“A detective comedy podcast. Even Greater London, 1887. In this vast metropolis, Inspector Archibald Fleet and journalist Clara Entwhistle investigate a murder, only to find themselves at the centre of a conspiracy of impossible proportions.”
Victoriocity
There are many ways to measure success - in the audio world as elsewhere.
Of course, there’s the empowerment of learning new skills - and the achievement of making new work (which can be shared with contacts, etc). Some shows become profitable in their own right, others win their makers and/or contributors commissions or even full-time jobs. And some - mostly American so far - are licensed as franchises for TV.
Meanwhile, the eccentric ambition of Victoriocity - another studio-recorded, full-cast series - has seen its creators’ investment in world-building and water-tight plotting pay off in becoming a Pratchett-esque book series.
Meet the Creators
I spoke to the series creators, Chris & Jen Sugden, about their path from improv comedy - through podcasting - into print.
The Spark
Chris: “Jen and I wrote - still do write - as part of a comedy theatre group. We came up through improv comedy - that turned into sketch - that turned into narrative theatre. We did a couple of runs at Edinburgh.
But, the sheer difficulty of doing that... Like, if we wanted to put the show on again, we would have to pack everything into a van, find a venue, sell tickets, get people there, unload the van, put it on... And then it would be over again.”
“…let's just do it online.”
Chris: “We'd come up listening to radio drama - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, this fantastic old BBC production of The Lord of the Rings... And we thought…let's do one of those. We don't work for a radio station and we have no contacts in the industry. We didn't even attempt contacting the BBC. Our thought was - let's just do it online.
We just thought that would be the quickest route to doing it. We'd come from the fringe - independent production. We write it, we go to the place, we do it.”
Why this project in particular?
Chris: “I'd had some of the concepts for Victoriocity - like the city, and the protagonist, Archibald Fleet - years earlier, but never got very far with it.
Jen and I developed it together. Came up with a new name. Jen suggested adding a second protagonist, which is great, because now we have this partnership, it's much more fun than it would have been otherwise.
And kind of took it from there.”
It’s kind of heartening to see how well your first attempt went, because one of the recurring bits of advice is - don't do your big idea as your first production - do something smaller, that doesn't matter.
Chris: “I think that's dead right - but we did that on stage for years.”
Jen: “I don't think we were ever like… this is The Big Idea.
And also - well, I mean, we do comedy, right? So, for us, it was important to do that on stage, because we had to develop our sense of what works and what doesn't, right?
It's hard to do that when you just upload…”
In terms of practicalities, how did you go about finding collaborators?
Jen: “We immediately went to our comedy group, because we knew that they'd enjoy it and they're very talented. And one of our number had directed some of our shows as well, so we knew that would be a good fit. That's Nathan Peter Grassi - he's just very good at knowing how to get the best out of actors.
Then we went to contacts - I knew a few actors, who knew other actors, and they disseminated the script. If people liked it, they offered their time up.
We paid for all the expenses, so nobody was out of pocket, but people did give their time for free - on the first season. On the understanding that if we were able to Kickstart a second season, they would be invited back and get paid some money.
Which is what happened.”
“I don't think we were ever like… this is The Big Idea.”
Jen: “There's a really nice community in the audio drama space. Lots of people willing to help. Sometimes just favours and stuff…but I don't think anyone would have done it if they thought the script was rubbish.”
Into Production
Jen: “We plot the mystery really carefully. Chris and I do that together - as a proper mystery novel, no comedy at all.
Like, we're not like - oh, this would be a fun comic moment. It's serious plotting - it has to have the emotional arcs in - and the thriller and mystery elements have to be satisfying.
Then we'll talk about – okay, for each of these episodes, what are the locations going to be? Because a lot of the sci-fi fantasy element is the world that they inhabit.
We might be like - oh, it'd be really fun to have a health spa. And then we'll think, okay, well, what is a health spa like in Even Greater London? We'll make sure that every episode has various locations that are building the world out.
And then the comedy gets layered on - when we actually write the scenes.”
I can't think of any characters - across the seasons - that wouldn't have been a lot of fun to play.
Chris: “Well, good. I mean, it must come from the plotting as well - we try and make it so that everything is doing something, right? And then it's just embellishing it, making it as good a scene as we can to fit in that link of the chain.”
Yeah - like, to give an example - there’s a scene in Season One where our heroes jump in a cab, and it turns into almost this kind of brilliantly excessive essay on capitalism - in terms of the rate of bribery determining how fast each cab will go…
A lot of writers would have just treated it as an exciting chase scene where everyone says what you'd expect them to say - and maybe it's intense, but it wouldn't, in itself, be comic and it wouldn't necessarily be interesting.
Chris: “I think a lot of that is the improv background. A lot of the scenes - we don't know what it’s going to be like until we write it. We don't plan it. We don't say let's have some hyper-capitalist cabbies. It's very sketch-y.
We think - what do they sound like? What's one sentence that summarises them, if they were to say their philosophy on the world..?
And you do that exercise and then - we keep going while it's entertaining, still knowing that the scene is gonna drive where it needs to go. You don't want a nine-minute comic distraction that gets too far from anything.”
And it's also really good for your actors because, you know, no actor wants to turn up at a studio and their lines are, in their entirety: ‘what, that cab?’; ‘Faster, faster!’
It must be depressing to have to - just - do that.
“…what do they sound like?”
Beyond the writing, though - in terms of new skills you had to learn…
Chris: “I'd never acted in front of a microphone before. So I had to learn how to do that.
