Jessa Crispin

My favourite failed podcasts

Someone have Jade Simmons call me and growl morbid tales down the phone to me. I miss it

Jade Simmons, host of the sadly short-lived Decomposed with Jade Simmons podcast

The promise of the internet was supposed to be thus: you could be your own bizarre, inappropriate self, and you would find a community of the likewise bizarre and inappropriate. You put yourself out there, and you will find what you consider unique or intolerable to be mundane and perfectly within the bounds of acceptable behaviour.

But look, some of us went online, we said our things, and the internet responded: what the hell is your problem, truly why would you say something like that?

There are a lot of reasons online projects fail, from lack of funds to real life intruding on your time to realising you just don’t care that much any more. But let’s not forget the power of realising you actually are a total weirdo in tracking the demise of creative endeavours. You start your podcast thinking the Patreon dollars will start rolling in, you’ll get to talk about your passions with other people and not just your dog for once, and then you are greeted with a total lack of interest and you discover that what you thought was a niche is just your own personal problem.

‘Hampstead, here we come!’

The podcast Decomposed disappeared in 2019, although the first — and only — six episodes were very optimistically labelled ‘season one’. I started listening because my local public radio station began running the audio of TED Talks, which was causing me, and my whole city I dare say, to get substantially dumber, so I needed some culture.

Host Jade Simmons takes us through the scandalous world of classical music, talking about absurd behaviour and terrifying divas and swoony romances and all the rest of it. And I bet you are thinking: aren’t there a million podcasts like this? Haven’t I personally heard about two dozen other podcast episodes about Tchaikovsky getting a weird letter in the mail that sets him off on a grand mistake? Yes, you probably have; I certainly have.

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