Three Bean Salad is a phenomenon. At last year’s London Podcast Festival, they put on three live shows over two days, all of which sold out the huge Hall One. Their other live shows sell out to their Patreons before the non-paying public even get a chance. Fans line up to have their photos taken with them. There’s a very active subreddit, and (paying the podcast one of the highest compliments the internet can offer) there’s a full-on Wiki – not just a page, but a whole network of sites trying to capture every detail of this comedy podcast. There’s even a TVTropes page, somehow, and at the top, it features an exchange that really sums up the pod:

Ben (reading an email from listener Ross): Your podcast primarily relies on in-jokes, previously established jingles, and meandering lukewarm banter about an email you received several episodes ago.

Henry: Okay, I think there’s a little bit more than that going on.

— Slippers

If you’re not a part of that community yet, you might need an introduction to the heroes of the show. The Three Beans are: Mike Wozniak (you probably recognise him from Taskmaster), Benjamin Partridge (who makes the very funny podcast The Beef & Dairy Network) and Henry Paker (how to begin describing him? Also, he’s an illustrator who does the cute artwork for each episode). Mike is The Dad, Benjamin is The Son (and has an evil alter-ego / doppelganger, Bonjamin), while Henry is The Wildcard. Each episode, they chat generally, then attempt to talk about a subject thrown up at random by the Bean Machine.

Episode subjects have included Disguises, Purple and Going To Disney World And Not Wanting To Be Dressed Up As A Ruffian. There are lots of jingles / full-on songs breaking the episodes up into segments, including Provincial Dad Chat, where Mike embraces his own non-London Dadness; Digestive Tract Talk, which is exactly what it sounds like; and the America jingle (“burgers!”).

If you’re a new listener, where do you even start? The Beans have just finished their 11th season, so there are plenty to choose from. It is a podcast dense with running jokes, call-backs and invented characters. However, Three Bean Salad isn’t a narrative podcast; it’s improvised, not scripted, so you don’t have to start at Season 1 Episode 1. In fact, the first episode, ‘Posters’, has few of the ongoing, in-jokey features that make the pod so enjoyable. it definitely has the feel of a pilot and it’s not really representative of what the podcast has become.

I’m going to suggest that you don’t start there and give you four of my favourite alternatives.

Season 1 Episode 2: Lizards

It’s only the second episode, but the podcast already feels much more lived-in here, compared to the first one. The Beans invent a film (one of their favourite kinds of chat), in this instance for the BBC’s Emily Maitlis as an assassin. This is the origin of some of Ben’s best jingles: there’s a lot of Royal talk, which later becomes The Regal Zone jingle; it’s the first time we hear that all creatures are on an evolutionary arc towards becoming crabs – the foundations for a Crab Bell introduced later on.

Of course, this is the episode that legendary podcast enemy and all-round passive-aggressive supervillain Sperbs makes his first appearance via listener email, thus setting up the Three Bean Salad Extended Universe. Reading out his missive also shows how devoted the Beans are to interacting with listener correspondence from the start, even when that listener powerfully manipulates them psychologically…

Season 1 Episode 3: Rome

Okay, okay, so far I’ve basically recommended skipping the first episode but the third episode, ‘Rome’ is a great follow-on. It’s a very meta episode, and if there’s one thing the Beans care about, it’s being endearingly transparent about how the podcast sausage is made. From opening with a discussion of “should we have an opening chat vs the fade in?” to Henry’s suggestion of a jingle whenever they discuss the workings of the podcast on the actual pod.

Part of the pod’s charm is how much the Beans think/worry about the listener’s experience and we see this when a listener asks for the ending of Henry’s beans story from Episode 1: Posters (giving you a good reason to return to that at some point). Episode 3 is a fun behind-the-scenes look at how the Beans make the pod.

Season 1 Episode 7: Sleep

There’s an ongoing thread that people keep telling the Beans that it’s a very easy podcast to fall asleep to, thanks to their soothing voices (yes it is true, and no, it’s not that much of an insult). Their chat about sleep definitely helps us to learn some oddly personal things about them, but this episode is mostly notable for an absolutely corking listener emails section. Their archenemy Sperbs resurfaces to suggest that the pod could become “an hour of contextless jingles,” before suggesting the topics of “yams, dog racing, staplers, barns, dog fighting, paganism, assassination of William McKinley, concept of self, dogs, Falklands, Scientology, animal testing, and dogs,”. Plus there is the horrifying suggestion that Sperbs could actually be one of the Beans.

