Talking points
The podcast explosion has reached an impressive new milestone with the announcement that podcasts (and radio shows) will now be Pulitzer-eligible. From 2020, the most prestigious award for US journalism will add a category “for a distinguished example of audio journalism that serves the public interest, characterized by revelatory reporting and illuminating storytelling”. Game on, Ira Glass!
Could a Netflix-style model be the future of podcasting? City AM reports that a new survey from the consultancy 4DC found that just under 60% of pod fans would be willing to pay around £50 a year for access to premium audio shows and no ads. Luminary, home to big names including Trevor Noah and Lena Dunham, and the Amazon-owned Audible are among the pod providers currently offering subscription-based services.
Picks of the week
Max & Ivan: Fugitives
Comic duo Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez play two developers who stumble across a batch of forbidden data in this satirical thriller. They start out at a tech company where there is an air of ambition, but when they search their colleague’s computer for porn they end up accessing information that puts them in danger. Which is how they came to be locked in a metal shipping container. There are wise observations and laughs along the way, with a cracking cast including Adam Buxton and Gemma Whelan. Hannah Verdier
Reality Check
Anna, Yewande and Amber didn’t find romance in the Love Island 2019 villa but they did find friendship, looking out for each other and drying one another’s tears in the cut-throat, pleather-clad reality contest. Now, with another series of the ITV2 behemoth on the way for winter, the trio make a play to extend their fame with a new podcast. Reality Check sees them play agony aunts to listeners’ issues, from sexuality to whether girls and guys can really just be mates. On the strength of their first episode, their advice proves far better than the 2019 Island catchphrase of “it is what it is.”
Hannah J Davies
Guardian pick: Books podcast
Westboro Baptist Church have been indelibly burned into the memory of most thanks to their appearance in various Louis Theroux documentaries and their infamously offensive protests. Holding up signs with henious slogans such as “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”, members of the Kansas-based church often target funerals, businesses and homes. In this week’s Books podcast, Sian Cain speaks with a former member of the WBC, Megan Phelps-Roper, about her upbringing in her family’s church (her grandfather was founder Fred Phelps) and her eventual escape from it.
Producer pick: The Ballad of Billy Balls
Chosen by David Waters
Back in 1977, a model named Rebecca met a punk rocker named Billy among the sleaze and squalor of New York City’s Lower East Side. Their worlds became passionately entwined until Billy was brutally murdered, possibly by the police. Enter the makers of this brilliant true crime podcast. It is, for the Crimetown team, “a tragedy that defined lives and a mystery that endures” – and one they hope to solve.
Its appeal doesn’t come from the whodunnit aspect – though that is quite fun. Rather, it’s from the way the series effortlessly combines the more trashy elements of the genre, with the immersive techniques of the best audio documentaries, pulling you into locations and characters as twists and turns entrance you and drive the narrative along.
There is one particular two-minute monologue eight minutes into the first episode, where Rebecca walks you through the New York she arrived in aged 16 – “in the thickest, stickiest, sweatiest part of the summer. In the height of Hell’s Kitchen. You can hear all the music coming out and it’s plumped and voluptuous by the wet humidity in the air.” As a producer it’s the kind of interview tape you’d kill for; as a listener it is dynamite.
