Transcriber’s Note: For ease of reading, most small speech noises and the frequent laughs/chuckles have been omitted from this text.
ANIL
Hello, and welcome to this special behind the scenes look at the making of Season 5 of The Magnus Archives. I’m your host, Anil Godigamuwe, and with me, I have –
JONNY
It’s Jonny… Sims. Hello! Writer. Voice actor. Hero? Question mark…?
ANIL
Who can say? Jonny. Jonny can say.
JONNY
I just did.
ALEX
And Alex… Newall. Hello! Director. Hero, question mark? No. Antagonist, question mark? Yes.
LOWRI
And me, Lowri. Producer. Overlord? Maybe.
ELIZABETH
And me, Elizabeth. Editor. Hopefully not a question mark at this point.
JONNY
To be fair, Elizabeth, the actual hero of the making of Season Five –
ANIL
Exactly!
LOWRI
A hundred percent.
ELIZABETH
I mean, how many episodes? Like, I think by the 89th one, you can probably say that you’re an editor at that stage.
LOWRI
Yeah!
ALEX
I keep saying it, there are few people on the planet who have edited as much audio drama as you.
ANIL
That is…
ELIZABETH
…probably true.
ANIL
Yeah.
So, 200 episodes, five years of audio drama. The curtain has finally closed, the stage has been swept. How are we all feeling?
JONNY
Ahhh… I think relief, you know, is broadly speaking my primary emotion. Like, it’s… a bit sad cos it’s been so much of my life for, like, yeah, the last five years. But mainly, especially given how Season 5 has been to record. And it’s just a real (sigh of relief) to have it all out there at last.
ALEX
I on the other hand would like to shatter the grand illusion, and say only one person in this room is done with Magnus! And it’s the person who spoke first!
JONNY
Yeah, it’s the person who’s feeling relief. You’ll get there.
ALEX
How do I feel? Like I’ve still got loads to do, Anil! That’s the truth.
JONNY
You’ll get there Alex.
ANIL
Cos there’s still loads to do!
LOWRI
That is true.
ANIL
Well, yes, but… the main body of the show is done.
ELIZABETH
I have to say, I, I have a different emotion. I think I was… I was feeling… possibly partway through last year, I was, like, when will this be over? And – But now, because I was a fan of the show, like I am losing characters that I enjoyed, that I’ve just animated across a landscape.
I’m like, I am losing a little bit of… character family for myself.
LOWRI
Awww.
ANIL
Awww, that’s sweet.
ELIZABETH
And I didn’t care about them that much between Seasons 1 to 4, but Season 5, I made their little feet go everywhere.
ALEX
Yeah, that’s the thing – you’ll have heard more of, like, their little tippy-tap footsteps, than you have, like, any other sound for the last year.
ELIZABETH
Every little shrug, every time Martin did something like this: “hands up, hands down.”
ANIL
Yeah. I think, from doing the transcripts, it’s like, [CLICK] and [FOOTSTEPS], I think are the things I have written the most.
ALEX
Yup.
ANIL
Well, I guess it’s safe to say that 2020 and Season 5 didn’t quite pan out the way we had expected. Before we talk about, like, the production challenges, let’s go back to the beginning on the writing front and what I’m guessing are the heady, heady days of 2019.
ALEX
Ahhh, the before time.
ANIL
The before times. But Jonny, you’ve said before The Magnus Archives was planned as a five series show. Could you talk a little bit about your overall vision, and how Season 5 fitted in with that?
JONNY
Season 5… The final act of The Magnus Archives, Act Five, as it were, was always intended to be this post-apocalyptic weird-mageddon odyssey to a certain degree. It was always going to culminate with the Archivist’s choice, and taking on the power, and releasing the Fears, sort of, out into these, these other worlds, largely because I am an absolute sucker for, like – They’re so cheesy, but I love your old school creepypasta. “And now you too, reader, are doomed for you have read these words and these words are how the curse was passed.”
And so I was, like, I really want to do, like, just five seasons. Each of which is, like, the slowest burn one of those. But the basic skeleton’s been in place pretty much from, like, about halfway through Season 1, I’d say. But obviously the exact format has changed and shifted. I think originally it was going to be a slightly shorter run of episodes. I wanted actually, initially, to do a sort of, kind of a fake-out with the early part of Season 4. [Note: Jonny actually means Season 5]
ALEX
Yeah.
JONNY
So that the apocalypse came, like, I dunno Episode, like 17, just out of the blue in Season 5, which Alex pushed back on, saying that it will be really hard to maintain that much of early Season 5 when there were effectively no actual stakes and, so –
ALEX
It’s, it’s fine. You can say it. What I did, is I said, “no one wants an office romance for 10 episodes. No one would enjoy that, Jonny, it’s boring! So let’s skip that, and go straight to the misery.”
ANIL
Have, have you actually seen the fan reactions?
ALEX
We don’t have fans! This all just gets put in a filing cabinet somewhere.
JONNY
But the, the actual format of Season 5, sort of, beyond the idea of, like, they are travelling the apocalypse, seeing these, like, the idea of the apocalypse and the fearscapes, checking in on all these older characters in their, sort of, final forms effectively.
That was there, but as it got closer, and I wanted to experiment a bit more with my writing, it took on this much more odyssey format of, like, one end of a Fear-transformed British Isles right down to the other.
ALEX
In your defence as well, like, when you were originally talking about it, you were trying not to force us to reinvent the entire series in light – “And we could do maybe ten episodes post-apocalypse. Would that, would that be okay?”
And I was like, “No! Forty! We’ll do forty! And we’ll triple the soundscaping!”
So, like, you were quite humble in the original, like, proposition. I have to, like, give you credit, as I just told you to scale it up and you, you rolled with it.
ANIL
Did you have anything in particular that you wanted to try to achieve with the writing of this season?
JONNY
Broadly speaking, I wanted to experiment a bit more. The statement format of the first four seasons has evolved as the, the metaplot and the interpersonal drama has developed, but it always stayed pretty grounded to one degree or another in the real world.
And I was very keen to experiment a bit more with the actual format of the statements, with the writing, and use this idea of, like, the psychoscape and these sort of personal hells to just, sort of, I guess, flex my writing muscles in some different ways. Also, it’s a paradox that the more surreal the actual setting, in many ways, the more real you can be with the subject matter and with the, like, the interpersonal drama.
People reacting against these very externalised metaphors can lead to some really interesting character moments that weren’t as possible when the world was normal. And you have to deal with – in metaphorical monsters when the world is real, are sort of literalised in a, in a very interesting way. When you take this idea of, like the world becoming this inherent metaphor.
ALEX
I mean, I’d argue as well that it’s kind of, it’s more than just, you can go more real, you sort of have to, otherwise you’re just this untethered balloon in – floating around in a big pile of weird.