This episode’s email segment is rich in origin story for the episodes to come. Also, if you have a dog – just quickly check on it?

Season 3 Episode 1: Exercise

Yes, this is a big leap forward, but it’s where the Patreon begins, so it’s actually a Bean-approved starting point. They start by talking about how the pod would work as Two Bean Salad in the three different pairings: a great intro to their personalities and relationship dynamics. They outline the kinds of bollockings they will take from listeners, no longer willing to crumble under any old criticism. There’s also the first appearance of the episode editor (in this case Ben) interrupting the episode with a phone call to another Bean to comment on what we’re listening to: meta upon meta, but in the service of being as correct as possible.

This is also the episode where the pod really goes professional: there’s now the Patreon and a website and the Bean Machine has gone fully digital. What more could you ask for when trying out a new podcast?

The music is a big part of Three Bean Salad. In fact, the podcast’s enemy Sperbs once suggested that the pod was in danger of becoming “​​an hour of contextless jingles” – a comment that cut the Beans deep. For you, the new listener, this might seem fair though, so in an attempt to provide some context for you, we asked Benjamin Partridge – maker of the jingles – to talk us through his Top 5 Jingles, and why.

Benjamin Partridge’s Top 5 Three Bean Salad jingles

5. Flightless Bird Zone

This plays every time flightless birds are mentioned. An important jingle for any podcast. Most of the big podcasts have one, but they usually haven’t had occasion to use it yet. For this one I was challenged to blend bossa nova and Bob Dylan style folk, and I think I pulled it off.

4. Provincial Dad Chat

This one mixes hard rock, Def Leppard style backing vocals and accordion folk. It really makes me laugh when Mike, in full provincial dad mode, says “who’s hidden my bloody walking boots?”

3. Neil

This came about because we were chatting about a very minor character called Neil who I played in the BBC Three sitcom Josh and we imagined what a spinoff sitcom would be like. So I made it as a proposed theme tune for the imagined sitcom. But now it plays every time someone called Neil is mentioned. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s a special moment.

2. The Regal Zone

This is played any time the royal family is mentioned. Which is more than you might imagine. Usually Prince, now King, Charles. He seems to come up a lot. This jingle makes good use of a horse sound effect. A horse sound effect can really bring a jingle together and make it something quite cohesive. I think if you were a dancing person you could actually dance to this one. I would love to play it over a huge sound system in front of 500,000 at a huge outdoor gig in São Paulo.

1. Bluebell

This plays every time Henry’s cat Bluebell is mentioned. I don’t think it can truly be described as a jingle. It’s too long. It’s a song. Featuring Henry describing his cat as having “sturdy paws and silky thighs”. Usually I fade it out after 30 seconds or so but sometimes I hold my nerve and play the whole thing, completely torpedoing the flow of the podcast.

Listen to Three Bean Salad on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other popular podcast apps >>

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I came up with the idea for the podcast after noticing how many of the audience members from my live shows wanted to come up to me afterwards and get into really compelling conversations about Amy Winehouse. They were full of memories, stirred up by the show’s time travel back to 2006, by the music I play and by this feeling that they had some unfinished business if not with the singer herself because they didn’t know her, but then with their idea of her. Talking about Amy was a way of reassessing the problematic 2000s, of understanding that we were young in a very different time to now.

I decided to ask fans from the worlds of music, journalism and comedy to talk to me about their three favourite Amy Winehouse songs, where they were at in life when they first heard her, the memories her songs soundtrack, her cultural importance… and all of those subjects naturally lead into explaining a feeling we shared: that we miss Amy Winehouse.

The first guest is journalist Emma Garland, who wrote the introduction to the book Amy Winehouse: Beyond Black. Emma was asked to do this by the book’s author, Naomi Parry, who had been Amy’s stylist and one of her closest friends. The book came out in summer 2021, to mark the 10th anniversary of Amy’s death, and it was accompanied by a beautiful exhibition about Amy’s life and style at the Design Museum.

I wanted to feature Amy Winehouse’s music in the podcast to make it a more immersive experience, rather than potentially pushing the listener away from our audio and off to stream the music elsewhere. This meant having to make some compromises. As an indie podcast maker, I can’t afford music royalties or a PRS licence of my own. So I decided to launch the series as a Music + Talk show on Spotify and Anchor. This means that I can search for any of Amy Winehouse’s songs hosted on Spotify and then drop them into the podcast episode. Listeners with free Spotify will hear a 30-second clip, and listeners with Spotify Premium have the option to hear the whole song if they want, otherwise they can easily scroll onwards.

