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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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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As listeners of Off Air with Jane and Fi will testify, nothing quite compares to the much-loved duo’s wry rapport and composure while discussing everything from Downing Street shuffles to, say, the merits of a baked potato. The voices behind the eponymous Times Radio show are, of course, Jane Garvey, who presented Woman’s Hour until December 2020, and Fi Glover, the broadcaster behind The Listening Project (2012 to 2022).

Each episode begins with a familiar format: a chatty introduction from the hosts, recording shortly after they have come ‘off air’ from their live show, which runs Monday through to Thursday. This framing device allows them to debrief from the most recent live segment – they’ll comment on their most recent guests (everyone from Jamie Oliver to MPs), before listeners hear a full replay of the interview itself. Before we get to the interview (and in the episode’s closing segments afterwards), Jane & Fi typically read through some reader emails – always with amusing commentary – and discuss a mixture of domestic anecdotes, for instance the most recent Nigella Lawson recipes they’ve tried out, with some glorious digressions – plus, what’s trending on the news.

It would be totally remiss of me not to mention Fortunately… with Fi & Jane, the award-winning BBC Radio Four show and podcast that featured the powerful pairing since 2017. It hit headlines when they left the BBC for Times Radio in October last year, leaving behind their original show and its 30 million downloads. Four months in, if you’re a long listener yet to follow Fi & Jane to their new home, be reassured that Off Air has proved a popular follow-up – and these are my cherry-picked favourites from the show to help you catch up. Feast your ear lobes on the below…

Chat & Chop – with Jamie Oliver

The first-ever episode of Off Air started with a bang: the pair discuss settling into the Times Radio studio, outline the show format going forward (so this is a good gateway episode if you’re new to the show), then they are joined by Jamie Oliver, who discusses his latest book One Pot and expounds his wisdom of decades of campaigning for healthy eating for children, amid the cost-of-living crisis.

A saccharine note of journo pap – with Elizabeth Day

This episode comes fresh off the back of the controversy around then-Prime Minister Liz Truss, making for a politics-themed beginning followed by a discussion of the difficulties of starting a new job in middle-age. The highlight of this episode is guest Elizabeth Day, a fellow podcast extraordinaire and bestselling author, who as coincidence would have it has interviewed Truss on multiple occasions and shares her insights. Talking of inside scoops – I particularly enjoyed Fi & Jane’s discussion of their former fellow BBC employees’ toilet habits, together with their own ‘favourite cubicles’ at their newfound Times Radio home.

If music be the food of love, order her a Happy Meal – with Fred Sirieix

One for First Dates fans. After a chat about everything from slippery pavements to elderly parents, the pair introduce guest Fred Sirieix, the TV dating show’s charismatic maître d’ frontman, and get into an animated discussion about relationships, together with the politics of cooking for dates and significant others.

I love Nando’s mash – with Romesh Ranganathan

Actor/comedian Ranganathan, also a fellow podcaster, is the guest on this Nando’s centric episode – he tells listeners all about his spontaneous decision to get an Albanian flag tattoo, his committed love of the popular chicken franchise (and the trio open up about their go-to orders and preferred sides) and what he would do (as a former maths teacher) if he were Education Secretary for a day.

At least I’m owning my hypocrisy

This fascinating episode opens with a discussion of Joanna Lumley’s controversial comments about the #MeToo movement. Later, Jane & Fi meet Teresa Weiler, an adopted child who discovered that her biological parents were siblings – a revelation which led to her deciding not to have kids.

Fantastically successful – with Grace Dent

Some amusing reader questions – including a deep dive into an awkward supermarket scenario – begin this episode, while the highlight is food critic & broadcaster Grace Dent, who opens up about giving up alcohol and her ‘deep love’ of breakfast buffets (funeral buffets also get discussed – plus the politics of consuming a post-death vol-au-vent…)

Listen to Off Air… with Jane & Fi on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast apps.

To learn more about Jane and Fi, thier love of podcasts, and the new show read our interview in Issue 25 of the Pod Bible Magazine now!

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Over the last four years, Fearne has spoken to guests from all walks of life – from household names like Dawn French, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Dame Kelly Holmes, to individuals finding happiness in the hardest of times, and even her own family.

As with all podcasts, there is a wider team behind the microphone sourcing these interviews, producing the sound and updating the socials. Reaching this milestone gives them a good chance to reflect on their favourite episodes too. And if you’re new to the show and finding the episode list a bit overwhelming, here are five episodes to start with, recommended by the Happy Place team:

Fearne Cotton, Happy Place Founder:
‘Björn Natthiko Lindeblad’

I chose Bjorn Nathiko the forest monk. I feel so honoured that I was able to have such an open discussion about life and death with this wise human. Knowing he didn’t have long to live gave him an expansive understanding of life. His words have never left me. I’m so grateful to have had such a special hour with Bjorn.

