From Barack Obama to Peter Andre and other familiar faces, there are plenty of great listens here this week.
1. Please Don’t
Streaming platform: BBC Sounds, all podcast platforms and YouTube
Genre: Entertainment
Raven Smith and Joel Golby’s new podcast Please Don’t takes a deep dive every week into the cultural moments that everyone is talking about. From red carpets to TV shows and books, they discuss it all.
In their most recent episode, the pair talk about famous actor Tom Cruise – bearing the question of ‘Is Tom Cruise Cool?’ Discussing Cruise’s interviewing style ahead of his new film Digger, they debate whether his laid-back approach is part of his character or if that’s truly what his personality is. Referring to him as ‘Mr Movie’, they then go on to discuss London Fashion Week, Saturday Night Live UK (SNL UK) and if actor Jeff Goldblum is the right person to do the skits.
‘Ariana Grande is one of the funniest people to ever be on SNL,” they state before going on to discuss the return of this year’s Big Brother and how the show influenced a variety of other reality TV shows after it.
Overall, this is a light-hearted listen that covers all the topics and cultural moments we’ve been thinking about already.
(By Sara Keenan)
2. At Home With The Andres
Streaming platform: All podcast platforms and YouTube
Genre: Entertainment
What really happens behind the closed doors of the Andre household?
Well, in Peter and Emily Andre’s new podcast At Home with the Andres, it turns out much the same domestic banter that goes on in most families. Taking the mickey out of dad, mum nagging he doesn’t change nappies, kids sending voice notes calling him “ab-normal”, which Andre turns into another nostalgic story about his “washboard abs” from his Nineties pin-up days.
With six kids between them (including stepson Harvey who Andre shares with reality star Katie Price after they met on TV show I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! in 2004), it’s all pretty wholesome, if bland stuff.
NHS doctor Emily, 37, is clearly the brains of the outfit, while likeable but vain Andre is there to provide the dad jokes. However Andre is clearly feeling all of his 53 years after Emily gets an old copy of Smash Hits down from the loft and he fondly reminisces about “filling arenas” after his Mysterious Girl hit in 1996 and “fans lying in wait in his hotel bedroom”.
While Emily kindly massages her husband’s fragile ego, the truth is these days the only person Andre would find in his hotel room is… the cleaner.
(By Siobhan McNally)
3. World of Secrets: Catching My Teacher
Streaming Platform: BBC World Service or wherever you get your BBC podcasts
Genre: Documentary series
The crushed sad voice of betrayed young female student, Zia, who trusted her pious headmaster “Abah” (which creepily means father) as if he were her own will stay with listeners long after the final episode of this compelling BBC iPlayer five-part podcast.
World of Secrets: Catching My Teacher is the 13th in a series of factual documentary podcasts from the BBC World Service. It delves into the murky world of investigations into grooming and sexual exploitation around the world – from searching for British soldier dads in Kenya, to US special agents infiltrating The Dark Web, and laying bare the evil deeds of Harrods predator Al Fayed.
This time we are whisked away to the idyllic Indonesian island of Lombok where tourists flock to powder-white sand beaches. But inland among the rice paddies, an Islamic boarding school where students are forced to live by its rule of “We hear and we obey” is about to have its dark secret exposed by students turned detectives.
The headmaster banned all phones so he could isolate and prey on his innocent victims. It makes the poetic justice all the more delicious when the young whistleblowers, Zia, Yusron and Sukma, use counter-surveillance technology, provided by BBC Eye journalists, to finally bring down the abusive school patriarch.
(By Siobhan McNally)
4. What’s My Age Again?
Streaming Platform: All streaming platforms and YouTube
Genre: Entertainment
A celebrity describing himself as “a piccolo-voiced androgyne who was an incel before it was fashionable” yet knew “sexual positions like reverse cowgirl” is what you get when two juggernauts of the confessional celebrity stage collide.
Louis Theroux, the BAFTA award-winning documentary-maker who exposed the manosphere, is the latest guest on Katherine Ryan’s hit podcast series What’s My Age Again?
The concept of the podcast is to take its guests’ blood to discover their biological age. What it doesn’t get in a vial, comic Ryan squeezes it out of them in their secrets. Using “awkward Louis pauses”, she plays the man who invented the unnerving interview technique at his own game.
With some guests it can be like getting blood out of a stone, but Theroux – more used to quizzing cults, paedophiles and white supremacists – enjoys spilling the (mung) beans of his unconventional Seventies childhood growing up with novelist father Paul Theroux.
He candidly chats about his hard launch into puberty through The Joy Of Sex, his dad’s collection of Playboys, smoking “a nightly spliff”, partying hard, and having therapy for his anxiety, stressful career and marriage problems.
The 56-year-old’s biological age was then revealed to be significantly younger, which possibly serves as a lesson for us all…
(By Siobhan McNally)
5. A Great Book with Barack Obama
Streaming Platform: Audible
Genre: Entertainment
There is something quietly compelling about listening to two hugely recognisable figures discuss the books that helped shape how they see the world.
In A Great Book with Barack Obama, the former US president sits down with six guests to explore a book that has profoundly influenced them. In this episode, actor Tom Hanks joins Obama to discuss Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.
The novel follows an ageing preacher writing to his young son, but the pair’s conversation soon stretches beyond the pages into faith, fatherhood and the “shimmering wonder” of everyday life.
Hanks, a father of three sons, and Obama reflect on their own relationships with faith and how these have evolved over time. There is a warmth to their exchange as they consider how growing older has made them more appreciative of seemingly ordinary moments.
One particularly thought-provoking idea is that so much of faith is simply recognising that life itself is the miracle.
It makes for a gentle, contemplative listen that is ultimately less about one great book and more about how the right book, read at the right moment, can change the way we experience life.
(By Sara Keenan)
