecessary, we can cut down on the fuels that we're burning, we can cut down on the time that we have, and I've actually quite enjoyed having a little bit more personal time to do things like eating better because you don't eat that well when you're travelling or doing a little bit more exercise. Have you found that there are some positive things that you can take from this that you'd continue?Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. There's a number. I mean, one was we made the decision, we used to have an office in Somerset House on the Strand, a beautiful, beautiful room in grade one listed former palace. Absolutely gorgeous. Looking down onto the piazza, currently covered in trees. I couldn't justify the cost because Lucy, my colleague, went over to Norwich to be near her parents. We very sadly lost one of our colleagues. There used to be three of us in the office and we lost one of our colleagues last year to cancer. Bernard Donoghue: There were just the two of us and I thought I can't justify an office just for me, lovely, though, it is so actually we haven't had an office. We've given it up, which means that I am, for the foreseeable future, working at home. There are plus things to that ... Well, this is a plus and a minus, this is no particular priority order, we've got a cat, Tom, he's a badsy cat. I think he's going to go into trauma whenever we leave the house.Kelly Molson: Oh gosh. Yeah. Bernard Donoghue: We've been around 24/7. We are now more grateful ... When I say we, this isn't a royal we. This is me and my partner. We are now more grateful than we ever thought possible to have a garden in central London. That's just been fantastic. Bernard Donoghue: But I am looking forward to getting back to some degree of working normality because I have to say I've never worked longer or harder than I have over the course of the last 15 months. It's been exhausting.Bernard Donoghue: On a normal day, I would probably have five or six, at least, one-hour Zoom meetings back to back. And then write the bulletin at six o'clock in the evening. Typically, I'm working from about 7:30 in the morning until about seven in the evening. I was doing a bit of that pre-COVID but it's pretty unsustainable so I'd like to get back to a degree of normality.Kelly Molson: Yeah. Definitely. I think that the difference between having multiple face to face meetings during the day is very different to the Zoom meetings. I don't know about you but my diary gets crazy and I look and I think, "I've got four back to back" and there's no time to process in-between. It's that cognitive overload whereas if you had back-to-back face-to-face meetings you don't get the same kind of drained feeling. Yeah. I really feel you on that. It's definitely been longer working hours for us here as well. I really sympathise.Bernard Donoghue: Also, I mean, the meetings that I'm having, bluntly, you can't coast because either I'm the guest speaker so you can't wing it, or it's a meeting with ministers or SAGE or public health England and so it's serious grownup stuff. You can't step back, you can't just switch off, you can't think I'm going to coast this for half an hour, I hope that nobody asks me a question because they're not those kinds of meetings.Kelly Molson: No. You can't switch off your Zoom and quickly grab a cup of tea and a biscuit while everyone else is talking, can you? It's not the done thing. Bernard Donoghue: It's not really, no. Kelly Molson: That was a good segue into something that's going to happen today. We are recording this and it is the seventh of June. There are reports that Matt Hancock is going to give us another COVID statement this afternoon and, potentially, that is about the dates that we are due to be opening up with no restrictions.Kelly Molson: Now I want to ask you a little bit about what that means for attractions and what we could potentially now be looking at. We are hopefully coming through to the other side. The vaccine program is doing phenomenal things. What does this fast-approaching end to restrictions mean for attractions now? Do you think that we're going to see this extended?Bernard Donoghue: It's a really good question. I've been talking to about five or six chief execs over the course of the weekend just about guidance and advice. I think there are two very significant things and at first glance, they're in contradiction with each other. The first is that the longer we have social distancing measures and face mask use and mitigation measures in place, the longer it will take for the sector to recover.Bernard Donoghue: When we have businesses, whether it's a hotel or bar or restaurant, a theatre or an attraction when we have those businesses opening up one-third capacity, none of them is making a profit. Actually, they're opening for PR purposes and in order to achieve fuller visitor figures down the track so no one is operating profitably.Bernard Donoghue: Getting those backup and running is really critical but we know from all of our visitor sentiment that still 80%, eight zero, 80% of the British public are uneasy or cautious about those very mitigation measures, like social distancing and face mask use, being eased too early. Bernard Donoghue: Visitor attractions are faced with a real dilemma I think, which is if it's announced that on the 21st of June all social distancing measures are lifted throughout England and, therefore, visitor attractions can up the numbers, don't have to do face mask use measures, abandon social distancing, still the vast majority of their visitors won't like that and will feel uncomfortable and a tiny minority will think they're in bliss and think that they're liberated and all the rest of it.Bernard Donoghue: My advice has been to visitor attractions, you and your visitors have to be the ultimate arbiter of the visitor experience. It may well be that you have to keep social distancing and face mask use measures in a place way beyond the 21st of September because that's what the public wants so, even though, you are technically allowed to get rid of those things by government, actually, take your lead from the public because they're going to be the ultimate arbiters. Bernard Donoghue: Those things are potentially in contradiction with each other. One of the things I'm constructing literally this week is some ALVA national advice to visitor attractions so that front of house staff can basically say to an irate guest on the 22nd of June, "I know the government has just announced that but actually, we're adhering to ALVA national advice" in order that they don't get than that confrontational pushback from members of the public because I genuinely feel that the loudest voices are for liberation but the quietest voices are for care, safety, sensible precautions and we need to manage that really, really carefully.Kelly Molson: That's a really difficult challenge, isn't it? For front of house staff that will be in that position of having to push back on people. I can see it in my head happening. There's an encounter where people are angry about the fact they're being told that they still have to wear their mask, yet the government has said that they don't need to do this anymore. I can't imagine how difficult that's going to be so I think what you're putting in place is a really valuable kind of asset for the organisations to have.Bernard Donoghue: We saw some examples, relatively limited, but we saw some examples of poor behaviour on the parts of the public last year when attractions reopened for, frankly ... It's not an excuse but it is understandable. They, like us, we're tired, fraught, and quick to anger, end of their tether, and they just wanted to get out and be in nice places. We've seen some of that poor behaviour on the part of the public again this time round as indoor and outdoor attractions. Bernard Donoghue: Honestly, for every one person who pushes back saying, "Don't make me wear a mask. Don't manage my social distancing", there are nine others watching saying, "Well done, you. You're doing exactly the right thing." That, I think should be the barometer of safety.Kelly Molson: How does this work with ... What we want to see is attractions open and open at full capacity. But we, obviously, have got this challenge around overseas visitors and many of them not being able to come here, many of them not feeling safe to come here at the moment, understandably. How do attractions manage that? If they can open at full capacity, is the reality that they're not going to be at full capacity because we just don't have that influx of people that we need?Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. That's right. I mean, bluntly, there are some visitor attractions in the UK and just off the top of my head, they're places like the British Museum, Edinburgh Castle, Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, Tower of London that are so heavily dependent on overseas visitors, inbound visitors coming from the rest of the world, that even the best ever staycation this summer won't help them repair their balance sheets. Bernard Donoghue: We've made it really clear to ministers ... I took the minister for London and the minister for tourism round four visitor attractions in London a couple of weeks ago to Westminster Abbey, Tower of London, London Transport Museum and the Royal Opera House and, at each one, showed them what a COVID safe welcome and visitor experience looks so they were comfortable with that but also made it clear to them that some of those, particularly, the Royal Opera House, Tower of London, Westminster Abbey are so dependent on inbound visitors that they will require additional support way beyond the rest of the sector to really recover sustainably because their visitors, their market won't come back in any meaningful numbers until next year.Bernard Donoghue: It was really to peg to ministers even if you lift all restrictions on the 21st of June, that's not the end of the story. Kelly Molson: Yeah. Yeah. You have to be prepared to give more support past that point as well. Those attractions, in particular, that do rely really heavily on overseas visitors, what can they start to think about putting in place at this point? I know there are many attractions that have put on lots of digital events or things that people can engage with online. Do you see that continuing hugely for the rest of the year and then into 2022 as well?Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. Yeah. I do. I mean, we've talked about this actually. At the VAC conference, one of the great achievements of last year was the explosion in digital content and not just the amount of it but the diversity and the brilliance and the innovative use of digital. I think because the last year has been sort of chaotic and odd and no holds barred, it's just liberated a lot of organisations to take risks with their programming and their content and their decision making in a way that they would never have conceived of before and to speed up some of their decision makings and just to think actually let's just do it and see what happens.Bernard Donoghue: I think the digital explosion has been absolutely phenomenal so downloadable jigsaws and recipe books and maps and behind the scenes tours and going up into the attic of buildings and into the archives, all of that, absolutely phenomenal. Bernard Donoghue: It hasn't particularly connected with audiences who weren't already interested in those buildings so it's had some public engagement successes but not massive but what it has made people do is get on the customer journey so if they're seeing the stuff online, they'll one day aspire to be there and stand there on the spot because it can't replace the actual physical experience of being there.Bernard Donoghue: In terms of digital output, the Bristol Old Vic, and the London Symphony Orchestra, they've both made decisions recently that in addition to their live performances, they're going to broadcast their performances on digital as well. If you're in Tokyo or San Francisco, you can subscribe to watch these performances, a bit like a Netflix subscription, so you buy a book of 10 performances at reduced costs.Bernard Donoghue: What this means, of course, is that those theatres, that orchestra is getting a whole new audience who are paying money that they never had before but they're also starting them on a customer journey so that person in Tokyo one day, hopefully, will want to stand in the Bristol Old Vic and see where David Garrick performed. You're getting them on that customer journey whilst also monetizing it as well.Bernard Donoghue: I think that's probably the biggest evolution and change to businesses in the course of the last year. You may have got round to it in about three or four years time but all of that has just been sort of contracted and sped up in an extraordinary way.Kelly Molson: It's what you said, it's about risk-taking. I can remember having this conversation with Laura Crossley from the National Football Museum. They came on the podcast to talk about their podcast and they said that actually, it was something they'd been talking about for ages, they were going to do it, and then things kept getting in the way. Ultimately, they just got to a point where they were like, "Let's just try it. Let's just throw something at it. Let's see if it sticks and let's just do it." Kelly Molson: I loved that attitude that has been taken by so many different organisations this year and it's propelled them forward in a digital sense because let's just try it, who knows what's going to happen? None of us had a clue what was going to happen last March. That whole attitude about risk-taking I think is really important and I'd really like to see that continue as well.Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. Me too. I mean, two years ago, people would have thought it would be utterly impossible to run a business with nearly all of their staff working from home and even if they thought it was possible, it didn't sound particularly attractive because it just sounded too complicated and messy. Look where we are now.Bernard Donoghue: Things can be done. I think one of the things that we've done for years is collect all of the visitor numbers from all of our members and then publish them in the media in March. I've done some longitudinal research to look at are there common characteristics or behaviours on the part of those visitor attractions that sustainably and successfully grow their visitor numbers but also diversify their business numbers as well? Bernard Donoghue: I do a presentation and a workshop on this and, funnily enough, there are. There are common behaviours. You can absolutely see them. In that group of about six or seven behaviours, one of them is about the appetite for risk on the part of the board and senior management. The other one is about the confidence to foster creative partnerships with unusual suspects. Don't just work with the people who are your natural neighbours, either physically or theoretically, but actually, this is something we were talking about at the beginning, try and foster creative partnerships with people who are not like you and, therefore, they bring something completely different to the party.Kelly Molson: That's going back to what we talked about, about museums not learning from other museums and theatres not learning from other theatres because you're just in the same challenges all the time. Looking at that kind of wider sector communication of sector cooperation even and seeing where the boundaries overlap and what you can do that like you said, the theme park or the zoo down the road might be doing but you're a theatre. How can you embrace some of the things that they're using?Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. Yeah. One of my favourite examples recently is that I was down ... I've managed to get out of London a couple of times since September in the last three weeks and I was down at Bristol going to see the Bristol Old Vic. They're doing something really, really clever, which is they have just parted ways with their in-house catering company and they've just decided that they want to be a community showcase so they're getting in local Bristol restaurants and chefs to be their in-house caterer for a month and they have a different one every month.Bernard Donoghue: It's just blindingly brilliant because, A, they're connecting with their communities, they're showcasing the diversity of food in the local area, it's all five-mile menu stuff so it's all locally sourced. But it also means there's a new reason to come back every month, even if you don't go to the theatre to see a show, you'll go there to eat. I just think that was genius.Kelly Molson: It is genius.Bernard Donoghue: I've been sharing that with a lot of museums and galleries and heritage attractions saying actually if you're in-between contracts and you're thinking about an interim period between catering contracts, why don't you think about this?Kelly Molson: That is an absolutely brilliant idea because I love attractions but I'm a big foodie as well so, for me, I'd be looking and going, "Oh, well, I need to book a table at that place at least once a month now because I'm going to go back and I'm going to experience a different food" or, "I've really wanted to go to that person's restaurant, how amazing, I can combine eating that person's food with a show that's on at the same time." It's a genius idea.Bernard Donoghue: It really anchors the theatre in its community. We've seen over the course of the last year that the wreaking of your community and understanding your community and reflecting back who your community are through your work and your HR programs and your staff recruitment measures and all those kind of things, that's been absolutely key because if you lose your connection with the community, you're lost and wondering.Kelly Molson: Yeah. Completely agree. I think, for me, personally, that's one of the best things that have come out of this. As an individual, I've always been really keen on supporting local independents and shopping locally anyway but even more so since this happened because you can see the effect of what's happened so drastically on your own community. You want to be able to do as much to support that as possible. That is such a great idea. I hope everyone that's listening picks up on that because I just think that is awesome. Well done, them. Kelly Molson: We're coming to the end of the podcast interview but I can't not ask you what's next for ALVA? What have you got planned that's coming next? It's been a pretty full-on year. Are the webinars going to continue? Are your daily bulletins going to continue for the foreseeable future? Sounds like you might need a little bit of a break at some point.Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. Well, the daily bulletins will certainly continue because I don't think anything is going to change significantly until September or such. The webinars are coming back. We took a month off from the weekly webinars so we had a webinar every Wednesday from the beginning of January until last month with over 50 case studies from across the UK. I mean, they were all amazing. Absolutely amazing.Bernard Donoghue: I think, by the way, that it's been through the webinars and also your work as well, that we've got to know what people are doing in a little bit more detail and from unusual suspects in a way that we didn't really before. We always used to rely on big annual conferences to get case studies and stuff. Now we're just full of case studies everywhere. I love that more generous, more open, more accessible, more sharing environment that we now inhabit.Bernard Donoghue: The webinars are coming back at the end of June. They'll probably be fortnightly and our first webinars will be the latest wave of visitor sentiment research so what are people thinking about now? Are they confident about going back into attractions? Are they confident about social distancing measures and those kinds of things?Bernard Donoghue: Also, we'll be doing case studies about post-21st of June, how visitor attractions are going to cope with that dilemma about being told, on the one hand, you can open with no restrictions, on the other hand, knowing well, that their visitors require and expect some degree of social distancing and protection of safety measures. How do you balance those two things? Those will be the first two webinars.Bernard Donoghue: Then beyond that, I suspect global domination. Kelly Molson: Of course. It's the obvious next step, isn't it?Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. I mean, I don't want to get Napoleonic about it all but I think we could be replicated around the world.Kelly Molson: Well, actually, on that note, what can people that are listening, what can our listeners do to support ALVA? Bearing in mind that I've had the bombshell that it's just the two of you that are doing all of these things. What can our listeners do to help you back?Bernard Donoghue: Oh, well, the most useful thing and I've said this a lot, honestly, it's been my complete saviour, is that we wouldn't have been able to achieve things like the reduced rate of VAT for visitor attractions, the continuation of furlough, the construction and the creation of the Cultural Recovery Fund, I mean, all of those critical measures for the tourism sector ... I mean, the tourism sector, by a long country mile, has been the part of the economy that's received the most financial support from the government. Bernard Donoghue: I think it's partly because we were hit first, hit hardest, and we'll take the longest to recover but it's also because we've had amazing data. I know data is a bit un-sexy but, honestly, we couldn't have got through the meetings that we've had with treasury and number 10 and DCMS and public health England and the Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Ireland governments without the depth of really, really useful data that visitor attractions have been able to provide us, what their percentage of furlough rates are, where they've had to make staff redundancies in what areas, where their visitor numbers have been affected, the difference between the dependence on domestic and inbound tourism, conversion rates in shops, average transaction values.Bernard Donoghue: All of that kind of stuff has just been bliss to work with because it's really good, really solid, well-evidenced data and as a lobbyist, that's just gold. Keep giving us information, anecdotes, case studies, and experiences as well. Those case studies can often feed through to government ministers in a way that just a raft of figures can't. If you can bring it to life, particularly, in small kind of epithets like sanitise the site, not the visitor experience and you can't furlough a penguin. Really short, understandable, Sesame Street type lobbying, that works.Kelly Molson: I love that. Keep sharing, keep cooperating, keep helping others, and we'll get through the other side in the best position that we possibly can.Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. I'm confident of it. Absolutely confident of it.Kelly Molson: Good. I'm really glad to hear that. Last question for you, we always end our podcast by asking our guests for a book that they love or a book that's helped shape their career in some way. Can you suggest one for us today?Bernard Donoghue: Actually, if I'm going to be really, really honest I'm not sure that I'd be in my job today were it not for Lady Bird books, that I had when I was a kid. Everything from Marie Curie to the plant life of Africa through Joan of Arc through to Christopher Columbus. Honestly, those Lady Bird books ignited my curiosity and the more I got, the more I started just reading about heritage and history and sciences and those kinds of things. Bernard Donoghue: Yeah. I mean, it's not quite Brideshead Revisited but if I was going to be completely honest, it would be the collection of Lady Bird books that my parents got for me from car boot sales and secondhand shops when I was a kid.Kelly Molson: Oh, I love that. I can remember them all lined up on the bookshelf as well with all the different coloured spines. Beautiful. All right. We'll choose one. Let's have a think, off-podcast, and we'll choose one. Then as ever, if you want to win that book when we decide what it is if you head over to our Twitter account and you retweet this episode announcement with, "I want Bernard's book" then you're going to be in with the chance of winning it.Bernard Donoghue: Actually, I have got spare copies of the Lady Bird book of London from about 1960. I'm very, very happy to donate it.Kelly Molson: Oh my gosh. Well, that would be fantastic. If you're happy to do that then all right, listeners, get tweeting and you could be in with the chance of winning. That's a really lovely gift. Thank you. Bernard, I've loved having you on today. Thank you so much. You are our season finale as well because we're going to have a little bit of a break over summer and we're going to come back again in October once all of you listeners will be so busy over summer with plenty to do. You'll have more interesting things to do than listen to this podcast every day. Kelly Molson: I'm really delighted that you could be our season finale. Thank you. I know how busy you are and, even more so, having had a chat today. We'll put all of your contact details and everything into the show notes so people can find where you are. If you're not following Bernard on Twitter, then, one, you're a fool and, two, where have you been for the last 15 months? Because, for me, personally, if there's been anything that I've needed to understand about what the sector is going through or go and find, it's either speaking to people on this podcast or it's go and follow ALVA and Bernard on Twitter and I'll always find out the answer to what I want. Thank you for being such constant support and thank you for all of the hard work that you've been putting out there through this pandemic. Really appreciate it.Bernard Donoghue: Oh, no. It's my pleasure and for those of you who do follow me on Twitter, I can only apologise for my behaviour on Eurovision song contest night. I just got carried away and it was inappropriate.Kelly Molson: What goes on on Eurovision, stays on Eurovision, Bernard. Don't worry about that.Bernard Donoghue: Thank you very much.Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five-star review. It really helps others find us. Remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip the Queue is brought to you by rubber cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.Download our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Doubling Your Visitor NumbersIf you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcastIf you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this episode.Competition ends August  27th 2021. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references:https://www.rubbercheese.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellymolsonhttps://twitter.com/TheChiefCheesehttps://www.skipthequeue.fm/https://twitter.com/Skip_the_Queuehttps://www.painshill.co.uk/https://twitter.com/PGriffiths_PHP Transcription:Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip The Queue, a podcast for people working in, or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip The Queue.In today's episode, everything has been turned on its head. Paul Griffiths, Director of Painshill Park, is interviewing me about what it really takes to launch a podcast, and why we started Skip The Queue in the first place. I think I should probably be worried about the ice breaker questions.Paul Griffiths: Hello, and welcome to this latest edition of Skip The Queue. And I'm your guest presenter today, Paul Griffiths, and I'm delighted to have a very special guest for you today, Chief Cheese herself, Kelly Molson. Kelly, welcome to Skip The Queue.Kelly Molson: Thank you for welcoming me to my podcast. Paul Griffiths: All right, it's an honour. I know we've been trying to get you on the show for a long time, so it's great to finally get there. Now, we're here today to talk about how you made a podcast, and how you turned Skip The Queue into the ultimate podcast for visitor attractions. But, before we do that, of course, regular listeners will know, we have to start with our ice breaker questions. Kelly, are you ready for some ice breaker questions?Kelly Molson: No, I don't think I am, if I'm completely honest. I'm starting to feel like this is a big mistake.Paul Griffiths: No, no. Well just think, all the people you've had on, and all the questions you've asked them...Kelly Molson: I am.Paul Griffiths: I think we're going very easy on you like you do for your guests. You hope you'll not get difficult questions. Now Kelly, through the series of podcasts, I think we've all learned little bits about you from various things you've said, or say. So, I've tried to theme these questions slightly on your interests. So, I know you're a big fan of all things '80s, so particularly music. So, I want to know, and our guests want to know, what is your favourite '80s dance floor filler of all time?Kelly Molson: Oh, okay. Do you know what, so this is really weird because we were just talking about '80s music on our morning catch up with the team. Because one of my team members... So, we've got a password system that we built ourselves, and it's called Kenny Loggins.Paul Griffiths: Nice.Kelly Molson: And one of... Yeah, I know, great, right? But one of our team was like, "Who's Kenny Loggins?" I lost my mind. Okay, so I think a great '80s dance floor filler, it's got to be Wham, hasn't it? I feel like something like Club Tropicana.Paul Griffiths: Nice.Kelly Molson: Would be a good choice. But I do, on the theme of Kenny Loggins, I do love a bit of Footloose, and I also am a massive Top Gun fan. So, Highway To The Danger Zone. I mean, is there anything more '80s than that?Paul Griffiths: It's the perfect song, isn't it? The Aviator sunglasses. Funny enough you should mention Club Tropicana, my son Barney, who I think I got mentioned before on Skip The Queue, his class got the '80s as an era for world music decade. Each class got a decade. And they had to vote on what song they wanted to sing and dance to. But Club Tropicana didn't make it. Kelly Molson: Oh.Paul Griffiths: They had Club Tropicana, Madonna's Holiday, or Madness' Our House. And they went for Our House as a class vote.Kelly Molson: Oh right. I'm disappointed. It's the spirit of the '80s for me.Paul Griffiths: Absolutely. Okay, now we all know that you are a big Spurs fan, so we're going to give you an option here, you've got to pick one of these two strikers, who is going to play for Spurs forever. But the one you reject is off to play for the Arsenal forever. Kelly Molson: Oh.Paul Griffiths: So, will you take Harry Kane upfront for Spurs forever, or will you an in his prime Gary Lineker to play for Spurs forever? The other's off to The Emirates Stadium. Kelly Molson: Oh, God.Paul Griffiths: Now, I'll give you some help here, maybe. Lineker scored 80 goals in 138 games for the Spurs. Kane's, at the time of recording, 166 goals in 242 games. Obviously, a lot more games played now with European football. But, who are you going to take, and who's off to The Emirates?Kelly Molson: Oh my God. This is awful. This is a dreadful question if you're a Tottenham fan, because Gary Lineker, Gary Lineker was just, I mean, he was just an absolute hero. Oh, and I can't imagine him. No, God, this is dreadful. I'm going to have to go Lineker. Yeah, no, I'd have to, because I just feel like I couldn't live with watching him on the telly, and him having played for Arsenal. No. I'd have to go for Lineker. I know that doesn't work out in terms of how many goals, and stuff, but...Paul Griffiths: No, but that ratio [crosstalk 00:04:58].Kelly Molson: It's from my childhood. Yeah, I couldn't bear that.Paul Griffiths: Oh, you Gazza as well as a package. He comes with Gazza [inaudible 00:05:07].Kelly Molson: I wanted to marry Gazza, genuinely, when I was a kid. Gazza was like my... Yeah, I thought I was going to marry Paul Gascoigne. Maybe I had a bit of a lucky escape there, though. Paul Griffiths: I was just going say, probably better you didn't [inaudible 00:05:15]. Right, and the other thing we know you love is visitor attractions, especially as you've spent so much time on podcast talking. So, there's some either ors for you here, would you go to, Disney Park, or Merlin Park?Kelly Molson: Disney.Paul Griffiths: Museum or stately home? Kelly Molson: Stately home because I really like the grounds as well that become part of a... Like that kind of outside space too. So, stately home I think.Paul Griffiths: Good answer. National Park, or landscape garden.Kelly Molson: Oh, that would be National Park.Paul Griffiths: Fair enough.Kelly Molson: I'm going to feel like I've upset... I'm going to upset someone along the line, aren't I? But how can I not say National Parks?Paul Griffiths: And that's what ice breakers are all about, but moving on to upsetting people, of course, we have to ask you, what is your unpopular opinion?Kelly Molson: Right, well I thought about this, and I've got many. I've got one about Lorraine Kelly, but I don't know if I'm prepared to take the backlash for that one yet, so, I might save that for another day. So, I'm going to go... Oh, I've got so many, I'm going to go with afternoon tea is rubbish, absolute rubbish. I don't understand why, when you get to a certain age as a woman, every... I don't know, all of your mates are like, "Hey, let's go out for afternoon tea." Like, "Really?" I'd rather go to the pub. Kelly Molson: And, I don't understand what meal afternoon tea actually is, because you always have it at about 3.00 o'clock. So, do you have lunch before you go, because I'd be hungry by 3.00. So do you have lunch, and then you have tea? And then dinner? So you're having an extra meal. And then you never get enough sandwiches. Too much sweet stuff, not enough sandwiches. And you have it with tea. I just don't get it. It's just not for me.Paul Griffiths: That's a really well thought out answer, Kelly, there. And I have to say, I'm with you on a lot of those points, although, as someone who's selling afternoon teas from this afternoon on, I'm a great fan of course. But ours do come with Prosecco, so maybe that's an added bonus.Kelly Molson: Yeah, I mean... Yeah, if it is a Prosecco based one, it elevates it slightly for me, but I still just... I don't understand the big hoo-ha about an afternoon tea. And I just... The idea of it is actually better than the reality I think. Paul Griffiths: I think that's going to be an unpopular opinion that splits a few of our listeners, but I think it's a good answer, and well thought out.Kelly Molson: Thank you.Paul Griffiths: It's okay. Thanks for coming to the show.Kelly Molson: You're very welcome.Paul Griffiths: No, it's great to have you. You know that we're all great fans of Skip The Queue, and I think we'll talk about it later, you've got an amazing, almost family, of listeners who almost become a little group that talk regularly together, et cetera. And it has been a lifeline for many over the last year, with resource, and with so much great content that's helped so many of us through lockdown, re-opening, sharing... I mean, the amount of times I've been in the car chortling at peoples' experiences because of the laughter of recognition because I've been there myself. Paul Griffiths: Now I think we want to know a little about how you set up the podcast, and I thought it would be really useful to start with because, over the podcast, we've learned a lot about you as well. But I thought it would great if you told us a bit about how you became chief cheese, and how you set up Rubber Cheese, why you got the name. I know you did tell us on another podcast, but people might not have listened to our American friends. So, just chat a bit about the background before we go into podcasting.Kelly Molson: Gosh. So, Rubber Cheese has been around for 18 years now, which is... It is the longest job that I've ever had in my entire life. I met my co-founder, Paul, when we were working at an internet company. So it was like... It was the first foray into people being able to build their own e-commerce stores. You know you've got Shopify now, where you can go on and load your own store. So, about 20 years ago, there was a version of that called iShop which is still around now. And Paul and I met working there. And I think there was just something. We just always wanted to do something for ourselves. So I think I worked there for a couple of years, got a bit of a taste for web stuff. I was a graphic designer previously to that. I used to design branding, and brochures, and marketing materials, all kinds of stuff, and packaging as well.Kelly Molson: And so, yeah, we were 24, and 25, and we just thought, "Hey, let's leave our jobs, and go and set up an agency, right? What could be difficult about that?" Paul Griffiths: What could go wrong?Kelly Molson: What could go wrong? And lots went wrong. But no, actually, it was great. It was... Look we didn't really have a huge amount of ties at that point, so it was like, "Let's just give this a go, and see what happens after a year." And about two months in, we won a really big contract with Tescos, via a friend of mine who I had recently reconnected with on Friends Reunited, which is really ageing me. Paul Griffiths: Yeah, we are ageing ourselves there, for both doing that one, yeah.Kelly Molson: Massively. And just... It started there really, so we won this big contract with Tescos, it was a two-year contract, it put us in a really great position of then being able to go, "Okay, well great, our rent's paid." And we could then start to look at clients that we were working with, and just grew quite organically. It was just the two of us for five years. And then we took on our first full-time employee, who... She came in as a designer. So she took my design role, and then that was at the point where I became Chief Cheese. So I then had to stop learning about design, so to speak, and start learning a lot about spreadsheets, and pipelines, and sales forecasts, and all the stuff that was really hugely complicated to my creative brain. Kelly Molson: And it's just gone from strength to strength really. So we've been really, incredibly lucky. I mean, there's seven of us. We're not a huge, huge agency, but we work with global brands, and I just think we've been so incredibly fortunate over the years to work with some amazing clients. Kelly Molson: And the last six, seven years, a lot of them have been within the tourism attractions sector, which is where we end up today.Paul Griffiths: What about the name, how did you come up with Rubber Cheese, because it is fabulous?Kelly Molson: Thank you. I really want to tell you that there's an amazing story behind it, but it's so dull. So Paul and I were, again, this is nearly 20 years ago, we were teaching ourselves to use Flash animation, which was all the rage back then. And we needed a website where we could upload stuff, and test it out, and see if it was working. And Paul was like, "Oh, we'll buy a domain. Rubber Cheese, that'll do." So we just bought this domain, and then when we left the company, we said, "Well, we'll take that domain with us, we'll buy it, and take it with us." Kelly Molson: And that was it. There was no... It was just, "Okay, well great, we've got this ridiculous name, that will draw some attention, won't it?" So, I'd love to say from a branding perspective, you should really think about your name, and what that means. But we didn't do any of that whatsoever. It just became this odd name. But it was quite... It was quite funny because when we'd start to go networking events, or even just a bank to pay in a cheque, how retro is that? You'd get asked, "What is Rubber Cheese?" And you'd end up having these great conversations with people about what it was. Sometimes I'd go to a networking event and people would go, "We've been waiting for you to turn up, because we really wanted to know what Rubber Cheese is." And it was like, "Oh, this works in a way." Because people want to talk to you and find out a little bit more. I think we did... We might have thought about changing the name at one point, but it's there to stay.Paul Griffiths: Perfect. And then now, she's been chief cheese, what more could you want?Kelly Molson: Exactly.Paul Griffiths: So, from Rubber Cheese, and obviously you've said, in the last six, seven years you've been focusing... Well, not focusing, but doing a lot of visitor attractions, talk a little bit about how you set