JONNY
Monsters are metaphors. And so the more of the world that is a monster, the more of the world has to be a metaphor. Otherwise you’re just describing an untethered hell, which, you know, is fine, I guess, but, uh, you kind of want something a bit more there.
ANIL
What was writing like at the start of the season compared to towards the end?
JONNY
In many ways not super-different. Like, I think it took me a few episodes to properly settle into what we were trying to do. And I would say that the last ten episodes, a lot of the final plot beats land, and there’s a lot of long-deferred conversations that need to happen. That was both harder and easier than the journey proceeding it. Easier because, a lot of these scenes were so, kind of, necessary, and I don’t want to say obvious, but like, I know how this scene goes because it’s a scene that’s been rattling around my brain for, like, three years now or so. But at the same time, there was a lot more pressure on it, because it’s, like, “Yeah, but if this scene doesn’t land, the series doesn’t land,” you know?
ANIL
Yeah.
JONNY
So, yeah, I think in some ways the early bits were, were easier. Also like pre-pandemic, it was a lot easier, because writing is hard in a pandemic.
LOWRI
Yeah.
ALEX
What?! Jonny, you’re forced to stay at home. Surely that means all you do is write, with no interruptions, forever. Right?
JONNY
Aww yeah! It’s… it’s wonderful.
ANIL
Yep. Said every creative, ever.
JONNY
Ah, yeah.
ANIL
On that point, were there any particular sticking points with the writing for Season 5?
JONNY
I mean, the last, sort of, I want to say fifteen episodes went through quite a few chops and changes with Alex. Like, there was the exact order of scenes, and the exact order of things ended up getting a little bit shuffled around.
ALEX
Well, I mean, in your defence, there was production pressure as well –
JONNY
Yeah.
ALEX
– which was, there’s no point dancing around it, is that although Season 5 was written with a sort of semi-odyssey act structure built in, originally it was structured for a mid-break, cos that’s what we normally would be fine with. And then a – and then you carry on. But that was physically impossible unless I had literally started feeding people to the machine to keep it going. So, as a result, we ended up splitting it harder into that three act. So it meant that you kind of needed to account for that.
JONNY
And it also meant that we had to factor in – Like, for instance, we couldn’t have Basira and Daisy periodically recurring throughout the whole season –
ALEX
Yeah.
JONNY
– because from a practical point of view, when Frank and Faye had a microphone, was like – We could make sure they had a microphone at any point we wanted, but it wasn’t as easy to say, well they’ll need a microphone throughout the whole deal.
So a lot of it was down to – Because me and Alex and Imogen, for instance, who plays Helen, because she’s also in Stellar Firma, there were a handful of us who have basically permanent recording setups. A lot of the mid-Season 5 was very much like, this is by production necessity, focus down much closer on these characters. Like, I think it was always going to be primarily John and Martin wandering through the wastes, but that sort of slightly peripatetic section will feel like, “Oh, well these are the three, four episodes with Daisy and Basira.” And the middle was, I think, much more of a production consequence than one that was initially planned.
ALEX
But, you did basically allow us to mobilise with the remote recording kits by doing that. So… I don’t actually think it’s worse for it, I’d say. A lot of times people say the change happens and then it’s, you know, “Ah, you’ve sacrificed your original vision.” I’m like, “Actually I kind of like that it fell out that way.”
JONNY
I think we’ve, broadly speaking, being quite good at, like, having a lot of two-way communication over the production stuff. It’s a lot less, like, you coming in and saying, “Well, these are the restraints, so make it work.” And me say, or me saying, “Well, this is my writing demand, make sure it works!”
ALEX
Sat on his throne of bone!
JONNY
And much more like us having a proper conversation saying, “Well, these constraints, what can we do within the writing to make this work, and to actually, like, capitalise on it? What, like, what is this an opportunity for, thematically?”
ALEX
That’s a good way of putting it.
ANIL
Yeah. Conversely, were there any parts that came very easily?
JONNY
By the end, the Martin and John dialogue. It’s one of those things that, like, after five years, you know how these characters talk and communicate –
ALEX
Yeah.
JONNY
– so deeply. “Martin and John have a heartfelt conversation about the apocalypse and Martin stubbornly sits on a horrible sofa.” Like, I’m, like, yeah, I can write that. That’s fine. Do-do-do, do-do-do, boof, done.
ALEX
I’m looking at Elizabeth wince at the mention of that sofa, and you’re like –
JONNY
Yeah… sorry!
ALEX
“Sitting on a sofa, that’s dead easy! That’s two seconds of writing!” And Elizabeth’s there…
ELIZABETH
I remember that.
ALEX
You’re so tactful.
LOWRI
I think Elizabeth’s just waiting for the editing section.
ANIL
Throwing this out there, probably slightly more towards adding Alex into this, when did planning proper for Season 5 begin? And how did that go?
JONNY
From a, an audience point of view, it was underway by the time Season 4 was, like, complete. Cos there’s obviously that delay.
LOWRI
I have a date.
JONNY
Oh, you have a –
LOWRI
So I remembered that we had a big meeting in December 2019, as like a debrief of Season 4.
ALEX
Yes!
JONNY
Mmmmm.
ALEX
That was it, thank you!
LOWRI
And I don’t think you’d done the final, like, detailed scene plan at that point. And you were going to do it in the next few weeks.
JONNY
Yeah.
ALEX
You’re right. We knew what we wanted to do, genuinely around, like, end of Season 3, and it was a question of, like, execution. How long? Is it twenty episodes and apocalypse? Is it all an apocalypse or whatever? And you’re right, that was the meeting where we sat down, and poor Jonny had to sit in a room, and just be told “No,” for like an hour, where it was just like, “Cool, I thought we could –” “No! It must have these characters. It must run at this length. You cannot have these characters more than this amount of time. It must only have this.”
JONNY
To be fair, like, a lot of the meeting was, you saying, “Oh, it’s gotta to have this” and me being like, “Yeah, of course, that makes sense.” And there was only, like, 30% of it that was, like, me being like, “I want this one,” and then you’re like, “Mmm, we can’t, we can’t do that.”
ALEX
I mean, that was the meeting where I said, we need to plan to not have Salesa.
JONNY
Yeah.
ALEX
In case it didn’t come off, as an example.
LOWRI
Mmmm.
JONNY
But that said, with Season 5, much more than any other season, “planning,” in inverted commas, has gone pretty much right up to the end. With all the other seasons, there was the initial two or three meetings where me and Alex hashed out the shape of the season, then I’d go away and make my episode plan. And then the main question was, how do we do this? How do we make this actually work?
Whereas with Season 5, because of pandemic concerns, a few structural things that we noticed as we came towards the end, there was much more of that: Well, what do we do? How are we shaping this? There were much more of those conversations, right throughout Season 5.
ANIL
Yeah.
