David Bodycombe is Managing Director at Labyrinth Games — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
James Cridland: You emailed right at the beginning of the year, because I think we’d been a bit grumpy about video in the Podnews Weekly Review, the sister podcast to the Podcast Business Journal. I may have said “what is the point of video on a podcast”. You produce Lateral with Tom Scott. You’ve been making video of the show, and you sent this very well put together email saying why video is actually a good thing and why I shouldn’t be talking it down. What were you saying?
David Bodycombe: Our host, Tom Scott, is a famous YouTuber. So of course, when we launch a podcast featuring him, everybody is thinking that it’s going to be in full video. We are a panel game. And so watching people’s reactions is is a good thing - if you have four people’s voices, we try and introduce them slowly at the start, so people get to know who’s who. But some people do find it difficult, perhaps if they’re neurodivergent or whatever, to keep track of the conversation sometimes [in audio]. And also we have a lot of people who are English isn’t their first language, and being able to see and hear words spoken in context with facial expressions - it all adds up to helping understand what’s going on.
JC: An interesting point that you just made, about being slow to introduce new voices. I didn’t realise the thinking behind that.
DB: It’s a technique that I borrowed/stole from radio for panel games. I actually used to appear on a long time ago on a BBC radio panel game called Puzzle Panel, and we would bring a puzzle to ask the others - Lateral has got quite a lot of in common with that, and being being able to introduce everybody slowly rather than having to crash into the content is is fairly important for us so that we know who’s who.
JC: I think one of the things that I was saying in, in my typical sort of over oversimplistic way, is that video podcasts are -
DB: “Cheap television” was the words that stuck in my mind…
JC: Yes, I normally use a bad word instead of ‘cheap’. But yes, cheap television. What’s your view on that? Obviously Tom has done a lot of different puzzle games and panel shows on his YouTube channel, and some of those are very fancy and have all of the CGI added to them. Why not just make - if I can be rude - why not just make it properly?
DB: It would involve ten times more people. Probably 20 times the budget. And the lead time is massively longer. The thing that’s great about having access to either YouTube, or podcasts, or Spotify, whatever they are, is the creator-led commissioning process, where we can just put it out there. We don’t need any commissioners to tell us: “Oh, that needs to be a little bit more orange.” I’ve literally had that happen to me sometimes.
So it’s just everything’s just so more efficient. I think formats that are regularly repeating work really well as podcasts because people expect them, it’s like a weekly friend. On YouTube, I don’t think that works so well. People have tried quiz or panel game formats on YouTube, and what happens is people watch the first one or two, then they look at what’s new and they have no brand loyalty.
JC: Perhaps that says that regular formats work much easier on podcasts than perhaps on YouTube, where you’re primarily finding new audiences. Interestingly, that is one of the reasons why podcasters love the idea of going on YouTube in the first place, because you’re finding new audiences all the time.
DB: Yes. And, as a producer, I have access to all the statistics and I can see all the numbers going up - some faster than others - but it’s very addictive to see that the hard work we’re putting in is showing results.
We choose to stick to a very regular weekly format schedule because it just just helps - it’s just friends, every week, like clockwork. And also with us, we can because we’re not a topical show, we can batch record. So we actually do a very intensive four shows over four days. We do two in the morning, two in the afternoon for four days in a run, and that means that Tom is then free to spend his next three months travelling to Europe to look at dams and escalators and whatever else he does.
When Tom started, he said: What we’ll do, is we’ll completely edit the shows in such a way that audio and video are going to be in lockstep. And that way we’ve got the whole audio, the whole video, and the show can exist in whatever form in the future. And now that we’re on Spotify and you can flick between the video and the audio, that’s been a very good decision for us.
We’ve got a brilliant editor called Julie Hassett in Dublin who takes a view on how to edit for both audio and video at the same time. There might be one or two moments where there might be a pregnant pause that ideally you’d want to take out for audio, but we can’t because it would ruin the continuity of the video. It works 95% better than I thought it would do.
We had the foresight to edit in video as we went because we needed them for clips anyway, so we just asked it for the whole show to be done. So I’m pleased to say that or whatever it is, 120 plus episodes are already now in full, full length video on Spotify. So knock yourself out.
JC: David, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.