up Skip The Queue, and what made you do that and why, if you're working in a number of sectors, you thought actually tourism, we'll focus on visitor attractions.Kelly Molson: So we have worked in lots of different sectors over the years. We've been really lucky. But what happened is, we started working so... I mentioned a global client earlier, we've been working with Pernod Ricard for, probably about 10 years, in various forms. And probably, it must have been about five or six years ago, that we started talking to them about the Plymouth Gin Distillery Visitors' Center, a fabulous place. And we were contracted to build a platform for them, which was a ticket booking platform. And what was really great about that project is, it was our first foray into understanding the visitor experience, and the experience economy, and a tourist attraction, and a visitor attraction, and what challenges they had. And it was the best project. Everybody loved working on this project. And it was such a good learning experience for us, and so that worked really well for them. Kelly Molson: They then rolled it out to the Beefeater Distillery, and then we've been working it again with four of the Whiskey Distilleries up in Scotland as well. And so, over those three years, four years that we've worked with them, we've just built up this huge amount of knowledge about what they were doing, and their challenges, and how we could make things work better for them, which then led to winning other projects in that sector. So, it was fabulous that we worked with Eureka, The National Children's Museum, who are just wonderful. If you haven't been there, please go. Find a child to take so that you can go. It's definitely, it's worth it, you know.Paul Griffiths: Brilliant. One of your podcasts with you a few episodes ago and listen to a chat about the new Eureka, that's really inspiring. I think everyone then was like, "I want to go, I want to go." Kelly Molson: Oh definitely. Yeah. And the new centre is going to be incredible, I cannot wait for next year when that opens.Paul Griffiths: We'll go with our Crocs and socks on. Kelly Molson: Oh, Michelle. Michelle. No Crocs and socks. Please don't do that. So yeah. It came from there really, and I think what was interesting is that all of the team are very much... We're all people that spend our money on doing things, rather than buying stuff if that makes sense. Paul Griffiths: Yeah, it does.Kelly Molson: We want to spend our money on things that make memories, so we love to travel, Lee and I, we travel a lot. We like to go to different places, we like to... Even like Christmas presents, we don't really buy each other stuff, we'll go, "Okay, well, why don't we go to the theatre, or why don't we go and..." That's what we would rather do with the money that we have. And we just spoke to the team, and said, "Look, we've never done this before, but we'd really like to focus all of our attention on one sector, what do you think?" And everyone was up for it. Everyone was behind it. And that's really where the idea came from because although we'd been working in that sector, we didn't know enough, it wasn't broad enough for us. So the podcast was a way for us to learn more from people. Paul Griffiths: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Kelly Molson: And so that's how we came up with the idea of starting it.Paul Griffiths: I should have said earlier actually, I must say thank you to a number of regular listeners who have emailed in or LinkedIn or Twitter with questions. And lots of these, I hope I'm covering in the next bit of the show. And a number of questions that people have sent in. And a lot of people are interested, Kelly, to know how you initially set this up from a brainwave of, "Let's do a podcast." To recording and turning Skip The Queue into what it is. But how did you start up in that sense?Kelly Molson: So, I guess there are quite a few facets to it really because you have to think about why you're doing it in the first place. So that for me is the first starting point. It's like, "Why are you doing it?" So, what are your objectives with the podcast, and ours was really... It was initially about education. We wanted to understand about the sector, understand about people's individual challenges, what the sector was going through. Good things, bad things. Kelly Molson: We wanted to meet people in the sector, so again, we wanted to expand our network. We really wanted to create a platform where we celebrated the people that worked in attractions as well, because we thought that was really important. There's a lot of things that happen behind the scenes in attractions that you don't realise when you visit them. And even the people that you're talking to front of house, you don't realise the kind of pressures that they're under, or you're sometimes not aware of the service that they're delivering you. So it was like, "Well, why don't we celebrate that?" And then, ultimately, it was a way of raising our profile in the sector as well. Kelly Molson: So from a marketing perspective, a podcast is a really great thing to have, because it can position you right in the centre of that industry that you want to be part of. So that was a big part of it. And then, we had to look at how we were going to do this. And what skills did we have internally to be able to set up a podcast? And so, I think Paul and I were like, "Okay, well we can host." I do a lot of public speaking for the agency anyway, so I was quite comfortable talking, although a podcast is very different from standing up in front of hundreds of people at an event. It's... In some ways, it's more uncomfortable, but I'll tell you why it started off being a bit more uncomfortable. And then you have to think about what format your podcast is going to be. Kelly Molson: So, is it going to be you just delivering your knowledge, or are you going to try and get guests in? What are those topics going to be? What are you going to talk about? How are you going to find the guests that you want to come on? Are they going to say, "Yes?" Is anyone going to say, "Yes," they want to come on this podcast, I don't know. What kind of content is there going to be? And then you have to really think about where your audience is because anyone can set up a podcast but not everyone is going to find it, and listen to it. So you have to think about, "Is there an element of community building that you need to do around this podcast as well?" Where you promote it, and how you get that out to the right people. And then, once you've done all of that, you have to think about, "Okay, well, who's going to edit this podcast? How are we going to actually make it a thing?" I can sit and record something. Kelly Molson: None of us internally had any podcast editing skills, and we made the decision really early, that nobody was going to learn that. It was going to be too much of a time drain for us. So we were going to outsource that element, so we work with Steve Folland, who is super. We knew Steve, he works and is based locally to where our office is. But he works on some really awesome podcasts. And he actually has his own podcast, Doing It For The Kids. He's got a really great podcast for the freelance community as well. And then it's down to, where are you going to host the podcast, you need some kind of platform to host it on? What are you going to record it on? And how are you going to promote it? So, we talked about building a community. If you're going to promote a podcast, you need things like graphics created. Are you going to have our podcast transcribed? That was really important to us. Kelly Molson: We wanted to make the podcast as accessible as possible to everyone, so not everyone can listen to a podcast. So we make sure that it's transcribed, so you need to have that done so that people can read the podcast if they want to. So there is a huge amount of things to decide on before you go, "Right, let's do it."Paul Griffiths: It's interesting. Lots of the points you've touched on, I'd like to delve into a bit more in detail, if we can, over the next few questions. A lot of people... One of the things that came up a lot when we put a plea out for questions, and what people want to know was costs. Because you just described things that people aren't doing free of charge. And I wondered if you could give an idea of what it costs to do an episode, or what it costs to set up, or whatever figures you're happy to give. It's just, I think a lot of people would be interested to know what sort of budgets they would need if they're looking to set up a podcast.Kelly Molson: Yeah, totally. So, I've thought about this in quite great detail. So because we knew initially we were not going to edit, we didn't have to buy any editing equipment. So I'm really sorry I can't answer any questions about that because genuinely, the best thing that we ever did was hire Steve to do the editing. He's a specialist. He makes everything sound brilliant. He even makes me sound funny sometimes. But what we did purchase were things like a really good microphone. So this is my microphone. A blue yeti microphone. Which was about £120, £150, somewhere around that. But that's a really great investment. It was a bit of trial and error actually, we bought other microphones that weren't that great, and ended up going back, but this has been the best one that we've bought. You need good headphones. These are average headphones. My good headphones I actually left at the office, and I haven't been back there for a while. So a good pair of headphones, noise cancelling ones are normally quite good. I don't know, 30, 40 quid for a pair like that. You could go higher if you want, but something around that price bracket would be fine. Editing an episode is an interesting one. You can hear my little dog barking in the background. Steve will edit her out.Paul Griffiths: Oh really?Kelly Molson: He'll work his magic somehow. You probably won't be able to hear her. But that for us is worth the weight in gold. So...Paul Griffiths: Desperate to be on the show, isn't she?Kelly Molson: She's such a drama queen. She's just... She craves attention. I mean, I wonder where she gets that from?Paul Griffiths: Ooh.Kelly Molson: But then you need to think about your site hosting. So we host our podcast on a platform called Simple Cast. That's about £15 per month. We record through Zoom. And Steve curses me for recording through Zoom because the sound quality is not great. We used to record through a platform called Zencaster, which again, is a cloud-based platform. It's about £15 a month. Now, the reason we stopped recording through Zencaster is, it became a bit complex for the guests, and sometimes some of the guests didn't really understand what they need to do, even if I'd sent instructions. People are really busy. They don't always read the things that they need to before they come on, which is understandable. Zoom, everyone was really comfortable using, because they were using it every day for all of their meetings. So it just became easier for us to do Zoom. So we've got a pro Zoom account. But obviously, we use that for other things as well, so I don't really tie that into podcast costs. But then you need to think about who's going to create your promotion graphics for this. We're lucky, we've got in-house designers. Kelly Molson: We've got an amazing VA who supports me hugely with our podcasts. So we've got templates set up, she will then create all of the podcast graphics from the templates that we've already got in place, but that is potentially a cost that someone needs to think about.Paul Griffiths: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Kelly Molson: Then I said we get it transcribed, each episode. It's roughly about $40 to get it transcribed. So there are lots of little things that you don't think about, that you need to think about in advance. We also run a competition. So there is a cost to that in the fact that you have to purchase the books that people recommend, sometimes they recommend two or three when I ask for one. And then that puts my budget up. And then the postage for that, and things like that. So I think we worked it out that the podcast probably costs about five, to six grand a year.Paul Griffiths: Oh. Kelly Molson: Which isn't a huge amount if you've got... It depends on what your marketing budget is, but it also then depends on what the returns, or what your expected returns are for that podcast, and for that amount.Paul Griffiths: Yeah. Kelly Molson: So you have to work out... And that takes you back to why are you doing this in the first place? And is this a worthwhile investment for you?Paul Griffiths: I think that that would be one of my later questions actually. Thank you for that Kelly, that's really honest, and I think that's really useful for people. Because I think that's one of the things that a lot of people, me included, probably felt that you go on Zoom, you record speaking to someone, bang, it's up live. But actually, there's so much more work behind it which is just quite frightening.Paul Griffiths: You obviously manage to attract brilliant guests, and I think they get better and better all the time, but how did you go about... Well, firstly can you tell us about how you got the initial guest, because you had no podcast, you were starting up. You had to invite 10 people on, and you had some fabulous people in those early days, real industry leaders coming on the show. And then, how do you now go about getting guests and picking topics, and thinking about what people might want to hear about?Kelly Molson: Yeah, so it was really difficult to get guests when we first started because you haven't got anything to show them. You've no proof of concept, you're just getting in touch with people and saying, "Hey, we've started this podcast, it's about this subject, we'd really love you to come on and talk to us, how do you feel about it?" And we would get emails back from people, and they'd be like, "Well, can you send us an episode? What is it? How many listeners have you got? How long..." We were like, "Well, zero listeners at this moment in time. Hey, we're listening." So, it was quite tricky. We lucked out a little bit, I'm not going to lie. So we had the CEO of Paradise Wildlife Park come on. Which, for us, was quite a big coup, because they're quite local to where we are, but the luck that we had is, one of our team members was actually related to her. So we had a little bit of an ins there already.Kelly Molson: And then I think some of the others we, again, it was just... We maybe just got them at the right time. They had something that they wanted to talk about, that they were quite keen to get out in the world. And then, actually, it was a case of, I stalked people a little bit. So, I went to the visitor attractions conference at the end of 2018, or no, it was in 2019. So, I'd been stalking people that had spoken at the attractions conference previously, and saying, "Oh, I really loved your talk, it was really interesting, I wondered if you could come on and talk about the same thing on our podcast?" And that's how I got a few of the early, of the second series people, come on. Kelly Molson: So Jules Ozbek, who I think is fantastic, I heard her speak at the Visitor Attractions Conference at the end of 2019, and then I... I basically just stalked her a little bit on LinkedIn and asked her really kindly if she would come on the podcast, which she agreed to. And also Abigail Olive, as well, who was awesome, from Castle Howard. Her story about... She shared the love story.Paul Griffiths: Yes.Kelly Molson: You must go back and listen to this episode because it's a brilliant story. But it was about how they... There's a wonderful love story that had happened that then brought them all of these incredible Chinese tourists to the place. And she was fabulous. And I think once people hear the calibre of guests that you can get, it sort of spirals a little bit from then.Kelly Molson: But those first ones were... It was really, really tough. And I just think you've just got to keep ploughing on, and asking people. People will say no, but don't be offended by that. Some of the people that have said no, would probably say yes now if I went back because I can showcase what we've done, and who's been on.Paul Griffiths: And so, how about now Kelly, do you have a long waiting list of guests lined up, you plan your series, don't you? So, are you finding it easier to get guests now, how do you go about it now, now you're that you're already onto this podcast?Kelly Molson: So, I still stalk people, if I'm honest. So, what I think, what's great is that the guests we've had on... There is something really lovely about the attractions sector, in that, there is a community there already.Paul Griffiths: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.Kelly Molson: And what is wonderful is that we've had guests on, that I've then been able to say, "Who do you think that we should have on? Who do you think has got a really interesting story?" And I can remember doing this with Carly Straughan, and Johnny Lyle as well, both of them. I had really good chats with them after their episodes. And said, "Could you recommend some people that you think that would be really great for us?" And they're so well connected, and they know everybody in the industry, and they were like, "Yeah." And they sent me lists of people. They were like, "You need to speak to this person, this person would be great." And so, that's how it spiralled. But because they knew them, obviously those guests come on, and then they knew more people and more people. So, that's one of the best ways, is like saying to your guests, "Who do you think should come on and talk about this? Because you know the industry better than we do right now." Kelly Molson: And then I do stalk people. I go on to Twitter, and like I said, there is quite an active attractions community on Twitter.Kelly Molson: And I see who people are talking to, or I see Blooloop is a fantastic resource, Attractions Magazine is another great resource. I see stories that come up in there, and I think, "Wow, that would make a great podcast episode, let's talk to them." So I've got my eye on the Black County Living Museum at the moment. So, I'm doing a little bit of stalking at the moment, because I'd love them to come on and talk about their Tik Tok fame.Kelly Molson: And so, stuff like that happens where you see what's going on, and you think, "Great, they would be awesome. And then you just reach out to them." But you do... I do get people to email us. Not very often actually, but occasionally people email us and say, "I think this person would make a great guest on the podcast, or we've got this thing that we'd love to talk about." I have to be really conscious that there are sometimes will contact that... I don't want the podcast ever to be salesy.Paul Griffiths: Right yeah.Kelly Molson: For me, it is an education piece, and it's really important that it stays an education piece, so I'll try to get that balance right between the kind of people that do come on, and what they're talking about and those topics. So, sometimes people will say, "I've got this thing that I've launched, and I want to come and talk about." And I don't know that that's a good fit for the audience at that point. So...Paul Griffiths: Fab. And what about the promotion of a podcast, from the early days of getting it known, I guess was word of mouth. And now, how do you promote it? How do you keep gaining more listeners, and how have you got your success?Kelly Molson: Well, it's lovely that you think it's successful. It is interesting because I think that success is really subjective. So, again, it goes back to your objectives, and what you are trying to achieve from it. Because our top one was always about education, we weren't that focused on what the numbers were. So, people are, "Oh, how many downloads do you get?" It's not really that relevant to us because that's not what we were... We weren't aiming to be number one in the podcast charts. So, the way that we've promoted it is by understanding where the community is. So, where do the people that would be our listeners hang out, and it's mostly Twitter. Kelly Molson: It's a very active community on Twitter, so that's really where we do most of our promotion. So we've got a Twitter account, specifically for Skip The Queue. We will post out on there when the new episodes are coming, and we'll make graphics and snippets, and we'll do as much as we can to promote the guest.Kelly Molson: It's actually probably more about promoting the guest than it is about promoting the podcast if that makes sense? So we really try to highlight those people and raise them up. And what's great is that so many people then help us spread the word. So, the best people to share, and promote the podcasts, are the guests that come on. And we've been really lucky that we've had great guests that have wanted to do that. We've had other great guests that have come on, and that's it. They've come on, they've done the podcast, they've shared their knowledge, we don't hear from them again. They're not, they haven't shared any of the Tweets, or any of the posts. And that's fine. If that's not their bag. But then, you do get a huge proportion of people that really want to. They're really proud of the fact that they've been on. They want to share what they've done with other people. And that's really where you see the numbers start to grow, and the interaction happen. We've got some really incredible loyal fan base.Kelly Molson: You are one of them Paul. You're always super generous with sharing what you think about the podcast, or what you've learned from it. And Mark Ellis does as well, from the National Arboretum. And that's how you spread the word. There are other things that you can do, which we haven't done as actively as we could. But things like going on other people's podcasts is a really good way of promoting your own podcast.Paul Griffiths: Right.Kelly Molson: And I was very kindly invited on the Attraction Pros podcast, which is our... It's the US equivalent. Josh and Matt who run that are fabulous. And honestly, all of our listeners should subscribe to that if you're not already because they get some really interesting guests on there, and they ask great questions as well. So that was a really lovely opportunity for us to cross-promote. And Matt and Josh have both been back on our podcast as well. So hopefully, that's helped and crossed the big pond. Kelly Molson: Sometimes it is also about getting a big name to come on the podcast too. And that drives up your listeners because they... So I reached out, oh God, I was so nervous about doing this. So I asked the ex VP of Disney if he would come on the podcast. And I was terrified. I sent this email on LinkedIn thinking, "He's never going to reply to me." And honestly, five minutes later he emailed back, and was like, "Yeah, I'll come on." "Oh God, now I've got to actually interview him." I was so nervous. But that was incredible, the value that that gave to the podcast, and how it was able to position it. After that, no one said no to coming on the podcast since that point so...Paul Griffiths: Lee Cockerell and you really are hard-hitting, aren't you? And of course, I think from his perspective, I guess because he's got a brilliant weekly podcast. Dan's got a brilliant weekly podcast. So they are, as you said, going on other people's podcast as a guest is a great way. And you said, was a brilliant episode of you on Attractions Pro, as was then, Matt and Josh came on yours. You talk about not worrying about the stats. Is there a little bit of you Kelly, that thinks it's like Top of The Pops, back in the old days, and you're wanting to see where you are on that list, and seeing how many people are listening, I know I would?Kelly Molson: I don't check it very frequently. I'll be completely honest.Paul Griffiths: Really.Kelly Molson: No, I don't check it very frequently. I started to do a top three on Twitter. Like the top three downloaded episodes, because I thought that would be interesting for listeners to know. But I did check it before we recorded this because I knew you were going to ask, so the most downloaded episode at the moment is The Making Of Harry Potter.Paul Griffiths: Oh yeah. It was a-Kelly Molson: With Geoff Spooner So, that was a great episode. And that, at the moment is on about 270 downloads. So, that's like 270 individual brand new downloads. And at the minute I think we're just about to hit 6,000 downloads in total. I don't really even know what that means though. So, again, I'm just not that bothered about it. It is a niche podcast. It's not for everybody.Paul Griffiths: No.Kelly Molson: And it was never made to be for everybody as well. So, I just think, for me, the numbers don't really matter that much.Paul Griffiths: Good answer. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? And I suppose for you it's a quality, not quantity because you're getting some people who are in that business, and going back to your original objectives, might well want to work with a digital agency, and you guys are therefore on the tips of everyone's tongues I guess, which is achieving your objective.Kelly Molson: Hopefully, yes. If it's achieving one of the objectives, that would be wonderful.Paul Griffiths: Yeah. Absolutely. The next question was all about the tech side, and I think you've already talked about a lot of things like the equipment you need, but also... So, when you're planning your episodes, so your guest has agreed to come on. You've contacted them, and stalked them through various social medias, they know they're being followed, and it's like, "Better say yes, otherwise Kelly is never going to leave me alone." Tell me a bit about what you do after that to prepare your guests, or to plan the episode. Kelly Molson: So, a lot of the time I will have invited that guest on for a specific reason. So, there will have been something that I've seen, that they've been talking about, that I'll think, "That would be really great to understand a bit more about that, and I think our listeners would like that as well." So, that's normally how it starts. Sometimes we have a pre podcast chat, so it might just be a five or 10-minute chat about what we're going to talk about. Sometimes it might just be, I'll email over and say, "Look, I heard you speak about this topic, I think it would be great to come on to the podcast, how do you fancy it?" If they say yes, then I work out a few pre questions. So, I don't like it to be super structured, I mean, obviously, there is a structure to the podcast. Kelly Molson: You all know that there's ice breaker questions coming. You know that I'm going to ask for an unpopular opinion. But the rest of the podcast is... I try to structure it in a way where there's three or four key questions that I really want to understand, but the rest of it is quite conversational, so it can go off on a bit of a tangent, and sometimes that's a bit more relaxed for the guest. But also, some guests, they like to know what we're going to be talking about, and what they're going to be asked. So, by giving them three or four questions that structure the topic of that conversation, it makes them feel a bit more at ease because they know what to expect. So that's what I do. I just... And then there'll be other times where I just think, "This person's really great, and they would make a really great guest. I think they'd be a great guest." But I might not have seen anything that I think they've been showcasing, or they've been talking about. Kelly Molson: So then we'll have a chat and say, "What could you share with the listeners?" What would you think would be relevant for them right now? Have you been through anything recently that's been a learning curve for you? Have you had any challenges that you're happy to come on and talk about?" Or, "Is something really exciting just about to happen that you think our listeners would be really interested in understanding more about why that's happened?" So it's a bit of a mixture.Paul Griffiths: Brilliant. So, I'm sure some of our listeners today have been listening in because they are thinking about starting a podcast, or they've... And I think it's been really great, Kelly, you've been so honest. Because I think it isn't an easy process it seems. There's a lot of work involved in it. I think it's great that people know that. But if people were thinking of starting a podcast, what are your key tips, or advice you'd give them?Kelly Molson: So I think that it's going back to what we talked about initially, so it's, "Why are you doing this in the first place? What are your objectives for starting a podcast?" And they're going to be very different, depending on what you do as an organisation, whether you're a supplier to the industry, whether you are the National Football Museum, for example, came on. And they talked a lot about why they started their podcast. Paul Griffiths: Yes of course.Kelly Molson: And a lot of that was to facilitate the fact that they weren't open, they'd got all of these fantastic artefacts, shirts, all of those things that they could talk about, and have conversations about. And they've got a lot of content already that they knew that they could do something with. So the podcast seemed like a natural way of getting that out to the public when they couldn't visit the centre. So, go right back, and think about what it is that you want to achieve by setting up this podcast. Kelly Molson: And that might education, it might be getting something out to the world that you've got to share. It might be... It genuinely might just be, you're an agency and you want to position yourselves in a certain sector. There's other agencies that we know have podcasts who work in the tech sector, for instance. So they focus on having tech guests, and those kinds of conversations. And then you really need to think about where your audience is, because I don't think it's enough to just have a podcast. You really want to be building some kind of community around that podcast. Or it's just output all the time. There's no engagement. There's no... It doesn't go to a deeper level. We've had so many incredible guests on there now. And a lot of those guests have turned into people that I can just call on about stuff. Or I can email and say, "How about this?" Or, "Oh, I saw this thing that I think that you'd really love. Here you go"Kelly Molson: And I like that. I think that there's a real positive energy to that. So, really think about what your objectives are? Who your audience is? Where they are? What do they want? What does your audience want to listen to? What is going to be relevant to them right now? We launched Skip The Queue in the middle of 2019, which was very different to the middle of 2020. And so, when we brought it back in 2020, for us, it was all about, "Okay, maybe COVID situation has given us a little bit of an opportunity here, because our audience is going to be, probably, far more engaged this year than they would last year. They've got a lot of time on their hands, sadly, with venues being closed and people on furlough. What would help them right now? What would be useful to them right now?"Kelly Molson: And so, we pitched it as, "Let's get people on that can share their experiences of how this has impacted them, what they're doing to plan for re-opening. What things are they thinking about past COVID? How has this changed what their marketing plans might look like? How has this changed their digital strategy, and what that might look like?" Kelly Molson: So, really, really think about what's relevant to the audience that you're trying to get in front of, at that time. Yeah, I think they're my top tips.Paul Griffiths: You've mentioned objectives quite a bit, Kelly, which is fascinating during this. And do you feel, when you sit back or look back at why you started it out, you've ticked those objectives? I mean, it sounds like you have, but do you feel that you have?Kelly Molson: Yeah, I do. And I feel really proud of what we've achieved actually. I think that I've always been quite honest and said that I think that actually, the podcast was the thing that got me through last year, because although we work in the sector, we were very fortunate to be relatively busy last year as a digital agency, because of the situation, and people having to pivot, and make those changes. But it was still really, really tough, and for me, being able to speak to someone new and really interesting every week, or every couple of weeks, that could come on the podcast, was just a bit of lifesaver really. It really helped me. But yeah. In terms of the objectives, has it ticked all the boxes? I mean, absolutely. I mean, what we know now about the sector, and what we know about the people in it, and the network that we have in it, is phenomenal. I couldn't have asked for more from it. Kelly Molson: And it has really brought some really interesting things. So, for example, I talked about going on the Attractions Pro's podcast. Because of our podcast, we've been asked to go on to other people's podcast. And that's helped promote our services. And our services, and what we do isn't really what we talk about on the podcast that much. So, that's been really nice. We've been asked to speak at webinars. We were always going to exhibit at the Visitor Attractions conference last year, which we did. But I think the fact that we had the podcast helped me then get a speaker slot at that as well, because they could hear that I was, maybe not a bumbling idiot. Kelly Molson: I don't know? So, maybe that bolstered my chance of getting a speaker slot. And we've been asked to contribute to publications, we, like I said, we've got an amazing network, we've built up all of these fantastic connections and community. But actually, it has brought leads as well. It has brought us leads and things into the business, where people have said, "Well, I was looking for an agency and found you, but then I heard the podcast as well." And so it reinforces your understanding of the sector, which I think makes people feel more trustworthy towards you. And more confident that you know... You'll understand what's important to them in their challenges.Paul Griffiths: Yeah. No, I think it's really done that. And moving forward, obviously, the last year has been successful, as we've said earlier, some amazing guests. What do you see... How do you take it forward? How do you take Skip The Queue forward, is it more of the same, or do you branch off into different things? Or what do you do next?Kelly Molson: That's a really good question. So, there's lots of things that I've been thinking about doing. We are going to have a little bit of a Summer break.Paul Griffiths: Yeah.Kelly Molson: And we're going to come back in October. So, just because we've been doing this continuously for a whole year now. And it wasn't what I expected. I always thought we'd do... I thought we'd make it very seasonal. So we'd do eight or 10 episodes, and then have a break, and then do more. But I loved it so much last year, and genuinely it was keeping my spirits up, I said to Paul, "I'm just going to carry on. I'm just going to keep going through." But it is definitely time for a little bit of a rest while all you guys open up this Summer, and go crazy with all the visitors that are going to come. I might just put my feet up for a little while.Kelly Molson: I definitely want to do some panel events. There's some things that Hannah and I, Hannah Monteverde from BeWILDerwood, spoke about. About women in the sector, which I think would be really interesting. Paul Griffiths: Yeah.Kelly Molson: And I'd like to get more... I'd like to do more panel events in terms of hot topics in the sector as well. And so, have three or four panellists that come on and talk about things. I really would like to do an event. I would love to do some kind of Skip The Queue event. I don't know what that would be, whether it would be like a little mini-conference or a live podcast event. I think live podcast... Steve would probably go insane listening to this, and go, "No, don't do it." But I think I would really like to do something where we get everybody together because it has really felt like a bit of a community effort where people have got behind us.Paul Griffiths: Yeah.Kelly Molson: And it would be really nice to put something on when we've got everyone together when we're able to do. So, I've got something like that ticking around in my head. Definitely more of the same as well. If that's what everyone wants to hear. But I take this opportunity to ask, what would our listeners want? If you're happy with the way it's going, great. We'll do more of that. If there are extra things that you'd love us to do, or you think would be really interesting, then email me at kelly@rubbercheese.com. Don't be shy.Paul Griffiths: Brilliant. Kelly, thank you so much for sharing everything with us today, but more importantly, thank you for everything you've done in the last year. These podcasts have been a lifeline for so many of us. We've all loved listening, and you've built up this family of regular listeners who comment all the time. And I know people look forward to it, and can't wait to download and listen. And you see that now, how quickly are responding to your episodes, and we've commented on it. But I know, from what you've told us today, you've really got into just how much work it is. So, on behalf of everyone, all the listeners, thank you so much.Paul Griffiths: But we can't finish, of course, without a book recommendation, and I hope you've got several. So you have to drive your marketing budget through the roof, so, Kelly, I want to know a book that you would recommend, and our listeners can get by re-Tweeting this episode, and saying, "I want Kelly's book." On Twitter. So, what is your book recommendation? Kelly Molson: So, this is the book that I have probably recommended the most throughout my career. And I read it about a year into having set up Rubber Cheese, well maybe about six to eight months into setting up Rubber Cheese, because somebody said to me, "Oh you need to get out, and you need to start networking." And I was like, "What the hell is that then? I don't know. What is networking? What do you do?" And they said, "Oh you go to meetings, and you meet loads of interesting people, and you just talk to them." And I was like, "All right." I was 25. I was like, "Okay, that sounds weird, but I'll do it." But somebody recommended Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends And Influence People.Paul Griffiths: Really?Kelly Molson: And it is a really old book, but it is genuinely the book that I credit with changing my whole perspective about how to listen to people. About how to have really good conversations. And ultimately, it is the book that I've given out the most to people. So, I think a really lovely girl that I know, I was mentoring her for a little while a couple of years ago, and that was the first book that I sent her. And said, "Have a read of this, I think you'll really enjoy it." And it's just the one book that I've sent out religiously to people. I've made Lee read when he started his photography business. Because I just think there's something about it that just makes you really understand that it is about the other person, more than it is about you.Paul Griffiths: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Kelly Molson: And I think when you're younger, you maybe... Well, me personally, when I was younger, maybe didn't really understand that fully, about how to listen to people, and understand what was important to them, and letting them speak. So, that would be my recommendation.Paul Griffiths: Well, thank you. And as I said, if you want that book, re-Tweet this episode link, and put, "I want Kelly's book." And Kelly will send you a copy if you're the winner. Kelly Molson: I will.Paul Griffiths: If you're the one lucky winner, I should say. She won't send them out to everyone, because Kelly's budget doesn't stretch that far. Well, Kelly, thank you so much for coming on Skip The Queue, it's been so insightful, so brilliant. And thank you for coming on.Kelly Molson: Oh, you're welcome. I really enjoyed this Paul. So thank you for being a fabulous interviewer today.Paul Griffiths: You're very kind. Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip The Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five-star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions, that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes, and transcriptions from this episode, and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

