A good number of people have asked me whether Mad Dogs and Englishmen will survive Kevin’s move to the Atlantic. The answer, alas, is no. The last show we did was the last we’ll do. That’s it, folks.
I shall miss doing them immensely. Kevin and I recorded 198 in total, and what you heard on each was what we heard too. We never did any planning, editing, or post-production; we never knew what the other person was going to say, or even what we were going it talk about; and we were notoriously appalling at keeping any sort of schedule. The idea first came about when we were both working in the same office in New York City. On most days, looking for an excuse to take a break from writing, I would saunter down to Kevin’s office and start chatting. Usually, this would lead us off into a 30-minute conversation—typically about whatever I’d opened with, be it George Orwell, shotguns, baked beans, real estate in Wyoming, or what you will. Eventually, we thought it might be a good idea to stick a microphone in between us and put the file on the Internet. This we did, and we called the result “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.”
Almost from the beginning we got into the habit of supplying false endings, usually in the form of Kevin asking a question—“Know what I really like about Debbie Wasserman Schultz?”—and then switching off the tape. It amused us greatly that, even as we racked up more than a hundred episodes and our audience grew into the tens of thousands, we constantly received emails from listeners who complained about the peculiar technical fault that always seemed to abridge the file on a cliffhanger.
Now, though, the show really is over. I will be starting a new show pretty soon, and I’m going to post the first couple of episodes to the old MDE feed. So if you’re subscribed to that feed, and are interested in what comes next, please stay subscribed for now.