The podcast format I’m working with is like a scaled-down Desert Island Discs, in that my guests only talk about three songs by Amy Winehouse that mean something to them. That format determined how I interviewed my guests, always keeping at the back of my mind the fact that I’d need to move them onto the next song.

The back end of the Music + Talk show determined how I’d edit. It works by letting you drop in songs into your audio, but of course I would have to introduce each song. I had to start thinking of my episode as halfway between a pre-recorded radio show and the podcasts I have been used to making (Freelance Pod, Black Mirror Cracked). I would also have to divide the interview up into segments, to allow space to drop the songs into the episode at the right place. The songs can’t be dropped into an uploaded MP3, only around it. As someone who will happily let interviews meander into interesting places and move sections about in the edit, I found myself aiming for much more linear interviews this time, to save myself from having to deal with too many moving parts in the edit.

Lastly, the main compromise is that the podcast will only be available on the Spotify app. For some potential listeners, that will be a dealbreaker; for others, it will be a mild annoyance for them not to be able to use their favourite app. We Miss Amy Winehouse won’t slot into their podcast queue, but maybe I don’t want it to – maybe it’s better that it stands out.

Making my Edinburgh show, I Miss Amy Winehouse, has been a mostly solitary undertaking, so producing the podcast has been a wonderful reminder that there is an audience for this out there, and even if I don’t get to meet them all at the Fringe, at least I’ve found another way to reach them.

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The rules of British politics are ancient, arcane and largely unwritten – so the podcast takes the form of Bercow answering Frances-White’s questions on how our political processes work. The first episode covers the role of the Speaker, a job Bercow knows well after holding it for 10 years, from 2009 to 2019. Then later episodes look at the Whips, Private Members’ Bills and SpAds, aka Special Advisors.

Known for his barking cry of “or-der!” when MPs refused to calm down, and for his growing despair at the direction that the Conservative government (of which he was once a member) was taking with regards to Brexit, Bercow opted not to seek re-election as MP for Buckingham in the 2019 general election. Instead, he left Parliament. In 2021 he joined the Labour Party.

Why make a podcast about the machine of British politics now?

I don’t claim to know everything about the political system, but obviously I did have the rather helpful vantage point of the best seat in the house for just over a decade. I must admit that I’m a political geek who could find a reason to make this podcast at any time, but I really do think that it is now more important than ever.

One reason is that we have a government with a very large majority, which hasn’t been the case for quite some time. That calls for big questions around power and accountability. The second reason is: this Prime Minister doesn’t treat the institutions of the country with the remoteness, deference or respect they deserve. His attitude is that they’re there to be used and abused by him.

How did you meet Deborah Frances-White and get started on this project?

We were on the panel for Question Time on 6th May this year. She was absolutely brilliant: very witty, quick to get to the point, and rather derisive in her attitude towards the government.

We got on very well, and she said to me afterwards, “Have you ever thought of doing a podcast?” I hadn’t but I was open to it, and she promised to be in touch. A few months later, she suggested joining forces to make a podcast series about the political system. She’s the experienced podcaster, but I know how to navigate the highways and byways of the political system. I thought, yes, this sounds fun to me.

How would you like listeners to react to the podcast?

What we’re trying to do is to fuse political knowledge with human interest, and some semblance of humour. I don’t think it’s healthy if people are feeling fed up about politics, then their sense of disillusionment translates into indifference or to apathy. It’s much better if disillusionment can be channelled into something concrete: representation.

Campaigning can only really come from some sort of rudimentary understanding of the system. You don’t have to be a political specialist to campaign for political change, or for the policy of your choice, or the removal of a policy you don’t like – but it does help if you know a bit about the way the system works now.

Do you see podcasting as a natural move on from your role as Speaker?

My late father used to say, “John, generally speaking, is… generally speaking.” He died before I got into Parliament, but he wouldn’t be altogether surprised that I ended up as the Speaker. He was an armchair politician of a distinctively right-wing flavour, and he used to speak in paragraphs. So, insofar as I have a speaking style which some people find rather quaint and eccentric, or even antediluvian, it is rather inherited from my dad.