Are lots of people deleting the NHS Covid app? The BBC's Technology Correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, knows what's what. And, as England prepares for the big final this weekend, we try to figure out what fans really mean when they sing "Football's Coming Home"... Adam chats to Dr Alex, from the National Football Museum, and Richard Tims, Chairman of Sheffield FC (the world's oldest official football club).   Today's Newscast was made by Ben Cooper, Georgia Coan and Alix Pickles. The Studio Director was Emma Crowe. Sam Bonham is the Assistant Editor. Dino Sofos is the Editor.

Dr Alexander Jackson is a curator at the National Football Museum, Manchester, England. He has written for The Blizzard, Soccer History and Playing Pasts and has a particular interest in early to mid-twentieth century football history. He has written, Football's Great War: Association Football on the English Home Front, 1914-1918, due for publication in Spring 2022.

Let’s celebrate the fact (to Jurgen’s disgust) how our warm-up t-shirt, worn ahead of our Liverpool match will now feature in the National Football Museum. Another youngster signs professional, lots of transfer rumours come rolling in (should we re-open the transfer centre) and will more players than just Kalvin make the Euro’s?  “Sean’s Finish It!!!” returns! REVAMPED – LET’s PLAY! Always get us on the show phone - WhatsApp, use wi-fi (as its free!) - 07747 084 311 Also – contact on our socials @ladtoleeds Be our Friend on XBox – Lad To LeedsFollow on Twitch – LadToLeedsIt’s where we game!

