YOU'RE GOING TO HATE THIS... PROBABLY (Patreon)

Y'know that podcast we've been threatening for a while? Well, we're finally doing it. We being Sanja and I. 

Unfortunately... most of you won't be remotely interested in it. That's not even an exaggeration. You really won't. This is something we will be doing completely for fun, in the most self-indulgent way imaginable. 

Given that I do a lot of other things, I wanted a podcast that I knew I was going to stick at. I've been batting around lots of ideas in recent months, but none of them really got me excited enough that I knew I'd be able to keep going, week after week. I knew it had to be on a topic that I'd be able to talk about at length, and not get bored. 

I considered a Star Wars one, but there's too much competition for that. We even thought about some sort of mental health/self-help type thing, but I worried about that too. A generic geek podcast didn't really float my boat - again, because of the competition. And also, I wanted to do something that might appeal to a completely different audience, because I know there's a lot already competing for your time and attention.

And then I had The Idea, and I couldn't shake it. Brace yourselves, because most of you are going to hate it: I'm doing a Marillion podcast. Working title: This Strange Podcast. At least until I can come up with a better pun (open to suggestions, if any of you are familiar with the band).

Anyway, yeah, I know. Sorry. You can kind of blame Sooz Kempner for giving me the idea, after she started co-hosting a podcast about her beloved Queen (the band, not the monarch).

To be honest, this is as much an attempt to just dip my toes in the podcasting waters, and do something entirely selfish, as anything. It'll have all the same sort of chemistry as you'd normally get from a video with Sanja and I, the same sorts of tangents and stories, because we can't change who we are, but... the baseline will be Marillion. So you may enjoy it if you can overcome an aversion to Marillion. I dunno.

Our plan is to cover each Marillion album in depth, and in order, from the point of view of me as a massive fan, and Sanja as a relative newcomer. She's perfect, because she hadn't even heard of Marillion until she met me, and has grown to love them. So, it'll be a finite run of about 20 episodes... after which we will maybe do something different that might be more up your street.

We've yet to record the first couple of eps, but I suspect we'll get them done this week, and then start rolling them out weekly. If it goes okay, I might set up a separate Patreon for it, as almost by design I'm not for a second expecting there to be a big crossover between my Biffo audience and this (barring a couple of you: hello, Shoggzy...!).

So, that's today's news. More to follow.

Paul