More people are watching podcasts – how The Harry Hill Show could signal the backward-looking future of the medium

Television has become a very difficult concept to pin down. It’s no longer the box situated in the corner of a family living room. Mobile platforms, online streaming and different modes of delivery have diffused our understanding of television. The concept of a podcast has, so far, undergone much less scrutiny, and yet we are seeing a need for a similar conversation: what is a podcast, not just to audiences, but to creators?

The podcast is becoming trickier to define. Where its roots may have been in radio, its relationship, or convergence, with that murky beast of television is becoming ever more visible.

To watch a podcast would seem like a contradiction. But in the US the video streamer Youtube has become the most popular podcasting platform. Video is reshaping the industry, with significant growth in people watching podcasts on living room devices – where people used to gather to watch traditional TV.

The usual video of a podcast features the host or hosts and whoever else is on the podcast chatting in front of microphones – the visual element is second to the listening experience. However, there are a slew of new podcasts which are taking this uptick in “viewers” seriously and creating material for them as much as for “listeners”, including the The Harry Hill Show.

In the stand-up comedian’s own words, The Harry Hill Show is a “vodscarf” – wordplay on podcast and video-on-demand. What makes this “vodscarf” interesting is the television-podcast format it toys with. While it is one product, the experience of watching the Harry Hill Show is different from just listening to it. It’s not that you’ll miss anything important information wise just listening but the visual experience is not secondary to the audio – as sets and camerawork, including visual gags and effects, are worked in. The show also draws on Hill’s own history in television.

Harry Hill is best known for his sketch show Harry Hill, later titled The All-New Harry Hill Show and also referred to as The Harry Hill Show, which ran from 1997 to 2003. In each episode, Hill delivered his surrealist comedy through a series of regular sketches, reoccurring characters and catchphrases that would repeat week-on-week. Into the 2000s, Hill fronted TV Burp for 11 series. The show infused his tried-and-tested formula into the television-clip show format.

Features from both these shows can be found in his podcast, which is clearly infused with a lot of nostalgia for that bygone era of TV comedy. Hill is mostly deskbound, as he was on TV Burp, and he again finds humour through the repetition of gags (“don’t make that noise, Gary, it will limit your appeal” is repeated weekly to his ventriloquist’s dummy, for instance). The segments have a deliberate (and possibly necessary) low-cost aesthetic, a style common to UK comedies from the broadcast television era of the 1990s like Hill’s shows.

But this isn’t simply a TV show masquerading as a video podcast. The Harry Hill Show also acknowledges and embeds common podcast ingredients. Each week the show has a special comedy guest and an educational guest who are interviewed in a traditional podcast style. Yet all the elements are highly reflexive as Hill passively (and sometimes actively) deconstructs podcasts and TV.

The single-guest interview that is at the centre of The Harry Hill Show, is common to the podcasting tradition. Media academics have noted that this format generates content that thrives on intimacy and authenticity. With Hill, this format is subverted by televisual factors where the guest is continually challenged and wrongfooted by his ludicrous segments.

For instance, in Hill’s Name That Seed segment, the special guest must guess the identity of a particular seed from a pack of 8,000 different species. The game is whimsical and deliberately baffles the guest. Like many comedy podcasts, this and other segments create in-jokes with the audience. The more you’ve listened or watched The Harry Hill Show, the stronger a listener/viewer’s relationship becomes with the podcast and the more they are rewarded. After listening to several episodes, they know how the seed segment goes and can laugh along, on the inside of the joke, with Hill.

In essence, Hill takes the scripted comedy format of his television work and rebuilds it into a podcast medium that prefers unscripted and authentic encounters. In doing so, he has created a recipe that provides audiences with familiarity of TV but with the authenticity and intimacy of podcast.

The Harry Hill Show is an example of a podcast that could reshape the medium by mixing older approaches to modern media. Hill does this by reconstructing his identity and past formats through a podcast that clearly enjoys celebrating their mutual deconstruction (or destruction). As special guest Nish Kumar comments to Hill in the show’s trailer: “You’re self-funding your own nervous breakdown!”

With The Harry Hill Show we’re seeing something that’s not strictly television, but not strictly a podcast either. It is an example of the increasing importance of visuals, which could overtake the importance of audio. But who knows? This could be a flash-in-the-pan moment, or it could signal something deeper for the medium – that the podcast might be a media format with a limited shelf life.

James McLean does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.