In addition to guesting on a couple of semi-political podcasts, with Ed Miliband and others, I’ve also been on sporting podcasts, thanks to my obsession with tennis, and with Arsenal. We’re very lucky that I’m doing this interview at all, as I’m still nursing my wounds from Arsenal v Everton last night, where we managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Somebody said to me, when I left my office job, that I should try to do things that make my soul sing – and I feel that podcasting makes my soul sing.

Listen to John Bercow’s Absolute Power with Deborah Francis-White on Acast, iTunes, Spotify, Google: 

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In January 2015, long-time podcaster Helen Zaltzman – not quite yet a Podcast Champion but on her way to the honour – debuted her second audio project, The Allusionist. “I didn’t know what it would be until I really started it,” Zaltzman told The Guardian* later that year. She just began with the idea that: “There are hundreds of thousands of words in the English language and the combinations of those words and humans using them is almost infinite.”

That’s what each episode of The Allusionist is: a deep-dive into the history behind a word, phrase, dialect or other facet of the English Language (slang and swear words feature often), that has been forgotten now that the term has entered mainstream use.

After eight years of making Answer Me This! along with Olly Mann and Martin Austwick, Zaltzman launched The Allusionist as a solo podcast, with Austwick providing the music. At 131 episodes and counting (Zaltzman releases two or three episodes a month; the latest, Podlingual, came out on February 25th 2021), knowing where to start with the podcast can feel daunting.

The good news is, you can start anywhere! Each episode is self-contained, there are no narrative arcs, and any inter-episode references are clearly signposted. There’s even a Lexicon page on The Allusionist website, where you can choose a word, then find the episode that it appears in.

I’ve chosen these three episodes as the ones I think newbies should begin with – and, I asked Helen Zaltzman herself to comment on my choices. Here they are:

Episode 4 – Detonating the C-Bomb

You’ve got to love a podcast that devotes its fourth episode to the strongest swear word in the English language. But why is it the one that makes people recoil the most? Why is it so much more popular in the UK as opposed to the US, and why does it sound all the morse insulting if you hit the final ‘T’ hard? If, like me, you find yourself lost in these questions, then this episode is a great place for you to begin!

HZ: At this point, I was still learning what the Allusionist was, and how to make it. I hadn’t yet adjusted to having an audience that was not predominantly British but American, as there’s a different attitude to the C-word in the USA that I hadn’t really understood. It’s a lot of listeners’ favourite episode of the show – swearing is always a crowd-pleaser, I have since learned. Listen now >>

Episode 93 – Gossip

Gossip is an absolutely classic Allusionist episode: taking a term that has been unfairly gendered as female – and maligned as a result – then looking at why this has happened. Zaltzman uncovers the history of sexism and behind the term. Men gossip just as much as women, because it’s essential to building social bonds and finding out news in the workplace, but they don’t get the flak for it. Want to know why? Dive into this episode!

HZ: Gossip was an episode that came about because on a whim I looked up the word’s etymology, and found it to be very different to what I expected – I love it when that happens, Step Away is another episode like that, and the pieces about ‘bulldozer’, ‘lemur’ and ‘copper’. Although the history of the word is what piqued my interest, the main narrative of the episode is more about how the word has been twisted to dismiss something as trivial and feminine, even though gossip is actually really important, socially and culturally. Listen now >>

Episode 99 – Polari

This is an unexpectedly emotional episode, as Zaltzman digs down into a culture and a dialect that emerged in the late 1800s, in response to strict laws against homosexuality, but fell out of use once those laws were neutralised by the Sexual Offences Act 1967. It’s a reminder that our language not only carries history in its syllables, but also the creativity of those who refused to be silenced. The Polari words mentioned so familiar – they’re very much in mainstream use today.

HZ: Some of the most interesting and complex topics on the show are about LGBTQ+ words, and language of oppressed people. Polari covered both. Quite a few Polari words have entered popular vernacular but I wonder if people even know they’re saying words from a secret language that gay men used to communicate with each other before homosexuality was legal. Listen now >>

Listen to The Allusionist on ACAST, SPOTIFY and all other podcast apps.

*That 2015 Guardian piece suggests starting with these three episodes, confirming the legendary status of the Detonating the C-Bomb episode: PortmanNO, C-Bomb, Bosom Holder.

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The podcast grew out of a Whatsapp group set up by London-based strategy consultant Marvyn Harrison on Father’s Day, 2018. Harrison added 23 friends who are also dads to the group, and told them that they inspired him to be a better father.

