Alex Gogarty works in media sales and performs stand-up comedy on occasion, and he has always wanted to be famous. He wanted a certain type of fame, the kind where people vaguely recognised him on the street but afterwards second-guessed themselves. Despite his best efforts, however, his musical-theatre career failed to take off.
It didn’t help when a fellow he went to school with called Patrick Gibson suddenly started to appear on big-budget TV shows and red carpets everywhere. But Gogarty went on with his life. (He did spend a few too many hours throwing shade on Gibson’s screen and red-carpet appearances, though all in his own head.)
Fast-forward to lockdown, when he binged Euphoria and fell in love with one of the main characters, Lexi, played by Maude Apatow. Which is why he slipped into Apatow’s instagram DMs to declare his affections, ultimately leaving her an ill-advised but effusive voice note.
I really want to spoil the plot twist in which Gibson makes a cameo, but I won’t, because, honestly, it’s such a delight to hear this story careen along as it does, read aloud by Apatow, on episode three of In Their Shoes. It’s a new podcast from the folks behind the Seanchoíche storytelling events, six episodes of which have been released to date.
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Each week two guests are invited to write a piece in response to a given theme. They are then asked to swap stories so that each reads out the words of the other while the hosts, Becks and Gaff (Rebekah Guilar and Ciaran Gaffney), respond with questions and elucidations. It’s a meandering affair, a kind of zero-rush approach to proceedings that means episodes regularly clock in at more than an hour, in defiance of a general trend toward shorter-format audio.
What makes In Their Shoes succeed is the calibre of its guests, who to date have also included Máiréad Tyers and Sofia Oxenham of Extraordinary, Senator Lynn Ruane and the artist Joe Caslin, and the singer-songwriter Shiv and her mother Tambu McClean. The notion is that each pair of guests gets the chance to walk in the other’s metaphorical and titular shoes, and it works best when the connection between guests lends that exchange a particular charge.
Tyers’s tale of loneliness and fear is crushingly honest and piercing, as read by Oxenham, while Ruane’s musings on time through the lens of the death of her father makes for deeply personal disclosures. McClean’s account of her family’s tradition of burying a child’s umbilical cord to connect them to place brings us to the revelation that Shiv’s is buried in a garden in Athy, rooting her to the Co Kildare town she grew up in even as she struggles with her sense of home.
And though Gogarty is the clear series winner for the sheer chutzpah of his attempt to throw moves on a Hollywood star, subtler magic is at work in other stories. I’m not sure we need as much pre- or post-amble from the hosts, but there’s something interesting happening in In Their Shoes that cracks the rules of modern storytelling as we’ve come to accept them – that a first-person story is being told by the person to whom it happened. In this podcast, guests switch stories and we listen in a whole new way.
