Picks of the week
The Moomin Phenomenon
Widely available, all episodes out on Wed
The Moomin philosophy – love, equality and courage – is a way of life for thousands of fans of Tove Jansson’s cartoons. These include Jennifer Saunders, who hosts this podcast that gets lost in the world of Moominvalley. In the first episode, she’s joined by superfan Lily Collins. Then she speaks with Jansson’s biographer Boel Westin, Moomin fabric-maker Rika Kawato and a fan who gets her third Moomin tattoo on air. Hollie Richardson
Dear Daughter
BBC Sounds, episodes weekly from Mon
The BBC World Service podcast, hosted and made by Namulanta Kombo, returns for a second season, in which people give advice for Kombo’s daughter and for daughters everywhere. Sex, self-esteem, skin, even the correct way to go to the toilet – it’s all the stuff we need to know. Nell Frizzell
Seasoned
Widely available, episodes weekly
You can’t eat with your ears, yet. But in Seasoned, Britain’s youngest Michelin-starred chef, Tommy Banks, takes celebrity guests around his restaurant, The Black Swan in Olstead, North Yorkshire. It’s a light, chatty listen brimming with geeky passion for food as they create a recipe centred on a different seasonal ingredient. NF
The Coldest Case in Laramie
Widely available, all episodes out now
In the latest from Serial, investigative reporter Kim Barker revisits the long cold case of Shelli Wiley who was murdered in her apartment in the town of Laramie, Wyoming. It’s a place that Barker describes, in her deadpan delivery, as “uncommonly mean”, where even the wind throws pebbles at you – and it’s the town Barker grew up in herself. NF
Alphabet Boys
Widely available, all episodes out now
American journalist Trevor Aaronson investigates “the alphabet agencies”, from the CIA to the DEA. Are they catching criminals or creating them? The episode on the FBI’s murky attempts to infiltrate racial justice campaigns alone has caused such a political uproar that US senators have waded into the row. NF
There’s a podcast for that
This week, Hannah Verdier picks five of the best podcasts about friendship, from a stereotype-smashing hit to “the millennial Bert and Ernie”
Best Friend Therapy
How to Fail host Elizabeth Day and her best friend, therapist Emma Reed Turrell, offer advice on anxiety, loneliness, arguments and a whole lot more. They cover so much ground in every episode of their podcast, giving some much-needed gravitas to issues around friendship, which aren’t always taken as seriously as relationships. Do people pleasers need to be pleased? How can divorcees look back without saying “I wish I tried harder”? And how do anger, rage and guilt all work together? Day is not afraid to use her own experiences to help listeners who might be feeling the same way.
Restless Natives
A podcast featuring a celebrity and a civilian could be overly fawning, but Line of Duty’s Martin Compston and journalist Gordon Smart’s 15-year friendship ensures there’s no danger of that. The pair show their bromance by lovingly ripping each other to shreds at every opportunity, swapping some solid stories. Whether Smart is talking about getting into a fight with Jay-Z or Compston is recalling the moment he thought he was in with a chance at a Peaky Blinders audition (until he found out Cillian Murphy was also in the running), they speak as if they’re the only ones listening.
The Receipts
Extreme girl talk is always guaranteed with friends Tolly T, Audrey and Milena Sanchez’s long-running podcast that started picking up fans the moment it smashed through the industry’s stereotypical white, pondering, male ceiling. It’s tough love and honesty all the way with these three (pictured above), dishing out their opinions on Prince Harry, dating older men and whether Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are in it for the long haul. And when a listener asks about how to deal with a friend who uses them as a therapist, they don’t hold back about setting those boundaries.
Best Friends
In sharp episodes of under an hour, Why Won’t You Date Me?’s Nicole Byer and former Saturday Night Live cast member Sasheer Zamata dissect the world of adult friendship, using their own relationship as a springboard. Although there are a lot of intimate confessions, they’ve always got an eye on entertainment rather than self-indulgence. Start with their two-parter about their disastrous trip to the Bahamas, told as only two best friends can, between fits of uncontrollable laughter. The tales include being thrown from a jetski, furiously trying to swim home and receiving assistance from a waiter bearing sweets, but nothing of any use.
Ki & Dee: The Podcast
This podcast captures the authentic friendship between songwriters Chiara Hunter and Diana Vickers (a one-time X Factor semi-finalist), better known as Ki & Dee. Occasionally the millennial Bert and Ernie will welcome guests such as My Dad Wrote a Porno’s James Cooper, but these two are at their best when they’re riffing between themselves and writing songs about getting the ick. Their knockabout humour is a delight, but when they stop to reflect on their closeness they reveal a lot about how their friendship blossomed living together in lockdown. Vickers nails it with her description of “an ongoing conversation that never ends”.
Why not try …
Between the Lines, a new podcast from The Athletic exploring how race impacts every level of the NFL.
The second season of NPR’s Pulitzer finalist White Lies, unspooling the story of a group of Cuban detainees who took over a prison in Alabama.
Eurovisioncast, the BBC’s countdown to Eurovision in Liverpool in May.
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