The episodes of “A Year in Europe” I listened to all start with hosts Scott and Sheryl describing the latest leg in the tour while they’re accompanied by some kind of background noise. You can hear the weather and movement on the streets while the Northern California couple reminisces over what they’ve just seen in Germany over France. While Listening to the show I wish the listeners were allowed to find out what was going on out on those streets (and pathways and hills) than just hearing the couple upfront talk about it. “A Year in Europe” is an interesting idea, especially since Americans tend to have an isolationist bent, but I found that the execution isn’t best for this format.
This podcast suffers from a “show, don’t tell” problem. If you have friends who come back from Europe you don’t want them to just talk to you about it. You want to see pictures and videos. Indeed I found embedded videos and a FLICKR group on the show’s website. That content doesn’t appear when you get the show through iTunes, though. What you get is the hour long conversations of Scott and Sheryl as they list what they saw. Like a lot of podcasts it’s a very casual conversation. After fifteen minutes I didn’t want to just hear about sights such as old German castles. I wanted to see them!
The hosts talk about going on museum tours. Imagine if you got the audio tour for a museum but not the actually paintings and artifacts in the museum to go along with it. That’s what “A Year in Europe” felt like at times, certainly by the end of an hour long show. Perhaps if the shows were shorter I wouldn’t have minded. It would have been interesting to hear some of the details of the trip while they were happening, although I understand that’s not always a possibility. I just needed something to create some sparks for this show.