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Oh My Word

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developmentdesignfootball1990spodcasting

Oh My Word is a podcast I made with Michael Moruzzi a few years ago: sixteen episodes on Watford FC in the 1990s, a season at a time, with detours into matchdays, fanzines and the man who commentated on it all. It has sat on Spotify and Apple ever since, which is another way of saying it has been unsearchable.

That is what the new site is for. Previously: twenty hours of two people talking about Kevin Phillips and Graham Taylor’s return, and no way to find the bit you half-remember. Every episode now carries its full transcript on the page, each paragraph anchored to its timestamp, so you can send someone the exact minute instead of telling them it is somewhere in the 1996-97 one.

The transcripts were the hard bit. Speech recognition knows little about football and less about Watford: Vicarage Road came back as “Riccarton Road”, Roger ‘Harry’ Willis turned up twice in the same sentence (once was too many), and at one point my agency’s name leaked out of the transcription tool’s account settings and made a stadium announcer into “the Omne Tannoy”. A thousand-odd corrections later, they read… better.

What stayed in is the part I find more interesting. Michael gave Luther Blissett’s last goal as his 168th; the club record is 186. I read out Wimbledon’s scorers and say Robbie Keane, who never played for them, when I meant Robbie Earle. Both are on the tape exactly as written down. Fixing the transcription is the job. Fixing the speaker is somebody else’s.

Some details worth noting:

  • Clicking a timestamp seeks the audio and docks a small player, so the transcript stays a transcript instead of turning into a second play button
  • A #t-5326 link cues that moment on arrival without autoplaying
  • Sixteen text files and one JSON file go in, seventeen pages come out, via a Python script. No framework, no build step
  • The design is matchday programme by way of fanzine: Big Shoulders Display over Newsreader, printed on newsprint that is not there

The name is Mike Vince’s. He commentated on Watford for local radio for years and said “oh my word” whenever the afternoon called for it. Episode ten is the best part of an hour with him.