But it’s not just a case of looking for the nearest set of oddballs in robes and pointing a microphone at them. Invariably the podcasts about cults which work best, and which make the best use of podcasting as a medium, don’t really look like cult stories at all. They’re about the ways in which a whole array of difficulties can combine to lead a person to look for meaning in places where most of us never go.

Cult stories aren’t really about cults; they’re about the gaps in society which people can fall through, and where they end up when they feel they’ve nowhere left to go. Here are nine of the best podcasts about cults.

Sounds Like a Cult

If you’ve been thinking of cults purely in terms of very spindly blokes with beards and sandals promising good vibes to anyone committed enough to hand over their Monzo card, you’ve had it all wrong. Amanda Montell and Isa Medina are joined by a new guest each episode to pick apart how the mechanics of cults are at play in all sorts of places: K-pop fandom, corporate America, Coachella, Peloton, the Boy Scouts, Apple, diet culture. Honestly, you’ll be amazed if it turns out you’ve not been in a cult all this time. Listen now >>

A Very British Cult

For Jeff, Lighthouse seemed to be exactly what its name promised: a beacon of hope and guidance during a difficult time in his life. The life-coaching company said it could set him straight and put him on a path to abundance and freedom. But his sister Dawn saw that it was leaching him of his self-confidence and his cash – to the tune of £100,000. This investigation from some of the team behind The Missing Cryptoqueen is often difficult to listen to as Jeff is crushed and trapped, but it’s compulsive too. Listen now >>

Escaping NXIVM

The luridness of what used to go on at NXIVM – grooming, sexual abuse, branding rituals with hot irons – made it a huge news story in 2018, and as soon as you thought you’d hit the most bizarre revelation another would pop up. Hang on: Allison Mack from Smallville’s involved? But focusing on just those lurid aspects ignores the wreckage which NXIVM strewed through its victims’ lives. CBC’s seven-part examination came out just after the ringleaders were arrested in 2018, and is as thorough and sober a telling as you’ll find. Listen now >>

The Orgasm Cult

There’s been a libel case hanging over this one for a couple of years, as the founder and former exec of OneTaste – a “sexuality-focused wellness education” organisation – attack the BBC over its accusations of manipulation and extortionate prices for enlightenment. OneTaste offered classes in “orgasmic meditation”, which is roughly what it sounds like, but this podcast suggests it was exploiting the women who came to it hoping for answers. It’s not a pure wibbly-woo cult story; there is a hard edge here, and is as much a business investigation as anything else. Listen now >>

The New Gurus

Now that cults and how they work are fairly well-trodden ground, you’d assume that most smart, level-headed people would be able to spot the red flags and skip on by. But as Helen Lewis points out, the methods which were once used to flog mysticism and self-knowledge are still around – they’re just being wrapped up in all sorts of new guises. While not strictly about cults, Lewis shows how techno-utopians promising the earth are speaking to people anxious about what’s to come, and the scions of, say, pick-up artistry, certainly have big cult vibes. Listen now >>

Trust Me

Most cult-concerned podcasts are limited, bingeable series, but this is an always-on one dedicated to talking to survivors of cults about how their particular sect worked, how they got out, and how they managed to readjust to mainstream life afterwards. Lola Blanc and Meagan Elizabeth are the perfect hosts: both are cult survivors themselves, and can probe in a way that doesn’t feel exploitative or judgemental. Recent guests have included Crystal Hefner on the Playboy Mansion and Jenna Miscavige Hill on getting out of Scientology. Listen now >>

The Coming Storm

When the Capitol building was stormed on 6 January 2021, the world suddenly woke up to the very real danger which the QAnon conspiracy posed to sanity and democracy. To show how a niche subculture on the 4Chan imageboard gestated, warped and metastasised to take over people’s entire lives and a frightening chunk of the Republican party, BBC reporter Gabriel Gatehouse goes all the way back to the very beginning, and the discovery of a dead body in a park. Listen now >>

Filthy Ritual

Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala from true crime podcast RedHanded tell the story of how a North London neighbourhood became the playground of a shamanic healer who convinced her clients to hand over hundreds of thousands of pounds. Maguire and Bala are engagingly wry hosts who nonetheless get over the strange hold which Juliet d’Souza had over otherwise rational, reasonable people. Listen now >>

Plus one from our Digital Editor:

The Commune
Recommended by Francesca Turauskis

“I couldn’t let this article go out without adding my own recommendation for The Commune, which won the ‘Podcast of the Year’ at the New Zealand Podcast Awards in 2022. For New Zealanders, Centrepoint is notorious – as was it’s Founder, Herbert “Bert” Potter. Started in 1977 just outside the town of Albany, it positioned itself as an alternative lifestyle. In reality, it was abusive and psychological manipulative, with unmonitored forms of group therapy and widely reported sexual abuse, drug use, and local corruption. The Commune features interviews with previous Centrepoint residents (some of whom look back on Centrepoint fondly) and people who lived near by, and ultimately tries to figure out, how did it happen.” Listen now >>

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You can see why: people still love true crime, scammers and freaky horror-thrillers about creepy people, and it’s very handy for TV producers and commissioners that podcasters have done some of the legwork for them. But there’s something about the intimacy of podcasting as a medium that can make the whole thing more satisfying to listen to. Often, interviewees on podcasts are talking about their experiences publicly for the first time, and there’s an immediacy and vulnerability to that, which makes it compelling listening. Podcasters get all the time they need to luxuriate in nuance and detail, and give the story they’re telling the space it needs to be told. So, we’ve pulled together seven of the best podcasts that have been adapted for TV right here.

Limetown

This scripted fiction pod was made into a show starring Stanley Tucci and Jessica Biel, which was perhaps unfairly cancelled after a single season, so if you want the full, creepy, atmospheric story of what’s going on at a neuroscience research centre in Tennessee. A 911 call draws police to the gates, but the facility stays locked – until three days later, when a pyre and a dead body are found, and 300 people are missing. Investigative reporter Lia Haddock goes on the hunt for clues. Listen now >>

Dr Death

The first series of this one was a proper blockbuster that told the story of Christopher Duntsch, a doctor who presented himself as a wunderkind of neurosurgery but who injured 31 people and killed two with his procedures. Later series looked at a chemotherapy-mad oncologist and a fraudulent thoracic surgeon who kept experimenting with synthetic tracheas. It’s properly nightmarish stuff, explored with a level of creeping dread and alarm which will stay with you. Listen now >>

Dirty John

If Dr Death was a blockbuster, the LA Times’ Dirty John was the Star Wars to its Jaws, the Avengers: Endgame to its Titanic. Debra Newell met John Michael Meehan on an online dating website, and he seemed like a catch: charming, good looking, had his life together. But Meehan was not the man he appeared to be. To say too much would ruin the whole thing, but it’s a twisty, deeply unpredictable story which reaches a wild climax which, depending on your view, will feel either like just desserts or a frustrating chance at justice missed. Listen now >>

Song Exploder

For a podcast that felt like the kind of thing only podcasting could do justice to – musicians breaking down the process of writing and recording their biggest hits, stripping down a song to its bare bones before putting it back together again – the TV version that turned up on Netflix did it great justice. Whereas the Netflix series has two seasons, pretty much everyone’s been on the podcast over more than 250 podcast episodes, from Foo Fighters to Sampha and Paramore to New Order. Listen now >>

Lore

Another one that tickles whatever part of your brain it is that likes sitting around a campfire listening to spooky stories, Lore tells true tales which lean toward the unsettling, the inexplicable and the mordaunt. There’s a delicacy and strange power to host Aaron Mahnke’s coolly underplayed narration, which makes the stranger-than-fiction stories all the more bone-chilling. The Amazon Prime series based on it looked at lobotomies, werewolves and haunted houses. Listen now >>

The Shrink Next Door

Will Ferrell, Paul Rudd and Kathryn Hahn all starred in the Apple TV+ adaptation of this psychological thriller of a true story about a psychiatrist who manages to inveigle his way into his clients’ lives and help himself to anything he likes. The tone isn’t quite true crime; it’s more like a relationship drama, with celebrity shrink ‘Ike’ Herschkopf and his biddable subject Marty Markowitz becoming bound tighter and tighter together over years of manipulation. Listen now >>

Can I Tell You a Secret?