ALEX
Yeah, I’d say it had slightly more real world course corrections where it’s like, “Oh, like this is going to be physically impossible to record, so we’ll need to, you know.” There was a version as an example where, like, if we couldn’t get decent recording setups to them, Salesa was behind bulletproof glass and talking through an intercom, and stuff like that.
JONNY
Yeah.
ALEX
And it’s like, cos that could work, you know? So yeah, I think out of all of the seasons, this is the one that’s had the most reconfirming and little adjustments here and there, but it’s almost all been to, like, facilitate rather than… rewrite, if that makes any sense.
ANIL
Sure. When did principal recording for Season 5 start?
LOWRI
Well, I looked this up, and our first recording for Season 5 was on the 18th of January 2020. And it was a John/Martin scene in the first episode. And on that day we also recorded – us five recorded “Making of Episode 158.”
ANIL
Yeah, I was gonna say! Cos I remember coming to the recording for “The Making of 158,” and Mike was just leaving –
LOWRI
I think that was – might’ve been the – Oh no, it would have been the first scene, right?
ANIL
Yeah. because he’s in the tape recording at the beginning of Season 5 as well.
ALEX
Oh my God, I forgot that’s how Season 5 starts!
LOWRI
Yeah, yeah, I had as well.
ANIL
Yeah, the birthday!
ALEX
Oh, I forgot! That was so much fun to plan!
LOWRI
Yeah.
ALEX
Just to be arbitrarily cruel in that way. Ah, I forgot.
ANIL
Yes, I walked up to your front door, it opened, Mike walked out. It’s like, “Oh, I didn’t know you were here today!” I think that may have also been the day of our staff party as well.
ELIZABETH
Yeah.
ANIL
The last party where we were all together –
LOWRI
Ohhhh yeah!
ELIZABETH
It was, yeah, yeah.
ANIL
– before shutdown. Principle recording started in January before we knew anything about, uh, really about how, how things were going.
So how did the plan for Season 5 change as the year progressed?
JONNY
Through a couple of, like, emergency meetings when we first went into lockdown Followed by weekly updates and discussions and all this sort of thing. I’ll be honest, at this point, I’ve been doing the, like, revised and changed – I couldn’t tell you, “Oh, it was going to be X or Y, and then it changed in, in this or that way.”
But certainly the initial plan was much more sort of, I think, interweaving with other characters’ stories rather than compartmentalise them in the way that it ended up being. Also, just like the way that dialogue worked. I had to be a lot more careful to not write too much crosstalk, at least in the earlier parts of the pandemic when everyone was still getting used to their remote recording setups. By the end, me and Alex, even with the video delay, we could crosstalk-acted off each other without any problem.
ALEX
Oh yeah. That’s a, that’s a fun insight. There were a few scenes that I’ve recorded as Martin where, due to internet issues, Jonny at the other end, to what I’m hearing, it’s like, “Hello John, how are you?” (low and elongated response) “Hellllooooo, IIII’mmmm fiiiiinnnneee, (normal speech) how are you?”
And then you’re just, like, “Okay, I’ll just… I know how you probably would have said that.”
JONNY
Yeah, like the thing is at a certain point we’ve been acting these characters off each other for long enough that I’m just like, “Okay, well, I’ve no idea what Alex just said, but the timing he would usually use is this, so let’s just go.”
ALEX
I believe my timing consists of “awkward pause.”
ANIL
When was the decision taken to move to fully remote recording? And was there any consideration given to delaying production or the launch of Season 5?
LOWRI
I have come to this with a list of dates to help jog memories. Cos I couldn’t remember.
ANIL
Ah, excellent!
LOWRI
But our last rec – studio recording day was the 14th of March, and it was with Hannah Walker, recording Jude Perry.
ANIL
The Towering Inferno episode.
LOWRI
So that was almost exactly a year ago today.
ALEX
Like, we were already well underway in setting up for remote recording at that point.
LOWRI
Yeah. We were quite lucky, I think. Well, from my point of view, I don’t know how much things were changed; I don’t remember these scenes being changed, but I think we had a bunch of John/Martin scenes coming up, and you both – I think Jonny was – Am I right, prioritised or had a recording kit at that time?
JONNY
No, I didn’t quite… In fact, I had no home recording until pandemic hit, and McGuffin & Company started doing streaming. At which point we bought our own recording kit that was – it ended up being supplemented in a couple of places by what Rusty Quill was sending out.
Fundamentally Alex, very wisely – “Yeah, this is not going to be a short thing. We need to make sure that we are in a position to keep recording, if it ends up being months or years.”
ALEX
Yeah, I’m a little bit of a pandemic-paranoia person as being forced as a child to read The Hot Zone by my mother who was like, “This is a thing that you’ll need to deal with in your lifetime!”
So, as a result, I may have been slightly primed to the point where I think during that Hannah Walker [recording], we’d already made the call that we basically were going to be in remote recording ‘til – I think we might have even given out that company message, like, “We’re assuming we’re going to be doing remote recording ‘til end of 2021, unless a miracle happens” or something, like, we basically have – had swapped by April to just, “We will be doing this permanently until further notice.”
So… yeah, I think we were quite lucky, in a way that I don’t often concede, in that we had a bunch of John/Martin we could be doing so that we did not have to completely tank Season 5 start. From a business perspective, I pushed quite hard, because pandemic was going to shut down a lot of shows, especially in the podcast space. And sustaining launch would be a big deal, would be an achievement in and of itself, even if it meant that we swapped to the three act structure. So, I think a lot of it was… a lot of people putting a lot of extra effort, but a lot of the people who were, like, “saving it,” in inverted commas, on here, April Sumner, Hannah Brankin, actually a few of the editors who helped, like, generating suggestions on tech, including you, Elizabeth, I think, where it was effectively coming up with what the recording stuff was.
That was logistically massive. That was enormous. But we were quite lucky that we could just record a bunch of John/Martin whilst mobilising, you know, twenty, thirty remote recording kits.
JONNY
And you bought every microphone left in England.
ALEX
Oh, I did, yes! I did! There’s your fun anecdote. Yeah.
I may have gone, “Hang on. Every single person on the planet is going to want to make a podcast as – cos they’re going to be bored at home, and I need to have this specific equipment if it’s going to sound good.”
So, because they hadn’t stocked up yet, I did temporarily purchase every single type of this microphone that was available in this country for, like, a couple of weeks. And it was just because they normally stock, you know, like, two. And every single shop, I was like, “I’ll take thirty!” And so we had to, like, clean out, like, genuinely, like, ten separate suppliers or something. So then for two weeks, there’s just this microphone wasn’t available in the UK. And it was my fault.
I forgot about that. You’d see all these advice forums being like, “Hi, I’m trying to start a podcast during pandemic, but I can’t find this microphone.” You were just sat there, and watching comments of people going, “Yeah, it’s weird, there used to be loads, and now there’s none. I don’t know what’s happening there.”
