Literally the evening before I flew to Florida, I hot-footed it from my Gatwick hotel room to central London and King’s Place for the London Podcast Festival.
It feels a little backwards, attending a live podcast recording. I guess they all have to be recorded somewhere, but a podcast should be heard and not seen, right? Wrong!
I’ve mentioned my favourite podcast, Beautiful Anonymous, in a previous post. But if you’ve already seen that, or you already know about it, then you’ll understand why I wanted to go to this. Hosted by American comedian, Chris Gethard, I was expecting humour from him but from the actual call – who knows?
We settled into our seats in the small theatre, being lulled into comfort by some mild punk music. And then it began! Chris came out and spoke to us for a little while, and then we were off. The show music was playing, and there was a caller!
I was aware that the caller would probably be from the UK. They tend to put out a number from the country they’re in when they do live BA shows. But fairly often, the caller ends up being from nearby, and not necessarily the country the phone number is from. This was the case this time around, and it was a caller in Paris.
I won’t go into the detail of the call. The first half of the show was a little slow. The caller had a hard time articulating what she really wanted to talk about, and Chris was having to concentrate quite hard to catch the end of the line she was dangling. I also found the sound in the room quite bass-y and as a result found it hard to understand what the caller was actually saying. I find it hard to hear the lower range of sounds, in general, so that was an issue for me. But by the second half Chris had pulled it back, turned it around and actually controlled the call really very well.
The subject matter was deep, but very interesting and Chris even managed to leave the call on a mighty cliff-hanger. What a dude!
Afterwards he had to rush off to do stand-up at another show, and there was another podcast recording in the same room 30 minutes after our’s had ended so we knew we had to leave sharpish.
What I loved about the show, and the people who visited (and the BA ethos in general) is that there’s very little judgement involved. Everyone was there to hear the perspective of another human, and listen to their story. Everyone was accepting, and I felt very at home in that group of people on that evening.
If you listen to podcasts and you hear that they’re doing a live recording near you, I’d recommend attending. It’s a really nice way of experiencing your podcast in a different way, and it puts a really interesting spin on the whole thing!
If you’d like to listen to this recording, it already been put up and can be downloaded via the Podcast app on iTunes. The show is called Beautiful Anonymous and the episode is titled ‘What’s it like to be a man today?’
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