The One with the Podcasts
I have a 30 minute each way commute and took to listening to podcasts over radio a while ago.
I have some favourites that I’ve listened to over a long time;
- The Football Ramble
- Skeptics with a K
- Be Reasonable
and more recently
- The Luke and Pete Show
- WrestleMe
- My Dad Wrote a Porno
- Berkhamsted revisited
But I’ve also listened to other great podcasts such as
- Serial (who hasn’t)
- Ricky Gervais
- Missing Richard Simmons
- Someone Knows Something
- Up and Vanished
- S-Town (can’t recommend enough)
and a couple of New Zealand Efforts, Chasing Ghosts; Ben and Olivia, and Chasing Ghosts: The Amber-Lee Cruickshank story, and Gone Fishing.
I’ve just download and am part way though an Australian Series Pheobe’s Fall.
Phoebe Handsjuk was 24. Complex and beautiful. She lived 12 storeys above with her boyfriend Antony Hampel, a son of Melbourne’s legal establishment.
But on that night, Phoebe died the most horrific death.
She had plunged 12 stories, or 40 metres, feet first, down the garbage chute.
She survived the fall. But the garbage compactor at the bottom had virtually severed her right foot. Phoebe bled out in the dark, alone, her jeans around her knees
As with the New Zealand podcasts I’ve found this to be un-fulfilling on a couple of points. The first is the division of protagonists, the very Pro-victim and the poorly portrayed uncooperative bad people. The lack of investigation into the financial aspects and gang connections that might have exited
The second is the casual tossing out of ‘facts’ that are not followed up, or what might be key parts of the background story that are carefully or carelessly omitted, glossed over or avoided.
Take the story of Pheobe, in the real world a depressive, alcoholic drug abuser, who is also a lithe black-belt athlete and expert in kickboxing, attracted to older men. To the the parents and friends; a meek, introverted but lovely person who everyone admired, but had some secrets, and would not under any circumstanced committed suicide.
So, Phoebe, the story set of an unusual death, improbable but not impossible, but the story is one of conjecture and is one-sided supposition that can’t be and won’t be answered.
Podcasts are very much a personal thing, like reading books, and they have widely differing production values, timbre and tones, but the shouldn’t leave you with a tangle of unfinished strings. like a book they deserve a begging, middle and ending point. One of the NZ podcasts seemed to earnestly think that they were somehow going to solve a cold case, not even kidding, they were all in, one shot deal, that there was no follow up or press would indicate that the market place and listeners were not likely to be the ones you wanted to get information from.
So I think where I’m going is that I’m going to keep to the magazine formats, the casually informative, the comedy and not expect to listen to something that brings epiphany or closure.
Oh and I can recommend “Three Body Problem” as a talking book that is a roller coaster of great and not so great science fiction, that introduces some lovely ideas and is well researched and reasonably easy to appreciate and follow, even if in it’s sometimes rambling tale leaves dead end story lines.
Any and all suggestions are always welcome, as well a Music to listen to, everything is worth a listen, what’s the most that can happen?
A life just as ordinary 