JONNY
In your defence, like, the issue was that there weren’t a lot of these microphones stockpiled in any given supplier because they weren’t pandemic-proofing –
ALEX
Oh yeah, they hadn’t stockpiled, like, anything, and then demand absolutely skyrocketed!
JONNY
Like, they would have vanished anyway. But, at the same time, they vanished because of you.
ANIL
It’s similar to the streaming situation. Cos, like, stocks of certain, like, Logitech cameras, particularly the c920, ran out.
JONNY
Yeah!
ANIL
So, Lowri, when Alex told you we were going to move to fully remote, what were your initial thoughts?
LOWRI
I think my first thoughts went to all of the recordings and the guests we had booked and just, you know, “Right, what do we do here?”
And the next recording we had booked that, you know, would have got ahead had we not had to go remote was with Chioma, who plays Annabelle, which we were unlucky in a way, because this was our first recording with her ever. So, you know, we hadn’t met her, and we were supposed to be meeting her for the first time this day.
But we were lucky, because what she was recording was a phone call.
ALEX
Oh yeah!
LOWRI
Literally, we were like, “You know what? I think we can get away with her recording on her phone,” cos she didn’t have a kit, and we couldn’t have got it to her in time. Cos I don’t think we had them at that point.
ALEX
This is a real insight into just how pathetic I am. Do you not remember our fun character cascade algorithm, we had to work on?
LOWRI
Yeah…
ALEX
It was this fun thing where it was like, “Right. You can only have so many people in a call, otherwise the call collapses. Therefore you can split it out, but we need to batch people because some people can’t have a – you can’t give a full recording set to every single character to keep for twelve months, they’ve gotta move around.”
It was one of those maths problems where it’s, you know, like, “A train leaves London at 20 miles an hour and another leaves Timbuktu…” Cos what was the minimum number of transfers and stuff, of equipment?
JONNY
Is this your super-dorky spreadsheet, you showed me once?
ALEX
Yeah! Lowri – I just gave a bunch of parameters to Lowri, went “You’re a mathematician, figure it out.”
ANIL
So, just swapping back a little bit. So you said there wasn’t really a decision to delay or push back the launch for Season 5. So we recorded a message from you that went out before the start of the season, but I have to ask Jonny, what was it like feeling so prescient about the apocalypse? Particularly with things like, The Sick Village.
[ALEX GROANS IN REMEMBERED PAIN]
ALEX
Oh, that hurt! That episode hurt me physically.
ANIL
I remember for a fair part of that early season, we made sure to preface things with cautions about the con – like, the first five, six episodes all went out with warnings.
ALEX
Yeah. Yeah.
“Being isolated in a cabin,” followed by “you go outside and there’s nothing but sickness.” Yeah, (head in hands) God…
JONNY
It was a weird one. Because, at some points in Season 5, like, because Season 5 is diving into, like, much more real world fears, and, like, real world experiences like – There, there’ve been some heavy episodes that… this one’s a lot.
But there is a real difference in going into an episode saying, “Okay, well, this is, this is engaging with something pretty raw, pretty personal to me,” versus just putting out an episode that’s like, “Yeah, this is a meditation on this thing.” And by the time it comes out, it’s suddenly, massively, directly applicable to everyone listening.
I don’t have any other good words to say, except it’s really weird. Not great. I would much rather those episodes had not been prescient, and everyone had just been, “Huh? That’s an okay episode. Let’s not remember it.”
ALEX
But… look at it another way. What if you had done an episode of them trapped in the cabin, and they go outside and it’s nothing but clowns. 2020 would have been a very different year for the world.
JONNY
The clowndemic.
ANIL
Well, we’re, we’re not going to talk about clowncore on this episode, but – despite its relevance to The Magnus Archives. But… So, Lowri, what were the challenges you faced in getting the rest of the season recorded as producer?
LOWRI
Well, first it’s that adjustment and the mental switch of, “Okay, everything’s completely different. All the prep I’ve done means nothing.” But I think, we’re probably getting into, kind of, the sound and the editing side of things now, because one of the biggest challenges is of course that everyone’s setup is different. You know, we’re not in a studio, everyone’s atmosphere is different, and you have to try and match that. Trying to think of ways to mitigate those differences.
I mean, obviously it wasn’t me who was coming up with those solutions. And I think for me, I felt like there was a sense of… going into the unknown. Like, we didn’t know what we didn’t know yet. So, you know, for example, we’d be recording things, you know, it’s a remote recording setup, and you know, everyone’s in different places and you’d think, “Oh, okay, this is a thing that we hadn’t considered that will affect us, and we should probably think about beforehand in the future.”
It added a few extra steps to production as well. So things like, “oh, we need to be getting test audio from people, and we need to be getting it a week before their recording, so that if there are any issues with their setup and their atmosphere and their audio, we can solve those before the recording day.”
ALEX
And then you’re explaining to actors, “No, you’ve got to use the actual setup you’re going to use. Don’t give us a test recording just on your phone, and then use a different setup, and stuff like that.”
JONNY
Teaching actors how to soundproof their own rooms…
ALEX
No, no. No, it’s not that, it’s, it’s just that you now have to: “Hi, this is a casting call. Cool. Are you a performer?” “Yes.” “Great. Are you an audio technician?” “What? No…” “Learn!”
LOWRI
And also explaining, “Yes. You’ve sent us test audio using the mic that we sent you, but we need you to be literally recording in the space you’re going to be recording in with it set up as it’s going to be on the day,” because that affects the quality so much. Almost as much as the quality of the microphone.
JONNY
I had to learn a lot about acoustics. It’s not, like, a bad thing. It’s not like, “Oh, I can’t believe I had to learn about acoustics,” but it was definitely –
Also, like, the idea of checking a spectrograph never crossed my mind. And then we lost, like, a literal day’s worth of recording on my end, because there was some problem that would have shown up if I had checked the spectrograph, but we didn’t. So just did the whole recording, and we’re like, “Yes, this is fine. Really enjoying this recording.” And then it’s, like, “This is… Jonny, this is completely unusable. Sounds like you’re underwater.”
ALEX
And then the awful one where everyone did a fantastic job, but the audio equipment reset, so they just recorded to the wrong microphone. So they’ve got the brilliant microphone setup, everything looks like it’s working fine. And they’ve recorded via their, like, three pound webcam. And you’re like, “Oh no, God!”
ELIZABETH
I mean, cos everyone has, you know – We can send out the certain recording equipment, but most people are recording into their own laptop or device. Right? So, and we don’t have control over that.
ALEX
We have tested every iteration of every, like, setup we possibly could before we came to this. And this was the one that was a combination of the easiest to get someone to learn, combined with least likely to create audio errors and crashes and stuff, but it took a long time, and Jonny’s right to be annoyed cos it’s been the bane of my life.