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.Download our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Doubling Your Visitor NumbersIf you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcastIf you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this episode.Competition ends March 31st 2021. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references:Laura is Head of Content at the National Football Museum in Manchester, UK, where she is responsible for overseeing the collections, exhibitions and communities teams. Prior to working at NFM, she held leadership roles at Oxford University Museums and the National Trust. Laura has 8 years’ experience as an independent museums consultant, a role in which she worked with museums of all types and sizes to improve resilience through transforming organisational practice, better understanding audiences, improving evaluation, and developing innovative programming. Laura holds a PhD in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester, UK, for research into resilient community engagement practice in museums.Outside of work, Laura likes going to gigs, exploring new places and visitor attractions, watching football (her own footballing ability is, sadly, non-existent), enthusing about dogs (particularly her own rescue Staffy, Chance), and spending far too much time scouring vintage shops to find the perfect 80s dress.www.nationalfootballmuseum.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/laurafcrossley/Twitter: @lfcrossley Jon is Exhibitions Manager at the National Football Museum and has worked in the sector for 15 years. He’s worked on a number of exhibitions including Curator of the show ‘Strip: How Football got Shirty’. Born in Blackpool, his seaside upbringing has had an impact on his exhibition ethos of bright colours, cheeky humour where appropriate, experimentation and “what’s the worst that could happen?!”. Prior to working at NFM, he served candyfloss to the punters at Blackpool Pleasure Beach and worked in the curatorial department at the Manchester United Museum. With a remit to lead the National Football Museum’s move into digital, Jon has co-presented the Museum’s successful podcast and developed a popular online version of the ‘Strip!’ exhibition.Outside of work, Jon is a vinyl obsessive and adores electronic pop and guitars. He supports the mighty Tangerines of Blackpool FC and is a season ticket holder at the cathedral of football, Bloomfield Road. He likes visiting attractions and travelling a lot, with a preference for open spaces where he can freely walk and drink ale (not at the same time!) in the countryside.  www.nationalfootballmuseumstrip.comTwitter: @introspective81 Transcription:Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue. A podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. In today's episode, I'm joined by two guests, Laura Crossley, Head of Content, and Jon Sutton, Exhibitions Manager at the National Football Museum. We discuss why it's helpful for museums to have a podcast and what you need to think about strategically if you're going to create one. We also talk about their new podcast, Strip!, and all of the lessons learned from creating it. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue.Kelly Molson: Jon, Laura, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Look at us as well. We've dressed for the occasion. We'll have to do a little standup, we've all got our strip on. Our favorite strip and all will become clear a little bit later why we are dressed as our favorite football teams today. Kelly Molson: Okay. As ever, we start with our lightning round. Jon, I'm coming to you first. What is the greatest movie that you have ever watched?Jon Sutton: I don't know. Karate Kid's very good. Karate Kid's a good film.Kelly Molson: With Karate Kid, are you a massive '80s fan? Is this your thing?Jon Sutton: Yeah, that's one of the films that left a great impression on me. I'm watching Cobra Kai at the moment, which is the follow-on.Kelly Molson: Can we talk about Cobra Kai? Because we were obsessed. I wasn't feeling very well, and I tucked myself up on the sofa with a duvet and Karate Kid. I was like, "Everyone keeps talking about Cobra Kai. We should do it. Let's start it tonight." Oh my God. Genuinely, did the whole two series in less than a week. We just smashed through it.Jon Sutton: Yeah, I'm stopping it. I'm calming it down because I don't want it to end. I think we got a bit giddy and then I'm calming it now because I want to... Series three is coming very soon so I want to make it that I'm there for it.Kelly Molson: So, you haven't seen the last episode yet?Jon Sutton: No, I've not seen the second, I've only just joined the party.Kelly Molson: It's feel good, isn't it? That's what I love about '80s films, they're really feel good. That was a great answer.Kelly Molson: Okay, Laura, I'm coming to you. What fictional family would you be a member of if you could be?Laura Crossley: The Simpsons. That's really obvious, isn't it? Partly because my family was absolutely obsessed with The Simpsons and even now, I find myself saying catchphrases. Like, "I have a feeling that we are going to win the lottery." Or like, I'm a vegetarian and I always quote things from the Vegetarian and I think other people know what I'm talking about but I'm like, "Oh no, it's just me and my family who know that."Jon Sutton: It was on the first day when you said, "Cowabunga dude." Laura Crossley: I skated in, in a hat. Kelly Molson: Love it.Laura Crossley: When I was younger particularly, I would get a lot of grief about basically being Lisa. Like when I was younger, I was very, very right on. I was a vegetarian and in the episode where she becomes a vegetarian, she can see bits of animals. That was exactly like me.Jon Sutton: Can you play the saxophone then?Laura Crossley: Can't play the saxophone but I could play the flute. I was in an orchestra, I could play the flute.Kelly Molson: Oh, that's close enough.Jon Sutton: Going to play the piano.Laura Crossley: And in my peak teenage years, I did go out, but I also spent early Friday evenings in Salford Youth Orchestra. So, I was really cool.Kelly Molson: You really are Lisa. You've already joined the family, you're there. Oh, I love it.Kelly Molson: Okay, we're going to go to your unpopular opinions. Jon, I'm going to come to you? What's the thing that you think is true but nobody else agrees with you on?Jon Sutton: I think it's humanity's worst invention, umbrellas should be banned really. I hate them. They're a weapon, pretty much, and particularly as people are more and more on their phones these days while they're walking down the street, if they're carrying an umbrella, you could lose an eye.Kelly Molson: Do you not think that this is an issue with people looking at their phones rather than the umbrella though?Jon Sutton: No, I think it was even before. I thought everybody hated them. Apart from Rihanna, I thought everybody hated them.Laura Crossley: I don't think I've ever hated an umbrella. I lose a lot of umbrellas. My mum once bought me 11, you know those little pocket-sized ones? She bought me 11 of them for Christmas one year. I had a whole stocking full of one pound bargain umbrellas because I just leave them in places.Jon Sutton: That's the thing, you think, "Well I don't want to spend a lot of money on them because I'm going to lose it," but if you buy a too cheap one, it's going to be inside out, probably leave things, it just doesn't stop revolving that's the problem.Kelly Molson: That's a great answer. Again, not really what I was expecting but interesting. All right, Laura, what's yours?Laura Crossley: Mine's going to sound really geeky now which is that I think that often theme parks are better at talking about history, teaching people about history and the environment than museums are.Kelly Molson: Oh wow, okay.Laura Crossley: Do you remember when we could go on holiday and things like that last year?Kelly Molson: The good times.Laura Crossley: We could go to other countries and it was really nice. I went to Florida last year and I didn't really go to Disney as a kid or anything but it was really fun last year and I nearly came back and wrote a big blog post about all the things that museums can learn from theme parks because I think they can learn absolutely loads. But one of them definitely is about teaching people about history and the environment and science because it just talks about things, you don't even realize you're learning. You think you're just on a ride or having fun or in a queue or just walking for a different land or watching a film or doing something that's just really fun and then you come out and you're like, "I've just learned about this new [inaudible 00:05:55] a new kind of animal that I didn't know about. I've learned about this really interesting thing in history that I didn't know about."Laura Crossley: Obviously, we can't see the original objects and that is a really good thing about museums but I just think the way that theme parks are quite sneaky about the way that they teach people history. Maybe it's mainly Disney because that is a big theme across Disney.Jon Sutton: I worked five years at the Pleasure Beach, Blackpool Pleasure Beach, for five years. I must admit I didn't really think about it from that point of view. I felt that I was not getting paid enough. I wasn't very good at doing candy floss either, terrible. If you asked me for a stick of candy floss and I would give you them through gritted teeth. I'd really try and shove a bag onto them because a bag was much easier to make.Kelly Molson: Oh, I always fancied a go of that though.Jon Sutton: Oh my god, it's really hard. It's so hard. Laura Crossley: Really?Jon Sutton: Particularly in Blackpool where it's windy all the time. The machine's quite dangerous as well because it spins around but you have to make sure you've got the right amount of moisture on the edge of the... You can't have too much moisture but you need some moisture for it to stick to the sides. It's really, really hard.Laura Crossley: It's like science.Kelly Molson: I've learnt so much today, I really have. I haven't even asked you any good questions yet. I've learnt loads.Jon Sutton: Museums are a breeze compared to producing candy floss.Laura Crossley: That's really interesting.Kelly Molson: I think, Laura, it's about making it fun.Laura Crossley: Yes absolutely, and immersive.Kelly Molson: Yeah, and then you don't really realize that you're learning, so you suck it in.Laura Crossley: Yeah, the other thing I really like is that it's really multi-sensory. You can hear music or read stuff and the atmosphere and so you just, yeah exactly, you don't realize you're learning. It's just really cool. Whereas at museum's I think sometimes, we don't talk enough about the story. I think sometimes it's just like, "Oh, there's another object." As Jon knows, I'm not the biggest fan of labels in museums. Maybe that's an opinion that won't go down well with the museum sector but I do think we put far too much stuff on labels and always want people to read everything.Laura Crossley: And I think sometimes it's nice to also help people use their imagination and tell a story, and not just be like, "This is a thing. Look at this thing and here are some facts about it." It's just, I don't think it's very engaging.Kelly Molson: Well, this leads us really nicely actually to what we want to talk about today because the reason that we are dressed in our strip is because we want to talk about your new podcast, it's called Strip the Podcast, but it's in line with the exhibition that you've got running at the moment which is Strip! How Football Got Shirty. And I guess that goes a little bit hand in hand about what you're talking about in terms of telling a story about something. So Laura, just for our listeners, can you just give us a little overview of what the National Football Museum is.Kelly Molson: I mean, it says very clearly what it is in its name, but what do you do there?Laura Crossley: We do all sorts of things. We are England's only national museum for football and we basically explore the impact that football has on all our lives and how it shapes identity and a bit like I was saying about telling stories, we are moving much more towards telling stories and sharing other people's stories about the diversity of the game. So we are not just about talking about men's elite game, although that's obviously a big part of football but we're also about the women's game and also, I think a really good thing that we can do is challenge attitudes around homophobia and racism. Laura Crossley: I watched that Anton Ferdinand documentary last night and just thought, "Gosh, there's still so much work to do in terms of challenging racism in football." So we're trying a lot more to tell those difficult stories and hopefully change attitudes and make football something that's really welcoming for everyone because it's something that touches all of our lives, even if you're not a football fan, it's not something that you can escape. It's something that you might dip in and out of or you'll know people who like football and so it is about telling those really broad stories and for me, about celebrating diversity and making everybody feel like they have a place in the game and that they're represented in football.Kelly Molson: Lovely. And Jon, the exhibition is something that you've been organizing. So can you tell us a little bit about what this exhibition is about? Again, How Football Got Shirty, I think we could maybe hazard a guess at that.Jon Sutton: There's no shorts or socks in the exhibition. That was the first thing. We're not having shorts, we're not having socks, it's just shirts. So yeah, it's got over 200 shirts going right back to the Victorian era, so it's very comprehensive. We did the first century of football shirts because there wasn't an awful lot of change and then we branch out into the '70s of Admiral and the dawn of replica shirts. And then we've got some bangers from the '90s, lots of the bright and the garish ones. We've got a bit about the retro revival. Got a real controversial hall of shame area which actually, the six shirts in the hall of fame are all pretty good shirts, to be fair, generally. But they're there almost for a malfunction of design, that's why they're there like that.Jon Sutton: And then right through to the present. So one of the big things now is eco-friendly shirts, so sustainability and we've also got loads of shirts from the women's game as well because I think we're the first exhibition that have worked out that basically women can play football too and women wear football shirts.Jon Sutton: There's been football shirt exhibitions in the past or there's almost like kit experts and things like that but I don't think the women's game and the shirts that women wear has been told yet. So it's really comprehensive. One of the toughest things is having to do the top 20 shirts of all time. It's so subjective.Kelly Molson: Yeah, I'll bet.Jon Sutton: I'm a Blackpool fan and I didn't put a Blackpool shirt in the top 20.Kelly Molson: There's no Tottenham shirt in the top 20 either, I checked.Jon Sutton: There are a lot more Arsenal shirts than Tottenham shirts as well.Laura Crossley: Oh dear, anyway.Jon Sutton: The shirt you're wearing is in the exhibition. Kelly Molson: It's a great shirt.Jon Sutton: We've got a Jurgen Klinsmann shirt as well when he did the dive celebration. We've got that in the museum as well. It's not in the exhibition.Kelly Molson: Perfect moment. Okay, so great exhibition, great museum. You've been shut for most of this year which has been a challenge all around in the sector. So what I really want to talk about is what you've done to engage your audience while you've been shut, and one of the great things that you've done is launch the podcast. It's a big thing to do, it's a bold move, and that's what I want to talk about today really. So I guess my first very short question, which has probably got a really long answer is, why a podcast?Jon Sutton: To be honest, I don't really listen to podcasts, so it was quite hard presenting one because I didn't really know much about the basis of being the host on a podcast, I'll be honest. And I think David realized that very quickly, our digital producer. I think David realized that too when we started.Kelly Molson: What have I let myself in for?Jon Sutton: I was amazed. On the day, luckily Tim, who is our graphics and interpretation producer, basically the three of us in our exhibitions team, we kind of led it I suppose, and luckily, he'd done a script which was really helpful because I was going there without even a script. Laura, why did you [crosstalk 00:13:36].Kelly Molson: Yeah, how did you come to the decision that a podcast is the thing that you're going to create to engage people with? How did that process work?Laura Crossley: I think a podcast would... because I joined the museum almost a year, just over a year ago, and even when I joined there were talks, before we even knew about COVID, there was talk about doing a podcast as a way to reach the audiences and share our stories in a different way. I think because our mission is all about sharing stories and a podcast, I think, and that narrative, is a good way to do that.Laura Crossley: So we'd always thought about doing a podcast and then Jon's team got some funding and it made sense to make that about the Strip exhibition. But certainly, when we then shut, for me it became more of an imperative. I know that museums decided to see lots of different things during lockdown but we have on our strategy, the aim to build a virtual museum, basically reflect the galleries and the content of the museum, but digitally, whether that be in our social media content on YouTube or via podcasts or whatever it might be.Laura Crossley: And so I saw this year as a way for us to just experiment because what other year do you get... I mean, obviously, it's been a bad year but the one positive, I think, is that it's allowed people to throw caution to the wind and just say, "Well, we'll just experiment with lots of different ways to engage people because why not? And if it doesn't work then it doesn't matter and we learn from it."Laura Crossley: And I really hope that that's something that museums take into the future. I think we always try and plan and try and be perfect, whereas actually, I think experimentation is much more exciting and just seeing what happens and not really worrying too much if things don't work because so what? You've learnt lessons and you try again. So for me, that was the really good thing about a podcast and also, I did really feel for them. Strip opened in my first week at the museum, and so it was open for what, three months, and then shut.Laura Crossley: And I could tell when I joined, I mean, Jon can talk a lot more about it because it's his exhibition, but I went to the opening night and I remember just thinking, "Wow, so much passion and love and care has gone into this exhibition," and it was incredibly sad to see it have to close, well, the whole museum have to close. So I think we focused a lot on putting content out about Strip. Partly for that, because it was just such a great topic, something that was really engaging. Something that we know that if the museum had been open, lots of people would have come to the exhibition and we really wanted to give them the chance to experience it in a different way.Jon Sutton: Yeah, on the day, the last day of March before we closed, we did a frantic tour around the exhibition and we got our own Strip website as well dedicated to the exhibition. And in co-curating the exhibition, we had so many assets. I'd spoken to a lot of the kit manufacturers, a lot of the kit experts. We'd had a panel discussion, been out to some clubs. We had so much and then only so much of that can go into the exhibition.Jon Sutton: So we're sitting on all these assets and I think we divided it so some went out onto the Strip website but then even then, we had so much and we just thought, "If we theme it right, we've definitely got a podcast here." And so we've managed to use some of those assets in the podcast but also recorded new interviews with people as well for it. So luckily, I think we've done a decent job on it.Kelly Molson: So you've done six episodes, is that right? Six episodes so far. Let me just go back a bit because what you said is really interesting, Laura, and I think I agree with you in terms of playing with things this year. We all know it's been a challenging year but it has given us that opportunity to do some new things and do some different things that we don't know if they're going to work, we don't know what the reaction's going to be but let's try it, right? Very much the same with this podcast that we're on. I had no idea what the... We'd pre-launched it the previous year. Hadn't really got a lot of traction and thought, "Let's bring it back. There's a lot of people that are potentially sitting around maybe with not a lot to do at the moment. Maybe we can give them something to listen to."Kelly Molson: And so, that was the objective really. What can we push out there that'll be helpful and engaging for people right now. So with the podcast, did you actually set any objectives for it or was it purely, "We're just going to do this, see what happens."Laura Crossley: I think this is what we were grappling with a little bit because we were kind of pushed into doing digital before we'd written a big strategy about it, and as I said, I don't think that's a bad thing. It's kind of like writing a strategy for research and development which isn't a bad way to do it. For me, Jon might disagree I don't know, but it's about engaging more people in a deeper way and growing those audiences and also hopefully, some of the people we engage will actually physically come to the museum. Acknowledging that some people who live in different countries might not actually physically be able to get to the museum now or in the future.Laura Crossley: But for those people, making them aware of us and getting a kind of loyalty to us and looking out for our stuff and feeling part of the museum and then for other people, hopefully encouraging them to come through the door and become physical visitors.Kelly Molson: And I guess you won't see that until a bit later on potentially, whether you do make that shift from people that are listening to the podcast, to coming along. Jon, I've got so many questions about the podcast because I know myself personally, how much time and effort and a challenge it can be. You said earlier, you've never made a podcast before. Have you ever been a guest on a podcast? Have you ever had any interaction with any of them?Jon Sutton: No, I don't think I have. I don't even think I've been a guest. I think I just assumed they were a bit like radio but not live. I have listened to some podcasts but not many, so I had no experience really.Kelly Molson: All right, so you were at the point where you've got all your assets and you think, "Yeah, we've got a podcast here. We can create some content and its valuable content, it's interesting." Where did you start because that's a big learning process, right? To saying, "I've got this idea about a podcast, I've got all this stuff, now I need to make a podcast." What did you have to learn?Jon Sutton: Well luckily, [crosstalk 00:20:02]. The first episode was a bit... Looking back now, if I listen to it now, I think it would be quite rustic and a little bit raw. One thing I did before we did the podcast, I listened to some other podcasts about football shirts. They were all pretty good, generally, but at the same time, I thought they might be slightly better at presenting than we would be. They may be more confident in front of a microphone, et cetera. But at the same time, I thought they might not necessarily have the assets we've got and also the knowledge that we've acquired in curating the exhibition.Jon Sutton: So that was a bit of me that thought, "Well, what's the worst that can happen with this thing and if we are terrible, at least we've got the guest to pull us out." The first one we did wasn't the best but then the next one we did was really good and then what we did was we went back to the first one and re-recorded it. But we did that with most of them, so it wasn't necessarily really a quick process. Sometimes we'd start in the morning, rattle through in say, an hour, get lunch. Then we'd go, "Actually, I think we could do that better now."Jon Sutton: So most of them, we did it in two takes. There was a period where we recorded, I think, probably three or four within a two week period because we were going into the museum, say, once a week when we could. And we found that we found a rhythm to it and then there was one episode, the last episode in the podcast, which I think is actually somehow the best one. We'd been about three, four weeks between recording the fifth and the sixth and that day, we had Linda working on it. She was fantastic. We had Tim working on it, he was fantastic.Jon Sutton: Whatever reason, I think I might have had a couple of too many drinks the night before or something, but I was absolutely appalling. Nothing was flowing that day, it was awful, but listening to it, you can't tell. So, David's a magician.Kelly Molson: So you had in-house editing skills, which is a huge bonus because we outsource our editing, we've got a brilliant, Steve is our... He's an award-winning podcaster. I have to just give him a little plug there. But that's the one thing that we didn't have in-house, so we were like, "Well that's something that we need to get professional help with." That's a huge cost saving and, like you say, it means that you can go back and do things again, so you've got that time.Jon Sutton: I mean, there's a lot of to-ing and fro-ing as well. David would cut something, for example, and I'd go, "David, you just cut me." The pinnacle moment of the podcast, for once I was really funny in that point and David's just like, with a straight face, "It wasn't very funny at all, Jon."Kelly Molson: Steve does this to me all the time.Jon Sutton: That's the thing. Just because you're the host doesn't mean you get any kinds of rights, do you?Kelly Molson: None at all. My bits are always the bits that have been cut. Jon Sutton: The weird thing, I've been finding myself cutting myself as well. So when we have the to-ing and fro-ing, I'll say to David, "You need to cut me at this point," because I sound like an absolute imbecile. And it feels weird being the... It's almost like if you did an exam or something and you're the teacher putting the red pen through your own examination.Kelly Molson: What about equipment or anything like that? I'm just thinking about other museums that might potentially be looking to make this decision and do something like this. Did you have to invest heavily in any specialist equipment or did you have things that you just got? Did you just get by with what you had?Jon Sutton: Yeah, I think what we try and do with each exhibition is we try and purchase bit by bit, like piecemeal, I suppose. Little bits that make us stronger in the future so we've got a legacy from each project we work on. I'm not really technical, I'll be honest. I think we got new headphones and the new microphone but we had some other microphones. I remember though, I had the worst microphone. It wasn't a massive outlay. The other thing is, David is really particular and Tim, we are quite particular, but I think really, you don't have to have mega-quality to do it.Jon Sutton: For me personally, I think the stories and what you're going to tell is more important than if there's a little bit of hiss on it, for example. And we did have to lower our standards a little bit because we did some interviews with people via Zoom, et cetera, for it. So it's not all slick, I suppose. But yeah, it wasn't a massive outlay and luckily we've managed to, each exhibition we do, we try and buy a little bit of stuff.Kelly Molson: All right, two questions. What went well and what didn't go well?Jon Sutton: I think we managed to replicate the themes of the physical exhibition, I suppose. If you hadn't seen the exhibition, I think you would've got a good flavor of what it was about and I think, actually, at times, we even went a little bit further. In the exhibition, for example, there's a Lewis FC shirt and it's got What If on it as a hashtag and it's about the fact that they are the world's leading club on equality. Their men and women's teams get exactly the same resources, same pay. There are not many clubs doing that.Jon Sutton: And you've got a label on it and we're really strict, I think it's 50 words on a label, but we then take it one step further, so we then in the podcast, feature somebody from the club about what that stance means. So in a way, it looks at it and expands on it. It adds more to it. So I think in that respect if you think about the podcast and the Strip website as a duo in digital terms, I'd still want people to come and see the exhibition but you're getting a really, really good flavor of what we're about.Jon Sutton: Things that didn't work was, you can't really tell, but it's quite a time consuming, I think, recording a podcast. David's having to do a lot of editing. Tim, our digital producer's doing the theme music to it which obviously you don't have to do, go down that route, but he was bringing his own symph-pop tune-age to the proceedings. But even writing the script's quite time-consuming as well, so you've got to dedicate quite a lot of time to it really but luckily this year, we've been able to do that with lockdown and that experimentation aspect.Jon Sutton: I suppose one thing is that if you're doing it, don't see it as an add-on to what you're doing really. I think you need to build it in from the start. I think in the past, we'd never done a podcast. We've done online exhibitions on our website but they've been very much afterthoughts. Whereas we did build it into our thinking when we opened the exhibition in, I think it was November. 