Sarah White, Senior Talent Manager, YMU, Fearne Cotton + Happy Place:
‘Björn Natthiko Lindeblad’

Bjorn’s episode was the first posthumous podcast we’ve released on Happy Place. It was incredibly poignant to be organising a recording with a guest knowing that when the podcast went live to our listeners, he would no longer be with us. He spoke about life with such optimism, and death with such eloquence.

Holly Bott, Global MD, YMU Entertainment:
‘Dawn French’

This was the first episode we ever recorded. To be invited into Dawn French’s house and for her to speak so warmly and with no restraints, was the point we realised that this idea was not just a good one on paper, but something important and that could work.

Anouszka Tate, Happy Place podcast Producer:
‘Ashley Cain’

Knowing that we’ve spent a number of years creating a safe space for mental health to be explored, athlete and TV personality Ashley Cain chose the podcast as the place he would talk out loud for the first time about losing his eight month old daughter to leukaemia, educating listeners about the disease, and making others feel less alone in the process. That he made the decision to do that shows what a beautiful community Fearne has created with Happy Place beyond the podcast.

This episode also featured relatively little of Fearne – which feels like a counter intuitive reason for her unapologetically proud producer to pick this episode – but it’s real testament to her world-class skills as a storyteller. She knows when there’s more power in listening than talking. In a world where everyone wants to be the loudest voice, have the strongest opinion, be the centre of attention, we need more people like Fearne who know exactly when to use their platform to pass the mic to someone else.

Amelia Kanaris, Senior Social Media Manager, Happy Place:
Lin Cotton ‘Mother’s Day Special’

One of the most memorable for me is the Lin Cotton Mother’s Day special episode. Fearne and Lin exploring the mental wellbeing throughout generations of their family made for an heartfelt and raw listen. The response from our community to take action and talk with their relatives about their own experiences was incredibly moving. It’s moments like this which really show that Fearne has created something so special with Happy Place.

Listen to Happy Place now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast apps.

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LOOK OUT! It’s only an article about Films to be Buried With! Our Issue 23 cover star Brett Goldstein has charmed us all with his enthusiasm for all movies, and guests ranging from actor Sharon Stone, serial podcaster James Acaster, and even Gleb Shemble*. In every episode, guests are informed they have died (in surreal ways) and must unveil their life stories through the medium of cinema before choosing only one film to take into the afterlife. A somewhat bleak premise, Goldstein makes death a fun, glorious inevitability.

The show’s been running since 2018 – launching between the boom of podcasts in 2016 and the popularisation of starting a podcast amidst a global pandemic – and now has over 200 episodes. It is right to acknowledge that there is a huge back catalogue of episodes. So if you’re new to Brett Goldstein’s podcast, we know you’re not superhuman, and you may need to whittle down where to start. So here are my personal recommendations. Happy listening!

*Ed Gamble

If you wondered why you never recognised the third name in my introduction, it’s because it’s become an in-joke with listeners to always mispronounce Ed Gamble’s name after Ed called Brett out for never mentioning him. Ed explains all in this introduction. This episode was one of the first ‘The Resurrection!’ specials –  an opportunity for a previous guest to redo their film choices before they return to the afterlife. Since then, multiple guests have returned to the world of the living to give some more films to describe their life… before dying again. Listen on your podcast player >>

Zach Braff

Fellow podcaster, director, fake doctor, and real friend, Zach Braff, banters with Brett about how films have illustrated his life. Out of all of the episodes I am suggesting, Braff’s chosen death is certainly the most epic, glamorous, yet oddly realistic. Whilst Zach Braff does talk about films, in a beautifully eloquent way, there are also discussions about being a highly-sensitive person (HSP), trying to get recognised by Hollywood with Zach’s directorial debut Garden State, and how it has been recording Zach’s podcast with Scrubs co-star Donald Faison. Zach and Brett share great chemistry as they both understand the podcast medium and how to tailor conversations that are engaging to listeners. A highlight is when Zach talks about how Beverly Hills Cop always brings a key memory of his late dad, and his description brings such a vivid image to you as a listener. Listen on your podcast player >>

