Have You Heard George’s Podcast? | BBC Sounds
Neutrinowatch
Have You Heard George’s Podcast? returned for a third series last week. The only podcast to have won a Peabody award (for its second series), as well as multiple British Podcast awards golds (for the first), George the Poet’s experimental, personal yet political show has manoeuvred itself into the audio mainstream. This is despite it being a natural outlier: one minute, George might take us on a tour of his brain, the next imagine a taxi drive to Grenfell Tower on the terrible night of the fire. Even now, most podcasts take radio programmes as their structural standard. Have You Heard… is more eclectic, detailed, free-flowing. A musical listen.
And in this new series, music takes a central role. George (full name George Mpanga) and producer Benbrick (Paul Carter) have always treated music with respect, both through George’s heartfelt analysis, but also by ensuring that the tracks – whether grime, Afro-fusion, Ugandan-Brit-jazz – sound great. Now George posits the idea that black music is a way for black people to succeed, not only individually, but as a community. “We can pull a lot of black people out of perpetual poverty, by thinking of music as our intellectual property,” he says.
He’s also using this series to launch a new venture, Common Ground. This is a website-cum-social-media-site-cum-thought forum designed for audience participation. In a Zoom presentation on Tuesday, George explained that he hopes for a community that exchanges ideas and builds social enterprises, with the podcast as kick-off point. “This audience is real,” he said. “They think, feel and matter, and are worth talking to.”
You can, of course, ignore the website and simply listen to the show. As is George’s style, there’s a lot in there. Does his new fame mean he can’t relate to his own friends? Can success only be measured within a marketplace? Is it better to record links in your car or at Abbey Road Studios? A full-on listen, as ever.
What George is trying to harness, or at least properly engage, is his audience. For such an intimate medium, audio is limited in the ways that listeners can contribute. In live radio, there are phone-ins, texts or emails. Some true crime shows ask listeners to contribute clues or insights. But most audio is like a book: you reach for it and read/listen. The episode doesn’t change, no matter how many times you return. You can’t contribute or redesign.
Ta-da! Another new approach to audio’s one-way, static nature is also launched this week. Neutrinowatch, the baby of Here Be Monsters’s Jeff Emtman and Answer Me This’s Martin Zaltz Austwick, was born of their wondering why podcast episodes are so fixed. After all, the technology exists for adverts within podcasts to change, according to place or time accessed; why couldn’t the shows themselves change as well? Neutrinowatch is a podcast with seven episodes (so far), and each one will alter, a little bit, every day.
Emtman and Austwick not only worked out the computer code that could manage such a thing, they also created a story that might make such changes plausible. John Welles, a lonely scientist, marooned in the Antarctic with his data-creating computer, Wendy, makes a podcast in an effort to engage an audience with his work. His work is to register neutrinos, an outer-space crisis that might – or might not – send out subatomic debris that will wipe all unprotected online creations. Has such an event occurred? And if it does, will Welles’s tiny podcast be the only one still available on iTunes?
Austwick has said he imagines that Wendy, having been hit by the blast, is simply generating podcasts around what she thinks humans are interested in (music, news and science). There are seven different podcasts associated with Neutrinowatch, including The Most Popular Podcast in the Universe (Tomorrow), which tells the Welles/Wendy story. Another, The Daily Blast, has Wendy and another computer, Ivan, asking each other for headlines around particular words. Wendy’s are positive; Ivan’s negative. The headlines are pulled from real sources such as HuffPost or the New York Times. These will change every day, because news does that, but also because the searched-for words will be different. That’s the most basic show: another one, a sort-of gameshow, is built around the real-life movement of the planets (Wendy goes a bit wild on this one). Another combines music and a story, with the overlapping structure changing like waves.
God knows if any of this will hold people’s attention, but the experiment, like George’s, has its heart in the right place. Both podcasts want listeners to do more than just idly listen. Whether you want to is up to you.
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