Stuck In A Lift: the podcast every London lift engineer should have on in the van
The lift trade has its own podcast. Fortnightly interviews with people off the tools, made by the industry's own film crew. Seven episodes to start with.
Nobody at Radio 4 is commissioning a series about door operators. If you want to hear lift people talk about lift work, the options have historically been the mess room, the trade counter, and whoever you got stuck sharing a scaffold with.
There’s now a better option. Stuck In A Lift is a fortnightly interview podcast made by Alice Black of Blacks Productions, the crew the industry already knows for pointing cameras at lifts. Each episode puts someone from the trade in front of a microphone and gets their story: how they got in, where the job took them, what they’d tell you now. It started in 2023 and is four seasons and more than fifty episodes deep, which for a podcast about our little corner of construction is remarkable.
It’s sponsored by VM Elevators and Target Lifts, which is said openly on the show, and it’s how trade media gets made. For the record, London Lifts has no connection to any of them. We just think the trade is better off with this thing existing, and more of us should be listening to it.
Why bother
The lift industry runs on people who mostly know each other secondhand. You’ve heard the name, you’ve inherited their wiring, you’ve possibly sworn at their labelling. A podcast where those people talk for an hour fills in the other half: careers rarely go the way anyone planned, and it turns out everyone else also fell into lifts sideways.
Fifty episodes is a lot of archive to walk into, though. So here’s a starting queue.
Start with these seven
The apprenticeship one: Danny Garaway (S2, E1)
Season two opens with Danny Garaway’s route up through an apprenticeship. If you’re weighing up the NVQ route, or you’ve got an apprentice in the van who needs convincing that the slog pays off, queue this first. Pair it with our own apprenticeships guide if you’re at the very start.
The career-changer one: Tom Wellham (S2, E4)
Tom Wellham played football for Millwall before he ended up in the lift industry, which is not a route any careers adviser has ever suggested. The episode covers the switch. Good listening for anyone coming into the trade late and wondering if they’ve left it too long.
The one that matters: remembering Dr Gina Barney (S1, E10)
Gina Barney’s name is on some of the standard texts of lift traffic engineering. After her death, the show gathered personal words about her into a tribute episode. Play it to anyone who thinks this industry doesn’t have giants.
The funny one: the Indigo Lift Group trio (S4, E11)
Three colleagues from Indigo Lift Group in one episode, billed by the show as the funniest trio in the lift industry. On-site stories from people who clearly spend too long in a van together. Save it for the M25.
The history one: Target Lifts with Fizzer Rippon (S4, E9)
Fizzer Rippon on how Target Lifts came to be. Firms in this trade carry decades of history that never gets written down; this one at least got recorded.
The job-hunting one: recruitment uncovered with MLR (S4, E12)
The season four closer takes apart how hiring actually works in the lift industry: what happens to your CV and who gets the phone call. Worth an hour if you’re thinking of moving, and possibly more useful if you’re the one doing the hiring.
The one for the drive: Rav, red flags and road snacks (S4, E8)
Recruitment again but looser, covering red flags from both sides of the interview table and the genuinely important question of what you eat between jobs. Trade podcasts earn their keep on episodes like this.
Have a listen
New episodes land fortnightly on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and video versions live on the Blacks Productions YouTube channel.
If an episode lands with you, tell them. Shows like this keep going because the trade turns up for them. And if you know someone whose story belongs in that chair, Blacks Productions are not hard to find.