One Year of Telefantasy Time Jump and the Pain of Rerecording

The first year of the Telefantasy Time Jump podcast was completed yesterday. 12 (and a tiny bit) months, and 25 episodes! Alas, the lateness of our final episode of the year, our Patreon bonus episode for December, was because we reached that special milestone suffered by many podcasts: the lost episode.

This happened once before to me, in the first year of the Verity! podcast, where we were doing a commentary on one of the Cushing Doctor Who films and I, brilliant podcaster that I was, shifted my laptop from my desk to my bed and managed to pause my recording. It did not get unpaused, the episode was never rerecorded. No-one shall ever know our incredible twelve year old thoughts on Peter Cushing’s Doctor Who.

Thankfully, this time it wasn’t my fault, which was a massive relief – it wasn’t Paul’s either, but a technical fault on his end. So of course he felt irrationally guilty.

Turns out, rerecording a podcast episode is the most demoralising thing I’ve ever done in podcasting.

It’s not just doing it again. It’s not easier because, hey, you did an unintentional rehearsal; it’s not some minor technical annoyance overcome by talking about a yayful subject for another hour (and this was our Man from UNCLE episode, I *adore* MUNCLE). I mean, you can argue with yourself that it’s totally all those things, but it doesn’t work. (Or maybe your brain is totally different from mine, and it does, in which case, please teach me your ways.)

The work had been done. The brain had completed its happy dance of a task completed, and now I had to take a crowbar, and smash open that beautifully crafted completed task box. And it took *days* for me to even feel able to lift that crowbar, never mind swing it.

Worse, while I do on occasion take notes, mostly I’m spontaneous in my extremely exciting and deep and well-thought out points. Ahem. But now going back in, I’m remembering vaguely what I said before, which bits I thought were cool, which made me go “oh God, why did I say that??” and which delightful observations I made the first time that would be less delightful the second time because they’re now *performed* spontaneity. I felt weirdly self-conscious (a feeling that I haven’t felt during podcasting for over a decade), and flat in my engagement, and…dishonest. Which is especially weird. They’re still my thoughts, and yet my feelings say I’m nicking them from my past self. Wtf, brain?

I always get a feeling of satisfaction after a podcast recording. A creative endeavour was started and finished in the space of an hour, brilliant! But the rerecord was painful relief. Just a whole different category of work that required so much more effort than the original.

But it’s done now, and it’s closed out the first year of the new podcast. And that does feel good. But never again, never ever ever again are we doing a rerecord*. If there is ever another such technical issue, we’re picking another tv series for that episode.**

*And this is the point where I confess something that may make your eyes roll…we never recorded a back-up. Most sensible podcasters will, for example, record the Zoom call as well as individual tracks, in case of fuck-ups. In my defence, we got away with it for eight years.

**Have not discussed this plan with Paul.