JONNY
The amount of experimentation it took to locate the exact right things to turn off, so that Skype wasn’t just gradually increasing my recording volume throughout the whole recording was a lot. But at the same time, yeah, like all the, like, the more specialist tools out there are a lot harder for, like, if you’re just getting an actor into, like, do an episode, it’s a lot more upfront to, sort of, unload onto them.
And at a certain point you just have to be like, “Do you have Skype?” “Uh, I think so.” “Great, it’s over Skype.” Plus, to be honest, when we started Teams and Zoom weren’t as big as they are now.
ALEX
Yeah.
LOWRI
Actually that is another big thing. So… you’re recording usually, you know, Alex is there, and you know, he’s acting as the sound engineer, so you’re pretty confident. I mean, obviously there are exceptions, things can go wrong, but usually once the audio is recorded, it’s done. It’s, you know, it’s there, and you can rely on that…
ANIL
Yeah.
LOWRI
But then recording remotely and, you know, waiting for everyone to send their audio in. Not that, like, anyone was late or, you know, slow sending stuff in, but you can’t just tick that off as being done. You have to wait, you know, so that it’s been checked or maybe gone through a few editors, so that all the different ways that it could have gone wrong, have, you know, been eliminated. And it’s, like, “Okay, after all this time, it sounds like that audio was okay. I can tick that as being done.”
ANIL
Were there any actual positives from Production’s perspective that came out of this? Like any benefits or unexpected wins that came from, like, this new normal of remote recording?
ALEX
Studio’s never been cleaner. You’re all just animals. And every time you come into a room, you leave it and it’s like a whirlwind of, of muddy footprints. This, this is glorious.
ANIL
Well, you’ve turned the studio into your actual office now.
ALEX
It’s, yeah, it’s, it’s my sterile soundproof bubble.
ELIZABETH
I just figured it was having a cast and crew who now are trapped at home and had no excuses.
ALEX
“You’re available, right?” “Ah, I had this thing…” “No you don’t!”
JONNY
I technically got to sleep a bit later on a recording day.
The trouble is that actually that works worse, because before I was having to, like, crawl out of bed at seven and take a two hour train and bus ride over to Alex’s. And the thing is that two hour train and bus ride, like, I’d get myself a coffee and, like, a bacon sandwich. I’d listen to Sonic the Comic, the podcast, and just like, take that time to wake up and so, by the time I arrived at Alex’s, I was like, “Yeah, I’m ready to record!”
Whereas in pandemic, I’ve much more been like just blearily-eyed, like, trying to set up a microphone at, like, five past nine. “Yeah, I don’t need to… It’s fine. I’m already in the room I record in. It’s fine,” and being like, (hoarsely) “I’m here!”
ALEX
Yeah, actually thinking about it, early pandemic was the big one for that, because we were worried that we weren’t gonna be able to catch up. People are busy dealing with pandemic, and instead it was every single person on the planet’s plans have been cancelled, which means that every single person, it’s like, “Yeah, I guess I’m free. Like I’m not going to that opera or whatever.”
So it weirdly made it feasible to catch up more than I actually thought we’d be able to in the first stages.
LOWRI
I mean, it was harder in the sense as well that we had to get mics to people, and also coordinate with other shows as well.
ALEX
Yeah, yeah.
LOWRI
Another win I’d say, is that it opened up the casting for us. I had been looking since January 2020 for an actor of Samoan descent that lived in London, or who could feasibly get to London. And I’d just been having no luck. And I can’t remember exactly when, but I remember one day during the lockdown, I woke up and was like, “Ah, we don’t need, we don’t need someone who’s in London. We can cast anywhere. Like, even Australia,” which Alex agreed to.
And to clarify Australia specifically, because I had an Australian director friend who had worked with a few Samoan actors who live in Australia. So I reached out to them and their agents. And that’s actually how we ended up casting Salesa.
JONNY
And Ray was – Ah, Ray was wonderful to work with.
LOWRI
Ah, he was a ray of light.
ALEX
International shipping is not fun! Once it’s there, moving around within country is fine. Getting things to countries can sometimes be tricky. Let’s leave it at that.
ANIL
I will say the fans very definitely reacted well to Ray’s casting as Salesa. He was very, very popular.
ALEX
How about you, Elizabeth? I’m assuming that from your end, it’s basically all been positive with remote recording with no negatives at all, right?
ELIZABETH
Yeah, no, it’s been a… it was a dream. A dream, yeah. It’s great. Great fun. We all learned lots. Just lots.
Cos I’d come from Seasons 2, 3 and 4, where it was all recorded in the studio. And so I had just grown up on this beautiful audio that just never needed anything, you know. I just needed to adjust the levels. Didn’t need to EQ it other than running it through the, the, you know, telephone filter that we use to, yeah, having to deal with this audio that was coming in where I think it stumped a lot of the editing team to, like really, you know, shape some of that, so that it sounded as good as possible.
ALEX
There were a few exterior scenes that ended up interior by the end, but I think it worked.
ANIL
Moving now to the editing side. Elizabeth, speaking as an editor for the editing team, what are the main differences in handling audio that is coming from multiple locations, compared to it all being nicely in situ in studio.
ELIZABETH
So, I mean, you’ve got, I think the two main things are obviously the fact that the audio is not going to sound the same because of the, the reverberance that each room has, you know, every space has some kind of reverberance.
And then the other thing is working with audio where the – there was, I think, for Annie and Nico who did most of those edits this year, they probably had to do a lot more of the frankenvoicing where it’s taking two records where potentially those people weren’t actually recording at the same time. And of course, dealing with lag.
Those I think are the two main differences from the studio. Like, the studio obviously does still have nice padding on it, so you don’t care –
ALEX
It’s lovely here.
ELIZABETH
Yeah. Looking good.
Whereas, yeah, there’s, there’s only so much that most people can do in their bedroom or their lounge to reduce the amount of reflection that their walls are going to give to the sound, so…
ALEX
Well, there’s a beautiful narrative closure there, that Magnus started in a blanket fort and it ended, not in a big fancy studio, but just in a lot of blanket forts, more like a blanket community –
LOWRI
Jonny looks nauseated.
ALEX
– a blanket hamlet.
JONNY
(deadpan) No, it’s fine. I’m happy. I love the completion of the narrative arc.
ANIL
Indeed you do.
Elizabeth, you moved from being the vocal cut editor to principally doing the soundscaping for Season 5. So how did that feel?
ELIZABETH
It came with a lot more feeling of responsibility. I love the show, because I love the characters and I just like, I enjoy being in, involved in media, like, you know, I just enjoy the show. So it was always something that I was – I’ve been passionate about, but the amount of audience hadn’t really sunk in.
And so I remember Callum, “Oh, we’ve got this many downloads a month.” And I was like, “Holy shit! I feel very responsible at this point.”
So, because also the vocal cuts, you know, cutting the dialogue for something. I mean, it doesn’t disappear, but you know, when it’s done well, you’re not paying attention to that, right? That’s just something that’s feels seamless. And you’ve just – you’re the invisible presence that made that come off fine.
