I'm Tommie McDonald. I make documentaries about hidden worlds and the people who live in them, and I put them out on YouTube as Offbeat.
Recently that's meant a Cairo neighbourhood where a hundred thousand people recycle most of Egypt's waste by hand, a desert horse race in a village near Aswan where the only prize is honour, and a witch in Liverpool who clears haunted houses for two hundred and seventy pounds. I go where the story is and I try to come back with the version you only get by being there.
Some of my films have been picked up and turned into television documentaries in Europe, by RTL and by Mediaset. There's another one coming that I'm not allowed to talk about yet.
I've also spent years investigating trafficking, coercion and violence in the adult industry, and naming the people responsible. It's brought legal threats and cost me a few friends, and it's some of the most useful work I've done.
I got here by an odd route. I spent years in publishing, editing trade magazines and newspapers, and after that I ran online media businesses for about a decade.
The films came out of lockdown. I'm not a natural in front of a camera. When I see one I've always run away, so I made it a project to get comfortable, and asked a photographer friend to help me get used to being photographed. From there I made some daft TikToks, and then a podcast, because it turned out that talking was far less effort. That ran to fifty episodes and about twelve million views.
Somewhere in there it stopped being a podcast. What I found out is that I love being let into somebody's world and telling their story properly. What I make now sits somewhere between a vlog, a podcast and a documentary, and I'd rather it kept moving than settled down.
If you've got a story, or somewhere you think I should be, the contact page is the way in.