Research Intern at ‘You’re Dead To Me’ podcast

By Anna-Nadine Pike

You’re Dead To Me calls itself “the comedy podcast that takes history seriously”, and my internship on Series 6 of this award-winning podcast fully immersed me in both halves of this description. Having worked with a group of interns since (I think?) their second series, the team behind You’re Dead To Me (Greg Jenner, Emma Nagouse, Dr Emmie Price-Goodfellow, Steve Hankey) have a clear structure and intention for such internships, which made joining this dynamic group an incredibly welcoming and positive experience. Back in October, we had an initial call to meet Team Series 6, before being assigned the three episodes which we would work on for the duration of the placement. I was given episodes on Leonardo da Vinci, the Jacobites, and Frederick Douglass, leading to a series of mini research projects which spanned the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, worked across several continents, and encompassed biographical research as well as socio-political and material-cultural. Although at times it was challenging to balance the workloads of part-time placement and part-time PhD research, it is also the case that having these entirely new topics to research, note-take, and write up for the team over 8 weeks developed my scheduling and time-management skills as a necessity. The research element itself was a useful exercise in reading with both breadth and depth; early in the process, we had a call with the academic appearing on each episode, to recommend sources and outline their proposed topic areas. Having established a structure for the episode, the intern’s tole was to take this into the secondary reading phase, writing a long pack of notes about the topic to pass on to the writing team, while paying particular attention to comedic opportunities in what was discovered. Some areas of research were guided by the historian; others evolved out of available source material, additional reading, and things just seemed interesting. It was useful to keep the overall format of a podcast in mind throughout the research process, asking questions like, “what can be summarised by the host, and what will needs more nuancing by the historian?”… “how can we make these topics link to each other?”… “is there any space to add in a visual element here as well?”

For me, however, the most interesting part of this process was seeing how the episodes developed from the notes stage - it was intriguing to see what made it in into the script, and what didn’t, and I came to understand that the YDTM team must start forming scripts in their minds from the very beginning, knowing how an episode should flow, how many topics can realistically be covered, and the kinds of anecdotes that lend themselves to comedy responses. During a scriptwriting workshop for the episode on Frederick Douglass, I could see how eventually you would start to think like a writer, even down to the way that sentences were constructed, characters were introduced, and political events were discussed for necessary context. I also appreciated being able to attend recordings and audio production sessions, and valued seeing the process through from start to finish. The highlight of the internship was undoubtedly attending the live show and recording of the episode I researched on Leonardo da Vinci, with Professor Catherine Fletcher and Dara O’ Briain, and sitting in the audience hearing how some of the stories I had written down as notes had since evolved into a script which had a whole room of people laughing. This internship was a brilliant insight into the value of public history within the media industry, really showing me the worth of shaping historical research into a format which is accessible, entertaining and thought-provoking for as wide an audience as possible.