THE BOOK OF JOE – Recent Podcast Highlights #005

Each week, guest writer Joe Ducarreaux picks out his recent podcast highlights in an effort to provide yet more wonderful content for your ears. Joe is an avid podcast listener who has been known to listen to over 40 episodes in just one week. To be honest we’re surprised he found time to write this column…

THIS WEEKS MUST LISTEN:

RICKY GERVAIS IS DEEPLY SIRIUS

A founding father of podcasts, Ricky Gervais broke world records with his mid-2000s shows with Stephen Merchant and made a household name of Karl Pilkington. Here, Ricky returns to the format he helped to create with Deadly Sirius. A truncated form of his radio show broadcasting on Sirius XM, Ricky sees guests through conversations on both the deeply philosophical and scientific, to the scatological and hilarious. Guests include Gervais’ regular work partners Robin Ince, Diane Morgan, Brett Goldstein and also featuring are James Acaster, David Baddiel and Richard Dawkins. If you’re a fan of Ricky’s, its more of the same brilliant stuff- and of course featuring THAT laugh! The episodes which have been made available as podcasts are ‘Best Ofs,’ chopped down versions of the whole episodes, which have been released as audiobooks on iTunes. Listen on Acast

EPISODES WORTH A DOWNLOAD:

THIS AMERICAN LIFE – #489 – NO COINCIDENCE, NO STORY!

This American Life is one of the most-listened-to and most varied podcasts in existence. The show examines a different subject each episode and it seems that there is nothing not worth looking into for this team. From car sales to political intrigue and scandal, the hosts manage to achieve the ideal for documentaries- introduce to the subject a topic of which they know nothing and then make them care about it. This particular episode is one that will leave you open-mouthed, as Sarah Koenig asks listeners’ for their best stories of strangest coincidences. From the fairly innocuous, to the wonderfully romantic, to the tense and at one point, scary, all of these stories are beautiful examples of the weird quirks of the universe. Listen on Acast

EVIL GENIUS w/ RUSSELL KANE – ROALD DAHL

This episode may ruin a part of your childhood. With Evil Genius, Russell Kane presents an individual to a panel of judges and asks them to decide whether society should look back on these people as either Good or Evil. The more interesting cases tend to be, strangely, the discussion around peope where the conclusion seems fairly straightforward- examples include Mahatma Ghandi and Mother Theresea. Where these two individuals tend to be thought of as people who enacted change upon the world for the good, their private lives reveal themselves to be somewhat murkier. With Roald Dahl, at the outset, it seems pretty one-sided for an author who created such magical characters and stories for the world, but further exploration into his family life reflects the dark undertones to a lot of his children’s stories. Bubbling under the surface are true horrors. Listen on Acast

Joe Ducarreaux is a podcast host, film enthusiast and gardener. For more of his ineffectual and disposable opinions, you can listen to him here or follow him on Twitter and Instagram.