40 channels on a radio tuned to static

June 22, 2009 4:11 AM

Looking for interesting podcast recommendations from outwith iTunes - comedy, books, current affairs and anything else to satisfy an autodidact who's curious about everything.

I'm finding that all the crafting I'm doing right now is eating into my reading time - I can't listen to speech on headphones whilst reading on the tube, but it's good to have something to amuse me whilst working with my hands. Currently I like The Moth (short stories from spoken word nights), Kermode and Mayo's film reviews (which kept me sane during a 1hr wait for a bus t'other week with their review of Terminator: Salvation Army) and Collings and Herrin (even if there's occasionally a bit too much bumming talk for my tastes). I need something amusing, or literary, or something that will teach me something. There's not that much on iTunes unless you like sport, video games or Twilight. I know I could go and spend the Selfridges voucher I got for my birthday on a DAB plug-in for the iPod, but discovering something new would be more fun. Any suggestions?

posted by mippy to society & culture (21 comments total)

More: I like snarky things like Glossed Over and Go Fug Yourself, but am not from the US so nothing that doesn't travel. I could be classed as a geek by some, but I don't really do sci-fi.
posted by mippy at 4:14 AM on June 22

It's not amusing (most of the time) but it's often literary and will certainly teach you a lot: BBC Radio 4's 'In Our Time' is mandatory listening if you're at all interested in history or philosophy (podcast feed). Sadly the BBC only keeps each episode available for download for a week, but if you look around the internet you'll be able to find years worth of archives. In a similar vein I also recommend The History of Rome, which I originally found via MeFi: there's some other historical podcasts recommended in that thread.
posted by Electric Dragon at 4:46 AM on June 22

For laughs I like Answer Me This.
For serious talk Mark Thomas is often good.
posted by devnull at 5:02 AM on June 22

Widely Ranging Interests
posted by Xurando at 6:13 AM on June 22

I am something of a podcast obsessive, so here are a few that I listen to on a regular basis. I heartily disagree with your assessment that there is nothing on iTunes but "sport, video games or Twilight" -- you're just not looking in the right places. All of the podcasts listed below may be downloaded from iTunes. Have fun!

The Bugle: current events from British comedians John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman.
Stuff You Missed in History Class.
Stuff You Should Know.
The Thomas Jefferson Hour: obviously US history-centric, but engaging and informative.
The Splendid Table: recipes, tips, and food history and culture.
BBC History Magazine podcast.
The New Yorker Out Loud: discusses a recent article from the magazine every week.
Studio 360: Kurt Andersen explores US pop culture and the arts.
Radiolab: a creative take on science, philosophy and the human experience.
Car Talk: two brothers diagnose listeners' car questions and badger one another -- a classic.
The Washington Post Book World podcast.
posted by the littlest brussels sprout at 6:15 AM on June 22 [1 favorite]

The Itunes podcast directory is so vast that it can be difficult to find things. (And do you really have the time to sample 10000 odd podcasts?) Seconding "In Our Time". Also:

More: I like snarky things like Glossed Over and Go Fug Yourself, but am not from the US so nothing that doesn't travel. I could be classed as a geek by some, but I don't really do sci-fi.

The Flophouse is a few guys discussing bad movies (from "bad bad" to "good bad"). Some episodes are better than others, but it has a good snarky sense of humour.

On the more serious side, Big Ideas is an eclectic mix of experts talking about their special topic. Again, some episodes are better than other (it's basically a taped lecture) but there's such a back catalog you can always jump to the next one.

