I did not expect to end up making podcasts. For twenty years my work has been behind a camera, but in March 2020, when the country went into lockdown because of Covid, that work stopped in a single day. Phone call after phone call confirmed the same thing, that every project I had lined up for the year ahead was now impossible to film. It is a strange thing, losing half a year’s work before lunch.

But then, a conversation with Professor Giles Gasper, Professor in High Medieval History at Durham University, turned into an idea. I had just started a filmmaking residency at the Department of History, and many of the people I had hoped to film were suddenly reachable only over Zoom. Rather than wait, we decided to record some of those conversations anyway, and to shape them into a series of podcasts. I had dabbled in sound production years before, making remixes and re-edits as a club DJ in the early 2000s, so the software itself was not unfamiliar. What followed was a few hastily bought pieces of kit, a Yeti Blue mic, extra lavalier mics for when I could eventually get back outdoors, and several weeks of relearning software and catching up with how far podcasting had moved on since I last paid it any attention.

It turned out to be a good skill to have picked up. Five years on, documentary podcast production has led to conversations across the university and beyond that I never expected to be part of, including two very different recording days this year that I have been meaning to write about.

How a Podcast Episode Actually Gets Made

Before any microphone is switched on, every episode starts with a pre-production meeting with everyone taking part. It is a relaxed session, usually over video call, where we talk through each person’s role in the project, what they most want to discuss, any anecdotes or sticking points from the research itself, and the wider case for interdisciplinary work of the kind Durham calls transformative humanities. From that conversation I build a running order of conversation starters rather than a fixed script. It is never a strict question and answer format. The running order exists to guide things but also gives us the flexibility to expand on points raised in the pre-production meeting, and for guests to then expand on the areas they feel most comfortable with. No one is put on the spot, and everyone has an overview of where the conversation will be going. This is the process behind every documentary podcast production I take on, whatever the format ends up being on the day.

A Walk Through Durham’s Industrial Past

The first of these two days was a podcast recording done on foot. Sandra Bell and Dr Adrian Green took me from the Market Place up North Bailey and South Bailey, then down across Prebends Bridge, where Sandra pointed out a coal seam visible in the riverbank. It was a warm day, and the streets were full of students and tourists, which made for a technically difficult recording session. I also filmed some sections for Durham’s archive alongside the audio, which meant a lot of walking backwards along busy pavements while trying to keep both of them talking naturally to each other and to me. You are constantly renegotiating your position against people, prams, bikes, and the general life of a city going about its day. It required a lot of editing once we were back in the studio, as noise levels from passing cars and people meant many retakes and a fair amount of careful work smoothing the conversation into something that sounded clear and unbroken.

A Seven-Person Roundtable on the Black Death

The second was the opposite kind of challenge. The Black Death episode was recorded in the Ogden Centre, with a full roundtable of contributors from across the university and beyond. Seven people took part, most of them in the room but one joining remotely on Zoom, and between them they covered medieval history, particle physics, archaeology, and research software engineering. It is not a combination of disciplines that usually finds itself around the same table.

My job there was almost the reverse of the walk. Instead of following two people through a changing landscape, I was recording seven very different voices, including one arriving down a Zoom line, through a single room mic. That meant a lot of work in post-production balancing levels, separating overlapping voices, and smoothing the join between the live room and the remote contributor, but it was also a good chance to sharpen skills I do not always get to use on other projects.

Documentary Podcast Production Alongside Filmmaking

What struck me, recording both within the same few weeks, is how much documentary podcast production has become a genuine second skill alongside filmmaking rather than a separate sideline. Coal Stories only really works as something recorded on the move, following the same trail the book itself sets out. The Black Death episode needed the stillness of a roundtable, because the value of that conversation was in watching ideas get tested against each other in real time, historians pushing back against modellers, an archaeologist grounding the physics in what actually turns up in the ground. Neither approach would have suited the other’s subject.

Podcasting has turned into a skill I now use constantly alongside my filmmaking, often on the very same project. Being able to offer both means I can deliver documentary podcast production and academic filmmaking as a single, joined up service, a film for the archive and a public-facing podcast recorded from the same conversation, without needing to bring in a separate audio specialist. It is not a bad skill to have picked up out of a difficult year, and one I still use every week.