Ross Sutherland
Ross Sutherland is the host of Imaginary Advice. Follow him on Twitter here.
Kindly introduce yourself and tell us what you do!
My name is Ross Sutherland— I make the podcast Imaginary Advice (write, host & edit) predominantly based in the bottom of a wardrobe in Peterborough, England.
The podcast is a combination of fiction and essays. Pretty much everything is written specifically for the podcast. The show is always changing form (and you can listen to the episodes in any order), but overall there's a trippy, late night feel to the programme. If you like Joe Frank, Black Mirror, Night Vale, Blue Jam...it’s that kind of territory.
Imaginary Advice doesn't seem to follow "rules" that other podcasts follow...every episode is totally different. Do you set any rules for yourself when creating content?
I work really hard to change the format every month (even though it makes the podcast much harder to describe to people). When I was a kid, I used to listen to John Peel on BBC Radio 1 and I always loved how he’d play Norwegian death metal one minute and then Mad Cobra the next. Every Peel session was a journey into the unknown! I’ve tried my best to emulate that on the podcast. For one episode I’ll write a blow-by-blow novelisation of the film Rumble in the Bronx, then the next I’ll pretend to be a podcast about horse facts. I try to imagine it’s a bit like spinning the dial on late night radio and finding a weird show that you’ll never be able to find again (and you can never quite work out if it’s drama or a documentary, but either way you have to listen to the end.)
I remember a radio commissioner once telling me “if you don’t have a format, you don’t have a product”. That kinda hurt at the time. But now I find it quite liberating. Because... it’s OK not to make a “product”. Podcasting is also an art-form in it’s own right, and art doesn’t need to be validated as a product in order to exist.
Even though the format of the show is always changing, there are a couple of things that remain constant. For example, every episode has a lot of emphasis on sound design and score. I’m always trying to create something that feels immersive, or to use editing creatively to achieve something that I couldn't do in a book or on stage.
Also most episodes feature some kind of combination of essay-writing and storytelling. My audio fiction episodes tend to have mini-essays hidden inside them (a bit like an extended footnotes), and my essay episodes often have little poem interludes (which function a bit like dream sequences in the essays). I think podcasting as a medium is well-suited to these kind of experiments... Audio is so mutable. And overheads are low! Which is always handy when it comes to taking risks, fucking around, etc.
Are there any rules you think podcasters should adhere to when creating a show?
I run occasional podcasting workshops where I get the group to come up with the worst idea for a podcast they can and then present it to the rest of the group. The next phase is to review these terrible podcasts and ask “what is the one tweak that would make these terrible ideas into amazing shows?” And every time, the group manages to spin these dogshit ideas into podcasting gold. What’s the lesson here? Maybe that the difference between a terrible idea and an amazing one is, like, one degree?
Good ideas often come from breaking some unspoken rule. When I come across a new author/musician/ podcaster I love, my first thought tends to be ”I didn’t know we were allowed to do that...”
Also, for new people starting (particularly if you’re doing it with no training, like me)— remember that the more you edit, the better the program will be. It’s a lot easier to enjoy the messiness of the creative process if you give yourself time and space to tidy up afterwards. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself that.
Where should people begin if they want to dive into Imaginary Advice?
Maybe the episode Six House Parties, which is about a rivalry between two people played out over a summer of fancy dress parties. I don’t want to give spoilers but FYI at the end the entire universe gets turned inside out and explodes.
Can you tell us how you came up with the name Imaginary Advice?
Lots of episodes of Imaginary Advice are about the act of storytelling: why we tell stories, how they help us (or deceive us), etc. So the title is connected to that.
The title of the podcast is basically two aspects of fiction jammed together. Fiction comes from the imagination, it’s pure simulation. But fiction is also a teaching tool, helping us observe the world. Separately, these aspects make sense, but when you put those two words side-by-side, they feel wrong. “Imaginary Advice” feels like a contradiction. The two words almost seem to cancel each other out. If a story is imaginary, then is the moral of the story also fake? Or... if all fictions are just thinly veiled moral lessons, then don’t we have to take everything inside them as the voice of the author, therefore real?
It’s OK if no one else reads the title like that... But that’s what it means to me personally. The podcast exists in this strange twilight area between fiction and non-fiction. In that kind of space, you have to live with certain contradictions, and the title was an attempt to speak to that.
Jesus, I’m making the podcast sound really serious. It’s really not that serious. For a podcast title that pretentious, the show itself is immensely stupid at times.
Okay now we have to talk about Sex and The City: The Return, one of my favorite things I've listened to, ever. (Listen to part one here, part two here.) Are you a SATC fan? How on earth did you put that story together, with all the brilliant references?
I’m so glad you liked it! It was important for me to make sure that the story made sense to people who had never seen a single episode of SATC. Still, there are lots of references for fans.
I’d actually never watched any of SATC before writing the story. But lockdown had just started and I was in the market for a new show. I liked it way more than I expected. Particularly the first couple of seasons. Also, I really recommend the podcast So I Got to Thinking as the perfect companion to any 2020 SATC re-watch. It’s made by Juno Dawson and Dylan B Jones and it does a great job of taking the show and re-examining it through a modern lens.
The idea for the story came after going to watch Sleep No More in New York on my honeymoon. My wife and I had a not-great experience at the show, but I got really interested in the online community that surrounded it. These bloggers have mapped every corner of the play, they know it minute-by-minute. And they still have this unwavering belief that vast secrets remain to be discovered.They’re really writing the show itself, and making it way more interesting than it actually is.
In the end, I guess my story ended up being less about SATC, more about fandom in general. How superfans can become so obsessed with little details that they can’t remember what the story was about in the first place.
What is the best experience for listening to Imaginary Advice? Walking, sitting, in bed, with someone, eating?
I got a message from someone in Auckland who said they listened to part one of my exorcist ghost story on their way to work in a bar, and were looking forward to listening to part two on the foggy walk home at 4am. Now I make all my episodes thinking of that person. They’re my ideal listener, I think.
So yeah, definitely best way to listen to the show is to get a bar job in New Zealand, wait til a foggy night, then listen on your way home.
What are you working on now? What can we be excited about?
Right now I’m working on a fiction miniseries about a cult called The Golden House. As well as being a drama, the series also contains some ARG elements.... every episode contains a puzzle, and solving the puzzles leads the listener to bonus chapters hidden elsewhere on the internet. It’s a new challenge for me and I can’t wait to share it. It’ll be up on the Imaginary Advice feed from Sep 1st, as well as available as its own series.
Thanks, Ross!