When documentary film-maker and journalist Louis Theroux found himself stuck at home during the lockdown he decided to launch a BBC Radio 4 podcast called Grounded.
The entertaining result is as much about his clumsy attempts at understanding technology as it is about the revealing interviews he’s done with the likes of actress Helena Bonham Carter and singer and musician Boy George.
Similarly, the BBC Radio 5 twice-weekly hit That Peter Crouch Podcast, with ex-footballer Peter Crouch and co-hosts Tom Fordyce and Chris Stark, has carried on throughout the lockdown thanks to the power of Zoom.
Somebody who knows all about the challenges of producing a podcast during the lockdown is Guy Kilty, who produces the hit The Price of Football podcast through his Dap Dip Podcast Production company as well as working as a BBC Radio 5 Live presenter.
The twice-weekly podcast lifts the lid on the finances of football and has just celebrated reaching the 500,000 download milestone.
Price of Football is hosted by comedian and Crystal Palace fan Kevin Day and football finance expert and Brighton supporter Kieran Maguire.
Kilty said: “We had to come up with a solution quite quickly, which was a challenge, but we managed to get everything up and running and were able to maintain the quality.
“We’ve also ended up doing more interviews with people in the game and they’ve just recorded their vocal track at their end. The situation keeps evolving too. We’re tweaking the set-up this month to increase the sound quality even further.
“Hopefully soon they’ll be able to record face-to-face again but until that happens we’ll keep tweaking our remote recording set-up.”
Before the lockdown Day and Maguire would meet face-to-face and record using a microphone each and a recording device.
During lockdown they’ve been using Zoom so they can see and hear each other but the pair record their voices separately at each end. This removes any glitches that occur when the internet drops and then the two vocal tracks are mixed together.
On reaching the half million download milestone, Kilty paid tribute to Maguire and Day. “It just shows how big the appetite is for the kind of forensic analysis Kieran provides around the financial side of football,” he said. “It also shows Kevin’s brilliance in being able to make the subject accessible and funny.”
Kilty launched Dap Dip Podcast Production in August 2019 but continues to work at the BBC as a freelance.
It’s estimated that six million adults in the UK now listen to podcasts every week and the 43-year-old believes there’s a gap in the market for businesses to produce their own podcasts.
Dap Dip Podcast Production, which gets its name from the Sharon Jones’ song The Dap Dip, offers everything from coming up with the idea, to production, recording and marketing.