I've listened to Terry O'Reilly, a Canadian adman who's made several excellent CBC Radio One series on the art and history of marketing, for just short of 20 years. When his current project debuted simultaneously as a podcast, it proved so successful that he and his family (in a classic Canadian turn, Terry's production team contains more O'Reillys than the Dublin phone book) launched their own podcast production company to produce other worthy projects as well.
One of which Terry flacked (admen are born, not made) on his own podcast. So I gave it a spin.
It was great.
It was fresh.
It was life-changing.
We Regret To Inform You: The Rejection Podcast is required listening for anyone involved in a creative venture. In each episode, Sidney O'Reilly (daughter) unspools the tale of an iconic creator – writer, painter, filmmaker, athlete, actor, musician, anyone shopping his or her heart – and reveals how conventional wisdom treated them before they were famous.
Like Jesus Christ Superstar's 40 years in the desert, searching for a producer, any producer, to take on this massive cultural epiphany of the 70s.
Or the Temple of Doom that the guys who finally gave us Bat Out of Hell – Meatloaf's epic genre-busting rock-opera of an album – had to negotiate, and renegotiate, and abandon, and reconfront, and assault again, to get one of pop music's most thunderous masterworks into listeners' hands.
Or the 15-year odyssey, complete with Cyclops and sea monsters, that the gods sent Mad Men on before they'd (grudgingly) allow it to become a landmark of modern television.
All beloved household names, all gold standards in their domains now. Every last one sneered down, dismissed as sophomoric, laughable, unsaleable, boring, tragically lame.
Over and over and over.
Till the day they redefined art.
As a writer, Regret populates my solitude and refuels my soul. The main movement of each episode, in which Sidney recounts in full numbing splendour all the obstacles these people had to overcome to reach the summit, is skeletal support for those of us in the foothills. When we've relived this ordeal, and are basking vicariously in the subject's earned glory, Terry steps in to deliver a pithy, potent epilogue, summing up what we've learned, and ending on the show's simple – but in that moment, roaring – catch phrase:
"Never – ever – give up."
I've teared up more than once.
Finally, as the theme music rises, we get an envoi: a synthesised voice lists the winding litany of triumphs, awards, firsts, and fortunes amassed by this pathetic geek whom no-one is ever going to take seriously.
The whole experience leaves me restored, replenished, and ready to horse up again. If you too are an artist – or just a fan – I suspect it'll do the same for you.
You can hear We Regret To Inform You: The Rejection Podcast on its own website, or download it to your favourite device from iTunes/Apple Podcast or wherever fine podcasts are downloaded.
Best of luck to everyone who's building today, in this dictatorship of yesterday.
(Photo of Australian painter Tom Roberts' Rejected, in which the artist contemplates a rejected work, courtesy of the ABC and Wikimedia Commons.)
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