Can You Hear Me?


It would be lovely to know if anyone listens to our radio show.

I tuned (or logged) in to the online radio station to listen to it when it went out last night and, while I was largely pleased with what I heard, it’s frustrating not knowing whether other people are listening too, or whether it’s just me, my wife and Glyn who are crouching around our respective laptops.

Recording the show is enjoyable, and it’s nice for the two of us to have an excuse to work together when our diaries are hard to synchronize these days – but I’d sooner swap it for a chat over a coffee in a café somewhere, if all the effort put into compiling the show is wasted, as no-one is tuning in.

Perhaps I’m being defeatist. The good thing about the way this stuff works nowadays is people no longer have to have their radio – or in this case, their internet-enabled device – on at the moment of broadcast, as they can always download the podcast at a later date. We live in an on-demand culture, vastly different to the timetable-led entertainment of the past; I’m saying this like there was never such a thing as a tape cassette.

Despite this, I still get frustrated by wasting our potential on projects where no-one else takes an active interest. It’s the same with our More Than Mostly Comedy Podcast. We've gradually got quite good at interviewing acts over time, yet despite how interesting our interviewees are, we still don’t know if anyone has listened to or liked what's put out into the ether. That said, it was nice to see a Guardian journalist tweet a recommendation of November’s episode with Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee the other day; it’s just a shame that such a sad situation brought this interest about.


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