Everything is too long these days, isn’t it? Every series is at least two episodes too long, podcasts go on for hours, you have to scroll through pages of someone’s barely disguised eating disorder mania to get to the recipe on their blog, and every documentary on Netflix is four hours long, forcing me to
It was something a friend said to me about The Revenant, Leonardo diCaprio’s bloody-minded and brutal Oscar vehicle: ‘The problem with the film is once you start laughing, you can’t stop. And for me, that moment was the second time he fell off a cliff.’ I thought about this a lot listening to Into the
The Duchess of Rutland, Emma Manners (née Watkins), grew up on a farm in the Welsh Borders before becoming proprietress of Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire. ‘On so many levels I was ill-equipped for the job,’ she reflects in her new podcast, Duchess. ‘I so remember opening a door and hearing the butlers downstairs saying: “Have
This year marks three decades since Robert Maxwell fell naked to his death from the deck of his yacht, The Lady Ghislaine. Power: The Maxwells is the latest contribution to the never-ending autopsy of Maxwell’s character and the circumstances of his death. It follows a now well-established formula, juxtaposing the lives of Ghislaine and her
With the arts world still largely in hibernation, the launch of a big podcast is as close as we get to a big cultural event these days. Such is the case with The Apology Line, the latest serial podcast from Amazon-owned Wondery, which shot to the top of the ‘most downloaded’ charts last week and
In my parents’ house, the radio is always tuned to one of two stations: Magic FM and LBC. When Magic is playing, it wafts through the kitchen like an over-scented camomile candle. LBC, by contrast, hits you like a strong gust of Novichok: it is undiluted poison, carefully synthesised from the DNA of hysterical US
On Archewell Audio, Harry and Meghan’s new podcast, ‘love wins’, ‘change really is possible’, and ‘the courage and the creativity and the power and the possibility that’s been resting in our bones shakes loose and emerges as our new skin’. There’s no room for Christmas — the first episode dropped as a ‘Holiday Special’ —
Good evening! Come shivering on in through the garden side door, my friends, and distance yourselves in a semi-legal fashion around the flickering flames of my recently installed firepit while I guide you through the best horror listening for the depths of this December dark and drear. The Magnus Archives is an unslagoffably enthusiastic anthology
It’s well known that you should never meet your heroes because they will only disappoint you. Less commonly said, but equally true, is that you should never google your favourite podcast hosts, because their face will not match their voice. I have just finished looking at photos of Dan Carlin, the host and sole narrator
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue has just been voted the greatest radio comedy of all time by Radio Times, ahead of Hancock’s Half Hour and the brilliant Round the Horne. The first two episodes of series 73 (can you believe it?) are also the last Tim Brooke-Taylor recorded before losing his life to coronavirus
The White Pube started life as an influential art blog, written by Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente. The name announced iconoclastic intent, playing on the White Cube gallery — which certainly deserves mockery (like a city law firm, it has outposts in Hong Kong and Manhattan). But The White Pube podcast is as
‘I used to be Mr Nasty! That was good! Mr Nasty was easy!’ Jeremy Paxman bellows at Michael Palin on his new podcast. Now Paxman wants to know: ‘Have you got any recommendations as to how you become the nicest man in Britain?’ ‘I’m a very angry, cross person half the time!’ Michael Palin protests,
Since technology is developing at such light-speed pace, why does it feel so strangely slow? There is a sense that driverless cars, green energy and of course certain vaccines are, for all their breakneck pace, still taking for ever to arrive. Watching the future emerge is like watching slow-motion footage of a high-speed train. We
The Slightly Foxed podcast, like the quarterly and old bookshop of the same name, is almost muskily lovely. It’s the sort of thing you can imagine listening to with a dog at your feet and whisky by your side in a draughty Mitfordesque folly. Ordinarily, you might attribute its homeliness to the fact that it
Italy has long captivated romantics from rainy, dreary, orderly northern Europe. Goethe, Stendhal, Keats and Shelley all flocked to Italy in search of the ideal society. There they found what they thought was a utopia. ‘There is,’ Byron marvelled in a letter home from Ravenna, ‘no law or government at all, and it is wonderful
Nineteen fifty-six: the Suez crisis, the first Tesco, Jim Laker takes 19 wickets in a match. But also: Trinidadian pianist Winifred Atwell becomes the first black woman to have a UK number one with ‘The Poor People of Paris’; Kenneth Tynan announces a playwriting competition in the Observer, which is won by the Trinidadian dramatist
In the week Jenni Murray left Woman’s Hour, I was listening to Alan Partridge on his new podcast, From the Oasthouse, and imagining what he might have been like as her successor. As I chuckled through half a dozen episodes of awkward Norfolk frippery, it occurred to me that, short of taking him on, the
Listening to the tacky and incomprehensible audio-adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series Sandman, I couldn’t stop thinking about the 19th-century Swiss artist Rodolphe Töppfer. Did Mr Töppfer realise what he was doing when he one day decided to draw a narrative in sequential panels with captions underneath? His satirical novel in pictures, Histoire de
If you’ve been listening to The Archers lately, you’ll know how tedious monologues can be. The BBC has received so many complaints about the stream of soliloquys that has dominated the episodes since lockdown, that Mohit Bakaya, controller of Radio 4, has been compelled to issue an apology. The new format — introduced so that
While most of life’s pleasures can be shared, reading is lonely. It’s more than possible for six friends to enjoy an exquisite meal, a bottle of wine and then settle down for a four- or five-hour orgy. Food, drink, sex: these things are better shared. But if, as dawn approached, someone cracked open Chaucer’s ‘Parliament
