What Doctor Who and death can teach us about podcasting
We need to think carefully about how we preserve our work for future friends, family, and fans
From 1963 to 1969, 253 episodes of the BBC TV series Doctor Who aired on British TV. Out of those, 97 are missing, lost — to quote another sci-fi franchise — “like tears in rain”.
Given the worldwide success and mass appeal of the show since its reboot in 2005, it’s hard to imagine a time when people didn’t think about preserving work. But prior to the invention of home taping, broadcast media was ephemeral — you made it for transmission on a particular day, and maybe there would be “another chance to see” it, but most likely, if you missed it, you missed it.
There was also a financial component. Tapes were a finite resource, so once there was no more use for a particular programme, the tape would be wiped and re-used.
The same happened to a personally-beloved radio show from the late 60s and early 70s, called I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, out of which grew the Goodies, and shared some DNA with Monty Python. Episodes surfaced online in various states of decay, as lots of them were bootlegged from American radio broadcasts.
I made my first “proper” podcast episode in 2008. (I’d made on-demand radio shows before but this was the first thing with an RSS feed.) It was called New Media Junkie and it was awful, mostly because it didn’t know what sort of show it wanted to be. After making six episodes, I finally clocked what podcasting was, and ended up making different strands of shows, a sort-of forerunner to My Brother, My Brother and Me (except not funny, try as we might), and some essays along the lines of Stephen Fry’s early Podgrams series.
In 2009 I made a radio show with a friend on a community station, and after a stressful but amicable departure, those episodes were swiftly deleted at the instruction of the station head. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯/
I don’t want anyone to hear these episodes… I barely want anyone to hear stuff I made prior to 2017… but I regret not having them, because they chart the personal progress I’ve made, and let me hear how my style has evolved.
I don’t want the same thing to happen to your podcast.
I think it’s good to have ephemeral content, and it’s equally important that we’re able to clean up after ourselves. The “right to be forgotten” should extend to the work we have control over, especially if that work doesn’t reflect the person we are now.
But podcasting is still in its infancy. TV was already 50–odd years old when the BBC were wiping tapes of Doctor Who. We can’t know what we’ll be making in five or ten years time, let alone twenty, so we need to think about preserving that work now. And just as we don’t know what we’ll be making, we also don’t know who’ll be here to make it with.
(Trigger warning: I am going to talk about death.)
Bits last, flesh decays.
I’m thirty-eight, but many of the podcasters I’m listening to now are hitting fifty. That is not old by any stretch, but they almost all started over fifteen years ago, and show no signs of stopping.
What will happen in another fifteen years, or another thirty? Do you think on-demand audio programming is a fad that will have ended by then? Almost twenty years after the death of its creator, some of us are still listening to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series, and some of us are still making podcasts about it.
Right now, many podcasters like me are thinking about the next episode, or maybe the next few. Hardly any of us are thinking about the hours of our voice we’ve committed to solid state storage that people might want to hear in the future.
I’m not talking about handing wisdom down for generations. I’m single and unlikely to marry or have kids. That makes me sad, but I have nephews who I adore, and I’d like to think that when they’re the age I am now, and their uncle has been poured into a beach in Cornwall, they might want to occasionally replay an old episode of one of my shows. (Ignore my troublesome maths here…. I very much plan to still be alive when my nephews are approaching forty.)
I think I can help.
We should all be thinking long-term about our work, whether to track how far we’ve come, or to pass samples of our voice down to loved ones. But it’s maudlin and mawkish to think about that stuff too much, so I spent about 10 days of feverish keyboard pecking to build Backup My Podcast, a simple and affordable way to backup your shows and to keep them private and secure.
You can only backup shows you own (by confirming the email address associated with the feed), but each show gets a long recovery code you can give to anyone who needs it. For podcast consultants, this might allow their clients to answer that awkward “what if you get hit by a bus” question, and for those that want to preserve their work and pass it on should the worst happen, it can be used to download a Zip archive of the entire show, along with a website you can open on your computer, that contains all the show notes, and even an RSS feed so you can upload it to a cheap web host and point your podcast app at it.
There are lots of reasons why backing up your podcast is a good idea. I run a podcast hosting service so I’m not worried about my media suddenly disappearing, but I do have a tendency to pull past work I’m not wholly delighted with, and I wouldn’t want to lose personal access to it even if it’s not my favourite thing right now.
Long-term preservation was my initial catalyst — not because I’ll ever say something so profound and wise that it needs to be passed down to future generations, but because in 2020 I made a bunch of podcast episodes for people who were feeling anxious and alone, and it might be nice for those to stick around.
I hope you think the same of your work.