2019, we knew we were going to do some of this stuff but when we had the lockdown, it almost accelerated it, I suppose.Kelly Molson: Yeah, that makes sense.Jon Sutton: Nothing major. I remember the police sirens going off quite a lot when we were trying to record and then the lift would be going up and down, so it makes a racket. You've got to choose your space as well. Kelly Molson: That is really good advice actually because our podcast has been a lot better since I've been recording it at home. I do get the occasional dog bark but that's better than the constant trains that go past our office. So, it's swings and roundabouts.Kelly Molson: This brings me to a really good question to come back to you on Laura, actually, and it's something that you mentioned before we started speaking which is around what you said about not just bolting a podcast on, thinking about this strategically. Why is it helpful for museums or attractions to have podcasts and what do you need to think about strategically from the start if you're going to go down this path?Laura Crossley: I'd say this for everything about digital museums, that I think we can get a little bit excited about the word digital and just go, "Oh yes, we need a thing. We need a digital thing and if we get a digital thing then we're going to engage lots and lots of people and then they're all going to come to the museum and it's all going to be amazing." And I try and remember back to my Masters, which was a long time ago now, so before we were talking about things like podcasts, we talked a lot about digital interactives and it was in the first session where the lecturer was like, "Digital interactives are great but they will break and you have to have a reason for doing them and there has to be an audience in mind."Laura Crossley: And I think sometimes with digital, we don't plan with audiences in mind. It's like everything that we know about audience-centric planning goes out the window because we think, "Digital. Cool. Amazing." And I love digital stuff and I do listen to podcasts. Adam Brookson's podcast is my happy place and I do think they can be really good for museums in order to tell those stories and engage people who might not have heard of the museum before. Build the brand. Engage them with stories that they wouldn't hear if they weren't in the museum. Laura Crossley: Keeping engagement with audiences. I suspect that some people who listen to the Strip podcast have come to the exhibition but want more information and also, as I said, potentially convert people into visitors to the museum. But I think it's really important firstly, that there's a reason to do it. The podcast took a long time, it wasn't the quickest digital thing that you could do, so you do have to have a reason for doing it. I also think, really thinking about who the audience is and is the audience right for a podcast or should you do something like a YouTube channel or should you get a TikTok channel. I don't know, all the various different digital things that we can do.Laura Crossley: And also really plan it into strategic planning because the time it takes, the capacity, the resources. It can feel like it's free because you might not have to buy loads of equipment but it's not free because it takes people away from doing stuff on the galleries and the museum. So it is really important to schedule it in and make sure that you have the provision for it. And although I think that museums are getting better at having roles, actually it's been really interesting, over lockdown, I've seen so many more roles for digital content producers who just solely focus on blogs and podcasts and digital channels. So I think that's definitely going to be a trend that continues but you do need someone to take ownership of these things and not just say, "Oh well, someone will do it at some point."Laura Crossley: So yeah, definitely have it in the strategic plan. Have a reason for doing it. Know who your audience is. Test if it's the right thing to do, and it's fine if you have all of those things and then you try it and it doesn't work because then you can evaluate why it doesn't work, but you need to know why you're doing it. And also I'd say, next week, we're doing an evaluation session about the podcast which is really important to me because again, I want it to be a learning experience. So there'll be things that have gone really well and there'll be things that haven't as much but it'd be good to really test that. And I'd also really like us to talk to people who listen to the podcast and hear what they think about it and whether it has done what we set out to do.Kelly Molson: That is really good advice, and actually, my next question was going to be, what would be your best piece of advice to other museums who were thinking about doing this? But I think you just summed it up absolutely beautifully there, Laura. Jon, have you got anything that you would add to that in terms of your best piece of advice for a museum that's thinking about starting a podcast?Jon Sutton: Yeah, I think I might have covered some of it already but it's things like building the time, don't see it as an add-on, what's the audience? The Strip, I knew that we already had an engaged crowd for that and also it's not particularly niche either. We're not going for necessarily the most niche subject in the world, football kits and what they represent. Particularly at the moment, I think lockdown brings in... This year, if anything, has brought in a real nostalgia to yesteryear, hasn't it? Jon Sutton: The first shirt, basically, I ever had. Wore it when I was eight years old. It's an adult one but it's the same design, so I knew there was an audience for it. So that's how we built around the exhibition but if we were talking about football studs, for example, boot studs or something like that. I'm not sure whether that-Kelly Molson: That's like the niche that, isn't it? I definitely wouldn't have listened to all six episodes of that podcast, Jon.Laura Crossley: [inaudible 00:32:44].Jon Sutton: Exactly, but the thing is, you need to realize what you're presenting isn't niche. I'm not sure all museum people do that, I think you get bogged down in the day to day and maybe you need that bigger picture of actually what I do is quite a niche.Kelly Molson: Great advice.Jon Sutton: So we knew with this one it wasn't too niche.Kelly Molson: Really, really good advice. We're coming towards the end of the podcast. On every episode, I ask my guests if there's a book that they would share with us and it can be a book that's either helped you in your career or just a book that you really love and our lucky listeners get to win this book. So Laura, what have you chosen for us?Laura Crossley: Well, I was racking my mind for museum books because I did a Ph.D. in museum, so I have obviously read some amazing and really not so amazing type of books. Some amazing museum books that have really shaped my career but I was thinking about what book do I actually really love and again, remember that I'm a geek. The book that's really stayed with me for a long time is, Of Mice and Men, which I read when I was in year 10 doing my GSCEs, a long time ago now. And I was thinking, "Has that affected my museum career?" And I think it has because of all the books that I like, like that and The Catcher in the Rye and A Room with a View. Well firstly, they're all set in the past. Well for me anyway, they might have been contemporary at the time but for me, it was reading about the past and so I think that kind of bringing history to life.Laura Crossley: A bit like I said about theme parks. I think that books can do that as well really, really well and sometimes in a more emotive way than museums do. I think museums have the power to do it but they don't always do it. And also, all those books are about this big and you can probably read them in a day if you put your mind to it. And again, I think that's why I really like the power of storytelling but not over using words, just telling, a bit like with films. I just want an hour and a half. I just want to watch Stand By Me in an hour and a half and be told a really good story. Laura Crossley: And the same with books, just tell me a really emotive, evocative story, that paints this amazing picture and transports me into that world. I don't need too much and that's what I think museums should really aim to do as well. Think about storytelling and description and emotional engagement, as well as just, "Here's an object," and expect people to be engaged with it. Kelly Molson: I love that. I love that you've tied your book choice in with your career and how it's focused you on what you do. Jon, what about you? What have you got to share with us?Jon Sutton: Bringing you back to football shirts. When we were starting this exhibition, there was two books that stood out. One of them was book that was The Worst Football Shirts Of All Time, and I was flicking through it and I was like, "Well, that's a banger, that's a banger. These are amazing shirts. This book is so wrong." But the thing is when you look at these best ever shirts and worst ever shirts, often they're the same, they've just put opinion. But the book really that got the exhibition, made me say, "We're definitely doing this exhibition and we need to bring this author in," is a book called True Colors by John Devlin. He's done various books. His latest book is all about international kits.Jon Sutton: He does these beautiful illustrations of the shirts. He draws every single shirt, for example, England. He will have drawn in that book, every shirt that England have worn. Really nice illustrations. The passion for the subject comes across, the depth comes across as well. His books are amazing and we actually hired him as an exhibition consultant on the basis of his brilliant books.Kelly Molson: Wow, bet he never saw that coming when he was writing his books.Jon Sutton: No exactly. We can't feature every club in the exhibition, we've got 200 shirts, but there is this rainbow of football shirts that he drew for us and so most clubs are covered under that, for example, Derby under white, for example, Tottenham under white. And so, True Colors by John Devlin is my choice and it's the right one.Kelly Molson: Great but I love that book has been part of this journey that you've been on with the podcast as well. It's really great to tie it all together. Well as ever, if you want to win a copy of those books, then if you head over to our Twitter account which is Skip The Queue, and you retweet this episode announcement with the comment, "I want Laura and Jon's books," then you will be in with a chance of winning them.Kelly Molson: I've loved having you both on today, it's such an interesting topic because I've a personal experience of just how difficult it is to start a podcast, edit a podcast, all right, Steve does the editing, but pull a podcast together. Think about who you're going to have on as guests. It's a huge amount of work and I think it's a brilliant task that you've gone ahead and done this.Laura Crossley: Can I just say, I think yours is brilliant. It's so good.Kelly Molson: Thank you.Laura Crossley: I think that visitor attractions have a lot to learn from each other and I sometimes think museums can be quite snobby and not see themselves as a visitor attraction. Whereas actually, one of the best things we can do is give people a good day out. We should sometimes just relax a bit and say, "Actually, a really great thing we do is give people a good day out."Kelly Molson: Yeah, it's making memories, isn't it? So six episodes of the podcast have been released, what's next? Do you think there's any more episodes coming?Jon Sutton: David was really, really brutal in his editing, so I think there could be something in a bloopers episode, like a special. He'll probably tell me, 'No," but I was thinking like some of the bits, sort of me being stupid generally.Laura Crossley: You've said it now in public, so that's it. [crosstalk 00:38:40]. Kelly Molson: It's a commitment.Jon Sutton: It'll get vetoed, I know it will. It never gets their own way. I think it's probably it for Strip for the time being but then we're going to look at hopefully something that talks about the other stuff we do as a museum. So something that isn't exhibition focused but is about our general offer and the stories we want to tell and the power of football ultimately.Laura Crossley: I think for me, really feeling down to who it's for because we could just do it in so many ways and tell so many different stories and maybe that's something that museums do grapple with a bit, that unless it's about a special exhibition, you have to really think about who it's for and what you're trying to do, otherwise you could do a podcast that just never ended and you talk about a different random thing every week.Jon Sutton: That doesn't mean it's not going to have those studs [crosstalk 00:39:28].Kelly Molson: Honestly Jon, if anyone wants to listen to a podcast about football boot studs, email me and let me know and I'll pass this onto Jon but I think I'm going to get very few emails about this.Laura Crossley: That's episode 527.Kelly Molson: Guys, it's been so good to speak to you today. Right everyone, if you want to listen to the podcast, it's called Strip! The Podcast and you will find it on all of your usual podcast channels. Go and download it, it's really entertaining. I have listened to five of the six episodes now and look, I'm a football fan, I love football shirts and I really, really enjoyed it. I think you'll get a lot out of it if you're a football fan in general. So definitely go and download it.Kelly Molson: All that's left for me to say is, "Thank you both for coming on."Jon Sutton: Thanks very much, brilliant.Laura Crossley: Thank you, I love the Skip The Queue podcast, so it's really cool. Thank you so much for inviting us.Kelly Molson: Thank you for making it... It's the guests that make it, so thanks.Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip The Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five-star review, it really helps others find us and remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.Download our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Doubling Your Visitor NumbersIf you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcastIf you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this episode.Competition ends March 31st 2021. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references:Jon Young is Director of BVA-BDRC. With over a decade in the Culture, Tourism and Leisure. Author of Holiday Trends since 2012 and working across a range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies.www.linkedin.com/in/jon-young-9451a92a/www.bva-bdrc.comhttps://hcontent.bva-bdrc.com/clearsightwww.bathnes.gov.ukwww.painshill.co.uk Transcription:Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. In today's episode, I speak with Jon Young, Director at BVA BDRC, an award-winning international consumer insight consultancy. We discuss their exciting new research around pre-booking and what the drawbacks to this are in the eyes of the visitor. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue. Kelly Molson: Jon, thank you for joining me on the podcast today. It's really lovely to see you again.Jon Young: Yeah, you too. And yeah, I've been listening for quite a while now. So it's an honor to actually to be on here as well. I think it's got a great role to play for the industry. So thank you as well for doing it.Kelly Molson: Aww, Jon, thank you. That's super kind of you, right? Don't be too nice to me yet because you know that we're going to go into our icebreaker questions.Jon Young: Yeah. Which I'm a bit worried about.Kelly Molson: Don't be worried. I think I've been quite kind to you, Jon. So I want to know what would you rather give up, your smartphone or your computer?Jon Young: I would say my smartphone definitely because I'm always trying to spend less time on it and I think that'd be a great way of doing that. I have actually read stories of people who've done it, but they've never sort of followed it through. But yeah, so definitely the smartphone.Kelly Molson: What do you do to try and reduce your screen time? Do you lock it in a drawer in the evenings or-?Jon Young: I've put it into a separate room. I've tried that. What else have I done? You can set your settings so it's grayscale. And apparently, that sort of deactivates the colors in some of your apps, which makes them less appealing. I've actually tried quite a lot and miserably failed. I've read loads of books about that sort of thing, but I'm still sort of scrolling through a tad at night and it's next to my bed at night as well. So I've failed at that. So if you could take it away from me, I'm sure my wife would say thank you as well if you do that.Kelly Molson: Okay. I don't know if I can help you with that because I'm the world's worst. It's difficult, isn't it? Because I think I like to engage with people. We speak on Twitter every now and again. And I think that the Twitter platform and LinkedIn for me-Jon Young: Yeah. Actually, that is something I've done. So I can't access Twitter on my phone now, is just through my laptop. So that has helped. But you end up just wheeling that out then at night.Kelly Molson: I'll just get my laptop out and check.Jon Young: Yeah, check something. Yeah.Kelly Molson: Okay. All right. Next one, what was your least favorite food as a child? And do you still hate it or do you love it now?Jon Young: Mushrooms. I remember quite clearly when I was about five years old, my dad tried to feed me a mushroom. I think he thought that this would be a good way to get me to like them. And I hated them and he chose to... He actually physically puts it in my mouth and I bit his finger. And he didn't talk to me for a while. He had a few stern words. I remember it really clearly. And my wife, she's Polish and they love going mushroom picking whenever we're in Poland. It's like quite a regular pastime. So they go into the woods and they go mushroom picking and they really, really try to get me to like them. But I think I read that if you eat something five times, then you will like it. So maybe I just need to do that, but I still hate it.Kelly Molson: So you still hate them. You're still a mushroom hater. I think that's quite common, isn't it? Mushrooms are a bit of... They're a bit marmite for people, aren't they?Jon Young: Yeah. I like marmite, but mushrooms, no, unfortunately, but it's an ambition to like them.Kelly Molson: To like mushrooms?Jon Young: Yeah. That's what lockdown does. You have these weird ambitions.Kelly Molson: I love that. It's such a strange goal, Jon. Okay.Jon Young: Well, I'm full of them. Kelly Molson: All right. Well, let's go to the unpopular opinion. So tell me something that you believe to be true that hardly anybody agrees with you on.Jon Young: So I struggle with this. So I've oscillated between going really superficial to really deep. So I've ended up with something a little bit superficial, but so my unpopular opinion is that I really don't enjoy Bake Off or Strictly. Just not for me. And I've tried really hard to like both, but I just can't get excited about people baking on TV or dancing. And I like doing both. And I know the masive tube layer or something like that, the dance, and the Soggy Bottom and all that. I can hold a conversation. It's almost like people who don't like football, but they can kind of hold that kitchen conversation.Kelly Molson: You've got the cultural reference down.Jon Young: Yeah, absolutely.Kelly Molson: But you're not down with the shows. Jon Young: But it's a no, unfortunately.Kelly Molson: I'm kind of feeling you on this one because if it's on, if Bake Off's on, I'd watch it, but I'm not a massive baker. So I don't have a huge kind of interest in it. And also, I thought I would love Strictly. I used to tap dance when I was a kid.Jon Young: All right. Okay.Kelly Molson: But I was really big into tap dancing and I thought I'd love it. Just don't love it. I feel like we're taking one for the team there, Jon, because I've agreed with you on this. And I think we're going to get some Twitter backlash.Jon Young: Backlash, yeah.Kelly Molson: Sorry, everyone. But thank you for that, Jon. Jon Young: No worries.Kelly Molson: So Jon, you are Director of the BVA BDRC.Jon Young: Yes. Kelly Molson: It's also a name that I have gotten wrong about four million times on this podcast.Jon Young: I know. It's a nightmare.Kelly Molson: Something needs to be done about this, but tell us a little bit about what you're doing.Jon Young: So with the name, I think it was the brainchild of the founders about 25, maybe 30 years ago now. And they just came up with a name, Business Development Research Consultants, and there were just two of them and it got shortened. And now here we are. There's about a hundred of us and we're stuck with it, but we've got bought by BVA, which didn't help. That's where that comes from. It wasn't some kind of genius branding idea. But yeah. So as a company, we've got an international presence, so we've got offices around the world, but we are so split up into divisions. So we've got two divisions in our London office. So we've got this of the commercial team and that they work with the banks and media. So ITV, Channel 4, et cetera.Jon Young: And then we've got our division, which we call On The Move. And the teamwork in, we sort of specialise with attractions and tourist boards. So I've been there 11 years now. And throughout that time, I've worked pretty much exclusively with visitor attractions and tourist boards, so the likes of Visit Britain, Visit Wales, Visit Scotland and a few overseas as well. So we do market research and we do the whole spectrum really. So it can be anything from focus groups to one-on-one depth interviews, to online surveys. So we do audience segmentation, membership work, pricing, pretty much anything that involves trying to understand what the public thinks. Jon Young: And yeah, we work with loads and loads of brilliant attractions. It's a wonderful sector to work in as I'm sure you know, Kelly. So we work with the little museums and some of the large nationals as well. We run the ALVA Benchmarking Survey. So this is a survey that is conducted a few times a year amongst visitors to around 80 different attractions across the UK. And we then sort of benchmark each attraction against the others just to understand the visitor experience, which marketing they've used, their profile, and a load of other things as well. So it's quite broad, but yeah, it means we work with lots of great organizations.Kelly Molson: It's incredibly useful as well, the things that you provide. And I think one of the ways that we met was through the Visitor Experience Forum.Jon Young: That's right.Kelly Molson: We both spoke on one of their webinars, didn't we?Jon Young: Yeah.Kelly Molson: And I had become aware of what you guys do at the BVA BDRC because of the consumer sentiment tracker that you've been doing all the way through lockdown, which was something you were... It was something that you did off your own back. So tell us a little bit about it because it was incredibly useful for us as a kind of suppliers to the industry, but it must have been a fantastic resource for the sector itself.Jon Young: Yeah, it was really great. So it was actually the brainchild of my colleague, Thomas Folque. I'll give him a name check there because it was his idea back in, I think, late March. And obviously, a lot of our work got canceled. We work with a lot of hotels as well. So that's the other team in our division. And so he just felt it'd be good to have some sort of tracker and then we also discussed it and it grew from there. And there's, I guess, a dual motivation just like any sort of content marketing. It did obviously paint us in a good light. It was a good way to sort of stay in contact with organizations that we worked with, but also to make new contacts. And I think I spoke on about 10 different webinars in the first two months and one of which I met you yourself. Jon Young: But it was also really good for us to help out as well. And most of us in our team, we are regular attractions visitors ourselves, and we've sort of built up relationships with the people we work with as well. So it was nice to be able to provide something for free. And we did that for 23 consecutive weeks. So every week, we produced a new report. It kept some of my colleagues busy as well because I think in the end, it was about 70 pages which is a bit ridiculous by the end of it. But it was full of data to understand how people felt, whether they were open to go out in public and who was and who wasn't and loads and loads of other things. Jon Young: And so we stopped that in August, but we've now gone down to conducting the research on a fortnightly basis and producing a monthly report. And so there should be one actually landing around about now.Kelly Molson: Oh, fabulous.Jon Young: Yeah, it's been a good experience. And when we did stop originally, we had a load of lovely emails from lots of different attractions saying how useful it had been. So yeah, it was worthwhile.Kelly Molson: I think that's something that's really come across from great people in the sector throughout this situation that we've been in, is that things that have... Like you described it. I mean, ultimately, it's a marketing piece. It was a content marketing piece, but it was helpful. And that's what's been really, really important, is that anything that people were pushing out was helpful and useful to the sector. And it was so invaluable to be able to see the snapshot of how people were feeling. And even for us, we were able to kind of build our own content pieces on your content piece because we thought, "Oh, wow, people have really changed their opinion on how they feel about this thing." Now, that's something that affects what we do. Now, we can talk about it. And so, yeah, thank you for doing it because I just think it was such a great and useful piece of data to produce.Jon Young: Yeah. Thank you. And I think I'm not sure if other sectors would have responded so well to, I think, because one thing that's really striking about the attraction sector is just how much everybody works together. And more often than not, they are actually technically competitors, but they don't see it that way. They think that as the sum of the parts is greater than the individual. Yeah. You see that with ALVA and I think we've had lots of organizations who we may sort of compete with also promoting this as well. So yeah, it was great.Kelly Molson: Brilliant. Yeah. And sector communication is something that we've been talking about all the way through this. Long way, it continues.Jon Young: Yeah. Absolutely. Kelly Molson: So this brings us to a very recent and new piece of data that you have been working on. And I'm really excited because I have a little copy of it here, and I feel like there's not many people that have got this. So I feel quite special. Now, this is about a topic that has... We have been talking about this probably since March, but it is still a hot topic and it's on everyone's minds and it's pre-booking. Now, there is a huge debate at the moment around the benefits of pre-booking versus the more kind of traditional walkup approach the attractions have taken. And you've carried out a new piece of research, which is specifically around this. Just give us an overview of what you've done, of what you've carried out.Jon Young: Yeah. So actually listening to your podcast and some of the various conversations that we've witnessed on various webinars, we felt that there was a lot of debates and a lot of opinion that maybe is worth putting some numbers against some of these opinions just to understand what was an issue and what wasn't. So we added, I think, around a dozen questions to our fortnightly tracker that we've just spoken about amongst a nationally representative sample of the UK population. And we just try to understand what proportion of these people had pre-booked, what proportion had booked but not shown up? What were the reasons for this? Were they understandable? Now, what proportion had actually booked and didn't fancy a visit but actually visited because they booked?Jon Young: And then we've also looked at whether people are put off by pre-booking generally. Whether people would think it's a good or a bad thing to go to 100% pre-booking after COVID. And what are the reasons that people like it and the reasons people don't like it? So I guess that's it in a nutshell. And we've also looked at some of the different audiences and dug into some of our other data as well just to understand some of the other issues that people are talking about such as spontaneous visits. So that's it in a nutshell.Kelly Molson: Excellent. Let's dive in to this because it's really interesting. I'd have to say I am a huge advocate for pre-booking. And I know, again, I've said this over and over and over on these podcast interviews. And it's quite surprising. I think I put a post out on LinkedIn a little while ago asking people what their experiences of it are and whether they think it's a good thing, whether they're uncomfortable with it. And the responses I got were really surprising.Kelly Molson: I think potentially because I'm very much a planner and I'm very comfortable to book in advance about what I'm going to do, but obviously, there's a percentage of people that are more spontaneous and they would prefer to just decide what they're going to do on the day. And pre-booking doesn't work for them at all. And it's really fascinating, the data that's come out. So from an attractions perspective, we know what the benefits to the attractions are. We know that pre-booking, it allows them to know how many people are coming. It's great from an operational perspective. They know how much of their team they need in. They can even out that kind of pattern of visitor arrivals throughout