Pick of the podcasts

They’re everywhere, but which ones are best? D.J. Taylor shares his guide to the top podcasts to listen to this autumn.

A columnist elsewhere recently diagnosed a crisis in the literary world. The problem, he maintained, was rampant over-supply colliding with slackening demand. There were too many books, too many literary agents, too many creative writing courses, too many writers, actual and aspiring, and – an inevitable corollary – not enough readers. The same point could be made of the podcast, where for every Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, whose The Rest Is History has made its creators household names, there are 20 loft-bound also-rans droning away into the ether to an audience in the dozens. As for the immediate future, more – to borrow Kingsley Amis’ remark about higher education in the 1960s – will almost certainly mean worse.

The consequence of an overactive medium for the podcast browser is that you spend most of your time discriminating, plunging an eager hand into the bran tub of material on display and hoping that it emerges with something other than bran, registering the fact that podcast A is quite interesting but suffers from a gravel-voiced American presenter who sounds like Dr Marvin Monroe in The Simpsons, while podcast B has a high-grade frontwoman condemned to spend her time in front of the microphone dispensing trivia and interrupted every so often by advertisements for cosmetic surgery. Negotiating these hazards needs skill and patience, and the online “10 Best Podcasts” guides can be highly misleading.

On the other hand, the best podcasts are so very good that the time put into finding them is time well spent. My current favourite is the Cambridge don and London Review of Books political commentator David Runciman’s Past Present Future, not least for the host’s regular sit-downs with the American pundit Gary Gerstle in which the pair discuss the forthcoming presidential election. A recent episode entitled “Is Anyone Winning?” included some ear-bending linkage to developments in the Middle East, acknowledged that the Democrats were losing momentum, put the odds of victory at 49.4 per cent each for Harris and Trump and ended with an artful hedging of bets.

Much more knockabout, but always full of good stuff, is Page 94, the fortnightly Private Eye podcast in which Ian Hislop, a trio of editorial colleagues (Adam Macqueen, Andrew Hunter Murray and Helen Lewis) and the occasional guest sit down to consider stories featured in the current issue. The tone, as you might imagine, is chatty, not to mention jokey and occasionally scathing. Hislop tends to take a back seat and let the young people enjoy themselves: the material ranges over such quintessential Eye topics as politics (the “ghosts” of this month’s Tory party conference); journalism (the demise of the London Evening Standard); and the allegations levelled at the late Mohamed Fayed. As for the Tories in Birmingham, the last word on this spectacle was pronounced by the ebullient Lewis, who observed that everybody who took to the platform claimed to have been “robbed”.

Double Jeopardy, fronted by former Director of Public Prosecutions Lord (Ken) Macdonald and the barrister Tim Owen, pursues the same kind of agenda but from a narrower, legal angle. Episodes tend to feature two topics – one immensely serious and treated at length; the other shorter and affording greater opportunities for amusement. One I tuned into recently began with a shocked analysis of the Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick’s plan to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and continued with a résumé of the legal proceedings surrounding the charity Fashion for Relief, which saw one of its trustees, the former supermodel Naomi Campbell, banned from future activity in this field. “Unbelievable,” Macdonald pronounced, as one sky-high expenses claim ­followed another and it was revealed that the charity had in one tax year raised £1.7 million while dispersing only £5,000 of it. Owen, shaking his head over Campbell’s £14,000 flight to Cannes by private jet, revealed that his own trip there in support of his wife’s attendance at a film festival had cost all of £350.

Out in the wider cultural world, planet podcast is full of men in late middle age pursuing their hobbies. One of them is the former advertising guru and Tottenham Hotspur fan Theo Delaney, whose Life Goals offers a footballing version of Desert Island Discs. Guests are invited to choose eight stand-out net-shakers from a lifetime’s terrace-haunting and a piece of music from the year in which they were slotted home. Inevitably, visit­ors to the studio tend to be men (novelists Tim Parks and Irvine Welsh, musician Colin Blunstone, lots of ex-pros), but there was space a couple of months ago for the much-capped England women’s inter­national Karen Carney.

Much the same demographic is catered for by Word In Your Ear, co-hosted by the highly engaging Mark Ellen and David Hepworth. Both men have serious pop biz connections (each, for example, edited music magazines as well as fronting up The Old Grey Whistle Test in the early 1980s; Ellen is even supposed to have featured in the same band as Tony Blair at Oxford), and these are reflected in the choice of guests: musicians, writers, com­edians and “other people we like”. If there is a tendency to lapse into anecdote, then the anecdotes – as in Hepworth’s recent book about “heritage rock”, Hope I Get Old Before I Die – are always worth listening to. Born a decade later than messrs Ellen and Hepworth, I feel very much at home; younger listeners may struggle to decode some of the allusions.

How does God shape up in the world of the podcast? Well, he is everywhere to hand, together with minute investigations of Scripture and vast acreages of the ecclesiastical backstory. Fr Mike Schmitz’s The Bible in a Year is still going strong, as is The Spectator’s Holy Smoke, while papal history boasts a raft of chroniclers, ranging from the sobersides Steve Guerra’s History of the Papacy – online reviewers sometimes complain that Guerra is too obviously reading from the script – to the markedly less respectful The Popecast: A History of the Papacy, which promises a more “unvarnished” take.

Back in the here and now, there is a big audience for Everything Happens with Kate Bowler: Ms B, an academic from Duke University who survived Stage IV cancer and goes in search of inspiring stories, certainly found one in her recent guest the Jesuit priest Fr Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, which specialises in rehabilitating West Coast gang members. Also recommended are the podcasts sponsored by the Cambridge-based Woolf Institute – dialogue from the centre of that hotly contested space where religion, ­politics and society meet head-on. Newcomers might try the four-part Inside Fundament­al­ism or the En­counter series, in which Ted Kessler, the institute’s founding ­director, performs such challenging tricks as getting a Jew and a Muslim together to discuss the story of Moses.

And the best podcasts of all? These tend to be low-key affairs, passionate and informed, but also unobtrusive, under-advertised and sometimes sporadic. One of my favourites is Susan Gordon Byron’s The Culture Boar, whose remit is advertised as “books, the arts, poetry”; she reviews books and films but seems more interested in lightning-quick descents – sometimes no more than a few minutes long – on particular poems or poetic tendencies. Back in the summer, for example, Gordon Byron could be found briskly considering Thom Gunn’s “The Idea of Trust”, and poems “grounded in interiority”, with particular reference to Philip Larkin. Having got through 18 episodes by last June, The Culture Boar seems to have temporarily ground to a halt – but a second series would be a very good idea. On this occasion, contra Kingsley Amis, more would probably mean better.

Most podcasts are available on multiple apps and platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts, as well as on apps for Android and other systems.