Barry Jenkins

This episode demonstrates the star power Films to be Buried With can accrue: Academy award-winning director Barry Jenkins. This was recorded during Covid-19 so Barry will have you reminisce on how deprived we were to not be able to go to the cinema and have shared experiences with others. As a guest, Jenkins is frank with a sharp dryness in humour. You can tell that Brett is keen to engage and learn from Barry’s experience as a filmmaker. It is easy for people to assume that such a critically-acclaimed director would be pretentious, but Barry brings up films that the average filmgoer will recognise, like when he talks about how Terminator talked about topics that are still relevant in America today. Plus, Jenkins’s choice of the worst film ever made is, frankly, the best of all the answers people have given in this podcast’s canon. Listen on your podcast player >>

Pearl Mackie

Even Brett Goldstein said in this introduction that Pearl Mackie’s appearance is one of the greats. The former Doctor Who star and West End darling opens up about how she found Robin Hood incredibly foxy, and not just in the literal sense of the word! This episode brings a wide range of emotions: from talking about how Fruitvalle Station was the film that made her cry, and what it’s like to reflect on that film after George Floyd’s murder; to watching About Last Night with her friend, drinking multiple glasses of wine and laughing at Kevin Hart’s antics. This was recorded whilst people were receiving their Covid-19 vaccinations, and Pearl shares how her arm is aching post-jabbing, so this is also a great time capsule for podcasting amidst the pandemic. Listen on your podcast player >>

Will Poulter Live @ The BFI

When writing this, one of the episodes that immediately leapt out at me was one of the first live shows for the podcast with We’re the Millers and Chronicles of Narnia star, Will Poulter, onstage at the BFI. Brett Goldstein is in his element showing his comedic prowess, to the audience’s delight. Will Poulter demonstrates his thoughtfulness and generosity as he asks to donate his appearance fee to a charity of Brett’s choosing. There are fascinating conversations taking place, like Brett and Will’s distaste for ‘method acting’, and what it was like to fence with a CGI mouse. Additionally, there is a fun faux pas with Will Poulter saying Titanic was the sexiest film of all time, and Brett interpreting it as Will’s ‘safe word’ to stop talking about it. The flow of the chat is smooth, hilarious and insightful, and is my personal highlight of the podcast. Listen on your podcast player >>

Nish Kumar

Nish Kumar may as well be the co-host of the podcast judging by the number of times he has contributed – here is where it all started. Since this episode, Brett and Nish started annually reviewing the top films of 2019, 2020 and 2021, and I will not be surprised if Nish is brought back for another ‘Judgement Day’ (the name of episodes where previous guests can come back a third time!). Of course, Nish and Brett’s conversation is hilarious and enthusiastic about movies, and what brought audiences to this joyous podcast. However, across this catalogue, Brett has remained the beating heart of the show, and why listeners keep coming back. Listen on your podcast player >>

To learn more about Brett Goldstein, his love of podcasts, and his show read our interview in Issue 23 of the Pod Bible Magazine now!

What’s your favourite episode of Films To Be Buried With? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter!

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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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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!

The post Where to start with… In Our Time appeared first on POD BIBLE.

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.

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It’s about music, obviously. But it’s more about people, and about life at large. That’s a very broad précis, admittedly, but the vast, sprawling, deeply moving stories that Soul Music manages to tell in 45 minutes are that podcasting gold.

It’s a way of getting right to the very core of a piece of music by giving a little bit of the context around its making, but by then lifting it out of history and hearing it through the people each piece has touched.

So instead of hearing, yet again, how unexpected the first line of God Only Knows is, we meet a couple in Burundi from different cultures who personify the whole sentiment, and a widow remembers how it felt to collide with what, exactly, she should be without her husband.

Always understated and beautifully paced, there’s a library of 165 episodes stretching back to 2000 on BBC Sounds now stretching from Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor to the Smiths’ There is A Light That Never Goes Out via the traditional Welsh ballad Myfanwy. Here’s where to start…

Sunshine on Leith by the Proclaimers

This is a great example of the way Soul Music finds interviewees who can tell the story of the song at the same time as the song is telling the story of the interviewees. The hymnal feel of the song is at the heart of the responses here, from the communal joy and relief of the crowd at Hibernian, who took the song as their anthem, to a lawyer who heard Craig and Charlie Reid singing the song at a gig while he was defending a prisoner on Death Row.

Prelude a l’Apres Midi d’un Faune by Debussy

The other thing Soul Music does extraordinarily well is articulating the abstract feelings that classical music can stir up inside you, especially when you’ve not got the specific vocabulary to really dig into exactly what it’s doing to make you feel that way. Rather than getting the thing up on the jacks and having a poke about inside it with a musicologist, Soul Music’s intertwining stories show how a piece is refracted like light through each person who hears it. Hearing Debussy floating from a window moves a Jamaican poet to write, and an Iranian doctor to leave Tehran for London, and a new mother to cope with postnatal depression.

