Today with tonies has just hit a thousand episodes and Audio Always has been working on the show for the past year. Hundreds of listeners, with the help of their adults, sent in voice notes to mark it: messages about what the show means to them, impressions of the big bubbling buckets, and even Happy Birthday played on what sounded like every instrument a four to seven year old can get their hands on.
A thousand episodes of a daily show is a massive milestone. Here’s what they sound like from the inside with Producer Matty Smith.
I’m a Producer working across multiple projects, with a focus on our kids and parenting audience. So my job involves developing and nurturing content which makes kids go ‘ooo’, ‘aaah’, and laugh their socks off. Most of my time goes on Today with tonies, a daily show with an audience of truly besotted four to seven year olds.
I usually spend the morning writing the scripts. In each episode, presenters Sam and Tim dive into the Big Bubbling Bucket of Challenges, where they have to navigate unpredictable gizmos to unearth that day’s challenges. The games can be educational, comical and musical, so it’s fairly common for me to petition the Audio Always office for any spare bombastic facts. Other days I find myself researching surreal questions like ‘can a fish fish?’.
Afternoons are for recording episodes with Sam and Tim, reviewing the latest edits from our stellar team, and looking for opportunities to grow the show.
I’ve somewhat lived two lives in my career, balancing full-time 9-5 jobs while developing a profession as a freelance playwright. The office jobs have revolved around programming movies for airlines, supporting primary schools with educational audio stories, and selling ad space for radio stations.
All the while, evenings and weekends were reserved for writing plays and securing commissions here and there for theatres like The Lowry and broadcasters like the BBC.
Producing at Audio Always is the first time I’ve merged the experience I built up in office jobs with the skills I’ve shaped as a freelancer. It’s utterly lovely that these worlds have now collided.
Today with tonies includes listener voice notes, where our fantastic audience can share any kind of recent good news. It’s an absolute delight hearing them talk about riding bikes without stabilisers for the first time, visits from tooth fairies, and singing solos in school plays.
In one of the first episodes I recorded, a kid contacted the show because they got a new microwave. So if I ever have a day feeling a bit blue, I can easily feel better by remembering the really sweet listener who was over the moon about their new microwave WHICH GRILLS TOO!
Getting hundreds of voice notes in for the 1,000th episode felt like the same thing at scale.
Today with tonies is daily. As Audio Always continues to attract and secure new projects, I’ll also be supporting the wider team with scriptwriting, compliance and other producer-y duties.
Thanks to every listener who sent something in for episode 1,000, and to Sam, Tim and the production team who make the show sound so brilliant.