Time to hang up my microphone on 2020. Even though I’ve been podcasting for thirteen years, this one has been - for obvious reasons - something of a learning curve. Answer Me This! has been recorded remotely since 2018 (when Helen and Martin became jet-setting ‘digital nomads’, although they’re currently back in the UK) - but this year all my other shows needed to make that transition, too.
Hosting panel discussions like The Week Unwrapped and The Media Podcast over Zoom, I often found myself inadvertently talking over my guests; partly because of the time-delay, and partly because I was missing those subliminal physical cues that someone is about to speak, which I’m really attuned to detecting when I’m in the same room. And we had to build in an extra thirty minutes of technical tomfoolery into each session - as inevitably someone’s broadband would fail, or a computer would crash. But, after a few episodes, it became second-nature.
It was harder to do the intimate, authentic interviews with ‘real people’ that are the bread-and-butter of The Modern Mann, as most of my guests have not had significant on-mic experience before, and I’m often asking them about the most traumatic episode of their lives. I found that gaining their trust took longer than in-person, and resigned myself to the fact that a two-hour recording was going to be necessary to get the 35 minutes of material we needed.
Perhaps the biggest adjustment was for Four Thought - because, instead of recording at live music festivals all around the country, I did the whole thing from my wife’s dressing table at home (see photo), and never actually met face-to-face with any of the 24 speakers I introduced and interviewed on this year’s series.
Why there? Well, it turns out that the wardrobes outside our en-suite bathroom have the best acoustics in my house - a small space, lots of carpet, double glazing - and it happens to be situated above our broadband router. This has been a matter of no small consternation to my wife. But I’ve become expert at assembling and striking the whole ‘home studio’ in about fifteen minutes, replacing the pop-shields and sound absorbers with my wife’s vanity mirror and make-up brushes before she gets back from work.
(For the nerds who are interested, my studio set-up is: a Marantz Professional sound-shield, Blue Yeti X USB mic, Audio-Technica AT875R shotgun mic, Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 Over-Ear headphones, Zoom H6 recorder, MacBook Air and two stepladders with a load of blankets! The vintage radio is just to put me in the right mood…)