A Little Bit Racey

After a successful 2015, the brains behind radio comedy panel show A Little Bit Racey are heading back to the studio to record their third series. This lot are sharp, smart and witty, and will have you in stitches by the time they've reached their obscure journey's end. Producer Sam Hutchinson gave us a glance at the inner workings of the show. For those who haven't already caught an episode, how would you sum up your podcast? Honestly, I’d call it a cross between BBC Radio 4’s The Unbelievable Truth and the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. To give you an idea of how the show works, there are four panellists and each one is randomly assigned an object, a companion and a mode of transport. They have to use them to improvise their way to a given destination within a three-minute time limit, while another panellist improvises obstacles to try and stop them. It’s light and fast and fun, but pushes the idea of radio being ‘the theatre of the mind’ to the extreme. Where did the idea come from? There were a group of us in a performance society at Bournemouth University who wanted to test drive something comedic on our student radio station, which mostly consisted of dubstep shows. One of us, Henry Fosdike, came up with a loose but highly inventive idea which was produced as a one-off. There was no plan to make a weekly show of it, but I loved it and so took it on myself. When I left university, I produced the show for community radio, but it really flourished when we joined Cornucopia Radio in Sheffield. The original idea is still intact, but the show has since developed into a tight, structured, 30-minute panel show episode format. Will the whole of the third series be recorded before it's released? We always record a series in full before its release. For series three, we’re recording all eight episodes over an intense three-day period in Sheffield in early February, with the first episode going online on 16 February. We’re releasing an episode every three weeks thereafter, with extra online content filling the gaps while you wait, until the end of the series, which concludes in July. How much post production is put into the show? Would you be able to record it live? While the show is carefully edited to sound as professional as possible, we like to let the rounds themselves flow as much as possible. We record these sections as if they were live in order to create momentum. With this in mind, a live show is something we are definitely considering. What have been the best things that have come from working on the show? In 2015, we were nominated for Best Comedy at the UK Podcasters Awards. This was a really proud moment for us. To take the show from the dusty corner of a student radio station to the top three comedy podcasts in the UK felt great. Other than that, getting to work with some of the terrific emerging comedians we’ve had on the show has been as good an experience as any - James Cottle, Tom Harrison, David Alnwick, Jo D’arcy, Pip Mason. What can listeners expect from the new series? We’re really happy with how series two worked out and with the outcome of our special episodes over Christmas - we recorded a Christmas Special, a Star Wars Special and a New Year Special - so we won’t be making any wholesale changes to format. That being said, in any given episode anything could happen, and that’s part of the fun. Hopefully the new series will be wild. cornucopia-radio.co.uk/a-little-bit-racey )