I dug into an old backup drive at the weekend and found this. I’ve been looking for it for ages.

It’s the very first piece of video that I made and shared via the internet. This was August 2005, 8 months after I’d started podcasting in a similarly impulsive, unplanned and amateurish way (three adjectives that have defined my career ever since!)

We’d heard of YouTube by this time, but I don’t think it was available in the UK so this was originally at libsyn.com where I was hosting my podcasts (audio blogs) – I can see I used a thumbnail of me gurning in the original blog post that linked to it.

Within a couple of months I had my first (unpaid) promotional vlog series for a line of men’s grooming products. So yes, I happily describe myself as an (if not ‘the’!) OG beauty vlogger.

I finally joined YouTube in March 2006, by which time I was regularly collaborating with Debbie Davies on our (too) short-lived series “All This And Brains Too” so my first video on YT was “Desperately Seeking Harvey”.

I’ve made a playlist of all the vlogging and vlog-like content I’ve got. I find it annoying that I can’t seem to edit the metadata so that things will show up in the order they were created rather than when they were uploaded. But that might just be me being old.

If you’re silly enough to try bingeing that vlog playlist, do let me know how far you got before your brain melted.