The Cato Institute talks are - naturally - all about important, complicated issues in the economy and politics, in which the solution is always - naturally - less regulation and government interference. But take it with a grain of salt and there's a lot of interesting stuff there.
posted by outlier at 6:58 AM on June 22

I like The Dinner Party Download, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, and second the recommendation for Studio 360 and Radiolab. Also, any of the New Yorker podcasts and PRI's Selected Shorts.
posted by Felicity Rilke at 7:14 AM on June 22

I'll take a look at The Flophouse, though not a fan of MST3K (I;d rather slag off old movies myself than have it spoonfed to me).
posted by mippy at 7:17 AM on June 22

Quirks and Quarks. It is a fun, accessible science show from CBC radio.
Also, KFI Sundays for the Jillian Michaels show.
posted by JoannaC at 7:43 AM on June 22

For humor, I listen to Jordan, Jesse, Go, and Never Not Funny. Never Not Funny is a paid podcast, but it is definitely worth the money.
posted by Four-Eyed Girl at 8:00 AM on June 22

The Adam Carolla Podcast is awesome. It might be a little male-centric, but he has comedians and other interesting guests on five times a week.
posted by reenum at 8:33 AM on June 22

Seconding the Adam Carolla podcast
posted by rlef98 at 9:00 AM on June 22

Not mentioned yet is Stop Podcasting Yourself - two comedians from Vancouver + a guest. Makes me laugh. I'd also second Jordan Jesse Go. And Jesse Thorn's other podcast, the Sound of Young America - an interview show which typically features comedians and musicians. Jesse is a surprisingly good interviewer.

I like Doug Henwood's political podcast, Behind The News. America-centric and very lefty. Guest are hit-or-miss, but Doug is always great. He's got a voice made for print, though.
posted by bonecrusher at 9:44 AM on June 22

This is an edited version of what I wrote in this previous thread concerning comedy podcasts.

The Best Show on WFMU. Podcast of the radio show hosted by Tom Scharpling. Nearly 3 hours of greatness each week, featuring the best long-form comedy bits you'll ever hear (see this AV Club writeup). Frequent guests include Paul F Tompkins, Patton Oswalt and Jon Hodgman to give you an idea of the comedic tastes of the show. It's the slowest burn of all the recommendations here as it is a 3 hour radio show with callers and so the energy ebbs and flows depending on how things are going, but it's the most rewarding of everything here. I will give a suggestion that may sound insane, but the best entry of the recent shows might be the 6-hour (!) Best Show from June 2nd. Because he has six hours to fill, Tom brought Paul F. Tompkins and Jon Hodgman into the studio and then demanded that everyone famous that has ever been on the Best Show (or just listens) call in. It's a bunch of funny people trying to make other funny people laugh and, seriously, six hours flies by.

If three hours is a bit daunting, there's also The Best Show Gems, which is a condensed best-of featuring the aforementioned beloved long-form comedy running anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour.

Never Not Funny, as noted passionately above, is worth every penny of the 20 bucks they're charging. The first 20 minutes of every episode is free on iTunes if you want a taste, but I think highly enough of it to say you could spend the 20 bucks sound unheard and you wouldn't be disappointed.

Doug Benson's I Love Movies (new shows iTunes link, old show archive) is the quickest listen of all of these. Doug Benson, who you may know from Super High Me or the now-deceased Best Week Ever, hosts three famous or semi-famous mostly-comedian guests in front of a live audience and at some point in the show get to talking about movies. Funny on- and off-topic.

Jordan Jesse Go! is brought to you in part by Metafilter's own YoungAmerican and is crazy funny. It's a distillation of the great parts of pretty much every other show I'm recommending: it's formatted but somehow also casual, it's funny with or without guests, it's funny on its own and funnier if you've followed along with the show's history, and ou feel like you know the two hosts or, at least, would like to know them. Have a disgusting Minnesota Danny with them, at least. Along with The Best Show, pretty much everyone who listens to it evangelizes its greatness, and with good reason.

You Look Nice Today is the hardest sell as it's the hardest to describe. Three guys pretending that the very funny things that they are saying are not funny at all, are a very serious matter and a potentially lucrative business venture? I guess that's a start.

Comedy and Everything Else is sprawling. It's almost entirely lacking in a format, careens wildly from topic to topic and sometimes the microphones don't work. For an entire show. Without anyone noticing. This might sound unpleasant but the roughness of this one is part of its many charms (except when the microphones don't work. That's just bad.) It might be the most pure fun of any of these because of its lack of adherence to a format.

