Exclusive: Iain Lee Interview Part 1

LaughRiot met up with Iain Lee recently, to talk radio, podcasts and being inspired by Frank Zappa. This is part 1, part 2 next week.

LR: To start off can you tell us what the show is about and what you try to make it?

IL: What’s it about? Well it’s about nothing really. I am a big fan of people like Tommy Boyd, Clive Bull and Danny Baker so it is kind of an amalgamation of those influences, and trying to stay away from anything that is in the news. It’s just pissing around and having mental people phoning in. I am a big fan of phone-in radio and the two best things about it are hearing people having arguments and people where you just haven’t got a clue what they are talking about. When you just go “What? Where did THAT come from?”. So the plan, if there is any plan, is to encourage as much of that as possible.

LR: I am have to admit I am a fairly recent listener to the show, having found you via the LBC podcasts.

IL: You’ve missed the glory days, last year were the glory days. Primarily because we were doing it at drive time so it was a slightly more exciting slot, we had a lot more listeners and so we had a wider range of people calling in. Agent Chris, the producer, and I were coming in each day saying “right, lets try this, lets try that”. But now we’re doing a late-evening slot where figures are lower, though they are going up, but by definition they are lower because people are watching the telly, putting the kids to bed, having dinner. You are kinda stuck with the same callers, a lot of them are good callers but it’s always nicer to have a wider palate – to be slightly pretentious. So I’m not saying its rubbish but a year ago we were firing on all cylinders.

LR: Have you done anything like this before?

IL: My first ever job on the radio was about ten to eleven years ago, on Milton Keynes Radio, Horizon FM as Iain in Black Thunder and it was f**king hideous. I would drive around in a jeep around Milton Keynes, giving pikers money. I have been at XFM a couple of times, I’ve been sacked by them twice. Once allegedly for swearing on air, which I did do, we left the fader up and me and this guy in the studio were just effing and blinding. That was the official reason, but the political reason was that they wanted me to do the breakfast show and I didn’t want to do it. And the second time I made a really inappropriate joke that I am never going to repeat, even as I said I thought “hmm, I shouldn’t have said that actually, that was out of order”.

LR: So you can’t “dump” yourself then, cut yourself off before it’s broadcast?

IL: There was no dump then, no delay on XFM as it’s not specifically a phone-in station. And I was an idiot back then.

LR: As I said I came to the show via the LBC Podcast, how popular is that?

IL: I think it is the most popular one here, or the second most popular. I know that Steve Allen has been bitching on about his being the most popular, but the last time I looked at the figures, my one was number one. So it’s number one or number two, and by quite some way, number three falls quite some way down. And in terms of how many listeners it is, downloads I vaguely remember being 80,000 or something. But maybe I just dreamt that.

LR: So was that the initial impetus for you to go and do your own podcast, Shindiggery?

IL: No, not at all. It was Danny Baker to be honest. It had sort of been in the back of my mind to do something that wasn’t LBC, something where I could do stuff that was more obviously comedy based and was sweary and was kinda just me. So that was in the back of my mind and then I heard Danny Baker doing these free podcasts, although he starts charging this week so it will be interesting to see how that picks up.

I’ve always been inspired by Frank Zappa, not necessarily his music but I read that he was always skint because every time he made some money he would invest that into the next project. So he would like hire the London Philharmonic Orchestra to play Uncle Meat, or one of his albums, and that would make him skint again. I quite like the idea of putting something out there for free, off my own back.

I saw that Baker was doing it, and it seemed quite easy. And I thought I didn’t want to do it like that, as I already have a radio show, I have already got that outlet and it’s quite a good outlet. And it would be really hard for me to do this kind of show as a podcast because of the very nature of relying entirely on phone-ins. So I saw he could do it, worked out how to do it and thought well let’s piss around a bit

LR: What do you think makes Baker’s podcast popular, and podcasting in general?

IL: What makes his so popular is because he is brilliant and that is the thing. He is one of those presenters who divides people, some people think he’s brilliant, some people hate him. I think he’s a genius. And I have done for years, when he used to have his own TV show I thought he was great. It is him that makes the podcast so successful, if it was Scott Mills doing it, people would download it for a month then go actually this is rubbish. It wouldn’t be the internet sensation that Baker’s is. And it’s because he makes it sound relaxed, makes it so fun, and he does what a lot of radio program controllers don’t want you to do, and we are always being told not to do. He makes it an exclusive club. We are always told to make it really inclusive so that people aren’t put off when they tune in, and they’ll get it straight away.

I kinda struggle with that, I like things like Danny Baker’s show where you turn it on and maybe it takes five, ten, fifteen minutes or even a few listens to work out what’s going on, where he’s coming from. And you lose the casual listener, but screw them, they can go and listen to TalkSport, who really wants them?

I must admit I was gloriously unaware of podcasting. I remember ages ago being offered shares in a podcast company if I went and did some some work for free for them. Of course I said no, because I’m an idiot. So, as a home-made phenomenon, people doing it in their bedrooms, I was kind of unaware of it. Until I started looking into what other people had done and how easy it was. That some kid can record on what looks like a tape recorder and then feed that into his pc and put it out. You click a few buttons and release a radio show to the world, and there is some rubbish out there because it’s so easy.

Check back next week for Part 2!
You can catch Iain on LBC 97.3FM Monday-Friday 7pm-10pm, and Sunday 10pm-1am! Also Shindiggery is on iTunes.