Reality is sometimes mimicking art. Back in 2020 in the middle of Covid pandemic, I decided to try something new. Zoom -meetings were a big thing and people even organized parties over video, because of the lockdowns.
I had been doing some live Santa gigs when I was young. That’s a big thing in Finland. Families pay big bucks to strangers in shabby costumes coming to perform poor stand-up comedy in their homes. The kids are too excited to care about the quality – and frankly there is a limited possibilities to evaluate it. You just get a phone number from classified ads, or on supermarket bulletin board.
Anyway I decided to give it a go. I ordered the costume from webshop and created my own website digipukki.com. I even added a e-commerce module, to make it possible to pay with credit card. There were options for recorded and live calls of different lengths. I did not want trouble, so I even registered it as a business in the tax office. Problem was to somehow get customers. I made some Facebook ads. Additionally I made some teasers in Youtube. To get a bit more content on the Facebook -page I also made a 24-part “Christmas calendar” -series, where the Santa was telling bad jokes in Finnish.
Additionally I made a couple of “music videos”, where I sing a traditional Finnish Christmas song “Joulupukki Joulupukki” over a different famous melodies from artists like Dylan, Nirvana, Dr. Dre and Sex Pistols.
Christmas came. I did not make much profit, but it was fun. After the lockdowns were lifted, there was no need for such a service anymore, so I abandoned it. The content anyway remained in Internet.
Come 2022. Finnish national broadcasting company YLE was looking for people to participate as guests in one of their Christmas programs. Idea was to talk about Christmas, life, everything between 4 strangers. I contacted them and mentioned my Digipukki project as a reason why I would be interesting guest. I did not fit the group, but later they contacted me and asked if it was possible to come to the studio and perform the punk song. I told it’s fine, although I’m obliged to inform them that I cannot sing and I have 0 experience of performing the song anywhere. They said it’s not an issue, so one Friday morning I took the train to Tampere and we shot a hilarious special guest appearance by Digipukki.
The show will be available in YLE Areena, live TV, and possibly also YouTube. Article (in Finnish) about the TV programme here.
