Localising the Podcast

Having a look around for some good podcasts to get me through a wet and dreary Friday afternoon, I’ve searched high and wide for something to keep me gripped beyond a minute. A minute is of course around the time that every listener decides whether to stick or twist with what their listening to – if you take a look at any audiovisual medium, there’s always a audience figure phenomenon in the opening moments as people declare that your show is or isn’t more interesting than making a cup of tea.

Well, unfortunately this afternoon the tea was winning out. Earlier in my blogs I spoke of a sort of categorisation of podcasting – the doc, the drama and the group ramble – but sadly, while I was discovering lots of content, it was short on originality. Many of the podcasts I stumbled upon were mere regurgitations of radio or TV content, like ‘Sunday Supplement’ (a weekend sports panel discussion) or Radio 4’s ‘Making History’.

So where do you go about finding something original that you can both relate to and learn from? Well, as I was scrolling back up from reading my old post I clocked one from VisVox’s own Ellen Arnold on ‘Localising audio slideshows’ and it inspired me to check out what podcasting about one’s own community has to offer.

© Hackney Podcast

Enter ‘The Hackney Podcast’. Now before you continue, have a listen. Seriously, listen to any one of their episodes, they’re excellent.

Okay? Hopefully you believe me now. But what is it that makes them good I hear you cry? Well, allow me…

Let’s start at the top. The first thing you’ll hear at the opening of the podcast is some sort of gripping sound – a siren, a coffee machine, footsteps on a empty street. It immediately transports you to Hackney, you’re there, you’re part of the community, you’re living and breathing the area. But that’s not enough, the podcast has to capitalise on this and suck you in further. So it incorporates some narrative, a reading from a book, some poetry, the experiences of a local Hackneyite. You’re suddenly on the bus and you’re talking to the person beside you rather than just listening to them.

What’s more, you may have noticed a rhythm to the podcast created by the music that runs through the background of most of them. In the ‘Night’ piece it’s haunting and ethereal, while in ‘Buses’ the brass instrumental is jovial. The whole podcast, from the very start, is designed to play with your temperament and lead you through an emotional narrative, rather than just simply tell you what Hackney is like.

Add to all this some wonderfully interesting people that we meet along the way and the sense of taking a journey (like the movement from night to dawn in ‘Night’) and you have an excellent podcast about a community. The temptation with this kind of project would be to inform people about Hackney through news and statistics, but it could never reflect the area in the way that The Hackney Podcast does. It’s a truly unique way to use the podcast .

More than enough to keep the kettle cold and the tea-bags dry anyway…