46 best podcasts of 2023 – podcast reviews

With the honourable exception of “The Skewer”, the late-night hit that has just returned for a new run, I have often “despaired” at the toothlessness of BBC radio comedy, said Patricia Nicol in The Sunday Times. “Call Jonathan Pie”, however, is a welcome step up in quality. Indeed, to my ears it’s the “most consistent, compelling satire and sitcom to have been aired by the BBC this decade”. 

The creation of actor Tom Walker, Jonathan Pie is a “choleric” political hack who “rants blisteringly off-camera” before delivering “anodyne, equivocating” pieces on screen. He has already developed an online following owing to clips posted on social media. The set-up for this ten-part BBC Sounds series is that Pie has been parachuted in as a late-night radio phone-in host – which enables him to range freely over a variety of contemporary talking points. “Sharply observed and close to the knuckle (especially about the BBC), it is a spoof that speaks truth to power.”

For an intellectually bracing take on the world’s problems, “serious-minded listeners” should not miss “Martin Wolf on saving democratic capitalism”, said James Marriott in The Times. To non-economists, Wolf’s writing in the Financial Times can seem a bit dry – but he proves a “charismatic talker”.

In the opening episode, he surveys the crises of capitalist democracies across the world, focusing on how wealth inequalities fostered by unchecked markets can destabilise governments. In search of a resolution, he talks to Hillary Clinton, the sociologist Larry Diamond and the journalist Anne Applebaum, conversations that are “enlivened by Wolf’s honest pessimism”. His family’s history, as refugees from Nazi Germany, is a reminder to him that “there is no bottom to which politics can go if they get sufficiently demented”. This is “superb broadcasting”.

The hottest of hot-button issues right now is the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), said Emma Dibdin in The New York Times. The NYT’s own series “Hard Fork”, in which reporter Kevin Roose reflects on his memorably disconcerting Valentine’s Day encounter with a rogue chatbot, is one of several tech podcasts covering the subject. 

Others worth seeking out include “Radiotopia Presents: Bot Love”, which also focuses on human relationships with AI companions; and “In Machines We Trust”, from the MIT Technology Review, a weekly examination of how modern life is being transformed by AI. In addition, the long established “Tech Won’t Save Us” podcast has been dominated by AI topics of late. “For anyone alarmed by all of the widespread predictions about AI swallowing whole entire job sectors, the show’s measured coverage might prove reassuring.”

If “Filthy Ritual” were a work of fiction, you’d “think it too far-fetched”, said Fiona Sturges in the FT. This riveting new series tells the astonishing story of Juliette D’Souza, who in 2014 was jailed for conning “well-to-do Londoners” out of hundreds of thousands of pounds. D’Souza had gained the confidence of her victims by “telling them – and stay with me here – that she was a shaman who had a special connection to a source of power deep in the Amazon rainforest”. 

The series delves into themes of class, wealth and coercion – and thanks to the clever storytelling of hosts Suruthi Bala and Hannah Maguire (the duo behind the hit true-crime podcast “RedHanded”), it is “wonderfully addictive”. Wryly funny, yet underpinned by tragedy, this is, “by some distance, the best podcast I’ve heard this year”.

“Drama is the hardest, most labour intensive audio to get right,” said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer, but Fun Kids (the children’s radio station that also hosts The Week Junior podcast) consistently nails it. Its latest success, “Badger and the Blitz”, is an “engaging and slickly produced” podcast set in the first few weeks of the Second World War, when hundreds of thousands of household pets were put down over fears of impending food shortages. (It didn’t help that many owners mistakenly believed that the government had ordered a cull.) The story centres on 11-year-old Jack, who runs away with his dog Badger, rather than see her put to sleep. Devon Francis is “great” as Jack, and the “always fab” Kerry Godliman narrates.

The TV presenter Rylan Clark, he of the sparkling white “gnashers” and glowing tan, started out as an “overwrought comedy contestant” on “The X Factor”, said Patricia Nicol in The Sunday Times. A decade on, he’s in demand on TV and radio – a “mononym star”, billed simply as Rylan. As someone who finds this “stratospheric” rise a touch perplexing, I approached “Rylan: How to Be a Man”, in which he talks to 10 high-profile people about their notions of manliness, with a degree of cynicism. But it’s a belter: a thoughtful, and at times moving and inspiring, podcast about masculinity. 

Guests include boxer Amir Khan, comedian Phil Wang, the “popinjay interiors guru” Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, and Jake Daniels, the UK’s only openly gay male professional footballer. Clark has a gift for putting them at ease, and “then – often half-joking – asking probing questions that elicit candid answers”. Teenagers might find some of it embarrassing to listen to with a parent, but many might be “grateful to be steered towards it”.

“Promenade”, an “elegantly produced” podcast about memories, and the role they play in shaping us, is back for a welcome second season, said Fiona Sturges in the FT. Curated by Andy Gaffney, the show offers “beguiling” self-portraits in which individuals “reflect on the sounds, sights and smells that transport them to different times”. 

We meet, for example, Peter Pallai, a Hungarian Jew, who as a boy was kept hidden by “courageous gentiles” and survived the Holocaust, unlike many members of his family. Pallai describes hearing Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” being played through a window of his apartment building at the end of the War. “I had never heard anything that beautiful before. It gave me a powerful feeling of peace having broken out. There would be no more killing, no more danger, no more hiding.” 

Ranging widely across the world, from Australia to Jamaica to Ireland, the “episodes are short – between three and 15 minutes – but rich in detail and atmosphere”.

New from BBC Sounds, “Vishal” is “almost too sad, I suspect, for some listeners to contemplate”, said James Marriott in The Times. It is about the case of Vishal Mehrotra, an eight-year-old boy who disappeared near his home in southwest London on the day of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding in the summer of 1981, and whose remains were found months later in woods in West Sussex.

“The juxtaposition of tragedy and celebration is eerie”, and the shockwaves the crime sent through the wider community are conveyed with “startling immediacy”. 

What sets this sensitive podcast apart from the “more garish examples of the true-crime genre” is the involvement of Vishal’s half-brother, Suchin Mehrotra, who is the host of the initial episodes. “If you’re going to do true crime, do it like this.”

In the run-up to the coronation, the BBC broadcast three “brilliant” programmes that are well worth seeking out on BBC Sounds, said Charlotte Runcie in The Daily Telegraph. In the “fascinating” Archive on 4: Charles – the Making of a King, Sarah Montague explored the King’s life through archive recordings and interviews with his friends and contemporaries. Montague struck a “sensitive balance”, taking in the “very human ups and downs of his life” in a way that was “refreshing and illuminating”. 

The King’s Garden was a behind-the-scenes tour of Charles’s beloved gardens at Highgrove, his private home in Gloucestershire, said Charlotte Runcie in The Daily Telegraph. Presenter Zoe Ball led the way “briskly” through the Highgrove gardens, interviewing people who work there and a “few famous friends of the garden and of the King”, including Monty Don and Pam Ayres, who “love to visit”.