Adam Jarrell and Joel Emery, the co-creators of Goalhanger Drama, have known each other since they were kids. Their first collaborations – making "silly little films" together at school – evolved into a shared professional interest in audio drama. In Jarrell's words, audio drama brought the friends even closer: "a real cliché, but if you enjoy your work, you'll never work a day in your life."
After early success with a critically acclaimed mockumentary podcast called The Offensive, they launched Sherlock & Co. with Goalhanger in 2024. The show, which reimagines the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for modern times, quickly became a cult favorite, cementing the pair as premier audio creators.
Podcast Review spoke to Jarrell and Emery a few days after the launch of their first limited series, Bear Hunt. They were joined by Goalhanger co-founder Tony Pastor, who helped write the show. Bear Hunt's ten-part thriller went straight to the top of Apple Podcast’s Fiction chart in the UK and reached #5 in the all-genres chart, marking a new era for British audio dramas, as we wrote in our review. While audio plays have always been part of the British media diet, Bear Hunt elevates the format into the Netflix age.
"You can have the best script and the best sound in the world, but if the actors aren't up to it, it will come through . . . audio is more exposed than either theatre or television: there's no back row to project to, no camera to find – just proximity," Jarrell tells us. His friendship with Emery influences how they approach their craft. The hardest thing to get right? The network of trusted talent they've built.
Audio fiction has become notoriously hard to monetize. But signing on with Goalhanger to build Goalhanger Drama feels like validation to keep going, even while the duo are still working out what audiences want. Emery compares audio drama to reading a book: trail off from an ordinary podcast and it's no big deal, but lose the thread of an audio play while you're doing the washing up, and it's "oh shit, I'm going to have to rewind it." No pressure, then.
For Jarrell, part of the appeal is the sheer scale of what's possible; an adventure set on the moon is within reach because audio can go anywhere.
Their creativity found a physical stage at The Rest Is Fest, Goalhanger's Southbank Centre takeover, where the pair were asked to put on a live Sherlock & Co. show — the first time the whole cast performed an original adventure together on stage, with Emery writing an original song in place of Arthur Conan Doyle's source material. Fans travelled from Australia, China, Canada, Mexico, the US, and across Europe to see it performed as a live radio play, with lighting and sound design cues woven in to keep the audience anchored in the show's world.
It sold out, prompting a second performance on the Sunday. "We were not only the first show to sell out," Emery smirks, no doubt a playful dig at other more high-profile Goalhanger shows like The Rest Is Politics, "we were the only show to piss off the Southbank Centre, because our fans wouldn't leave."
So, the Knicks of British audio?
Tony Pastor politely chuckles at the joke. "It was a brilliant event. I went to see it, sat in the crowd, and it was joyous to watch an audience who've followed Sherlock & Co. for getting on for four years finally see their heroes on stage — many of them for the first time — and to scream and love it so much was fabulously rewarding."
When Sherlock & Co. was released, Goalhanger didn't know what to expect. It turned out to be our most intriguing demographic of any show Goalhanger had produced so far. It was by far the youngest. It leaned more female than they might have imagined. It was also very popular in the US.
"We wouldn't have predicted any of those three things when we launched it," Pastor remarks.
The team reveal that they plan to expand the Sherlock & Co. universe of cozy crime with both a Mycroft Holmes and an Inspector Lestrade spin-off. Each episode is told from John Watson's point of view, recorded into his amateurish microphone. The character is not a professional sound editor — he's an army doctor. But while Sherlock & Co. employs many premium sound features, the team knew they needed to raise the game for Bear Hunt.
Bear Hunt is an ambitious project. The spy thriller is inspired by real life individuals and written with as much authenticity as the team were allowed to include. Pastor reveals that the idea began as a hypothetical question:
"I was out walking my dog with [Sergeant Dave Allen], a serving special forces soldier with 23 years' experience, and I said, 'If Britain decided it needed to do away with an international leader, is that actually possible? How would you go about it?' Dave immediately said, 'Do I need to get the assassin home?' When he said that, it literally stopped me in my tracks. It made me realise there was a really complex narrative and plot in this — one simple question had opened up a whole world of possibility. I said, 'Well, let's assume you do have to get them home, back to Cardiff, where his base is.' He said, 'That makes it a lot harder.' And immediately I was dragged into this rabbit hole of the possibility and challenge of it."
I said, "If Britain decided it needed to do away with an international leader, is that actually possible?" Dave immediately said, "Do I need to get the assassin home?"
Before we go any further, it is important to stress that Bear Hunt is fiction. The notion that Britain would actually attempt such a plot is unlikely. But the logistics of the story, from the physics of bending a bullet around a building to infiltrating an agent into a foreign army, are based on real methods. It may not be real, but is is realism. The Goalhanger Drama team went to great lengths to ensure accuracy, including obtaining satellite shots of airports in China and mapping out all of their action scenes on real geographical locations.
When we asked how they got this information, Pastor revealed that Allen, their military consultant on the show, told them about "Britain's best soldier," though he loathes the phrase.
"When you ask [Allen] who Britain's best soldier is," Pastor recalls, "he says that if you asked around British Special Forces — the SAS or the Parachute Regiment — most people would name the same fella. There's a real person Duffy is based on, someone currently active in the British Army who most of the other soldiers think is the one. I found that massively intriguing."
"We only know his nickname," Emery chips in.
