Skip to main content

Doug Saunders

Ten years ago, a new and thoroughly annoying medium was invented. Its purpose, at first, was to work around a design flaw in Apple's newly minted iPod: The white plastic marvel could not receive radio or streaming audio. To compensate, coders created a way to let us subscribe to series of short chunks of downloaded audio.

During that post-2004 Podcast boom, when I resided in England, my friends would fill my inbox with the big series of the day, which consisted mostly in what was locally known as "laddish banter" – a couple of guys (and less frequently a woman) basically horsing around. One of these, created by The Guardian newspaper, starred the comic actor Ricky Gervais and basically propelled him into international stardom (it remains the most-downloaded podcast of all time).

The podcast trend more or less faded away with the iPod itself. And then it came back, in more elaborate and less avoidable form, bigger than the first time. If you enjoy people talking into your ear in pre-recorded blasts, you can slake your appetite with hundreds of dramas, comedies, documentaries, confessionals, romances and great quantities of random blather.

This week saw the conclusion of the most popular North American podcast series ever, Serial, in which a group of reporters re-investigate a murder case (think Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line, strung out over weekly long episodes, but without the painstaking editing, the visual appeal, the careful shaping of the story, the ending, or the point). Apple has added a mandatory and non-deletable Podcast app to all its devices. And Slate, the online magazine, which had produced a weekly podcast in which people talk about the latest episode of Serial, jumped the shark this week with a special essay-filled all-podcast issue, which included people talking about the podcast in which they talked about Serial.

You may have noticed a tone of subtle disdain in my remarks. If I were reading these words into a microphone, and you were listening to them while driving to work or pumping on the StairMaster, my disdain would manifest itself in a plummy inflection, a querulous upspeak in my word endings, a few overlong dramatic pauses and lots of sighing.

For those of us who can't stand podcasts, that's what they sound like: A perfectly nice piece of text, or drama, or journalism, or radio, rendered unpleasant by dint of someone canning it up and reading it into your ear.

I'm not speaking out of some Luddite aversion to the delivery vehicle. I love audio and headphones and have even created podcasts (and will happily do so again, as I enjoy the craftsmanship). Comedy and drama and essays and journalism are all great forms. But turning them into a pre-recorded speak-packet has the effect of rendering them unpleasant.

The podcast seems new (as far as decade-old technologies go) but really is a repackaging of several old genres. Your ability to endure a podcast really depends on your ability to appreciate these genres.

The first is the rock-radio morning show. This is what classic podcasts essentially are: A funny host and a sidekick delivering the sort of sardonic shtick one hears at 8 in the morning while waiting for the seventh caller.

The second is the oral history. This genre takes the raw material of history – that is, long interviews with people – and dumps them in your lap, without any historian culling them, editing them, giving them context or making them into an interesting history.

The third is the radio play. If you haven't heard one, here's how it goes: It's like a play, but without any acting and with much more dialogue. Dramatic tension is created by having the actors sigh a lot.

If you like those three things, you'll love podcasts. For the rest of us, it's just somebody we'd rather not invite into our ear.

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe