Oh What A Time... - #148 Audiobooks & Podcasts (Part 2)

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!In our most meta episode ever, this week we’re discussing the history of audiobooks and podcasts! Firstly, what was the equivalent of podcasts in Ancient Rome? How Thomas Edison pioneered the podcast. And lastly.. what was the first podcast, proper?Plus also, is Center Parcs the greatest place in earth? Will the marketing directors at Center Parcs reach out to us? And is everything better now? Do let us know: [e-mail] in huge news, Oh What A Time is now on Patreon! From content you’ve never heard before to the incredible Oh What A Time chat group, there’s so much more OWAT to be enjoyed!On our Patreon you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash O-Water Time. Hello and welcome to part two of podcasts and audiobooks. Let's get on on the show. It's the year 1877, Thomas Edison is wiring away, completing the first phonograph. And when he invents it, he's not just thinking of music. I traditionally think of that being invented. purely for music. But that's not what Tom Mercedeson had in mind. One of his first ideas was to create what he called a talking book.

And he had an idea of how it would work. He actually recorded himself reciting Mary had a little lamb. And that was the first time a human voice had ever been played back by a machine. I have a strong feeling about talking books, most, well, particularly the ones that kids. have, which have like five buttons throughout them, and they'll play like the sound of a wolf or what it happens to be. Oh, yeah. And then the polar bear walked across the ice with its heavy footprints.

And he makes a noises. Yeah, because they run out of batteries after about a month. And then you just have the most frustrating book your child has ever seen. And there's a weird period for about a fortnight where the batteries are basically going and the polar bear sounds like it's in pain. Whatever you're pressing just doesn't sound like it's supposed to. too. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, no, it's the fire engine. No, no. Generally, we quite distressing. Yeah, not a fan. And who buys replacement batteries for a book? That is not something anyone has ever done. Replacing the batteries on a book, you need a certificate from NASA or something,

a screwdriver with their head to the size of an atom. You have too much time if you find yourself doing that. And it's impossible you order the little tiny batteries off Amazon. They turn up, they give you like five. But never going to get through five and a thousand lifetimes. Completely agree. So Thomas Edison's there. He sat in the dark, recording himself reciting Mary,

he had a little lamb, and he plays it back on his machine, and it's the first time a voice has ever been played back by such a machine. Just a few months later, he told the North American Review exactly what he had in mind. He said, books may be read by professional readers, their voice is recorded for the blind, for the sick, or for anyone whose eyes or hands are otherwise occupied. And that was in 1878. Incidentally, Chris, can I just say, I reckon, I guarantee you that Edison had written something that he lost faith in at the last minute. And that's why he did, Mary had a little lamb. He would have thought it was funny.

And then he'd have read it and gone, oh, God, people are going to hear this. I'll just do Mary had a little lamb. Because it doesn't feel like something a leading scientist would be. go with from the off it feels like a panic decision let's have a listen let's have a listen the first words i spoke in the original cornograph a little piece of practical poetry mary had a little lamb it speaks with quite as slow and everywhere that mary went the lamb was sure to go wow is that the first voice ever recorded isn't now hang on it i'm remembering Isn't Otto van Bismarck, isn't his voice recorded on voice record?

There is a voice recording of Otto von Bismarck, I'm sure there is. Oh, the original recording was lost, so that's him saying that I did Mary at a little lamb. Ah, okay. So that's him much later. Well, look, email in. We're happy to be corrected if we got this wrong. Hello at Oh, what a time.com. So in 1878, that quote from Edison, he was already describing something that sounds remarkably like

the audiobook industry or even a podcast feed itself. He dreamed of a day when great works could be read aloud by actors or authors so listeners could experience the pleasure of a book performed. And by the late 1880s, Edison claimed his team could already record full readings of novels like Nicholas Nickleby, but he wasn't quite there yet. The technology could only hold just a few minutes of sound, but the ambition was clear. And if the technology could only hold just a few minutes of sound, no doubt could have captured. The first few pages of any book, Tom Crane, attempts to read. I'm one of the world's great readers now, I'll have you, though.

Devouring them. You started finishing them. I have, yeah. Can't get enough of it. So let's skip on a few years to 1891. The great American writer Mark Twain. He's ill and tired of writing by hand. So he visited Edison's Lab to try something new.

And he began dictating his next book, the American claimant, straight into a recording device, making him the... the first author to write by audio. Well, I remember, and particularly panicked when I was at university, thinking, I can't just type this out again at midnight in the library again. And someone in halls had one of those like headsets and you could type, you could speak into it. And it would translate. It was very early on in that, that tells you.

