Podcasts of the week: selfishness, loss and nostalgia
is a funny and stimulating new serial, written and narrated by the New York-based radio producer Sharon Mashihi, which has achieved what I regard as the “ultimate accolade for a podcast”, said Charlie Phillips in The Guardian. Namely, I’ll listen to it when I’m walking, painting walls or hoovering (when I can give it my complete attention) but not when I’m cooking (when I can’t). The theme is Mashihi’s tribulations in figuring out whether to have a baby, and dealing with her “suffocating” Iranian-Jewish family. You’ll need to concentrate, because she plays multiple characters, including her own alter ego, and the boundary between the real and the fictional is sometimes intentionally fuzzy. But this is no “intellectual game”: it’s an absorbing exploration of the family, the individual, and “how selfish it’s OK to be”.
A moving and deeply personal new podcast from the BBC World Service, is the story of one woman – the Australian documentary-maker Sophie Townsend – “navigating the death of her husband from cancer and raising two girls without him”, said Fiona Sturges in the FT. It might sound emotionally gruelling, but I “urge you to listen”. More memoir than audio diary, it a “wonderfully written” account of love, loss and the “balancing act that is being human”. Townsend doesn’t
QI
“deal in melodrama or sentimentality”. Instead, by “magnifying life’s mundane details and revealing her petty annoyances, she reveals much about resilience and the ways we keep going in the face of catastrophe”. The series is also exquisitely produced (by Eleanor McDowall), with terrific music (by Jeremy Warmsley) and a focus on the “background noise that soundtracks all our lives”.
I found it charming to discover that Queen Mary University of London has a Centre for the History of the Emotions, said James Marriott in The Times. Even more charmingly, its academic staff (let’s imagine them “rampaging around their faculty offices variously weeping, cheering, ranting and staring mournfully into the distance”) produce a podcast about emotions. It is named, with “disarming literalism”,
– and consists of short but illuminating episodes focusing on concepts such as happiness, loneliness and schadenfreude. My favourite so far is Agnes Arnold-Forster’s one on nostalgia, in part because I’m a “chronic nostalgic”, but also because it’s a model of clarity. Top nostalgia fact: the last recorded death from the condition – that of a US soldier in Europe – occurred in 1918 when the word referred not to longing for a lost past, but to longing for a distant place. “Boom. elves salivate. And I breathe a sigh of relief.”