“It was so much fun,” John Oliver writes in an email. “It was basically an hour of laughing at Andy every week.” Oliver is talking about The Bugle, the clever, biting, and laugh-out-loud-in-your-cubicle-at-work audio newspaper that Oliver and Andy Zaltzman created back in 2007.

The Bugle started out at the Times in London with weekly doses of what they called “satire and bullshit”, with Oliver and Zaltzman cracking each other up with a steady string of puns from Zaltzman and hysterical outrage from Oliver. The show became one of the most popular comedy podcasts in the UK with roughly 400,000 weekly downloads. Then came the News of the World phone hacking scandal in 2011, and Zaltzman and Oliver did not hold back, despite the fact that Rupert Murdoch owned the paper where they worked. When The Bugle was eventually chucked out of its cradle at the Times for repeatedly, brutally mocking Murdoch and the News of the World, it wasn’t much of a surprise. In fact, Oliver and Zaltzman had been joking about it on-air for weeks before it actually happened. “Should this not have been stopped by now?” Oliver asked in one episode, and Zaltzman had already developed a back-up plan: “I can take up busking, John, it’s all right.” When the axe fell, they were prepared.

That near-death experience didn’t stop the Bugle, though. They brushed themselves off and kept going. They went independent and continued producing the show, even though Oliver had absconded to the States to work on The Daily Show. The show’s production and release schedule became increasingly erratic as they accommodated Oliver’s work schedule. It was possible for Oliver to still host The Bugle when he worked as a correspondent on The Daily Show, but when he moved to HBO to helm his own series, Last Week Tonight, it proved too difficult to continue with both. “It eventually became impossible for me to find enough time to write for it properly,” Oliver writes, “But we used to have an absolute blast recording it.”

While many shows would have folded when a founding member and co-host walked away, Zaltzman is bringing the show back from what could have been its second death, and not letting reports of its possible demise slow it down. Instead, he is determined to reanimate the show that has been part of his life for years and is something he clearly loves. “It’s the thing I’ve enjoyed most in my career,” says Zaltzman. “Obviously a big part of that was working with John. I just had to decide whether to start something fresh or ‘reboot’ – in the modern parlance – The Bugle with different people. I thought it would be interesting to use the existing format and the existing following to create a show that’s not entirely new, but has new elements while keeping the old stuff.”

Now The Bugle is firmly in Zaltzman’s hands and after a successful comedy tour of the US, he’s back in England hard at work getting The Bugle back on a regular schedule. “It’s what we did for the first seven years or so of the show, before it started getting more irregular,” said Zaltzman. “Now I’m aiming for it to be properly weekly again.”

The result is a newly invigorated version of The Bugle, with a series of co-hosts replacing the dearly departed Oliver, including comedian Hari Kondabolu, former Daily Show contributor Wyatt Cenac (“John knows him very well and recommended him,” explains Zaltzman), Nish Kumar, and Helen Zaltzman, Andy’s sister and the host of both Answer Me This! and the etymology podcast The Allusionist. (“She’s one of the most successful podcasters there is,” says Zaltzman, proudly.) “I wanted a range of different perspectives from around the world, a broader range than just two white guys who went to Oxford and Cambridge,” says Zaltzman. “It’s a good thing, I think.” The show also has a new home, joining The Allusionist at the Radiotopia podcast network.

Thanks to the fact that the show is no longer solely hosted by “two white guys” and Brits, The Bugle now takes a more global approach to politics, which Zaltzman is excited about. “I wanted to make it a much more global show,” he says. “The advantage of having different co-hosts is that I can have people from different parts of the world.” While the news coverage may be more global, The Bugle won’t stray much from its original structure, because it always covered a wide variety of topics from the news cycle, including sports (Zaltzman is a world-renowned cricket expert) to volcano porn, babies, whether Stonehenge was an ancient tax dodge, and even male genitalia drawn on rooftops. “The show won’t change that much, because we always did whatever we wanted anyway,” says Zaltzman, chuckling. “That’s sort of the joy of podcasting, you don’t have people standing over your shoulder saying, ‘We’re not really sure about this.’”

As for the exact format of the revived show, according to Zaltzman, it’s a work in progress by design. “It depends slightly on the different co-hosts and what they bring to it,” Zaltzman says. “It will hopefully have a lot of the stuff from before, but new voices, new angles. It will evolve in different ways with different people. I hope it will still be funny and topical.”

As for those new hosts, Oliver had a bit of advice: “You’re going to need to develop a physical ability to withstand puns. That’s not easy, and it’s not a natural state for the human body, but it’s important if you hope to survive,” he wrote. “Also, do not under any circumstances try to ‘out-bullshit’ Andy, because you’re going toe-to-toe with the master there. He has weapons-grade nonsense at his disposal, and is more than happy to use it.”

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