And I thought, this is the answer to everything. Yeah, yeah. I can just stream of consciousness talk. An essay will tip me about. 10 minutes. I'll just talk. Needless to say, it misunderstood every other word. And the words that came out of my mouth were nonsense anyway. Oh my God. A particularly late night in the library, that one. Yeah. Edison was onto something. It's hard not to see. Twain in there dictating a book was the start really of a creative revolution, the first human to turn the microphone into a pen. Skip on a few

more years, 1914 and Edison's company are selling disc recordings of poetry, plays, prose, excerpts, miniature performances you could play at home. There was even a 1905 dramatization of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with music and sound effects, basically like an early radio play decades before radio drama became a thing. And although we're talking about like 1914, 15 around here, one of the things about comedy that I think we've lost is like, do you remember when comedy albums would win Grammys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was a real movement of comedy on vinyl

and of comedy recordings being committed to wax. That's got, that's really gone away, hasn't it? Absolutely. Well, it's been replaced by the special, isn't it? On Netflix and HBO, et cetera. The old comedian will still release a special on vinyl. It does, it does still happen occasionally. I think inside by Bo Burnham was, wasn't it?

And also that did win lots of awards. I think that, yeah, I think that won an Emmy or something like that. sort of stuff, didn't it? So it does occasionally happen, but it has to be as good as that, which is one of the best things I've ever seen. So other companies like Columbia Records soon joined in with Shakespeare readings and soon talking books became a staple novelty. Once, Matthew Crosby, friend of the show from Pappies, I got in his car, gave me a lift, he had the complete works of Shakespeare on CD in his glove compartment. Did he? Yes.

Who's he trying to impress with that? That's remarkable. I was impressed then. I'm impressed now. That feels a bit on the nose for me that. That's like that banksy coffee table book, isn't it? I can't think anything worse than driving down the motorway listening to the full works of Shakespeare.

You know, I don't mind going to see it in the context of live performance. Just the words, I think I'd struggle with that. But one issue, all these. attempts to turn poetry plays and prose into disc recordings, again, much like earlier years, was the issue with storage. A full novel would take dozens of discs, so complete audiobooks weren't possible yet. Of course, yeah. There were probably only really possible, like, yeah, in the 90s and 90s. You could, that's probably the first one could really get Shakespeare onto like CDs. Probably why Crosby snapped it up. Yeah, that's when he got really big,

isn't it, Shakespeare? And you got moved to... That was the big... That's the big launch moment for instance. I could never follow Orgy Books on CD. Why not? Obviously, I can read. Yeah.

But I used to find that I would miss little things and then I'd want to go back and it was quite hard to skip back. Yes. And it was just a very, very unsatisfactory experience listening to audio books. So I've never really listened to audio books.

I've had told you what I do, which is that I dual track. I will read a book like a night or a month train, bed, whatever, and then I will listen to the audiobook if I'm just walking around or doing the washing up or something. Oh, really? So I get the audio book

and the actual book, and I will read and listen to a book across both of those mediums. But are you skipping the bits you've then listened to? Yeah, of course I am, you're not. I'm going back over to double check. How long would that take me? Well, I don't know how much if you're completed you are. Maybe you feel

you haven't read the book properly if you've listened to some of it, and you think, I've got to put my effort in. So I can say that I've actually read this so I can tell my friends that I've read Sapiens. I do both. Yeah, wow. But the technology all changed in the 1930s

and this is when the idea of Talking Books basically found a new purpose. In 1934 with support from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and funding through his New Deal, the American Foundation for the Blind launched a program to mail talking books to visually impaired readers. Amazing.

The first titles included PG-Wood House is very good. There's that man again. We talked about him last week. Jeeves and Rudyard Kipling's The Brushwood Boy. By early 1935, over 50 titles were in circulation. I love that. And Britain followed a year later when the Royal Institute for the Blind released its first batch, Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Akroyd and Joseph Conrad's Typhoon. For the first time, entire novels could be listened to, not just excerpts and the Talking Book have become a real medium. And now, as we head into the Second World War and beyond, new long-playing records made it possible to fit much more audio onto a single disc. And in 1952, two women in New York, Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Mantel founded Cademont Records,

the company that effectively created the order book industry as we know it. And their first release was Dylan Thomas himself reading his poetry and prose. Love this. So on the 22nd of February 1952, which was George Washington's birthday, Cade Mon recorded Dylan Thomas at Steinway Hall in New York. Side A featured

poems like, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Side B was his now beloved, a child's Christmas in Wales. It almost didn't happen though, because Thomas turned up for the recording at Steinway Hall in New York on the 22nd of February 1952 having forgotten

to bring his books. Perfect. A producer had to sprint to Gotham Bookmark, which opened after hours to sell new copies. That's so brilliant. That's so funny. What a great fact. Despite Thomas's...

