Recommendation Engine: The reviews are in for Meghan Markle’s entrepreneurship podcast

plus What's Up Docs? and Dying for Sex

5:32 PM GMT+1 on April 10, 2025

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 & Noteworthy

Spotify: New & 🔥

Pocket Casts: Featured

Miranda Sawyer in the Observer

Don’t Cross Kat (Wondery) - “This is a good show, well told and hosted by Chico Felitti. But there have been a few stories like this recently – tales of female wellness groups that turn into sexual exploitation – and, God, I find them depressing. Still, if that’s your bag (and it really is a lot of people’s bag), then this is a solid listen.”
Dying For Sex (Wondery) - “Kochan realises quickly that many of her hang-ups about intimacy can be dispensed with. ‘What’s the worst that he can do, kill me? I’m dying!’ she says.”
Inside Counter Terrorism Policing (Counter Terrorism Policing) - “If you’re not currently busy embarking on a sexual odyssey or falling for wellness guff, then, ladies, this sounds like really interesting work.”

Fiona Sturges in the FT

Crime Next Door: The Golden Toilet Heist (BBC) - “Delivered in bite-sized episodes — around 20 minutes apiece — the series is determinedly jolly in tone: think The Italian Job meets Wondery’s British Scandal series. The producers certainly sound as if they’re having a ball as they throw in layer upon layer of sound: revving engines, cars smashing through gates, sledgehammers hitting metal and, yes, flushing lavatories — all overlaid with a genteel classical soundtrack.”

Patricia Nicol in the Sunday Times

How to Age Up (The Atlantic) - “In the first episode, on longevity, the soft-spoken co-presenters Yasmin Tayag and Natalie Brennan compare the wellness industry to the role religion once had as a central organising purpose. We have eschewed gods but not factionalism, zealots or a thirst for instruction.”
What’s Up Docs? (BBC Radio 4) - “Trust is important, and one of the things I like about the Van Tullekens and them being on the BBC is that this medical advice does not come interspersed with advertisements for protein supplements or expensive biohacking technology. Their shtick is that Xand is more of an everyman and his naturally teasing interplay with Chris, along with the concision of these episodes (many medical podcasts seem to last longer than open-heart surgery), make this an enjoyable, enlightening show.”

James Marriott in the Times

Confessions of a Female Founder (Lemonada) - “Given that Meghan only launched her first products last Wednesday, it will strike some listeners as rather early in her entrepreneurial career for her to start dispensing business advice. But she gives the impression of having never been much troubled by self-doubt.”

★☆☆☆☆

Crime Next Door: The Golden Toilet Heist (BBC) - “There is something irreducibly British about the case of the missing golden toilet — like Agatha Christie or Richard Osman via Salvador Dalí. The story is so absurd that it has the pleasing effect of making everyone involved sound rather mad. Doubtless some normal people were tangentially associated with the heist, but it is hard for any of the witnesses or security guards to discuss the theft of a golden toilet without coming off as at least mildly eccentric.”

★★★★☆

Kate Hassett in Marie Claire

Confessions of a Female Founder (Lemonada) - “In fact, during the 45-minute episode, the chemistry between Herd and Markle provided a perfectly enjoyable environment for exactly what the podcast’s synopsis claimed to offer.”

Gwilym Mumford in the Guardian’s Guide newsletter

The History Podcast: Invisible Hands (BBC Radio 4) - “David Dimbleby, still acute as ever at 86, brings his stentorian tones to podcasting with this limited series, which looks at how the free market system took over Britain and the world.”

Chris Bennion in the Daily Telegraph

Confessions of a Female Founder (Lemonada) - “The frustrating thing is that Whitney Wolfe Herd, who is just 35, presumably does have wisdom to impart, having been part of the team that created Tinder before she created Bumble. Imagine the drive, the talent, the decisions and sheer bloody ruthlessness it must take to achieve what she has. We get none of it. In this perfumed echo chamber, the best we get is a sense that Wolfe Herd didn’t love school and that she wishes she hadn’t worked so hard.”

Cleo Watson in the Daily Telegraph

Dying For Sex (Wondery) - “After two days immersed in Kochan’s story I feel like a human raisin: dehydrated from crying and laughing. It’s so desperately sad to keep realising that this vividly funny and thoughtful person died in 2019.”

Sarah Carson in the i Paper

Confessions of a Female Founder (Lemonada) - “As the conversation concludes, the women agree that the only thing separating it from one of their usual lunches is a ‘glass of rosé’. Which confirms that the intention – the ‘why of it all’ – was not to deliver real insight into female entrepreneurs but to yet again offer a glimpse at what it’s like to be gal pals with Meghan Markle.”

Lucy White in the Irish Independent

Pack Your Bags (Tui/Chalk and Blade) - “Celebrities are well travelled which makes them more expert than most (Rob Beckett proudly lets slip that he has a degree in tourism management) when it comes to hot picks, packing hacks and autobiographical vignettes that offer glimpses into their past and present, and indeed into their emotional baggage as they each ponder their childhood holidays and memorable trips.”
A Girl’s Guide to Travelling Alone (ind.) - “The series concluded in 2022 after four years, but there’s plenty of evergreen content here.”
Where Are You Going? (Loftus) - “Catherine Carr asks strangers Where Are You Going? for bite-sized insights into their daily journeys, from an attorney turned photographer in Brooklyn who has popped out to buy doughnuts, to the group of Brits travelling to Malaga to watch the Cheltenham Festival.”