What’s that faint music coming through your earbuds? Is it the world’s smallest violin? These are hard times for podcasters. The lucrative distribution deals are over. Paltry advertising money is split between thousands of shows. Since the BBC and The Rest Is monoliths take a big chunk of the market between them, independent podcasts will increasingly need subscriber funding. Podcasts can’t really merge or consolidate, and many will not survive. At no time since I presented the Guardian’s daily pod in 2006 can I remember more gloom in the industry.
But leaner times could make for better podcasts. Listeners may tire of the same old voices. More women are listening to podcasts, and they want to hear themselves on them. Less cheerfully, I suspect that 2025 will be the year that the populist right makes a real push in the UK podcast market. Elon Musk needs to find somewhere to spend his money.
Political Currency (Persephonica) is giving another big beast the chance to tell his story on December 30, when David Cameron shares memories of his first year as PM. You may learn more from Naomi Alderman’s Human Intelligence (BBC Sounds) on January 6, telling the story of how 25 great thinkers came up with their ideas.
And a new pod from historian Alex von Tunzelmann and Nathaniel Tapley (the head writer on Netflix’s Bad Dinosaurs) looks fun. Board of History explains how board games and history interact.
For a while now, the Imperial War Museum has been my favourite place to visit in London. The third series of Conflict of Interest starts on January 3 and has some intriguing guests (Helen Lewis, Rachel Parris, Geoff Norcott, Carl Miller).
On BBC Sounds, Extreme: Peak Danger (January 20), tells the story of 30 climbers who tried to climb K2 in 2008 and didn’t all return. True crime fans have series two of The Con, and Intrigue: Word of God looks at a bizarre attempt to buy up thousands of religious artefacts and make America the centre of Christianity. A new series of Traitors has just begun on the BBC, and once you’re hooked, Ed Gamble is presenting Traitors: Uncloaked.
I’m intrigued by Fieldwork, an independent sitcom about four ecologists stuck in a field station in Yorkshire by Suw Charman-Anderson.
Scotland has been neglected by the London-centric pod world and the BBC will attempt to remedy that with Scotcast, presented four times a week by Martin Geissler.
Many readers will want to listen to European pods. There’s a Substack newsletter for that, called Eurowaves. Radio station apps are a good place to start: I alternate between RTL.fr to practise my French and Onda Cero for Spanish (on half speed). If you just want to improve your body rather than your mind and don’t object to liberal use of the word “wellness”, the first episode of Self-Conscious with Chrissy Teigen is on January 9 (Audible). The Americans do this kind of thing far better than we do.
Ros Taylor presents the Oh God, What Now? and The Bunker podcasts, and will launch a fourth series of the postwar history pod Jam Tomorrow in 2025