Netflix has just announced an adaptation of Sirin Kale’s investigation into a mystery that gripped Northwich in the mid-noughties. Over a decade, dozens of apparently random women were sent the same message: “can I tell you a secret?” This mysterious person would then spread rumours of infidelities, which spiralled into real life fights and fall-outs. Kale tries to find the cyberstalker at the centre of it all, and speaks to the women whose lives he made a misery. In the end, things are far more complicated than they seem. Listen now >>

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But The Great British Bake Off is part of the furniture now, and despite shuffling presenters and channels has retained its cosy charms, and its weekly knockout format makes it a perfect show to whip up a quality watchalong podcast for. Some are presented to the judges – that’s you, podcast fan – and quickly found to have collapsed in the oven, or gone all funny in the middle, or unaccountably have mixed some pretty inadvisable flavours together.

Not these ones though. These are the podcasting equivalents of the star bakers: the best Great British Bake Off podcasts.

Baking Bad

Comedians Ross Drummond, Harry Monaghan and North American correspondent Claire Downs chew over the events of each episode, in an enjoyably home-brewed podcast which has a lot of fun with the transatlantic appeal of Bake Off – the show is, Americans are reminded, screened on every IMAX screen on the country each week. It’s got a magnificent take on the Bake Off theme tune for its opening sting too. Listen now >>

Worth the Calories

Matthew and Cathryn Vose run the rule over the contestants and their efforts, as you’d expect, but the cherry on the extra dollop of cream on top of this cake is their enthusiastic dissection of exactly how doable any of the individual entries are for the home baker. It’s that linking of the show and the slightly frazzled would-be cream horn maker which gives Worth the Calories its charm. Plus, there are bonus recipes in the show notes each time. Listen now >>

The Bake Down

There are only a select few people around who know what it’s like to enter the tent and feel its suffocating atmosphere play merry hell with their creme pat. The Bake Down brings in expert witnesses in Bake Off alumni Jane Beedle (series 7), Howard Middleton (series 4) and Dan Beasley-Harling (series 9) to join host Sarah Taylor to talk review the action each week, and recall what it was really like baking under the steely gaze of Paul, Mary and Prue. Listen now >>

Sticky Bun Boys

This is a watchalong pod which has wandered between Bake Off and The Traitors, but is back on Bake Off for the new series. David Atherton and Michael Chakraverty are particularly keen on the innuendo – they tend to title their episodes after new entries in the canon, like “dry beaver” – and as well as going over the twists and turns of each episode, they speak to former contestants for an inside scoop. Plus: they love a bonus dating disaster story. Listen now >>

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That’s one reason why podcasts are, if you’ll pardon the pun, the perfect medium for spooky stories. Without special effects, latex masks or wringing out an eighth sequel from some IP that should’ve been left alone two decades ago, podcasters can conjure up haunting soundscapes and engrossing stories so well precisely because you have to bring them to life yourself.

Whether it’s new fiction using the storytelling possibilities of audio, film fans delving into the history of horror cinema, retellings of shocking true crime or investigations into the paranormal, there’s absolutely tons of podcasts out there that’ll give you what MR James, the master of the ghost story, called “a pleasing terror”. Try not to have nightmares.

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Uncanny

The podcaster who’s done more than most to bring spooky listening to the mainstream is Danny Robins. The Battersea Poltergeist was a blockbuster investigation of one of Britain’s most famous hauntings; Uncanny is the ongoing follow-up, which takes on a different case each time. With new interviews by the people at the centres of the stories and on the ground investigations to see how much of the story stands up, the ever-likeable Robins is a wide-eyed and empathetic guide. It’s gone on to a live tour and TV version. Listen on your podcast app >>

Last Podcast on the Left

The horror buff’s horror podcast, this one has been going for more than a decade and pretty much set the template for many scary podcasts to follow. Each time there’s a different mystery, conspiracy, ghost story, alien abduction, historic disaster or true crime intrigue to learn about, and Ben Kissel, Marcus Parks and Henry Zebrowski stand ready to both recognise how horrible they are and try to neutralise the horror with their own kind of daft nonsense. Not one for those of a particularly sensitive disposition though.. Listen on your podcast app >>

Welcome to Night Vale

This was one of the very first fiction podcasts to make it really, really big. The hook is that we’re listening to radio broadcasts to a small community somewhere in America – adverts for carnivals, local election reminders, that sort of thing. Except the carnival sounds horrific and the only vote in the election comes from disembodied voices in a hidden gorge. Both funny ha-ha and funny peculiar. Listen on your podcast app >>

Alice Isn’t Dead

Rather appropriately, this podcast is sort of undead: the main series ran from 2016 to 2018, but very occasional new episodes have been known to claw their way up through the cold earth. It’s a horror-leaning thriller from Welcome to Night Vale’s co-author Joseph Fink, and follows a lonely trucker as she traverses America on the search for her wife, who’s gone missing. Their relationship isn’t straightforward, but then neither is this America: it’s full of ghostly no-places lost in time, not-quite-human serial killers and, at its heart, a sprawling conspiracy. Listen on your podcast app >>

A Podcast to the Curious

This one started out as an exploration of the life and work of MR James, the master of the English ghost story. It’s literary rather than alarming, digging into the context and the story of how each story was written as well as dissecting the tales themselves. They’ve tip-toed into the dimly lit library of other English ghost stories too, from Dickens to writers who followed James’ lead. Listen on your podcast app >>

They Walk Among Us

To these British ears, there’s something quite distant about American true crime podcasts. No matter how gruesome or sad, there’s always the sense of relief that nothing so outlandish could happen in the dull old UK. They Walk Among Us, though, shows that there is terror out there in the mundanity. Each time husband and wife duo Benjamin and Rosanna Fitton retell a British true crime story with a forensic but empathetic eye, exhuming the strange and the sad and reminding you that it could happen to you too. Listen on your podcast app >>

The No Sleep Podcast

The tradition of the anthology horror movie has found a modern home in podcasting, and few places do it as well as this one. Each time there are new, original stories drawn from listener submissions – a couple for free listeners, six or seven for paid subscribers – with some performed by a narrator and some by a full voice cast, with subtle sound design to ramp up the creepiness. We’re knocking on for 500 episodes of scary short stories now after nearly 12 years, and some writers have gone on to launch successful writing careers off the back of it. Listen on your podcast app >>

The Harrowing

The frame of this audio drama is a police investigation into a mysterious tragedy on a remote island off the west coast of Scotland called Toll Mòr. A growling stranger walks into a church warning of doomsday and demons, and local police sergeant Jackie O’Hara (Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt) arrives just as a huge storm rolls in. Listen on your podcast app >>

Lore

Though the horror pod wave has been driven by mixtures of fact and faction, some of the most spine-tingling are those like Lore, which meticulously research true scary stories which inspire folklore. Each time there’s a different theme – opportunity, confidence, music – which are explored by the tales different cultures tell each other about them. There’s a truly vast back catalogue of nearly 200 episodes here to creep into. Listen on your podcast app >>

Can’t get enough scary podcasts? Make sure you check out Pod Bible’s Horrible Halloween playlist for the ULTIMATE list of scary shows…  

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Far be it from us to start gushing about high street supermarkets, and obviously other high street supermarkets are available, but everything Waitrose does comes with the implicit promise that it’s going to be a little bit nicer than the equivalent own-brand product you’d have got elsewhere. It’s a little present to yourself.

