“I didn't really feel like a person anymore”

Helen Zaltzman has been podcasting for almost 20 years and now resides in Canada, a long way from her hometown of Tunbridge Wells. Steven spoke to talk about how she started podcasting, her work on The Allusionist and Answer Me This!, and lots more...

What is your official occupation? 
Oh god. Podcaster, I suppose. 

Do you have any additional roles, paid or unpaid? 
I guess I'm a writer. I perform. I suppose those are my main roles.

When you say writer, is that books?  
The podcast is largely a writing job. I have to write live shows. I do need to work on a book. I just don't have that much time. Often, it's writing material for performance, but it has to be written somehow. I used to write for papers, but it's a long time now.

Is the book connected to the podcast, or will it be something completely different? 
Let's see what comes out. There's nothing to report, really. People have been asking for years, and I have demurred, but now my agent keeps emailing me, so I have to do something.

Language is a really complicated thing that we use all the time

What is the podcast?
I have two podcasts. One is Answer Me This!, a podcast where we answer questions from the audience, and that's been running since 2007. The other is The Allusionist, which is an entertainment show about how language works. I do have to emphasise entertainment, because people just think that is going to be boring as shit. But the fact is language is a really complicated thing that we use all the time. I was never really taught anything about it, and I think that was unfortunate. The more you think about it, the more interesting it gets.

What led to you launching Answer Me This in 2007?
God, it's such a long time ago now that it feels like what I'm doing is repeating a story that I heard. My friend from university, Olly Mann, said, 'Do you want to do a podcast?' I had no reason to say no because I didn't know what they were. I had no related skills. Then we had to figure out how everything worked, because there wasn't help. I think it was good to have to learn from scratch, how to do things because I don't really like following other people's guidelines that much. It's funny to contemplate because it's so different now.

What podcast would there have been back in 2007 to listen to get an idea? 
Oh, I didn't listen to a podcast until I'd been making one for a year. Ricky Gervais had a big podcast. I never liked Ricky Gervais' work, so I didn't listen to it. Then there were cut down radio shows. There was Adam and Joe's then XFM show, and I loved Adam and Joe. I guess technically I'd heard that on podcast, but it was a radio show repackaged. There were podcasts by non-radio people that I wouldn't have known how to find then. I didn't have an iPod. iPhones didn't exist when we started the show. Discovery was so different.

Was Martin the sound man involved from the very beginning? 
He was involved from the very beginning because Olly and I didn't know how to record sound, and luckily Martin, my now husband, then live-in boyfriend, was making music, and he had microphones. He had the ability to use them. Then, because we had made him help us and he was going to be in the room while we were recording, we thought we'd better put him on mic so that if he mutters during the show, it's at least audible rather than in the background and something that's annoying, but not legible or the audio equivalent of legible. Then he became a character.

The questions you've been asked on the show are really quite eclectic. How much work goes into preparing the answers, and how much is off the cuff? 
Olly and I have to go through our inbox, and we do that together. We make a long list of which questions deserve to come out of the inbox and onto a Google Doc. Then we go through that. Some, we did something a bit similar recently, we'll hold it even though this is a good question. Some of them, maybe in the future, or it's a Christmas question, but it's April. Then we go through and we pick. Not sure how many it is now, between around seven to ten questions. You want a variety, you don't want everything to be factual, you don't want everything to be emotional. Then we arrange it. Quite lot goes into it, actually. We're trying to pace the show. This would lead on to this, and this would be a tonal contrast. Then we divide up by who's interested in taking the lead on something and doing the factual research into whatever, or who's got a story that matches what the question's about. None of the questions are a surprise, but what comes out of our brains can be a surprise, and we don't know what the other's going to say usually. There's substantial editing. That frees you up to experiment in the moment with the recording and also to say things that aren't necessarily interesting or aren't necessarily going to be funny or aren't necessarily going to work or you can make a factual correction having blundered. It's two or three days of editing per episode.

You can't really know what a podcast is until you are doing it

What was the impetus to launch The Allusionist? 
The impetus was that a friend of mine named Roman Mars was staying with me on a visit to London, and he had recently started a podcast collective called Radiotopia, and he'd been a big fan of Answer Me This! for a long time. I knew he liked my work, and he makes 99% Invisible, which is about design and the minutiae of that. I want to make a show like that, but about language. At the time, he was looking for people to be on Radiotopia who could reliably deliver two episodes a month. He agreed just based on that idea and managed to get funding for it from Mailchimp for a couple of years, just to get it off the ground. That's what greenlit the show.
I didn't know anything about what the show would be until I was making it, which I think is quite a good thing now. I think now people are much more likely to do extensive piloting, and that's never been my process. I think you can't really know what a podcast is until you are doing it. That's how it works for me. If I'm not learning while I'm doing it, I don't want to. I'm not interested. 

Who is Veronica Mars, and why did you decide to do a podcast about her?
Veronica Mars is a TV detective played by Kristen Bell. At the start, she's a teen detective at high school investigating her best friend's murder and her mother's disappearance. A three-season TV show cancelled to much upset from fans from 2004 to 2007. Then there was a big Kickstarter to revive it with a film in 2014. There's two canonical books. Then there's a 2019 reboot series that made the fans really angry. So, maybe that is the end of Veronica Mars.
The reason I started doing a podcast about her in 2019 is that I really wanted to make a podcast that was fun and had a shape that wasn't provided by me, and that I didn't have to figure out what happened, and it had an endpoint. Podcasts that recap TV shows were becoming popular, like West Wing Weekly, which really made the genre good. Rishi, who makes West Wing Weekly, was a friend of mine, and I was talking to him about this, and he thought I should make a show about Veronica Mars, with his friend Jenny. He introduced me to Jenny Owen Youngs, a musician who also does a show recapping Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's an interesting project to take the full canon of something and consider it in an overly detailed way.

Was there a reason for that show in particular?
I think because there's enough of it to get your teeth into, but it's not too long. You're not trapped doing this show for ten years. It's a very interesting show because some of it has dated super badly, and some of it wasn't that good to start with, but some of it is still incredible television. A lot of the actors are really excellent. People are still discovering it, and they're still enjoying it. It doesn't feel completely moribund or like a product totally from the past. I'm not sure what else, what other shows I would do that piqued my interest as much. 

Why did you decide to end Answer Me This?