The Allusionist is going on tour!

The Allusionist tour kicks off in Newcastle on 25th August and runs until 20th September. With this exciting news, plus the approach of the show’s 200th episode and 10-year anniversary, there’s a lot of exciting things happening in the Allusionist world. We caught up with the show’s host Helen Zaltzman to find out more…

Who are you and please tell us all about your podcast?

Hello! I’m Helen Zaltzman. I started my first podcast nearly eighteen years ago, which is, for context, before iPhones were launched; Tony Blair was still prime minister and George W Bush was still President of the USA; people were still smoking in pubs. Wow, I sound like I sit around offering children Werthers Originals and making them listen to my tales of ancient podcasting. Instead, I made that first podcast, Answer Me This, until 2021, and have made other podcasts too, including Veronica Mars Investigations, Sound Women and The Allusionist, which is an entertainment show about how we humans use language, and is about to go on a live tour of the UK!

I also run the Podcasters’ Support Group on Facebook, where podcasters can seek and share advice and have some company, because podcasting can be a lonely thing to do, as well as rife with tech irritations.

Please tell us about the very exciting live tour?

I spend most of my time in a room by myself making podcasts, but what I love to do the most is come up with and perform funny and absurd stage shows. Previous Allusionist live shows have been about speed typing champions, protest cakes, ancient curses and how doing a really boring chore at my bank in 2014 completely changed my brain. The new show that we’re touring in the UK in August and September is called Souvenirs, and among other things is about two men who were great friends at the end of the 19th century, then had a huge falling out and spent more than a decade fighting over a typeface. And then it gets weird.

Also, the tour merch is a tea towel that I drew, that even has a picture of the tea towel on the tea towel [see tour poster below]. Tickets and dates are listed at theallusionist.org/events; come to the show for the tea towel, stay for the hour-and-a-bit of entertainment.

The Allusionist launched in January 2015 – that’s almost 10 years of podcasts! – what changes have you noticed in the podcasting world in that time? And how has The Allusionist changed over the years?

The Allusionist began right when the podboom was kicking off, with the enormous success of the first season of Serial. At that moment, a lot of new listeners were finding podcasts; a bunch of people started writing about podcasts, which happened only rarely before; and many new podcasts began around the same time. Although podcasting had been growing steadily the whole time I had already been doing it, that was the first time where if I said I was a podcaster, I wasn’t met with a combination of blankness and pity. Instead, people would say, “I know podcasts, I’ve listened to Serial!” Since then, things have evolved so much, people say, “Oh, I’ve been thinking about making a podcast!” Either that or I still get the look of pity, combined with mild disgust, because podcasting went from obscure to cliché without much of a cool patch in between.

The period of rapid growth was a mixed bag. I’m certainly glad more listeners found podcasting, and more people chose to do it, and that for a while a lot of audiomakers had incomes and jobs. I’m not glad that it was this classic neighbourhood gentrification story, where we had built something of value so then developers swooped in, made a bunch of money and made it much harder for us still to live there. The podboom begat this gold rush of a handful of big companies throwing around huge sums of money to try to become Big Daddy Podcasting. Within not many years, the flaws in that plan (or rather, absence of plan) became unignorable. Now a lot of audiomakers are out of jobs and don’t own the work that they made but some execs got very rich off the back of it.

But! That’s just the podbiz, which is really such a small corner of podcasting as a whole. I’m on the periphery of it, because I’m an independent podcaster, so nobody could fire me, but the tides of the industry still rock me a bit. It is now more difficult to get listeners and to hang onto them than it used to be; income from sponsors and listener contributions is less predictable; and the whims of tech companies have significant ramifications on my ability to make a living. Yet somehow I’m still going! This is also surprising, because making The Allusionist nearly killed me at one point. I thought by now it would have come back to finish the job. Perhaps it will! A big 10th birthday surprise!?

Reflecting on it, the Allusionist has changed over the years in several ways. Episodes are longer because my thoughts are less compact than they used to be. I’m older and more melancholy, but more tender too. I already covered a lot of my most obvious ideas, so subsequent ideas became more obscure or obtuse. What hasn’t changed is that I learn new things with every episode, and I still make my podcasts myself, as I’ve done from the very beginning of my podcasting life, when I taught myself how to produce audio from my living room. The living room has changed – and is sometimes a bathroom, a hotel bed, a car, even once a friend’s tumble dryer – but the methods not so much.

The Allusionist Live – Photograph: Baranduin Briggs

Do you have any tips for new podcasters on how to engage with their audience?

Firstly: make it easy for the listeners to engage with you. If you are seeking their input, make your request specific: they are less likely to respond to a general question like “What did you think about this episode?” than “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever put your foot into?”

