Ten Years of Beef and Dairy

Benjamin Partridge and Benjamin Partridge, ten years apart.

TEN YEARS OF THE PODCAST FOR THOSE INVOLVED - OR JUST INTERESTED - IN THE PRODUCTION OF BEEF ANIMALS AND DAIRY HERDS

Today saw the release of Episode 124 of The Beef and Dairy Network Podcast, marking ten years since the show began! If you haven’t ever heard (herd?) it, it’s notoriously difficult to describe. After ten years of being involved in the show myself, here’s my best go: it’s a sketch comedy show that’s also a very abstract sitcom that’s posing as a hyper-specific industry podcast about cow farming. But if you have heard (herd?) it, you know that barely scratches the surface.

I first saw Benjamin Partridge in his one-man Edinburgh Fringe hour An Audience With Jeff Goldblum, wherein Ben took to the stage purporting to be Jeff Goldblum while quite evidently not being Jeff Goldblum. It was an hour of brilliantly-composed little segments, games and running jokes, and looking back was a perfect prototype for what was to come. I still think about Jeff’s dinner diary, and about Trout Night, regularly.

A scant two years after that, Ben and I spoke quite a bit about podcasts because, of course, the team and I were just about to launch our own bid for digital audio glory, Wooden Overcoats. We compared notes on how to get people to actually listen to these things, and I think the truth is the same now as it was then: bar keeping it going and posting online about it a lot, there’s no real dependable answer. And anybody who says differently is selling something. Probably something that involves AI.

Perhaps because he knew I was already doing voice stuff on BBC Radio and with Overcoats, or perhaps because he knew how desperately underemployed I was at that time, Ben got me involved with some early episodes of Beef and Dairy, which was excellent because I was already a loyal listener and loved its udders off. In December 2015, I was called in to voice Robert Wrightworth, who sells candles on the dark web, in Episode 6: The Cumberfeld Cow Disaster and Paul Paul. I said one sentence. Since then I’ve played a man who’s lost his cow, a man who’s lost his daughter to a devastating lamb addiction, an unqualified arts critic, a demented actor with a sideline in seasonal heavy metal and King Penagor of the Lowland Folk, among many others. I even played Benjamin Partridge, in a way, when at the first ever British Podcast Awards in 2017, Beef and Dairy took home the Gold Award for Best Comedy Podcast and, with Ben unavailable to attend the ceremony, I went up to accept the award in his honour.

I’ve come to be one of the more frequent guest performers in the show over the years and while so many talented people, among them Ted Danson, have contributed to the mighty Beef Monolith over the years, I’m proud of my little part of it and I’m always grateful and giddy whenever Ben comes a-knocking with his rancid beef wagon. He has become one of my most faithful employers and frequent comedy collaborators and I feel terribly, terribly lucky. He has also been a crucial point of inspiration. If I hadn’t sat in various parks and public plazas with him and a portable field recroder, I doubt I’d ever have worked up the courage and the work ethic to start making my own self-produced sketch comedy podcast. Listening to the all-of-Beef-and-Dairy-so-far megamix in today’s Episode 124 was as moving as it was funny, looking back over all the brilliant, funny, weird sketches I got to be part of and all the excellent people I’ve had the chance to work with, whether up close or remotely, by the grace of beef.

While I don’t find it any easier to describe the show, after appearing in forty-five episodes including four live shows, all I can say for sure is that it’s very funny, it’s very strange, it’s quite disturbing at times, it’s ferociously imaginative, there’s a lot of talk about cows but it’s not always about cows, and it’s exactly the sort of radio comedy mega-achievement that can only really happen through podcasting. Good beef to you, Benjamin Partridge, and to all the beeves in your paddock. Beef out.