Music, Money & Mayhem (Novel/BBC Sounds) - “It might have been nice if the series acknowledged the large debt it owes to Eamonn Forde’s great book The Final Days of EMI: Selling the Pig. If you want the full gory story, I’d start there.”

Fiona Sturges in the FT

Coining It (Global) - “A fantastically gripping new podcast detailing one of the biggest cases of cryptocurrency fraud in Britain. Despite the eye-watering sums of money involved — the loss to the Australian crypto site was £24.5mn — this isn’t the tale of a sophisticated scammer preying on innocents; let’s face it, we’ve had enough of those. It’s about a lonely chancer who, down on his luck for decades, became an overnight millionaire and couldn’t wait to share the spoils.”

Patricia Nicol in the Sunday Times

Pride and Prejudice (Audible) - “I lingered over walks and household tasks to carry on listening. Its central pairing has a simmering, slow-burn chemistry. A honey-toned Marisa Abela (Industry, Back to Black) enchants as our sparky heroine. But it is the initially forbidding, gravel-voiced Harris Dickinson (Blitz, Babygirl) as Mr Darcy who delivers the swoons.”
Jane Austen Stories (Noiser) - “Unfortunately Andrews’s delivery is sometimes wavering and her diction sibilant. Her raspy reading provides gentle entertainment but lacks the verve, vivid characterisation and coloratura of pre-existing narrations from Rosamund Pike (Audible), Juliet Stevenson (Naxos) and Lindsay Duncan (Penguin Classics).”
Becoming Meg Dashwood (Audible) - “The voice acting here… is assuredly convincing. More so than the overwrought, too-crammed drama’s plot, which too often seems a tick-box exercise in fashionable historical research, rather than anything much to do with Austen.”

James Marriott in the Times

Heavyweight (Pushkin) - “Virtually every other podcast in the world seems determined to hammer the world into a series of marketable pre-set formulae: beautiful woman is brutally murdered, good-looking boyfriend is a scam artist, gullible young man is lured into a cult. Heavyweight takes the world as it comes in all its weird twists, tragic contingencies and unexpected redemptions.” ★★★★★

Lucy White in the Irish Independent

Lives Less Ordinary (BBC World Service) - “Standalone episodes of around 45 minutes spotlighting incredible personal stories from around the world, variously calling upon patience, endurance and hope.”
The Romesh Ranganathan Show (Listen) - “One of the more superior chat shows.”
Saving the City (ind.) - “Analyses the present state of, and future visions for, Dublin by chatting with those on the ground about social cohesion and gentrification, the night-time economy, how considered design can improve quality of life, and what we learned from the Dublin riot in 2023.”