I think with the soundscaping you’re telling people a lot more about – well, you’re telling people everything about the environment, if you start editing soundscaping and, right? So you’re saying, well, you know, we’ve got this hospital, well, what sort of hospital is it? Like, what sort of environment do we have here? So, and then of course, once you’re adding that soundscape layer as well, it’s gotta be believable enough. If you have everyone thumping around, not sounding realistic, you’re just going to take everyone out of that environment.
I would actually prefer, if I was listening to a podcast, something that had less soundscaping, if they weren’t going to do it well enough for it to be believable, because to me like the story is the most important thing. And what I’d hate to do is distract from, you know, the narratives that Jonny was telling.
JONNY
You say that, but, like, as you say, the soundscaping is so important for the environment, and because so much of Season 5 is about the environment, I want to say, like, Season 5, Elizabeth is a hundred percent the third author. It’s literally the fact that, like, a lot of the decisions that you take in the soundscaping have these, sort of, very significant and transformative impacts on the episodes. And it’s been wonderful to, like, come to some of them and be like, “Oh wow. That’s not what I wrote because that’s better,” you know?
ALEX
No, all you ever wrote was just, “there’s the sounds of tens of thousands of people screaming.”
JONNY
Yeah.
ALEX
And it’s real difficult to keep that fresh.
JONNY
It’s not so much that it’s not what I wrote, in the sense that like, that is different from what I wrote. It’s like, well, what I wrote was like a line of description. What Elizabeth has come back with is so transformative to it.
And often, occasionally people have been like, “Oh yeah, like this particular thing in the episode that really spoke to me!” I was like, “I don’t recall writing that in.” And I go back to listen, and I’ll be like, “Oh, that’s just a really cool sound effect that, that was dropped in there.”
ALEX
But that draws attention so much to, and this is biggest in audio drama, actually, there is far more directorial action that happens at the sound effects/soundscaping layer than people give credit for. This isn’t even talking, like, from a procedurals point, it’s talking about, like, from the nature of how you consume this, right?
Body language is a thing, okay. In audio drama inferred body language is a thing. There’s a very big difference between a character who says, “Yes, I agree” and someone who says, “Yes, I agree” then fidgets uncomfortably. Those are different scenes. So as a result, a lot of that is Elizabeth’s readings of scripts where sometimes it’s codified, but even if it’s not codified, Elizabeth doesn’t have the luxury of just leaving it blank. People don’t just sit perfectly still in a void.
So as a result, you can imply a lot. And I think it’s probably the thing that’s the least appreciated, and thing that you smashed with Season 5. And it’s stuff like rowing the boat, where it’s the thing of when they choose to stop rowing the boat. When they start again, how does that interact, and things like that. You learn a lot about the characters just by that. And it’s the bit that no one really pays attention to. But it’s the thing that when it’s missing, they’ll say, “Oh, it just feels like talking heads.” And it’s cos it’s missing an entire layer of sound design, which is what you are very good at.
Like really, really good at!
JONNY
To be fair, it’s not always been purely Elizabeth’s interpretation. Sometimes she has dropped me messages on Teams being, like, “Hey, what did you mean by this?” I’ll go back to script, and then I’ll say, “I don’t care.”
ALEX
But I will say this definitively: if the sound design is coherent in any way in Season 5, it’s because Elizabeth has agonised in a way that I have personally breezed past before. What are the rules for this thing? I don’t know, does it sound scary? Well, no, that doesn’t make sense. It has to make sense.
And then – And now we have entire systems in place where Elizabeth’s been like, “I will make this coherent and wonderful.”
JONNY
Yeah. The soundscapes are good despite myself and Alex, not because of.
ANIL
Delving a little bit deeper on that. Elizabeth, how do you set about soundscaping an apocalypse?
ELIZABETH
I mean, obviously you’ve got just, I suppose the generals of sound design that you’d have, which is like, if you’re going to have an environment, which is your background sounds and your, maybe, some mid-ground sounds, and then you’ve got your character movement.
So… basically for this show particularly, we needed to think of it in advance for quite a bit. I needed to get from Jonny and Alex, an idea of, like, where everything was going to be set, so that I’d have enough forewarning about whether there was going to be environments which were the same. So the hospitals actually came up three times in different ways, and I needed to be able to create environments, which were going to sound separate from one another. Needing to map out like, okay, were there going to be conflicts?
And I think the hospital was the big one, where to give, like, depth to the first one, which was the psychiatric hospital, it still needed that kind of NHS psychiatric hospital rather than, like, creepy house psychiatric hospital, because it’s very hard to like do that in an audio way. But that meant I really went hard for the second hospital with the much more violent kind of surgery feel to it.
Especially with the EQ range that we’re working in. Like, there’s certain things – If you went organic, you can do, like, the knuckle-popping kind of sound. But actually that gets really lost in our EQ. Anytime someone got hit in the head or smashed by something, it was normally about seven layers of sound, just to give it enough depths, because the EQ that we have, it just makes everything sound quite small.
I think the other thing was, we never really super talked about how we all envisioned the world working. And my vision of it is subtly different, I think, from your guys’. The way that I built the worlds, particularly when we dove into doing the statements with them quite soundscaped.
ALEX
Hmmm.
ELIZABETH
My world was that, you know, like, John and Martin would enter these domains and they would be seeing the framework for other people’s fear. So they’d be in like a domain, they would be like in the prison domain. You know, you sort of hear a couple of people murmuring or something, but for those people who are murmuring or who are crying, they’re hearing, or they’re experiencing their own facet of that –
ALEX
Personal, yeah, yeah.
ELIZABETH
Everyone’s in their own fear bubble, which also explains why, you know, if they interact with John and Martin, they can’t remember their name. They can’t – All that sort of stuff. My idea was that the Fears were warping around each person. But yeah. So when John and Martin walked into something, they just experienced the kind of… framework that allows a domain to exist.
ALEX
I think as well, like, it’s the best example of scope creep in Season 5, is entering into Season 5, I’ll be honest, the original plan was when it comes to the monologues, we’ll put them in a static environment that is being on stage for someone else’s fear, but not necessarily, like, in their fear. And then we can allude to it here or there or whatever. And it became very apparent as it carried on that the intimacy of the statements precluded that perspective, because they were landing a little flat if you don’t have it.
But that meant that suddenly it has gone from: Oh, these are some monologues with a nice kind of generic environment around them to narrative journeys, which is if you actually compare stylistically a) a complete genre shift of the show between Season 4 and Season 5, and b) is a completely different technical undertaking, which means that poor Elizabeth entered with like, “What’s the soundscaping for this?” “It’s like a five.”
And then like within three episodes, like “What’s the soundscaping for this?” “Ten ‘til the end of the season.”