The biggest one was probably in post-production. Mine and Jen's role was listening to the dialogue edits - then the sound design edits - and giving feedback.
Which I think we only really do because it's a comedy. We've got four takes of the same joke, but this one is just emphasised wrong. So it doesn't quite work, right?
It’s script supervision. Like - we catch something that the director hasn't caught. Or we didn't realise a line was ambiguous, and it totally is… And it's really important that it's said a certain way, not another way.
So, a lot of back and forth about those kinds of things. And yeah, that's a lot of work.”
The Flame
You say you thought of it primarily as comedy but, for me, the second season does seem to be slightly more dramedy… Which I like, I think it gives it a bit of extra heft. Even the amount of jokes seems to relax slightly..?
Jen: “That's probably just becoming more confident as writers and also knowing - in a way, Season Two is more satisfying in that way because there are some quite cartoonish moments in Season One.
And that just comes from, well, partly developing the characters in the world, but also - you're always changing, aren't you, as a writer?
I do strongly believe that the show is not for everyone, which doesn't bother me at all. What we find is - if people like it, they really like it - and, otherwise …it's not for them.It's not one that people just have lukewarm views towards.
Fortunately, people that dislike it - and I can understand why, it's a bit bananas - tend not to say. They just move on with their lives, which I'm very grateful for.
A lot of our fans, we would never ever hear from - but people do tweet nice things, put nice things on Facebook…
And, occasionally - more often than you'd think - we get really nice emails from people, telling us how much the show means to them, that it's made them laugh, or given them some respite from whatever it is they have going on, and it's so nice to see that the thing you've written has made a real difference to someone else.”
I think - when you have a very immersive world. it doesn't matter so much that it's a genre world, what matters is that it's all joined up, that it's interesting - and especially that the characters are relatable (or understandable, at least).
It becomes that parasocial thing - a parallel world you can escape to. And escapism isn't necessarily just a shallow thing. I think it can be incredibly, incredibly valuable for people.
Chris: “It’s often presented as people escaping their lives, which is a bit of a sad way of thinking about somebody just engaging in something that brings them joy, right? As if their lives don't include that thing, - that joyful experience is somehow separate to their lives.
It's just part of their day, like everything else.”
Plus, it’s often a way into community, a way into interests. It can snowball into all kinds of real world things. I bet you guys have lots of fans who have made genuine friendships through the show.
Chris: “I think so. That'd be nice. I did hear rumours of a Discord…”
“…that little breather from the horrors of reality.”
For all the show’s success in audio, its story is now taking root in the slightly more established media of books. How did you manage that?
Jen: “We always thought we'd like to get into other media. Novels, short stories, maybe graphic novels…
But it happened much more quickly than we expected because we were listened to by Glenn Weldon, who presents Pop Culture Happy Hour for NPR. They have this little section which is like - what's making you happy this week? And Glenn said, this podcast called Victoriocity - it's funny as hell and you should listen.
We got a big spike in listeners - and one was an editor at Simon & Schuster in New York. She decided it’d be great for a YA series - with different characters from the same world. So we started working on a YA novel…
A little bit later, Rachel Winterbottom at Gollancz had it recommended to her.
But she was like - oh, well, I don't really want YA. I’d quite like a Fleet & Clara series of mysteries. And Season Two ends with them setting up a detective agency - which seems like a great starting point for a series of novels. And that's really what we wanted to do.
So we started working with Rachel - a sample of chapters and a plot outline - and she got it through the commissioning process. We got an agent who then negotiated the deal. And that was that.
It was based on just, you know. people happening to enjoy listening to audio drama podcasts, thinking - this would make a great series of novels, are you interested?
Yes.”
It's a testament to how well made the show is. It's not one of those where you can imagine a talent scout seeing ‘potential’. It's fully realised. You're already doing what you would have to do - just in a different medium.
Scripted podcasts can allow someone to showcase the level they can take their work to when they have, not total control, but a lot of control - where they're at least not having to compromise massively.
Chris: “We wanted to get our work out there - and putting it online - people eventually found it …on the other side of the world.”
Jen: We wanted to be writers. We tried to do the traditional route - going to Edinburgh, trying to get people to come and see the show.
And, actually, success - like, being able to be writers and getting paid something for it… It came because we decided to not wait for permission to do something - which I think Wooden Overcoats paved the way for.
So I think that's really important - don't wait. Don't think there's a certain way you've got to do things. We always wanted to write for the BBC because we grew up listening to Douglas Adams and Brian Sibley and all that kind of stuff. The way we actually ended up writing for the BBC was on Murmurs, the weird fiction anthology series. And we got asked to do that because we did Victoriocity. We got asked to do a novel because we did Victoriocity.
Doing your own thing can open doors.”
Listen to Victoriocity.
Or, for yet more hard-won wisdom from Jen & Chris, click on their names to visit their profile pages - or check out their contributions to the ever-expanding practical podcasting database, elsewhere onsite.
For the other side of the story - that of contributors to the show - follow the names below to interviews with actors and more.
Tom Crowley (Actor - Archibald Fleet)
Nathan Peter Grassi (Actor - Prince Albert)
Coming Soon
Nicholas Collett (Actor - Multiple)
Peter Rae (Actor - The Narrator)
Nathan Peter Grassi (Director)
Ida Bergelow Kenneway (Actor - Queen Victoria)
Cityscape
Jaanus Jagomagi