Time for Cakes and Ale is the quirky and highly entertaining podcast “featuring Geeky ramblings with Becks & Eeson”. Launched at the end of 2016, their well-informed musings have covered Star Wars movies, computer games and have produced two highly regarded podcast series based on TV Classics Twin Peaks and The Prisoner.

In just over a year their unique style, encyclopaedic knowledge and endless enthusiasm for their subjects has seen them attract a wide variety of high-calibre guests including Nick Briggs actor, writer, director and co-founder of Big Finish Productions, Prof. Fiona Moore,  author and The Prisoner historian, Rick Davy from the Unmutual Website and Alex Cox, movie director (Sid & Nancy and Repo Man) and host of the much missed Moviedrome series from 1980’s.

Earlier this year they were interviewed on one of the largest podcasts in the world dedicated to Twin Peaks, Twin Peaks unwrapped.  Their appearance can be enjoyed here.

Jeppstones are delighted to have them launch our new series and here we ask them about their journey so far, their future projects and get a behind the scenes look at The Tech Behind their podcast.

How did “Time for Cakes and Ale” come about?

Over the years we found ourselves listening to more and more podcasts instead of the radio. We loved hearing from people who were passionate about the same subjects as us, how knowledgeable and enthusiastic they were, and how as a listener you really feel like you get to know the hosts as time goes by. We started musing on what we would podcast about if we ever decided to do it – we go to a lot of conventions and we wanted it to feel like we were taking those late-night conversations you have in the bar and sending them out into the world.

We planned for several months before telling anyone what we were doing! We filled a notebook with ideas for podcast names, topics, logos, anything that came into our heads. It took a while to settle on ‘Time for Cakes and Ale’. It was originally going to be ‘Cakes and Ale’, but the handle was already taken on some of the more prominent social media platforms, so we adapted. It’s a reference to a line from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and it just means enjoying life with good friends – sharing cakes and ale together.

We registered the username across social media and got the website set up before announcing anything. We recorded an entire test episode about iZombie just to see how it would feel to try and talk about something for an hour… strangely that was the most nerve-wracking one to record, even though it will never see the light of day! In the early episodes we felt awkward recording, despite being just the two of us in a room. Now it feels really natural to do.

How did you go about researching kit?

We had no idea where to begin, so we contacted the hosts of Geek Syndicate, a podcast we listen to regularly, and asked them how they got started. They recommended some mics and software to try, and they reassured us that it wouldn’t cost a lot to get it off the ground.

We also needed theme music and a friend suggested PremiumBeat. They have thousands of pieces of music you can licence for podcasts. We spent a day listening to all sorts of options before choosing what we use now. You buy a one-off licence and you can use the music for the podcast forever. We can also make edits to it and for our Time for Cherry Pie and Coffee podcasts, we played around with the music using audio editing software (Audacity) to make it fit our Twin Peaks-theme for those episodes.

What kit did you start with / has any of it changed?

We bought two mics – a Blue Snowball and a Samson Meteor. The Snowball is an affordable omnidirectional/cardioid mic that plugs into a laptop via USB. You can set it up in cardioid mode to pickup from one direction, which we use for most recordings, or in omnidirectional mode to pickup sound from 360-degrees, which is useful for recording conversations with guests in person.

The Meteor is more portable, as it folds up into a compact space and so is better for taking with us if we’re hoping to record on the go. Like the Snowball is simply plugs in via USB. It’s also useful as a second mic for when we need to record interviews using Skype – more on that later! Both mics together cost less than £100.

We do all of our recording and editing using Audacity, which is free open-source audio software. You can edit multiple tracks together easily, reduce background noise, tinker with sound levels… pretty much everything we need is on there, plus about a hundred more features that we don’t use or even understand! There are dozens of free plugins you can download for it – we highly recommend the de-clicker, which gets rid of those annoying clicking sounds you sometimes get in recorded speech. Be warned, though, the de-clicker takes a long time to process…

We are planning to buy lapel mics for the next time we have to record an interview in an uncontrolled location. A few months ago we had a really important episode to record where we had been invited to the guest’s home, and when we arrived we had to set up the Snowball in a wood-panelled room with high ceilings – pretty much the worst acoustic environment possible! The resulting recording suffered from so much echo, we had to filter it by downloading a third-party Audacity plugin that removes reverb. Thankfully the plugin had a free trial period, or it would have been a costly problem – one that we want to avoid having again!

Your podcasts can last over an hour but appear tightly structured. What is the typical process for planning an episode?

When we started Time for Cakes and Ale, we tried to keep our episodes below an hour. We wrote simple notes on what we wanted to cover for each subject. If it was a film review, it was fairly straightforward to hit each point that we wanted to make; if it was an episode about an author, then we’d sit with the books in a pile to run through. If we had a guest on who was also a friend, then the the whole thing would be a lot looser and more of a chat between mates.