Its podcast, Dish, has that feel. The idea is that it’s a dinner party with a different famous type each time, and exactly the kind of unguarded, daft conversation which any decent dinner party usually degenerates into with the appropriate company and drinks. Hartnett, the Michelin-starred chef, wisely takes charge of the cooking to put together a different dish every time; Grimshaw does the glad-handing, sous-cheffing and sommeliering.

That isn’t to say that it’s over-polished or prim: hosts Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett’s skill is in making each episode sound like you’re earwigging on their conversation with a famous friend having been sat next to them in a restaurant, or perhaps that you can hear their conversation floating through the kitchen window. Here’s where to start.

S1 E1: Nick and Angela

It’s an obvious place to start, but given that you’ll be spending a whole lot of time with Grimshaw and Hartnett from here on out it’s an essential grounding in their attitudes to food and where they’re coming from. This first dish is a pea and pancetta risotto, with a side of memories of Hartnett’s time being lambasted by Gordon Ramsey for making a hash of a terrine and sending butter flying everywhere from a stand mixer. “And as I’m cleaning down in my panic, I switched the freezer off,” Hartnett remembers. “So then I start melting the ice creams for lunch, everything.” It’s reassuring to know that even extremely good chefs have literal and metaphorical meltdowns when the pressure’s on. Plus: the insider knowledge of which famous people are famous enough to demand takeaway from Hartnett’s restaurant. Harrison Ford is a big yes, as are Cher and Claudia Winkleman. Sting’s touch and go.

S2 E1: Rylan Clark

Everyone’s favourite X Factor dud turned all-round presenting and chatting geezer is a national treasure in the making, and his visit to Hartnett and Grimshaw wanders typically quickly from the point and onto the many types of wildlife making themselves at home chez Clark. That includes a one-legged pheasant he found using his treadmill, and the snake which he found staring him down in the kitchen. Obviously he asked Instagram what to do.

“Half of them were saying, ‘It’s a grass snake, it’s more frightened of you.’ The other half were saying, ‘My dad’s a vet and it’s gonna kill you.’” Panicking, Rylan called his gardener to come and sort the snake out, which had gone missing again. “So I’m in a boiler suit I once wore on X Factor, tucked into a pair of UGG boots. And it was boiling as well, it was like 30, 40 degrees out. So he’s opened up the bi-folds. It was like Cilla Black’s ‘Moment of Truth.’”

He lived to tell the tale, clearly, and to wolf down the beer and burger Hartnett prepared for him.

S3 E7: Aisling Bea

The slightly luvvie-ish chat about how Aisling bumped into Grimshaw while he was getting a facial in Los Angeles – “gym-ed out, with his face absolutely pummelled and worked on” – soon turns into a deep dive into Bea’s extremely extensive knowledge of potatoes as they tuck into tuna niçoise and its natural counterpart, a nice whisky. If you’ve ever wondered exactly how to become a potato farmer, Bea has some sound but kind of gross advice: “How you do it is you just cut an old potato in half, let it dry out, and then – this sounds disgusting – its eyes will become its legs and then the eyes are to grow into a bit of soil, and then another potato comes out of the potato.”

Listen to Dish now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast apps >>

To learn more about Angela and Nick, their love of podcasts, and the show read our interview in Issue 29 of the Pod Bible Magazine now!

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Over the next six months I listened to loads of different sleep podcasts, discarding also-rans and adding contenders to my nightly rotations. There are a few different types, and you’ll probably have to shuffle through a few to see which works best for you. The most common style are story readings, either classics or new, specially written low-stakes scenes that aim to lead you gently into dreams – though there are a fair few that deploy mindfulness techniques and immersive soundscapes too

It’s a tricky balance to strike. They have to be interesting enough that you want to melt into the sound-world they create, but they have to be dull enough not to rev you up so much you can’t drop off. They need to be welcoming, but not overfamiliar. Almost by default, they’re oddly sensual experiences – someone is whispering in your ear as you lie in bed, after all – but they must be in absolutely no way alluring. Having said that, Audible got Matthew McConaughey for theirs and that didn’t do them any harm. Anyway: here are seven of the best.

The Sleeping Forecast

The Shipping Forecast is a widely prescribed sedative, but if you’re listening to Radio 4 at 00.47 you’ve got to be conked out pretty quickly before ‘God Save the Queen’ comes thundering in at 1am. Fortunately, BBC Sounds married extracts of it with neoclassical piano pieces in its hour-long piece, part of its Mindful Mix strand.

The smooth, lilting baritone of British-Jamaican announcer Neil Nunes is the perfect voice to hear gently reciting the liturgy of mythic places around the British Isles’ coastline: Fitzroy, Cromarty, German Bight. Producer Freddie Botham told me that Nunes was always his first choice. “There’s something about lower frequencies and Neil Nunes’s voice,” he said. “They are naturally comforting – there’s a womb-like aspect.” Listen now on your podcast app >>

Get Sleepy

From a slightly pokey walk-in wardrobe somewhere in Buckinghamshire, 27-year-old Thomas Jones reads specially written sleep stories in an even, soothing tone. Get Sleepy’s stories come in a few flavours. Some take you to different places around the world, like the Costa Brava or Nova Scotia; others take you to different places in time, perhaps Roman Colchester or Ancient Athens. There are new spins on folk tales and comforting retellings of how crayons or love heart sweets or the Pony Express came into being. It’s just added a new strand, too – The Sleepy Bookshelf, which features readings of classic stories and started with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Listen now on your podcast app >>

Phoebe Reads a Mystery

The title’s a tiny little bit misleading here. What started with a reading of Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles became an anthology of full readings of classic novels including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Sense and Sensibility and, amazingly, over 44 episodes, Jane Eyre. There’s been a year’s hiatus but the show is back, and also boasts a big back-catalogue to dig into. You’d never think that Dracula could make for a good bedtime story, but it really works. Listen now on your podcast app >>

Nothing Much Happens

Yoga and meditation teacher Kathryn Nicolai narrates little tales of perfectly formed mundanity. You’ll pop to the bakery, wander around a village looking for a gift for a friend’s housewarming, and revisit the first few months of a lifelong friendship. This is a great big cuddle of a podcast, and Nicolai’s whispered delivery is as calming as they come. Listen now on your podcast app >>

The Audible Sleep Collection

This was one of Audible’s biggest sellers in 2020, and it encompasses two strands: stories and meditations. The selling point here, that the stories are read by well known voices, seems a little bit self-defeating. How, you might ask, am I meant to sleep when Matthew McConaughey is reading to me? Me! Matthew McConaughey! A bedtime story! The meditations are more amorphous and rambling, and feature the likes of Diddy giving you affirmations and Nick Jonas rhapsodising about the perfect baseball swing. It is, however, undeniably effective. Listen now on your podcast app >>

