The Tall Tales Emergency Broadcast System

Tall Tales has decided that, in these troubled times, people desperately need alternatives to ill-informed commentary and we intend to prove that it doesn’t matter how bad those alternatives are.

The dream is do it literally every day. Maybe only every weekday but maybe every day. Something like twenty minutes? The wheels are going into motion as we speak.

We’ve been running so long that it should be possible to keep the show on the road for a while.

Ok, look, it's not that we're doing NOTHING

So. Marie and I have recorded three podcasts. It's hard for us to judge them. I think there's something in them but I am not sure we've nailed it yet.

It's that general interesting thing of being freelance. We enjoy it, but it takes time. Part of the plan is to work out a way where we are doing something we love doing in a way that doesn't mean we are, for instance, doing a week's work every month without being paid for it. That's not a sustainable model, for obvious reasons.

Maybe we are nearly there. Maybe we are not. If our test listeners like what we've done, then we might start Season One in January. If our test listeners tell us we need to re-think, we might well do that.

Oh, I don't know. Do you put out something rough and ready and ask the world to forgive you for that, or do you try to get it right before you put it out there - that is the question. It's tricky to put out stuff that's rough if it's in an area you engage with professionally. It literally makes you sound bad, and we literally don't want that. We'd rather sound flaky.

(We are not flaky, incidentally. I mean, we've done a good week's work each on this project trying to get it right, and we just haven't. Not quite.)

Coming REALLY soon...

Ok, we've now recorded three, and we have a pretty clear idea of what these will be and how to make them sustainable.

Much as we thought, they be chats where we work out plots for projects that will never actually exist. What we didn't realise is that this makes each podcast into an exercise in live storytelling. By the end of 30-45 mins, we will have told what we hope is a fun story from beginning to end. You will have to fill in the pictures / beautiful prose / songs (depending on genre) from your own imaginations. Any failures, therefore, are your fault rather than ours.

Episode one has had to be re-edited in line with the above. It will go live very soon, along with a commitment, for a trial period at least, to a regular schedule...

Coming soon...

Listen & Often, once hosted by Toby Davies & Robert Hudson will, in future, be hosted by Robert Hudson & Marie Phillips. It used to be full of brilliant things our friends had written and jokes about being in the bath. Now it will be RH & MP, plus Special Guests, coming up with plots for books, movies and films that will never exist.

It's going to be called L&O because it's a good name and we've paid for it. Very briefly, during the test-of-concept phase which our marketing people insisted on, we thought we would call it Schrodinger's Podcast but our team of evaluators thought that might be misleading. This is not a science podcast.

We have recorded a couple of episodes. We are learning sound quality and microphone best practise from the Universities of Life (RH) and Hard Knocks (MP). Our plan is to publish fortnightly and we will start doing so once Marie is back from Canada where she is a big star, like Aldebaran.