Tony Martin’s ‘Sizzletown’ reaches one million downloads

Comedian Tony Martin has officially hit the pause button on his hugely successful Sizzletown podcast, but not before it reached an extraordinary milestone.

The ‘world’s first late-night call-in’ podcast has been downloaded more than one million times.  It’s a feat that many dream of, but very few achieve.

However, he’s told Radio Today that he’s taking a break from the myriad characters that inhabit the world of Sizzletown.  

“We announced our hiatus a couple of weeks back because, sadly, we have to make a living and there’s just no way you can do this show half-arsed. 

“The plan is to do another full series in 2021, but hopefully we’ll be sneaking out some surprise episodes over the next year. 

“Our ‘Unplugged’ series has been surprisingly popular, so there could be some more of those as well.”

Martin began working on the Sizzletown project with producer Matt Dower in early 2018 with the first of 40 episodes released in April of that year.

It quickly gained a loyal following, which Martin admits took them by surprise.

“It’s such a bizarre idea, we thought the ‘Get This’ fans would be into it, but otherwise it’d be relegated to the ‘cult’ bin.

“But the very first episode had one of our maddest callers, Dion, in it, and within a week people were yelling ‘What’s it gonna be???” to me from cars. Then I knew we were onto something.”

Creating a podcast with a million downloads is a huge undertaking, which Martin acknowledges is one of the reasons for the 2020 hiatus. 

He says making it sound like an ‘unfolding shambles’ takes a lot of work, especially for Dower on the ‘Pots ‘n Pans’.

“A lot of people don’t realise that I’m playing all the callers, and making it sound like we’re genuinely interacting takes hours and hours of editing.

“Matt spends ages moving individual breaths around to make it sound natural. And because all the calls are initially improvised, there’s a huge amount of logging and whittling down to get even a usable two-minute call.

“All those sequences where I’m being attacked by birds on a flying fox, or having daggers hurled at me on a runaway revolving platform – to give just two examples – have led to all-nighters for the already overworked Matt.

“But we love making full use of the ‘bells and whistles’ and fiddling about with stereo. It’s addictive for a couple of audio nerds. And the fact that no-one else in the world is really doing this stuff to this extent is a great motivator.”

Away from Sizzletown, Dower is busy as a voice-over artist and audio producer for Triple M’s national drive show Kennedy Molloy. 

Martin also has plenty on his plate. He makes regular appearances on Nova 100’s breakfast show; Chrissy, Sam and Browny, Channel 10’s Have You Been Paying Attention and is also pushing ahead with a plan to walk every street of Melbourne.

In the meantime, we’ll have to wait for the promised ‘surprise’ episodes to get our fix of Sizzletown.