When Helena Merriman, the award-winning BBC broadcaster, started working on her new podcast Tunnel 29 — an extraordinary true story about a man who helped refugees flee from East to West Berlin by digging a tunnel under the streets where border guards stood stern in thick-soled boots — she bought a teetering pile of screenwriting books.
“And I started storyboarding,” Merriman explains down the phone from Beeb HQ. “Working out what to focus on, how to structure it, where to put the cliffhangers. I thought about it like it were a film — or a Netflix series.” She studied the screenwriter’s bible, John Yorke’s Into The Woods, in forensic detail.
Merriman’s modus operandi isn’t the only thing about her podcast that is reminiscent of a blockbuster. Last night, Tunnel 29 was launched with a huge premiere at The Steel Yard in the City, attended by editors, broadcasters and the cast of the show. It dropped onto the BBC Sounds app yesterday, and will be on Radio 4 later this month. Listen to the first episode here.
The research has been filmic, too: Merriman, a former BBC Middle East correspondent, confirms it is “absolutely the most ambitious project I’ve ever worked on”, and involved months of interviews and sound recordings.
“There are so many podcasts now. But with so many of them, you listen to the first episode and then you don’t go back. What makes us go back? It’s storytelling — that’s what Netflix is doing, really.”
Perhaps this is an obvious point: the best podcasts have always been doing it. The series that kickstarted the modern audio renaissance (at Ofcom’s last reckoning, more than six million UK adults tune into podcasts each week) was Serial, a true-crime programme that worked its cliffhangers and big reveals as well as any blow-the-budget Hollywood thriller. To date, it’s been downloaded more than 175 million times.
Still, Serial was a surprise hit — weeks before it broadcast, presenter Sarah Koenig was running around telling family and friends: “If it sucks, we’ll just never speak of it again” — and a relative outlier. Despite its success and flexing of the format, the idea that podcasts and films are working off the same playbook is relatively novel, and has happened only as podcasters grow into their ambition, and the medium.
Now, though, it’s on. In the past year there’s been a volley of thrilling podcasts that sound like film scripts. The Drop Out, an extraordinary story of Silicon Valley hubris straight out of classical mythology, seduced listeners earlier this year (Apple Podcasts and Stitcher). Hollywood has snapped at the bait and the tale is being adapted for the huge screen, with Jennifer Lawrence to star. There’s also a TV show created by Hulu and starring Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon, based on the podcast.
True crime podcast Dirty John, about a charismatic con man and created by Wondery and the LA Times, was downloaded more than 10 million times in the first six weeks of its release and has already been adapted into a successful Netflix show starring Juno Temple and Julia Garner (Apple Podcasts and Stitcher). Gimlet Media’s Homecoming — a haunting tale about PTSD — has been turned into an Amazon Prime show, while Limetown, a story about mass disappearances at a Tennessee neuroscience research facility, started as a true-crime podcast but launches tomorrow on Facebook’s broadcasting platform, Facebook Watch (Apple Podcasts and Stitcher). Jessica Biel plays the lead, journalist Lia Haddock.
And tomorrow, Amazon Prime will drop its new mini-series Modern Love, adapted from the New York Times podcast. Its big-ticket names include Anne Hathaway, Andrew Scott and Tina Fey, all playing characters in self-contained episodes about relationships, kinship and connections.
It started life as a column in the NYT but it was not until it became a chart-topping podcast in 2016 — where the essays were read by A-listers including Rachel Weisz and Peter Sarsgaard — that producers were tipped off to the potential of its narrative world.
Still, Merriman wonders if the stories might lose something in the translation from audio to screen. “The sound, the intimacy — podcasts are the only medium you can give someone that is unmediated. The power of that unmediated sound going into your ear … It’s like books, where the power is that you make the stories in your head yourself, you create the images yourself.”
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