Sleep Cove

Another podcast that mixes voyages into the past with factoids and meditative breathing exercises which encourage you to find sleep through mindfulness, this one also adds guided sleep hypnosis episodes into the mix. The idea is that narrator Christopher Fitton leads you gently into a state of readiness for sleep. It’s somewhere between mindfulness and general wellness, a more active experience than whacking on a story and waiting until you drop off. Listen now on your podcast app >>

Send Me To Sleep

Now, this one comes with a warning: narrator and pro voice actor Andrew’s reading style is a bit of an acquired taste. His slightly halting delivery can take a little getting used to, but it clearly works for a lot of people. He reads stories ranging from Ancient Greek fables and Shakespearean adaptations to The Phantom of the Opera and The Time Machine. Listen now on your podcast app >>

Boring Books for Bedtime

Dropping off while someone with a calming voice reads to you from a book that’s just interesting enough to hold your brain’s attention, but not so interesting you want to hear any more than you absolutely have to. Maybe it’s just me, but not all of the out-of-copyright books read here sound boring – PT Barnum’s autobiography? A history of the art of firework making? Oscar Wilde on English art? Sign me up! – but presenter Sharon’s semi-whispered style render everything she reads deeply soothing. Listen now on your podcast app >>

Podcast to Fall Asleep To

This is about as Ronseal a podcast name as you’re ever likely to find, and much like that celebrated wood stain it gets the job done with minimal fuss. Host Jimmy Jo softly and patiently talks about different topics which are, by his own admission, “both unimportant and uninteresting”. Most recently it was pets – specifically his cats, who have become producers on the show. Jimmy Jo’s murmurings have been less frequent over the last year, but there’s a back catalogue of 161 episodes to curl up with. Listen now on your podcast app >>

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Looking for a podcast for children struggling to sleep? Check out our interview with Kerry Keenan, who created Your Floating Bed >>

This article was first published in August 2021 and updated August 2023.

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The official British singles chart turned 70 last year, and while we’re all obviously delighted for that venerable institution to celebrate its Platinum Jubilee it should probably be looking over its shoulder. There’s another numerical ranking that might one day overtake it as the barometer of exactly what the nation is thinking about and feeling: the podcast charts.

There are a few different podcast charts around, and they all seem to have slightly different ideas of what’s popular and who’s going, as Smash Hits used to put it, down the dumper. For this article, we’re going by the Apple Podcasts chart, and this is just a snapshot of things as they stand this month. That said, there’s a fair few instant hits, which have clamped themselves to the upper reaches of the charts on launch and might be difficult to dislodge.

The Diary of a CEO

Part business heavyweight, part new age sage, all podcast behemoth, Dragons’ Den’s Steven Bartlett is Britain’s highest profile example of a very 2020s archetype: the CEO who’s almost as much a spiritual leader as someone who knows how to stick a business together. His podcast is all about finding that thing every business leader with their LinkedIn recommendations likes to talk about now, purpose, with the help of guests who’ve been down to the bottom as well as up at the top, much like him. Listen now >>

The Rest is Politics

One of the many unexpected narrative turns of British politics in the last few years is the rebirth of Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart as centrist dads with a runaway hit podcast reflecting on domestic and international politics twice a week. Originally pitched as a classic odd couple dynamic – Campbell the trenchant Labour scrapper, Stewart the old Etonian liberal Tory – the reason it works is actually that they realise they’re so similar, and happy to do what they call ‘disagreeing agreeably’. They’re both fuming with the government, for one thing, and both good at taking a global view on the news. Listen now >>

The Therapy Crouch

After sewing up the football podcast game, Peter Crouch of – let me check my notes here – The Peter Crouch Podcast has planted a long, surprisingly cultured foot into relationships podcasts. If you’re doing a relationship pod these days you’ve got to do it with your real life partner, and Abbey Clancy is ideal for it: funny, opinionated, and only too happy to take the mick out of her husband. Each time they dissect a difficulty your love life might throw up, from working out when to move in together to the perfect proposal. Listen now >>

Sh**ged Married Annoyed

Of course, The Therapy Crouch follows in the footsteps of the relationship pod that set the new agenda: Chris and Rosie Ramsey’s giant hit passed 100 million downloads more than a year ago, and doesn’t look like it’ll slow down any time soon. The format is loose and freewheeling, the better to let the Ramseys’ easy chat flow and bring forth the relatable laughs about the day to day irritations and agitations your nearest and dearest are so good at landing in your life. Listen now >>

The News Agents

BBC heavyweights Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall all left the corporation earlier this year to lead Global’s banner current affairs pod, and even this early on in proceedings it looks like the gamble’s paying off. Through the late Johnson collapse, the Tory leadership scramble, the Truss interregnum and the Sunak ultimatum, they’ve been around Westminster and the party conferences reporting with authority and confidence. Listen now >>

The Rest is History

The other big hit in the Goalhangers production house stable sees historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland (not that one) digging through corners of history both familiar and obscure, and also using it as a means to look at current affairs with a longer view than most other podcasts tend to take. The series of World Cup-themed specials, which dive deep into a slice of a competing nation’s history, have been particularly good. Listen now >>

Off Menu

You know your podcast is doing quite well when you collab with a menswear brand on a run of tie-in t-shirts. Ed Gamble and James Acaster’s food pod is that kind of big, and you can see its popularity in the rash of podcasts where guests think up a fantasy thing: festival line-up, film screenings, that sort of thing. But Off Menu still does it best, and draws on guests as varied as Stanley Tucci, Rina Sawayama, Ed Sheeran and Rylan – plus Rylan’s mum, who called in during their recording because she was worried he’d died. Listen now >>

ZOE Science and Nutrition

The breakout health and science podcast in the UK became what it is with a very simple idea: if you ask questions people are worried about, and have them answered by experts, listeners will flock to you. Each time presenter Jonathan Wolf takes one question – what’s the best natural sugar alternative? Is dairy good or bad for you? How do ultra-processed foods affect your body? – and sits down with a scientist or health professional to talk over the latest research. It’s reassuringly clerical and straightforward, but never hectoring. Listen now >>

Scamanda

Amanda Riley is dying of cancer. Everyone knows that. It’s heartbreaking, especially given that she’d just got her life exactly how she wanted it: the perfect husband, the perfect house, the perfect life. But as that none too subtle portmanteau title implies, all is not what it seems. Amanda’s friends and family believe her, though, and start to raise money for her treatments – more than $100,000. Over the seven years she kept up the charade, the lengths that she goes to to keep her ruse going become more and more extreme. Listen now >>

Brydon &

Aw, lovely, cuddly Rob Brydon. There are more than enough interview podcasts out there, but Brydon’s is more than just another rush job with a shoehorned plug for whatever the guest is promoting. His easy warmth and feel for a story make podcasting an obvious home for him, but interestingly, Brydon’s often at his best as an interviewer when his guest pushes back a little, and encourages him into comic running battles with a gently waspish edge. Steve Coogan’s recent appearance is a case in point. The third series of his chats has pushed him back up the charts. Listen now >>

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Ready for more recommendations? Make sure you check out our lists in the Recommendation section.

This article was originally published in December 2022 and last updated on 1st August 2023.

The post The 10 most popular podcasts in the UK appeared first on POD BIBLE.

