Podcasts: to take you away... and bring you back
Armchair Explorer (Spotify, Apple et al.)
This enchanting fortnightly podcast put together by writer Aaron Millar is about the sort of travel that “average Joes” will probably never experience, but still love hearing about, says Liz
Edwards in The Sunday Times.
So far, it has featured the likes of
1994 Olympic downhill champion
Tommy Moe talking about backcountry skiing in Alaska; the
Lebanese mountaineering pioneer
Tima Deryan on her ascent of
Everest; and the travel writers
Jonathan Thompson and James
Stewart on trekking across
Antarctica and cage diving with great whites. You can even rocket up to the International Space
Station for a space walk with John Herrington, the first NativeAmerican astronaut. It’s “thrilling” stuff, with atmospheric soundtracks and an enthusiastic host.
Watling Street (Soundcloud.com)
This “imaginatively produced” four-part series weaves together music, poetry, chat and “little-known snippets of Britain’s history and culture” into a soundscape that “transports listeners to a different place and time”, says Dixie Wills in The Guardian. In it, the authors John Higgs and David Bramwell follow one of Britain’s most famous pre-Roman ways, the 276-mile route from Dover to north Wales. On the way they meet Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore, Salena Godden and “others whose work has been inspired or moulded in some way by the prehistoric path”.
The Habitat (gimletmedia.com)
Ever wondered what it would be like to travel to Mars? This “fascinatingly original” podcast can’t take you to the red planet, says Georgia Stephens in The Sunday Times, but it does take you into a sealed dome on a remote mountain in Hawaii, to listen in on a group of six scientists and engineers taking part in a Mars simulation project being studied by Nasa. In “fly-onthe-wall, audio-diary style”, you listen to the group as they forge new friendships, venture on “spacewalks” on lava fields and play the didgeridoo, badly.
More or Less (BBC Sounds)
If you “can bear to hear more about the blasted virus”, then the BBC Radio 4 statistics show
More Or Less has become “essential listening”, says James Marriott in The Times. In one recent coronavirus special, the statistician David Spiegelhalter explained that “your chances of dying of coronavirus correlate strongly with the chances you’d die anyway” – and that the disease is merely bringing those deaths forward. “To which you might reasonably reply: it’s my death being brought forward that I’m worried about.” It’s not a soothing listen, by any means – but it is gripping.