A human take on podcasting

RICKY GERVAIS has made such a success of his podcast performances that his website refers to him as "The Podfather". And last year, the Queen's Christmas speech was available for download over the internet for the first time, attracting more than a million takers.

But, while podcasts have become a familiar part of the media landscape, a Scottish society broke new ground this week by using downloadable broadcasts as a campaign tool.

The Humanist Society of Scotland announced on Darwin Day - which was Monday - that it would be releasing a series of Thought for the Day-style podcasts - to protest against the continued refusal of the BBC to allow humanists to participate in religious programming.

Despite having the support of prominent figures - such as Stephen Fry, Sir Ludovic Kennedy, Iain Banks and Claire Rayner - humanists are still barred from participating in the five-minute daily spots set aside for religion on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland.

The society has responded by setting up its own alternative Thought for the Day, which began on Monday with the comedian Stewart Lee, creator of Jerry Springer: the Opera.

In the first podcast, the comedian - who provoked the rage of the Christian right by making Jesus, Mary, Joseph and God characters in his comic opera - argued that the myths and symbolism of religion are the common property of humanity, not just of those people who follow religion.

Yesterday, for St Valentine's Day, Kate Hudson, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's chairwoman, spoke about love by quoting Che Guevara: "The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love".

The podcasts - on thinkhumanist.org - reflect the humanist argument that rejecting religion should not exclude a person from moral and ethical debate. Philosophers AC Grayling, Nigel Warburton and Julian Baggini have already signed up to contribute - ensuring a standard of intellectual thought, which some would argue trumps many contributions aired on the BBC.

However, the corporation remains adamant that rules on religious programming preclude secular contributions and is committed to protecting religious slots from non-religious content.

A spokesman for BBC Scotland said: "Thought for the Day, within Good Morning Scotland each weekday morning, allows for a faith perspective on the issues which impact on modern-day Scotland.

"Secular viewpoints, perspectives and comments effectively contribute to the vast bulk of our output, much of which deals with the ethical and moral impact of public events and decisions."

However, despite the refusal of the BBC to enter into a debate on the issue, the Humanist Society of Scotland has successfully raised its profile in the media, and encouraged some impressively high-profile support with its podcast rebellion.

AC Grayling, who will also be making a podcast, says: "It is wrong that Thought for The Day refused to have any but religious voices on it. The far richer and longer-standing humanist tradition, stemming from Socrates to our own day, is a treasure house of insights and perspectives that our world is tragically lacking, oppressed as it is by mainly religion-fuelled divisions and atrocities.

"The Humanist Society of Scotland has done us a service in offering a real alternative to predictable pieties that now speak to minorities only in our society."

Author Iain Banks writes on the society's website. "I was always told that extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof; religions make the most utterly extraordinary claims while offering no real proof whatsoever, and yet are allowed to go unchallenged even by those who ought to know better.

"It is this unthinking acceptance of religion's absurd pampering that ideas like the Darwin Day podcasts seek to challenge. Such ideas have rarely been more timely."

On the first day, the renegade humanist Thought for The Day podcast, generated more than a thousand hits on the website. The site has been linked with 7,000 humanist organisations worldwide - but the real question is whether this approach can succeed in preaching to the unconverted.

Media analyst Professor Adrian Monck, who is to launch his own podcast series of discussions to promote his forthcoming book Crunch Time, says reaching a wider audience was always the challenge for web content.

"What these people really want is to talk to all the millions of people out there who tune in to Thought for the Day at 8:10am - but they are not allowed to because of the rules that govern religious programming," he says.

"It is a nice try by the humanists but it is just like starting a blog. You could write it quite easily with no-one knowing it exists. They are trying to let people know it exists by mounting a campaign against the BBC - which is not a bad way of attracting attention. But all media needs distribution, you need a marketing budget and you need advertising."

Nonetheless Brian McNair, professor of journalism and communication at Strathclyde University, believes the Scottish humanists may have hit upon a genuinely new idea with their podcast campaign.

"It is a very interesting example, which shows the potential of podcasts and other user-generated content," he says. "Podcasts have been used a lot as a promotional and marketing tool and for entertainment, most successfully by Ricky Gervais.

"With the growth of blogging and YouTube, both here and in the US, new media are being used quite extensively by political campaigners.

"But I am not aware of anyone using podcasts as the basis for a campaign or protest.

"The interesting thing will be to see if it finds an audience - particularly an audience beyond its own signed-up support."

Juliet Wilson, of the Scottish humanists, believes there are already signs the podcasts are developing their own momentum. With almost 1,000 hits on the first day, 7,000 links to sites worldwide and plenty of interest from the conventional media, she believes the humanist podcasts have hit a nerve, and hopes that what began as a protest may yet become a force in its own right.

In future, she plans to include contributions from Afghanistan and Iraq and to invite thoughts for the day from ordinary humanists, to run alongside the more high-profile contributions that have kicked off the campaign.

She says: "The site will bring humanists from around the world together and encourage discussion and debate.

"We have had a lot of publicity about thinkhumanist.org but luckily we don't have to rely on this as the internet has its own community and word spreads fast through people e-mailing their friends about the site and bloggers writing about it.

"Obviously we hope to get on Thought for The Day at some point but we intend to keep the site going because, if we are honest, we don't really need any endorsement from the BBC when we can put out Thought for the Day ourselves."