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

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

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

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

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

Episode 4 – Detonating the C-Bomb

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

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

Episode 93 – Gossip

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

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

Episode 99 – Polari

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

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

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

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

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With the latest series starting today, we asked Off Menu superfan and meme supremo  @nocontxtoffmenu, to tell us where they think new listeners should start… 

Like a genie waiter bursting out of a lamp, Off Menu exploded onto the podcast scene in late 2018 and since the first episode has consistently brought listeners a delectable mix of humour and food chat through a hugely diverse selection of brilliant guests. Each week, comedians Ed Gamble and James Acaster invite a guest into the “Dream Restaurant” where they choose their dream meal consisting of a Starter, Main Course, Side Dish, Dessert and Drink. It’s a simple premise that never fails to deliver some very big laughs from all the cuisine quizzing.

I’ve been a huge fan since the beginning and one rainy day, whilst listening on my commute home, I had an idea to set up a “No Context” Twitter account – where I could post out-of-context quotes from the podcast that were laden with double-entendre, bizarrely confusing or just outright hilarious. In two years, the account has grown to almost 30,000 followers, occasionally gets mentioned on the podcast and even has its own official merch made in collaboration with the Off Menu boys themselves! With the fifth series set to kick off on Wednesday 27 January, the good people at Pod Bible got in touch to ask which episodes I would recommend that best showcase the podcast. There are just so many to choose from, but here are my picks of what to delve into if you’re new to Off Menu…

Episode 15 – Sindhu Vee

Filled to the brim with huge laughs and incredible food choices that will surely have your tummy rumbling, Sindhu Vee’s visit to the Dream Restaurant stands out as one of the finest episodes simply because it strikes the perfect balance of side-splitting humour and good, honest food chat. Vee is a wildly entertaining and funny storyteller who deftly holds court as she dispenses tale after tale from her fascinating life. With stories of stolen wedding ceviche and eating four slices of pizza a day for 42 days to impress a guy, it’s a perfectly rounded episode with everyone on their top form and is a testament to how well the format of Off Menu worked from its early days.

“To the hungry person, even the doorway looks like crisps”– Sindhu Vee

Find out the context and listen to Sindhu Vee on Off Menu episode 15

Episode 50 – Joe Thomas

In this fan favourite episode, Joe Thomas (forever to be known as Simon from The Inbetweeners) visits the Dream Restaurant and gives us the most frantic, scatter-brained menu yet! There are more tangents here than a geometry textbook, as he skips and stutters back and forth through what is frankly an indecipherable and maddening collection of inexplicably hilarious yarns. His anecdotes (“Whatever happened to the Spaghetti Bolognese Boys?”) and his general thoughts (“Why is the 90’s four decades ago?”) are so bewildering that James “The Genie” Acaster has to take a back seat and play the straight man for once. “Never met you before, Joe… You are an absolute mess”, Acaster comments as the chat twists and turns and takes you to the most unexpected of places, climaxing with the infamous, epic tale of a lamb being buried in a garden. Truly an emotional rollercoaster that gets paid off beautifully in a follow-up surprise episode that dropped on Christmas Day 2020.

“Did it smell? Yes. What did it smell of? Blood.” – Joe Thomas

Find out the context and listen to Joe Thomas on Off Menu Episode 50

Episode 82 – Thomasina Miers

One of the joys of Off Menu is how rich the guest list can be and being a food podcast, it opens up the opportunities to have some brilliant chefs on board who really know their stuff. Famous chefs such as Tom Kerridge and Marcus Samuelson have made very memorable appearances in the past but recently ‘Masterchef’ winner and Wahaca co-founder, Thomasina Miers, was an absolute delight. There’s some excellent culinary conversation in here, even a whole recipe for some delicious Crushed Potatoes intricately and beautifully described by Miers. But it’s not all gabble about grub; there’s a whole lot of silliness in there too: a highlight being an extended conversation about things you can put up your butt that leaves the guest incapacitated with laughter.

“Butt plug” – Thomasina Miers

Find out the context and listen to Thomasina Miers on Off Menu Episode 82

This article was written by the mysterious entity known as No Context Off Menu. Follow @nocontxtoffmenu on Twitter or Instagram for more fan favourites and no context Off Menu fun.

You can listen to Off Menu on Acast, Spotify and all other podcast apps.  You can also hear Ed and James discuss the show on Episode #012 of the Pod Bible Podcast before hearing Ed Gamble recommend one of his favourite shows on Episode #018 of the Pod Bible podcast, and James Acaster giving his recommendation on Episode #022 of the Pod Bible podcast.

The post Where to start with Off Menu appeared first on POD BIBLE.

We’ve all asked ourselves this question before when starting something new, and whenever we at Pod Bible interview hosts and producers from podcasts, we always try to give our readers a point of entry, whether it’s episode 1 or an episode the creators feel is their strongest.

The problem is, we can’t interview everyone (though we sure are trying!) and we won’t always have an opportunity to give you a diving board for the next thing that comes your way. What we can do is offer you some suggestions on how to find your own point of entry when someone makes a podcast suggestion to you; and for today’s example, we offer No Country For Young Women‘.

A programme like the one Sadia Azmat and Monty Onanuga create offers us as listeners so much: fun and insightful discussion, humour, thought-provoking and emotional moments, and topics we can relate to. Plus, it sounds great and has an extensive back catalogue to explore. But much like the anxiety that has befallen us all lately as we stare into the endless abyss of streaming service content, massive back catalogues can quickly feel overwhelming. So where do we begin?

Sometimes the best option is to try whatever’s most recent, but sometimes those can be one-off live episodes, a special feature, or even a message letting the audience know the show is going on a (hopefully brief) hiatus. Instead, we recommend viewing a list of episodes, starting with the most recent and scrolling back – but not too far. Sometimes shows change over time – getting new hosts, altering formats – and you want to make sure you’re getting a clear picture of what the program can offer. Within this selection, it’s time to look out for topics, guest names, and keywords that jump out at you.

As an avid reader, our Online Editor Jordan Rizzieri was keen to try the August 4 episode of No Country For Young Women, as it featured a book she’d recently read, “Such a Fun Age” and the book’s author Kiley Reid. The podcast also brought together a panel of women to discuss the book – not simply for plot devices and character development, but as a critical voice in today’s society.

Sometimes a podcast sits on your “to listen” list for ages – usually for no other reason than you’re not sure where to start. And just when you feel completely exhausted with the idea of digging in, a new episode will appear, dead in the middle of the intersection between “voices I want to hear from” and “ideas I want to hear about”. That’s where your point of entry is waiting. Time to dig in!

No Country For Young Women is a BBC Sounds podcast. Find it on BBC iPlayer, Spotify and everywhere you get your new favourite podcasts!

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