British Podcast Awards 2022
Media Storm (The House of the Guilty Feminist) | Apple.com
Decode | Spotify
Songbook (White Rabbit) | Apple.com
We Miss Amy Winehouse | Spotify
The Museum of Bad Vibes | BBC Sounds
Last weekend’s British Podcast Awards was the usual fun affair, though the handing out of gongs took a loooong time. Thirty-three awards! Up from 18 in 2017, the first ever, showing just how much podcasting has exploded in the UK. There were lovely moments throughout, the most poignant being Lauren Mahon from You, Me and the Big C accepting her podcast champion award alone, now that both Rachael Bland and Dame Deborah James have lost their lives to cancer. What a strange, upsetting, uplifting thing for Mahon to have to do. She did it with enormous grace.
Other moments? Podcast hosts Ki and Dee (Chiara Hunter and Diana Vickers) singing their award-giving speech, hilariously. The genuine excitement rippling across the room when Idris Elba and Sabrina Dhowre Elba arrived to give out the wellbeing award. 5 live’s Elis James and John Robins’s hosting of the whole event: many jokes about John Lewis suits, event sponsors and bad podcast ideas, all delivered with their trademark spiky warmth.
The awards are excellent at highlighting non-mainstream audio gems (in 2019, the award organisers invited George the Poet to enter and he swept the board, winning five awards). One such delight this year was Media Storm, hosted by Mathilda Mallinson and Helena Wadia, which won gold for best current affairs podcast. It looks at news from the point of view of those who are central to the stories but don’t often get to speak; Mallinson and Wadia started it after they noticed that reports about migrants rarely featured any actual migrants. The journalism is excellent, thorough and empathic, and they both have a great knack for revealing questions. If you’re new to it, you might want to start a few shows back, as the most recent episode isn’t representative: choose from drug legislation, sex worker laws, even treatment for chronic UTIs (revelatory).
The latest episode concerns non-offending paedophiles: people who are sexually attracted to children and young teens but who don’t act on this attraction. (So: fairly obvious trigger warning.) Mallinson goes to Germany to talk to a psychotherapist who set up a clinic in 2005 to help non-offending paedophiles control their behaviour. He explains that humans develop their sexual orientation at around 14 and don’t grow out of it, whatever it may be. She talks to others, including a celibate female paedophile and a man who realised he was attracted to children when he himself was very young, so turned to the internet for support and was exploited. An enormously challenging subject, well handled by Mallinson, deeply questioned by Wadia. I have been thinking about the episode ever since I listened.
Another BPA winner was Decode, Spotify’s British version of the US hit show Dissect. This takes an album and goes through it track by track, unpicking the lyrics and music, contextualising the artist’s history. So far, the decoders have tackled Dave’s Psychodrama and Skepta’s Konnichiwa, both albums that merit intense examination (I loved the episode on Skepta’s Shutdown). It’s a reassuringly nerdy programme, occasionally slightly pompous, but informed and nicely produced, and the host, poet Kayo Chingonyi, is a lovely listen.
If that’s your kind of thing, here are two brand new music analysis shows. Songbook is hosted by music journalist and pop culture expert Jude Rogers, whose work is often in the Observer. It’s an interview show that, each week, discusses a book about music. Later episodes promise Vashti Bunyan and Adelle Stripe (the series will feature more women than men, unusually), but the opener has Suede’s Brett Anderson chatting, with his usual wit and intelligence, about Starlust, which features fans’ musings on their beloved stars. “It was mundane in places,” he says, “which I quite liked.”
And here is We Miss Amy Winehouse, from comedian Suchandrika Chakrabarti. She’s an engaging audio presence, good at emotional reactions though a little woolly when it comes to analysis (Back to Black doesn’t sound like a funeral march until the end!). We get to hear the entirety of the tracks mentioned, which is an utter joy. With both shows, I’d be happier with a tougher edit, but that’s just me.
The Museum of Bad Vibes is another interesting new show, emerging from BBC Sounds’ Audio Lab, a scheme to help new podcast creators. In each episode, host Hanna Adan (excellent) examines a different museum artefact. The origin of each object is far from the UK, but they now live in British museums, on display or – more upsettingly – in a box, away from view. Some of these artefacts were designed to be actively worshipped or are from a culture that believes that they are a living presence. Adan’s script is great, the discussion about repatriation fascinating, and the voicing of the objects’ feelings is far less irritating than you might fear. This one could be up for an award next year.