the day. And we have seen an increase in donations and gift aid contributions as well via pre-booking. But let's start with what the visitors see as a benefit. How supportive are visitors of pre-booking?Jon Young: So I think it's quite sort of striking that the majority of your markets, so these are people who visit attractions, seven in 10 do think it's a good thing. So 70% stated that they would still go ahead and visit if they found out that the place they had wanted to visit required pre-booking. So that is a strong majority, 70%. We also asked the question in a slightly different way if post-COVID attractions went to 100% pre-booking, would you see this as a good or a bad thing? And 75% stated either a good thing, or it wouldn't make any difference to them. So these are strong majorities who are probably in your camp, Kelly, who are sort of the planners and the organizers and they're fine with this.Kelly Molson: Interesting. But that's not all of them, is it? Okay. Jon Young: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: Which we'll get to in a little while. And what do they see the main benefits of pre-booking is?Jon Young: The main benefit was to be able to plan the time with more certainty. So that was around three in five. So 57% of visitors to indoor attractions. Slightly lower for gardens, and just to make the point that we tested pre-booking at indoor attractions. So looking at museums, art galleries, historic houses, and also gardens and country parks because clearly, the weather has a big impact too. Kelly Molson: Sure.Jon Young: And we also tested the restaurants just to kind of get a feel for that sort of benchmark where pre-booking has been in place for quite a long time. So yeah, the main reason was just the ability to plan in advance. The second most popular reason was that there's less queuing when we get there. So over half stated that. People were allowed to give more than one reason.Jon Young: And then it drops a little bit to around three in 10 stating that places just tend to be less busy. One in four saying, "We can do some research ahead of the visit." And I think personally, I think that's quite an important reason even though only one in four were giving it. I think for me, one of the benefits of pre-booking to the attraction is they can have this conversation with the visitor in advance of the visit. And you can maybe raise awareness of parts of the attraction that you wouldn't necessarily see.Jon Young: Year after year in research we've done with attractions, we speak to big chunks of visitors who say they went for maybe an exhibition, but they had no idea that half of the other elements of a site were there. They didn't know that there was an original version of this document on the back and would have loved to have seen it. So I think being able to have that conversation is really important. But for the visitor, that's one in four. And then one in five stating there are fewer debates about what to do on the day. So I can imagine families, certainly, if it's not spontaneous and it's in the diary a week in advance, then you don't have to have that debate and any sort of toys thrown out of premises.Kelly Molson: Yeah. It's decided in advance, "This is what we're doing on Saturday, team. So let's plan for it." Rather than on the day, maybe have to have multiple conversations with different people in your family group about, what does everybody wants to do? The decision's already been made, we're doing this. Jon Young: Absolutely. Yeah. Kelly Molson: So what about drawbacks? Let's dive into those because I find these really interesting. So what are the drawbacks in the eyes of the visitor?Jon Young: Yeah. So as I mentioned earlier, three in 10 felt it was actually... They'd probably think twice and not visit and one in four saying it's a bad thing post-COVID. And the number one reason that people don't like to book ahead was that they just don't like to commit to things too early. They prefer to be spontaneous. And that was 67% of those who thought it was a bad thing to go to 100% pre-booking. So that's quite a big chunk of people who are quite spontaneous in their behavior. And we had some really... I thought, some quite interesting quotes alongside that. So we asked people just to write out, "Why do you think is a bad thing?" I'll just read a few of those out. "I like to be able to make spontaneous decisions in my life. I don't like to be tied to a time. Because I often visit places when I'm passing by." Jon Young: And we've noticed in our research that if it's a city center attraction, particularly if it's free, you will often have up to one in five of your visitors actually deciding to visit when passing. And I do this quite often myself. Our office is in Holborn in Central London. So you'll often go for a walk maybe at lunchtime or after work. And I might sometimes walk past the British Museum. And I think, "Actually, I might just pop in," or any number of others in the area. And when I was working in Birmingham, there's Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, similar sort of thing. You can easily just pop in. And there's a lot of people for whom attractions are just nice places to be. And it's just that they might choose it over a café or over a park just because it's a nice place to spend some time. So that was quite interesting. Jon Young: The next couple I thought were also quite an interesting. So one person said, "If you plan on visiting several places in a day, that means a lot of booking and you have to be hyper-organized."Kelly Molson: Which again, with a family, that's difficult, right? It's hard enough to get people out of the house on time to get to the first attraction at the time that you've booked. But then you're constantly clock-watching because you think, "Well, we've got to get to here at this point as well." And things might happen that way-lead you.Jon Young: Paul had actually said he had his own personal experience of going to London during half term and with his son and then maybe they had a few museums planned and it's actually quite hard sticking to time. Yeah. So I think that's actually one that I hadn't thought of beforehand because you kind of think in the silo, don't you? I'm pre-booking one place. But the reality is people try to squeeze loads in, especially if they're visiting Central London or a big city.Kelly Molson: Yeah, completely. And from my personal view, I had kind of not considered how close people might be to attractions and how easy it is just to nip in. You described where your office is in Holborn. We're outside of London. So for me, I'm always kind of making a trip somewhere to go to something. So I've got to get into London first. So for me, I'm kind of always doing that plan ahead. There isn't really those opportunities to be spontaneous where I live. So I don't think about being in that zone.Jon Young: Absolutely. I mean, I know London. I'm from South Wales, but I probably know London in that sense better than anywhere in the UK. But maybe Edinburgh from when I've been there is quite similar. But if you imagine, I've been to South Kensington umpteen times and often take family there. And I'm thinking to the last time my sister came up, we went to the Natural History Museum as you do. And then we finished and we had a bit more time. So then, "Actually, should we just pop in the Science Museum?" So we went there and I think we even went to the V&A afterwards just because we were enjoying ourselves so much, but we hadn't planned the other two. It was just Natural History Museum. So I think certainly when they're quite close to each other, that's quite something to bear in mind too. Jon Young: What else was there? Another quite interesting quote, a couple of quotes around the spontaneity point. Someone said, "When it's about entertainment, it's just stupid to plan your mood." I quite liked that. Kelly Molson: I like that.Jon Young: And about three months ago, I spoke to somebody. I was doing some work for a museum in Central London, and I was trying to understand the sort of habits before lockdown, before COVID, and after lockdown. And the lady I spoke to was an artist. And we did the Zoom chats and you could see in the background, there was wonderful pieces of art. And she's clearly an incredibly creative person. And she said that before COVID, she was going to attractions maybe two, three times a week if not more. And she just liked being in the National Gallery or the National Portrait Gallery or all these other places. But after lockdown restrictions were lifted, she said she'd been maybe twice in a month if that. And she had a few reasons, but the main one for her was pre-booking. And she said, "I'm such a spontaneous person. I really hate planning." And she even said that when you've got something planned say at two o'clock, then you spend most of the morning kind of thinking about that. Kelly Molson: Right. Jon Young: You know what I mean? I could actually imagine myself, there's a little anxiety. Am I doing everything for time? So there's definitely that type of person and they definitely exist and they are a minority, but they're a fairly chunky minority. And then there's the not organized people. Someone's said, "It would put me off because I hate organizing. I like to float around and browse. The commitment can be a serious burden and other events may occur." Maybe a bit extreme, but I think these people clearly exist and I think they're quite valid reasons.Kelly Molson: Yeah, completely valid. And this is really difficult, isn't it? Because as an attraction, you need to cater for all of these different types of people and how everybody needs and wants the flexibility to be able to book or not book. Gosh, it's really difficult task that people-Jon Young: It really is. And I think a couple of people gave the weather as well, which is obviously more applicable for some than others. I think one thing that maybe is missed in the debates, and maybe I've just not heard enough debates in it, but is that a lot of visits to attractions aren't necessarily those tick box, memorable moment, life-changing experiences. And if you're going to Warner Brothers or maybe a Merlin Attraction or Natural History Museum for the first time, then obviously, these are moments you'll never forget. But a lot of attraction visits are actually really casual visits. We call them the social mindset segments and they tend to make up around one in five people who visited typically visit attractions. And these are people who just go there to be in a nice environment and to maybe chat with a friend or to have a coffee or just to be around like-minded people. And I guess that can sometimes get missed off. It's not necessarily that big standout tick box experience every time.Kelly Molson: Yeah. Like the example that you gave of the artist, I'm sure she finds those environments quite inspiring for her work and for what she does and who she is as a person. To have to plan that is almost like planning your inspiration. It's not quite right, is it? You take yourself off for a walk somewhere random to be inspired. And I think having to kind of go, "Okay, well, at two o'clock, I'm going to go to the Tate for my inspiration for the day," it doesn't quite sit well with that, does it?Jon Young: Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. It is a minority, but yeah, it feels quite valid.Kelly Molson: Are there any differences by visitor party types? So families, retirees, et cetera.Jon Young: Yeah. So it was quite interesting when we asked this question and when we looked at the life stage. So we looked at pre-nesters, those under 35s without children in household, older independents, so 35 and over without children in the household, then families, and then retirees. So we look at those four different life stages as opposed to age group. And families were a little bit higher in terms of being resistant. I think it is worth noting that they were a little bit higher. It's about seven percentage points. It's not a huge amount, but the vast majority were still happy with that. And I think my take, having thought about this quite a bit now, is that the differences aren't really based on life stage or party size per se. There are some, and I can understand why families would be resistant.Jon Young: There are more moving parts with a family literally and more things that can go wrong in the day. Whereas if myself and my partner, we've just got ourselves to worry about. So I can see why that would be a barrier. But for me, the biggest distinction is in attitudes. And as I mentioned earlier, we do quite a lot of audience segmentation. So we don't tend to do them on demographics anymore. So we don't do it on gender or age or any other demographic. We do it on people's attitudes and base their attitudes to life. Or it could be to how they do their leisure behavior or anything else. And that's what's come across here, I think, is that the key distinctions are attitudes to pre-booking and how organized you are and how spontaneous you are and how much you like planning and how much you don't.Jon Young: And that does transcend all life stages. Certainly, there's an indication that families are a bit more resistant, but it's not as big as the sort of differences in terms of attitudes. One other thing we noticed though is that even though families were a bit more resistant, they were actually more likely to go ahead. So it's almost as if they were gritting their teeth and visiting. And again, that did make sense because I guess when you're a family, you really need to fill your spare time and to get out and do things. So whereas maybe an individual on their own or a couple, there's less pressure to do that.Kelly Molson: Yeah. You've got the challenge again of keeping children and younger members of your family occupied. Jon Young: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: So that's that. We've got to do something. Whether we like this or not, we've got to get them out of the house. They're a bit stuck in these four walls. Everyone's going crazy. We've got to go out and do something kind of attitude.Jon Young: Yeah. So my sort of take from this whole section is that not to get too caught up on the party type and just to think about these different attitudes because that feels to be the big dividing point.Kelly Molson: Okay. And audiences that are not picked up by the research. Again, I think this is really interesting to me because I hadn't thought about some of these things as actually being a challenge for people, which is it's not on them to be honest. I should have been more aware of them, but tell us about the audiences that have not been picked up by the research and how it would affect them.Jon Young: Yeah. So I think the international audiences. This was amongst a UK sample. So I can visualize here my wife's parents who are Polish and they don't speak any English. And coming over here as they have done a few times and just setting them free into London and see what they get up to. And they often do visit attractions, but they'll walk up and they'll have that conversation. And there's less room for error, but to ask them to go on a website, they don't book their National Express from Stansted. They get my wife to do that because they know that they can do something wrong. They're a great example in my mind that there's likely to be a barrier for international visitors, particularly those who don't speak English. And there's lots of those who come to London and the rest of the UK.Jon Young: So that's definitely a barrier thing. And unless you can cover all the bases with language, then I think that will be. I know that Google have an inbuilt translation function, but again, you have to be quite IT savvy to know that. So I think that's definitely one audience. The older retirees, so we conduct our surveys on a panel. So these are people who've signed up to do the surveys online. So we're naturally missing out that small proportion of older citizens who aren't that IT savvy. So I guess my Nan would have fallen into that category. She always liked to phone ahead, for example. So there is a danger that they lose out a little bit. And I think, obviously, there's always the option to phone and they do that. But perhaps that is just one extra barrier then, one extra step when maybe a year before, they would have just turned up. Jon Young: So that audience, I think, is quite an important one still, although they are becoming more IT savvy. I think a lot of data shows that. I see people's grands on Facebook now just to make that point. That's a different place to 10 years ago for sure. And I think the third big audience is the low-income audiences. So we've been doing some work for a network of libraries in the UK. And I think it was about two months ago that we had a big meeting with representatives of these different libraries around the UK. And we decided to switch our research to online, again, because of COVID. We used to have paper-based surveys that we've handed out in each library. And we felt, "This is a great idea," maybe for the same reasons as the pre-booking. It's much more efficient. You get much better data, more reliable, blah, blah, blah. Jon Young: And about halfway through, someone from a Glasgow Museum put their hand up and said, "This is great, but can we have paper surveys as well?" He said that it was around about 30% of his catchment area didn't have access to the internet. And I was really surprised by that.Kelly Molson: Right. It's a huge amount.Jon Young: It is. You don't expect numbers like that. But I know there is quite high deprivation traditionally in that area where the library is. So he said, "It's absolutely essential that we have paper surveys." And there was another way of doing this as well. And obviously, that made me think about pre-booking online too. And it's been a challenge for certainly the museum sector and cultural attractions to reach out to all of their audiences. And actually, in Glasgow, they've done a really amazing job. The likes of Kelvingrove, for example, but this audience is quite large. And I guess it needs to be thought-about too. So yeah, that's quite a big barrier as well, I think.Kelly Molson: Yeah, absolutely. And it's a focus for cultural organizations to raise their awareness in audiences that are not necessarily their natural audiences or people that are less aware of them. Those people would fit into that category. So it's understanding all the different ways that you need to be able to help people visit, help them understand what you do and be able to book.Jon Young: Absolutely. I think certain funding like HLF funding is dependent on attractions actually doing that as well. So they kind of need to be seen to return in all these different ways.Kelly Molson: Gosh. So what are the conclusions from this? Because there's not a one answer fits all, is there? This is going to be some kind of hybrid model. Jon Young: There really isn't. I think one thing I didn't mention is the no shows as well. I don't know if you wanted to mention that. Kelly Molson: Yes.Jon Young: But I think there's a big worry as well. In our survey, around 10% of people... Actually, it's 15%, sorry, said that they booked and hadn't shown up. And so there's another, I guess, barrier as well. Although we also found that a similar proportion had shown up because they booked. So I think that maybe balances out. So I think in terms of our conclusions, that was quite an important point for me because there was a lot of people not showing up just because they were never committed in the first place. So I think about seven in 10 of those people said actually it was always 50/50, "I've just booked it." So I think there was a need to maybe make that more taboo.Kelly Molson: There's a challenge there around annual passes as well, isn't there?Jon Young: Absolutely.Kelly Molson: So if you have an annual pass for an attraction, and you have to pre-book as well to use that annual pass, you book it but you might not go. But that can't then be resold. So the attraction in a way kind of loses out because there's no one else that they can put through the door.Jon Young: Yeah, it is a real challenge. And I think I was really struck by the fact that the majority of people who don't turn up just said they had more than one option that day, and they didn't really get the gravity of it. And I mentioned that we tested restaurants as well. And what was really striking was that the proportion of no shows is a lot lower. And people who don't turn up to restaurants were more likely to give understandable reasons like they were ill on the day or so. And I think not turning up to a restaurant is a little bit more taboo. You can kind of visualize in your head that empty table that you're leaving there.Jon Young: So I think the more the attractions can create that sense of taboo without sort of shaming anyone, the better. And maybe that will happen less and less. And I think they are doing that. But you said the annual pass point is quite important. So I think when people have parted with a lot of money for their pre-booking, they're less likely to do it. So yeah, I think one of the conclusions is if we can reduce that a little bit as well, that will help.Jon Young: But in terms of overall conclusions, I mean, I'm like yourself. I'm massively in favor of pre-booking. I think it's brilliant at so many different levels. And I think you listed those right at the start. It's great for the attraction. And it can really improve the visitor experience. It can see improve rates. And also, you can gain loyalty in the long-term and have that conversation on either side. So I'm really behind it. I think it really does suggest, though, that there's a need for some sort of hybrid where there is a walkup option possible because as we've discussed at length, this one in five of your visitors, they may be spontaneous visitors, depending on where you're situated. Jon Young: Obviously, it does matter where you are and how much you charge. If you are the British Library, then there's loads of people coming out of King's Cross and just popping in. But if you're in the middle of nowhere, then you're less likely to have that. So there's obvious differences. And I guess people need to sort of work those through as well. But I certainly think some sort of hybrid. And I'm glad I don't have to sort of deciding on how that works. And I just got to give the data because it's clearly very challenging. But there's a lot of operational brains out there, I think, that can really can work that through. Jon Young: And maybe there's a bit of trial and error as well. But I think the point I made earlier about just understanding it's more of an attitude, no barrier, I think, than anything else. And not to get too bogged down in the demographics of it all. And just to understand that some people hate planning. Yeah. I'm not so good at it myself. So I can kind of empathize. Yeah. And I guess just to be aware that there are other audiences out there who might really struggle. I saw some figures today from Visit Britain and their projections on inbound tourism and it's so low.Kelly Molson: Yeah. 16.9 million, wasn't it? For next year. Jon Young: Well done. I can't remember.Kelly Molson: I think that's what I read this morning. I've been looking at it myself. But it's so vastly down. It's really scary.Jon Young: It really is. And markets like the states will take longer to catch up just because there's a big lag from bookings to visiting. So we need to do all we can to get as many of our British-based visitors in as possible. So I guess we just need to have all the options we can. So yeah, that's the key conclusion, I think, really. And yeah, like I said, I'll leave it to the boffins' fractions to work out how to do it because I guess you don't want to have a situation where if you can turn up walkup anyway, why would you pre-book?Kelly Molson: It's difficult, isn't it? Yeah.Jon Young: So, balance. Kelly Molson: It is about balance, I think. I mean, a lot of attractions are just going to say, "No, that's it. We're going to keep the pre-booking. That's it." It's almost tough, but I think it depends on... It's very location-driven like you were saying. It's interesting. We've actually got Geoff Spooner coming on the podcast in the New Year from the Warner Brothers Studio Tour, The Making of Harry Potter, which obviously launched with pre-booking from opening day. So it'll be really interesting for people to tune in and hear all of the positives from that. But Geoff is very pragmatic when he speaks about it because he does say a lot of those decisions are driven by location actually in terms of kind of parking and congestion in the area where they're located as well. It made sense to do that. And so there's so many factors you have to think about, and it is going to be down to the individual attractions to work out what's going to work best for them.Jon Young: It really is, and I think the likes of Warner Brothers, as I said earlier, when you visit Warner Brothers, it is-Kelly Molson: It's magic. Jon Young: ... amazing. I went a few years ago with my niece, and we actually booked four months in advance. And it was amazing. And everyone's had the same experience, I think. So it is maybe different to the [inaudible 00:41:38] in Central London where you can visit more regularly perhaps. But I think actually one thing that Simon at Roman Baths mentioned was that their booking system is really flexible. So they've had a really low proportion of no-shows. So you can cancel, I think, up to the minute pretty much. And so I think the more flexibility, the better, and maybe that will help as well. So yeah, lots out there. And I'm sure there'll be some great best practice.Kelly Molson: Well, lots to think about for 2021. Hopefully, this podcast has given you a little insight into what visitors are thinking about pre-booking. Jon, I mean, I've been lucky enough to have my copy in advance. Where will people be able to find this research so that they can have a read of it themselves?Jon Young: So hopefully, by the time this is published, we'll have put it into a blog and maybe in a Q&A format. We'll see how it goes. Might put a few graphs in there. We love a graph.Kelly Molson: Love a graph.Jon Young: Feel a bit naked without a graph actually just talking about this. So yeah, we'll put it on our website. Follow me on LinkedIn or whatever, and I'll be promoting it on there as well.Kelly Molson: Right. Well, for our listeners, we will link to all of these things in the show notes. So we will link to Jon's LinkedIn profile. We'll link to the BVA BDRC website and their Twitter profile. So go ahead and follow them. And then you will have access to this brilliant research. Jon, I always end the podcast by asking our guests to recommend a book. Something that they love or something that's helped shape their career in some way. So have you got something to share with us today?Jon Young: I do. I've got this book called How Emotions Are Made. Kelly Molson: Great.Jon Young: So I read this on jury service.Kelly Molson: Okay. Interesting jury service then?Jon Young: Yeah. Well, when I got to the jury service, I noticed that there were loads and loads of thousand-piece jigsaws which gave me an idea that we wouldn't be doing a lot with our time. I think I spent 90% of it just hanging around. So luckily, I had this book, which is written by a neurologist called Lisa Feldman Barrett. And it's the science of how emotions are sort of created. It's a hard read. And I don't think I'd have read it if I didn't have so much time on my hands. But it's really, really fascinating and it kind of changed how I thought about the visitor experience.Jon Young: In a nutshell, it sort of talks about how you can only really feel emotions if you recognize the stimulus you're given and if you're not distracted in lots of ways. So when we test the visitor experience now, certainly in exhibitions, we will just make sure we sort of test how relatable exhibits and descriptions are and whether there are any distractions in the exhibition room, and lots of other things around that. So I do recommend it. It really changed how we thought about the visitor experience. I'm just looking at the footnotes, were about a hundred pages. So I'm not sure if anyone wants to win this, but it's really interesting.Kelly Molson: Jon, you're not really selling it for our listeners. I'm not going to lie. Listen, if you've listened to all of that, and you'd still like to win that book, then if you head over to our Twitter account, and as ever, retweet this episode announcement with the words, "I want Jon's books." Then you will be in with a chance of winning a copy of it. Jon, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It's been an absolute pleasure. And I would like to just thank you again for all of the work that you've been doing throughout lockdown because it has been invaluable for us. And I know that it's been invaluable for many, many attractions up and down the UK. So thank you. Jon Young: Thank you. Kelly Molson: This is the last episode of 2020, which is crazy. I have had an absolute blast this year talking to the most interesting people. And I'm so grateful that all of you, listeners, have been tuning in week after week after week. So thank you. We are going to be back on the sixth of January with a very exciting episode. In fact, we've got loads of exciting episodes lined up for the start of the New Year. As you heard earlier, we've got Geoff Spooner coming on from The Making of Harry Potter, which I'm really excited about. I definitely fangirled a little bit on that podcast. We have Holkham Estates coming on to talk about their sustainability plans. And we have the brilliant National Football Museum who are coming on to talk about why your attraction should have a podcast. So stay tuned. We'll see you in the New Year. But in the meantime, have an absolutely wonderful Christmas and festive break.Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five-star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

