Podcasts mean you have no excuse to be bored ever again. You can study ancient Roman history while standing in a queue at the bank; learn Mandarin while doing the ironing and listen to your favourite novelist field hard questions while on the treadmill at the gym. Podcasts have opened up universities, time-shifted radio and created new audiences for comedy, poetry and music. University lecturers and high school students, wine buffs and tech-heads are all uploading information, opinions and creative work. Most striking of all, podcasts are free – and legally so.
Even the iTunes store charges for songs, movies, tv shows, audiobooks and apps but does not ever charge for podcasts. But the information overload is scary. The independent podcast library Podcast Alley holds 91,757 podcasts comprising 6,070,164 episodes. And there is no suggestion that it is complete. Given the numbers, any selection of the best is going to be incomplete.
But here is the ArtsHub Top Ten of the most selected for popularity, variety, quality and with the interests of the ArtsHub readership in mind.
1.Public journalism, private quirks
This American Life is a perennial contestant for number one on the US iTunes list and often pips any local offering for Australians too. It’s a quirky but serious hour of public journalism, broadcast on more than 500 stations to about 1.8 million listeners across the US and downloaded about 700,000 times each week. Host Ira Glass has a knack of finding remarkable interview subjects like the one-armed woman who manages to hide her disability so well that her professional dance partners don’t know. He also likes bizarre historical titbits such as the rash of murders in the 18th century committed by people who tried to get themselves executed so avoid going to hell for committing suicide. But This American Life also gets into the essence of important issues including what schools can be realistically expected to do or what it’s like to be an illegal immigrant in Alabama. Based in Chicago, the show’s context is definitely urban America but the eclectic range of subjects has international appeal.
2.Intelligent interviews
ABC Radio National offers a huge range of podcasts including specialists programs on arts, books, design, music and the magnificent Big Ideas. But their top ranking podcast is often Conversations with Richard Fidler, a simple interview format that ranges across a vast array of subjects. Fidler is old-fashioned quality interviewer who knows the secret to a good interview is to get the right subject, ask the right question then shut up. His subjects include soldiers, economists and scientists but he has a great many writers and quite a number of other creatives on the show. Recent guests of interest to the arts community include broadcaster and writer Clive James, Scribe publisher Henry Rosenbloom and lighting designer Gillian Huzley.
3.For a laugh
Podcasting has been a boon for comedy because the format is low-cost and excellent for short bites. A great place to start is the Comedy Central Stand-Up podcasts which give you two minute bites of stand-up, quite enough to decide if this comedian is not your thing. Creating a podcast is now standard practice for aspiring comedian and comedy festivals. The American-based 2012 Comedy Awards Best Comedy Podcast went to WTF with Marc Maron. His foul-mouthed chewing-the-fat and belligerent interviewing of his comedic colleagues certainly won’t be to everybody’s taste but there is no question he has a following. The podcasts don’t give you access to his stand-up which is his real calling card.
4.Book Club without the gossip
If you are despairing about the intellectual level of media coverage or feel like there’s no one to have a really serious conversation with about a good book, download the BBC’s World Book Club podcast. Host Harriet Gilbert masterminds an hour of first class Q & A with top class authors. Nobel prizewinner Toni Morrison was on the show talking about Beloved, Booker prizewinner Possession was explored with its ever-erudite author A.S. Byatt and and last year’s Booker winner The Finkler Question had its politics and humour taken apart with author Howard Jacobson. The format allows questions from Gilbert herself, a studio audience and an international audience who write in, record or phone in their questions. Questions are obviously curated: the standard is extraordinarily high. This is the global village at its finest and it gives you a warm fuzzy to listen to a high-school teacher from Norway , an expatriate Indian in Canada and a British academic putting questions to the same novelist.
5.When TED talks, people listen
TED is a non-profit devoted to ideas worth spreading. It started out as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design, hence the acronym but now it covers just about anything. TED runs conference with live and online participation. Anyone can suggest a speaker and speakers range from unknowns with something to say to icons of business, politics, science or art including former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, designer Phillipe Starck, architect Frank Gehry, primatologist Jane Goodall, musician Paul Simon and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Not all TED talks are available as podcasts, the organisation encourages you to join and participate in conferences. But there is a good selection guaranteed to ensure you begin a sentence with the words, ‘Did you know…?’
Hamish & Andy began life as a comedy duo on radio and still have the larrikin feel of breakfast show presenters making prank calls and stirring each other up. The only difference with the podcast is that you can have it at a time that suits you. The show is all banter and bluster with an impro feel. The podcast has a tremendous following in Australia and New Zealand, sometimes pipping the full gamut of Radio National offerings for number one spot in Australia, and an international following in – what sounds like a Hamish and Andy joke – Dubai.
The Moth is another original not-for-profit organisation, this one dedicated to the craft of storytelling. It describes itself as ‘a celebration of both the raconteur, who breathes fire into true tales of ordinary life, and the storytelling novice, who has lived through something extraordinary and yearns to share it’. The Moth holds storytelling events around the US that are part theatre, part community-sharing and selects a weekly story for podcasting. Many of the storytellers are actors or authors and big names have included Malcolm Gladwell , Annie Proulx and Salman Rushdie. But they can also be ordinary Joes and Janes. A mother tells how her Second Grade daughter turned into a bully at the wrong school; a man who survived death row recounts his experience; a New York cop about to conduct the biggest drug bust of his life is sidetracked by the events of 9/11. Warning: it’s an emotional roller coaster and highly addictive.
8.You won’t be Robinson Crusoe with this one
Long before podcasting, the BBC’s Desert Island Discs had a cult following. The show has been broadcasting since 1942, inviting public figures from every walk of life to select the music they would take with them to a desert island. To be chosen as a ‘castaway’ to select your discs is a mark of having made it in British society. It even happens to fictional characters such as the eponymous character in The Finkler Question. The podcasts allow you not only to download the latest castaways but also more than 1000 from the past including Deborah Kerr, Dave Brubeck, Alfred Hitchcock and Ginger Rogers.
9. For literature lovers As if transition to tablets and mobile devices were not enough, podcasts are also challenging the role of books, newspapers and magazines. The New Yorker has long been a centre for new fiction, particularly short stories but also reviews, literary journalism and extracts of longer works. Their podcast invites authors to read a short story from the magazine’s archive. Colm Toiben (complete with gorgeous Irish accent) reads Sylvia Townsend-Warner, Tessa Hadley reads Nadine Gordimer and Ben Marcus reads Kazuo Ishiguro. Perfect bedtime stories for grown-ups.
10. Go back to school This last choice is a bit of a cheat because we couldn’t just choose one podcast. But we can’t end this list without mentioning iTunes U, the section of the iTunes application which contains lectures from universities around the globe. This is where you can take Yale’s Introduction to Music course; get a grounding in particle physics at Oxford or learn about the slow food movement from Switzerland’s Hotel and Tourism Management Institute. No fees, No HECS. Just pick a subject you have always wanted to study and start downloading.
