A Thought From Our Creatives: Tom Price

“Starting A Podcast; Getting creative in a global pandemic”

Creating and producing a podcast has been an aspiration of mine for a few years now. I listen to them by the truckload and the entire process of recording, editing and releasing them fascinated me. Many ideas have come and gone over the years of what a podcast I made would sound like. Could it be a Radio 4 style game show format? Or could I seek out interesting people and interview them about their lives, their passions? Well, I didn’t quite have the contacts for the latter just yet, and the former would require a lot of planning and involve a lot of other people. Those I had in mind were extremely busy people (most of them busy with the amazing work done at TACT) meaning scheduling would be a nightmare. And so, the ideas went on the back burner and a podcast went on an ever growing list of creative ideas that I never got around to doing anything with. Until, that is, I suddenly found myself with a lot of free time around March of last year…

About halfway through the first lockdown, like a lot of people,  my best friend of 12 years - Emma, and I were both feeling pretty hopeless about the whole situation, as well as aimless in our personal lives and careers. During a conversation about one of our favourite podcasts, we joked about doing something similar ourselves. We have a great rapport and back and forth, owing to a shared ridiculous sense of humour built up over the years. We both have a love of movies/television, visiting the cinema most weeks pre-COVID, as well as an obsession with actors in general. Why, we quipped, didn’t we just pick our favourite actors, watch all of their movies, review them in our usual jokey way and upload it on the off chance anyone else found us funny too? We even joked we could call it On A Role to reflect our rolling cast of actors and their roles. In short, we had an idea, a format, a name and whole lot of nothing else to do. 

Suddenly what started as a joke turned into a more serious venture and an opportunity to create something to scratch the itch lockdown had created of needing to do something with our time and lives. In the end, we figured that even if no one else liked it at least we’d have something to do so why not go for it.

This led to a few months of planning. We needed to decide who to talk about, research recording set ups and buy equipment – as well as working out all the ins and outs of hosting the podcast and getting it out so people could actually listen to it. We slowly started ticking things off our list. I took care of all the technical stuff and Emma (who has a background in social media and graphic design) would take care of making everything pretty and marketable. Just as all these things were neatly getting sorted, lockdown began to ease and we were ready, and safe, to get together and record some test episodes. 

There were a few (many) technical issues but after some help and feedback from TACTs very own tech dream team of Bobby and Ashley everything was pretty much ironed out. We didn’t feel quite ready but we decided that if we kept putting off actually starting, we never would. And so, we set about recording our first set of episodes and announced a release date.

The initial launch was relatively successful with our friends and family being incredibly supportive, we still felt we could improve our presenting skills and could refine the format but we quickly hit what felt like our stride. That was back in October and since then we’ve gone from strength to strength. We’ve completed our first season and, at time of writing, the second releases tomorrow! We get a respectable 100 weekly listeners and been have picked up by a podcast network - something far too lengthy to explain here in full, but will hopefully help us grow our audience and possibly monetise our podcast in the near future. 

There have been a few hitches, don’t get me wrong – having to work out how to record remotely when another lockdown was announced or having to re-record entire episodes due to mics not being turned on, to name but a few! The podcast is by no means perfect and we have a long way to go to refine it and a hell of a lot more to learn. I don’t want this article to come across as a massive pat on the back to myself but starting a podcast is something I’m incredibly proud of both myself and Emma for doing, as well as something I can look back on this last year and be positive about.

I couldn’t finish without a shameless plug, could I? So, if two best friends chatting absolute rubbish about films featuring their favourite actor(s) sounds like your cup of tea and you’re 18+ (watching every film an actor has been in leads to some interesting films to say the least) then give us a listen! Unless you already have, then you’re my favourite. Our first season featured every ones favourite sparkly vampire Robert Pattinson and our soon to be release second is all about Ryan Gosling! You can listen at www.onarolepod.com or find us anywhere you listen to podcasts by searching On A Role!