Africa by Toto

Soul Music’s also very good at taking a piece of music that has some level of ironic appreciation attached to it, and dusting it away to reveal the very earnest emotional tug underneath. The soft rock classic turned into a viral hit around the time a DJ in Bristol played it for 12 hours solid at a charity night. But beyond the surface it’s got this deep yearning which David Greig, the Artistic Director of the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, leveraged by using the song in one of his plays. And, on top of that, a song by an LA rock band is reclaimed by a youth choir from the poorest parts of South Africa.

Listen to Soul Music on BBC Sounds, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and your preferred podcast app.

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The first thing to know about the cricketing podcast Tailenders is that it’s only very barely about cricket.

Hosted by Radio 1’s Greg James, former Maccabees guitarist Felix White, England bowler James Anderson and caller-turned-mascot Matt ‘Mattchin’ Horan – a Bristolian shoe salesman who’s distantly related to Indian cricketing great Sachin Tendulkar – it’s more like a cricket-adjacent comedy podcast.

Tailenders had a previous life as Not Just Cricket, a Radio 5Live show hosted by James, Anderson and Anderson’s old England teammate Graeme Swann back in 2011. It was fun, but extremely cricket-centric. Which you’d think would be the point of a cricket podcast, but Tailenders is usually at its best when it’s about everything except cricket.

The magic is in Horan’s increasingly complex quiz formats, and the supportive and lovely listenership, and in odd stories like the time White got hit by a bus and, while lying on the road, got injected in the wrist by someone who said they were a doctor. The more chaotic and cack-handed everything gets, the funnier it is.

When Tailenders hit its own century of episodes in 2020, James compared the podcast’s run to a century England’s Mark Butcher scored against Australia: “Against the odds, nobody thought he’d be able to pull it off, frantic, frenetic, and sort of worked by accident.”

Anderson agreed: “Bit of a fluke.”

Brisbane, Adelaide and Uncle Sach

To understand the appeal of Tailenders, one must understand Mattchin Tendulkar. Early episodes had been quite good, but it all took off when Horan, who knew absolutely nothing about cricket, rang in at the behest of his friend to explain his tenuous family link to a legend. He soon became a regular, asking Anderson questions nobody’s ever bothered to and suggesting improvements to a game he only recently grasped.

“I guess Mattchin typifies everything we wanted this podcast to be like,” James has said. “We wanted to bring people into the game, and he’s the sort of person that we can impress our passion of the game onto, and say, ‘This is why we love it’.”

Sandra Bullock

Anderson has a reputation as a bit of a grump, and at different times Tailenders has both undermined and conclusively confirmed it. A game of Horan’s invention, ‘Our Jimmy’, put forward a quote from a famous Jimmy – but was it our Jimmy who said it? A long forgotten tweet about Sandra Bulluck cuts straight through the mystique that an elite sportsman has built up over two decades, while White shows off the most infectious cackle in podcasting.

The Wizard and the Frog

A real peak of Horan’s stupid questions. If a wizard told him he could make it happen, would Anderson take £100 million and the chance to prolong his career at the top level for a decade – and keep bowling for England into his fifties – but be pursued for the rest of his life by a small frog which would kill him with a single touch?

You don’t get this sort of stuff from Paxman. This one’s a great example of the supremely daft sense of humour that joins Tailenders and its audience; during a recent tour, people dressed up as frogs and wizards in the crowd, and plans are afoot to make sure there are frogs and wizards around Australia during the upcoming Ashes series. That’s commitment.

Listen to Tailenders on BBC Sounds, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast apps >>

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In Have You Heard George’s Podcast?, spoken word artist George The Poet joins producer and composer Benbrick to create this narrative-style podcast where the narrator, George, delves into different themes and topics. Starting as an indy production in 2018, its huge success at the 2019 British Podcast Awards brought it to the attention of the BBC, who took it on for the second series, or ‘chapter’.  So far George and the team have released three chapters in total, and I will be choosing my favourite episode from each.

Chapter One: Episode 3 – A Grenfell Story

A Grenfell Story was released 2nd September 2019 almost two years after the Grenfell Tower fire, which occurred 14th June 2017. Here, George narrates the story of a teacher in the background of the disaster.

With George’s research, the script is full of knowledge as he tackles the issues that occur in inner city London through this teacher – she faces rejection throughout as her colleagues call her methods a nuisance, even though she is trying to get through students who are used to hustle culture. The relationship between her daughter’s father lacks stability and her relationship with George’s character seems to lack substance as he doesn’t even know which floor she lives on – this is repeated and holds significance.

