Podcast Corner: Three favourites return for new seasons
George the Poet: Have You Heard George's Podcast? has changed the game for the medium
We’ve written before about this multi-award-winning, acclaimed show, the brainchild of George The Poet. It’s now into its fourth season, 30-plus episodes and is still as striking and unique as ever. Previous seasons have found George talking variously, in verse, about Britain, his newfound fame (he wrote and read a poem at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan), rap music, and racism. With production by BenBrick and featuring the BBC Concert Orchestra, it sounds like nothing else in podcasting. This time, George, newly wedded and father to a young baby, is turning his eye to colonialism, to Africa and the Caribbean and their struggle for independence.“
What happened between the time when my parents were born and the time i was born that led to black life being in the condition that I found it in?” he ponders. In the first couple of episodes, he looks at the rise of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, and the story of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first prime minister. The two parts that comprise the latter’s story features a tour of Congo by Louis Armstrong, effectively used as a front by the CIA. As with everything he does, you’ll be hanging on every word of George’s podcast.
Another idiosyncratic show back for another round, you might have to be in the right frame of mind to listen to the esoteric Jonathan Goldstein and his often crushingly sad stories (hence the title). The new episodes begin with ‘#52 Lenny’, who’s an old friend that Goldstein made radio programmes with when they were young but hasn’t talked with in nine years. It turns out Lenny only has months to live, so Goldstein picks up the phone to talk, and argue. He sounds full of anger, about his mother in particular.
Goldstein, in turn, focuses inward, telling us about things like using a ketamine inhaler to tackle his bouts of depression and offering a raison d’etre of his podcast: “Without the record button pressed down, life is fragmented and fast and nearly impossible to make sense of. Narrating it helps me to shed light, but always in retrospect.”
After wrapping up her ‘bantercast', Doireann and Friends, at the end of August, Garrihy returns for the ninth season of The Laughs of Your Life, with the first couple guests well-known podcasters in their own right, Spencer Matthews (Spencer and Vogue) and PJ and Kevin from I’m Grand Mam, who can do no wrong.
