Why podcasts kill creativity

Even more worrying is the fact that Serial's success is also playing a major role in TV documentaries. This threatens the quirky, more auteur-written one-offs that were once a major part of the TV ecosystem and have now all but disappeared. It's unlikely that a documentary writer like Nick Broomfield (the director of Kurt and Courtney and The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife, about the far-right Afrikaner nationalist Eugène Terre'Blanche) would find a platform today if he started out.

In fact, one-off shows are a problem in general, and podcasts fuel the idea that everything has to be a series, a potential bingefest for bored and sleepless people to binge on. I think radio drama is particularly vulnerable. At the BBC, the main broadcaster of radio drama, the closure of Woman's Hour Drama and Friday Play means there are fewer opportunities for aspiring and experienced playwrights.

It's true that drama podcasts are in relatively good health (technically you could say The Archers is a podcast, as it's available in that format on BBC Sounds), but they are episodic in nature and tend to follow a particular structure, like Life Lines, which is set in an emergency call centre.

While Audible, Amazon's audiobook service, has come to the rescue with some star-studded adaptations, such as David Copperfield, which was executive produced by Sam Mendes and starred Helena Bonham Carter, such ventures are few and far between. These commercial producers don't have the capacity to produce endless dramas, and if they do, more worryingly, they're more likely to choose big brand names than up-and-coming authors. Tom Stoppard began his career writing short radio plays. Would a new name from Stoppard's unfettered intellectual genius get a hearing today?

I'm not critical of most podcasts – and I believe they offer a unique experience that radio can't – like deep analysis that regular radio can't match. However, when it comes to the creative side of things, I think it's time for a rethink. As it is, podcasts feed the mind but not the soul.