One of the UK’s most successful podcasts has hit a huge milestone ahead of its return for a new series tomorrow.
How To Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven’t gone right, has reached 35million downloads since its launch in 2018.
Guests featured are people we don’t often hear from, who offer a different kind of interview about the failures they’ve encountered throughout their life that have helped them reach an extraordinary level of success.
The podcast was born out of a trip to LA, when Elizabeth Day was looking for a solution to how she felt after a series of setbacks in life. While listening to podcasts about other people failing, Elizabeth realised that from all her own, some good had come out of each one.
She drew the artwork herself and eBayed her wedding dress for her (failed) first marriage to fund the first series. Elizabeth asked her good friend Phoebe Waller Bridge to be her opening guest in a first episode that’s now been listened to over 635,000 times.
How To Fail soon topped the podcast charts, winning the Rising Star Award at the British Podcast Awards 2019 and receiving rave reviews from the media. The podcast has gone on to sell-out live tours in venues such as the London Palladium, the National Theatre and Southbank Centre, and has inspired three books.
Past guests have included famous actors, bestselling authors and most acclaimed thought-leaders from Andrew Scott who discusses his failure to be heteronormative, Daisy Edgar-Jones who discussed her need for constant validation, Brene Brown who discusses the failure of her early writing career and Simu Liu who discusses rebelling against his parents’ restrictive and sometimes abusive behaviour.
The new series returns with a first guest who’s never going to give you up, let you down, run around and desert you – no prizes for working out who that is!
How To Fail with Elizabeth Day will be available to listen to every Wednesday from 4 January.
