From No Such Thing As A Fish to Marlon And Jake Read Dead People, The Assassination and The Allusionist, this week’s top podcasts
No Such Thing As A Fish
This blockbuster podcast began as a spin-off to QI. Every week, four of Stephen Fry’s mythical elves huddle around a mic to reveal remarkable trivia they have uncovered in their research.
You’ll emerge from each half-hour episode radiating facts. Who would have thought, for instance, that rejected names for British storms include Noddy, Baldrick and Branch Wobbler?
The result is something very British and charming. You’ll emerge from each half-hour episode radiating facts.
Who would have thought, for instance, that rejected names for British storms include Noddy, Baldrick and – my favourite – Branch Wobbler?
Marlon And Jake Read Dead People
Book podcasts can be deadening, but this new one is great fun.
Book podcasts can be deadening, but this new one is great fun. Each 40-minute episode is hosted by the Booker-winning author Marlon James (above) and his editor Jake Morrissey
Each 40-minute episode is hosted by the Booker-winning author Marlon James and his editor Jake Morrissey, who between them have clocked up hundreds of hours of reading.
They whizz through authors they love, authors they loathe and everyone in between: the only criterion for inclusion in the conversation is that the writer must be dead.
The Assassination
Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was leaving a rally in 2007 when her car was blown up by a suicide bomber.
The Assassination, in which Owen Bennett Jones looks into the death of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (above), is one of the finest podcasts to have come out of the BBC
In this peerless mini-series, the journalist Owen Bennett Jones, who knew Bhutto, examines who may have killed her and why.
The puzzle that comes together over ten half-hour episodes is gripping. It is no exaggeration to say this is one of the finest podcasts to have come out of the BBC.
The Allusionist
Did you know that the word ‘woman’ is not, in fact, derived from the word ‘man’? Or that British people use the word ‘please’ slightly differently to Americans?
These are just some of the etymological curiosities to be enjoyed in Helen Zaltzman’s wonderful half-hour podcast.
Every fortnight she investigates the origins of words and expressions in the English language, often drawing on the research and contributions of experts. Her logophilia (a word I learned on the podcast) is surprisingly infectious.