He was a fucking messer guy. He really was. I went through a big Dylan Thomas phase where I read all of his poetry and I read, if he was, you know, his plays and things. And then I read at the big biography of him. And yeah, the guy needed to fucking pull his socks them in so many different ways. I went to the pub in New York where he used to stand on a stage and sort of hold forth and hold

court basically hammered every night, basically. Real sort of remarkable character. As we touched on there, despite the fact that Thomas was a notorious drunk and a very prickly personality, in fact he referred to the Cadman founders not very kindly. He referred to them as the Cade Mon Hary's. Despite all that, the record was an enormous hit. In 2008, it was added to the US National Recording Registry, credited as the recording that launched the audiobook industry. And Cademon quickly expanded, signing the biggest literary names of the era. Lawrence Olivier, Sean O'Casey, Yudora Welty, Ogden Nash, Basil Rathbone, Richard Burton, Ernest Hemingway, even J.R.R.R. Tolkien and James Joyce were all brought together to read

their own work. And this is, I find it's so striking when you hear an author read their own work with their own rhythm, their own accent. Yeah, yeah, definitely. The little pauses that no one else would think to make. And Cademon realised this. They said early on, read by the author will always have a special magic. Yeah. By the 1950s, late 1950s, there were even companies called literally audiobooks. And each new formula that came out, real to real cassette, CD MP3, and finally streaming made listening easier and more portable. As I said at the top, there's never been a better time to be alive. Everything is better.

Today, that same tradition runs from Edison's wax cylinder to audible servers from Dylan Thomas at Steinway Hall to the podcast in our pocket. It has taken almost 150 years, but Edison's original dream did come true. Books you don't read, you hear. Yeah. And L, a Welshman at the hub of it. Yeah. He had a great voice for it.

He had a stronger Swansea accent in person than he did. He sort of put on an RP for reading, you know, for the speaking tours and things he used to do, apparently, and when he used to do radio plays and stuff. I've never heard of recording it, Dylan Thomas. Does he have that heavy Welsh accent then when he's doing it? No, not at all. It's quite an RP voice, but he's from Swansea,

so he would have sounded Welsh when he was just talking to his mates, I think. I'd love to hear the recording where it's him reading, but they've kept the recording going when he's finished the book, and it's just him snapping out of it, sort of talking side of stage. He's going straight to his... Yeah, it was all right in the end, wasn't it? Yeah.

Can you press fucking stop on that? Exactly. A friend of mine lost his virginity in his bedroom. What in Dylan Thomas' bedroom? He was brought up. up in five come donking drive in the uplands and that was like a student flat in the 80s

Wow And come bonkin drive more like that Come bonking But now it's been restored To how it would have been when he was living there Wow I love that I don't think I realised Dylan Thomas died when he was 39

Yeah because he looks fucking 70 Yeah He looks so old Like he looked horrendous Wow Blimey Another friend of mine, she had a poster, well, or a framed picture of Dylan Thomas above her bed. And she had a one night stand with a thick bloke.

Right, right, yeah. And at the end of it, he looked up the picture of Dylan Thomas and said, why have you got a framed picture of Nick Hucknull over your bed? And she said it's Dylan Thomas, you complete thick old. Right. Podcasts, I know that you're all big fans, because we're on one. Yeah. Yeah. Now, it is, as I said at the start, very meta to talk about history podcasts, on a history podcast. But we're now sort of 20 years in, and there's been certainly since lockdown.

Lockdown, God, it sounds awful to say, it was very good for, podcasts and it's had an enormous impact on on audiobooks, the way we consume information, especially historical information, and we can reflect really on what any of us did before podcasts existed. It was back in November 2004 that the BBC launched its first podcast of a domestic radio programme and can anyone guess what it was? What was the year? November 2004. Their first podcast? On the BBC. Liquid news?