The chat group soon became a community that would talk about everything they were going through, including co-parenting, marriage, fatherhood, blended families, and more. As 2018 went on, the growing group became a community of knowledge-sharing and support. In 2019, during Black History Month (which falls in October), the Dope Black Dads podcast was launched as a safe space for Black dads to discuss issues they face.

In 2020, the podcast continues to grow and strike up conversations about Black parenting that we should all be listening to, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Umar spoke to Pod Bible about which Black parenting podcasts we should be listening to.

Backtalk, by the Successful Black Parenting Magazine, is first on his list, as it offers a valuable American take on Black parenting. “Raising Black kids in America has some similarities to raising children here in the UK,” says Umar, “but I think there are also those big differences. We’ve seen recently everything that goes on with the police and just generally how African Americans are viewed and treated.” In June and July this year, after the footage of George Floyd’s death went viral, and Black Lives Matter protests began in the US, the podcast published two episodes on the complex subject of talking to children about race.

Next on Umar’s list is Chronicles of Black Parenting Podcast, which has just launched. In the first episode, host Chidinma Okorie, talks about being a Nigerian immigrant in America who became pregnant at the age of 17. The second episode also features a teenage mother, and the advice she has for the future grandparents. The podcast is engaging with traditional ideas of parenting, and as Umar’s family background is Nigerian, he is interested in the perspective of a young Nigerian parent in America. As Umar puts it: “There’s definitely a shift in terms of how we parent. With our generation, I think parenting has become a lot more equal between mothers and fathers. It’s not just left to the mum, as it traditionally is often done in Nigerian households.”

Shades of Black: Parenting Podcast “is for Black British parents, and those who are parents of Black children,” says Umar, “and I guess it is a bit more relevant to me as it gives the Black British experience.” Season 2 of the podcast has just launched, and the latest episode rounds up how hosts Sam and Ola have got through “Brexit, a pandemic, Lockdown, homeschooling, protests, heatwaves and sadly, bereavements.” This is the podcast Umar goes to for another view on “things that we often will talk about in the community; how we’ve coped with the pandemic; how we’re dealing with that and adapting to homeschooling, and so on.”

Dope Black Mums has just celebrated its first anniversary, and acts as a sister podcast to Dope Black Dads. “It’s great to hear the Black mum’s perspective,” says Umar. “I get to have more of an insight into what life is like for Black mums. There are times when I’ve listened to the podcast, and I go speak to my wife about the issues they’ve brought up.” A recent episode on race and maternal care digs into the horrifying statistic that, in the UK, Black women are 5 times more likely to die in childbirth than white women, and the hosts bring their personal experiences to the discussion. Other recent must-listen episodes include Dear Dope White Mom – “an emergency response to the state sanctioned murder of black men – which we have all witnessed yet again with the filming of George Floyd”; The True Colour of Colourism, in which the hosts “unpack colourism and the cost it has on [their] children’s wellbeing”; and Racism is a White Person’s Problem. RIP George Floyd.

For his fifth choice, Umar has gone for his own podcast, Dope Black Dads. In 2020, the conversation around Black parenting has grown ever more important, with the pandemic disportionately affecting people of colour, and the huge growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Recent episodes include a recording of a segment on the BBC’s primetime The One Show, on talking about kid about race, and The Mental Health Impact of Racism with Dr Roberta Babb. The podcast has also recently tackled issues brought up by cultural events, such as Will and Jada Smith’s Red Table Talk, Kanye West’s recent bid for the US presidency and Dads: Should we bring Back Football during the Lockdown?

“What I love about what we do with Dope Black Dads is the fact that we’re trying to shift the narrative, what those headlines have said about us. We’re trying to change how people perceive a black father,” says Umar. “People have a certain viewpoint on what a Black father can be, it’s the idea that Black fathers are absent, or they’ve got multiple baby mothers. Actually, that’s a very small minority.” Umar himself is married, and has two children aged five and two – and he knows many others like him, who don’t hit the headlines because of their stable, ordinary lives. “There’s a majority of Black fathers who are very much present in their children’s lives, who play an active role in the running of the household and the upbringing of the kids,” he concludes. “We need to tell our stories, and we need to educate people about us and what we go through.”

Suchandrika Chakrabarti is a freelance journalist, podcaster and comedian from London. She makes Freelance Pod, which is about how the internet has changed creative jobs. It was shortlisted for a Lovie Award for Best Host in 2019. 

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