This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
A critic, Kenneth Tynan claimed, is someone who knows the way but doesn’t know how to drive. In that spirit, I must reluctantly admit that I would be an awful podcaster — moody, unfocused and disorganised. Actually, I’m not even a good podcast guest. But if you’re appearing on a podcast you might benefit from some advice on what you shouldn’t do.
1. Don’t be hungover
This might sound obvious. Alas, for your humble critic it has been more difficult to learn than Polish grammar. Here’s the problem: as an expat, I often do podcasts when I’m visiting Britain. But I’m often visiting Britain to attend parties. Podcasting before the parties would be sensible.
For whatever reason, though, I have sometimes ended up rolling out of bed with a mouth like a landfill and tottering into a podcast studio looking like the vagrant that other vagrants don’t want to be seen with. Then I am as eloquent as a boxer peeling himself off the canvas.
2. Don’t podcast with your pets
In case you haven’t yet been dragged kicking and screaming into the year 2020, online platforms like Riverside, Zencastr and even Zoom make it easy to podcast from your own home.
I was appearing on a podcast from my living room this year, and my dog was sitting next to me. About halfway through, Buddy — perhaps feeling neglected — started growling. This would have been enough of a distraction, but I was also aware that the muffled grumbling could make it sound, to viewers, as if I had just eaten a Jalfrezi and gulped down half a keg of beer.
This might have been an unusual concern. But the bigger point is that we should minimise distractions. Close the windows. Turn your phone off. Ask your family or your flatmates not to play music or experiment with power tools. It is difficult to think if you hear other sounds — still less if you think that canine irritation might be confused with a bout of flatulence.
3. Don’t film up your nose
Once, I was invited on a podcast at a time when my laptop was broken. Complacently, I decided to podcast on my phone. I had propped it up on a table, against a stack of books, but, as I discussed the World Economic Forum, I realised that it was gradually collapsing.
I picked up the phone and kept on talking — giving the New Culture Forum’s audience a spectacular view up my nostrils. It is difficult enough to argue about the “Great Reset” without the knowledge that your viewers might be confronted with dried nasal mucus.
If you are podcasting from your home, you should take the time to be sure that your camera angle and lighting are going to flatter you — or at least are not going to be a distraction. Let’s face it: podcasters are not a dreamy bunch at the best of times. The least that we can do is not to film up our nostrils.
4. Don’t forget to prepare
There are people who are so eloquent, knowledgeable and intellectually agile that they can talk in articulate and interesting detail about almost anything. There are others who can’t. Your humble critic is in the latter camp.
Somehow, though, I always end up being underprepared. Granted, it’s possible to prepare too much for podcasts. There has to be an element of organic spontaneity, or it becomes less of a conversation and more of a late night infomercial. Still, someone as disorganised as me should worry about being overprepared as much as Giant Haystacks should have worried about undereating.
So, I often forget to pin down a host on what we’re going to talk about. I often forget to make notes — or else I scribble a bunch of incomprehensible nonsense on the back of a receipt. Then a host asks me to talk about gentlemen’s clubs or the West Bank or nuclear physics, and I realise that I either have nothing to say or can’t express my thoughts in fewer than 60 minutes and 10,000 words (at least half of which are “er”).
You don’t want to script what you’re going to say. But you want to at least have a sense of what you’re going to talk about and what your thoughts might be. You want, in other words, a foundation that you’re going to build on. (Unless you’re exceptionally knowledgeable and quick-witted. But you aren’t.)
5. Don’t believe your own bullshit
People listen to podcasts to be informed. People listen to podcasts to be challenged. Above all, though, people listen to podcasts to be entertained. In all my worst appearances, I have been over-earnest — confusing the humourless for the serious.
To call someone humourless, Martin Amis wrote in Experience, is to impugn their seriousness. “Such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.” Don’t be afraid of humour and emotion and informality. You need something to say, but you also need people to care about what you have to say.
I hope this advice will help you if you’re ever on a podcast. Of course, sometimes the best advice is simply not to go on a podcast. God knows I should tell myself this sometimes.
