Where does the idea for a good podcast come from? As with most other good ideas in life, it often arises from the ashes of a late night out with friends.
Over drinks, comedians Justine Stafford and Kevin McGahern were talking about their shared appreciation for Irish video clips that had gone viral (Stafford speaks fondly of one clip of a particularly enthusiastic bingo announcer). It was the catalyst that sparked a podcast idea. “Initially we thought: that’s the concept,” she recalls. The pair would get together and pick apart these cultural relics and see what conversation flowed from that.
However, it quickly evolved into something broader. “The angle we saw was, I’m from Meath and he’s from Cavan ... two people from the country in Dublin, in the city, reminiscing over rural life and our upbringing and how that has served us living in Dublin.”
A double-header made sense with McGahern because they already had a “friendship and chemistry that just worked ... I love having someone to bounce off.”
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After successfully pitching their idea to HeadStuff Podcasts, The Lovely Show has been going strong since April 2024. Their recent live show (their first) as part of the St Patrick’s Day Festival at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre in Dublin sold out in hours.
It is far from the only two-header podcast in Ireland making an impact. The Irish and UK Spotify podcast charts are full of shows with two presenters: The Rest Is History, My Therapist Ghosted Me, The 2 Johnnies Podcast, Vogue & Amber, Keep It Tight, Miss Me? - the list goes on and on. These shows cover a vast swathe of topics and concerns, but they are all predicated on the same idea: when it comes to podcasting, two is the magic number.
Whether it’s co-hosts Vogue Williams and Joanne McNally chatting through relationship mishaps on My Therapist Ghosted Me, Lily Allen and Miquita Oliver debating the perils of show business on Miss Me?, Deirdre O’Kane and Emma Doran chatting about what’s delighted or enraged them that week, or comedians John Bishop and Des Bishop sparring on The Bishop Exchange, the attraction for the listener is clear: it’s all about earwigging on the relationship between the two co-hosts.
On the surface this may seem unremarkable. Surely it’s no surprise that podcasts with two presenters are so popular - it seems like a very normal way to produce a show. But things become interesting when comparing the Irish and UK podcast charts to those of the United States.
There, the individual reigns supreme. Millions of American subscribers spend their days listening to names you may or may not recognise: Joe Rogan, Mel Robbins, Shawn Ryan, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Theo Von, Stephanie Soo. Podcasts with two hosts of course exist on the far side of the pond, but often play second fiddle to big solo names.
Do these disparate podcast consumption habits represent a cultural divide? Is American society now so tilted towards controversy that hot-take soapbox-style podcasters are revered not just as entertainers but as saviours? Or maybe the old stereotypes are true and Irish people just love an auld nose and a chat. Perhaps genetic memory of our rich, storytelling past plays a part. Is it a natural compulsion?
In discussing what is driving the trend towards double-header podcasts, Dylan Haskins, commissioning editor for BBC Sounds, highlights two important factors. The first is advertising. He says a vast proportion of advertising money goes to those kinds of podcasts. “If you’re a host and you’re doing a show once a week, or even twice a week, it’s quite hard to talk for that length of time on your own. So then you maybe do an interview show, but then you have to book a different guest each week, and that is a tonne of work.”
Having two hosts removes a lot of these problems, and is far more appealing to potential advertisers. “Practically speaking, producing at the level and volume you need to sustain a series to then sell advertising against, it makes a lot of sense.”
Perhaps most importantly, these podcasts are based on relationships, and it is these relationships that people respond to. This is especially true of shows like My Therapist Ghosted Me, with Vogue Williams and Joanne McNally, and Miss Me?
“People feel an extended part of the relationship that they’re listening to, where they project their own friendships on to those relationships,” Haskins says.
“We know from loads of research about the different listener needs that people have at different moments in the day, there’s certain different things that you want.” Towards the end of the day when you’re tired and looking to unwind, for example, you probably don’t want to listen to a barrage of dense information that requires a lot of concentration.
