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Jake Humphries (not sure either) had caused a bit of a stir by saying that he was told in 2020 that starting a podcast was too niche, but look at him now, playing the O2. Anyone who thought podcasts were niche in 2020 was a fucking idiot. There were people in America making millions of dollars each month from podcasts. In 2020 if someone didn't have a podcast it was pretty niche. Sure, if you want to start a podcast in 2008, that's pretty niche (but even then Ricky Gervais and Ian Boldsworth and Ed Gamble were doing them). A lot of people told me that I was crazy and asked why I was working for no money. And to be fair, they were right about it. I should have started in about 2017 when it was possible to get paid.
In truth podcasting paid off for me straight away, because it was never about the money, but about the freedom to do what I wanted and probably more so, to keep me busy so I didn't go insane. Or more insane.
It's worked out OK in the end. And lucky for me, because if I'd left it til 2020 to start I might well have not being doing comedy any more and if I was, I am pretty sure I'd have got lost in the tsunami of podcasts that had suddenly appeared. Jake should be proud of himself for starting a podcast in 2020 and for it to be popular enough for an audience to pay (presumably) to see it. Even RHLSTP, which has been going for a decade this year, is struggling to get a live audience post pandemic. So you don't need to start making up stuff if you want to impress people. Your new podcast has beaten the odds and has an audience. Well done.
What Jake Humphries was trying to say was look at me, I'm playing the O2. That would be an OK thing to say. It's impressive. But Jake was only playing the Indigo Room, the chancer. What's really impressive is to play the bar at the O2, but then for a pandemic to hit so that the gig gets moved to the O2 offices, but then there's a lockdown the day before, so the gig gets postponed, so then you do it over zoom a few months later, but the link goes down so people can't really watch it. That's the real goal for podcasters.
It's OK to show off about being a successful podcaster. You've taken something on, probably off your own bat and made it work for you. Though it's been a long journey for me, when I step back from it and think about what has been achieved, I am very proud and still a bit surprised. I'd love to say that it was all a grand plan and I've been proved right, but I have just lucked out, pretty much all the way, but the success I have had comes from the fact that my motivation was to make the stuff I wanted to make and not caring about whether it was commercial or that it seemed very unlikely to make money. We continue with that ethos to this day. It will one day destroy us, but it doesn't matter because we only wanted to make stuff. And the stuff will be there even when we aren't. Unless it all gets destroyed in a nuclear war. I might have to carve all my podcast content into stone so it might survive. That might be the decision that destroys us.
Instead of a retro RHLSTP, this week we have some brand new content - Robin Ince and me chatting about my favourite movie clips from the Bristol Slapstick Festival - https://play.acast.com/s/rhlstp/rhlstp-slapstick-special-with-robin-ince