ANIL
What would you say is the strangest or the most fun foley or sound effect you had to create for Season 5?
ELIZABETH
The process for editing is normally that for the sound effects that you download a lot of them from different sites or from, you know, you can get sound effects packs, because obviously if you’re doing something, which is like, forty episodes and you’ve got fifty weeks to do it in, like, you’re not going to do a lot of your own foley, like, especially when you’re trapped in the house.
So I recorded the trains outside my house for one show. Also having trains outside your house isn’t very good for foley either.
But there are a couple of spots, one is being under my duvet, drinking a glass of water poorly so that I would sound like I was choking a little bit. Whatever the one is, where the – you can hear someone, like, choking and sort of gasping, that’s me.
ANIL
The Vast episode across the lake.
ALEX
I figured that had to be you, because there’s no way you found a sample that clean of that. No way.
ELIZABETH
That’s me gasping, anyway. But I think the one which is – Ah, it’s just the saddest one. 199, where Martin is comforting John. And it’s like, there’s like, just a fabric noise of like hand panning across? I just knew exactly this right sort of sound. And so I was just sitting in my bedroom, alone, in the company of myself.
[ALEX IS CRY-SOBBING IN SYMPATHY]
It’s been a year. I just kinda pat myself for audio, and pretend that someone’s here to care about my feelings. So yeah…
ALEX
Oh God…
ANIL
On behalf of the fans, I’m going to ask, are you willing to tell us how you created [FABRIC RUSTLES]?
ELIZABETH
Oh, “fabric rustles”? Not by myself. I will have you guys know as well, there’s at least one hug in that series, which Jonny did not write.
ALEX
Well, there’s, there’s plenty.
ELIZABETH
So, please, please be giving me all the love for the fabric rustles. It is just literally clothing movements.
JONNY
I’m pretty sure that [FABRIC RUSTLES] is not my stage direction.
ALEX
It’s not.
JONNY
Like, I’m pretty sure I will write in, like, “they hug” or “they embrace.”
ANIL
Yeah. I think that came out of, like, following on from the talk that we had with “The Making of 158” where it was, like, with Alex being vehement about kissing or, like, the talks that we’ve had about soundscaping kissing, and how to actually have affection show up on, on audio.
ALEX
You can have like one, maybe two, but if it’s any more than that, it’s not a pleasant listening experience. I’m sorry. That is the reality of it. So you got to pick your moments. That’s all it is.
ANIL
So, Elizabeth, what soundscape or episode are you proudest of?
ELIZABETH
188, actually, which is a woman who, sort of, she leaves, she goes to a therapist and she comes back home.
I quite like the transitions that I got to do in those. And I quite like the eye monster noise behind the wall. Like the pulsing eye monster noise.
ANIL
Oh, that was very visceral.
ELIZABETH
Yeah, so there’s been other editors involved like Maddie and Tessa, who’ve helped build some of the samples and things for the soundscapes.
And so, you know, like parts of London, like, the little camera chorus as it’s referred to, which is like the little cameras everywhere, is something that Tessa built out for me. So that’s been very helpful. I think I was just very glad when I got past the stage of, like, having to turn to Alex and be like, “I don’t know how to do this thing” and just me, just pushing the files, I’d be like, “I’ve done my best. And I know it’s not good enough.”
ALEX
That was a big gear shift with you from, “I’m not sure if this is right” to “Alex, this is right. This is right. I don’t care. You’re wrong. This is right.” And you were correct. And you were right to make that gear change.
ANIL
So are there any parts of the soundscaping that you would change looking back on it?
ELIZABETH
I mean, I think everybody who creates would probably say yes, you would go back and change all the episodes, but… I think you can’t. If I got to work on each episode for two weeks or three weeks or a month, they would be slightly better. Like, ever oh-so-slightly better. Or maybe I would have found a bit of a better sample to do this explosion with or, or something.
Yeah. I think just like every other creator you would love to go back and change it, but also, you know, it would be just a time sink.
ANIL
How does making Season 5 compare, practically and emotionally, from either Season 1 or your first season working on the show?
ALEX
Season 5, for me is simultaneously closer to Season 1 than I would have expected, maybe emotionally on the making side, even if practically it was wildly different. Because for Season 1, we had to invent a bunch of processes in order to get anything out the other end. And then for Season 5, we’ve had to invent a bunch of processes in order to get anything out the other end.
So that feels like I weirdly went full circle. However, the problems have gone from, “how do I plug in this microphone so that it doesn’t explode” and have become, “how do I negotiate international shipping agreements with Brexit trade negotiations ongoing?” Like, it’s still just a series of very quick solutions to problems.
JONNY
For me, it’s, like, kind of similar in the sense that like Seasons 3 and 4 felt very professional. Like we had – we knew what we were doing, like, we had the processes pretty much down, and there was a lot of running back and forth, but fundamentally it felt like, yeah.
ALEX
Season 4 especially.
JONNY
Because Season 5, I was like, it was a lot more making do and figuring out, it did feel a bit more like Season 1 in that sort of sense.
The big difference between it for me is, like Season 1, it’s like, “Ooh, I’m writing, writing my first proper horror thing, putting out in the world. I hope people like it” and Season 5 was like, “Oh no people like it, go away, oh God.”
ANIL
“I hope people look at this” versus “people, stop looking at this!”
JONNY
“Okay, everyone’s looking at it. This is, this is a lot. This is a lot.”
ALEX
Yeah, it goes from “Look at me!” to “Look at me, between these hours, for a small amount, and only with one eye.”
JONNY
“Just look away a bit.”
ALEX
“Look away for a while now, please.”
ANIL
What lessons would each of you say that you’ve learned from Season 5?
JONNY
I think I have learned a lot practically about writing. I think I’ve developed certain styles. Like, I think I’ve gotten better at writing a lot of stuff. In terms of the overall plotting, I don’t know if there is much, I would say, I’ve learned, like, most of the stuff that I’m coming away from, is also stuff that I kind of knew going into it.
You go into this sort of thing, being like, well, landing a 200 episodes season, you make some narrative compromises. Like, you’re not going to be able to tie up everything you want to, like, and it’s slightly different to actually experience that and have to make those calls, being like, “Hmm. Yes, intellectually I know that this is coming.”
But at the same time, I wouldn’t say that there’s any single glaring lesson that I’m like, “I did not realise this going into Season 5 and I, I do now.”
LOWRI
I think for me as well, there’s been a lot of small things. I don’t think there’s any one particular, huge thing, apart from you just don’t have as much time as you think you have. Or, I suppose you will fill that time. Like, I don’t know about you, but that I feel like that’s a lesson that I just keep relearning through life.
ELIZABETH
Well, I came in with the show with limited, kind of, soundscaping experience. So obviously there was a learning curve in terms of… just getting those skills up to the level that Alex wanted. And I mean, I wanted.
I’ve learned to please one man, there we go.
