NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS…WHERE’S THE PODCAST?
At the end of June, I sat in the vocal recording booth of my arts comrade, Ruth Urquhart (the Tartan Chameleon herself) and we played with ideas for our upcoming podcast.
We intend to chat about the lives of many of the women of activism, from the early twentieth century, up to the present day - with one or two women from the days of yore thrown in for good measure.
Why bother making the rules if you don’t intend to have fun breaking em?
The main thing we found ourselves doing, during ‘podcast practice’, was laughing. Laughing until our laughers could take no more. At one point, we became hysterical, then leaned into that hysteria, reclaiming it, like it was going out of fashion. We could barely breathe, so there was a lot of gasping and panting going on in that booth. Anyone passing by might have wondered what on earth we were getting up to in there.
I believe our laughter was partly triggered by the fact we’d locked eyes as we strove to maintain a veneer of “sounding professional” during some ‘intro’ and ‘outro’ recordings - this could certainly have been the trigger-point for our descent into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter, because we momentarily saw each other - and what we saw was a right pair of tits.
Looking back, it also seemed as though the foremothers of activism had somehow conspired to reach through the vortex and tickle our funny-bones, having collectively decided that any such podcasting experiment ought to be a laughter revolution in the name their job done well - a party of celebratory joy.
And yet another reason we got hysterical is neither of us are known to be ‘fact machines’, or fax machines, or for that matter, fart machines - well, maybe the latter, but I digress.
The point is, we’re not a pair of professors or a couple of women’s history experts, we’re more your keen arts-comrade sorts, and we’re both as much about activism as we are about arty endeavours.
To be clear, we weren’t being disrespectful - far from it - we look up to the women who sacrificed time, energy and sometimes even their freedom in an effort to make the lives of we who’ve followed just that little bit better and more equal.
Those marvellous radical fore-sisters.
But one final potential reason for our imprompu visit to the laughter-pole, could be our friendship. We’ve been mates since about 1890, which is a long time to have a friend who enjoys taking the piss as much as you do.
Across the years, we’ve written, performed, devised and facilitated work together and as individual practitioners. We’ve produced plays and films within varying communities, as well as with actors (somebody had to), and we’ve created and developed workshop experiences and pop-up street theatre events.
So, that’s the experience we bring - many years of doing that sort of thing and more and now we approach a podcast, to see how the land lies in that world.
You can only be who you are and I’d say Ruth and I are a pair of radical arts-sorts, who like to have a laugh and get fun out of immersive research, especially when we’re wearing our zip-up anoraks.
During this celebratory offering, we’ll attempt to share titillating titbits of tittle-tattle alongside some novel nuggets of news as we natter on about the lives of awe-inspiring women from the history of activism - women who set our proud and mighty chests a-thumping.
“Conscious art. Political art leads to the necessity and the desire for change”
In addition, we might do some read-throughs of scenes we’ve written, or are currently working on (about these fore-sisters). And we might also include the odd book review!
So, prepare yourself for a laughter-fuelled pod, that joyfully shares snapshots from the lives of phenomenal women and ‘drops’ in early 2025.
“Education is not a mere process of stuffing heads with facts; it is the training of the mind to think”
- Ellen Wilkinson (who led the Jarrow marchers)