I'm joined by Belinda Scarlett from the National Football Museum in Manchester. The museum is gearing up for a big exhibition on the women's game next year. In this podcast, we major on the Dick, Kerr Ladies, who were drawing 50,000+ crowds in the early 1920s before the FA banned women's football from FA-affiliated grounds.

We're joined by Dr. Kevin Moore, the former CEO of the National Football Museum. His book 'What You Think You Know About Football is Wrong' seeks to debunk some popularly-held myths, and we talk through some of them here. We also discuss his former role at the National Football Museum and some of its more popular artifacts.

D-M, Nat & Shahan discuss Bristol City's thrilling 2-2 draw with a mediocre (but smartly dressed) Tottenham Hotspur side as part of Women's Football Weekend 2020. We delight in Ebony Salmon's stellar finishing and presence in the starting line up for the third game running. We also admire Chloe Logarzo's composure from the penalty spot. This podcast will live long in the memory as one that celebrates the Vixens' first point of the season & documents our relief that Alex Morgan couldn't do it on a wet, muddy Saturday night in Bath. We also look ahead to facing Lewes in the Conti Cup & our next WSL game against Reading, & discuss our greatest victory of the season (so far): the fabulous purple & lime away shirt being declared the Nation's Greatest Kit for 2020/21 by the National Football Museum (more details here: https://www.nationalfootballmuseum.com/news/nfm-greatest-football-shirt) Because of lockdown we once again recorded this episode remotely, so apologies for the occasional internet sound gremlin that joins us. Featuring guest contribution Spurs fan Craig Turnbull (@CraigJacob21 on Twitter) - thanks as always! (D-M also apologises for the terrible pronunciation of Siri Worm). This episode is dedicated to Tanya Oxtoby. Get well soon! Vixens 'Til We Die. Like us, share us, subscribe us, rate us, tweet us @BCVixenCast --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bcvixencast/message

Arsenal legend Rachel Yankey was the first professional female player registered in England, and went on to became one of the country's most successful and well known footballers. She became England's most capped playing in 2013, beating Peter Shilton's record with 129 caps.  Having played in the UK for Arsenal, Fulham and Birmingham City Rachel Yankey's honours include five Premier League Championships, two Women's Super League Championships, 11 FA Women's Cups, 7 Women's Premier League Cups, 1 UEFA Women's Cup. She also played at the London 2012 Olympics. In 2017 Rachel was inducted into the National Football Museum in 2017. She received an MBE in 2006 and an OBE in 2014 for services to football and coaching.

The fifth Sport in History Podcast brought to you by the British Society of Sport History in association with the Institute of Historical Research continues the summer interview season. Today my guest is Prof Jean Williams of the University of Wolverhampton where she is professor of Sport in the Institute of Sport and Human Sciences. Jean has published extensively on the history of sport, including her seminal 2003 work on women's football, ‘A Game for Rough Girls? A History of Women's Football in England' In a very topical podcast Jean talks to me about her work on developing a new museum of motorsport at the home of the British Grand Prix, Silverstone. We also talk about the history of women's football and Jean's pioneering work with the National Football Museum to uncover the hidden history of the women's game. Jean is the editor of two special editions of the BSSH's journal Sport in History which bring together a wonderfully diverse collection of articles, ranging from her own co-authored article on the 1971 Women's World Cup to an examination of the significance of the Danish-Afghan footballer Nadia Nadim by Sine Agergaard. We also talk about Jean's role as a mentor of young historians as a PhD supervisor. Two of Jean's students, Amanda Callan-Spenn and Jo Halpin, will be taking their viva examinations this week and I hope to talk to both of them in the future.

Last week Rugby League Cares, the sport's charitable arm, announced that the new National Rugby League Museum is going to be housed at the George Hotel in Huddersfield, the birthplace of the game. In this special museum episode, I discuss the plans for the museum with Dr Kevin Moore, former CEO of the National Football Museum, and answer listeners' questions about the project.

On Wednesday, Justin Fashanu went into the National Football Museum's Hall of Fame. It's a story that has made headlines around the world - so we thought we'd do something a little bit different and take you inside the Museum for the induction itself. This episode is a bit different to our other ones - with not just one guest but lots of them, all talking about what Justin Fashanu's induction means to them. The edits are a bit rough and ready - but the stories, as always, are powerful and surprising, and we think they'll give you a real flavour of what the event was all about. WANT TO GET IN TOUCH WITH THE PODCAST? jack.murley@bbc.co.uk @jack_murley

Wednesday would have been the 59th birthday of Justin Fashanu. The footballer was the first black player to earn a one-million pound transfer fee – and played for twenty-two clubs in a career that spanned two decades. Fashanu was also the first male English professional to come out as gay while playing – and became the victim of constant crowd abuse as a result. Ultimately, Fashanu took his own life – but on Wednesday, he's being posthumously inducted into the National Football Museum's Hall of Fame for his contributions to the sport. His niece Amal will be accepting the honour on his behalf – and joins us for this powerful, poignant episode on her uncle's legacy, as well as her memories of him as a man. There's so much on the agenda – from visibility to inclusivity to mental health – and we think this is an interview that you won't forget any time soon. WANT TO GET IN TOUCH WITH OUR GUEST? @AmalFashanu @TJFFoundation WANT TO GET IN TOUCH WITH THE PODCAST? @jack_murley jack.murley@bbc.co.uk

A special episode about the UK's first and only openly gay male professional footballer Justin Fashanu as he is inducted into the National Football Museum's 'Hall of Fame'. Guests include Di Cunningham from 'Proud Canaries', Tim Desmond from the National Football Museum and Ian Pearson from 'United with Pride'.

Finding himself in Wrexham, Russell called into the town's museum to catch up with Steve Grenter, museum manager and heritage lead for Wrexham county borough, to hear about how the National Football Museum development is coming along. The museum's exhibitions officer, Jon Gammond and volunteers, Dave Weaver and Andrew Edwards, also discuss how they curated the current Football Forever! exhibition. Tra fod yn Wrecsam, fe alwodd Russell mewn i amgueddfa'r dref i ddal i fyny gyda Steve Grenter, rheolwr yr amgueddfa ac arweinydd treftadaeth i fwrdeistref sirol Wrecsam, i glywed am sut mae'r Amgueddfa Bêl-droed Genedlaethol yn datblygu. Hefyd mae swyddog arddangosfeydd yr amgueddfa, Jon Gammond, a gwirfoddolwyr, Dave Weaver ac Andrew Edwards, yn trafod sut wnaethant nhw guradu yr arddangosfa gyfredol Pêl-droed Am Byth!.

This week’s ‘Rugby Reloaded’ chats with Dr Kevin Moore, former Director of the National Football Museum in England and author of a new book, 'What You Think You Know About Football is Wrong: The Global Game's Greatest Myths and Untruths'. We discuss the unquestioned narratives of soccer, such as why did soccer defeat rugby, could soccer have America's national sport, the history of ancient Chinese football, the eventual death of the game, and much more. For more on the history of rugby and the other football codes, take a look at www.rugbyreloaded.com (which also has show notes for this episode) and follow me on Twitter at @collinstony.

Listen to Paul and Andy coming live from the National Football Museum in Manchester ahead of England's 1000th game against Montenegro.The guys had a look around the exhibits with Dr Alex Jackson, the Collections Officer at the museum, and were also joined by esteemed guests such as Jon Wilkin and Chris Kirkland. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you’re on Twitter, you’ll know em. Nick Fraser and Mark Liptrott have created an online sensation with their cleverly-worked club badges, which combine football crests with bands' logos and names. Think Wu-vemphampton Wanderers and All Saints (Southampton). A fun idea between mates has spiralled into highly sought after collectables, an exhibition at The National Football Museum and even a match day programme, done in conjunction with the Charlatans and Gary Neville, at Salford City. We caught up with Nick at Charlatans’ frontman Tim Burgess’ gig in London.

Host Ian Cheeseman presents the Talking City podcast live from the National Football Museum in Manchester, he is joined by M.E.N City correspondents Stuart Brennan and Simon Bajkowski, as well as ex-City icons Shaun Goater and Dennis Tueart.All things Manchester City were discussed as the audience were given the chance to put forward questions to the panel, from envisaging life after Pep Guardiola to whether or not Shaun Goater would swap his 99' play-off final medal for a Premier League medal, this is not one to be missed! For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Comedian Tez Ilyas and his football fanatic dad visit the National Football Museum in Manchester, where they reminisce about childhood and Blackburn’s glory days as they put their skills to the test for penalty shoot-outs and match commentary. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Paz and Ketch discover some AMAZING relics from footballing past on their visit to the National Football Museum in Manchester.

Joe, Alex Stepney, Gary Owen and Ian Cheeseman are live from Cafe Football at The National Football Museum as we look ahead to tomorrows derby See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

