How I produced a podcast while suffering from Aphasia
In 2019, I had a bleed on my brain. When I was in hospital I was diagnosed with Aphasia which is an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write. For me, speaking was difficult as was writing. Interesting, I could read perfectly well in my head but not out loud.
With some speech therapy, I began to recover but I am still not back to my old self. Move forwards to the spring of 2021 and I had some further sessions with a speech therapist who suggested that I should start writing something in earnest rather just exercises.
I have a film script I had written in 2018 called Three for the Road and someone suggested it would make radio play and I came up with the idea of a podcast. I called a friend of mine who is a professional actor and he agree to do it. I used the film script as the basis and slowing turned it into a radio play/podcast. We cast the actors and my friend suggested I played one the main characters. At first, I cannot see how it would work as I can’t read or speak fluently enough to deliver whole speeches. He persuaded me to give it a go and slowly we worked out way of doing it. We would play a scene and I would give it my best shot and then in post-production I would redo the lines I had trouble with. As we were still in lock-down, the actors were recorded remotely so, surprisingly, it didn’t take much longer to record than normal.
After some post-production work turning the script into 3 episodes, it was launched in the beginning of August 2021.
To listen to Three for the Road, go onto any of the following sites:
