The Now Show Goes Podcast

Went to the Drill Hall tonight with GGF, courtesy of Chris Vallance from Pocketplanetradio to watch the recording of the first in the new series of Radio 4's The Now Show.

This is the first BBC Radio comedy to be a podcast. It was a strange and patchy show, with some oddly self-conscious satirical references to the Blooker Prize (Sam Pepys? Come on, you can do better than that!) and a song by Mitch Benn which made great play of the supposedly giveaway-for-free nature of the music included in the podcast. Um, right. Ha ha. There was also some rather snide comment about podcast bandwagon-jumping. I think they are missing the point, somehow. Later I remembered the Henry Ford quote, who observed that when something new comes along, at first people laugh at it, then they scorn it, and after that, they all use it. Guess we are at the beginning of the third phase, then.

The highlight for me was the part after the main recording, when fluffed lines have to be re-recorded for later editing. In my own podcasts I am very aware that production technique is something which separates the podcast men and women from the waffling boys and girls, and which along with decent microphones and (gasp!) scripts lifts the medium into the land of reasonable standards and potentially larger audiences. Of course, leave a bunch of actors and stand-up comedians alone with a warm friendly audience, and you won't see them sitting patiently and obeying the producer.

As matters dragged on, warning the audience that, once they emerged, there would be nobody else left alive in Britain as Bird Flu took its deadly toll, Marcus Brigstocke was particularly funny as he began impersonating David Attenborough narrating Planet Earth - "This... is one of the most inhospitable places on Earth... where shards of urine fly out of the ground... at regular intervals... and I have sent a camera crew there... just because I can..." Great tittering stuff.

I made it my business to put Mitch "Brian Blessed" Benn right after the show and pointed out that, in their clumsy way, MCPS-PRS were attempting to send some money at least to copyright holders with their new license scheme. I was conscious of how completely unfunny I was, but I guess that's how it is after a comedy show.