The UK’s Brexit podcasts: the temporal affordances of podcasting in a time of crisis
Résumé
It is sometimes said we live in an age characterised by crisis. Taking Brexit as an example of a recent crisis moment, we explore the role of the UK’s political podcasts. Brexit was the subject of a huge amount of conventional media coverage in the UK and elsewhere, including radio, TV and short podcast series. But here we focus on two hugely popular, long-running, single-issue podcasts: Brexitcast and Remainiacs, which emerged when podcasting was exploding as a popular form and became an unexpected audience hit. They reported on Brexit with far less efficiency than conventional media, taking up hundreds of hours of media time. Much of this time is spent on speculation, humour and domestic trivia. In this chapter we explore how these are used to dramatise and make sense of Brexit as a chaotic process that moves both too fast and too slow. In exploiting the temporal affordances of podcasting, these series carnivalise (Bakhtin, 1970) the sacred space of international politics and help to strip it of some of its power. No wonder this genre of political podcasting has endured post-Brexit, becoming a popular phenomenon in the UK.