Did we invent podcasting, political commentary, and the 2016 nostalgia trend? Read on to find out.
As Annabelle likes to remind me – often – she was tricked into becoming part of Gone By Lunchtime. I’d asked her to guest on a new thing we were giving a whirl at the fledgling Spinoff, aka a TV blog in a trench coat. Somehow I’d persuaded this illustrious TV producer (then Annabelle Lee, now with added -Mather) along with political adviser turned PR hack and social media savant Ben Thomas to take part. I hadn’t told them it involved climbing several flights of stairs to our dilapidated, death-trap “studio”. Annabelle really enjoyed that, being about 100 months’ pregnant at the time.
But in February 2016, trick them I did, and they’ve been trapped there ever since, emotionally speaking. In those early days, it was a monthly pod, but we quickly turned it into a fortnightly with sporadic emergency outings and now, 10 years on – actually still a fortnightly with sporadic extras. But 10 years old! That makes us something like a geriatric in podcasting terms, and we’re celebrating with a world tour of live shows (complete with not-safe-for-platforms content) with two stops: in Wellington tonight and in Auckland next Thursday.
In that first episode of the podcast, which majored on whether John Key would go to Waitangi (we thought he probably would; he didn’t), I said that the podcast is called Gone By Lunchtime, “but we might change that”. So far, we haven’t, and though I’m open to all ideas, it does seem to have stuck. So thanks must go to Don Brash, who infamously told or did not tell a delegation of half a dozen Republican senators in 2004 that when he became prime minister and the National Party became government, the nuclear ship ban would be “gone by lunchtime”.
The first GBL decade has spanned 280-something episodes, three elections and five prime ministers. We’ve hosted some of them on the pod, even if none has matched the cameos from Annabelle’s parade of newborn children. We’ve drawn inspiration from fancy international podcasts. We’ve podcast from Washington DC, from the parliamentary playground, from a petrol station in Morrinsville. We’ve done a bunch of live shows. We did one podcast, for reasons I can’t wholly recall, that lasted 12 hours.
As the definition of “podcast” grows ever more elastic, meanwhile – seems like soon it might just mean TV show? – the thing that matters more than anything else is the chemistry. We might have different views on a subject but we basically like one another. We’ve even, over time, come to enjoy – hopefully this is true? – one another’s company. That’s in good part thanks to a stellar series of producers over the years, not all of whom have lodged personal grievance suits against us (thank you, Jose, Alice, Mad, Tina, Jane, Jonathan, Jin and Te Aihe).
But the whole thing hinges on those same voices piping up pod after pod. (And if you were to say to me, how about the post-election episode in 2017, when you were gallivanting overseas somewhere and Duncan Greive stepped in with great insight and aplomb, and Annabelle took over as host, cracking jokes and driving the discussion superbly, I’d say, wouldn’t know, haven’t listened.) That chemistry, the rapport, is pretty much everything in podcasts of this kind.
Tony Pastor, who along with Gary Lineker founded the Goalhanger podcast network, responsible for The Rest Is History – a podcast empire that started a few years after ours but arguably has become almost as popular – recently said they now perform extensive “chemistry tests”, a concept familiar from film and TV casting, before deciding who should host new projects. Then they spend an extraordinary amount of time getting their hosts chat-fit ahead of hitting publish. Before the newest of the Rest-Is firmament, the Rest Is Science, was launched on to platforms in November, for example, it had been “heavily piloted for four months”.
Listening back to parts of the early episodes in preparation for our early shows, I’ve been mostly – what’s the word – mortified. It could not be more clear that we did not do any pilots. It took some time for me to stop talking like a plank of wood, or for Ben to unleash his extended metaphors and Hammond-organ laugh, or Annabelle to reveal the truth about the pigeons stalking her home. But we got there, and we must have at least one more election in us.
The Gone By Lunchtime 10th Birthday Live is in Wellington on February 19 and Auckland on February 26. More details here.
