Radio
To die for
If there’s any form of entertainment that I will reliably find time for, no matter how big the to-read pile…
Mild at heart
It’s a sweet, green, glowing dawn in north-west Scotland. All around us are empty hillsides of rock and heather. The…
Moomin marvellous
Moomins do not like winter. In one of Tove Jansson’s stories, Moomin’s Winter Follies, young Moomintroll bumps his head when…
The great pretender
Eleven years ago, Kirat Assi received a message on Facebook from a man named Bobby. There was a family connection…
The 900 numbers game
We’ve been living through a nostalgia for the 1990s that has lasted longer than the decade itself. That was back…
Our old Macca
The Paul people are out in force these days. A New Yorker profile, a book and a new documentary have…
Men in black
Martin McNamara, the writer of Mosley Must Fall, a play on Radio 4 this week, must have had a jolt…
Health, wealth and happiness
Stories about money are never about money. They are about pain, about family, about atrocity, about luck, about health, about…
Open book
365 Stories I Want To Tell You Before We Both Die is a podcast that experimental filmmaker Caveh Zahedi started…
Old school ties
It is incredibly hard to convey the fleeting invincibility and passionate self-significance that we feel on the cusp of adulthood.…
The art of listening
There’s a great documentary film on Netflix at the moment about the late artist Bob Ross, he of the happy…
Spooky furniture
‘I’ve actually seen ghosts.’ This statement comes less than ten minutes into the first episode of Dark House, a limited-series…
Sent to Coventry
The story is likely apocryphal — and so disgraceful I almost hesitate to tell it — but it goes like…
Alan key
Given my affection for M*A*S*H, I can’t think why I haven’t listened to Alan Alda’s podcasts before now, besides the…
Crime and punishment
How do we have difficult conversations? Especially in an age of polarisation, where everything is immediately politicised? But also where…
Crude mittens
Let me give you a free piece of relationship advice: just break up. If it’s more work than pleasure, if…
A fat king with a sex chair
When it comes to history programming, television’s loss is increasingly audio’s gain. People moan to me most weeks over the…
Men and sheds
The interview podcast is a genre immoderately drawn to gimmicks, as the logical space of possible formats is gradually exhausted.…
The trying game
On sketch shows, the wisdom once was that you needed a punchline. That is, a slightly hammy, summative sign-off to…
Kicking the habit
Work is our new religion. There are people whose primary job is writing listicles of celebrity gossip, illustrated with gifs…
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Listening to Trees A Crowd, a podcast exploring the ‘56(ish) native trees of the British Isles’, solved one of childhood’s…
It’s who you know
All the world’s on stage again so where to go to for insight into what to see and why? Podcasts,…
Shawn again
Pity the aesthete, the flâneur and the opera-goer. Those who find the contents of their own heads so dull and…
Grand designs
Passenger List opens with a carefully structured ripple of breaking news bulletins: a mysterious catastrophe, an unconvincing official explanation, the…
Miliband’s last supper
You have to hand it to Ed Miliband. After bacon sandwich-gate, he might never have eaten in public again, but…
