Archive podcast relaunch: Friday changed completely
24 Years at the Tap End archive/podcast relaunch edition
The previous Friday Extra Show had announced the change.
Now the replacement arrived.
Instead of another loose end-of-week podcast, Fridays would revisit 24 Years at the Tap End, Chris Stark’s audio autobiography.
Scott and Chris introduced the relaunch from Scott’s home and joked about opening the vaults.
The archive was treated like *Game of Thrones*.
Somewhere beneath the house was apparently a Radio 1 King’s Landing full of old tapes.
The title came from one bath
Chris explained the moment which inspired the whole series.
At around 24 years old, he was lying in the bath.
Then he had a sudden realisation.
His head was beside the taps.
He had spent his entire life lying that way.
What if everybody else put their head at the opposite end?
Had Chris been using the bath the wrong way round for 24 years?
The thought was so perfectly representative of the small revelations which seemed to happen to him constantly that it became the title of an autobiographical radio feature:
24 Years at the Tap End.
The original feature predated the podcast boom
The stories had originally been recorded before podcasts were as central to radio listening as they became later.
Chris would arrive with a chapter from his life.
Scott and Beccy, then part of the show, interrupted, questioned him and often discovered details Chris had not realised were unusual.
The result was not a polished autobiography.
It was Chris gradually learning that many things he considered normal were not normal at all.
The archive came with a warning
Scott and Chris also acknowledged that some of the recordings came from a different period of radio.
Jokes, language or attitudes might appear which they would approach differently now.
The point of revisiting the material was not to pretend nothing had changed.
It was to preserve the stories and hear them again with the presenters’ later perspective.
Prague, Smurfs, Germany and France waited in the vault
The relaunch teased some of the chapters still to come.
Workplace banter in Prague.
Chris dressed as a Smurf.
The German exchange.
Trips to France.
University.
School.
Holidays.
The stories already existed.
Friday’s new job was to release them properly.
Friday Extra had become Tap End Friday
For nearly a year, the Friday Extra Show had acted as the home for listener follow-ups, behind-the-scenes Radio 1 and archive clips.
The new format kept the archive element and made it the whole programme.
Chris’s life was now the archive.
The first edition did not need one enormous old story.
It needed to explain where the whole thing had started.
At the tap end of the bath.
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