
Face it: nobody says 100% interesting things.
I certainly don’t. I’m certain you don’t either. Not even Stephen Fry does.
Happily, when you’re podcasting, this isn’t a problem, because unlike radio or real-life conversation, podcasting is not live. And therefore you can reap the benefits of the most magnificent part of the process: editing.
We edit the shit out of Answer Me This!, and I mean that both literally (i) and figuratively (ii):
i) Although we’ve chosen which questions we’re going to answer each week, we don’t decide what we’re going to say before the recording, so the conversational results are not predictable. Sometimes a very unexpected tangent will produce some Class A material, which we never could have planned; other times, it’s just not good. But thanks to editing, nobody ever need hear that stuff! Goodbye, shit. Goodbye forever.
ii) We record around 90 minutes per episode, and cut that down to around 30 minutes. I do one rough edit on Logic; I send it to Olly, who writes a list of further cuts he wants made; then I do a final edit. So each podcast undergoes some 10 hours of editing. It may not sound like one, but it is a very highly polished turd.
In my opinion, absolutely every type of creative endeavour benefits from editing, but I think it’s particularly important in podcasting. Why? Because podcasts are on the internet. The internet is very entertaining. Your podcast is competing with the whole of the internet for your listener’s attention.
People complained that MTV reduced people’s attention spans to four minutes; well, online you have maybe 10, 20, 30 seconds to grab your listener’s attention, after which they’ll defect to the rest of the internet, and quite probably never give your podcast another shot. There really are so many funny videos of animals on YouTube, and so little time.
Bearing this in mind, keep your podcast tight, especially in the opening stretches of the show, and also in the early stages of your podcasting career, while you’re trying to gain an audience. Short but good is better than long and lacklustre. Numerous new podcasters have asked me to listen to their first efforts (never ask me to do something like that, I’m horribly critical) and so many of these are an hour or so of ‘Errr, I don’t know what to say’ and ‘Ummmm….Sorry, this is terrible!’ Better to cut out all of that stuff and release a 30-second podcast, I say ruthlessly. If the podcaster doesn’t sound like they’re enjoying it, there’s no way the listener will enjoy it. As for apologies and disparagement: self-deprecation has its place, of course, but I urge you not to leave in statements which imply to the listener that they shouldn’t be bothering to listen to your podcast. If your listener has been generous enough to offer you their ears, don’t censure them for having done that.
One must in fact hold the podcast-listener in great respect. They have not only chosen your podcast over the aforementioned All Of The Internet’s Wonders; they have leapt several hurdles in order to listen to it. Unlike radio, which might just be on in the background without anyone bothering to change the station all day, it’s pretty hard to find oneself listening to a podcast by accident. The listener has made a series of conscious decisions: to seek it out, to download it, to choose to listen to it at that moment. Repay this effort with a podcast which does not imply that your own amusement is considerably more important than theirs.
I’m not saying every podcast has to be as heavily edited as ours, but do not presume endless indulgence on the listener’s part. Although celebrities might expect an audience to be devoted enough to sit through their uncut musings, the rest of us can’t. And rightly so.
For the rest of the posts about podcasting, click here.
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