How much of Sergeant Tom "Duffy" MacDuff's character is based on this person? "He really does do jungle training for the Americans," Pastor tells us. "He's so able in his skillset that the American forces hire him annually to teach them. He learned [his skills] in Sumatra, I think, for the Brits, and ends up teaching in Hawaii for the Americans. This is a real person, alive and well, currently running his courses every month."
Rather than laying out all of this information through tired exposition in the first fifteen minutes, Goalhanger intentionally made Bear Hunt an immersive listen for their audience. "There isn't loads of explanation along the way — it's got a lot of real terminology you might encounter if you met these characters in real life, and they don't explain it. We took the approach of the very best TV drama, which is that it forces you to keep up, figure things out, and learn its own language as you go. What Joel did so brilliantly, with the help of Dave Allen, was make it sound as though you're listening in on conversations between people who really know what they're talking about. It gets easier for the audience the longer they stay with it," Pastor tells us.
That immersion owes as much to the sound design as the script. "Joel took the lead on the sound design on Bear Hunt, but between the two of us we've got a lot of practice," Jarrell explains. "With Bear Hunt, Joel had a bit more time to really finesse things, to sound premium. We had the time to go, 'that just doesn't sound right,' and tweak it, experiment. We had a cast of over 60 actors — the biggest project we've ever taken on as far as casting goes. We're lucky to have what's no longer [just] a little black book of performers we know and trust, from all over the world."
(L-R) Adam Jarrell, Joel Emery (Image: Goalhanger)
"The sound design came from the initial brief, which was to make something that felt like television," Emery says. "You're hoping the listener stays in sync with their own visual imagination, like with a novel, while also keeping up with the plot. You can use a lot of TV tricks, because everyone's watched dramas before — if you make it feel that familiar, you can use sound design in your favor."
The team are, by Emery's count, signed up to four or five sound-effects libraries by now, and go further than most shows dare: "We do something a lot of other audio dramas don't, which is add a lot of kinetic energy to a scene — you can hear characters moving around. It might feel unnecessary to have a chair squeak in the middle of a scene, or somebody itch their chin, but we always put that stuff in."
"That is everything for us," Jarrell says. "The day we stop putting in those little details is the day we're failing at our job. It's also a testament to our actors — a lot of audio performers work mainly in audiobooks, where everything has to be crystal clear, and ours is dirty on purpose, because it suits the scene, especially during a chase. Try chatting while you're in the middle of a run — it's hard. So when you've got all that drama going on around you, that's testament to our performers too, and it's another layer on top of why it sounds so good."
For all its firepower, the team is adamant Bear Hunt isn't making a political statement about Centrist Dads or current affairs. "It's definitely not meant to be suggestive of our worldview — we don't think assassinating world leaders is a good idea," Pastor clarifies. "We just got captivated by the idea of an action story. There's a great lineage in the UK with [James] Bond, and it felt like a very modern version of that, with more of a Jason Bourne feel."
Still, he concedes the show can't help but feel prescient: "There's a funny bit early on about sanctions and 'super sanctions,' and it does feel quite timely as we try to control the behavior of certain international leaders — it's interesting that the Americans have chosen, in Venezuela and Iran, to almost do exactly what this describes: decapitate leadership rather than use international economics to force regime change. I'm definitely not advocating for it — this is just meant to be a super exciting story."
That timeliness extends to the mechanics of the plot, too. "It's meant to feel very real, not massively far-fetched," Pastor says. "The method used to bring down the British Airways plane at the start — interference with a plane's ability to geolocate itself — is actually happening on a regular basis."
It's the emotional stakes, though, that Jarrell credits with keeping the show grounded. "These aren't 2D characters, they're 3D characters that John's written," he says. Pastor agrees: "They're all fictional characters, but Kernoway feels like the kind of contemporary Prime Minister we've seen in recent times. Brann feels like the kind of person we could have in power if Reform were to be successful in the next election — she's not based on a specific person, but characters like her seem to be popping up on the European stage on a regular basis. It should feel timely to people."
That realism comes with its own gruesome moments, such as several violent action scenes. "We definitely didn't want to soften it to make it more palatable for audiences," Pastor says. "The Afghan scenes are real — they're based on anecdotes we got from serving soldiers. We used Dave to keep us honest on that, to make it as real as possible." Jarrell is unapologetic: "There's no need to sugarcoat it. We don't really make the kind of podcasts you can hold a conversation over, and we're quite proud of that — you do need to switch on, you need to listen."
Emery agrees the visceral scenes earn their place: "We're taking people where other shows can't take them. You could make a show where you sit around and talk about how you could kill somebody, and the threats Russia poses, and so on — plenty of podcasts do that. But you can't have bullets whizzing past people's ears. It would have been a missed opportunity not to have those big, visceral scenes."
We don't really make the kind of podcasts you can hold a conversation over, and we're quite proud of that — you do need to switch on, you need to listen.
Will there be a Bear Hunt 2? "I think we'd all like to do it. We've already worked out who the next victim would be — and it's not me, because of my review. I think you should look to the tech bro sector for our next target. I don't know if it'll be a TV series. It might be — we've already had a number of inbound requests to talk about it, three or four already, and we're certainly open to it," Pastor says.
Bear Hunt is only the beginning for Goalhanger Drama. "We're going to do a lot more," Pastor says. "We've given Joel and Adam free rein to build out the team and develop more shows — this is something we want to do more and more of, we're really excited by it."
And The Rest Is Fest, the event sold 26,000 tickets across 22 shows? That's a yes, too.
While other media companies turn away from fiction podcasts and limited series, it's clear that Goalhanger has a vision for a different kind of audio craft. Read our review of Bear Hunt and binge the first four episodes.
