Making The Podcast
Do you record it in a studio?
The podcast is recorded in a studio, in my case in a natural radio studio. They don't need to be that technically proficient, as there's often equipment available on the meagrest PC that will record your voice. It's just a question of how professional you want it to sound, and particularly when you're doing bits of telephone inserts, you need a proper studio to balance the sound and all the rest of it. However, that's just being picky - it's the content that's important, not the quality that's recorded.
What does a producer do?
A producer will prepare the program - they organize the guests in running order (in consultation with the creatives), and then during it they are guiding the production, making the creativity come to life, and sprinkling fairy dust on what otherwise would be dull old fare. They spend all their time clutching their head, because the special guest hasn't rung in yet, and tell you to go faster and to shut up. They are a prime nuisance, and you should avoid having one if you possibly can.
Is swearing allowed on a podcast?
Swearing is allowed. It depends on what you're doing the podcast for. If you're doing a podcast for the local church union, I suggest that you don't swear. You could also be doing a podcast for people for whom swearing is a perfectly acceptable day to day activity - you've just got to judge your audience.
Do you choose who you work with on the podcast?
It would be a marvelous world if we could choose everyone we work with, but that's part of joy. In my case, some of the journalists who come to the podcast were imposed upon me because they work for the Times, and therefore they were cheap, or free, and include some of the staff that were already working for the Times. Unless you actually have a personality or a culture clash with somebody, this is a great thing. It's new blood - people I haven't known before, new relationships are struck up, new knowledge is got - the same old noises but shown a different light. The trick is to make sure either the personalities you're working with, particularly the voices that people hear, are endlessly renewing themselves; there's always something new to say. Or, if that's not the case, rotate the voices. I didn't particularly choose the people I work with, but I would choose them now.
How does co-presenting a show differ from going it alone?
Co-presenting is in many ways a much more difficult thing to master, but can be much more rewarding. A lot of the time, the best radio is made by two or more people who really understand each other, understand the subject matter, and understand the listeners. Whether it is radio or podcasting, that is when you really get the pure gold. One and one equal three in those situations. My golden rule for this is very simple: you must be kind. Be kind to who you're interviewing, unless you are looking to be deliberately confrontational with them. Also, be kind to your co-presenter - not everything people say is brutally funny and you shouldn't laugh if it's not funny. If it is funny, it's good to laugh; nothing is more infectious in audio than laughter. In visual arts, the most powerful thing is tears, crying. The opposite is true in the audio, if you hear somebody else laughing, and almost if you're in the room doing your ironing, reading the paper, or whatever it is, you'll start to laugh as well. Try and be generous, try and be open, do not compete with your co-host because the two of you will sound less than you actually are.
Is much lost in the edit?
Editing is the great alchemy of radio if you're not doing things live. In my own case, and I can't speak for anybody else, we record it as close as we can to live. If we overrun for time, we'll edit stuff out. I'll leave the listeners to be the judge, and the users to be the judge - we don't leave in much fat, other than my good self. We don't leave in anything that we need to take out - we are very lucky like that. Often, the shows are edited from forty-seven minutes material to forty-five. Nothing is thrown out if we can avoid it, because we try to run it exactly as live. the reason for that could be the laziness of the other producer, who doesn't want to do a lot of editing. I actually think it is a very good discipline. If you fail, you only have seven minutes on topic X, you'll try to get your best stuff up to the top of your remarks. The problem with long shows, and I've done those too, is that if you've got three hours, you'll often start husbanding your resources and saving stuff for later on. In something like a podcast where it is unusual for them to be super-long, it's a good discipline to get what you've got to say, say it, and move on. We record it as live, with very little editing.
How do you keep to time?
It's much better to get the story done at the very top. If you find 2 or 3 minutes to chat to the person, then you lean forward and say, "I understand you were brought up in India. Tell us about that." The trick, particularly live, is to get the meat and bones of the story out there, because if the story is interesting, the person becomes interesting. They can stay to fill 7 minutes. If you stop boring on about the person and people don't dig them, then they're not 7 minutes anyway. In a podcast, you've got to make your own breaks because you don't tend to go to news and travel and things like that. Rather, you'll have a 5 minute chunk for this, or a 10 minute chunk for that. It's about personal discipline. If a topic starts and it's a really good one, or it's a really good discussion, let it run. If you're really in the middle of something good, you'll often see producers say windup, windup. You've got to have the skill to say, no we're going to carry on here, because otherwise you're pretending the next piece is so brilliant that it can't possibly be cut down. If you're in the middle of something good, do not kill it because you can't guarantee the next thing is going to be any good anyway.
How do you book guests?
The person booking guests in any medium is one of the black arts. If you're Jay Leno, or if you're BBC Newsnight, you can usually whisk up your Hollywood superstar or the head of the United Nations. After that, there's a very steep drop off, and everyone who's ever worked in the medium knows that you start the day or the week with the most highfalutin ideas. We'll get King Zog of Albania. We'll get Alicia Silverstone. And we'll get Bernie Ecclestone. By the end of it, you're looking at "Didn't that bloke used to be in Green Day in the early days?". We've got the MP for Ashton-under-Lynes assistant, and a bloke who once pulled a cat out of a tree. The fact of the matter is that if you become reliant on guests, you'll struggle. Guests should be a brilliant bonus, particularly celebrities. The trick is to try your best to get them, but if you don't get them, don't sit there crying. There are great stories out there that don't rely on having Jack Nicholson, and if you remember that, you won't go far wrong. Jack Nicholson is nice to have, but not an essential for your podcast.
Do you get feedback from your audience?
You get loads and loads of feedback. You get feedback in the form of e-mails, and of course from podcasts. On radio, you've actually got people on the phone saying "Get this bloke off, he's no good - I don't agree with that", ringing up the station, and all the rest of it. The podcast is very open to e-mails and it is a very important form of content, because people will often add to what's being said, or set things off in a whole new way. I look forward to the day when all these technologies converge further. We're starting to get the phenomenon of the phone out, aren't we? We know how radio phone is, and now with podcast, whereby you have a group of people you know are listening, you phone out to them and they come onto the show. It can't be very far away from the days when podcasts are as live and interactive as radio shows. I do look forward to that, very much indeed. For the moment, you're relying on your feedback on e-mails. The good thing about that is, it's a media, it's direct, and it's in your face. The bad thing is, people can really get stuck into you remotely, in a way that they couldn't do in the past. They would have to write a letter, and it would take 3 weeks to get there. If you're not right, or if you're rubbish, you're told very quickly.
What keeps you interested in doing this?
I was thrilled when I was asked to do a Podcast. I've been doing radio broadcasting for 20 years, and it was a chance to do something slightly different. You've got to have an inquiring mind, and it's genuinely got to be bothered about the events of the day and expressing them. The last thing that keeps you going with this is that it can sound a bit phony, but it's true - I want to do the best work I can. You can hear it when people are going out there and just going through the motions. Radio can be the most turgid and stolid of all media. Podcasts are exactly the same, if people that are good at it are getting into it and it's not about shouting loud. Sometimes you can be very quiet and be just absolutely brilliant at it. When people are still pushing themselves, pushing the material to the limit, it's an absolutely brilliant medium and it's like trying to make sure that the mixture of language, knowledge, interaction, and entertainment is being pushed up, pushed up, whisked up, and it keeps me wanting to do it. I wouldn't do it if I was just going through the motions. I really wouldn't.
