DIY radio ate my spare time
Lessons from making a six-part audio sitcom series
The sixth and final episode of Lee-Ann's Spare Fridays series 1 was released on June 23rd 2023. About a month later I summed up some of the things I'd learnt from writing and recording it in an interview over on James Cary's Substack but I wanted to reflect a little in my own space, as it were.
Late in 2022 I had the mad idea of making the leap from occasionally talking about making my own scripted fiction podcast to actually making one. I'd just heard that I'd been longlisted for the Comedy Women in Print short story prize (which I later ended up on the shortlist for) and I knew that more people than usual would be looking my way in mid-December when the longlist was announced. Wouldn't it be great if I could point to some other comedic output and say 'hey, I also do this'?
As is often the way, if I'd thought it through properly at the start I would never have got going. My day-job takes 22.5 hours a week and it's fully remote so I have no commute. I blithely imagined that would leave me plenty of time to write and record a fresh script each month based on the notes and lists of story ideas I'd got. That turned out to be more or less true, but only if I focused pretty much exclusively on the podcast.
From December 2022 - June 2023 I submitted my other writing to only half a dozen prizes and anthologies and none of those pieces were written from scratch, though some were heavily edited for the occasion. When I wasn't writing, recording, editing or attempting to promote the podcast, I was thinking about the next script or vague ideas for the one after that. If I did work on something else I felt guilty, worried that I'd fall behind in my podcast schedule. It wasn't quite 'all-consuming' but it was a bigger commitment of creativity than I'd envisaged.
I also discovered, though maybe this should have been obvious, that it's hard doing everything yourself. I did get production assistance from my other half but he'd be the first to admit that it amounted to the odd bit of noise reduction I was struggling with, and the bulk of the work was mine. It would have been nice to be able to hand over responsibility to someone else now and then instead of picking a story idea, writing the script, setting up the microphone, recording myself reading the episode, editing the track down and adding music and effects, publishing to Spotify, writing a blog post about the latest episode, and announcements on Twitter and Ko-fi, and starting again.
If you're on a conveyor belt it's easy to get disrupted. I've had a parcel of musculo-skeletal problems for years now and sometimes it's difficult, inadvisable or downright impossible to sit at a computer and type. More often, it's difficult/inadvisable/impossible after a day spent sitting at a computer for work. Having a cold or a bit of a sore throat doesn't usually interrupt the writing or editing but it does make it hard to record the episode. The day-job had to increase to 30 hours a week from the start of June 2023 to the end of October for a variety of reasons, which has made getting ahead on series 2 harder than I'd hoped. And I still haven't finished my PG Wodehouse-inspired novel set in 1920s Northumberland.
The big lesson really is Life Will Get In The Way. The other related one was that that needn't be as big a deal as it sounds. I meant to release episode 6 in May but it got delayed until June, and yet plenty of people came back to listen to it. Most listeners discovering series 1 in retrospect won't even realise there was a gap, and if they do notice the release dates, it won't make any difference to them. I shifted some self-imposed deadlines and it didn't make me lazy and prone to shifting them further, it allowed me small but necessary wiggle-room in order to finish the project I'd started.
I've tried to use some of this to help me plan series 2. I already know what dates I'd like to release each episode, but I'm not announcing them in advance in case they have to move. Episode 1 is written but not recorded. I hope to have at least one and preferably two more episodes written by the time episode 1 comes out in December. I'm being highly selective in the other writing I'm doing alongside the podcast so I have more chance of doing justice to all of it.
The one thing I haven't yet learnt is how to let people know Lee-Ann's Spare Fridays exists. I got a spike of listeners after featuring at The Situation Room, and some of my friends have spread the word. It's listed at Audio-Drama.com and AudioFiction.Co.Uk which is an offshoot of The Cambridge Geek. Mike Kelly has featured 3 episodes on his Pick of the Podcasts show on Bradford Community Broadcasting, since I'm local and the sitcom is set within striking distance of Bradford too. It has appeared at least once in the Comedy Fiction list on Apple Podcasts, but that only ever shows a limited number not the whole category (so if you're ever browsing there and find something you might fancy listening to sometime, follow it quick because it might not be there next time you look). The last time I investigated Spotify, you couldn't even browse to the comedy fiction category to see what they had.
The problem with podcasts is that everyone expects them to be chat-based. Podcast has come to mean two men in a room discussing things they find interesting - I listen to some of those as well, but they're not all there is. All the tips I've found for getting your podcast noticed seem to involve being a guest on someone else's podcast and having them appear on yours. I could at a pinch appear as Lee-Ann in someone else's sitcom, if I knew anyone else who was writing an audio sitcom and was willing to write an opinionated history buff from Bingley in, but since Lee-Ann's Spare Fridays is single-voice, their return 'appearance' would be me as Lee-Ann talking about interacting with them.
Which, I suppose, brings me to the usual plea of the creator - if you've listened and enjoyed, spread the word. Or indeed if you've read this and know someone else who might enjoy reading it too, please send it their way.
Since the Substack content is all free for the foreseeable future, you can always buy me a cuppa on ko-fi if you'd like to fuel my brain with Earl Grey.