So perhaps the popularity of the double-header is just the market responding to our ever-more-hectic lives. There is comfort to be found in good company. The world can be a terrible place, after all.
Tara Flynn, who hosts a podcast with Marian Keyes called Now You’re Asking, knows this only too well. After the success of their live show, Between Ourselves, Flynn and Keyes were approached by the BBC to host an agony aunt-style podcast – an opportunity they both jumped at.
The set-up is as intimate as the listeners’ questions they discuss – producer Steve Doherty drives from Wales on the ferry with his equipment and they record in a room in Keyes’s house, creating 10 episodes a year. Apart from selecting questions and some individual preparation, the show is entirely unscripted.
“The best thing about the podcast is getting to work with Marian and Steve,” says Flynn. “It’s an absolutely joyful thing to do. And the very organic nature of it, because we don’t know what to expect.” It’s like improv in a way, Flynn suggests, because you’re sitting opposite someone and you don’t know what they’re going to say. The endless digressions and tangents of rich conversation isn’t just a perk of a podcasting job, it’s essential to keep the audience engaged.
Listening to double-headers, Flynn adds, is a “fun way to feel like you’re part of a gang, part of a little team, without having to volunteer any conversation yourself.”
But there are challenges. Flynn says the most difficult part of Now You’re Asking is realising how many people are struggling, now more than ever. Some of the problems are heartbreaking and difficult, but ultimately it is an optimistic podcast. People trying to help other people is, by its very nature, a hopeful endeavour.
Aside from behind-the-scenes practicalities, might there also be another, more tangible benefit of having two hosts? The podcasting world is surely nearing saturation point, yet podcasts have never been more popular. The number of people who regularly listen to podcasts is expected to be almost 620 million by 2026. That’s a whole lot of chat in a deeply competitive market. Why not double your listenership by bringing two big names together? Is it just a commonsense, if slightly cynical, way of getting a bigger slice of the pie?
Haskins says that’s not the case. He’s tried that approach in the past and found things don’t work out that way. Audience behaviour is more sophisticated than listening to a podcast just because someone they like is one of the hosts. It’s not the hosts people respond to, but the relationship between the hosts.
On their BBC Sounds podcast Miss Me? Lily Allen and Miquita Oliver catch up twice a week to discuss whatever is on their minds. If you are of a certain age you’ll remember both from early 2000s fame, Oliver as a TV presenter, Allen as a singer. The success of their podcast isn’t down to name recognition or a cashing-in on nostalgia, but rather the honesty and relatability of their conversations.
As Haskins explains: “Before we commissioned Miss Me? I was really adamant we don’t put genres in a box, where entertainment means we don’t talk about anything serious, and serious stuff means it can’t be funny.” Like meeting a friend for a drink, the conversations ebb and flow naturally. This is what listeners are responding to.
Tom Whiter, head of content at podcast producer Goalhanger, agrees. The forging of relationships, both real and imagined, he believes, is the key to understanding the rise of the double-header.
And if anyone should know a thing or two about the double-header, it’s Whiter. Goalhanger has struck on a winning formula that sees its shows consistently top the podcast charts. It didn’t invent the double-header, but Goalhanger surely perfected it. The Rest Is History, The Rest Is Entertainment, The Rest Is Politics – different shows about different things with different people, but with one key factor in common: they each have two hosts.
“It’s tried and tested from the radio world,” Whiter says. With a background in BBC Radio 1, Whiter noticed “there were always really successful pairings and we’d seen what worked there and figured it could also work in the podcasting space”.
He says the logistics are easier with two people. You always have an anchor point, and you always have something to talk about. Goalhanger podcasts are designed to be “always on”, ie sustainable and endlessly repeatable. With this in mind, the two-host approach is just easier.
