5 podcasts that helped me through lockdown
Back in mid-March, just before official lockdown in England began, I stopped going in to the office, with 2 weeks of my contract left to work. Ordinarily, OneMonkey and I would listen to the World at One if we were lunching together at home on a weekday (oh, the excitement of our forty-something lives) but for obvious reasons we decided current affairs analysis wasn't the best accompaniment to a break from work at the time, and looked for something different. I've mentioned before that I'm a habitual listener to the Reasons to be Cheerful podcast, where Ed Miliband and Geoff Lloyd talk Big Ideas with an assortment of expert guests, but that fell into a similar category. What on earth could we listen to?
We tend to use a five-year-old tablet computer as a portable radio in our flat - BBC Sounds, Spotify, radio.net, and all our digitised music in one handy-to-carry purple package. We could, I suppose, have bunged an album on and chatted over our sandwiches but because we were used to speech and information, we first turned elsewhere on BBC Sounds and came up with the You're Dead To Me podcast. This is a light-hearted but factual look at history presented by a historian, Greg Jenner, who has two guests each episode, an expert and a comedian. Topics include Stonehenge, chocolate, football, Mary Shelley, general elections - some narrow, some broad, some British, some not. As a rule I've enjoyed them, both when I was already pretty clued-up on the topic and when I didn't think I'd be interested, and they work best when the comedian is interested in the history, not just in trying to sound funny (Tim Minchin was a great guest. And I don't even like him as a comedian). In short, highly recommended, but I'm not including it as one of the five because I suspect it's not available outside the UK, and knowing BBC Sounds it's probably not available at all times, either.
And so, on to the list proper - 3 sitcoms (comedy dramas?) and 2 discussing forgotten or overlooked books. All of these are available on Spotify, that's where we listen to them:
We Fix Space Junk. For the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fans, this one revolves around 2 people and a computer, on a spaceship. And one of the people doesn't really want to be there. I have to admit if I'd only listened to the first episode I probably wouldn't have listened to the second, but we had it on autoplay while Spring-cleaning and it got more interesting in episode 2 so we stayed with it. Some adventures, some satire, and an overarching story. The website says "an award-winning dark sci-fi comedy about two repairwomen surviving in space against insurmountable odds and unimaginable debt." The production company have a variety of ways to support them, including merchandise to buy, at the link above.
Marscorp. Also comedic sci-fi, this one is about EL Hob becoming the new supervisor at the Marscorp base on Mars. She's just been woken up after her journey from Earth in 2072, keen and ambitious and not at all nervous. The characters are definitely on the caricature side, it gets very silly and quite sweary, and is immense fun. The sideswipes at corporate culture are fab. This one's more of a sitcom I guess, with 'what hilarious misadventures can our favourite characters have this episode?' though there are sort of running threads or longer story elements in the background. You can support the production company on Patreon.
Mission Rejected. An American spy comedy this time. Their greatest secret agent has gone on a world cruise and due to budget cuts they're forced to use a backroom nerd and his scraped-together team of misfits to fill in. Great characters who work well together, in one disastrous farce after another. These episodes are self-contained adventures but there's also a longer story bubbling away and the odd reference to a previous mission pops up. You can support the series via Patreon at the link above.
Backlisted. Part of the joy of discovering a podcast is delving into a well-stocked archive. Backlisted has been going a couple of years already so there's plenty to catch up on. The idea is that the 2 hosts have a guest each episode and discuss a book that deserves a wider readership. It could be a minor novel from a well-known author of the 1960s, seventeenth-century non-fiction, a forgotten Victorian poet - if their guest can enthuse people about it, it's fair game. The hosts have also read the book in preparation for the episode, and they might play snippets of the author reading their work or being interviewed, or read out other people's opinions of the book. I started out by listening to a couple of episodes where the featured book (they begin each episode with general chat about what they've all been reading lately) was one I was familiar with, to test out where the hosts' tastes lie in relation to mine, then moved on to books I'd heard of but hadn't read. So far, they've only persuaded me to add one book to my To Read list but I have enjoyed the bookish chat and banter. The hosts are the kind of middle-class southern men who are confident, bordering on arrogance (one mentioned a Ben Myers novel as being surprisingly good, and not just for people interested in the north!), though the guests are often a contrasting voice, but if you can put annoyance aside and be amused by that for an hour, it's worth a listen - they are usually both irreverent and nerdy about the books, which is a winning combination. You can support the series via Patreon at the link above.
Slightly Foxed. This one is my guilty pleasure. I actually discovered Backlisted when I listened to the Slightly Foxed episode where one or both of the Backlisted hosts was the guest (I confess in my northern prejudice I can't tell their voices apart, and neither can I tell the 3 main women on Slightly Foxed apart - the 4th is clearly younger and therefore easily distinguishable). As with Backlisted the idea is bringing overlooked books to a wider audience, but this time it goes with a magazine. Slightly Foxed is a quarterly publication where enthusiasts, both well-known authors and the erudite amateur, write about a book that means a great deal to them - often it's out of print, sometimes Slightly Foxed will put out a fancy edition of it. The format of the podcast is an independent host talking to the Slightly Foxed editors at their publishing HQ, usually joined by a younger member of the team and one or more guests to talk about a theme, e.g. books about gardening, books about royalty, travel memoirs, Evelyn Waugh. They also chat about what they've been reading lately, and there's an audio version of one of the articles from a past issue of the magazine. It's incredibly gentle and soothing, and I can't quite believe that the presenters are real people. They all talk so much like characters in a 1950s film, they make the Queen sound common, and they've never been reading the latest Val McDermid, it's always something like 'I was put in mind of the third memoir by Algernon Fitzsimmons when he was the British consul in Greece in the 1860s, so I revisited him in all seven volumes and I'm so glad I did'. Like I said, guilty pleasure, but class-consciousness aside they talk about books I would never delve into (probably still won't) which opens up whole vistas of the literary world to me and I enjoy listening to them being so absorbed in these books, and so damned nice.
As a bonus I'll mention I've just discovered the Red Hot Chilli Writers podcast, a bunch of British Asian writers including crime authors Vaseem Khan and Abir Mukherjee chatting amongst themselves or to guests. I've only listened to half an episode so far but I enjoyed it.
If you've found new audio delights via this post you can always buy me a cuppa once you've supported your new favourite podcast...
