Five hundred episodes. Eleven years. A 4.9-star average from roughly 1,200 listeners who apparently cannot be talked out of it.
CheapShow — the podcast about cheap things, terrible snacks, and worse decisions, and one of the shows that joined the ACPN lineup this summer — hits episode 500 this Sunday, and they’re doing it the way a milestone like that deserves: live.
CheapShow 500 LIVE goes up Sunday, August 23rd at The Cambridge Junction 2, doors from 4pm, show at 4:30pm UK time. Tickets are still available — and if Cambridge isn’t happening for you, the whole thing is being streamed live on YouTube. A £5 tip on their Ko-fi gets you the stream link:
→ Get the live stream link here
For the US crowd doing the time-zone math: 4:30pm UK is 11:30am ET / 8:30am PT on Sunday. Set an alarm, or don’t — but the boys are promising, in their words, “horrors,” and that’s usually a threat they keep.
Why 500 is a genuinely absurd number
Do the math on a weekly show: five hundred episodes since 2015 means Paul Gannon and Eli Silverman have essentially never taken a week off in eleven years. Most podcasts don’t reach fifty. Most that do aren’t any good by then.
CheapShow is both. It carries a 4.9-star average across roughly 1,200 listener ratings — a number that’s hard to fake and harder to sustain — and has charted in Apple’s comedy rankings in multiple countries. Along the way it’s picked up a Guardian review that called it “howling with laughter,” features in Viz and Podbible, a Golden Lobe, and the surest sign of a real audience: a fan-maintained wiki nobody asked them to build.
Which is also why, after Sunday, CheapShow is taking a month off before returning in October. Not a cancellation, not a hiatus of the ominous variety — a deliberate breather before a soft reboot. [Optional: your own line here — something about how the smartest thing a long-running show can do is rest while it’s still good.]
The podcast version of Sunday’s live show will land on the feed after the event, and an edited video version is coming to their YouTube channel — both of which will show up right here on the site when they do.
Until then: go get a ticket, and go tell two men who’ve made 500 of these that somebody noticed.
Live stream link (£5 via Ko-fi): ko-fi.com/s/5ead43a5bd
Tickets (Cambridge Junction): junction.co.uk
More CheapShow: thecheapshow.co.uk
CheapShow on ACPN: more episodes here
