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To Broadcasting House this afternoon to chat to the skill Miranda Sawyer about podcasts for a Radio 4 show called “In Pod We Trust†(which starts on Saturday morning - but my episode is the fourth and final show in the series). I have been podcasting for almost exactly 8 years - I believe the first Collings and Herrin podcast was recorded shortly after I started dating my wife, so it's easy to remember how long it's been - and although I wasn't the first to get on board this imaginary train I was certainly one of the early adopters. I have, arguably , embraced the medium more than any other UK podcaster and I am certainly the only one who has seen the potential for an audio only self-playing snooker podcast. And somehow, in spite of giving nearly all of it away for free, I am somehow still making a living. I'd love to say it's because I am a brilliant businessman with a ten year plan, but I just started because I wanted to get stuff out there and see what happened and I have no idea if it's the best use of my time, or whether I should be trying to do the proper paid work I have. But it's kept me in the little air bubble that means it's given me enough new fans to make my tours financially viable, without periscoping me out of the water into fame. It's nice being in an air bubble, but I am aware it's a bit insecure. But I am still breathing for now.
Anyway the programme gave me ample time to discuss my motivations for starting up with this stuff and to explain why it worked for me, as well as to recommend two of my favourite podcasts (Adam Buxton's brilliant new one and Stuart Goldsmith's Comedian's Comedian - got to try and stop him egging me somehow) - it was almost like doing a podcast!
In the taxi on the way in I got a call on my mobile from a young member of the production team. “Is Richard Herring there please?†he asked. As I no longer answer my landline phone (even I don't know the number so can be pretty sure that the occasional times it rings it is not someone who is really trying to get hold of me), it's a long time since I've heard this question on a phone call. In the old days you'd be asked it all the time. Even if you had answered the phone, often the caller couldn't be sure who you were so they'd ask that and if they were asking for you, you'd say “Speakingâ€. It was a common event a couple of decades ago, but since the rise and predominance of mobile phones it's pretty much died out. Because when you ring a mobile you'd expect the person who owns it to answer it and then only ask if there were there if the voice that answered was very different than the one you were expecting. And even then you'd expect the owner of the phone to be thereabouts, unless you suspected you were talking to a phone thief. The man sounded young enough to me for it to be a surprise that he even had any concept of ringing a phone and not having the person he was ringing pick it up. But it was nice to be able to say “Speaking†again. It was like being in an interactive Peter Kay routine when I remembered something that I thought I'd forgotten, but that I hadn't actually forgotten.
My cab driver on the way home was rather loquacious and I wasn't sure I was in the mood. If I was a cab driver I'd always ask the passenger if they wanted a chat, but perhaps he had done that in the past and too many people had said no, so he just launched straight into it. His first couple of stories were about friends who had been going out with beautiful women who turned out (in his opinion) to be really stupid. I wasn't sure why he was telling me and I didn't really enjoy the stories, as I thought there was a chance the ladies in question were just being polite, like I was, while he talked at them. I could understand why someone intelligent might do that. Just so as not to seem impolite.
But things calmed down and became less sexist, although the man told me stories all the way home and I hoped there might be some wheat amongst the chaff, but it was mainly about how down to earth some footballers were in real life and how one of them had kindly gone along with a quite rubbish Cinderella joke when he'd left part of his shoe in the cab (which makes it sound like a better story than it was). I had hoped to do some work on the way home, but instead I let the stories wash over me. In the end I was glad I'd listened instead of telling him to shut up, because now he might tell a boring story about how he had me in his cab and I had been a good listener. Except he didn't know who I was. So if you hear a cab driver telling you about Charley Boorman then you'll know what happened.
