In this article, David Thomas shares his experience of creating a remote audience for radio comedy shows as comedy relies so much on the rapport between artist and audience. Over to you David…
When Covid-19 began to affect the audio industry the first thought was about how to keep the disruption to broadcasting to a minimum. In my part of the audio world, radio production, we were able to get back on with work after only a small amount of initial upheaval. It was a bit stressful, to begin with, but before long it became second nature. By July though, people began asking about the possibility of recording comedy shows with audiences made up of people listening at home. Comedy relies so much on the rapport between artist and audience and many performers were finding it difficult to do their best work without the response of a crowd in real-time.
The BBC Radio Theatre staff began work to make this happen around July 2020 and it inspired me and a colleague, Jerry Peal, to find a solution for productions that didn’t have direct access to the BBC in-house solution.
The Problem
We needed to get people at home with no audio knowledge to a stage where they could connect their computers into our audio systems for recording. We needed them to be able to hear our performers and for us to hear them without reducing everything to one massive delayed feedback loop.
The Solution
Jerry and I began solving the issue independently of each other at first but eventually, we brought our ideas together to resolve outstanding niggles. We knew we needed to keep the outgoing feed to the audience members as separate as possible from the incoming feed from the audience so we used two separate paths to minimise the possibility of feedback. The only way to eliminate a feedback loop entirely is to make sure that people listen on headphones, but we were hoping for people to listen in family groups or as couples so Jerry’s brainwave was to have people listening on headphones from a Zoom Webinar on their phones, which meant that we avoided the need for headphone splitters if more than one person in a family wanted to join in.
Scaling up the number of audience members was my problem to solve. We’ve used Clean Feed extensively since March to make programmes and one of its handiest features is that you can get up to 29 remote people per Mac or PC at the studio end. I invested in a couple of new laptops to add to the machines I already had and after a bit of testing, I found I could comfortably have 145 feeds coming into the studio at once. Given that each remote audience feed usually has at least two people on the other end this gave us a potential of approximately 290 people.
The night before a show I generate Clean Feed login codes for each of the audience members and share that with the production company’s audience services team. This means that every audience member has a dedicated slot on one of my machines. If they’re not logged on 15 minutes before the show then the slot becomes released back for someone on the waiting list to come in, thus minimising no-shows. During the recording of the show I do a temp mix, muting problematic feeds as we go, and send them down yet another Clean Feed link to Jerry so it can be fed back to the performers and out to the webinar.
In Practice
At the time of writing, so far I have done three remote audience shows in the last couple of weeks and they’ve worked really well. We’re getting a small number of audience member no-shows and a larger number of unusable feeds, often due to people chatting in the background, eating their dinner whilst listening or non-functioning computer mics but we still end up with a very full sounding live audience and the performers love it.
The New Normal?
As long as we’re unable to go back to theatres and performance spaces this will be the new way of working for us. It’s not anyone’s preferred night out but at least it’s a bit of fun in an otherwise fairly repetitive lockdown routine.