Hello. Oh how lovely to see you here again, looking bright and breezy on a sunny June morning.
Seven days in sunny June were long enough to bloom
The flowers on the summer dress you wore in spring
The way we laughed as one, and then you dropped the bomb
That I’ve known you too long for us to have a thing.
Not my words. The words of the people’s poet – Jamiroquai.
By the way, I don’t mean to be rude, but have you got the number one science podcast in the UK Apple charts? Probably not, because we have.
That’s Just Wild
I know it is. Number One eh? But ‘That’s Just Wild’ is also the name of the show. Episode 2 is out this morning, and the launch week has gone as well as we could have possibly expected.
Episode 1 was a cracker. Each episode has a descriptive one-word title. We started the series with ‘Freezing’, because Steve Backshall has just come back from the Arctic. So it’s packed with stories about narwhals, polar bears, growler bears, pizzly bears, and things you can do with a walrus’s wang.
You’ll need to listen to get the full story, but I can tell you that a great deal of Fresh Air’s editorial resource was used up this week in discussing what constitutes a podcast-friendly term for an animal’s winky dinky. Scientific terms are fine, but podcasts are all about storytelling, and storytelling is all about painting pictures. Baculum is the accurate name, but sounds like some sort of microscopic organism of very little interest, and ‘walrus’s wang’ is much more fun.
Tuesday night saw the TJW team gathered in Cheltenham for the Science Festival, regaling a live audience with animal and adventure stories. It’s difficult to describe the elation of realising that the idea you thought might be a good one back in February is now a) an actual podcast b) a really good podcast c) popular with listeners d) big on social e) a full length YouTube show, and f) something that people will actually pay money to watch.
We’d love you to listen/watch, give it a review, tell your friends and submit your questions for our Q&A episodes. Please. Thank you. We hope you love it.
WTF it’s over?
Marc Maron – podcast pioneer from the time when you didn’t really know what a podcast was – has announced that his show, WTF, will finish in the autumn. Since launching in 2009, Maron has interviewed everyone from Paul MCartney to Brad Pitt and Robin Williams from his garage. The appearance of Barack Obama on the show in 2015 was one of the moments when podcasting’s power as a mainstream medium started to be taken seriously.
So why is he finishing?
‘We’re tired. We’re burnt out.’
Yep, fair enough.
‘It’s OK to end things. It’s OK to try to start some other chapter in your life. It’s just time folks.’
Can’t argue with that. I felt exactly the same once I decided to move on from my songwriting career after writing one song and making £45 in royalties. See previous newsletters. For a guy to set up a mic in his garage and go on to reach 1.1 billion downloads makes him a certified member of the podcasting hall of fame. Arguably, if he started now it would be much harder to break through and reach his audience. But he started before most people and played a massive role in establishing podcasting in the US, and the world. So cheers to that.
Apple Art Classes
Standing out in the world of podcasts isn’t always easy. With millions of them out there, you have to use every trick in the book, and one of those tricks is your artwork. Great artwork means you’ll grab attention and be more likely to be featured in the promotional sections of your favourite podcast app.
But are there tricks we should know? Is there a magic formula? Let’s be honest, some of the most popular podcasts have pretty dull or predictable cover imagery but they capture the spirit of the show, and become visual representations of the audio within.
Well, thankfully, Apple have created a guide to help us all optimise the visual appeal of our podcasts, laying out all the assets you need to create from episode artwork to full page designs.
Michaela Hallam gets dramatic…
Controversial figures make for brilliant biography dramatisations, and they don’t come much more dramatic that Georgia Frontiere, AKA Madam Ram. Madam Ram follows the rise of our eponymous hero from aspiring singer to the only active female owner of an NFL Football team. During her nearly three decades in charge of the St Louis Rams, she took her team to the Super Bowl three times. Impressive. But not massively controversial. Where it gets spicy are the added ingredients of the mysterious death of her last husband (she had 6), her reliance on astrology to guide her decision making, and the way she navigated a very male-dominated world in her quest for respect and legacy. It’s a story full of ambition, power struggles and scandal. Toni Collette stars in the title role, and it’s great casting. It’s definitely more Jilly Cooper than Hilary Mantel, but it’s the audio equivalent of a wickedly indulgent holiday read. And that’s just how I devoured it.
Richard Blake gets hungry…
Yes – it’s Off Menu. I know, normally we love the niche and strange. The podcasts you would never hear if it wasn’t for this newsletter. But I’d never listened properly to this show until last week. I’d heard great things, I watched Ed Gamble once, and seen the clips – but never properly got down and tasty with James and Ed. And oh, what joy. Funny, escapist, makes you hungry delicious, two friends having fun with people I want to hear about. How they opened up Robert DeNiro from grumpy monosyllabic to actually quite chatty was a pleasure to listen to. Yes, there’s parts of that’s insufferably middle class with some of the posh food people are describing but relax, sit back, be entertained and come out a little lighter and a little hungrier. And it made me shout POPPADOMS OR BREAD to random children in the street on holiday. Never a dull moment. Listen here.
What we’ve been listening to this week
Evie.
If you have kids of the right age, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Peppa Pig has a new sister – Baby Evie. And Baby Evie has a new song. It’s called Evie. It goes ‘E.V.I.E, Baby Evie, E.V.I.E Baby Evie’.
Now, I bow to no one in my admiration for Peppa Pig and the people behind it. Daddy Pig is one of the greatest comedy characters of his generation, and it is my life’s ambition to be stopped by the Police and boldly say ‘Hello Officer. I don’t know what I was doing but I won’t do it again.’ However, they have created a monster here. It somehow seems louder than any other song I’ve ever heard, even when it’s on quietly. It’s at a frequency that will surely drive dogs mad. There’s just too much going on. I can’t get through more than 5 seconds.
It’s not helped by the fact that my eldest daughter is called Evie, and therefore she loves playing it really loudly. But she’s 18 for God’s sake. Get it out of my smartspeaker.
What we’ve been doing this week
On Tuesday night, after the live ‘That’s Just Wild’ show in Cheltenham, it was too late for the last train back to London so the team stayed the night in my beloved home town of Swindon. I know how to treat my employees, you know: A room at the Holiday Inn Express, a tour around the Magic Roundabout (three of them had been round it before but once is never enough), and I even pointed out the headquarters of WH Smith.
Notably, they all got on the first off-peak train out of there the next morning, but I’m sure that’s because they had work to do. They’d have stayed longer if they could. They definitely would.