When your show is new, you may have to goad your friends into providing a lot of the interaction. Listeners are more apt to do it once they’ve heard it being done. But just be prepared for how the vast majority of listeners will never do anything more than listen to your podcast. They won’t follow you on social media, respond to your requests for interaction, share the show, write the reviews, visit your website etc. But the smallish percentage who do do those things love you quite a lot.

Secondly: building up a community of listeners around the show is really one of the most wonderful things about podcasting, but it doesn’t just happen on its own you have to be intentional about it. Ask yourself: What tone do you want to set? Who and where are you in relation to the listeners – are you their friend chatting into their ear, or their school principal intoning from a lectern, or a naughty lil imp muttering in the back of their skull? If the listener community exists on other platforms, what is your role in it, and what are you doing to cultivate it and keep it from raging out of control, as online communities are wont to do without careful maintenance?

It’s fun though. And you can never predict who might be listening – it’s very surprising who turns up, for instance we had an Answer Me This question once about the winter sport event the skeleton, and by next episode we had heard back from the most successful Olympic skeletonist ever, Lizzy Yarnold, who used to listen to the show despite it being made by three of the least athletic people of all time. But the thing the listeners all have in common is liking your show, so have a clear idea about what you want someone to get out of listening to an episode. Usually people come for a particular feeling and the company of the podcaster, and the content is secondary to that. Just remember to treat the listeners with respect, and never punish them for choosing to spend their time with you.

And the worst thing I’ve ever put my foot into was after the family dog stole a kilo bag of raisins. My foot was the first to learn that she had puked them up under the dining table.

There is a Discord community for Allusionauts – can you tell us more about what goes on over there? How important was it for you to build a community around the show?

It was very important to me to build a community around the Allusionist, because Answer Me This had had one from the beginning, courtesy of having the interactive format of answering questions from the audience. Web 2.0 was taking off around the same time that show began, so it might seem intentional that that’s how we did it – but the real reason we chose that format was so that we didn’t have to come up with all the content ourselves.

The Allusionist didn’t have such an obvious built-in community angle, although I absolutely love getting the listeners to talk about themselves, like why they changed their names or how anti-fat culture has affected them or the worst line used by or to them to dump someone, and they contribute a lot of amazing thoughts and expertise and even whole episode ideas, like Eclipse and The Egg’s Warning and Fiona parts 1 and 2.

The Allusioverse Discord is a really nice way not only for me to spend more time with listeners and have actual conversations with them that aren’t one-sided like the podcast mostly is, but also for them to hang out with each other. Some even started hanging out together in real life! We talk about all sorts of stuff: whatever joys and sorrows are on our minds, help with problems we might be having, what books/podcasts/TV we’re enjoying (or not), advice on craft projects, and share pictures of fancy spoons that we find. Fancy spoons come up a lot.

You’re approaching your 200th episode (congratulations!) – are you planning anything special to commemorate the milestone?

Thank you! Each year I do a language-themed quiz episode that listeners can play along with, and my wish for the 200th is for listeners to supply the quiz questions so that I can play along too for once. People can submit questions at theallusionist.org/quiz, and the first one that came in, I guessed wrong, so that bodes well for my score at my own celebration.

Do you have any standout episodes that you’re particularly proud of?

Pride is a rare emotion for me, but I’m proud of No Title, which started as a live show, because who would have thought you could make a full-length standup show out of the topic of gender in language? And I heard from a lot of people after that it had helped them communicate with family members who had been at odds with them about that kind of stuff. Any of the episodes that made someone care who didn’t previously care, those are special to me, like Parents, Joins or Project ENABLE.

I am also slightly proud whenever I manage to make something very very silly work. In 2020, in the bleak mid-lockdown, I enlisted my houseband and husband Martin Austwick, and my VMI podpartner Jenny Owen Youngs, and we composed a Christmas hit specifically for that cancelled Covid Christmas. It was a banger! Hopefully it will never be relevant to another festive period in our lifetimes, but I also came up with a catchy little number about the festive meat sweats that can go on annual rotation.

Do you have any dream guests that you’re still hoping to entice on to the podcast?

I’d love Joe Lycett to come on to talk about the time he changed his name to Hugo Boss.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as a podcaster?

The big lesson was really several hundred small lessons, that never stop coming. As much as I have learned, all I really know is that I can’t get too cocky about whatever I’m making now because I’ll probably look back in the future and rue how ignorant I was.

Where can the Pod Bible readers find out more about you and the podcast?

Pod Bible readers can go to theallusionist.org to find all the episodes of the Allusionist, plus transcripts and links to extra information about all the topics, and gig listings and social media links and so on. And here are some links to me; if you search for my name, you’ll probably find me, but there is someone else out there with a very similar name because for a while I kept receiving subpoenas for them. [Editor’s note: see also Suchandrika Chakrabarti’s article Where to start with The Allusionist.]

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