Having launched interview podcasts in the past, Whiter admits that the format can become “a millstone around your neck”. The pressure to find someone new and interesting to talk to every week can lead to the standard at times slipping due to a guest pulling out at the last minute or some other unforeseen circumstance. So from a purely logistical point of view, having the same two hosts talk to each other every episode contributes to the longevity and sustainability of a show.
Whiter also points out an interesting trend: any time one of their podcasts with two hosts have a guest on, they almost always perform worse than episodes without a guest.
For shows such as The Rest Is History, his message is simple: “Don’t have guests if you don’t need to. Your relationship is what people keep coming back for.”
Expanding on the bond between listener and hosts, Whiter speaks of a parasocial relationship specific to audio. A presenter on TV tends to address the collective audience, whereas there is a subtle yet far more intimate address to the individual in podcasts. So whether you’re walking the dog, doing the dishes, or have your headphones on at the gym, you feel like the third person in the conversation. Whiter notices this connection most clearly at live shows, where audience members address the presenters like old friends. Which is unsurprising – in the listener’s mind they are old friends.
Maura Fay, who produced The 2 Johnnies podcast for six years, and is now a reporter for Today with Claire Byrne on RTÉ Radio 1, explains how deep this connection can go.
Even if you’ve never listened to The 2 Johnnies – presented by Tipperary comedians “Johnny B” O’Brien and “Johnny Smacks” McMahon – you have most likely heard of it.
As soon as the podcast launched it went straight to number one in the charts, and kept growing from there into the cultural juggernaut it is today. If a podcast’s popularity can be measured by the success of its live shows, then The 2 Johnnies is surely the biggest in Ireland. From an initial sold-out two nights in The Sugar Club they had to move to bigger and bigger venues, eventually ending up in the 3Arena by way of Vicar Street.
Fay says what really impacted her most were the messages she received from listeners. “We got emails saying how much the podcast helped people. They might be on the way home from the hospital after getting a cancer diagnosis, or experiencing a miscarriage, and they just need that bit of escapism. It takes them out of themselves for an hour and a half each week.”
So, if the double-header format is preferred by producers and advertisers and many listeners, is the same true of the presenters themselves? Matt Cooper’s idea for a podcast came while he was lying in bed with pneumonia during the summer of 2023. The podcast in question was to become Path to Power, a weekly politics podcast the Today FM presenter now hosts with Ivan Yates, with whom he had previously worked on Virgin Media’s late-night politics television show.
“My pitch to Ivan was that we would have more freedom than we had when we co-presented The Tonight Show on Virgin Media and rarely interacted with each other on air, despite having plenty of animated off-air conversations.” The idea was to bring this off-air material to listeners in a way that was entertaining and informative.
Cooper picked Yates specifically because they have different ideas on the world, but they are able to discuss them (sometimes heatedly) without falling out with each other. They wind each other up. “He [Yates] likes to call me ‘woke’, predictably, and I’ve taken to calling him Ivanov for some of the ridiculous pro-Trump stuff he’s been spouting about Ukraine, which could be coming from the Putin playbook.”
It is a dynamic that further exemplifies the unique position podcasts hold outside of TV or radio. “Podcasting allows the hosts to show more of themselves, biases included,” Cooper says. It’s easy to see the appeal of a conversation “without the constraints of the radio running order, with its preset time for news and sports bulletins, weather, traffic and ad breaks to be met at predetermined points in each hour.”
Looking again at that curious rift between US and Irish podcast tastes, Tom Whiter suggests these things often work in cycles.
“We may see the dial turning,” he notes, with everyone soon deciding that duos don’t work any more. “I hope that’s not the case,” he’s quick to add. “We like the format. We think it works.”
Irish audiences obviously agree. According to Tara Flynn, the appeal of the double-header is simple. “What we offer is that people don’t feel alone. I think that’s what all podcasts offer.”
It doesn’t matter if you’re listening to a show debunking medical conspiracy theories or reality TV recaps, “You’re meeting some friends ... in your ears. And where better to have your friends?”
Additional reporting by Nadine O’Regan
