Stephen Fry's Podgrams

» see stephenfry.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2008 I had been on a TTNet line for two years and could pull a twenty-five minute MP3 down in about as long as it took to make tea, and I still never downloaded this one. Stephen Fry's audience was the English-speaking internet talking to itself at length, which is a thing you can admire from outside without joining.

The announcement is still up on his site, dated 20 February 2008 and signed by him. "It's my pleasure to announce my first podcast entitled Stephen Fry's PODGRAMS, a new series with the first twenty-five minute Podgram (podcast) disclosing the stories behind my working life of the past two years and journeying through the trials and tribulations of breaking my arm whilst filming on the Amazon river in January." Episode one was called "Broken Arm" and came out that Wednesday. The post credits the team behind the official website rather than a production company, because there was not one.

Nine episodes exist, across two series. Five came out in 2008 between February and September, and the second series opened on 15 October with seven minutes about his own website relaunch. The shortest podgram is five minutes and fifty-two seconds, on Oscar Wilde; the longest is fifty-one minutes and forty-six seconds, recorded around the iTunes Live Festival and posted on 21 July 2009. Some of the material had already appeared on his site as what he called blessays, blog essays long enough to be read aloud. The MP3s were served by The Positive Internet Company, his hosting provider.

Nothing followed the July 2009 episode. The series was reported at the time as one of the most downloaded podcasts on iTunes, and that bought it exactly nothing. There was no network behind it and no contract anywhere obliging anybody to record a tenth one.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the thread that asked ~

The cover art was an Arcimboldo pastiche, a face built out of fruit and vegetables with Fry's signature across it, and along the bottom edge it said "MORE PODS VISIT WWW.STEPHENFRY.COM/FORUM". The forum is where the death is legible. One topic is called "any news on language podgram", from the gap before the December 2008 episode. Another is called "are the podgrams dead", and by the time the Internet Archive crawled it in April 2012 it had run to a second page of replies.

Nobody ever answered it with an episode. Fry kept writing on the same site all the way through, so the podgrams went quiet while their author stayed completely audible everywhere else.

~ what is left on the page ~

The February 2008 announcement still loads, under a current menu with a store and an events page on it. There is no audio player on it and no MP3 link anywhere in the markup. Each podgram had its own artwork file, named after the date it went out. The four from the first half of 2008 are all still retrievable through the archive, while the one for the September episode returns a 404.

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