My favourite podcasts by middle aged white guys

I often see Twitterers and columnists opining that we don't need any more podcasts from middle aged (or middle class) white men and I would like to be an outlier on this, and recommend the following excellent and entertaining podcasts from that demographic. Other demographics are available.

Kermode and Mayo's Take: Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode
https://www.kermodeandmayo.com/
Apple podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

A continuation of the excellent 'Wittertainment', the BBC 5 Live show that ran for ages before Simon and Mark parted company with the BBC and set sail under their own steam. Fabulous interviews with people who make films and streaming series, pithy film reviews, amiable complaints about various annoyances, audience emails, terrible jokes and a general feeling of warm film-fan community. There have been a couple of live events too in London, hugely popular.

There's a free version and a paid-for version and a whole bunch of extras. The free version has some rather funny adverts. 

Bunk Bed: Peter Curran and Patrick Marber
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0735nh6/episodes/downloads
BBC Sounds

Love this. Late night chats recorded lying down in the dark while in bunk beds. Gentle and funny bickering and story-telling with occasional guests on the pull-out mattress, all in 15 minutes. I love the sounds of the duvets rustling and the conversations veering off in directions. 

Here's a lovely review from the Royal Television Society: https://rts.org.uk/article/ear-candy-bunk-bed

Really? No, Really?: Jason Alexander and Peter Tilden
https://reallynoreally.com/
iHeart Radio | Apple podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | Amazon Music | Simplecast

The new kid on the block. I have recently been bingeing Seinfeld on Netflix, getting me through a miserable bout of Covid (now recovered) and just so delighted that the end of that coincided with Jason Alexander launching a podcast with his pal Peter Tilden. It's a lovely buffet of odd facts and interesting guests in which they're trying to get to the bottom of why the things that make them go "Really? No, Really?" are that way. It's funny and fact-checked so ticks my boxes.

Coincidentally both Patrick Marber (Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan on The Day Today) and Jason Alexander (George Costanza on Seinfeld) have been making me laugh for 30 odd years and both are now directing (Marber, Leopoldstadt) or about to direct (Alexander, The Cottage) plays on Broadway. I wonder if they know each other! Also, perhaps there are other left-handed, Jewish, poker-playing actor-directors whose podcasts I might like to hear about...?

Much missed - Speechification, curated radio documentaries

2008 was a happy year. I seem to have discovered the world of podcasts and listened to loads of them via a tiny mp3 player to which I saved downloaded programmes via a USB cable. Radiolab has been a long-term favourite since then and I discovered the Speechification podcast and blog probably towards the end of its runtime. I'm not sure how I came across it but I've mentioned it in 30 tweets since 23 September 2008, generally pointing out a particular programme I'd heard there.

Speechification was run by Steve Bowbrick, Roo Reynolds, Russell Davies and others and its aim was to curate English-language speech-based programmes from radio and help people hear a wide range of stuff. There was plenty from BBC Radio 2, 3 and 4. I can't remember the exact history of the BBC's Listen Again service aka iPlayer at that time but I think that it wasn't always so straightforward to hear a programme if you'd missed it. Even now programmes have a shelf-life (often 29 days to listen) before quietly sinking back into the archives to be released at a future date (often after two years have elapsed). So programmes oscillate between being briefly available and then having "This programme is not currently available" added to their landing page. Speechification let you listen a little longer.

So when it closed in late 2010 and took down its archives there was a bit of an audio gap for some of these programmes, but audio-only things have started popping up every so often on YouTube (admittedly probably a bit dodgy from a copyright point of view). Here are some things I've discovered through Speechification and loved, with their YouTube or other links if they're available to listen.

Other places to find interesting audio include the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/audio, Box of Broadcasts https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand and for sonic snippets of old tech try the Museum of Endangered Sounds (eg ) http://savethesounds.info/

Josie Long's "All of the Planet's Wonders" on Plants



Stephen Fry - Third Reich and Roll
"Stephen Fry tells the story of how Hitler's huge financial investment in recording for propaganda purposes gave rise to modern recording techniques"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00j6qh3 - not available at time of this blog post

Spoon, Jar, Jar, Spoon - The Two Sides of Tommy Cooper
"Rob Brydon explores two sides to comedian Tommy Cooper - his humour and his love of magic. On stage, Cooper assumed a manic and bumbling persona, but behind this was a man with a genuine talent for magic, as revealed by contributions from magicans Paul Daniels, Alan Alan and Ali Bongo."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jm66h - not available at time of this blog post

The Archive Hour: Putting it Simply
"Kathy Sykes charts the way that science has been seen and heard on radio and television, from postwar lectures to modern animations."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076zc6 - "Sorry, this episode is not currently available"

Simon Fanshawe's Tracking the Lincolnshire Poacher



also available at https://archive.org/details/TrackingTheLincolnshirePoacherRadioProgram

Mark Miodownik's How to Write an Instruction Manual
https://archive.org/details/HowToWriteAnInstructionManual - available
BBC page https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m4470 - not available

Fifteen Inches Per Second - 2004
A brief guide to the history and use of 1/4 inch magnetic tape.
https://archive.org/details/FIFTEENINCHESPERSECOND - available
BBC page - couldn't find it! Found its info in BBC Genome (Radio Times listing).

Jarvis Cocker's Musical Map of Sheffield


Rainer Hersch's Gershwin's Horns
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00bc2r4 - not available on BBC at time of writing but if you work at a UK university or other HE institution you may be able to access it via the Box of Broadcasts (BoB) which is a MASSIVE collection of audio for educational use. Shame it's not public though, sorry https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/0091F4CC?bcast=127759481 - actually starts at 6m 30s in.

Other things that are much missed

This post is part of a series of me being a bit nostalgic about things, the other posts are as follows 

• Somerset House and Film4's Summer Screen series of open air films in the courtyard (9 June 2022)
• The Bankside Frost Fair 2003 - 2008 (24 November 2020)
• Speechification, curated radio documentaries (9 January 2020) - this post
• The National Geographic shop on Regent Street, London (4 January 2020)
• Much missed - MOMI, London's Museum of the Moving Image (2 January 2014)