The shed window – a Lapwing and Pen y Ghent
When the BBC decided they no longer wanted the kind of show I did I was faced with two alternatives: I could either retire ungracefully and go off fly fishing and playing my banjo, or I could carry on making the show, that more than 800,000 people seemed to have liked, in another way. So many friends suggested that I could simply produce my own show and Podcast it, that eventually I set about looking at the possibility. I was already used to working with digital audio (back in the days I used to run a sound studio in Manchester with my good friend Colin Goddard) and I knew that Spike, who looked after all my IT stuff, could sort out a folk show website and the nuts and bolts of streaming a show out into cyberspace.
After that, it was simply a matter of buying the necessary licences, buying space on a server, uprating some of the hardware and software in the studio and settling down to making the show – without incongruous trails and without having to worry about “crashing the pips”. I went a bit mental at first and the show ended up as a fairly unkempt beast which didn’t know what length it should settle down to – I let the “feel” dictate how the show ended up. It’s all about content, not style.
Cheers
Mike