To celebrate the launch of the Pele' exhibition along with regulars Gary Owen and Micky Thomas See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Alaska Rabbit - News - Rabbit Catches a Duck - Sunflower - Greenhorn This episode: Alaska Rabbit; News; Rabbit catches a Duck; Sunflower; Greenhorn Feel free to visit the website: http://www.hareoftherabbit.com/ If you would like to support the podcast either visit the link for Amazon, then make your purchases as normal.  I cannot see who purchases what, but a small percentage of your purchase will benefit the podcast: https://www.amazon.com/?&tag=haroftherab-20&camp=228761&creative=536025&linkCode=ur1&adid=0Z1J5SZGFHE81DASKT78& Or you can donate to the podcast at: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4748024 Outline: Today we are going to discuss the Alaska rabbit, some recent news, and we will have another Rabbit folkelore tale. We will also have the plant of the week, as well as the rabbit word of the week.  I would like to thank whoever purchased the items through our Amazon affiliate link on the www.HareoftheRabbit.com website.  I cannot see who purchases what, and there is no additional charge for you, but a small portion of your purchase is sent to support the podcast. Now, the Alaska Rabbit When I first encountered this breed, I guessed that it had been developed in Alaska, based on the name, but in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.  What is also surprising is that the rabbit named after an American state "Alaska", is currently an unrecognised breed in the United States. Despite the name, the Alaska rabbit doesn't come from the cold extremities of North America.  They were actually first developed in Germany and descend from Argente and Himalayan rabbits. We are going to cover the History of the Alaska Rabbit. The Alaska rabbit was created in 1900 by Max Fischer, of Gotha, and Schmidt, of Langensalza. Their Breeding goal was of obtaining a rabbit that looks like the sought-after Alaskan Fox.  The wanted to develop a rabbit breed that would provide another source of fur which would be profitable in the fur trades of that time.  A breeding programme was established in 1900 where they crossed Havanas, Dutch, Himalayans and Champagne d'Argents. The goal was to create a long Jet-black coat with long white guard hairs to mimic the coat of the Alaskan Fox whose pelt commanded a high price in those days, believing they would have a good market for their rabbit pelts.  They found the white guard hairs impossible to produce consistently, and as any good rabbit breeder will know, the genetics rarely go according to plan, so instead of getting a the black rabbit with the long silver hairs, the Alaska rabbit turned out to have an intense black colour and long glossy black guard hairs that gave the rabbit a beautiful sheen, and the rabbit became the rich black coated rabbit  that it is today.   So, they did not achieve their goal, but with the uncommon dense black coat, rich colour shade and unique intensity, they chose to keep the breed they had created and let it remain as it was, rather than keep the breeding process going.   They ended up with the jet black Alaska that is known today.  The first Alaskas were shown in 1907 and rapidly gained recognition across Europe.  The Alaska rabbit was introduced into the UK soon after their development, then became "extinct" until it was re-introduced in the 1970's.  It was known as a ‘Nubian’ in England and was extinct in that country until 1972 when it was reintroduced by Belgium Peter Townson.  By the 1970s, the Alaska had also found its way to Canada by being imported to North America by Bert Reurs of Canada.  It was in the mid-1970's when ARBA (American Rabbit Breeders Association) had acknowledge the Alaskan breed. Their recognition in the United States was sadly short-lived, as the even more popular Havana rabbit came along in the 80s and the Alaska was dropped from the ARBA registry.  In 1981, the Black Havana Rabbit, which is similar in colour and build was introduced, and this saw the Alaska fall out of favour and it was subsequently dropped by the ARBA (American Rabbit Breeders Association) from their list. The breed has yet to make a comeback in the United States, but there are breeders who are hoping the breed will see a resurgence in popularity. We are going to now discuss the charactoristics of the Alaska Rabbit. As we covered before, at some point, the breeders didn't achieve what they intend to create but they were satisfied enough with their different result.  The results of their program did produce the Alaska rabbit which have a completely Jet- black color with a long glossy guard hairs without any mixture of silvering.  The Alaska is instantly recognisable thanks to its striking glossy black fur. The Alaska Rabbit Fur I believe that the most stricking characteristic of the Alaska Rabbit is the Jet Black fur.  The fur of the Alaskan is jet black with the base colour a slate blue and the tips a glossy black. There may be an even dispersion of isolated white hairs.  Long guard hairs are also interspersed throughout the coat.  The belly is black but may not be as shiny as the brilliant body coat. The eyes and toenails are a dark brown.   It is a ‘self’ rabbit and the underside is matt black.  The third gene in the A series is the self gene, which we indicate using the small letter “a”.   Any rabbit that shows a self color has the genotype of “aa,” because it cannot hide agouti or tan pattern under it.  In the show world, “self” means one single color all over, like black, blue, chocolate, and lilac.  When we’re talking genetics, the definition of self is slightly different.  In addition to black, chocolate, blue, and lilac, self colors also include tortoise, Siamese sable, sable point, smoke pearl, and other unrecognized varieties.  Although some genetically self rabbits have some shading, a genetically self rabbit will never have agouti or tan pattern markings.   Nearer the skin the hairs will be a deep slate colour, turning to a vibrant, shiny black towards the tips. A smattering of white hairs are allowed by the breed standard, but any more than that or any white patches or stripes would not be permitted by the standard.  A self or solid-coloured breed, the Alaska rabbit only comes in one colour - black.  The under-colour of the coat, near the skin, is usually a deep slate blue and turns jet black the closer it gets to the surface.   Only glossy black fur, any colour other than black is a fault for this breed.  It is considered a ur breed by British Rabbit Council standards, and only comes in its standard, pitch black color. The Alaska Rabbit Club is the BRC's national specialty club for this breed. The Alaskan rabbit is one of the very few true black rabbits and has a coat that is a jet black colour and dense in thickness. Alaska Rabbit Description Although It is not known exactly how they were created, it is believed that it was a crossing of the Havanas, Dutch, Himalayans and Champagne d'Argent rabbits which  resulted in an animal with the silky, thick fur which is the animal’s trademark.   The Argente is an ancient French breed. They have passed on their erect ear carriage to the Alaskan. They also have very dense, glossy coats like the Alaskan. The Argente has five colours recognised by the British Rabbit Council – Bleu (blue), Brun (brown), Creme (cream), Champagne (silvery) and Noir (black).  They have compact, cobby bodies with short necks and broad, rounded loins. The Himalayan rabbit has been known by many different names and its origins are uncertain. It has a very docile temperament and is popular as a pet. Generally the Himalayan breeds very true to type. Crossings of the Himalayan  and the Argente resulted in the Alaskan which is popular today as both a pet and a show breed. Body The Alaskan rabbit should weigh between 2.7 and 3.9kg (7-9 lb) and is regarded/classed as a medium sized variety.  It is a thick-set rabbit and appears to be without a neck. They have a well-rounded and balanced body with a solid block type and, while not as compact as other breeds, they have good bone development for their size.  The head is broad and carried very close to the body without a distinct neck area.  The head of the doe is generally slightly finer than that of the buck.  Bucks (males) have a little heavier type, while does (females) tend to have more feminine features and are permitted to have a dewlap (a roll of skin at the neck, often giving the appearance that the rabbit's head is resting on a cushion of fur). In show rabbits, a dewlap is allowed providing it is well developed and in proportion to the whole.  The chest is broad and the shoulders and rump well-muscled. The legs are strong and of medium length.   Ears and Eyes The ears are upright and quite short, broad and rounded in comparison to other similar breeds. They are quite broad and rounded at the ends.The ears of the Alaskan are a brown-black colour and are held open and straight. The breed should have dark toenails and dark, bright eyes and should only ever be brown-black eyes to black. The nose and pads of the paws should also be a matt black colour. Temperament/Personality Like many other breeds the Alaska is generally docile and makes a great pet or show animal. Rabbits are generally more active in the morning and at night and an Alaska will be fairly active rabbit.  The Alaska rabbit has a well-tempered behavior and are relatively non-aggressive when compared with other rabbits so they make great pets.  Although they have a rather bubbly, outgoing personality, they are gentle, very loving and will love to spend hours at a time with you! Like any Rabbit, they should be handled carefully only by those who know how to pick rabbits up correctly.  It’s easy to cause spinal problems in rabbits if they are not handled properly.  Plus, if he feels uncomfortable or fearful while being carried he will struggle and may kick out with his very powerful back legs which could cause injury to himself or whoever is holding him. Although a gentle and quite affectionate breed, the Alaska can be skittish.  Having said that, they relish playtime and have lots of energy, so they will appreciate the company of those who can keep up with them.   The Alaska is an intelligent rabbit and can be trained to use a litter tray quite easily so if you’re planning on bringing your rabbit to live indoors he should be shown where he can relieve himself. What is it that makes this breed original? Why choose an Alaska Rabbit? ⦁    The Alaska is instantly recognisable thanks to its striking glossy black fur. ⦁    The Alaska's original purpose is for its fur, helping to reduce the pressure of trapping Alaskan fox.  You could also tan and utilize the fur.. The fur are its greatest value wherein you can tan and utilize the fur either for personal or business interest. ⦁    The breed makes a very flashy pet, with its intense and shiny black coat and dense silky fur.Pet lovers will surely enjoy their comfy black dense silky fur. ⦁    At 7 - 9 pounds, this rabbit can also double as a meat rabbit or a source of raw homemade pet food. Health All rabbits should be vaccinated against myxomatosis and VHD – both of which are potentially fatal conditions that can be spread by infected animals, bedding, utensils or toys.  Annual vaccinations against Viral Haemorrhagic Disease and myxomatosis are recommended.  They should also be treated regularly for fleas, ticks and worms. Rabbits are most active in the morning and at night.  They are more delicate than is generally believed. The basic diet should consist of unlimited fresh hay (which should not be dusty), fresh fruit and vegetables, good quality dry rabbit mix and clean water. They should be housed in a dry, draft-free area.  If kept in a cage, a plastic or wire base should be covered with a suitable bedding such as straw or wood shavings.  Fine sawdust is not suitable as it can cause eye irritations.  They should have sufficient room to exercise himself.  Keep his environment and food and water containers clean and you will have a contented bunny who should have few health problems. Dental hygiene is an essential part of rabbit care.  Their teeth grow continuously and will need the correct diet to keep them worn down. Overgrown teeth can cause lots of problems for your Rabbit, including difficulty eating, and injuries in the mouth that can lead to abscesses.  The best way to combat overgrown molars and enamel spurs is to stop them happening in the first place by providing a diet high in good quality hay and lots of fibrous green vegetables such as cabbage and kale. Gnaw toys also help keep teeth in check. If you suspect a dental issue your vet can carry out an examination and any remedial work necessary. The coat needs a good brush at least once a week, more during periods of  moulting. Additionally, as rabbits’ teeth keep growing throughout their lives, eating the right food will help to keep the teeth properly ground down, but you do need to check, on a frequent basis, that this is happening properly, or your pet may need to have its teeth ground down by the vet. Your rabbit should never be allowed to get overweight.  Excess weight will prevent your pet from looking after himself properly and if he can’t groom then flies may become attracted to soiled areas of fur.  These flies could lay their eggs in the fur and the emerging larvae will bury into your rabbit’s skin causing great discomfort and even infection.  Flystrike can be prevented by keeping your rabbit’s weight down and making sure his fur and his bedding is clean. Caring for your Rabbit: Whether he’s going to be a house or a hutch rabbit, he will need access to a run or a secure area so he can nibble and take in some rays.  Rabbits do love sunbathing, but the should have a shaded area where he can get out of the sun if necessary. If they are going to be a house rabbit he should be introduced to other pets carefully and while he/she still young enough not to be scared.  they should have a place he can go to get away from it all – a dog crate is ideal for this.  They should be provided with a litter tray too and can be trained to use this relatively easily.  Cables, wires, shoes, clothes, important papers and anything else you treasure should be kept out of the way as they will chew whatever they can get his teeth into.  Even a house Rabbit should have the opportunity  to have a good run and explore in a safe place outside. If your pet is going to live in a hutch you should consider getting two animals as rabbits live in colonies of many animals in the wild and do not like to live alone.  This medium sized rabbit needs plenty of space to move around and exercise, and a hutch that is large enough for it to stretch to its full height and length in all directions.  The hutch should be water and windproof and a cover should be placed over the mesh front in the harshest weather. Sawdust makes an excellent substrate and can easily be cleaned out once a week.  Droppings should be removed regularly.  the rabbit should have access to clean, fresh water every day and logs, tubes and toys would be welcome additions to his home.  The hutch should have a covered area where he can build a nest and go for a snooze or get out of the weather. The diet should be carefully planned to help him stay fit and healthy and should consist of good hay, high-quality rabbit pellets and lots of green leaves and vegetables such as cabbage, dandelions and nettles.  Feed a standard rabbit diet to ensure good digestion, avoid obesity and give proper wear on the rabbit’s continually growing teeth. Notes of safety: Please note that, despite their ‘cute’ appearance,  rabbits are not ideal for very small children to handle unless they are closely supervised. Rabbits should be socialised at an early age and young children should be told how to hold a rabbit properly. If any rabbit becomes frightened, its natural reaction is to try and escape, and its powerful back legs can injure the human handler and can cause the rabbit to be dropped and injure itself. As with all pedigree pets, it is very important to obtain a young rabbit or rabbit kit from a reputable source where you can be guaranteed that it has been bred with a view to avoiding any inherent problems found in the breed. Always keep your rabbits safe from dogs and cats who may harm them.  Even where pets ‘get on’, they should be supervised when together and you must ensure that your rabbit is not stressed by being exposed to other family pets or people. Health issues in the Alaska rabbit The Alaska rabbit is a generally healthy breed of rabbit. As with all rabbits, however, check that its bottom is clean of any debris and is kept dry to avoid the danger of flystrike. Teeth and also toe nails should be checked frequently to ensure they are not growing too long. Average lifespan of the Alaska rabbit. 7 – 10 years and sometimes more. Alaska rabbits are non aggressive so would be fine with younger pet lovers who are gentle. This breed is both outgoing and affectionate, soit will be rewarding to interact with.  Nevertheless, these are beautiful, vibrantly colored rabbits, bright-eyed, substantial, and densely furred. Use This is a multi-use breed.  It is mostly a dual purpose rabbit, mainly kept for its fur and meat, although they should also make for a great pet! Intersting Facts! ⦁    There was also a white Alaska however it is now extinct. ⦁    Interestingly, probably because of the thick, dense coat, the Alaska was used in the creation of the Black Rex. Club Recognition? It is recognised by the British Rabbit Council; however it is not recognised by the American Rabbit Breeders Association. Today, The British Rabbit Council continues to raise the profile and status of rabbit breeding. As new breeds were developed during the 1920's, they were standardised and adopted by The Beveren Club until the society had become a general fur breed club. To recognise its new status, it had two name changes, first to the British Fur Rabbit Society and then later to the to The British Rabbit Society. By 1928 the Society had 13 different fur breeds under its jurisdiction.  Today, The British Rabbit Council encourages research into diseases and other topical issues. As the role of the rabbit has developed into a popular pet, the British Rabbit Council actively encourages good rabbit keeping amongst pet owners. The Newark Head Office receives many hundreds of letters or calls each month asking for advice or information on an extremely wide variety of topics concerned with the rabbit. These are not confined to individual people but are sometimes from official bodies, Governments or overseas.  Each year approximately 1000 shows take place throughout Great Britain! Today sees a structure of District Advisors who give their time to help people in their regions. These are well respected members of great experience appointed by the Council to give advice locally. At shows, awards are available from the Council. The basis of these is the Challenge Certificate which is awarded to the best rabbit of its particular group. Breed Status The BRC (British Rabbit Council) had classified the Alaska breed for fur production.  This was due to their jet black dense, silky and lustrous fur. The fur are also glossy and intensely pigmented. In the United States, ARBA no longer recognize this type of breed which means that they can go extinct.  With your help, you can change the future of the Alaskan rabbit breeds by raising them. This will maintain their number that ARBA might consider them on their list once again.   ARBA still does not recognize this breed. Maybe YOU could help change this by raising them and spurring interest in the breed.) Rabbits with such dense and lustrous coats usually tend to win more often than seems fair! http://www.thenaturetrail.com/rabbit-genetics/agouti-tan-self-a-series-otter/ http://scl.io/NA8sTOfi#gs.Ze3R8do News: European rabbits landed in Australia with the First Fleet in 1788. Since then they have multiplied, as the saying goes, and are estimated to cost the nation more than $200 million-a-year in lost agricultural production – not to mention the damage to native species growth, regeneration and biodiversity. The various state primary industry departments hope the new K5 virus strain, a variant of the existing RHDV1 virus released into the environment in 1996, will be more effective as a wild rabbit killer, particularly in cooler climates and among young rabbits, known as kittens.The virus will be released at more than 150 sites in Victoria and owners of pet rabbits, commercial rabbits and rabbit breeders are urged to vaccinate their animals in preparation. "The current calicivirus vaccine, administered by vets, is expected to provide good protection of pet rabbits against all strains of the RHDV1 virus, including the RHDV1 K5 strain," says Victoria's Acting Chief Veterinary Officer Dr Cameron Bell. Other protective measures include: ensuring pet rabbits do not come into contact with wild rabbits, or grass that has been grazed on by wild rabbits; insect-proofing hutches (the virus can be transmitted by fleas, mosquitoes and flies); and disposing of any virus-affected carcasses properly and hygienically. http://www.smh.com.au/national/pet-owners-warned-to-vaccinate-against-rabbitkiller-virus-20170223-guk0z2.html Rabbit on Ahmedabad airport runway almost makes IndiGo, SpiceJet planes collide The pilot of IndiGo flight reported that there was a rabbit on the runway after which he pulled the brakes hard averting a lethal accident. Airport sources told IndiaToday, a major accident which could have claimed lives of many was averted yesterday between two airlines, namely IndiGo and SpiceJet, on Ahemedabad airport runway. After landing the Indigo aircraft, it was moving towards taxiway and the SpiceJet aircraft was ready for take off. Sources inform that the SpiceJet pilot at this juncture saw the IndiGo flight was still on the runway whereas it was supposed to be off the runway by then. ATC Ahmedabad had to intervene. The pilot of IndiGo airlines reported that a rabbit on the runway was spotted just after landing at Ahmedabad airport, due to which the pilot was forced to pull the brakes hard to halt the aircraft. As the IndiGo pilot stopped the aircraft, the nose of the aircraft was still on taxiway and tail of aircraft still on the runway. While SpiceJet pilots maintain in their report that the IndiGo aircraft wasn't cleared off the runway when SpiceJet was ready to take off. Both the pilots reported ATC about the incident. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/rabbit-ahmedabad-airport-runway-indigo-spicejet/1/891272.html ‘Never Again’ Marks 75th Anniversary of JA Incarceration “Never Again,” a series of speakers, films, and exhibits to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, kicked off at Occidental College on Feb. 12. That’s one week shy of the Feb. 19 anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066 in 1942, which led to the incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans – more than two-thirds of them U.S. citizens – in 10 hastily constructed camps in California and six other states. “What happened to people of Japanese ancestry in our country 75 years ago remains relevant today,” says Julie Kimiko Santos, associate director of international programs at Occidental and series organizer. “Now more than ever it is important to know how and why this tragedy occurred, and the many lessons to be learned.” Bay Area filmmaker Emiko Omori began the series Feb. 12 with a screening of her short film “When Rabbit Left the Moon,” inspired by her own family’s incarceration in Arizona. Omori, who was a toddler when her family was forcibly relocated to Poston, and her older sister Chizu Omori answered questions after the screening. The Vaults at Waterloo - Alice's Adventures Underground Alice’s Adventures Underground – the immersive theatre experience which is returning to The Vaults at Waterloo this April! Audiences will tumble down the rabbit hole and interact with the magical and bizarre characters of Wonderland as they hunt for missing Alice. Audiences choose their own adventure, creating a unique experience with every visit. Meet the White Rabbit, enjoy tea with the Mad Hatter and finish the evening with a cocktail in the Wonderland Bar! The show is unlike anything else in London at the moment and requires a tremendous amount of detail to ensure each audience member is seamlessly immersed in the world of Wonderland. As I’m sure you can imagine, creating Wonderland in the 11 tunnels beneath Waterloo Station is no mean feat either and requires 33 detailed sets, over 65,000 jam tarts and almost 100,000 playing cards! The Wonderland Bar, which is open to visitors to the show and to those just wanting to transport themselves to another world after work, is set to include some bespoke Alice themed cocktails and some delicious food as well. http://www.tntmagazine.com/london/stage/the-vaults-at-waterloo---alices-adventures-underground Tale of 2 Rabbit Hashes: Northside brewery reconsiders name after backlash A brewery in Cincinnati is changing its name before its doors even open after a social media feud boiled over. When Paul Kemp and his father decided to switch from home brewing to opening a true brick and mortar shop, they chose Cincinnati as the location because the environment is more welcoming, Kemp said. When they chose a name, they picked Rabbit Hash, as an homage to the small Boone County, Kentucky town. Rabbit Hash Brewery filed as a limited liability corporation in April 2015. In December 2015 it applied for the trademark for Rabbit Hash Brewery and its logo. The rub? The brewers never talked to the Rabbit Hash Historical Society. The Kemps, who live near Hebron, just miles from Rabbit Hash and are business owners in Burlington, never guessed what would happen when Cincinnati's Northside neighborhood residents got wind of the "misappropriated" brewery name. The brewery is holding a contest to rename the brewey... http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2017/02/22/tale-two-rabbit-hashes-brewery/98209348/ An anonymous donor has dug deep to help veterinary professionals enhance their rabbit skills by covering the costs of CPD courses aimed at understanding the species’ ailments and treatments.    Retired vet Frances Harcourt-Brown, who runs a range of rabbit-related CPD courses in Yorkshire, contacted vettimes.co.uk to speak of her delight at learning a “very generous lady” – known only as Mrs X – had provided the funds to enable practitioners to attend a number of sessions. https://www.vettimes.co.uk/news/mystery-benefactor-funds-rabbit-course-places/ The creative flair of Teesside chef Michael O’Hare is now on show in Manchester - at an eatery owned by two Manchester United legends. The Eston-born Michelin star chef is the creative director at new ‘space age Asian’ restaurant, The Rabbit in the Moon. Owned by GG Hospitality - a company owned by Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville - the eatery is located on the fifth and sixth floors of the National Football Museum in Manchester’s city centre Urbis building. Among the eclectic dishes on offer are Wagyu truffle nigiri, edible plum stone, duck liver satay, sticky halibut ribs and a Chinese bacon butty. http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/rabbit-moon-creative-flair-eston-12635693  Dogs, people and at least one rabbit strut through Soulard for the annual pet parade     By Tim O’Neil St. Louis Post-Dispatch Feb 19, 2017 (0) Several thousand dog owners dressed up their pooches in Mardi Gras attire for the 24th annual Beggin’ Pet Parade Sunday in the Soulard neighborhood, where excuses for a street party come easy. Lovers of dogs, sunshine and anything Mardi Gras lined the streets five to 10 deep to watch people stroll with dogs in zany costumes.warmup to next Saturday’s big Mardi Gras parade, many of the people present Sunday showed up in their Carnival finest. Marchers tossed beads into the crowds of grasping onlookers.Tracie Quackenbush, director of the Open Door Sanctuary in House Springs, said she was optimistic that Sunday’s turnout would beat the record $20,000 raised by the pet parade two years ago. It has supported the sanctuary since 1994, when the event began with perhaps 300 dogs and was known as the Mystic Krewe of Barkus. As the parade caught on, Purina became sponsor to promote its Beggin’ line of dog snacks. The parade is open to all pets, but dogs rule overwhelmingly. There was hardly a cat in sight. A solitary rabbit rode in a cage on a children’s wagon. Stella Palmer, 12, of Crestwood, brought her pet hen, Speckle, which perched calmly on a milk crate as Stella watched the parade go by on Russell Boulevard. Stella brought her for a simple reason: “I don’t have a dog.” http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/dogs-people-and-at-least-one-rabbit-strut-through-soulard/article_2b63ee4f-0a7d-56cc-962d-643a3b99f3bf.html Dick Bruna, 'spiritual father' of rabbit Miffy, dies at 89 Dick Bruna, the Dutch "spiritual father" of Miffy, the white rabbit who enchanted millions of young children around the world for more than half a century, has died at age 89, his publisher announced Friday.     Bruna "passed away peacefully in his sleep" Thursday night in the central Dutch city of Utrecht, Kerkhof said. The simplicity of Bruna's characters drew adoration not only from children, but also from adult art lovers. Amsterdam's venerable Rijksmuseum put on a show featuring his work in 2015. He wrote and illustrated a total of 124 books, but Miffy, known in the Netherlands as Nijntje, a contraction of the Dutch word for rabbit, was far and away his most popular and best known character. Bruna created 32 books about the rabbit, which were translated into more than 50 languages and sold more than 85 million copies, Kerkhof said. The man his publisher described as Miffy's "spiritual father" stopped drawing in 2011. Miffy, who turns 62 this year, is a merchandising juggernaut, featuring on stationery, toys and children's trinkets sold across the world as part of a multimillion-euro (dollar) business. http://www.chinapost.com.tw/editorial/taiwan-issues/2017/02/19/491880/Dick-Bruna.htm Agri-business getting youth attention By: Emmanuel Ntirenganya     Published: February 18, 2017 Rwanda’s agriculture and livestock sector has long been characterised by an ageing farming population whose average age is 55 years. As a result, innovation, creativity and technology adaptation as well as skills transfer has been slow, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources (MINAGRI) and agricultural experts. But lately, some youth have embraced the sector and committed to making it more vibrant in its entire supply chain. The Rwanda Youth in Agribusiness Forum was formed in May 2016 to bring together young people engaged in commercial farming in the country. Unlike traditional farming, these youths’ focus is commercial farming. Currently, the organisation has 1,265 members grouped into five clusters namely crop production, livestock production, agro-processing (animal and crops), other agro-services which include packaging, inputs, extension services, mechanissation, among others, and information communication technologies (ICTs) for agriculture. Eric Manirakiza, a rabbit farmer, founded Impano Rabbitry Company. The 26-year-old is a 2014 graduate in ICT programming at the University of Rwanda’s College of Science and Technology. He told Saturday Times on Monday that he started with 100 rabbits in October 2016, and his colony has already grown to about 600 with modern rabbit farming involving proper record-keeping on the rabbitry population and ensuring hygiene and sustainable productivity. The rabbitry has an average birth of 200 rabbits per month. 1487363533manirakiza Manirakiza at his rabbitry in Ruhango District. Manirakiza’s farm has 80 female rabbits divided into two units of 40 each, he said. An adult rabbit at his farm gives birth to at least five baby rabbits, he said, and its gestation period (conception to birth delivery) is 30 days. It also breastfeeds its off-springs for 30 days after which the off-springs are weaned and the mother rabbit made to mate again. The rabbits are sheltered in plastic-covered metallic sheds which let their liquid and solid waste out freely, leaving them well aerated. After paying farm costs and salaries for his 11 employees, he earns about Rwf700,000 per month from his business. Manirakiza said that his rabbits typically weigh about five kilogrammes at five months and are sold at Rwf8,000 each. Rabbit meat costs Rwf3,000 a kilogramme at the local market and about Rwf6,000 per kg when exported, he said. His farm, located in Ruhango Sector of Ruhango District in Southern Province, was one hectare at inception but has since grown to five hectares so he can grow enough grass to feed the rabbits. Manirakiza said that his rabbitry has an ICT system which helps him keep records for his livestock and analyses the database looking at things like when should the rabbits give birth, when should the young ones mate. “It’s like a calendar alert application in a telephone. We enter data into it and it gives us notification, for instance, when there are two days remaining for the rabbits to mate,” he said. His priority is good rabbit hygiene, because he wants to begin selling rabbits to restaurants soon. Hotels in Rwanda are currently reluctant to put rabbit on their menus because there is an unreliable supply of the meat and it is sometimes unhygienic, he said. Once he starts to get 1,300 kg a month, he will begin selling to hotels, he said. Consumers in Belgium and South Africa have asked him to supply 2 to 15 tonnes of meat per week, but his current production falls far short of such demand. “Rabbit meat is healthy; it is high in protein and very low in fat, almost zero. In countries like Kenya, rabbits are on high demand,” he said, adding that he wants to work with other youth to help meet the demand and create more jobs. Manirakiza also plans to make manure compost from the liquid waste generated from his farm, currently, they produce about 10 jerry cans (about 200 litres) of liquid waste per day and trials have shown that such manure has very high soil fertilising properties, he said. http://www.newtimes.co.rw/section/article/2017-02-18/208129/ I will tell you of how The Rabbit Goes Duck Hunting from the Cherokee People. http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/1097lore.html The Rabbit Goes Duck Hunting     The Rabbit was so boastful that he would claim to do what- ever he saw anyone else do, and so tricky that he could usually make the other animals believe it all. Once he pretended that he could swim in the water and eat fish just as the Otter did, and when the others told him to prove it he fixed up a plan so that the Otter himself was deceived.     Soon afterward they met again and the Otter said, "I eat ducks sometimes." Said the Rabbit, "Well, I eat ducks too." The Otter challenged him to try it; so they went up along the river until they saw several ducks in the water and managed to get near without being seen. The Rabbit told the Otter to go first. The Otter never hesitated, but dived from the bank and swam under water until he reached the ducks, when he pulled one down without being noticed by the others, and came back in the same way.     While the Otter had been under the water the Rabbit had peeled some bark from a sapling and made himself a noose. "Now," he said, "Just watch me;" and he dived in and swam a little way under the water until he was nearly choking and had to come up to the top to breathe. He went under again and came up again a little nearer to the ducks. He took another breath and dived under, and this time he came up among the ducks and threw the noose over the head of one and caught it. The duck struggled hard and finally spread its wings and flew up from the water with the Rabbit hanging on to the noose.     It flew on and on until at last the Rabbit could not hold on any longer, but had to let go and drop. As it happened, he fell into a tall, hollow sycamore stump without any hole at the bottom to get out from and there he stayed until he was so hungry that he had to eat his own fur, as the rabbit does ever since when he is starving. After several days, when he was very weak with hunger, he heard children playing outside around the trees. He began to sing:     Cut a door and look at me;     I'm the prettiest thing you ever did see.     The children ran home and told their father, who came and began to cut a hole in the tree. As he chopped away the Rabbit inside kept singing, "Cut it larger, so you can see me better; I"m so pretty." They made the hole larger, and then the Rabbit told them to stand back so that they could take a good look as he came out. They stood away back, and the Rabbit watched his chance and jumped out and got away. Sunflower Greenhorn

Tara talks with Dr Kevin Moore about the National Football Museum.  Kevin reflects on the nature of sport studies and museum studies, particularly through Brexit.  Popular culture remains a key area of future study and attention in the contemporary museum.

The first half of the Blizzard's live Q&A event held at the National Football Museum as part of the Manchester Football Writing Festival on Thursday 1st September. Featuring a panel of Jonathan Wilson, Jack Pitt-Brooke and Philippe Auclair, hosted by Rory Smith. The panel took questions from the audience and Twitter on a range of subjects across two halves of chat including thoughts on the transfer window, doping in football, the homogeneity of goalnets and massive journalistic clangers that they'd dropped. Apologies for the poor sound quality - we were unable to take a direct feed from the microphones and so had to bodge a compromise, and would rather bring you some audio than none at all. Part two is better - honest. Don’t forget that Issue Twenty Two of the Blizzard is available now to subscribers, and will be released on a general pay-what-you-like download basis on 12th September. If you have any feedback comments or suggestions email podcast@theblizzard.co.uk or find us on Twitter @blzzrd. All issues of The Blizzard are available on a pay-what-you-like basis from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital downloads cost as little as 1p each (RRP £3), while print versions are available from £6 + postage (RRP £12). You can also find us on the Kindle and Google Play stores.

The second half of the Blizzard's live Q&A event held at the National Football Museum as part of the Manchester Football Writing Festival on Thursday 1st September. Featuring a panel of Jonathan Wilson, Jack Pitt-Brooke and Philippe Auclair, hosted by Rory Smith. The panel took questions from the audience and Twitter on a range of subjects across two halves of chat including thoughts on the transfer window, doping in football, the homogeneity of goalnets and massive journalistic clangers that they'd dropped. Apologies for the poor sound quality - we were unable to take a direct feed from the microphones and so had to bodge a compromise, and would rather bring you some audio than none at all. Part two is better - honest. Don’t forget that Issue Twenty Two of the Blizzard is available now to subscribers, and will be released on a general pay-what-you-like download basis on 12th September. If you have any feedback comments or suggestions email podcast@theblizzard.co.uk or find us on Twitter @blzzrd. All issues of The Blizzard are available on a pay-what-you-like basis from www.theblizzard.co.uk. Digital downloads cost as little as 1p each (RRP £3), while print versions are available from £6 + postage (RRP £12). You can also find us on the Kindle and Google Play stores.

Our collection of First World War records is one of the largest in the world. It includes, among many other documents, service records, letters, diaries, maps and photographs. Part of Britain's folk memory of the First World War is of long lines of Tommies bravely going over the top, resolutely kicking and passing a football as they walked into a hail of machine gun fire.Iain Adams, of the International Football Institute, looks at what really happened when the London Irish Rifles performed the first football charge at the Battle of Loos on 25 September 1915.The International Football Institute is a research partnership between the University of Central Lancashire and the National Football Museum.

The Blizzard Q&A recorded live at the National Football Museum as part of the Manchester Football Writing Festival, on the evening of 1st September. With a panel of Blizzard contributors - David Conn, Andy Brassell and editor Jonathan Wilson - hosted by the Football Ramble's Marcus Speller. A heavyweight first half features discussion on the key takeaways from this summer's transfer window, the effect of the new Premier League TV deal, a mention for the Chinese stock market and some talk about financial fair play and the corrupt nest of debauchery that is Fifa. In the second half the panel looked at footballers' diva moments, answer a fan's query as to WTF is going on at Man United, ponder the lifespan of a manager and the tactical dunce that is Laurent Blanc. There's also some chat on the role of the full-back, and recollections of difficult/awful interviews, which throws up the unlikely triumvirate of Darius Vassell, Dave Whelan and Colin Kazim Richards. As ever with our live events we do the best we can with the sound quality at our disposal, what with roving mikes, the odd bit of feedback, guaranteed big laughs and on this occasion Jonathan Wilson doing an impression of a raving Louis van Gaal spiking the top of the microphone range. Those minor issues aside, we trust you'll enjoy the podcast.

Any mention of football and the First World War will evoke the Christmas Truce of 1914 and the football match played in No Man's Land. At the time many denied that a truce had occurred, let alone a football match between the combatants. This talk uses British Army War Diaries, individual soldier's diaries, letters and newspapers to examine how citizen diplomacy apparently subverted the wishes of higher command, at least temporarily, to possibly have allowed some soldiers to enjoy a game for Christmas.Iain Adams is the Principal Lecturer at the International Football Institute, a research partnership between The University of Central Lancashire and The National Football Museum. He lectures in sports history and culture and has published papers on the Christmas Truce and the football charges of the Great War.

This week the podcast crew look back at the Blackpool game, good performances throughout the team. Oriol Riera off the mark and it could quite easily have been a rout.James McArthur, Adam Forshaw, Ivan Ramis and Andy Delort, leaving, staying, coming? Who knows, we don't!There is a preview of the Birmingham game at the weekend, can we build on the three points from Saturday?We finish off with a special plea from Dan for a special project at the National Football Museum involving your unwanted Panini cards.Contents: Cold opening… for Rob (0:00); Blackpool review (1:25) including jubilant Statman and Sir Emmerson of the Boyce under the microscope (8:00); the old ins ‘n’ outs – 5 days to go (15:15); Forshaw Saga: Redemption (22:00); Birmingham preview (34:29) including RefWatch (38:20) and Barnum predictions (40:54); stick around (47:20); Feelin’ Good (51:40)

Gab Marcotti is joined by Manchester United (and City) legend Andy Cole, alongside Oli Kay and James Ducker, live from the National Football Museum See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

With Mark Lawson. In the new three-part TV thriller Blackout, Christopher Eccleston plays a disillusioned, heavy-drinking local politician, who is dealing with the consequences of an alcohol-fuelled fight. Author and former MP Chris Mullin reviews. The new stage version of Chariots of Fire has just transferred to the West End, with the actors put through their paces on a running track which extends five rows out into the stalls. Mark puts on his running shoes and tries out the track for himself, alongside the set designer Miriam Buether. A new film Ping Pong follows a group of eight pensioners from different corners of the globe as they compete in the over-80s category of the World Table Tennis Championships in Inner Mongolia. Three-time Commonwealth table tennis champion and two-time Olympian Matthew Syed reviews. Photographer Stuart Roy Clarke has spent 20 years with his focus on football, taking over 100,000 photographs at more than 4000 matches around the world. As an exhibition of his work opens at the new National Football Museum in Manchester, Clarke discusses his work with the Rochdale manager John Coleman. Producer Jerome Weatherald.