But you’re also kind of busy, and despite your best efforts your partner/mates/colleagues/flatmates/pets don’t have anywhere near as much invested in, say, the ongoing struggle for control of Waystar-RoyCo. Where do you put your energy, your urge to shout about it, your extremely tenuous fan theories? Or, if you pick up a show absolutely yonks after everyone else was raving about it, how do you feel it unfurling before you without getting the standard “What, you’re only just watching Breaking Bad?” response from anyone you try to chat about it with?

You listen to one of the many watchalong podcasts, obviously. There are a few different genres here, from the kinds of slightly ramshackle, homemade pods powered by their hosts’ deep devotion to their subject to the super-swish broadcaster produced tie-ins that have become de rigeur for shows big and small. Here are some of the best.

His Darker Materials

Hosts Dave Corkery and Empire magazine’s Helen O’Hara delve deep into HBO and the BBC’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novels, with cast members including Dafne Keen and Amir Wilson and VFX don Russell Dodgson also popping by to explain how the show comes together behind the scenes. Empire Podcast listeners will already be familiar with O’Hara’s mix of insight, knowledge and generally being a laugh, and the easy rapport she has with Corkery is the bedrock here. Listen now >>

Buffering: A Rewatch Adventure

It’s hard to overstate quite how important Buffy the Vampire Slayer was to a generation of young people who found community and recognition in its portrayal of gay women. Hosts Kristin Russo and Jenny Owen Youngs are both queer and bring that perspective to their ep-by-ep rewatch of Buffy. Astutely picking out viewpoints that were bypassed in the late nineties, they bring a fresh and affectionate eye to a show they both love. And, at the end of each episode, there’s a new original song responding to what they’ve seen. Now they’ve finished Buffy, the pair are moving onto another cult favourite with The eX-Files: An X-Files Podcast. Listen now >>

Office Ladies

The crew who starred in The US Office are clearly loath to leave a thing they loved behind – after Brian Baumgartner’s The Office Deep Dive pod, which featured pretty much anyone who’s ever been near Dunder Mifflin there’s this from Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey who played Pam and Angela respectively. It’s another ep-by-ep breakdown, and the very palpable sense that these best pals are having fun wandering down memory lane is apt for the ultimate comfort blanket sitcom. Listen now >>

The Crown Official Podcast

Official podcasts can be a teensy bit dull, but what you lose in spicy takes and off-brand wittering you gain in glossier presentation and a hotline straight to the big dogs at the heart of things. The Crown costs about a trillion quid as it is, and clearly some of that’s gone to the official tie-in pod: Edith Bowman on hosting duties, cast members dropping by to chat, and a raft of fascinating below-the-line professionals doing the hard yards to pull the whole thing together. Listen now >>

Dragoncast

Back in the heady days of early 2019, before that Starbucks cup got left on Daenerys’ desk and everything started going to pot, the Game of Thrones fandom was one of the most obsessive and upbeat fandoms around. With House of the Dragon, it feels like the good times are back again, and Jamie East’s podcast has been there for all the ups and downs. Sue Perkins and journalist Chris Mandle are regular guests, and ensure every fan theory and world-building detail is chased down. Listen now >>

Dug Too Deep

A billion quid later, we’re still kind of making our minds up about whether Amazon Prime’s admittedly beautiful Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series was worth all the palaver. But as with everything Tolkien, there are passionate defenders of – and, even more crucially, knowledgeable interpreters of – his work everywhere. Jim, Aron, David and John are some such types, reverently irreverent about everything Rings of Power but full of Middle Earth lore too. The chiptune rendering of Concerning Hobbits which opens each ep is a joy. Listen now >>

The Lost Boys

Film journalists Jacob Stolworthy (Lost superfan) and Jack Shepherd (Lost agnostic) watch the entirety of the extremely what-just-happened desert island drama. It’s a particularly handy pod for the Lost first-timer, what with Jacob’s deep knowledge and Jack’s knack for asking exactly what you’re probably thinking about the show which stands as probably the biggest fan theory generator since Twin Peaks. The interviews with the cast and crew are excellent too. Listen now >>

Firecrotch and Normcore: A Succession Podcast

Husband and wife Geoff Lloyd and Sara Barron will be familiar from their work on BBC comedy across TV and radio, and as well as breaking down each episode they’re exceptionally good at picking up and pulling at the stray threads which live rent-free in the heads of Succession stans. Where exactly did Marcia’s son go? We deserve to know. Listen now >>

HBO’s Succession Podcast

Official tie-in podcasts can be a bit of a mixed bag. Yes, the access to stars and prime movers is great, but the necessity of only being nice about the thing that it’s tied in with can make the discussion a little anodyne. Fortunately, Succession is on such outrageously good form that it takes that roadblock out of the way of HBO’s pod, and host Kara Swisher is appropriately brisk with her guests to get the most out of them. Well, it wouldn’t be right if such an unsentimental show got too cosy a pod, would it? Listen now >>

Talking Sopranos

It’s been off the air for more than 15 years, but it’s never the wrong time to get into The Sopranos. Whether you’re fresh to it or on a twelfth rewatch, this is the top companion pod. Its hosts are Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa, who played Christopher Moltisanti and Bobby Baccalieri, and who liberally sprinkle anecdotes and memories from their time on set into the mix. It’s as close as you’ll get to hanging out eavesdropping on Tony in Dr Melfi’s office in podcast form. Listen now >>

This article was original published on January 4, 2023.

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With casting for a brand new Bond still in its early stages, a top-to-bottom reboot on the cards and nothing much happening in the near future, it’s a good time to dig into the back catalogue of the man who makes functional alcoholism with a side-order of post-traumatic stress disorder look exotic and saucy.

The Bond pod-verse is one which skews pretty severely male – and particularly toward formats where two blokes talk to each other about one film for ages – but there are other, more interesting and provocative takes out there too.

Here are some of the best James Bond podcasts out there.

The James Bond A to Z Podcast

The sprawling, interconnected, frequently quite strange history of Bond from his roots in Ian Fleming’s novels to the films, games and comics is a bit of a mess. It needs organising. Journalists Tom Butler and Tom Wheatley and comedian Brendan Duffy start at the top of the alphabet and work their way through, from Aston Martin and Ken Adam to Cubby Broccoli, Blofeld and onward. Telling a definitive history of James Bond is a daunting task – its fandom is very sensitive to people getting Bond wrong (copyright A Partridge) – but the three hosts draw on a really deep well of knowledge to give the people responsible for Bond their dues. Listen now on your podcast player >>

Smersh Pod

What started as host John Rain and friends rewatching all the Bond films and ripping them to pieces together – though always from a place of great love and respect – has mushroomed into an all-purpose cinematic snark-athon taking in any films even tangentially related to Bond actors. That means you get classic Pierce Brosnan joints like Mamma Mia! and The Lawnmower Man, Connery’s The Hunt for Red October and The Rock, and the Timothy Dalton-Mae West comedy musical Sextette. Very daft, very sweary and very funny. Listen now on your podcast player >>

No Time To Die: The Official James Bond Podcast

Now mothballed of course, there are nevertheless a lot of useful tidbits about the making of Daniel Craig’s final Bond film here, and as is usually the case with in-house promo pods, the access is second to none. Everyone involved in the film pops up here, from Craig himself to director Cary Joji Fukunaga, Rami Malek and the rest of the gang, and it goes well beyond just gassing up the last film and instead picks apart what makes a Bond film a Bond film. That means deep dives on the music, the locations and the way that the fictional spy has been moulded by the real world. Listen now on your podcast player >>

