My Favourite Podcasts of 2019

Podcasts continue to go from strength to strength. In the early days, there weren’t enough podcasts to fill the time I had available for them, nowadays I’m constantly having to prune podcasts out of my subscriptions, or skip a few episodes because I can’t listen to all my favourites. Here, though, are a few that I never skip. Some started this year, but a lot have a large back-catalogue to dip in to.

The Birthday Game

If you’re from the UK, you’ll probably know Richard Osman from Pointless, or his sharp, funny, appearances on various panel shows. The format of this light-hearted, weekly podcast is Osman tells the guests a celebrity who has a birthday this week, and they have to guess their age. It’s simple, and fun to play along with, and the guests regularly make me laugh out loud in embarrassing ways when I’m listening to it in public.

The Birthday Game Podcast

The Adam Buxton Podcast

Adam Buxton didn’t start his podcast this year, but there have been some great guests in 2019. I particularly enjoyed the interview with Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers, but there’s something interesting in every episode. It’s introduced me to a lot of people I’d had no exposure to, but found fascinating (Maya Fou, director of Reprieve, springs to mind) Buxton is a great, disarming interviewer - often vulnerable and self-critical and it leads to some fascinating conversations. Also contains some of the best adverts on any podcast, which perhaps sounds like odd praise, but listen, it’s well deserved.

Adam Buxton Podcast

Cautionary Tales

This is a podcast from Malcolm Gladwell’s Panoply network, presented by the Financial Times’s Tim Harford. Harford takes various stories from the past and pulls some often subtle and absorbing lessons from them. It’s clearly well-researched, and Harford is an excellent presenter. There are only a handful of episodes so far, but each is superb.

Cautionary Tales Podcast

Beyond The Screenplay

This is the podcast accompaniment to the Lessons From The Screenplay YouTube channel (which also comes highly recommended). The presenters include scriptwriters and an editor and provide insights into what works and what doesn’t in various films, especially regarding structure, character and plot. Time and again I’ve seen films I’ve loved in a new light off the back of this podcast.

Beyond the Screenplay Podcast

Broken Record

This is another Panoply network podcast. Justin Richmond presents with interviews by the producer Rick Rubin, the writer Malcolm Gladwell, and the former New York Times editor Bruce Headlam. The particular favourites of mine are the interviews by Rick Rubin since he’s a hero of mine. Take, for example, the episode where Rubin interviews Andre 3000 - it becomes almost a therapy session and both are achingly honest about the difficulties of creativity. If you have any interest in music and how it’s made you’ll find a lot to love here.

Broken Record Podcast

Conversations With Tyler

In his end of year episode, where the tables are turned and Tyler Cowan, the interviewer, is interviewed by producer Jeff Holmes, Tyler's explains that he doesn't understand why people listen to podcasts, which I find particularly interesting because he has a real skill at making incisive, engaging podcasts where he interviews a range of intellectual heavyweights. Tyler himself is a renowned academic economist, but interviews range from literary figures (his interview with the translator of the Odyssey, Emily Wilson is particularly good), other economists, public intellectuals and many other extremely smart people. Each podcast also comes with a transcript which I find extremely useful. I can’t say I come to like every interviewee (I found myself shocked by some of Jordan Peterson’s views, perhaps unsurprisingly) but I love being exposed to people I disagree with, and often these are the episodes I find the most intriguing.

Conversations With Tyler Podcast

You're Wrong About

Each episode, Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes take a story that you think you know reasonably well, or perhaps just haven’t reconsidered since the period it was dissected daily in the press, and reassess it. It’s opened my eyes to a number of my preconceptions (the Kitty Genovese and "Bystander Apathy" episode was a good one for this) and helped me think much more about how the media works. Mike and Sarah are excellent presenters and are funny and incisive making each episode an excellent listen.

You’re Wrong About Podcast

I hope you find something you’ll enjoy in these podcasts. Podcasting seems to be the place a lot of the best creators have gone to of late so I’m sure I’ve missed some great ones. Any suggestions?

My Favorite Murder - A Drag-Along’s Review

Last night, my wife and I went to see My Favorite Murder live at the Hammersmith Apollo (blah blah “Eventim” - it’s still the Hammersmith Apollo to me). Before I get on to reviewing the show proper, I’d like to comment on how strange I still find it that podcasts sell out places like the Hammersmith Apollo. It still only feels like a few years ago that when I mentioned a podcast the next part of the conversation would have to involve a discussion about what a podcast was, and how to get it. Granted, that time is actually over a decade ago now, but I’m getting old. It’s great that these shows have found an audience in the way they have, but I still find it weird.

Despite being a drag-along (their term for the partners of people who are brought along to live shows by the person who actually listens) I’d been well aware of the show for some time. Another feature of the podcast boom we’re living in is that, whereas I used to check out pretty much any podcast that anyone recommended, nowadays I spend more time begrudging unsubscribing from podcasts I rather like because I don’t have time to listen to them. True crime is not really a passion of mine. I have a passing interest in it, but not enough to try and squeeze the show into my listening habits. I came to the show having heard a couple of excerpts from my wife, but not really knowing much more. I mean, I’m not an idiot, I can work out what a true crime comedy podcast was likely to entail, but I hadn’t listened.

The format was what I expected. The presenters, Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, were seated on stage, explaining the details of two murder cases (in this case both from the early 20th century) and joking about them. Put like that, it sounds tasteless, I accept, but it really wasn’t at all. There wasn’t anything mean about the show at all. The jokes mostly came at the expense things like of the ineptitude of the murderers and around the fringes of the story. I would also add that I fully accept that anything can be the subject of humour. The main issue is that the darker and more controversial the topic, the more skill is required of the comedians. Luckily, Karen and Georgia are hilarious.

I was expecting to have an enjoyable time, but to feel a little left out, knowing from experience that long-running podcasts build up such a history of in-jokes and stories that to someone late to the party they can be almost incomprehensible, let alone funny. That, though, was not my experience at all. I could spot the odd in-joke, and I’m sure there’s stuff I missed, but overall it felt much more like a comedy gig. All the more impressively, though, it was clearly almost entirely improvised. In (what I’ll call for now) “formal” comedy, improvisation on stage is often carefully coordinated prepared material. Take Eddie Izzard, for example, who can role out a show that feels like it’s been made up on the spot, but in fact is carefully prepared, with the “improvised” beats crafted into the show. My Favourite Murder quite clearly wasn’t like that. It was made up on the spot by two funny women.

In the show, they had a handful of notes about the murder in question, and had gathered some photos of the people involved. One shared the case, while the other commented, and then they reversed roles. At the end, in the “Hometown Murder” section, someone from the audience shared a murder from their own town. For us, Alice from Basingstoke, shared the case of Richard Markham, which I have to admit had passed me by when it occurred in 2003. For someone thrown up on stage in front of a massive crowd, she did an astonishingly good job telling the story.

Overall, it was a great experience. I’m not sure I’ve heard a louder crowd at the Apollo and I’ve seen a fair few gigs and comedy shows there. Communities that rise around shows like this can feel a little like a cult, and this shared a few of those features, but I came away glowing with the warmth of an excellent show and a uniformly lovely crowd.