Meet Tom Whalley

by Matilda Price

‘I'm just a guy that loves audio, and I love podcasts.’

Listeners will know Tom Whalley as a long-term producer of The Cycling Podcast and co-host of Service Course, but what they may not realise is that this is only a fraction of what he does. An award-winning producer, Tom works on podcasts on everything from football to The Wire, as well as The Huey Show on BBC 6Music – all from a shed where he has to climb over his bike to get to his desk.

Despite working almost exclusively in podcasts now, Tom started his career in radio shortly after leaving college. He learnt the trade at BBC Radio Nottingham – as a self-confessed “proper local radio bod”, doing everything from answering the phones to driving the radio car – before moving to his dream station, BBC 6Music.

After ten years working in radio, it was circumstances rather than design that led Tom to audio freelancing. He was due to leave 6Music and return to Radio Nottingham, but when a job came up producing The Huey Show – on a freelance basis – he took it.

“I never thought I’d be self-employed, but I’ve been self-employed ever since. This is my tenth or eleventh year of being a freelancer and I love it, it’s brilliant.”

In the last decade, Tom has turned his hand to everything from guest lecturing to running an independent record label, but podcasting now forms the bulk of his work. As a freelancer in an industry where there’s seemingly a podcast for everyone, Tom counts himself lucky to be able to work on such a wide range of projects, and on topics he loves.

“I’ll put my phone on in the morning, I'll look at my podcast app, and I'll probably delete about four. And that's because I've made them. I get to make some of my favourite shows.”

Not every show is a passion project – it’s not a surprise to hear that he doesn’t produce the British Standards Institute because he’s a fervent standards fan – but the same skills and notions of audio storytelling apply to every job.

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Though now a prolific podcast producer, joining The Cycling Podcast back in 2015 was one of Tom’s first major steps into the format that was only then starting to expand into the mainstream.

“Obviously Serial was the big one. That changed the way everyone viewed podcasts,” he says, referring to Sarah Koenig’s 2014 series on the case of Adnan Syed.

“And then the first big podcast that I got involved with was The Cycling Podcast and that changed everything for me. I got in touch with Lionel as a listener. I thought, well, I love cycling, I’m a cyclist myself and I do audio. I can make a difference here.”

Since then, Tom has been a regular producer of the podcast, these days focusing mainly on special episodes, Grand Tour coverage, and areas where he can experiment with sound design.

On his favourite episodes, it’s perhaps not surprising that Tom mentions the travelogue-style Lionel of Flanders and its Ardennes companion, as well as the short-form, energetic Kilometre 0 – programmes that require creative production and fine-tuned editing.

However, he adds, sometimes it can be a small segment or a particular detail in a longer episode that stands out to him.

“I've just done a bit with Lionel for a Magnus Bäckstedt special and Lionel did a section where he was doing a bit of voiceover to describe Bäckstedt’s 2004 Paris-Roubaix win. I mixed that with some archive commentary from the race, with a bit of ambient music in there. It’s only three minutes or something, but it just sounds a million dollars.”

“I love producing podcasts that are basically two people talking to each other, but if I can do more complicated ones with music and voices and archive material, I really love doing that.”

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As well as producing, Tom took up presenting in 2019, hosting Service Course with Lizzy Banks. While a change in role, Tom says getting in front of the mic wasn’t too big a challenge.

“At one point in time, presenting was what I thought I wanted to do,” he says. “But you realise that if you’re a radio presenter, a lot of the time you’re on air five days a week and you can’t be feeling great every day. It’s actually quite daunting the idea of having to get up and entertain people every day.

“So I like doing stuff in front of the mic, but actually, I realised that maybe production was the best thing for me in terms of the main part of my job, with just doing little bits of presenting here and there.”

The presenting may be relatively straightforward, but after years of producing other people, how does he find editing himself?

“It’s so much harder,” he says. “The show itself is not difficult to produce. But if I've got two shows to finish off that day, and one of them has got my voice on it, the other one doesn't, I'll finish the other one first.”

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With a radio show, multiple production projects and a hosting job on the go, Tom’s plate seems pretty full, but he’s still keen to explore new avenues. He’s currently working on a comedy pilot, and would like to test the waters with fiction or a big narrative project, though he concedes the challenge is finding the right story to tell.

He may be busier than ever, but it’s clear that Tom Whalley is full of ideas, enthusiasm and skill to bring to the expansive podcast world, from his little shed in the Peak District.