Podcast

The promise of the internet was supposed to be thus: you could be your own bizarre, inappropriate self, and you would find a community of the likewise bizarre and inappropriate. You put yourself out there, and you will find what you consider unique or intolerable to be mundane and perfectly within the bounds of acceptable behaviour. But look, some of us went online, we said our things, and the internet responded: what the hell is your problem, truly why would you say something like that? There are a lot of reasons online projects fail, from lack of funds to real life intruding on your time to realising you just don’t care that much any more. But let’s not forget the power of realising you actually are a total weirdo in tracking the demise of creative endeavours.

Calls is the very antithesis of televisual soma. In fact it’s so jarring and discomfiting and horrible that I think this week’s column damn near cost me my marriage. ‘Why are we having to watch this hideous drivel?’ grumbled the Fawn, who felt cheated of a soothing night glued to our new addiction, the French series Call My Agent! (Netflix). ‘Because it’s my job and this is a new thing and Call My Agent! isn’t,’ I said. So I had to watch on my own. I do understand the Fawn’s objections. Really, it’s more like radio than TV and might work better enlivening a long car journey.

If you’ve been listening to The Archers lately, you’ll know how tedious monologues can be. The BBC has received so many complaints about the stream of soliloquys that has dominated the episodes since lockdown, that Mohit Bakaya, controller of Radio 4, has been compelled to issue an apology. The new format — introduced so that the cast and crew could follow social-distancing rules — has proven especially unpopular because, as some listeners have pointed out, the producers might easily have stitched recordings together to keep the drama going. Instead, they’ve more or less dispensed with dialogue between characters in favour of a watered-down talking heads approach.

Talking Sopranos — a new weekly podcast which launched this month— is another example of a seemingly unstoppable sub-genre occupying an ever-growing slice of the podcast market: the television-rewatch podcast. The format is simple: take any much-loved yet expired television series (the kind usually prefaced by words like ‘I can’t believe you haven’t seen…’) and scan the cast list until you find some former stars willing to work for an affordable rate. Record them giving an audio commentary on each episode and, bingo, you’ve got yourself dozens of hours of podcasts — and a massive fan base waiting to be converted to listeners.

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Man the food-gatherer,’ wrote Marshall McLuhan, ‘reappears incongruously as information-gatherer.’ Once we foraged for information in the library. Now we graze among the podcasts. In the age of compulsive eating, podcasts are compulsive listening, an attempt to fill the silence. Nothing better to do? Click on a podcast, and let your attention drift. It takes no effort, it dissolves minutes into hours, and talking about the ‘great podcast’ you just listened to can sound just as smart as saying you’re reading War and Peace. After all, podcasts were originally made by nerds, for nerds.

The Spectator USA Life 'n' Arts podcast launches this week with fanfares, the popping of corks, and much coughing and wheezing into microphones. From now on, every week I’ll be casting a pod with artists, writers, thinkers, painters and even people who do something useful for a living too. First up is the novelist and essayist William Giraldi. Author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, and The Hero’s Body, a memoir of misspent youth as a bodybuilder, Giraldi is one of the few contemporary American critics worth reading. This month, he publishes his first collection of essays, American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring (Norton).