The feeling of neglect that the teacher experiences mirrors what the residents of Grenfell went through – before the fire the residents expressed concern regarding the safety of the building including lighting issues and even calling the building a firetrap in 2014. As the inevitable happens and the fire occurs, what I appreciate is the humanity that George brought towards this story – it is a reminder that these were real people not just numbers.

Chapter Two: Episode 18 – Concurrent Affairs

In May 2019 George The Poet turned down an MBE, and in this chapter two finale he explains why.

George personifies the countries of Uganda and Great Britain. With the character of Uganda, although a complicated relationship both she and George want peace. When talking to Great Britain, George exclaims how appreciative he is to the BBC. Great Britain asks “tell me more about me as a country” and this is when there is a slight pause – Benbrick has been experimental with sound, pushing and manipulating what we can do with it particularly with episodes where George spirals into his mind – however here it’s quite simple.

MBE stands for “member of the British Empire” and this title does not sit right with George. He shares in detail what damage Great Britain had on Africa and its children, including gaps in information, and that this is the reason why he must fight for his identity. If you have been listening to this podcast George’s decision to reject the MBE makes sense – George has dissected his identity through each episode and tried to understand parts of himself through music and other themes. He has tried to explain his upbringing in Great Britain – though at times full of nostalgia and joy – George is transparent and doesn’t shy away from calling out its institutional and systemic faults. George makes it very clear: “Yeah Brexit is tough. Me and your pain are not the same. I’m not a member of the British Empire. I’m George Mpanga and my name is my name.”

Chapter Three: Episode 25 – Who Hurt R&B?

In Chapter 3, George and his team have developed Common Ground – a website where after you listen to an episode George asks questions relating to it, so the conversation continues. After you answer the questions, you get taken to the ‘commons’ where you get to read and listen to other people’s perspectives through voice recordings, mini essays or images.

In this episode he explores how much R&B has changed and dissects how African Americans have had a history of conveying pain and frustration through music, tracking the narrative back all the way to the 70’s. He talks about several reasons for changes. Towards the end of the 20th Century feminism affected music and divorce was on the rise among African Americans. We hear the power anthem “It’s not right but it’s okay” by Whitney Houston, and George notes it wasn’t just feminism that played a part in the number of divorces but poverty. Throughout the episode there’s examples of how surroundings shaped these men and women and the music that they created as George explains “rap music portrayed women being put down but RnB portrayed women putting their foot down.”

I shared on Common Ground that what this episode and George’s whole podcast has taught me to do is go beyond the surface – it has also caused me to think about what I grew up with and how that has shaped my identity.

Listen to Have You Heard George’s Podcast on BBC Sounds and all other apps.

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Formerly the internet’s favourite podcast about the internet, Reply All is at the start of a bit of a rebuild.

From its first episode in 2014 up until February 2021, hosts PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman chased leads into the very strangest and most unexpectedly fascinating corners of modern life. They called back cold callers and made friends with them. They tried to help a man track down a song he thought he heard at a party years ago. They unravelled tweets to their befuddled producer.

Then came their exposé on Bon Appetit’s Test Kitchen. Just as Reply All tried to lay out exactly how Bon Appetit had been a toxic, unsafe environment to work in for people of colour, contributors and staff pointed out something not dissimilar was happening at Reply All. Vogt and producer Sruthi Pinnamaneni left under a cloud.

In June it returned from its short hiatus with the Londoner Emmanuel Dzotsi alongside Goldman, who’s contributed some of Reply All’s best stories over the last couple of years – see episode 167, ‘America’s Hottest Talkline’, about a weird recording promoting an intimate chatline which kept turning up on American government phonelines for years. It’s brilliant, and the future of Reply All looks bright.

Episode 114: Apocalypse Soon

It remains to be seen whether the Yes Yes No segment will return in Reply All 2.0, but even if it doesn’t there’s an enormous amount of fun lurking in the back catalogue. Each time, Vogt and Goldman explain a tweet to Gimlet Media co-founder Alex Blumberg, who is terminally confused by Twitter comedy.

They’re often extremely densely packed with stuff you need to have been living fairly intensely online to get, and never more so than a tweet which packaged several notable Twitter fights from 2019 into a new verse to ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’. Along the way, we learn about the beefs between people who wash their legs in the shower and those who don’t, the Aperol wars, and a grown man who blocked his wife on Twitter.

It’s hilarious, and also maddeningly catchy. Quite how Billy Joel restrains himself from singing, “Uber strike, Wiccan life, gamer blocked his elf wife,” in concert is a marvel.

