Pilot: why we started

Hello, and welcome to the first episode of Room Tone. I'm Ada Lindqvist.

And I'm Tomás Reyes. We're recording this at Ada's kitchen table, so if you hear a kettle, that's the kettle.

It's a good kettle. It stays in.

How did we meet, for the people who are wondering?

At a radio station, in a corridor, arguing about whether a two-minute pause could ever be good radio.

I said no. Ada said yes. She was right, and I have never fully recovered.

The pause was a farmer deciding whether to sell his land. You could hear him breathing. Nobody switched off.

So, why this show? We both spent years making radio about big things. Elections, budgets, people with press officers.

And the best conversations always happened after the microphone was off. With the engineer, the cleaner, the woman who ran the café downstairs. People who do skilled, quiet work and are rarely asked about it.

A baker who starts at three in the morning knows things about patience that most managers would pay to learn.

So the idea is simple. Every week, one person, one job, and the questions we actually want to ask. How do you price it? What goes wrong? What do you hear that the rest of us don't?

We go to where they work, too. The sound of the place is part of the story.

And we keep it short. We'd rather you finished an episode than saved it for later and forgot.

One more thing about the name. Room tone is the sound a recordist captures when everyone in the room is silent. Editors use it to stitch a conversation together without anyone noticing.

It's the quiet underneath the talking. That felt like the right name for a show about work that happens in the background.

And it's the first thing our sound recordist guest asked us to do, in episode three. You'll hear it.

Thirty seconds of nothing. It was the most nervous I've ever been on a microphone.

Coming up, we'll meet a café owner who works the night shift at a ferry port, a sound recordist, a letterpress printer, a bike mechanic and a baker.

New episodes come out on Thursdays. If you know someone whose work deserves a closer listen, there's a form on our website. We read every one.

We'll also answer listener questions now and then in short bonus episodes, so send them in. Nothing is too small to ask. Thanks for pressing play.

This has been Room Tone. See you on Thursday.