Where Should We Begin? With Esther Perel (Esther’s Office Hours) | Stitcher
The Girlfriends (iHeart Podcasts/Novel) | Apple Podcasts
The Crossbow Killer (Radio Wales) | BBC Sounds
Get Birding | Peanut & Crumb
Esther Perel’s sweep-all-before-it relationships podcast Where Should We Begin? is back for a sixth series. In the past, the show has hopped around from platform to platform, and Perel has experimented with other formats, but now the original show is back and easily accessible, for zero pence, in all the usual places. If you’re not familiar with it, you’re in for a treat. Perel is a world-renowned psychotherapist, and Where Should We Begin? lets us listen to a real-life couple’s counselling session with her, three hour’s-worth edited into an hour. Occasionally, some details are changed for anonymity, plus Perel records some asides to explain what she’s thinking, but other than that you’re in the room with her and a couple in crisis. This might not sound like much, but, honestly, it’s riveting and revelatory. (Try Speak to Me in French, Trauma Doesn’t Like to Be Touched or Happily Divorced for starters.)
I interviewed Perel in 2018, for the launch of WSWB’s second series. She was charming – insightful, curious, funny – and she brings all of that into her show, along with 40-plus years of experience as a therapist. Occasionally, her insights are so acute, she can seem like a witch (though, of course, that’s what experience does). Every episode will give you something to think about.
So, a new series is exciting! Especially after Perel’s experiments with other formats (Esther Calling; How’s Work?; Couples Under Lockdown) were not quite as satisfying as the original. At first I found the opening episode, Donny Daddy, a little choppy: it seemed to me that there were a lot of Perel asides, and this, plus adverts, made the session seem disjointed. However, when I listened again I realised that the disjointed feeling was actually coming from the couple; they didn’t quite reveal what was really going on until around half an hour in. But, as ever, Perel’s clever questioning meant they – and we – got there, and the problem was far more complicated – involving that nouveau relationship wrecker, social media - than it first appeared. Perel’s acute observation about the man in Donor Daddy, and how he reacts to women saying what they want, completely changed the couple’s dynamic in the room, and opened everything up. Oh, is there anything more delightful than hearing about – and learning from – someone else’s relationship difficulties?
If you fancy more, a paid subscription will give you a brand new show, in which Perel conducts a therapy-lite session, this time with a famous person. First on offer is actor Neil Patrick Harris, who has a big 50th birthday party coming up and is unsure how to cope with feeling guilty about not talking to everyone there. Their conversation is sweet enough, but it’s Where Should We Begin? that truly delivers.
Here are a couple of new true crime podcasts for you, intriguing in both subject matter and production approach. The first, The Girlfriends, is American, and concerns an eligible Jewish doctor named Bob Bierenbaum, who moves to Vegas in the mid-90s and dates various women there. Once he’s not in a relationship with any of them, the ex-girlfriends get together and start piecing together Bob’s strange backstory (rather like true crime podcast producers, though they didn’t exist back then). Our host is one of these girlfriends, Carole Fisher, and she’s great: funny, deliberate, clear. And Novel is the production company, which always bodes well: the Novel-ists know how to tell a story, but also how to use sound production to enhance that storytelling. So The Girlfriends has a haunting theme tune, and uses music and real-life atmosphere, along with great plotting, to help keep our interest. It’s all really well done.
And from BBC Sounds, there’s The Crossbow Killer, the story of an unexpected murder in a remote area. (Echoes of West Cork, just in its subject matter.) In 2019, in a remote part of Anglesey, a law-abiding retired lecturer, Gerald Corrigan, was shot by an arrow from a crossbow when he went out to check on his TV aerial. Corrigan ended up dying of his injuries. But who shot him, and why? The producers are Overcoat Media, based in Wales, and their approach is imaginative, even more so than The Girlfriends’. Rhys Iorwerth has written poetry for the podcast, and reads it beautifully. Reporters Tim Hinman and Meic Parry are excellent, and the gorgeous Welsh accents of many of those speaking have an effect, as does the sonic atmosphere. The show is beautifully paced and realised. A feeling of dread – of something going really wrong – is conjured subtly and maintained: a result of careful, imaginative production.
Finally, Get Birding is back for a new series, kicking things off with new presenter Kwesia, aka City Girl in Nature. Episode one focused on birds in the city and featured David “the Urban Birder” Lindo: “For me, the GOAT of birding,” said Kwesia, excitedly. (You may think cities aren’t the best places to spot anything feathery, other than pigeons, but Lindo disagrees. A thrush from Siberia has only been spotted once in Britain and that was in Chingford, east London.)
This is a sweet programme and, for a small show, gets some top guests. Last week, actor Alison Steadman and writer Jonathan Franzen – separately – stomped around with Kwesia, reciting a Keats poem about a nightingale (Steadman) and expressing a “latent sympathy for animals” (Franzen), who recalled crying out with joy on seeing a great hornbill. Steadman, particularly, is delightful, especially about blackbirds. Now that the blue bird of Twitter has gone rogue, perhaps going out searching for real-life birdies could give us all some respite from the ever-noisy virtual world.