The Great James Bond Car Robbery

Though he’s adept at getting hold of all sorts of stolen bits and pieces on behalf of HM Government, Bond has never been part of a heist crew. And fair enough: he usually leaves a trail of destruction behind him. But a real-life heist sprung in a Florida aircraft hangar in 1997 was easily as strange and inexplicable as that gondola hovercraft Roger Moore drove through Venice in Moonraker. An Aston Martin DB5 used in Goldfinger and Thunderball and estimated to be worth £18.5 million is missing, but specialist sleuths are on the case. Elizabeth Hurley narrates. Listen now on your podcast player >>

James Bond & Friends

From the people behind the fansite MI6 HQ, this is a holistic, 360-degree expert’s eye view on pretty much every iteration of Bond, from the films to novels and video games to cartoon spin-off series James Bond Jr. Yep, it’s another let’s-watch-the-movies-in-order kind of a pod, but you know why people keep doing that? Because it works. And this load of Bond fans really do know their stuff. Alongside MI6 HQ’s James Page is a coalition of Bond aficionados who’ve read every ‘for your eyes only’ secret dossier out there, while regular guests include Dr Lisa Funnell, an academic whose research focuses on Bond and gender. Listen now on your podcast player >>

Kill James Bond

If you’re less pie-eyed about Bond and his penchant for murder, following his horn and the more yikes-y quips of yesteryear, this one might be more your thing. Abi, Alice and Devon (who produces the very good comedy/economics/current affairs/whatever pod Trashfuture) have watched all the Bond films and go in on them with both feet. Their assessment of Bond’s flat as seen in Spectre (“He has one crate of Gamer Fuel he’s using as a chair”) is worth the admission alone, and they’ve expanded out into anything even vaguely spy-adjacent since. The good news is you don’t need to have seen Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London to enjoy their work. Listen now on your podcast player >>

Desert Island Discs

It’s a mark of how venerable Desert Island Discs is that it was already two decades old by the time Ian Fleming washed up to pick his tunes with Roy Plomley in 1963. (As well as Rosemary Clooney and Edith Piaf, he picked the appropriately noirish Harry Lime Theme from The Third Man.) Roger Moore dropped in in 1981, while latterday M Dame Judi Dench reflected on her time sending Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig to almost certain death in 2015, and iconic set designer Ken Adam has been set adrift. Bond composer John Barry has done it too, as have a raft of Bond theme song acts: Macca, Lulu, Sir Tom Jones, Adele and Dame Shirley Bassey all feature.

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The alternative name for their show – Wittertainment – has yet to trouble the OED. But the duo have been part of the podcasting furniture for so long it’s easy to forget exactly how important they’ve been to making podcasts feel like something important and useful.

That first episode was downloaded 42 times. Since then, the duo have been reliably among the most-downloaded podcast hosts of them all in the UK, and returned to the top of the podcasting charts with their shiny new Sony show Kermode and Mayo’s Take. With plush new digs, a big neon sign and crisp HD clips ready for YouTube, it feels like right at home in the podcast landscape in 2022.

But so much remains the same from the BBC days: running jokes which nobody can quite remember the origins of, rants against unworthy films from Kermode, perceptive interviewing and occasional sly digs from Mayo, and a bulging mailbag of thoughtful, enlightened views about films old and new from the listeners.

Here’s a primer to get you going.

Kermode and Mayo’s Take: Tom Hiddleston

The first edition of the new show began just as their first show on 5 Live did in 2001 following their first shows together on Radio 1: with Kermode jabbing a finger and picking up as if nothing had happened with, “And another thing…” New features abound, but the good natured bickering and the revelatory correspondence abides. First guest Tom Hiddleston, on to chat about The Essex Serpent, began with a gushing tribute to the show and its hosts. The old smoothie. Listen now on Apple Podcasts >>

Kermode and Mayo’s Take: Tom Hanks

For some years now, the Wittertainment lodestar has been Tom Hanks, America’s dad and all-round voice of sanity and goodness. His most recent chat with with Mayo saw him on typically ebullient form, talking up the tacky appeal of his Colonel Tom Parker in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic and reassuring us – in acknowledgement of one of many longstanding Wittertainment catchphrases – that everything will, in fact, be alright in the end. Listen now on Apple Podcasts >>

Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review: Chadwick Boseman

Given how simple he makes it sound, it’s easy to forget quite how adept an interviewer Mayo is, and how adroitly he can draw stories and opinions out of pretty much any guest. (A truculent Charlie Kaufman was a notable exception.) Best of all was an extraordinarily thoughtful response from Chadwick Boseman to Martin Scorsese’s dismissal of Marvel’s cinematic credentials. Far from being lightweight, Boseman said, Black Panther tapped into anxieties among black Americans. “We felt that angst, we felt that danger from cinema when we watched it,” he said. “And maybe Scorsese didn’t get that when he watched it. That’s generational. That’s cultural. I’m secure in what we did.” Listen now on Apple Podcasts >>

Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review: Sex and the City 2

A Kermodian rant against a film which has failed dismally is one of nature’s great events, and catching one live on the BBC show felt like seeing the Northern Lights or watching a blue whale breach from the sea in front of a perfect sunset. Kermode’s 2010 review of the SATC sequel is perhaps the definitive, Platonic form. “You’re not gonna get a rant about this,” Kermode says at the outset. Seven minutes later, he’s singing The Internationale and has declared its central characters “imperialist American pig-dogs of the highest order”. Beautiful stuff. Listen now on Apple Podcasts >>

To learn more about Mayo and Kermode, their love of podcasts, and their new show, read our interview in Issue 22 of the Pod Bible Magazine now!

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And, apart from that, the Wittertainment bubble is so completely full of in-jokes, well-trodden anecdotes and cosy back-and-forths that it feels like it delivers as satisfying a podcasting experiences as it’s possible to find.

And yet. There’s always room for more Kermode and Mayo, and they’ve both struck out to do their own thing on the podcasts, whether hosting or guesting. The broader Kermode-Mayo Podcasting Universe – the KMPU, if you will – is still expanding.

Perhaps understandably, given Mayo has his drivetime show to be getting on with, Kermode has the most outside podcast action going on. Here’s where to start with their extracurricular podcasting.

Simon Mayo’s Confessions: Eddie’s Meaty Mishap

Now revived on his Greatest Hits Radio show, the Confessions feature was a big part of Mayo’s days on Radio 2 and there are loads of compilation episodes to dig into from those days. The idea isn’t too dissimilar to Fern Brady and Alison Spittle’s Wheel of Misfortune – listeners email in with their tales of misfortune and shame, everyone has a laugh – but here, there’s no guarantee that anyone’s going to be forgiven for their sins. You could pick any at random and have a lovely time, but this one’s a doozy: a dad accidentally forces his child to eat all the gristle from an awful dinner he didn’t want, while someone else wants absolution for flooding their school. Listen now >>

Kermode on Film: debbie tucker green

Kermode’s podcast feels a bit like when someone from a band starts putting out solo records where they get to do the stuff they don’t get to in the day job band. Here he mostly does interviews, either one to one or recorded at his regular MK3D shows at the BFI in London. In part it’s a way of giving writers, directors and actors who are deeply respected in the industry but have so far remained slightly under the radar of your average multiplex-goer. A case in point is debbie tucker green, one of our most inquisitive and exploratory playwrights and directors, who gives a rare and engaging interview here. Listen now >>