Episode 158: The Case of the Missing Hit

This one has a case for being both the most Reply All episode of Reply All, as well as the very best Reply All episode of them all. The ingredients are all there: someone kind of remembers some fragment of culture, and needs help finding out what it actually was; Goldman and Vogt go way, way, way beyond what any sensible podcast would reasonably do in pursuit of a story.

It started when Californian filmmaker Tyler Gillett sang a song he remembered to his wife. It was kind of like Barenaked Ladies, a little bit like U2, something from the nineties. But after hours and hours down blind alleys on the internet, he can’t find it. Is he going mad? Has he somehow written his own earworm? Reply All tries to get to the bottom of it, going as far as to get Gillett to reconstruct the song with musicians in the studio.

With twist after twist and a great pay-off, it was an instant favourite. “We say in the story that the song and the desire to find it are contagious,” Vogt reflected last year. “I think that just turned out to be a little truer than we thought.”

Episode 166: Country of Liars

The QAnon phenomenon spurred a lot of podcasts. It’s an amazing story: a fringe gag on the 4Chan imageboard where someone pretended to be a member of the secret service turns into a community of credulous believers, which turns into a mini-industry of gurus and vibe artists interpreting gibberish a thousand ways, which turns into thousands of people storming the Capitol building and five dead.

Reply All’s QAnon story, though, might be the one which actually got under the skin of it. Cutting through all the noise and sensation which came after, Vogt goes right back to the very beginning of the QAnon story, to 2Chan, 4Chan and 8Chan. Frederick Brennan founded 8Chan as an ultra-free-speech alternative to 4Chan, but lost control of his site as its posters became more and more unhinged. Brennan, though, was able to see the nuts and bolts of the site, and has a good idea who the original Q was.

As fun as Reply All regularly is, this is a reminder that it also has some really, really solid journalism at its heart.

Listen to Reply All on SPOTIFY, ACAST, and all other podcast apps.

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There aren’t many podcasters more widely and warmly regarded than Adam Buxton, AKA Dr Buckles, AKA Count Buckules. Since 2015 he’s been talking to comedians, writers and musicians, though usually only in passing about their comedy, writing and music. Without any gimmicky formats or forced jollity, The Adam Buxton Podcast has been the gold standard of interview podcasts for a little while now.

Each episode opens and closes with Buxton wandering through the Norfolk countryside, usually with faithful dog Rosie haring around nearby, and in between is an apparently unstructured stroll through the conversational hinterlands. Buxton and his guest might chat about their careers; they might just as soon talk about picking up hitchhikers, what they’ve been watching on telly, or UFO sightings. The chat goes where the chat goes.

The magic’s in how completely unforced and genuinely fun each episode feels, though Buxton’s self-deprecating style masks a real skill at getting his guests to relax and talk unguardedly. He even got Paul McCartney, who’s been reflexively telling the same anecdotes for about 40 years now, to spill some new stories.

He’s got a deep back catalogue to dig into too. Here’s where to start with Dr Buckles’ patented ramble-chats.

Episode 28: Michael Palin

A couple of big Buxton themes crystallised in his chat with Python and genial explorer Michael Palin. Early on Buxton’s guests leaned heavily toward British comedy greats past and present – big tick on this one there – and Steve Coogan, Michaela Coel, Sara Pascoe and more all featured. Palin pitching up to chat was a pointer that Buxton was moving into the biggest podcast leagues.

The other big theme is death. When Buxton’s dad, the journalist Nigel Buxton, died in 2015 it coloured a lot of the early episodes, and Buxton spoke very movingly about more recent passing of his mum with Joe Cornish last year.

It all builds toward Palin talking with disarming frankness and fondness about the last moments he spent with fellow Python Graham Chapman, as Chapman lay dying of cancer in 1989. Palin remembers sharing bad reviews which mutual enemies had recently received, and gossiping with the unconscious Chapman. “I just hate this dreadful solemnity that happens,” he says. It’s a prime example of Buxton’s empathetic style and, staggeringly, found another dimension to Palin’s all-round good dude status. Listen now on Acast >>

Episode 34: Joe Cornish

Buxton cut his teeth as an audio broadcaster on XFM and 6Music with his Adam and Joe Show co-host and best friend Joe Cornish, and it’s now a Christmas tradition for the pair to meet up for a catch-up and some low-grade gift-giving. (Their mutual school friend Louis Theroux is a regular too – start with episode 26, in which Theroux sings Baccara’s ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’ in a truly haunting falsetto.)

