If you’re based in the UK and a watcher of the media landscape, then you’ll be aware that something strange has been happening in the past few months.
The BBC – our monolithic public broadcaster, which dominates both creative media and journalism – has been haemorrhaging talent. To use a few high profile examples: Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel (two of the corporation’s leading political journalists) headed off to Global, while Andrew Marr went to LBC (also owned by Global) and the New Statesman. Peter Crouch took his BBC podcast to the private market with Acast, and, perhaps most importantly, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo took their Wittertainment show into their own hands.
I say ‘perhaps most importantly’ for a few reasons. Firstly, there’s the personal one. Without Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review I possibly would never have got into the business of podcasting at all. It’s the only podcast that I can remember downloading onto my computer and then uploading onto my old-fashioned (read: not internet connected) iPod. To some extent, the first podcast that you listen to shapes your understanding of the medium, and everything that I’ve made subsequently has held Wittertainment as a benchmark. I stopped listening to the show a few years ago – I wasn’t regularly going to the cinema and therefore couldn’t really justify two hours a week of rambling box office chitchat – but must’ve consumed several weeks’, if not months’, worth of content before then.
Secondly, Wittertainment is a foundational podcast within the UK audio scene, and particularly within the BBC. It has been one of the best performing podcasts in British history, and has also served as a bellwether for the BBC’s podcast strategy. It began on radio in 2001 and the podcast version emerged in 2005, as the BBC began to grapple with the advent of on-demand audio. At that point, ‘podcast’ was deemed an insufficiently generic term for the Beeb’s impartiality rules: the show was described as an audio download. But the high-ups also realised that they had a huge arsenal of content ready to be repackaged for this new medium, giving them an instant and enormous industrial advantage.
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