An early episode was about Mark Frost’s The Secret History of Twin Peaks, and we knew that when Twin Peaks came back to TV in the summer of 2017 we’d have so much to say about it that Twin Peaks would be in danger of taking over the whole podcast. So we made a swift decision to start a sister podcast on the same feed, called Time for Cherry Pie and Coffee, where we could talk about it to our heart’s content! Our Cherry Pie and Coffee episodes were very long, right from start, and since then our attempts at staying below 1 hour have well and truly gone out of the window.

Those Twin Peaks episodes were pretty exhausting to do as we only had a narrow avenue in which to record and get them out. We’d watch each episode of The Return at 2am on a Monday morning, as it was simulcast with the US. Then we’d go to work, come back and watch it again on Monday night. Once or twice we tried to record and edit on the Monday night too and get the episode out right away, but it wasn’t sustainable with that level of sleep deprivation! So it was more likely for us to record and edit on Tuesday night. The episodes were a mix of recap and speculation, so we had detailed notes but would go off on tangents quite often. Once our episode was published, we could then spend the rest of the week listening to other Twin Peaks podcasts to hear their theories and chat with them on Twitter. It was a wild summer of Peaks with a great podcasting community.

We both love The Prisoner and had always planned to do some special Cakes and Ale episodes around the 50^th anniversary in September 2017. But the more we planned them, the more we realised we had lots to say and lots of people to talk to… so along came another sister podcast! This time there was no clever pun on our regular title that we could come up with, so we went with The Tally Ho.

Those 2017 episodes of The Tally Ho were all interviews, and we’d go into them with a list of potential questions but once recording we would roll with whatever direction the guest wanted to go in. They were a huge amount of fun and we made contact with some great people who helped us a lot when we decided to carry on with The Tally Ho by going in-depth into each episode of The Prisoner this year.

During the recording of the podcast do you work with a plan?

For our current run of Tally Ho episodes, we make very detailed notes about each episode of The Prisoner in advance. We watch it a couple of times to get the recap down and come up with some ideas for tangents and connections. A typical episode has 7-10 pages of notes, which is far more than we do for any of our other podcasts! But even with that level of detail, we still find ourselves ad-libbing, and we always keep a few ideas up our sleeves to surprise one another with during recording to keep it interesting. We don’t time the segments but we do get a feeling if we’ve gone on too long about one part of the show, and try to move it forwards. During the note-taking process we also identify potential sound clips to use and gifs to make to promote the episode online. The notes often serve as a loose reference for the recordings as our discussions have to remain natural – it would sound too stilted to read anything like a script for an episode, but prompts about topics can be helpful to keep the conversation flowing.

For our interview segments we research the guest’s work and prepare a list of questions but we also like to allow the guests freedom to take the discussion in an organic direction. It is really important to plan an interview. Firstly, we are always extremely grateful to our guests for taking the time to chat to us, and for us to be unprepared would be both impolite and unprofessional. Secondly, preparation adds structure to an interview. A framework of questions means that the interviews remain focused, guests don’t have any unexpected questions to answer, and there are no lulls. We often ask our guests if there are specific topics they want to talk about, and planning our episodes helps us ensure we don’t miss anything.

For a podcast operating for only 18 months, you’ve already landed high-calibre guests such as Nicholas Briggs from Big Finish and Film Director Alex Cox. Any tips for other podcasters on how to attract top guests?

We’ve been constantly surprised by how many people have said yes when we’ve asked them for an interview! We approached Alex Cox through his publisher when his book about The Prisoner came out in 2017, and he must have enjoyed doing the show because he agreed to come on again this year.

Nick Briggs has also been wonderful guest to interview. He is very entertaining to talk to and is both a fan of the original TV show and the creative force behind the wonderful The Prisoner audio dramas from Big Finish, which we are huge fans of.

Many of our guests we contacted either through their online presence, or through a representative, and only a couple have declined. Our best advice would be to just ask! Some guests we only got introduced to after another guest enjoyed their time on the show and offered to put us in touch. We were lucky to have the chance to interview the wonderful film-maker Chris Rodley, who not only made the In My Mind documentary about McGoohan but also interviewed David Lynch extensively for the book Lynch on Lynch, so it was a real joy to put together those podcasts.

When people see that you are enthusiastic about a topic they care about too, that helps a lot. If you told us a year ago that we would be interviewing the calibre of guests we have had on, we wouldn’t have believed you! The important thing is that we are fans of The Prisoner, they are fans of The Prisoner (or indeed have been in The Prisoner!) and our listeners are fans of The Prisoner. The interview segments, which we are always grateful to our guests for given the amount of time they give us, are about them and the show – the guest is always the most important person.