Really, all of the Buxton-Cornish collab episodes are essentials here, with the easy, silly chat between the pair both deeply endearing and . Go back to the first, though, to get in at the ground floor of The Doodle Story, a fairly pedestrian anecdote Cornish tells about being in a meeting with Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg while working on The Adventures of Tintin, and which ended up being thrillingly serialised over three years. Listen now on Acast >>

Episode 130: Zadie Smith

One of the many things which separates Buxton’s podcast from the many billions of other celebrity chat podcasts is its literary streak – Philip Pullman, Marlon James, Kazuo Ishiguro and Candice Carty-Williams have all featured. Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, is in many ways a perfect guest: she’s lucid and earnest about big stuff, and just quick to laugh and be daft.

This episode is exactly in the sweet spot between talking about very biggest things – in this case what the point of art is, and what it means to make art at a time of global turmoil, and whether Smith makes art to escape her fear of death – in a laidback, funny way. Doesn’t sound like it’d be possible to have a laugh about all that, but Buxton and Smith manage it. No other podcast interviewer would be quite able to get away with asking, “What is it about death that’s such a downer?” Listen now on Acast >>

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Jessie and Lennie Ware first invited us round to theirs back in November 2017, when they had Sam Smith over for turkey meatballs. Since then they’ve had more than 150 celebs for tea, and become such a cornerstone of the podcasting ecosystem that it feels like a significant wedge of new chat pods since have tried to emulate its freewheeling, slightly chaotic energy.

The format’s simple: a guest heads around to the Wares’ for a really, really nice meal – of varying complexity and refinement, depending on what Jessie and Lennie can be bothered with that day – and a chat. That’s basically it. 

It’s ingenious though. The loose structure tends to encourage unguarded conversation – see, to take an example from that first Sam Smith episode, Smith admitting they accidentally froze their hamsters as a child, and thought Mexico was in Europe – and the consciously lo-fi sound makes you feel like you’re standing at the kitchen island with a glass of cold Chablis on the go. 

The guestlist has tended to be heavy on musicians in the past, with John Legend, Alanis Morrisette, Kylie Minogue and Carly Rae Jepsen popping up, though so have the likes of Ed Miliband, Riz Ahmed and Kiefer Sutherland, which might be the first time those three men have ever been in a sentence together. Here’s where to start…

S4 Ep 1: Nigella Lawson

If you’re a food podcast, then a visit from Saint Nigella of Lawson is the final benediction. Lawson is as effortlessly charming and engaging as you’d expect of the woman who’s done more than most to promote cooking for friends as the highest form of joy and fulfilment.

Despite having been a broadcaster for a good couple of decades, there’s a rare openness to Lawson in this episode. She talks about how making her mother’s chicken soup is “an act of devotion” since she passed away, and the underpinnings of her unifying theory of food. “Cooking as performance art has never interested me,” she says. Which is, you know, exactly the kind of thing that means more from someone who could quite easily do cooking as performance art.

There’s also the revelation that Lawson used to eat rice pudding for breakfast, which is an attitude to life we could all learn from. Listen now on Spotify.

S10 Ep 6: Dawn French

That unguarded conversation thing we were talking about really came to the fore with Dawn French, who was revelatory about what she’d discovered about herself since starting to write books in her late forties.

“What I started to discover when I started to write was that it was quiet and just me on my own in my own head,” French tells Jessie and Lennie. “What I think I’ve discovered about myself through my writing is that I’m a kind of functioning introvert. That’s who I really am.”

It’s a pretty startling thing for a lifelong performer to say, but that’s the kind of thing that people do end up saying on Table Manners. Alanis Morrisette’s experience of postpartum depression over lockdown, Zawe Ashton realising that moving her entire life to the seaside was a terrible idea, and David Schwimmer being incredibly lovely about his daughter. Listen now on Spotify.

S11 Ep 18: Paul and Mary McCartney

The deep love and unvarnished snappishness between the Ware Junior and Ware Senior is a key feature of Table Manners – along with hearing the clatter of plates and cutlery and everyone milling around in the kitchen, it’s the very real mother-daughter dynamic. Naturally, that sometimes spills over into bickering. In front of the former Beatle and his daughter, it turned into a proper barney. 

“Usually, it’s just a nice chat over food,” Jessie reflected later. “But sometimes with my mum you get all the baggage of previous discussions we’ve had off-air coming to the forefront. That doesn’t stop when you’re meeting a legend.”

Most podcasters wouldn’t have the chutzpah to keep it in, but it quickly became a very big Table Manners moment. Plus, there’s the revelation that Macca puts his good eyesight at the age of 79 down to ‘eye yoga’. You could have locked him in a room with David Frost for six hours, and he’d never have got near that titbit. Listen on Spotify.

