It’s been over two months since Ben and I sat down to record episode 1 of the podcast. Listening back to it now, it very much feels like an ‘episode 1’. I think we’ve definitely got better since we recorded our debut effort.

I don’t think it’s a bad effort though. We’re leaning into the format a bit too much at this stage, but then we literally have no idea what we’re doing. Indeed us not knowing what we’re doing is pretty much the main focus of episode 1. I think you can hear that we get on pretty well and we bounce quite well off each other, but you can also hear that I’m attempting to follow some sort of script. Ben, in fairness, is not and he sounds more natural than me, but then he has experience of being on the actual telly in his youth, whereas my brief stint on the open mic comedy circuit circa 2009/2010 is not quite the same grounding.

Indeed this was not our first effort at recording. We’d had three previous attempts, in the back of a camper van in January, which perhaps was not the optimal setting for a debut podcast. I think we did somehow manage to record some OK stuff in those sessions but we clearly had no handle on the PodTrak P4 in those and the sound quality is not great. I think we did, at least, have a better understanding of the kit for this one, which is why it did make the grade to be our official episode 1.

At the time of recording I’d never used the Audacity software before, and you can hear that in the edit. In fact, pretty much everything we recorded when making episode 1 made it into episode 1. I think we recorded for 35 minutes and the final edit is around 30 minutes. Compare that to more recent episodes when we’ve recorded for around 2 hours to get a 40-minute final version and you can see we’ve evolved. Although in fairness, it was a lot easier to edit the earlier episodes, so perhaps we do need to rein ourselves in.

The postcard was meant to be a throwaway device in the early episodes, and there was no actual postcard in my hand when we did the recording, although I knew that a postcard of the fake Bayeux Tapestry would be on sale in Reading Museum so it was something of a white lie. I did subsequently buy one though and that is the image you can see above.

It’s quite easy to make fun of a museum, which has a replica of the Bayeux Tapestry but in fairness, it is a very good replica and it does have some historical worth—it was made in the 19th century, so it is knocking on the door of being 150 years old. The original is coming to visit the UK in September of this year and my wife is very keen that we go and see it. It’s a short train ride from Reading to London and I’m sure it’s well worth taking my kids to see a genuinely iconic piece of history, but in some respects, having a perfectly serviceable replica on our doorsteps makes me question whether a trip with two small kids into the capital is really worthwhile…

In terms of historical value, I’m not sure that episode 1 of Ben and James Could Do Better can really compete with a 1,000-year-old tapestry, or even a 150-year-old fake tapestry, but it is where it all began for the podcast. Which I suppose is fairly significant for us.