After eight years and hundreds of episodes, The Real Pod takes its final bow with a lunchtime livestream today.
At midday today, Wednesday the 29th of November, you are cordially invited to join Jane Yee, Alex Casey and Duncan Greive as they gather in the studio one last time to farewell The Spinoff’s longest-running podcast. Our pop culture behemoth The Real Pod has been meeting weekly for over eight years to recap the biggest reality show of the moment, sift through local celebrity gossip and dissect some of the more challenging weird news from across the country. Now it’s time to say goodbye.
We’ve been there for Art and Matilda falling in love and forgetting the final rose, for Chris Parker’s triumphant Celebrity Treasure Island win, for our future deputy prime minister twerking in neon. We’ve been there for the big scandals that have plagued Married at First Sight NZ, The Real Housewives of Auckland and Below Deck Down Under. We’ve even recapped a whole season of New Zealand’s Next Top Model from the archives, just because we could.
Host Jane Yee reflected on a glorious eight years in the last newsletter for our Substack. “Yes, we’ve enjoyed the opportunity to go to Anne Batley-Burton’s Pussy Party and The Apprentice Aotearoa unofficial finale screening at a go-kart track,” she wrote. “But were it not for The Real Pod Corner and the golden corn nuggets within, there’s no way this silly little podcast would have lasted this long.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had more powerfully mixed feelings about the end of something,” added Duncan Greive in the same obituary email. “The Real Pod has been around almost as long as The Spinoff itself, and I’m not gonna lie it has been stressful at times trying to build this weird media org from scratch. But being able to retreat into the goofy safety of The Real Pod every week and just have so many laughs with these two deadset legends saved my life and brain.”
Alex Casey concluded that she never could have imagined the podcast would still be around 2023. “Thank you for being there with us through all the emotional dumps, big life changes, celebrity guests and endless non-sequiturs usually ending up in a toilet bowl,” she wrote. “But, most importantly, thank you for being a constant reminder that there’s a whole community of kind, funny, generous dorks out there who also love pop culture as much as we do.”
In this extra special one hour farewell, we’ll look back at the moments that gripped the nation during The Real Pod’s tenure, and a couple of things you might have forgotten about. We have also dug up our very first episode and will look back at our biggest celebrity guests to grace the pod. Who can forget when Jordan Mauger revealed he flipped a coin to decide the winner of The Bachelor NZ, or when Mike Puru talked about nearly crapping himself during the weather?
We’ll also do a live tour of The Real Pod museum, a delightful collection of reality television artefacts that we’ve accumulated over the years. Will the popcorn from The Apprentice Aotearoa still be good two years later? How about Larissa’s fondant from The Great Kiwi Bake Off? And will Jane or Alex every accept Haydn from MAFSNZ’s proposal? All that, plus a live Q&A and many more surprises to come. See you there on The Spinoff YouTube at 12pm!
Can’t make the livestream? Catch the final episode of The Real Pod on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.