As discussed in yesterday’s edition of ‘This is NOT a podcast’ on my Patreon page, the end of this month marks 13 years since myself and childhood friend, the even- more-muscular-these-days Micky Boyd, launched one of the UK’s earliest comedy podcasts, ‘Please Don’t Hug Me’. Well, it was meant to be a comedy but it ended up becoming, very quickly, something else, though to this day I’m not sure what.
The middle of 2010 had promised to be one of my best years in a long time but by the end of that July, things were rapidly unravelling. A planned move with the then-girlfriend failed to come off, a fire playing a big part in that. By episode 2, I was living in a Pimlico hotel, though I think B&B would be a more apt description. I would be there until that Christmas, one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made in the face of stiff competition. That stay gave me a longstanding aversion to skimmed milk and continental breakfasts.
Micky would turn up every Thursday evening at the hotel with a foldable fishing chair and make his way up to Room 11 on the second floor. Who knows what the staff made of the weekly visual of a bullet-headed muscular man coming to my room every Thursday with his own chair. Who knows what Micky even made of my situation that grim winter?
We had been talking about doing our own podcast, big fans that we were of the new genre from the beginning, for a couple of years. Micky, I think, would’ve been happy to leave it at that, but in some respects I decided to call him out on it. Originally the intention had been to find an editor as I had no idea or inclination to learn, and my co-host, well, I think it’s clear I’ve established he wasn’t going to over-extend himself to launch the project, but I soon realised grasping audio would give us full control over the show. It was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to learn and from week one, I hated it. How I ended up making over a thousand podcasts since 2010, I don’t know. It is too labour-intensive.
We trialled some audio content on a wonderful site known as Posterous in the summer while the South Africa World Cup was on and we started to get a good response via social media. Twitter was a very different place back then, more innocent, more creative, more fun. Seeing the potential to do more, it was then that we decided to launch the podcast.
There were funny moments along the way. Micky taking umbrage with an earlier show logo because he felt it made him look about 20 years older than he was is a particular standout memory.
There was always a natural rapport between us and we had already run a school football magazine together in which, foreshadowing how Please Don’t Hug Me would work out, I did the bulk of the work. He remains one of the funniest guys I have ever met, but unfortunately for the show, he came with the creative work ethic of a 1970s football maverick who expected to be let off training so he could open a new sports shop in town or judge some beauty pageant. Or to take the analogy further, he was a bit like Phil Collins the day he arrived at Tears For Fears’ studios to record his memorable drums for the epic ‘Woman in Chains’ on their troubled ‘Seeds of Love’ recording. Curt Smith once memorably recalled that recording. Collins had turned up and Smith had informed him that they’d booked him into a hotel for two weeks to work on the song. Collins, nonchalant and super confident in his musicianship, as he was entitled to be, was bemused and informed Smith he’d only need an afternoon. And so it turned out to be.
Please Don’t Hug Me documented a couple of years of struggle where I could never settle in one place, some of it perhaps the psychological fallout of losing my great friend Lopez to cancer in the summer of ‘09.
56 episodes were recorded from a multitude of different temporary homes, an experience which continues to inform my views on the housing crisis.
I never worked on a show that had better input from listeners. Only Daniel Ruiz Tizon is Available during its years as a live radio show on Resonance FM came close. In addition to regular contributors like Roisin Rae and Fat Man on a Couch Stuart Armstrong, there were a bunch of listeners who really were part of the furniture and from week one helped to make the show what it was. I don’t know if that could ever happen again. These Tweeters really seemed to get the show from week one, even as it morphed into something that no one really expected or understood quite what it was.
As often happens with creativity, during dark times, your creative output scales a level only often accessible when the creator is struggling.
You can still find all the shows @ Please Don’t Hug Me
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Came in late to the party on PDHM so had a huge splurge on listening to them.
Never knew that Phil Collins had played drums on Woman In Chains, probably because I didn't think the drums were particularly remarkable, but listened to it again and it is Phil Collins. He probably knocked that out in a couple of hours at that stage of his career.