No. That was a serious. guess. First podcast, it's Radio 4. So is it a comedy podcast? So could it be like the Now show? No, it was it. It was in our time. Was it? Ah, okay. Oh, yeah. In our time. I would have thought it was either in our time or Desert Island discs. That would have been my guess. Anyway, the radio show itself had been around since 1998. This was a genuinely novel innovation in UK broadcasting. In fact, the word podcast had barely been invented when Lord Melvin Bragg started his. So it's still a very new word at the time now. The Oxford English Dictionary

credits blogger and former computer programmer Dave Slusher of the evil genius chronicles with the first recorded use of the word podcast which was made on the 18th of September 2004 although it seems already to have circulated among tech enthusiasts earlier that summer as these things do. So yeah so the word, the OED thinks that the word's been around since the 18th of September 2004. Okay. Now, what distinguished the podcast from me, sort of audio on demand or online radio, was the automated download. As explained in a newsletter, published on the 8th of October 2004,

podcasts are pre-recorded internet radio shows that can be downloaded on a single file, e.g. to an iPod. Contemporary added that as a portmanteau, the term derives from iPod and broadcasts. I never realized that I don't know what I thought it was It's an iPod broadcast It's an iPod broadcast yeah I never knew

Because you could listen to radio shows on the net As people said at the time Yes But you had to listen as they were going out Wow So in many respects The podcast came at an opportune moment For the radio industry

In March 2005, the Wall Street Journal warned that radio was on the ropes. Ratings were down, and listeners, especially millennials, were turning off rather than tuning in. Now, this is something that the three of us have worked in telly, that if you told me in 2005 that audio would be where it was at rather than TV. Yeah, completely. I would have thought that you were mentally unwell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would have thought, your cruckers, there's this, you just, what are you talking about? I would also have assumed that all films would have been 3D.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And that's what you've told me. If you said, what's going to be like in 2025? They'll all be 3D. And they'll all have smells in them as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The smell of vision would be huge by the year 2020. It won't, we can't be the same in 20 years' time.

It's funny, isn't it? Because every TV company now is trying to get out of tele and into podcasts. I know. It's absolutely crazy to me. I know. So if you told me, well, Tom and I start a stand up pretty much in the same. same couple of months, early 2005. If you'd said then, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, comedians, they won't be, they want to be on

telly. Yeah. They all want a massive podcast. What's that, I would have said. Oh, it's like a radio show you can download your iPod. I'd be like, yeah, you're having a laugh for me. Why, why would you think? And what's an iPod?

Yeah. In the United States, the number of hours of radio consumed by the average listener slipped from about 21 hours a week by the start of 1999 to just 19 hours. by the end of 2004, in Britain, by contrast, ratings went up 22 hours a week at the start of 1999 to 24 hours by the end of 2004 before entering a similar decline to the US. Into the Gaps roared the podcast. By 2024, over 20% of the UK population,

that's about 12 million people, listened to at least one podcast a week. Ah. The figure in the US is even higher, some 34% of the population, according to recent estimates, with nearly three quarters of Americans having listened to it,

least one podcast. And the Aussies, and we have got lots of Australian listeners, they're even more addicted. Almost 40% of Australians listen every month. Wow. There's a telling divergence in terms of audience between millennials, the most common podcast audience member and Gen Z on the one hand, and older generations on the other. This difference is also apparent in audiobooks, with younger people, ironically, more likely to consume literature in this format than older adults. So gone is the cliche of talking books being for your granny. So the appetite for audio media

and I mean, the podcast changed my life. Like it completely changed my career. Because I was you know, I would do the odd panel show. I was never any good at them. If podcast, but this is genuine. Like if podcasts hadn't

I, you know, I'm better at podcasts than the other stuff. So if podcasts hadn't been invented. Because it suits a very natural way. of just being yourself, I suppose, in a way that a lot of these more engineered forms of comedy entertainment aren't? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I never could do that on Mock the Week. Yeah, I would just come across as a bashful odd ball on Mock the Week. And eight out of ten cats and eight out of ten cats does come down, etc., etc. So the appetite for audio media, either as information or entertainment, is there. And this is something we share with civilisations

and generations past, So in practical terms, there's not much difference between a Roman lector reading out a book from the corner of a room or an Anglo-Saxon or ancient Greek performer poet and a podcast stream three headphones because we like hearing voices. It's a very natural thing. Yeah. Now, the top genres in podcasting are, as might be expected, your news and current affairs. Your talk shows, your discussion shows and comedy and light entertainment. But in no subject has the influence of podcasting been more obviously felt than in history. how we consume history is increasingly shaped

not by the academic article or the specialist book but by popular media and by the podcast itself so back in the 90s popular consumption of history was shaped by the grammar of television and I remember some of the great

historical programmes of the 90s the ones that the BBC and ITV would throw huge amounts of money at like do you remember people's century that was a big one around the end of the sort of decade there was an amazing one on the rise and fall of the Soviet Union.

I just remember watching that on BBC 2 and thinking, this is as good as it gets. And obviously, if you go further back, things like the world at war. Now, you know, there was the presenter, the visual imagery, the narration, maybe an audio soundtrack of contemporary music to sort of put people in the mood.

