No more Party Games. What I learned from running a podcast for 6 years.
Behind the scenes of the podcast. A video released to coincide with the 100th episode.
It’s perhaps hard to believe, but back in 2015 every second person you met didn’t have a podcast. But I did.
Eight years have passed since the first episode of Party Games, focused on the latest twists in British politics, and it’s more than two years since the final episode. Now, the website has disappeared, and with it around one-hundred hours of audio.
Honestly, I’d forgotten the website was still there until the hosting company sent their bill for another year. A quick look at the stats and it was obvious there were better ways of spending the money.
For six years, the podcast took up a huge amount of time. It was a hobby spun off from my then day job, reporting on politics for the BBC and others. It was enormous fun, occasionally frustrating, and reached many more people than I ever expected.
Like most things in the last ten years, it was largely Boris Johnson’s fault. In 2015, Britain’s foremost political liar was deep into a second term as Mayor of London, and was thinking about his future.
Johnson was about to return to Parliament, as MP for the London seat of Uxbridge and West Ruislip. I was covering the General Election for BBC Radio London, sporadically chasing Johnson in the hope of a rare moment of clarity.
Boris Johnson was a semi-permanent feature on the podcast…
Just before the campaign began, I was at a birthday party, talking to a friend with a similar interest in politics. Robert Meakin wrote about politicians for newspapers and magazines, and I talked about them on the radio. Perhaps, I suggested, we should do a podcast during the election.
2015 was the start of the second generation of podcasting. The first wave, ten years earlier, had concentrated on a tech-savvy minority, happy to download episodes to their laptops then painstakingly transfer them to an iPod. But now you could stream episodes to your phone whenever you wanted, wherever you were. Podcasts were crossing into the mainstream.
Self-promotion was definitely one aim — Robert was popping up on TV reviewing the papers, I was doing more political reporting and commentary, and we both thought having a podcast would make us more appealing guests to book onto radio and TV.
BoJo lurking in the background
The first few episodes, with a thankfully tiny audience, are best thought of as pilots. They were technically poor - I sat on my bed with a handheld microphone plugged into my MacBook, Robert was on a FaceTime call. Over time I invested in better equipment and software, and gradually improved the sound.
Inadvertently, we were pioneers of remote recording, five years before Covid. Only handful of episodes were ever recorded face-to-face — we were usually 300 miles apart.
Even in Episode 1, Johnson is lurking. We speculate on how he might manoeuvre himself from London Mayor to Prime Minister.
The early episodes feature some big names (in 2015, anyway) — Ed Balls, Harriet Harman, Rachel Reeves, even Eddie Izzard. I was taking advantage of my day job at the BBC. I would do one interview for them, then pull out my phone and knock off a second for the podcast.
An early celebrity guest. Eddie Izzard on the podcast in 2015.
On Election Night, Robert and I were in the same BBC studio as it became obvious the Tories would not only win, but gain enough seats from the collapsing Liberal Democrats to get a tiny majority.
We had predicted the Lib Dem vote would crater, and the Tories could gain seats without winning any extra votes, but hadn’t anticipated the scale of the collapse — hence the title of our very brief 5am podcast, recorded outside Broadcasting House: “Bloody Hell”.
We kept going, through the Brexit referendum (another “bloody hell” episode), Theresa May’s rise and painfully slow fall, and of course the chaotic arrival of Boris Johnson.
We were hardly the only people to be deeply suspicious of Johnson, but I remain proud of the consistency of our suspicion.
We never really stopped warning of the inevitable catastrophe of giving Johnson significant power, highlighting his propensity to lie through the Brexit campaign and his hopelessness as Foreign Secretary.
On his first day as Prime Minister, I described him arriving in Downing Street with “a clown car overloaded with impossible promises and a cast of oddballs, ready to prove the lunatics have taken over the asylum.”
It was a rare successful prediction — bearing in mind we had also insisted we would vote to remain in the EU, Hillary Clinton would be elected US President, and we needn’t waste any time talking about Jeremy Corbyn’s obviously doomed bid to be Labour leader.
A theme of angry exasperation came to dominate the podcast — inspired by the horror of British politics in the late 2010s: a paralysed Parliament, consequence-free lying, an increasingly toxic online debate, and sitting at the top perhaps the two least well-equipped party leaders we had ever seen — the Tweedledum and Tweeledummer of Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson.
The Corbyn era ended after the 2019 election, our third. And it seemed like Johnson was in it for the long-haul, his huge majority allowing him to not only resolve Brexit but dominate politics through the next decade.
At the very time we needed serious, credible leadership to guide us through the pandemic, we had Boris Johnson. And the price — in lives lost, and others ruined, was higher than many of us could bear.
Nothing lasts forever
Johnson of course imploded, finally dragged out of Downing Street in September 2022. We weren’t there to delight in his obvious misery, having brought the podcast to an end early in 2021.
Our lives had changed since 2015 — Robert now lived far from Westminster, and spent less time covering politics. I had a young daughter, and a lot less time to devote to producing and promoting a podcast.
The last normal episode was just before Christmas 2020, and while it continued as a kind of solo monologue for a few months, Party Games properly came to an end in April 2021.
At its height, the podcast had about 15,000 subscribers, enough to top the podcast charts in some categories — but not in news and politics.
By 2021, the big beasts of broadcasting had moved into podcasting, elbowing out the indie producers. The BBC, The Times, The Guardian — all can aggressively promote their podcasts for free to a vast audience. It’s still possible to find an audience, but without some kind of organisation behind you it’s certainly harder.
News podcasts in particular are difficult — out of date almost as soon as they’re published, with a vanishingly short shelf-life. It can feel like being on a hamster wheel.
What advice would I offer to someone starting a podcast today? First of all, don’t just open your mouth and start talking — plan what you’re going to say. One of the best compliments we received praised both the quality of our audio and our words. A lot of effort went into that — it’s the least your listeners deserve if they’re giving you their time.
Secondly, take promotion seriously. For every hour you spend making your podcast, spend at least an hour promoting it. Be politely relentless on social media, incorporate video from the start, put yourself up for interview on other podcasts, go after guests who can help grow your audience by promoting their appearance. It’s not enough to be a good podcaster or a competent audio producer. You also need to run a PR campaign. For a hobby, it can be surprisingly close to a full-time job.
Before you begin, ask yourself why you’re doing it. There’s nothing wrong with podcasting as a hobby — and nothing wrong with spending a little money on a hobby. But if you expect it to boost your business or your personal brand you need to take it seriously. You probably need to engage a professional to help you (me, for example).
Running a podcast was hard work but enormous fun, I learned a huge amount from it, as a presenter, an interviewer and an editor.
From podcasting to actual radio. Presenting at BBC Radio London.
And while I certainly didn’t make a fortune from podcasting, it did change things for me. By the end, I was being asked to present radio shows and podcasts for the BBC and others, and be a guest on other programmes.
I gained confidence, and learned to trust my instincts. It turns out I actually do know what I’m talking about, can explain complex things with relative clarity and even a little humour. Doing that every week on a podcast really helps with imposter syndrome.
I still have an archive of all the episodes of Party Games, and if someone knows of an easy way to automate turning them into basic videos and uploading them to YouTube, please let me know. It would be nice to keep them alive somewhere, if only to preserve a record of the most creatively insulting ways of referring to Boris Johnson.
