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.

Platforms

Apple Podcasts: New Shows

Bottoms Up! With With Alan Carr and Lee Peart (Listen)

Behind the Business (Ind.)

Emer & Esher’s Sunday Roast (Ind.)

Locarno Meets (Locarno Film Festival)

How to Win the World Cup (talkSPORT)

Spotify: New & 🔥

Man Like You (Ind.)

Game's Gone: The Steve Bracknall Podcast (BBC Radio 5 Live)

How to Rebuild Britain: Politics Joe (JOE Media)

Lines of Enquiry (GoLoud)

Cheat Sheet with Ridge & Frost (Sky News)

Amazon Music: Best Podcasts of the Week

Joe Marler Will See You Now (Folding Pocket)

Bottoms Up! With With Alan Carr and Lee Peart (Listen)

Routes (LNER)

Paranormia (Always True Crime)

True Crime Catch Up (Always True Crime)

Pocket Casts: Featured

Once We Were Spacemen (Ind.)

In the Dark (The New Yorker)

Till Death Do Us Blart (Ind.)

Adrift (Apple Original)
Galaxy Brain (The Atlantic) 

Reviews

Miranda Sawyer in the Observer

• Katherine Ryan’s Christmas Intervention (Audible) - “Ryan is, of course, a delightful broadcaster: fluent, self-aware, snarky without being nasty – and really funny.” 
• Joe Marler Will See You Now (Folding Pocket) - “Marler, a breakout star of The Celebrity Traitors – the only faithful in the show who had a clue what was going on – is lovely, charming and clever. I’ve also no doubt that, as a former rugby union player, he’s good with a ball. Generally, he’s fab – but he’s not a podcast host. His responses to his guests are too slow, his jokes drawn out.”
• Bottoms Up! With With Alan Carr and Lee Peart (Listen) - “There are a lot of camp jokes – “I’m getting wood!” shouts Carr during a tasting – but, among the hilarity, I found myself learning quite a bit too.”

Patricia Nicol in the Sunday Times

• Katherine Ryan’s Christmas Intervention (Audible) - “This is an entertaining listen. Family is the most amusingly relatable of the chapters, Gifts has some funny toy-building anecdotage, and I savoured Bobby’s ham enthusiasm. Joy has touchy-feely warmth.”
• Charles Dickens: Ghost Stories (Noiser) - “These follow on from the success the producer Noiser has had with its Hugh Bonneville readings of the Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, and its more recent launch of Julie Andrews narrating Jane Austen Stories, starting with Pride and Prejudice. If you like those, or the sound-effect heavy styling of a Noiser production (Titanic: Ship of Dreams has been a monster)” 

Robert Colls in the New Statesman

• The Rest is History (Goalhanger) - "The Rest is History tells you stuff – loads of stuff, the sort of stuff I don’t remember being told by anybody else. I don’t know how long they can keep it up, but these guys are the history publishing phenomenon of my lifetime."

Gerard O’Donovan in the Daily Telegraph

• Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4)
• Wright At Home (Formidable)
• Anatomy of a Cancellation (BBC Radio 4)
• 1440 Explores (1440 Media)

Listings

Clair Woodward in the Sunday Times

• Version History (VOX)
• PantoSplaining (Ind.)
• History’s Toughest Heroes (BBC Radio 4)
• Sound Heap (Ind.)
• Chameleon (Campside Media)
• No Man’s an Island (Men’s Therapy Hub)
• The Moment with Miles Jupp (Carousel Studios)
• Betwixt the Sheets (History Hit)

The Guardian’s Best Podcasts of the Week

• The Rest is History: Beatles Special (Goalhanger) - pick of the week
• The Guilty Feminist: Road to Gilead (Ind.)
• Really?? The Doors? (Talkhouse)
• The Switch: Living Planet (Deutsche Welle’s)
• Paranormia (Always True Crime)

The Guardian Weekly magazine’s Podcast of the Week

• Hope on Repeat (UK for UNHCR)

In the Saturday Guardian magazine

• The Modern Art Notes Podcast (Ind.)

And in the Guardian’s Guide newsletter

• The Bomb (BBC World Service)

In the Radio Times

• Joe Marler Will See You Now (Folding Pocket) - pick of the week
• Anatomy of a Cancellation (BBC Radio 4)
• Cheat Sheet with Ridge & Frost (Sky News)
• Have You Frozen Your Eggs Yet? (Ind.)
• Money Week Talks (Future Publishing)
• The Whale, Secrets of a Stranding (BBC Radio Cornwall) 

• Charles Dickens: Ghost Stories (Noiser)
• That’s Not How It Went Down (Ind.)
• Katherine Ryan’s Christmas Intervention (Audible)
• The Calm Christmas Podcast (Ind.)
• The Uncanny Christmas Casebook (BBC Radio 4)

Plus Anna Jones speaks to David Suchet about his new podcast Charles Dickens Ghost Stories.

In i Weekend

• Game's Gone: The Steve Bracknall Podcast (BBC Radio 5 Live) ★★★★★
• Adrift (Apple Original) ★★★★⯨ 
• Only If You Get Caught (Radiotopia) ★★★★★

Plus Anna Bonet speaks to David Suchet about his new podcast Charles Dickens Ghost Stories.

Heat’s Top of the Pods

• The Guilty Feminist (Ind.) ★★★★☆
• Jane Austen’s Paper Trail (The Conversation) ★★★★☆

Woman Magazine’s Listen Up section

• Lousy Advice (Ind.)
• The Teen Commandments (Ind.)

Scott Bryan in Great British Podcasts

• Bottoms Up! With With Alan Carr and Lee Peart (Listen)
• Toast (BBC Radio 4)
• The View From Here (Ind.)
• Aftershock: The War on Terror (London Review of Books)