EVENT REVIEW: Blacklisted Podcast: Live!
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Saturday 8th October
Gala Theatre Studio
Review by Gabriel Brown
While I’m not the most avid podcast listener, I found it fascinating to see one recorded live.
It was nice to see that the recording environment wasn’t intimidatingly official. There was a nice level of audience participation, for example, the hosts asking attendees what they have been reading recently.
The podcast itself was interesting to listen to, and as such it was surprising to see how quickly the hour seemed to go. Only occasionally did I see directions from who I presume were the recording team, but in itself this was quite interesting as it’s something you wouldn’t see if experiencing the podcast in its normal format.
Andy Miller also had to repeat a sentence at the end, meaning that the audience had to repeat their applause. This will be, of course, neatly edited together in order to make a perfect podcast and provided another glimpse ‘behind the scenes,’ in a sense. The podcast as a whole was split into different segments by short recordings of poet Stevie Smith reading her poetry. This was a personal highlight of mine. The words sounded incredible, and I will definitely be taking a look at some of her writing in future, thanks to this event.
The one thing I could say about the podcast is that it felt like it went too quickly. It wasn’t as if the hosts were trying to cram things in, I just felt it had the legs to continue for a while longer.
It’s hard to talk about a podcast as a performative event due to it being primarily talking – but the fact that I love a good conversation and that it didn’t bore me proves it works in both its recorded and live formats. The conversation was good, the readings were funny (but also poignant) and the poetry was very, very interesting to listen to.