Inheritance Tracks

Mayo doesn’t tend to do many guest slots on other people’s pods, but in 2018, he popped up on Saturday Live’s regular Inheritance Tracks feature to talk about The Nightmare Song from Iolanthe by Gilbert and Sullivan and Graceland by Paul Simon. He’s often forthcoming with opinions, but less so with more personal stuff. Here, though, he’s very open. Mayo often finds himself conducting along to The Nightmare Song in exactly the way his dad used to, he says: “So I’ve not only inherited the music, I’ve inherited the mannerisms too.” Listen now >>

Screenshot: Box Office Bombs

Hosted with film journalist Ellen E Jones, Kermode’s other podcast is a magazine-style show which takes a different cinematic phenomenon or genre as its subject each week. There have been episodes about trains on film, the screen presence of Elvis Presley, and indigenous peoples’ film traditions. But the best so far has been this one on box office bombs. There’s a ghoulish fascination with the sheer scale of failure which a truly massive flop can achieve, and the industry-bending gravitational waves the biggest can send rippling across cinema. Jones and Kermode dissect the biggest of them – Warren Beaty’s Ishtar – and draw up rules studios can follow to dodge a flop. Listen now >>

To learn more about Mayo and Kermode, their love of podcasts, and their new show, read our interview in Issue 22 of the Pod Bible Magazine now!

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The format is simple. Each week a topic from culture, science, history or religion – the evolution of teeth, the Chinese philosophy of Daoism, Thucydides – is explained by three academics, wrangled by Bragg. No idea is too big, and no pocket of time too small.

At the centre of it all is Bragg, cutting through any over-ornate explanations with an ever so slightly terse tone and chivvying his charges along towards clarity and specificity. His tight handle on the tempo of proceedings is part of what makes In Our Time work so fluently.

With nearly 1000 episodes of Radio 4’s flagship intellectual roundtable broadcast since its debut in 1998 – a half-hour discussion of war in the 20th century – there’s a lot to rifle through. You could, in all honesty, pick one out at random and find yourself feeling immeasurably enlightened 45 minutes later. But here are three to get you going.

Zero

This is one of those In Our Time episodes which makes you stare into space for a couple of seconds in slack-jawed incomprehension even before you’ve started listening. Obviously, when you think about it, the idea of a graphical representation of nothing had to be invented at some point. But as with the best In Our Time episodes, this is probably the first time you’ve spent much time thinking about it. We go back to Ancient Egypt and Greece to hear about how the idea of nothingness was tussled over before Islamic mathematicians popularised the zero. Listen now >>

The Evolution of Teeth

Another one from the ‘wow, never even considered that’ stable, it turns out that half a billion years ago we were all just armoured fish, scuttling around in the seas and rivers, sucking up bits of food in our jawless, toothless mouths. Then at some point the scales started shifting around, and we could get to nibbling something more substantial. There are clues to the past in the fossil record of sharks, and sharks also point to a possible future where humans might manage to replace their own teeth. Madness. Listen now >>

The Gin Craze

Back in the late 17th century, as William of Orange took up the English throne, the country got a taste for a novel new Dutch import. A slightly mysterious new spirit flavoured with juniper became a national passion which curdled into a full-blown public health crisis, and was considered such a threat to the social fabric of the nation that Parliament legislated five times to bring its sale and consumption under control. The wild details about what life was like in a perma-sozzled England are great. Listen now >>

You can listen to In Our Time on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast players. Already a fan? Tell us your favourite episode over on Twitter!

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However wobbly and is-this-still-a-good-idea the extended franchise films become, however fraught the conversation around JK Rowling, however rambling and complex the Potter lore becomes, it seems there will always be people ready to pick apart and dissect it afresh.

They’ve done it every which way – or should that be witch way? – from watchalong commentaries for the films to forensic chapter by chapter breakdowns. Here are some of the best.

Potterless

Mike Schubert had seen four and a half Harry Potter films before he decided to podcast his chapter-by-chapter discovery of the original books. Each time he and his more Potter-literate friends dissect what he’s just read, as he merrily points out plot holes, inconsistencies and absurdities that you definitely just skipped past when you were racing through the Potter books as a kid. You’ll see the whole thing with fresh eyes. Listen now >>

Mugglecast

This one bills itself as “the original” Harry Potter podcast, having been running in some form since August 2005, two months after Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince landed. In that time hosts Andrew, Micah, Eric and Laura have looked at Potter from pretty much every angle: they’ve dived deep into each chapter, recorded watchalong film commentaries, and interviewed cast and crew. These days they keep up with all the latest developments from the broader Potter-verse. Listen now >>

Accio Politics

Don’t worry – this isn’t like one of those lame tweets that used to pop up every so often comparing Donald Trump with Voldemort. Rather, it’s a chapter-by-chapter assessment of the politics of the wizarding world, from the objectifying dynamic of fame and celebrity which Harry experiences to what we can learn about how supremacism and bigotry function and spread from the books. Listen now >>

Potterversity

There are a lot of fancasts out there to pick over the development of Quidditch in ancient Ireland, and they’re all well and good, but Potterversity sets its sights a little higher. Katy McDaniel and Emily Strand bring critical perspectives to the Potter stories and speak to academics to get an intellectually fresh take – Hermione’s advocacy for house elves, for instance, serves as a training ground for young readers to get into activism. Smart stuff. Listen now >>

Harry Potter Therapy

Another podcast which uses Potter as a framework for exploring very complex, weighty ideas, Harry Potter Therapy is presented by psychologist Dr Janina Scarlet, who developed a ‘superhero therapy’ as a way to treat people with depression, anxiety and PTSD. This spin-off from it uses Potter as a way of talking about and conceptualising emotions and feelings, and points to some handy ways to cope with them too. Listen now >>

The Quibbler

Heather Price-Wright and Alex Dalenberg’s ‘book club for adults’ is the podcasting equivalent of the restricted section in the Hogwarts library. Their discussion about each and every chapter of the saga are frequently X-rated and always irreverent in the way that only a truly dedicated fan podcast can be. Listen now >>

Behind the Wand

If you’re still misty-eyed about the film reunions which came together around the 20th anniversary of The Philosopher’s Stone, Behind the Wand should scratch that itch. Flick Miles, who was Emma Watson’s double in the first three films and is now a journalist, interviews the people who weaved the movie magic, from costumers and concept artists to casting directors and cinematographers. Listen now >>

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The archive is gigantic, and a gentle wade through it can quickly leave you bogged down in choice. One easy way in is to start with these podcasters who’ve been cast away by the BBC over the last few decades.

