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Gentle podcast-listeners, cast your minds back. To a time before The Rest Is… anything, back when Radio 4 ruled speech audio in an era when any podcast discussion included phrases such as “but what is a podcast?” and “it’s like a radio show on the internet”. Return, in fact, to 2 January 2007, when the first episode of Answer Me This! With Helen & Olly came out.
Answer Me This! – a podcast that had 26-year-old Helen Zaltzman, a book reviewer and comedy club promoter, and 25-year-old Olly Mann, a researcher on BBC Two’s The Culture Show, answering offbeat questions from listeners – might have launched at a time when few people knew what a podcast actually was, but it was a success from the off. There was something about the combination of Zaltzman and Mann’s personalities – Mann, a giggler with a vast knowledge of Disney and musicals; Zaltzman, a more alternative and acerbic wit – that appealed to anyone searching for a funny substitute to radio’s phone-ins or scripted comedy. Like a next-generation The Adam and Joe Show, Answer Me This! was nerdy and warm, celebrating what were then still seen as cult interests, such as Star Wars, with an equal co-host dynamic far from the serious male and giggling female cliche of the time.
And the listener questions – sent in via phone, email and Skype – well, they were bananas. What’s the best way to clear the air when you’ve headbutted your housemate? How is tuna in cans cooked? Whoever thought that unicorns would be good for little girls to play with – they’re horses with horns, wouldn’t they kill them? What does B&Q stand for? Mann and Zaltzman would properly research the answers (Block & Quayle, DIY fans), but they’d also have a laugh.
How would they define Answer Me This!, I wonder, as we meet over Zoom. (Zaltzman now lives in Vancouver; Mann in Hertfordshire.) “A deliberately silly show that we take seriously,” says Zaltzman. “Unbland companionship,” says Mann. “There’s a lot of spiky stuff out there, and there’s also a lot of cosiness. We have Radio 4 voices, but we swear and we talk about difficult subjects. You don’t know what’s going to come next.”
The show developed and changed over time, and not just because the listeners would react to current events. At the start, Zaltzman, the show’s producer, would burn her edit to CD and post it to Mann for him to upload to his iPod and give his thoughts; for some time they’d share edits via MySpace. Their listenership grew as iPhone introduced a podcast app, and continued as smart tech meant you could ask Alexa to play the show. Zaltzman and Mann became known in the audio industry as UK podcast pioneers, winning a British Podcast award and two Sony awards, and becoming the first podcasters to be given a show on BBC 5 Live. Mann presented a show on LBC and co-hosted Radio 4’s Saturday Live; Zaltzman joined the cool US podcasting group Radiotopia in 2014 (and then left in 2020, in protest over its then lack of diverse hires). They both launched their own solo pods, gave up their outside jobs and worked hard. Answer Me This! accompanied them through it all. And then, after 400 shows and almost 15 years, in August 2021, it stopped.
Why? Well, Zaltzman was, she says, “completely burnt out”. Not only was she hosting and editing Answer Me This!, but also The Allusionist, her show about language, as well as a podcast she made about Veronica Mars. She and Martin Zaltz Austwick, her husband, who appears as Martin the Sound Man on AMT!, had been travelling the world since 2016, when they were kicked out of their rented home in Crystal Palace. (Covid meant they settled in Vancouver.) Mann too, had a lot on his plate, with two other podcasts, The Modern Mann and Today in History With the Retrospectors, and a young family. Anyway, AMT! was “retired” and, since 2021, aside from a 2023 one-off show, that has been that.
Until now. A couple of weeks ago, Zaltzman and Mann announced that Answer Me This! is coming back, with the new series starting on 30 January. The fan reaction has been intense. There have already been more than 500 contributions to the podcast via the fundraising platform Patreon and a promoter has been in touch about a live event.
Clearly the show has lost none of its appeal, but why bring it back now?
“Well, we stopped at the end of the last Trump administration, and we’re coming back with the new one,” says Mann. “That’s probably not coincidental. People look for something like Answer Me This! when they want to turn off from the news.”
Zaltzman says it’s due to the listeners. “From early on, we’d hear from people saying, ‘I listen to this to help with my mental health.’ It was a really special thing. I thought: ‘Jeez, if there’s ever a time people are going to need that, it’s now.’ And I did really miss it.”
Answer Me This! has spawned a genuine community that chats warmly online. And Zaltzman is good at building such supportive groups: for a while, she hosted a podcaster meet-up in London, and she’s busy doing similar things in Vancouver. But, weirdly, a podcast can also do this itself; the parasocial relationship that listeners have with a podcast is a curiously intimate one. “Yes, it feels like you’re taking part in a conversation, but it doesn’t require too much from you,” says Zaltzman. “And then when people do get to spend time in the company of other people who like the same podcast, it’s wonderful for them. They’re kindred spirits.”
Zaltzman and Mann met at university, where they studied English. They both wanted to work in radio, and did a bit of writing for radio shows, but couldn’t get presenting jobs, because they weren’t famous. Even when Answer Me This! became a phenomenon, it proved difficult. “You’d go to a meeting and they’d have a list of people who they believed could host radio shows,” says Zaltzman. “And they were all TV presenters. And we’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s a bummer, because we have a proven track record of making audio that people like, but you can’t see how that qualifies us to make other audio?’”
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Still, it pushed them to continue on their own path, one that hacked its way through the audio jungle so other podcasters could follow. It’s standard practice now for a podcast to produce a book, or become a live event, or for podcast hosts to be offered presenting opportunities elsewhere. A welcoming in-studio vibe is also the norm, as are listener contributions or questions. Answer Me This! had all that, years ago. “Yes, I sometimes think we started a decade too early,” says Mann. “I went to The Podcast Show [trade event] last year and felt like a punk at Glastonbury, or like I was the guitarist in the Ramones. One in 10 people were like, ‘Oh you were the first podcast I ever listened to!’ But the vast majority were like, ‘We’re not interested in punk, we’re here for Coldplay.’”
“Actually, for quite a lot of years, the shows that were in the ascendant were true crime, or celebrity interviews,” says Zaltzman. “But I’ve noticed in the past two or three years that what people really love are conversational shows, often by people who are not particularly well known in other media.”
“But the presiding view is still, ‘We need Emily Maitlis,’” says Mann. “Or someone else off the telly so they look good on the cover art.”
Still, long gone are the days when people didn’t understand what they did for a living. On the school run, when parents ask Mann what he does, and he tells them, they say, “Oh, I’ve got a YouTube channel.”
“There’s no surprise that’s the kind of thing you might do,” he says. “And my accountant came around to my house, talked to me about my tax affairs and said, ‘By the way, I used to listen to Answer Me This!,’ and talked about the show for 40 minutes. So it’s that. Creating something that is someone else’s favourite thing. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?”
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Answer Me This! returns on 30 January