You were interviewed on the U.S. based Twin Peaks Unwrapped podcast series. How did that come about and what was the tech involved for a transatlantic podcast?

We listen to Twin Peaks Unwrapped a lot. While season 3 was on TV last summer, the Peaks podcasting community was buzzing every day on Twitter and we chatted with them and many other podcasts about the show. When we began The Tally Ho, the hosts of TPU dropped us a line to say how much they were enjoying it, which was lovely to hear. As a US podcast they were planning to celebrate The Prisoner when the 50^th anniversary of the US broadcast came around this year and they invited us on to talk about it.

They used a piece of software we hadn’t come across before called Zencastr. It’s a way of recording remote podcast interviews on multiple channels. The hosts send a link to each guest, and you dial in with the link. It’s audio only, no video, but Zencastr records each guest’s audio in a separate file and sends them to the host’s dropbox. There’s a free hobbyist licence, and paid professional licences which also include post-production options. We are thinking of using this ourselves for some future interviews.

You often have a variety of sound sources on your podcast; Telephone interviews, Audio recordings from Rick Davy from the Unmutual website, Becks even did a Top Ten pastiche on what happened in 1878. How do you record these and meld them into the podcast?

All of our remote interviews to date have been done via Skype. Some guests prefer to be called on a landline, which we call through Skype, others are happy to use Skype to conduct interviews by video. It’s always nice doing a video call as being able to see one another helps build a rapport.

In the early days we tried using some software that recorded both sides of a Skype call on our laptop but we struggled with the sound quality. Now we actually record the two sides using two separate laptops. One will be set up with Skype running, the Meteor plugged in for Skype to pick up our side’s audio, and Audacity running and set to record Stereo Mix input. The result is that Audacity only records the guest’s side of the call but the guest can still hear us.

Then our backup laptop is set up with the Snowball and Audacity running. Because we wear headphones to Skype, the Snowball only picks up the sounds in the room which is just our side of the call. That way we get two separate tracks, one their side and one our side. This is helpful when mixing them together, as one side is often louder than the other, or one side will need noise-reducing to remove background sounds.

We combine them by setting up an Audacity file with two stereo tracks. This is the same way we did the Top Ten pastiche, placing the music on one track and the vocals on the other, so that the volume levels can be adjusted and everything lined up correctly. When Audacity exports the file to an mp3 it automatically mixes everything down to a single stereo track for you.

Rick Davy, who runs the fantastic Prisoner and McGoohan fansite The Unmutual records his news round-ups and sends us the raw WAV files. We use Audacity to import and adjust them before pasting them into the episodes.

If money was no object… what Tech would you use?

We’d definitely invest in some fancy lapel mics, and a more powerful laptop so that some of the Audacity processes run a bit faster! We’d still use Audacity but we’d buy a couple of the third-party plug-ins for post-production.  We’ve seen some very elaborate set-ups for podcasting, but a lot can be achieved with some fairly cheap standard equipment.

What are the next projects for TFCAA?

We’re planning a series of 18 more Cherry Pie and Coffee episodes, each one exploring a theme of Twin Peaks season 3. We’ve also got plenty of upcoming Cakes and Ale episodes, which will cover our wider interests in TV, film and comics. Our next one is going to be about The Good Place.

The Tally Ho will continue with plenty of Prisoner-related podcasts after we’ve finished the main 17. We have been planning the future episodes and it has been great to have listeners suggest topics they would like us to cover. In the long-term The Tally Ho will transition into a podcast about classic TV from the 60s and 70s.

Your Tally Ho podcast series based on The Prisoner is now more than half way through the 17 Episodes. Are you going to share your theories on what was behind the final controversial episode “Fall Out”?

Fall Out will always resist explanation but I’m sure we’ll have a lot to talk about! Is it really happening? Is it a hallucination? How can the geography of The Village’s apparent location make sense with everything else we have learned?

We’re still figuring out how we will actually structure our episode on Fall Out. Expect more than one episode about it though!

For anyone wanting to start podcasting what would you advise?

Podcasting has been growing for a long time. If you are interested in doing one, give it a go. It can be achieved relatively cheaply. The main things are to try and keep to a schedule of releases and produce content that you are happy with, recorded at the best sound quality you can achieve. Enjoy making it.

Do a lot of research into the podcast hosting services that are out there. Some are free, others are paid-for. We decided at the start that we wanted an ad-free podcast. We also occasionally write blog posts so rather than just use a podcast feed, we link it into our website.

The most important thing about it is to do it because you enjoy doing it, and stop doing it when it stops being fun.

You can hear all of the “Time for Cakes and Ale” podcasts on their website.

You can also follow them on Twitter  or on their Facebook page.