Welcome to this week's Recommendation Engine from Podcast Rex, rounding up the week in podcast reviews. Get this in an email each week by signing up to be a supporter of Podcast Rex from £3.99.
Apple Podcasts New & Noteworthy:
- Answers for Claudia
- The Girlfriends
- Apple Music 100 Best Albums
- Bridgerton: The Official Podcast
- Sweat Daily
Spotify New & 🔥
James Marriott in the Times
- To Catch a Scorpion - “Lawrie and Mitchell put in a lot of work: interviewing refugees, visiting migrant camps, tracking smugglers. Private production studios are increasingly reluctant to put money behind expensive, time-consuming investigative shows such as this.”
Fiona Sturges in the FT
- Afghan Star - “It is cleverly produced, weaving the sounds of gunfire, chanting crowds and music to evoke the horrors and joys of Afghanistan’s turbulent recent history.”
Jude Rogers in the Observer
- Death of an Artist - “The bold, engaging presenter tells us the story of Lee Krasner, wife of Jackson Pollock, a huge influence on his work and reputation in life (she taught him techniques and connected him to critics and collectors) and in death (she promoted and protected his legacy, despite his unfaithfulness and alcoholism).”
Patricia Nicol & Clair Woodward in the Sunday Times
- Answers for Claudia - “Tom McDermott’s justification for this six-part series is that ‘what you hear round here, over pints and between friends, is quite different from what you hear on the news. There’s something else too: people are just weird about this case… they talk about it with fear.’”
- Deep Cover: The Nameless Man - “This is a gripping story about tragically intertwining fates that keeps you guessing to the end. Superb.”
- To Catch a Scorpion - “Even if you have already heard the outcome of their risky mission, it is worth listening to this series to fully grasp the scale of these smuggling networks.”
The Guardian’s Hear Here column recommends
- Broomgate: A Curling Scandal - “Comedian and curling geek John Cullen investigates the switch to the ‘super broom’ that caused a furore.”
- This is History Presents… The Iron King - “Hoot of a medieval expert Danièle Cybulskie brings the graphic details on a period of history that saw the king involved in adultery, vicious murders and a battle for succession.”
- The Girlfriends - “[Displays] the same beautiful loyalty to each other and the victim.”
- Tom Dean Medal Machine - “In this second series he continues to speak to people who can inspire him.”
- The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam - “The gripping story of this new series begins in 1995, deep in the Indonesian jungle, where Canadian mining company Bre-X claim to have struck gold.”
Highlights from the Radio Times
- Home Sleuth - “This series lets the people who use their home web connections to chase leads the way police may just have overlooked describe their grand obsessions in their own words.”
- Sold a Story - “I didn’t quite believe it when I heard that children in the United States are not taught how to read.”
- The John Dredge Nothing to Do with Anything Show - “Sounds as if the iconoclasm of Chris Morris has been tempered with the nonsense of Edward Lear.”
Heat’s Top of the Pods
- Shrink the Box ⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Brydon & ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Scott Bryan in Great British Podcasts
- Fur and Loathing - “Despite being one of the largest chemical weapon attacks on American soil in the last fifty years, the poisoning was overlooked and even mocked by the news media because of where it took place.”
- The Self Love Revolution - “At a first glance you might think that this podcast would be full of endless platitudes, but it is actually full to the brim of grounded advice.”
- Shrink the Box - “Actor Ben Bailey Smith and 6 Music broadcaster and trained psychotherapist Nemone Metaxas unpack some of television’s most compelling and complex fictional characters.”
- About the Boys - “Despite it being a wide subject, the series manages to cover a lot of interesting topics: from masculinity and role models, to relationship and consent.”
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