It promised so much, but ended up a right mess. Danny Baker and friends’ All Day Breakfast Show podcast and the fantastic Baker and Kelly football show, revived this autumn as a podcast, appear to have been killed off. The concept was where many people believed podcasting has been heading from the outset: it could have transformed radio, and indeed, I believe it still will – if not Danny, someone else will start to make this thing work widely.
Producing a radio programme needn’t be an expensive business, and if you have a big enough audience paying a few pennies each per show, in theory you should be able to make a lot more money from selling your own podcast direct than any broadcaster is likely to pay you (unless you’re Jonathan Ross, with your mystifying hold over the BBC). But it would seem that’s still just theory.
Anyway, Danny tried it, but he ran into all sorts of problems. There was an unexplained one soon after the All Day Breakfast Show finished its free promotional run – the host Wippit certainly had a lot of problems delivering the downloads and was roundly slated by many subscribers online, but there was never a real explanation given as to why many people who paid fifty quid for the year then didn’t get any product for many weeks. The show came back in October, with three shows a week (rather than the hoped-for five) and all seemed well. But it turned out that behind the scenes the presenter and the host company had different views as to how this whole deal was going to work out, and what they’d actually agreed to. And in the end, this week, Danny announced that he wasn’t going to continue.
The All Day Breakfast Show group on Facebook has 273 members and represents the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of fans signed up as the show’s Elite Premium Guard (including me, somewhere in there as the tricky left winger). I think the Baker and Kelly football podcast had potentially even wider appeal, believe it or not: the show was being discussed widely on football websites and had inspired merchandise and all sorts of fun. Somebody is going to make paid-for podcasting work, just as many more musicians are going to earn a living selling direct online. It will happen. In the meantime, I just hope there’s another blog entry coming up here soon saying that Danny Baker is trying again, because these were great shows and we’ll miss them. Particularly as they’d tantalisingly promised us the return of Joanne this week on Baker and Kelly. I am gutted. Perhaps we ought to have a whip-round here and see if we can come up with enough cash between us to pay for the lads to do one more show. I’d be the first to put my hand in my pocket. If the web can buy Ebbsfleet for life, I’m sure it can buy the two Dannys for one more hour.
There’s a better essay than this about the Danny Baker situation here.