David Tennant

This very Doctor Who-centric episode went out on the same day Tennant’s Doctor regenerated into Matt Smith, and there’s a nicely elegiac, wistful tone to his chat with Kirsty Young as he recalls being a young Doctor Who obsessive with a Tom Baker scarf. His picks swing wildly between the very Scottish (The Proclaimers’ ‘Over and Done With’), the very bouncy (‘Me and the Farmer’ by the Housemartins) and the very 2010 (‘Ruby’ by Kaiser Chiefs). Listen now >>

Lyse Doucet

Having been a foreign correspondent for the BBC since 1982 covering Ivory Coast, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and, most recently, Ukraine, Lyse Doucet’s reminiscences from earlier this year drew on a professional life spent bearing witness to intensely important and distressing events. “I don’t believe in [being] emotional because that means you’ve lost control of your storytelling,” she told Lauren Laverne. “But empathy, I absolutely believe in.” Her podcast, A Wish For Afghanistan, speaks to ordinary people about their hopes for the country after the return of the Taliban. Listen now >>

Louis Theroux

Everyone’s favourite quietly probing documentarian made some pretty unexpected picks for his discs: ‘Heaven on their Minds’ from Jesus Christ Superstar sits next to the trailblazing hip hop of Eric B & Rakim and samba from Antônio Carlos Jobim. Theroux talks through being inspired to go to boarding school by Enid Blyton, his greatest hits and his habit destressing before tricky assignments by making loads of pasta sauce, and there’s a particularly nice moment when he reflects on his early work with fellow documentarian Michael Moore: “I think the level of incompetence that I brought to the job was, for him, a big plus.” Listen now >>

Ian Wright

As you’ll know if you’ve ever dropped round Wrighty’s House, the former Arsenal and England striker is an effervescent, perceptive guy who’s pretty much impossible to dislike. His chat with Laverne went beyond his footballing exploits and into his difficult early life, and the enormous difference which therapy has made to him since he first opened up. His memories of former teammate and childhood friend David Rocastle, who died at 33, are especially touching: “I don’t think of the accolades or the trophies I’ve won or the England caps – which mean the world to me – all I think about is the fact that I played with him for a year as a professional.” Listen now >>

Malcolm Gladwell

Doubling up on one artist is a slightly rogue Desert Island Discs decision, but then again Gladwell’s whole thing is thinking differently and challenging norms. And also, if you’re going to pick two records from one artist, it might as well be Marvin Gaye. Gladwell is on typically analytical form here. “One of my rules is, if at all possible I never want a person that I talk to to regret having talked to me,” he tells Kirsty Young. “This does not mean I’m nice to everyone… As I get older I more and more understand how many doors close when there’s a lack of generosity on the part of the journalist.” Listen now >>

Mary Beard

The joy of Desert Island Discs is often in the unexpected images that the interviewees’ picks conjure up. Few such images are more joyous than Mary Beard vibing to the Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin’s ‘Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves’. Bob Dylan, Henry Purcell and Janis Joplin all make appearances too, though perhaps most notable is her choice of luxury item: the Elgin Marbles. Unless her desert island is somewhere among the Greek archipelago, that might be a bit politically tricky. Listen now >>

Miriam Margolyes

Some interviewees take a little while to warm up; some never entirely let their guard down. Miriam Margolyes is not one of those interviewees. The Growing Old Disgracefully host is as straightforward and open as ever, but though she might seem to reside in a place beyond such petty concerns as embarrassment or propriety, she admits to feeling like a “frightened little muffin”. She leans into spoken word for her discs, picking extracts from Great Expectations and Private Lives along with a reading of Dylan Thomas’ A Visit to Grandpa’s. Listen now >>

Baroness Floella Benjamin

Benjamin’s route from working in a bank to getting into West End musicals and ascending to the House of Lords via presenting and making TV, writing books, running charities and campaigning for diversity in creative industries is a fascinating one. She’s great company on her From the Heart podcast and she’s got great taste too: George Benson, Ella Fitzgerald and Bob Marley all make Benjamin’s list. Listen now >>

Listen to Desert Island Disks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or other popular podcast players.

The post Where to start with… Desert Island Discs appeared first on POD BIBLE.

It’s taken criticism from some quarters over a few editorial choices, but The Trojan Horse Affair restates again how podcasts as a medium can take complex, morally grey stories and tease them out into a story rich with characters and twists which are all the more fascinating for being real.

If it’s got you hankering after more deeply reported investigation podcasts, you’re in luck. Here are some of the best of the last few years.

Death by Conspiracy?

When 46-year-old Gary Matthews died of Covid in January 2021, his family’s grief was made all the more disorientating by conspiracy groups claiming that Gary’s death had, in fact, been part of a cover-up. Marianna Spring, the BBC’s specialist disinformation and social media reporter, goes to Shrewsbury to find out who Gary was from his family and friends, how he drawn into the conspiratorial thinking of the Shropshire Corona Resilience Network, and how much responsibility they feel they bear for Gary’s passing. You’ll likely inhale all 10 episodes in one sitting. LISTEN NOW >> 

S-Town

The breakout hit that set the investigative podcast mode for the next decade, S-Town is a gripping, twisty, intensely characterful listen. The red herrings, the local eccentrics, the tiptoeing pace and sudden revelations are all part of the furniture now. The bigger question is whether you think it’s an exploitative piece of yokel-baiting or a thoughtful meditation on life itself. When horologist John B McLemore got in touch with This American Life asking them to investigate an alleged murder in his hometown of Woodstock, Alabama, it quickly turned out to be nothing. But a much bigger, more moving, and more profound story was there already – McLemore’s own life. LISTEN NOW >>

Bellingcat

A lot of podcasts do punditry and analysis. There aren’t that many doing proper investigative journalism. There are even fewer doing the kind of laborious, fiddly work that goes into disentangling the confusion which piles up around international incidents from original, open source material. Bellingcat has been doing that for some time now, and the two series of its podcast showcase how it does things. The first tried to get to the bottom of how flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2014, and the second a video apparently showing militiamen killing women and children in an unknown country. It’s extraordinary stuff. LISTEN NOW >> 

The Tip-Off

The big stories which break in the national press are frequently shocking, engrossing and revealing in themselves, but the stories of how they came together are often equally as fascinating. That’s what The Tip-Off focuses on. Maeve McClenaghan speaks to the journalists behind some of the most complex and important stories of recent years – including Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones, who broke the story of Jimmy Savile’s crimes – about the complex business of getting to the truth. LISTEN NOW >>

How It Happened

Axios’ behind-the-scenes strand has included a couple of Trump stories: first, reporter Jonathan Swan traces how the Capitol riot came to happen, going all the way back to Trump’s recovery from Covid and attempts to jump-start his re-election campaign; and second, the attempts to broker a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians which first failed, and then were rescued. They’ve also started a new Putin themed season this month. LISTEN NOW >> 

Where is George Gibney?

Reporter Mark Horgan sets off on the tail of George Gibney, a former Irish Olympic swimming coach who was charged with 27 counts of sexual assault and rape against young people under his charge, and who fled to America via Scotland in 1994 before he could stand trial. This pod isn’t about having a triumphal moment of catharsis, though; rather, it’s the culmination of dogged detective work and a particularly empathetic understanding of what Gibney’s accusers went through. LISTEN NOW >>

A Very Fatal Murder

Just went it felt like investigative podcasts might be disappearing up their own Dictaphones, satirical newspaper The Onion’s show A Very Fatal Murder arrived to spoof them all beautifully. David Pascall is a journalist on the lookout for the perfect death to make his Great American Podcast about, with help from ETHL, an MIT-engineered robot constantly sweeping news reports for “the most interesting, violent, culturally relevant murder cases in America”. It’s pitch perfect, and extremely funny. LISTEN NOW >>

The Walkers Switch

The closest British equivalent is about an appropriately British outrage: the fact that at some point in the nineties, Walkers switched the colours of its salt and vinegar and cheese and onion crisp packets – a fact that the company denies ever happened. Overnight, it seemed, the world of deep fried potato was turned upside down. Or… was it? What starts out as a deadpan gag turns into an oddly absorbing examination of the Mandela effect, the Illuminati, and Gary Lineker. LISTEN NOW >> 

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