[Ash101]

Claudia Winkleman just confirmed on the BBC Two aftershow that she makes the decision alongside the producers, though the Claudia-contestant discussions do play a part.

Considering the series starts with 22 contestants, those Claudia chats must take ages!

---

As a general point, I’m still not really sure what is gained from doing the spin-off as a visualised podcast - they could have still done a TV spin-off and the podcast in the same way as they did this series, but I don’t think the TV show gets anything out of being branded as part of the podcast. The audience surely doesn’t care about this sort of thing and, apart from the mics being front and centre (surely a lapel mic wouldn’t have sounded *that* bad for audio listeners!) and there being a couple more rough edits than you would expect (the odd mic left up, one of the lights on Ed turned off part-way through and there were a few odd camera cuts), the production quality was still very similar to just a normal studio-based TV show. At least they weren’t all wearing headphones on-screen for no reason (looking at you Newscast!).

I'm not sure there were any mic's left up... they've been able to speak over the clips of the show all series on Uncloaked, for reasons I can't quite understand.

I do agree that it is an odd set up.... if they wanted the extra BBC Sounds stuff, surely doing an additional 15 minutes could've still happened.