“The bus is dead,” Chris Bajema says. The creator of the podcast Man with the microphone always carried an orange Ford Transit with a flashing light on it for his street interviews. Very recognizable.
But the corona has killed the van. “He stood still outside the whole time, in Amstelveen. It was originally a German disaster car. If there was a disaster somewhere, that van would drive there.” Bajema used the bus for recognisability: “I used to be a radio producer and I worked for a broadcaster. It is then clear to people on the street: that man is from the radio. But as a podcast maker, I was nothing, just a man with a microphone. Such a bus radiated confidence. When they saw the bus, people thought, ‘Oh, that’s serious’.”
Bajema was one of the podcast makers from the very beginning in 2015. In Man with the microphone he mixes fiction with human interest. He asks people on the street for personal stories about a certain theme, and mixes this with fictional scenes, made by the Harde Hoorspelkern. Now the podcast veteran has recorded his findings in the how-to book How do I create a podcast?.
Also read: Man with the microphone becomes man with the podcast guide
The art of telephoning
His book is in the form of a Canary Book – like a series of self-help booklets was called in the years around the war, after the American model, with which you can learn to be successful in business and life, with titles such as: The art of telephoning and What married people need to know. Bajema had already made many podcast episodes about this series, and now wanted to write one of his own. According to him, creating a podcast is more complicated and difficult than he outlines in the book. „I want to enthuse people, so that they think; I can just do that. The Canary Books have that too, that positive tone of: ‘Come on people, get to work!’
Bajema was in the early days, like many, inspired by This American Life, the podcast with the crime series serial caused a boom in the genre. At that time he worked for public radio, where he was unable to work with his ideas. “I wanted my own program in which I would mix fact and fiction, but that didn’t fit anywhere. When I wanted to make something, I was always asked: what is the news value, where is the scope? But I’m a story collector, I’m not into news. So my programs were always broadcast in the summer, in the shade.” According to him, the Dutch ‘radio school’ focuses on journalism, on news, and that is why all other genres – such as the radio documentary, the radio play – are switching to the podcast, which is by definition more timeless.
A new form such as the podcast also ensured that there was room for deviant forms “In the journalism course you hear that you should keep your own personality out of a report, you tell someone else’s story. But with the podcast you have to put yourself in the foreground, people like to listen to a podcast from a specific person.” For Bajema, the genre felt like a liberation: “You can completely find your own form. That is different from working for a newspaper or radio program and having to work within an existing format.” The frequency and length were also no longer fixed: “First I wanted to come up with twenty minutes every two weeks. My first theme was ‘A fresh start’: an interview with someone who had had a psychosis, and someone who got out of prison. I needed at least three quarters of an hour for that, so then it became three quarters of an hour once a month.”
Family
When the lockdown started last year, Bajema switched to a daily broadcast. Taking to the streets became difficult, so the podcast was about his own family: “I was especially interested in: how do other families do it? So I thought other people would be interested in my family as well.”
Also read: The podcast market is changing. Who becomes dominant?
His five-year-old son had his own section, and so did his mother. He gave lockdown tips such as: start making Christmas cards. In addition, listeners called with lockdown stories, but not about corona: “That they were once snowed in, or were on a sailboat for three weeks.”
Bajema records everything in his own neighborhood in East Amsterdam. Why? “Once I traveled through China for seven weeks for the VPRO. And there I thought: I am completely on the other side of the world, while around the corner is also someone with a nice story. The latter suited me much better.”
It also had a practical benefit: “If I’m not happy with a recording, I go back to the people to redo it. Then it would be handy if I can do that on the bike. You have to have a disability, and you have to work from there.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of December 10, 2021
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