Episode sorting

Over the weekend, P2P project leader Bruce Ryan has been considering the division of our recorded material into episodes for our podcast series. Bruce says:

'We now know the rough combined duration of all components of the Diary of the war podcast series, i.e. the full length of all the diary entries, the BBC news items, and newspaper 'cuttings'. Although these data are not final – we still need to edit out a few pauses and edit in some ‘pick-ups’, and add timings for the announcer's words and our theme tune - they are good enough for us to start thinking about dividing the content into episodes. In addition to roughly 3 hours of material for the Diary of the war, we also have about 35 minutes of poetry for our bonus episodes.
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'A decision to present episodes of equal length, such as 15 minutes or any other arbitrary time, would leave them feeling incomplete. I believe that each episode should tell a coherent part of the war as chronicled by Lorna. ‘One episode per month’ also wouldn’t work either because Lorna wrote intermittently. For example, there are many more diary entries in September 1939 (30) than there are in September 1940 (5).

'So my initial thoughts are that we present eight episodes:

1. Declarations of war, beginning of fighting to cover September 1 to September 7 1939
2. Fall of Poland to cover September 8 to September 30 1939
3. 'Peace', preparations for more attacks by Germany to cover 1 October to 20 November 1939
4. Fall of Finland  to cover 30 November 1939 to 15 March 1940
5. Fall of Norway and Denmark  to cover 9 April to 8 May 1940
6. Fall of Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and France to cover 10 May to 3 August 1940
7. Battle of Britain to cover 4 August to 12 December 1940
8. Goodbye Lorna 31 to cover December 1940 to 5 February 1942

'This, however, raises another issue. Episodes 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7 would be between 22 and 29 minutes in length. Meanwhile Episode 1 would last just 16 minutes, Episode 5 would be 14, and Episode 8 only 11. Does this matter? Given there is so much grief in Episode 11, I don’t mind that being short. However, more thought may be needed about the other episodes.

'For the poetry, I am thinking of 4 episodes: 1930 and earlier; early 1930s, mid to late 1930s, 1940s and unknown composition dates. The themes of Lorna's poems are so diverse that it’s impossible for me to think of a suitable classification.  In addition, I'm not sure that an episode full of comedic poems followed by an episode full of dark themes would work.

'Here's hoping that the P2P will crack the question of the scheduling of content into episodes this coming week.'