I’m launching a new podcast and I’m really excited about it. It’s called Sound Heap and the idea is that John-Luke Roberts hosts a selection of clips of the week’s best podcasts. All of these podcasts are, of course, made up.
https://podfollow.com/1569675977
John-Luke improvised the podcasts with over thirty different comedians, each of whom would do ten-minute excerpts of half a dozen different ideas over the course of an hour on Zoom*. We then took those recordings and whittled them down to just the absolute gold, and put a voiceover over the top to tie it all together and contextualise it. Paddy Gervers and Rob Sell at Torch & Compass wrote us some jingles and a theme (the rest of the music is from the Epidemic music library), and we made it sound like a real podcast - we’ve made the chatcasts sound like chatcasts, the documentaries sound like documentaries, and so on.
What’s exciting is that blend of the loose, spontaneous comedy and the tight, edited production. It’s a best-of-both-worlds, cake-and-eat-it approach that allows funny people - people like Mark Watson, Josie Long, Kevin Eldon, Katherine Parkinson, Bilal Zafar, Sooz Kempner - to just be funny, while also taking out the thinking-out-loud footsteps that are sometimes necessary in improv to get from one good bit to the next.
Podcasting has overtaken Radio 4 as the dominant home of UK audio comedy, in volume at least, but the BBC still sets a benchmark that independent podcasts can struggle to match, for fairly obvious reasons; a Radio 4 comedy with a budget of ten thousand pounds an episode can afford actors and studios and sound designers, of course, but also to pay writers and producers for the time to think and craft the programmes. Few independent productions can match that for resources and cut their cloth accordingly - sitting and chatting with a friend for an hour and cutting out the dull bits doesn’t take as much time, effort, or resource as writing a sitcom or sketch show, rehearsing it, recording it, and editing it. And even the resources that come from the BBC (or Audible) don’t particularly speed up the time it takes to do that, which is why single-authored audio comedy runs in series of four to six episodes every twelve to eighteen months.
Sound Heap attempts to bridge that gap; we asked very little time of our guest comedians, no more than they’d take to do an interview podcast. And they did no prep - we emailed them the titles of the podcasts we were thinking of doing the day before but they were under no obligation to think about it until John-Luke started the “podcast”. But then we did what we’d do for a funded production - whittled and edited and mixed. (We received funding from the lovely people at Auddy which meant that everyone got paid, but we would have done it anyway; it would just have been Paddy and Rob making music when they had time, as a favour, rather than us being able to pay them. And it meant that John-Luke and I were able to fence off time to make it, rather than squeeze it in between paid jobs; as I said, the main thing a budget buys you is time). I think there are lots of very good funny-people-chat podcasts, but they’re not a particularly adventurous form of audio, and having grown up on the produced silliness of The Goon Show and The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, it’s been brilliant to find a format that allows for that sort of structure and sound design to be placed on afterwards.
I keep telling people, “I can’t think of anything like this”, and I stand by that. The sheer range of voices means we’re not asking you to suspend disbelief and accept a comedian as two different characters (apart from John-Luke, and we are asking you to suspend your disbelief in other ways...). And that allows us to jump from parody documentary to parody chatcast to parody solocast, with sound design accurate to the genre, in a way that provides maximum variety - it’s a sketch show! - in a way that’s quite rare. But as I was typing this, I was thinking of something Armando Iannucci said to me when I interviewed him for a documentary, about how when he joined the BBC Radio Light Entertainment department**, there was a sort of “set” way of making radio comedy:
“One or two people went into a room and wrote something - they were probably men - and they would come out with a script, and a producer would say ‘Oh, very nice, very nice’ - I hated that phrase, ‘nice’, in my head that meant ‘not funny’... A studio would be booked for two or three hours, and actors would come in and read out the words from the page, and then sound effects would be added, or indeed played in live, if someone had access to a horse or anything like that nearby. And then if it was a thirty-minute programme, maybe they’d record thirty-one minutes to be on the safe side, and then they’d cut things down.”
- Armando Iannucci, The Frequency of Laughter, 2014.
That way of making radio comedy is only sustainable with a budget. For people trying to make things without the backing of a commissioner, you need to find ways to do things for, essentially, free. This limits the amount time you have, and the creativity that you have time to apply. And then I remembered what Armando went on to say, immediately after that, in the same show:
“...so On The Hour was a sort of reaction to that. It was a kind of experiment in looking at doing what was fundamentally a sketch show, but seeing if we could do it in a different way so that it didn’t sound like all those sketch shows. So it was about, if we were recording a thing that was meant to sound like a news report, actually recording it like a news report, which is get three or four people to play the parts of different characters, give them the gist of the funny stuff they’re meant to say but ask them to say it in their own words, have someone ask them questions, and so on. So you end up recording about an hour and a half of these three interviews, and then, like any news editor, going away and cutting that hour and half of stuff down to a report that lasted three or four minutes. It was asking, ‘what is the style of the joke we’re trying to tell would it be improved if we did it in that style?’.“
- Armando Iannucci, The Frequency of Laughter, 2014.
So, in trying to create a new production style that straddles the low-fi independent production methods of making original audio in 2021 and the high standards set by the greatest of audio comedy down the years... we’ve ended up copying a Radio 4 show from 1991.
Sound Heap is available wherever you get your podcasts; the first episode is out next Wednesday, 2nd June.
*Actually Cleanfeed, but we used Zoom so they had eye contact.
