![]() That came from Radiolab, Snap Judgment, 99% Invisible and the New York Times’ The Daily. “A generation of podcasters heard what we were doing and sought to improve upon it. “We’ve been widely imitated,” says Glass. Now all radio documentaries sound a bit like TAL. This American Life’s approach was so revolutionary, the results didn’t seem like documentaries at all. All I knew were BBC Radio 4 documentaries about the history of the BT Tower, the semicolon, or rain. Like most Brits, I grew up believing there was only one way to tell a story on the radio. And then they say something and you’re like, ‘Aha! Right there!’ Because it makes you feel something, you think someone else is going to.” With success has come a major change in status. How did that make you feel? What does your mum think? And why? And why? You’re letting them talk, waiting them out. Killing stories that aren’t working should be considered a joy, not a failure.”īim Adewunmi, who joined as a producer last year, found she needed a similarly exhaustive approach when it came to interviewing subjects: “It feels like therapy. I think Ira has said they kill around half of their stories, which is great. And it’s hard to get a story accepted – I’ve had so many rejected. But the process always makes the story better. It can be dizzying – I sometimes feel like a sloth that’s wandered into a tumble dryer. It can be just me and Ira, or a room full of producers. “We have long, intense conversations, sometimes for hours, about practically every word in the script. Jon Ronson, who has contributed since the early 2000s, says a lot of that comes from taking a rigorous, perfectionist approach. Subsequent series, as well as other spinoffs S-Town and Nice White Parents, have turned TAL into a podcasting powerhouse and, alongside the New Yorker, led to a reputation for committing huge resources to stories, many of which take years to get on the air. That series has been downloaded 340m times, a podcasting world record. The other change came in 2014, when a story that felt too complex to tell in a single episode led to the launch of Serial, in which the story of a possible of miscarriage of justice was told over 12 episodes, giving a staggering insight into the US legal system. Record-breaker … Adnan Syed, the subject of the podcast Serial, now downloaded 340 million times Photograph: Baltimore Sun/TNS via Getty Images I didn’t see the potential.” The show has rarely been out of the iTunes weekly Top 5 ever since. “It was just that Seth, our operations manager, said it’s what we should be doing. “It didn’t seem like, ‘Here’s a moneymaker’,” says Updike. The first was a seemingly minor distribution decision made in 2006, to release TAL as a podcast, a novel format at the time. Two developments supercharged its success globally. Over time, the show started to grapple with bigger subjects: private contractors in Iraq, segregation in US schools, Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Mentioning four names in your first sentence is OK in a book, but not on the radio, where people can’t turn back thinking, ‘Now which one is Martin?’” “It made a real impact on my career, and taught me about writing for radio: not to overcrowd the stage – a listener’s head – with characters. ![]() “There was a, ‘Let’s put on a show!’ feel,” Sedaris says. Such emerging non-fiction writers as David Sedaris became regular contributors. ![]() There were pieces by audio artists, too, and young writing talent. Updike recalls one of the first stories she worked on, about how she and her young Irish boyfriend weren’t using condoms because they were no longer scared of Aids. The show sounded more in your face back then. “Four people putting together a live show we invented that week. “The first week, it was mayhem,” she says. ![]() One of the first people Glass hired was Nancy Updike, who has worked on TAL ever since. Those early live experiments led to the creation of Your Radio Playhouse, the show that would become This American Life. “I wanted to do a documentary story that allowed for different colours: something funnier, more emotion, using the music as a kind of score in a film. It was a way of practising being myself,” he says. “I would try to tell a story live on the air,” he says, “and bring in quotes, music, everything live – trying to tell the story to the other person in the studio. Mini warfare … Ira Glass, at back, filming a TV version of This American Life in 2007.
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