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!

The post Top Guest Appearances: Kermode and Mayo in the broader podcast universe appeared first on POD BIBLE.

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.