THE BALLY #210: Time to take a break…

I’m putting Radiant Circus’ screen listings service on pause while I work out how to review & relaunch it. Thank you for all your support. RCx

By RADIANT CIRCUS // Twitter @radiantcircus / Instagram @radiantcircus

I know I’m going to regret this as soon as I post it, but it’s time to pause Radiant Circus’ screen listings service. I’m therefore putting the work on extended hiatus while I figure out how to revive and relaunch it.

I started blogging in 2017 as a new arrival in London, keen to explore but unable to discover easily the city’s indie and alternative cinema scene. Several years – and a complete industry shutdown! – later, and my daily, weekly and monthly listings are bigger and more exhaustive than ever.

Increasingly, time spent compiling listings has come at the cost of promoting them to a wider audience, or seeing and writing about the wonderful events included in them. And that’s taken the wind out of my sales as subscriber/visitor numbers have dropped.

I’ve spoken to friends about scaling back the scope of this work and producing curated highlights, but other people occupy that space well (and many others will enter and leave it, as they often do). My love of listing at Radiant Circus has always been its full-fat insanity, and I genuinely miss it now I’m not creating it. However, finding a day and a half (or more) a week is increasingly challenging and not in any way cost-effective. The work needs reconfiguring and rebuilding with wider support. And that will take time.

I’d like to thank all of my monthly subscribers at Patreon. Some of them have backed me since the beginning and all of them have weathered the peaks and troughs of my blogging behaviour. I regret not getting to meet more of them in the aisles, but even though they’ve been small in number, their support has been hugely motivating and rewarding. There’s much more to do with subscriber power, I just need time to work out what and how.

Specific thanks to my friend Victor Craven for keeping me online and helping me learn the essential tools of websites, domains, servers, RSS feeds and SSL certificates. I always write “we” when posting at Radiant Circus because, even though it is only ever me creating content, your support has made the entire endeavour possible. Thank you.

What lies ahead?

Radiant Circus will remain online and on social media as it’s the name of my company. It will be revived at some future point as new ideas and opportunities develop. I’ll also be continuing my screening endeavours at Token Homo and look forward to expanding my activities there with some extra time on my hands. There’s a lot more fun to be had.

I still believe there’s scope to build and expand the audience for indie screen culture in London. There are so many amazing DIY exhibitors and indie venues out there for people to discover. But the systems and structures to sustain us are not functioning well enough.

Spending thousands of hours copying and pasting screening times of films I’d never see was never going to fill this development void. But once you’ve started mapping the stars, you can’t help but dream of their infinite potential.

See you in the darkness again soon,

Richard // RADIANT CIRCUS