LIVE PODDING
You may or may not know this, but I co-host a weekly podcast with my old mate Judith Holder, called Older and Wider (not a typo), which drops into the ‘podosphere’ every Friday morning.
Judith and I first met when she was the TV producer of Grumpy Old Women for the BBC, she was even bossier than my older sister and forced me to wear a Santa Hat for the Xmas special, even though I didn’t want to.
We became good friends and one day over a terrible lunch in an awful pub, we came up with the idea of doing some ‘Grumpy Live’ shows. These took us into the West End and to places including Iceland and Australia, they were really successful (even in Icelandic), and we still can’t believe how lucky we were.
Cut to today, we are in our 60s, Judith lives in a thatched cottage in the country, and I live in a wooden box (like a posh shed) on a main bus route in South London.
We are very different, yet share enough common interests to yatter on for an hour every week, covering regular topics such as our latest ‘taste sensation’ (favourite meal), the grandkids (Judith trumped me with twins), and ‘hypochondriacs’ corner, an in-depth discussion of our latest ailments – bliss.
A few months ago, we decided to celebrate our listeners, by doing a handful of live Older and Wider matinee shows in London, before hopefully branching out around the country.
The aim of the show is to gather together a load of like-minded listeners for a couple of hours in the afternoon, have a good laugh and be home for tea.
With this in mind, we booked a couple of try-out gigs, billed as ‘work in progress’, the tickets for these shows are cheap and the venue is a cute minitheatre in a room above a pub.
At our first try-out, the place was full, Judith and I were delighted, for the first-time ever, we were going to experiment with material tailor-made for our loyal podcast audience. What could possibly go wrong? Well nothing, nothing apart from when we cheerfully asked how many people in the audience had listened to the podcast?
Rather than see a forest of hands, accompanied by some cheering, we were greeted by silence, and a lone raised hand… so… just the one then?!
‘We share enough interests to yatter on for an hour’