Emma recommends: the Left of Leftfield podcast
By Emma.
I haven’t been posting here enough. Sorry! Another writing project and life in general has been distracting me. I need to get back into the habit.
So to start me off gently, I thought I’d make a new habit of writing occasional recommendation posts for things I really enjoy and I believe deserve a wider audience.
So to start, I thought I’d go with the thing that inspired this, the Left of Leftfield podcast.
Now I’ll admit it, I know about this podcast because I watch Emmerdale and am a Labour activist. It’s a weird route into as comedy podcast, I’ll admit, but there you have it. Once upon a time, a friend, knowing my passion for both, tweeted me a photograph of Mark Charnock – who plays Marlon Dingle in the aforementioned soap – wearing a Labour rosette. It made me happy. So I started to follow Mark on Twitter in the hope of more politics/soap crossover antics.
These were – for the most part – unforthcoming. And those of you who are neither Labour nor soap fans will probably be pleased to hear it. But what I did get introduced to was the delightful podcast that Mark produces fortnightly with writer Paul Coates.
The premise behind LoL is quite simple. Each week they address a set of challenges sent in to them by “listeners” and have to come up with the most extreme (or left of left field if you will) solutions to these they can imagine.
Other segments include the Left of Leftfield or LOL - where each has to guess which are real and uniquely insane inventions and which are the products of their podcast partner’s twisted imagination – and Swell-O-L the inspiration for this post.
It’s a quite simple format. But what shines through in every episode is the love it is made with and the friendship at the heart of it. Each episode is no more than 30 minutes, but each one is a big juicy hug for your ears. It’s like being enveloped into their friendship on a regular basis.
That they are both comfortable media performers is probably not a surprise given their respective professions. But the openness they demonstrate in the podcast is incredibly welcome and refreshing. Television fame is such an intimate form of fame – appearing in people’s living rooms six times a week in the case of Emmerdale actors, and creating the emotional scenarios we react to daily in the case of soap writers – that it must be so hard not to become jaded and guarded. But they simply aren’t. Perhaps Paul and Mark are – in fact – such good actors that they are merely playing the parts of podcast hosts. Maybe they really hate each other in real life…
No matter. What they give us is real. It’s a slice of real and pure joy. A podcast so joyously emotional I have at least twice had to pull the car over to allow my emotions to return to safe driving levels. Once screaming with laughter at the best job interview anecdote I have ever heard and once when I welled up at Paul’s reading of a WW1 poem.
This podcast is about the simple joy of being daft with your best mate. Making that work in a way in which the audience feels warmly included is a skill that both hosts have truly mastered. If you ever encounter me on the bus or the tube (having clearly proven it unsafe to listen while driving!), grinning from ear to ear, the chances are it’s because I’ve been listening to Left of Left Field. I strongly recommend you do so too.
All past episodes of Left of Leftfield can be found here.
Tags: Emma Recommends
