best for STRAIGHT TALK
Mum Liz Moseley scrolls through the internet fads and obsessions of 2024 from her sofa, and asks what on earth these people are doing… ,
Even seasoned trend spotters like me get blindsided once in a while. And this month, I’ve been nothing short of flabbergasted. You see, I’ve happened across a number of podcasts that I actually like. I know! Never saw that that coming.
The podcast app is the school fair Lucky Dip for the 21st century. You dive in headfirst to the audio equivalent of a wheelie bin full of sawdust, scrabbling around in the dark – hoping to find toy treasure but inevitably coming out with a plastic turd.
For years, there have only been two categories of podcast. The first one, true crime, is self-explanatory. The second I like to call “men talking”. The biggest pod on earth falls into the latter category, hosted by an American chap called Joe Rogan who describes himself on Instagram as a “psychedelic adventurer” and can bore on for three solid hours about “current events, comedy, politics, philosophy, science, martial arts, and hobbies”.
He must be doing something right because ol’ Joe Ro has a whopping 14.5 million followers on Spotify, and millions more on YouTube.
Here in Blighty, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart have become the Simon & Garfunkel of political punditry. Their pod The Rest is Politics (“TRIP”) has been top of the pods for so long, they now sell out The Royal Albert Hall. Think I’d rather see Take That, but each to their own…
How fabulously surprising that over the last few months a much jollier “women talking” category is gathering pace inside the giant podcast bin. Miss Me on BBC Sounds is a weekly chinwag between noughties nepobaby Lily Allen and Andi Oliver’s daughter, Miquita Oliver. Their foul-mouthed, wincingly honest, disarmingly unpe
