Podcasts of the week: sex, drugs, and parenting
If any one podcast encapsulates the dramatic developments in the genre over the past couple of years, it is a new documentary series from Spotify and Vice, said James Marriott in The Times. For years, podcasts were “the unglamorous sister of radio (and think what an unglamorous medium that is)”. Podcasting was something you did if you were too niche for mainstream radio, or your budget was too small. There’s still plenty of room for the lowkey and the quirky, of course. But which tells the story of America’s fentanyl crisis, takes long-form audio to a new level. It is a “gorgeous thing”: recorded on location across the US, Mexico and China, “sprinkled with sensitively conducted interviews and filled with lush, convincing sound effects”. Even I, a weary critic, “goggled at this sleek, expensive-sounding thing”. It is “beautifully constructed” and utterly gripping.
Painkiller,
The fourth annual British Podcast Awards (held this year as a virtual event) celebrated “all things audio” last week, said Amelia Heathman in the London Evening Standard. Podcast of the Year (as well as Best Sex and Relationships Podcast) was won by
which has been cheerfully “overturning stereotypes” since it launched on the BBC Asian Network last summer. It features three British Asians – Poppy Jay, Rubina
Pabani and Roya Eslami – who talk about their sexual experiences and discoveries, “in a way that is unlike anything else out there”. Best New Podcast was
which “offers a unique look at queer history” and has gained a strong following since it launched last year. The Listeners’ Choice Award, in which a record 229,000 people voted, was scooped by
the warmly entertaining and humorous podcast in which married couple Rosie and Chris Ramsey talk about “life, relationships, arguments and parenting”.
One of the most important podcasts of the pandemic has been
in which comedians talk about their experiences of loss, said Maighna Nanu in The Daily Telegraph. For many of those bereaved in recent months – no matter the cause of death – “lockdown has impeded their grieving process and compounded an already difficult time”. Listening to comedians talk about death might not sound like an obvious form of solace. But for many listeners it proves a great comfort, said Nanu – fostering a sense of shared loss and community. was launched in 2016 by the actress and comedian Cariad Lloyd, whose father died of cancer when she was 15. And its “almost 2,000 five-star reviews on the Apple Store testify to its far-reaching impact”.
Griefcast