There is a delightful farrago to People Movers. Green often leaves the edges of the work untidy and the production values belay the independent budget and spirit. Her interviews conducted by phone are often of poor quality: her voice echoing, their voice coming through crackly and broken. This quality has been enough to turn me off podcasts before, but Green’s enthusiasm and her honesty, as she speaks of working in ‘my home studio – also known as the inside of my wardrobe’ (a technique perhaps most famously used by Millennial’s Megan Tan) is enough to carry the show through.
[Green] aims to refocus all our eyes on this prevalent part of our lives, and understand how these objects can be used to tell a social history of how our cities came to be.
Green leaves in filler words and noises, the ums and likes so often edited out; she keeps in snippets of inconsequential conversation, or her testing the pronunciation of words and names. Unusually, the whole of episode six is given over to running an interview with Green as the guest on Triple R’s Parallel Lines, where the host Sara Savage asks Green about these moments: ‘I guess the topic is inherently a little bit silly,’ she says, ‘[so] I feel like I’ve got a bit of creative license to be kind of silly myself and not take myself too seriously.’
This silliness is present in the playful sound-effects (in the transcripts for each episode, Green describes her sound mix in entirely accurate ways: ‘Sparkle sound effect’, ‘Crackling old-timey sound effect’, ‘Ta-da sound effect’) as well as in the music by Umbra, which somehow feels simultaneously current and like we’re in an 80s game show.
But while Green may be approaching herself and the topic with silliness, she’s also sincere in her approach, both to escalators and to her guests. As a journalist, I’ve often rued having to cut my interviewees’ answers for word counts, understandability, or brevity, and perhaps this is why I appreciate the space Green gives to her guests. Often, their answers are long winded and repetitive; they would be so easy to pare down. But in including these extended responses and ruminations, she unmasks their passion. In episode one, Roger Haig, the National Support Manager for KONE, says: ‘No it’s not a job, you’re right – it is a bit of a passion. It’s one of those industries, I guess, where it gets into your blood, it gets into your blood.’ By the end of their conversation, we know this is true.
People Movers perhaps feels most analogous to a zine: its absolute passion, its clutter, its untidied edges, its young voice, its singular committed focus.
Green is often self-deprecating, almost laughing at herself, but she is mostly excited by her passion – for escalators, yes, but also for podcasts and crafting audio stories. She never tries to hide her beautiful fervour, and it is infectious. In this way, People Movers perhaps feels most analogous to a zine: its absolute passion, its clutter, its untidied edges, its young voice, its singular committed focus.
So often what podcasts can do is highlight the joy of discovery. While sometimes that might be spread out over multiple stories on a theme, there is something special to Green’s fidelity which makes this extended focus work.
It is Green’s optimism which carries People Movers. She elevates a small story into one which sustains itself, shifting and changing, over multiple episodes. It both feels like this is a story Green could keep telling forever, but also like there are many other stories of our world which she could help us to explore.
