Podcasts are booming – and this is the pick of the bunch
It denotes autumn as surely as conkers dropping from horse chestnut trees: a sudden boost in the quality of what’s on TV. After a long summer of reality television and sport, the nation is suddenly spoilt for choice for quality dramas – from the cliffhanging twists of Bodyguard to BBC Three’s delectable psychopath comedy Killing Eve.
There’s more to come, too: tonight, Jenna Coleman stars in kidnapping drama The Cry, and next weekend, Jodie Whittaker makes her debut as the first female Doctor in the new series of Doctor Who.
So it would take something quite remarkable to steal the spotlight at the water cooler come Monday morning – let alone a cultural offering that isn’t even on the television. And yet, the one thing you’ll be desperate to tell your colleagues, friends and family about over the next few weeks is a podcast: Dear Joan and Jericha.
Created by Vicki Pepperdine and Julia Davis, long-term collaborators on cult TV comedies like Nighty Night and Camping, the series takes the form of a conversation between two middle-aged agony aunts – Joan (Davis, with a warm Scottish burr) and Jericha (Pepperdine, ripe with jaunty scorn) – variously trained in “life coaching, female sexual health, psycho-genital counselling and sports journalism”.
Each episode, they address the awkward and intimate problems sent in by three of their listeners
– from marital tedium to deranged sexual appetites – with increasingly tangential l judgment and preposterous medical advice. A case in point: when a 62-year-old woman sends in a request for ideas for role-plays she can carry out with her husband in the bedroom, Joan and Jericha castigate the unattractive photograph she has attached and suggest that she dresses up as Dot Cotton.
These women are hateful, toxic and entitled. Presented as a maternal solution for womankind’s woes, Joan and Jericha are actually wildly critical of female agency. Meanwhile, men can do no wrong: an errant husband is championed as “a man with a little bit of spunk about him”. Joan has been married “several times”, and likes to take long, exotic holidays away from her rich husband, who has recently been incapacitated by a stroke. Jericha enjoys luxurious swinging parties with her husband of 30 years. And yet, such venom is completely addictive. As one fan wrote on Twitter: “I vehemently disagree with everything that comes out of their mouths, so I’m not sure why this podcast is making me ache with laughter in a car park.”
The answer, partly, is Pepperdine and Davis’s ability to build hilariously surreal worlds while maintaining the calm veneer of two wise, measured women who supposedly care for their hapless correspondents. The majority of each show appears to be wildly improvised; every now and then, you can hear one of them desperately trying not to erupt into giggles down the microphone. Much like Pete and Dud of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s mid-Sixties Dagenham Dialogues, Joan and Jericha are two characters their creators are egging on to be ever more ridiculous. Plus, at 20 minutes long, each of the eight episodes are eminently bingeable.
Dear Joan and Jericha arrived quietly in March, and has been building its listenership through word of mouth and social media recommendations ever since. Pepperdine, who also starred in and co-wrote the critically acclaimed sitcom Getting On with Jo Brand, turned down an invitation from The Sunday Telegraph to be interviewed about the project, and both creators are remaining tight-lipped. Nevertheless, it has gained a five-star rating on iTunes. It’s an impeccable score achieved in a crowded market; as research publish published this week by broadcast regulator Ofcom revealed, the number of podc podcast listeners has almost doubled in five fi years, with half the audience now a aged under 35. The third most popular British podcast this year is My Dad Wrote Wro A Porno, the funny erotica saga that t Dear Joan and Jericha leaves look looking very tame indeed.
Pepperdine and D Davis don’t have any television proje projects coming up in the near future. Th Their last, 2016’s excoriating Camping, Campin has undergone an underwhelming underwhelming-looking US remake, which will air in October. Thank goodness goodness, then, for Dear Joan and Jericha Jeric to remind us of television’s most darkly comic minds. One reviewer said they had listened to the whole thing four times – I can see
myself doing the same.