I've been Terry and Julie. I've stood on Hungerford Bridge, and it's one of my most magical memories.
Two episodes, recorded
Two pilots, chosen to show the range — the beauty and depth of Waterloo Sunset set against the darker cultural undercurrent of Deadly Women, two readings of nearly the same era.
Frances and Chris on Hungerford Bridge — the perfection of being alone in a crowd.
The fear under the femme fatale — ‘why isn't she interested in me?’
Plus a two-season slate of further episodes — full running order in the producers' pack.
Beyond the Sleeve
When an episode ends, we point at the record itself — the pressing, the stream, the book, the film. Here is the set for the Waterloo Sunset pilot.
Why these two
Every commissioner keeps a quiet space on the slate for a show they can half-describe and rarely find: clever without being cold, warm without being thin — deep enough to reward a second listen, alive enough that you don't want to leave the room. Two voices, not a lecture. A song you've heard a thousand times, made new in an hour. You know the slot. It's the one everyone means to fill and few ever do.
We're the two people for it — and, we'd wager, better than the two you'd been hoping to find.
Here's why it works: bring a single song to two very different libraries at once. One of us reads it through psychology, archetype, film and image — the shadow and the femme fatale, the hero who goes down in order to come back up. The other reads it through music and poetry and their architecture — how a line is built, why a melody aches, what the old lyric poets were doing that the songwriter is doing still. Most shows own one lens. A song sits at the crossroads of both of ours, and gets triangulated: history on one side, feeling on the other, the record itself in the middle.
And we're not two academics with microphones. We've performed together, on a stage, for years, and it's audible — the timing, the interruptions that land, the moment one of us opens a thought and the other takes it somewhere neither would have reached alone. Neither of us is the clever one; neither is the funny one; we make each other quicker. It's literary criticism, painted in theatre lights.
Give us a song — any song, your song — and we'll find the hour inside it. That's the part we'd want you to trust most: not that we've made these two pilots, but that we could make the next fifty.
Frances Sones
Trained musician and singer with an advanced qualification in literature. She doesn’t analyse a song, she performs the thinking of it — penetrating, joyful, the wry aside a beat behind, always moving the discourse and discussion in an inspired direction.
Dr Christopher J Smith
psychiatrist and music history lover
On the name
I suggested “Between the Lyrics.” Frances took out the the.
That small edit is the whole show. “Between the Lyrics” can only mean the words of a song. But a lyric, in its older sense, is a poet — someone in love with words and the way they’re built. Without the “the,” the two lyrics become us, Frances and me, as much as the song. So the show lives in both places at once: between the two of us, thinking aloud, and inside the words themselves.
One deleted article, and a flat phrase carries a double meaning. Saying that much in two words is, more or less, the whole job.
Why now
Most of this you'll already sense — it's part of why you're reading. We've just drawn the opportunity tightly, more tightly perhaps than a show usually bothers to, so nothing rests on trust.
Start where your eyes are: the audience, and what it's worth. The listener this show is made for is the one advertisers most want and least reach — attentive, affluent, and no longer podcasting's past but its growth engine. Over-55s are now a quarter of the UK podcast audience and its fastest-growing part; weekly listening runs highest in higher-income homes; and they're heavy, loyal and habitual — the kind of audience you build a business on, not just a season. That they still buy the record — vinyl is in its eighteenth straight year of growth — only tells you they spend on what they love.
And the market that pays for that audience is growing fast: UK podcast ad spend has roughly tripled since 2020, and in the US it passed $2.9bn last year. The ceiling for this exact format is already proven — The Rest Is History, two knowledgeable voices in close conversation and the nearest cousin to this show, now runs to over 20 million downloads and views a month, and everything a business that size sells: advertising, membership, live shows, the format itself.
Then the timing. The industry has just made its largest-ever bet on old songs — billions for the very catalogues these episodes read closely — while the majority of all streaming is now catalogue, not new releases. The appetite for intelligent attention on those songs, and the money behind them, are arriving at the same moment.
We won't over-explain what you already know. The point is only this: we know exactly who this show is for, exactly why the moment is now — and what that combination is worth. The full case, figures and sources and all, is in the producers' pack.