Helen Zaltzman was named the 2018 Podcast Champion at the British Podcast Awards and her podcast 'The Allusionist' was crowned the smartest podcast at the festival. Helen chatted with Sean Rocks on Arena ahead of her upcoming appearance at the Dublin Podcast Festival at the end of September and explained a little bit about what her podcast aims to do.
"(It's) an entertainment show that is about language and mostly the English language because that's the one I'm most competent in so it's about the history of words and expressions and why we use words in the ways that we do… The English language is quite the mishmash of elements and so it's very interesting language to examine and then also people are interesting so that's the main thing."
As evidenced by the title, Helen is a master pun artist herself, albeit a reluctant one. She came from a "pun-heavy family" and said "I hate puns – that's my form of family rebellion – but I still have an aptitude for them, it's still innate."
A love of words was inescapable for Helen and rather than fight it any longer, she embraced her fate and turned into a phenomenally popular podcast.
"As I dug more into language, I realised the rules, a lot of them are made up by some 18th century grammarians who wanted English to behave like Latin which it refuses to do and also just when you're telling someone they used a word wrong, it means you're not really paying attention to what they're trying to express to you."
Click here for more from the Dublin Podcast Festival or you can click here to listen to Arena.