So regardless of the combination of those things in any given documentary, it was a filmmaker's medium, as it had been for decades. So Simon Charme has a history of Britain, for instance, which I remember taping off the text, which came out in the year 2000 and there were the three or four books

that the tie-in books which I bought as well it's not really very different from Jacobinovsky's Ascentive Man from 1973 or the World at War which came out in the early 70s even though three decades were separating those original broadcasts so before the rise of... Is the World of War early 70s? That's remarkable. That's one of the most incredible

series I've ever watched I think, the World of War. Oh, it's so incredible. Yeah, I had the box set. World at War, sorry. I had the box set on DVD. I had it on DVD as well. Yeah, it's remarkable piece of work. I stand by it.

It's an amazing piece of television. It's 24 episodes, I think. But yeah, 1973. 26 episodes, 1973 it came out. I remember that box set, actually. I remember you having that box set in Cardiff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It looked like the Bible.

And it was, I remember you having that box set in Cardiff, Elle, and it was something like 35 discs or something mad like that. Yeah. Now, before the rise of television history documentaries in the 60s, there'd been radio lectures, which took their cows in the lecture hall by distilling the ideas of books and research articles and making them accessible. But otherwise, this format gave listeners less of a feast for the years

than television documentaries provided for the eyes. So whether it was Eric Hopsbaum doing a radio lecture in the 50s or Jacob Bronowski making a television documentary in the 70s or a Simon Sharma one in the 2000s, the common thread was an excellent. expert, delivering expert information to an interested but generally lay audience. So podcast changed that equation by putting lay exploration of the past at the forefront of the programme.

Basically, fucking idiots like us presenting. With people who know what they're talking about, i.e. Domstahl Leeworthy does all our research in the background. So now audiences and presenters alike are on a journey of discovery. So their partnership is now an equal one. And this transformation is what makes a history podcast so compelling. So the grandfathered with this approach to the past as it happens is a book, and not just any book, but one rooted in comedy.

It was first published in 1930, written by two graduates of Oriel College, Oxford, Walter Cruthers-Seller and Robert Julian Yeatman. And the book, of course, is 1066 and all that. Or to give it his full title, 1066 and all that, a memorable history of England comprising all the parts you can remember including 103 good things, five bad kings and two genuine dates.

Brilliant. So, you know, it's like a precursor to horrible histories or something. So Seller and Eatman's work, not only very funny, but it anticipates the postmodern tendency to put everything into confused binaries. The round deads and the cavaliers, the civil war, for instance,

as shown as wrong but romantic cavaliers and right but repulsive, the roundeds. And that's without getting into these sort of hilarious test papers which are included in the texts with questions and problems such as trace by means of graphs, et cetera, the incidents of scurvy and the Chilternhundred's doing the reign of William the Rufus, number two, the bosom of the Pope. Right. So these looks like a hundred years old. And what's funny is, discovering history, it's a funny, imperfect kind of journey you're on. Yes. So what we do obviously

We don't read each other's research That's how we do it on this podcast To give a little glimpse by the magician's cloth So when Chris and Tom are telling me stuff I am hearing it for the first time By the way people don't believe that When you read the comment

I've seen people coming like Come on guys we know you read each other stuff No no no I don't know It's true I refuse to Yeah But that's the thing They try

Because the thing with As Darrell points out The joy of history is comedy is that often the truth is just really funny. Yes. And it's far easier to tell a joke than it is to sort of write it down. And that's why podcasts are just so, especially history podcasts. Yeah.

Why they're so popular. It's interesting, isn't it? I think podcasts have made the communication between people and an audience far less formal than it used to be. Yeah, yeah. That's being one of the big shifts, isn't it? And I think that's why, especially for like subjects that maybe at school could have been quite serious, there's an ability to break them down and make them more,

just, you know, the silly and sort of accessible than the previously would have been. If I was doing my history A level now, I'd be looking for a hilarious, lighthearted podcast on the Ottoman Empire. I'd be like, great, this is, now I understand, Solomon the Magnificent.

Finally, two American comedians have explained it to me. Great. So that's it for another week on our week. What a Time. We'll be back next week, but don't forget, if you've enjoyed this episode, feel free to live as a five-star review. But if you've really enjoyed it and you don't want to let go and you want more O-Water Time right now, you can become an O-Water Time, full-timer, a part-timer, or an all-timer. Go to Patreon.com, forward slash O-Watertime. You get two bonus episodes every month. Loads of good stuff over there, lots of bonus content to be enjoyed. So if you want to support

the show, feel free. Go ahead. Patron.com, forward slash, oh, what a time. Otherwise, we'll see you next week. Bye. Bye. Bye. Oh, what a time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else. Add free, plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets, and access to the Oh, What a Time.

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