[EVERYONE FALLS APART LAUGHING & JOKING]
Everyone’s dream.
I’m a child of my time, I just can’t help it.
ANIL
And that’s all that matters.
ALEX
Oh God!
JONNY
Yikes.
ELIZABETH
I always remember, when I did broadcasting school, like, one of our teachers was, like, “Everything you do will be twice as hard and sound half as good as what you want it to be.”
And so, like, there – just, if you’re listening out there, gentle listener, it takes a lot of effort to do one of these things, like, way more than you would expect.
ALEX
Excuse me, excuse me! Anil. What have you learned?
JONNY
Yeah. What have you learned, Anil?
LOWRI
Yeah!
ANIL
I have learned that trying to pull all of these disparate parts together and communicate this to people, to the listening public, is a lot harder than I had expected it to be. Particularly cos when the pandemic hit or when, like the notions of lockdown started coming, I was not in the UK.
ALEX
Oh yeah!
ANIL
I was abroad in Sri Lanka, cos I went to see my grandmother with my family at the beginning of March. And as the holiday progressed, and we were getting updates about how the world situation was going, it’s like, “Am I going to be able to get back?”
I was having chats, like, five and a half hours delayed between, like, Alex and Hannah and Jonny too about, like, what we are going to do and how we can communicate things. Because at this point I didn’t have any assistants. So all Comms was running through me, and how we were going to work this if I was stuck abroad for two weeks, an extra month or so.
So it’s like learning how to communicate in a crisis is very much something I have learned through all of this. And it’s been weirdly fun in places with Magnus.
ALEX
Wrong. Always misery, never fun.
ANIL
No, no, no. That chocolate torte is still going to be tasty because it’s chocolate.
JONNY
I don’t know what any of you are talking about, I am a joy.
ANIL
Indeed. I’ve got one last question, before we finish all of this up. What would you say is your favourite episode or scene from Season 5?
LOWRI
It’s a very, very recent one. And it’s going to be praising Elizabeth again. It’s 198 – Precipice, where they push themselves off the cliff. I had genuinely, like, a shock shiver, visceral reaction with everyone that pushed themselves off the cliff. Like, not just when Martin went, but like, Basira and the Archivist, each one.
Ohhh, I just felt it. I was – It was like, I felt that I was on that cliff and I didn’t like it, but I loved it.
ALEX
198 probably as well, specifically for the dialogue banter throughout that episode. It’s one of the few episodes in the entire season that has, like, legit banter. Where it’s just, like, we’re on our journey, there might be stuff to discuss or whatever, but like once you get past that initial, like, couple of minutes, there’s a lot of back and forth. And that’s very rare in this season.
JONNY
Cos 197 is the one where, like, it drops the, like, “These are the stakes. This is the final decision. This is what this ending is about.” 198 is this slight breather episode, taking a breath before diving into those last two. And so, yeah, I’d like we did allow ourselves to be a lot – just to let the characters be funny in the way that they can be funny, you know.
ELIZABETH
I remember you chatting about that, and you were talking about how you were gonna end it, how you were going to script it, with me and Lowri. And we were, like, just ended up being like, “Ha ha, why don’t they jump off the ladder? Ha ha ha.” And you’re like, “Ooh, I’ll use that.”
JONNY
To be fair, I think I actually had the ladder episode in a completely different place. And I had – like, 198 was always going to be that slight breather episode. I think the ladder was from somewhere else, but I’d forgotten. And then I was, like, “198? That was, uh, that was the, the ladder, I think?” And you and Lowri were like, “What ladder are you talking about Jonny?” And I was like, “Ah, you know, I think they were on a ladder, I’m pretty sure.” And you were like, “Not according to the plan.” I was, like, “Well, they’re going to be on a ladder now, I think.”
ALEX
And that’s what working with Jonny is like. Quote, “now they’re on a ladder.” God.
JONNY
This was like eight or so weeks before, like…
ALEX
That’s not as big an excuse as you think it is.
JONNY
That’s plenty of lead time. Plenty of lead time.
LOWRI
Yeah…
ELIZABETH
I guess for me, 170 or 171, the one where Martin is – basically got, like, symptoms of dementia. And that’s just because I think it’s… it’s just so well-acted, which means that it’s also got great writing, Jonny, because like, you know, good acting has to go with great writing.
ALEX
Awww.
JONNY
It wasn’t actually – Like, dementia wasn’t actually a deliberate touchstone on that.
Actually thinking about it. I would say that the rain conversation with themself is, is maybe one of my favourite episodes to have written, just because it’s the sort of conversation that, like, it’s just the whole situation and, like, having the weight of like 180 episodes of character development behind it.
Ah, it’s got dialogue and like a lot of different ideas. And like, you don’t need to worry about setting stuff up. It can all just be this slow, thoughtful discussion. Like it felt like a real payoff. To me writing it, at least.
ANIL
I’m going to be horrendously biased here with, uh, my favourite scene, and that it comes from 191 where, thank you, I got to have a cameo. And the scene where Arun is snarking at Martin, where we just got to be really, like, fractious. People were saying, “Oh, well what will happen when two poets meet?” And it’s, like, “Hmm, well, I wonder…”
ALEX
The problem is that Martin’s really, really good at poetry, and he doesn’t suffer fools. That’s that’s the problem.
ANIL
Yes… That’s exactly how I’m describing it, when I’m talking about his [poetry].
JONNY
I also like that, actually… from the poetry side, you are both of them!
ANIL
Yes, exactly!
It’s weird, because I have actually written the, like, the poetry profiles for both of them and we have discussed this. So yes, there is Arun poetry coming as well.
ALEX
So what I’m hearing, Anil, is that your favourite scene, really, is the scene where you played against yourself.
ANIL
Hmmm.
ALEX
Which I can sympathise with, don’t get me wrong.
But, uh…
ANIL
But yeah, that’s the thing.
ELIZABETH
I mean, and the editors love it when there’s a scene where the same person plays two roles.
ALEX
Oh, I feel so bad. I think it was Nico that did the vocal cut for that one.
ELIZABETH
Yeah.
ALEX
Oh, I feel so bad for them. Sooooo bad having to work from that. I’ve done that before. I’ve edited other people doing that as well and things like that.
So the only solution you can do is over-record, but that does mean that you go to someone like, “Cool, here’s a 15 minute segment. Here is six hours of audio.”
LOWRI
I kept getting messages from him when he was working on it, like, “Can I, like, there’s, there’s quite a lot. Can I get a few more hours?” And I was like, “Yeah, Nico. Yeah, that’s fine.”
And then another message being like, “Yeah, no, there’s a lot! I’m going to need more time.”
ANIL
Yeah.
Well, thank you everyone. That has been most enlightening. I hope you listening at home have also found that very interesting. Thank you very much to everyone. Stay tuned for more from, the wrap-up of Season 5!
So… bye!