reporting live from...
the time I pretended to read the news
I’ve been trying lots of jobs recently. When I did a photoshoot for a Hinge advert last year and pretended to be a model for the day, I really learnt why models have difficulties with mental health: having spent the whole time being ferried about in cars, styled in expensive clothes, catered for at every moment and told how amazing I looked and how well I was doing, it was quite a slump to sit on my bed at the end of it all, silent and alone. What was I supposed to do with myself now? Who was going to tell me what I ought to wear, or eat, or think? I could not be a model full time; thankfully, after the Hinge campaign went live, the offers did not come flooding in, and now that Hinge have replaced us with a fresh set of couples for 2025, my modelling days are definitely over.
Helping Tara cook food for one of Manningtree Arts’ brilliant Supper Club events, I also discovered first hand why chefs are all drug addicts. Whilst I was dropping battered cauliflower florets into a vat of boiling oil, racing against the clock to roast potatoes, blend sauces and not forget anything, I found myself wishing there was a way to both pump myself with the adrenaline required to work non-stop in a hot kitchen, whilst simultaneously numbing my fingertips from the burns I was sustaining. Cocaine would have done the trick! I do see what they’re thinking. Thank God I’m also not really a chef.
And the most recent of these escapades came last week when my brother Jack asked if I could help him out with a strange side quest. He is a History teacher and was running an MUN day (model United Nations) with his students. Jack wanted some fake BBC News broadcasts pertaining to the scenario of the day: an independence act for Somaliland. I obliged… and then I went overboard.
I probably didn’t need to take it as seriously as I did, but I wanted to impress: after all, I was repaying a favour.
A while back I organised Aislin’s 30th birthday and put together a long string of games and puzzles, all tied together with a ridiculous narrative involving her kidnap. I thought it would be fun to involve an interactive moment where we called the Uber driver responsible and enlisted Jack to play Bogdan, who dropped a few clues in the phone call to help us along the way with the story. Jack not only accepted this challenge, taking a random phone call in the middle of his day from a group of strangers, but delivered an impeccable Russian accent and a full backstory of ad-libs and asides. It was such a highlight of the day, so when my chance came to help him in return, I took it and ran.
Who knew a blue gilet, a bike helmet wrapped in a bin bag and duct taped piece of paper could go so far? I enlisted the help of Rahul, Rosie, Izzy and Jack (other Jack, not brother Jack!) to hold lights, a phone camera, and importantly to scroll the script on my laptop as a mock-teleprompter and we set to work, hoping the darkness of night might help obscure our Lake District location into something I could edit into Mogadishu.
A lot of fiddling around on Final Cut, some copying and pasting in Canva, some stock footage of war zones stolen from Youtube and even a short AI generated video of Trump later, and the final product is something I’m actually kind of proud of. It was so fun pretending to read the news!
Is it a job I would actually take on though? No, absolutely not. Even though I wasn’t in actual Mogadishu, it was hot enough under that helmet and strapped into that gilet; so hot in fact that I did most of the news report without my trousers on, cropped for modesty in the edit of course. Reading live without making a mistake is almost impossible, and I have absolutely none of the required knowledge to cut it as an international journalist: I had no idea until this project that there is an area of disputed territory in Somalia called Khatumo, formed from a conflict in 2023. I think it’s safe to say I won’t be appearing on the actual BBC anytime soon.