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QCODE is a Los Angeles based audio production studio who develop innovative and immersive scripted narrative stories. Normally what would occur in the Point of Entry series is episode recommendations, however QCODE now have 13 different shows. Instead, I will recommend some of my favourite shows, as I feel if I recommend individual episodes, I will be giving away spoilers.

For people who enjoy watching television but don’t always have the time to sit down, narrative fiction podcasts are great – you can listen to the drama unfold on the go. If you are already an avid podcast listener who enjoys an interview style show, you may enjoy scripted audio because there is still an interesting back and forth, chemistry between people and great audio design – it is just at a bigger scale because the visual aspect is taken away.

BLACKOUT

The first QCODE fiction podcast release was a drama starring and executive produced by Academy Award winning Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody). BLACKOUT tells the story of a local radio DJ named Simon Itani who is based in small town Berlin, New Hampshire. One of those small towns where everyone is in your business and something shady is going on. One night a blackout occurs and Simon gets fatally shot, whilst his son Hunter Itani’s (T.C Carter) camping trip with his friends takes a disastrous turn. The whole town is turned upside down – food, medicine and essentials are in low supply.

In the midst of this Simon is determined to keep the community spirit alive with his show and continues to play selected rock tunes with his signature “Look out for each other” thrown in for good measure. A fascinating thriller where the listener is moved through the Berlin woods into the back garden of the Itanis through a random field with a crazed neighbour with a shotgun. This can only be done by a meticulous sound department team – where every detail is thought of, the eerie music is just as important as the cereal during breakfast. Along with most podcast recommendations, this is best listened to with earphones. However if you want to avoid jump scares in public, I recommend it on a loud volume at home.

With all this being said, with what has happened in the past year, perhaps indulging in an apocalyptic thriller about modern civilization falling apart, may not be the best choice for a form of escapism. The characters explore themes like control, authoritarianism, freedom of speech and justice.

With a second season of BLACKOUT featuring How To Get Away With Murder star Aja Naomi King just announced, if you choose, now it the perfect time to catch up with the first season.

Soft Voice

The second series I would recommend is Soft Voice – a psychological drama that delves into the dangers of the mind. Soft Voice (Bel Powley) is a voice inside Lydia’s head (Naomi Scott). Soft Voice is a blunt and no-nonsense entity that values perfectionism – it controls every aspect of her life down to Lydia’s diet and love life – Lydia doesn’t know any different so she goes along with it as it comes with a peace of mind and much success. It is not until one day Soft Voice stops talking and Dark Voice enters (Olivia Cooke) and Lydia’s life takes a turn in the most dramatic manner.

What it does well in the same way the TV show Black Mirror does – is it makes you question ‘what would I do if I were in that situation?’ and then it makes you sit and wonder maybe I am closer to being in that situation then I would like to admit. Think the ‘Nosedive’ or ‘White Bear’ episodes – it may seem dramatic, however if you get to the heart of what issues are being explored and take away the hyperbole – they hit closer to home.

Listening to Lydia navigate her inner thoughts is unnerving and unpredictable. She faces the same insecurities that many others do, acted brilliantly by Naomi Scott, you can hear her cleverly switch from moments of panic, uncertainty and relief – perfectly depicting the trials of the mind.

Unwanted

After you indulge in two intense podcasts you can have a go at an action-comedy. Unwanted is about two 30-year-old best friends Ben (Lamorne Morris) and Grant (Billy Magnussen). They are strapped for cash and unwilling to get a job. One day while driving they accidentally hit a woman who bizarrely just walks it off. It is not until later they find out the woman was a hard as nails runaway convict, named Shelley O’ Keith (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell) worth a million pounds if found.

After much deliberation both Ben and Grant go on a mission to get that prize money. With a fun back and forth between the two main characters as they have their hand at the bounty hunter/good cop bad cop persona, this podcast series packs plenty of laughs. We are treated to our favourite movie clichés like a good old catchphrase, they opted for “LET’S DANCE!” and the evergreen “we’ll ask the questions here!” followed by silence and fumbling to develop an actual helpful question but a random debate over buying and renting whilst someone is tied up in the basement (a few episodes in and this will make sense).

Shelley is frightening and shows no mercy to anyone who crosses her path. Her no nonsense attitude is balanced well by a hilarious ex-convict named Darko (Flula Borg), an old friend who owes Shelley a massive favour after his betrayal led to her six years in jail. He runs an electronics store and seems to be more interested in leading a quiet life with the occasional trip to TGI Fridays.

With a catchy 80’s synthwave-style theme song sung by the legendary Rick Astley, and the constant mention of Arnold Schwarzenegger, for those who want their movie clichés with a fun script, this is a great introduction into scripted audio because it is still familiar but with a few twists and turns.

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