The 40 Year Old Boy. Stream of conscious monologues from a man who has done some truly (hilariously) awful things in his life. Start from the beginning on this one and work your way forward. It's the equivalent of those youtube videos you watch through a slit in fingers covering your eyes. Except it's worth it.

Adam Carolla is funnier than he has any right to be. He's a blowhard (even though he has guests every show, if the guest can't keep up, it's as if they're not even there), he's a jock (cars and boxing are two of his biggest passions), he's mildly racist (in a slightly off-putting but more "Oh, Grandpa! You and your ways!" way than anything else, and he chooses to believe he isn't) and he's a former co-host of the Man Show. All that being said against him, his show is great. He puts out five episodes a week (!) with guests of varying quality, but it's always interesting and always funny.

Comedy Death Ray Radio is another actual radio show hosted by Scott Aukerman (who you may know as a writer from Mr. Show. He's also producing the Between Two Ferns series with Zach Galifianakis) and features some very funny comedians as guests.

And if you haven't heard The Ricky Gervais show, spend the money. It's one of the funniest things I've ever heard.
posted by unsupervised at 9:56 AM on June 22 [1 favorite]

So I obviously listen to a lot of podcasts, here's my recommendations for the "learning" side of your request. Unless I note otherwise, all of these shows lean toward the entertaining side of learning. Not that you won't learn at the expense of entertainment, to the contrary, you'll learn more because you won't drift away while listening:

Radiolab. This is the best popular science show being produced in any medium today. Honestly. They take one big idea/topic a week (Morality, Time, Sperm [yes, an entire episode about sperm]) and explore it in the most mind-blowing and audibly interesting way possible. It's fascinating, it's frequently funny, it's the opposite of dry, you come out of every episode a different person, seeing the world in a whole new way. Of everything I have recommended and will recommend, this is the one's the best.

Honestly, download Radiolab. It will not disappoint.

Here's the rest:

Backstory with the American History Guys. Three guys, one whose expertise is in the 18th century, one in the 19th, one in the 20th take today's headlines and examine them through the lens of their particular period in history. Think our media has a problem with partisanship? The 18th century has something to say about that.

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Despite its decidedly silly title and sometimes melodramatic tone, it's a very entertaining look at some of the less explored bits of popular and not-so-popular history.

The Ethicist averages about 4 minutes and is an audio version of the New York Times' Ethicist column. Host Randy Cohen is fairly funny and it's a brief trip into the ethical quandaries of people that would think to write to the New York Times about their ethical quandaries.

In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg is dryer than crackers in a desert, but it's in-depth learning at its most interesting. Round table discussion on a single topic (ranging from a thorough examination of the Magna Carta to a discussion about the physics of time) that does not wait for you to catch up.

The Sound of Young America is not quite learning and not quite comedy but somehow both. Interviews with guests chosen for their particular excellence in whatever they do. There will never be an episode where someone the host (Metafilter's own YoungAmerican) is does not care about is being interviewed.

Widely Ranging Interests is a show crafted entirely of tangents. Tangents about things you will likely never hear discussed anywhere else.

Tank Riot! is three guys talking exhaustively on a single topic they love. Frequently funny and always interesting, past topics range from Richard Feynman to Mister Rogers.

Uncensored History of the Blues Don't have any particular love for the Blues? I don't. Yet I love, love, love this podcast. It's history examined through really, really old Blues: episodes range from Lesbian Blues to President Blues to how Prohibition forced people to drink canned Sterno (there's a reason a lot of Blues nicknames start with "Blind"). A really well-curated guide through old blues and the history they're singing about.

A Way With Words is a call-in radio show exploring language and its interesting variations. Is cotton pickin' racist? Wait, you call dust bunnies something else? What do you mean hair of the dog that bit me? And so on and so forth.

Hope I found you some good listens!
posted by unsupervised at 10:39 AM on June 22 [1 favorite]

I like The Naked Scientists a lot.
posted by Sidhedevil at 11:28 AM on June 22

The Creative Screenwriting Magazine Podcast - Q&A Sessions with Screenwriters after screening their work. Every episode is insightful, and some of the more interesting episodes for me are actually about screenwriters trying to defend/explain bad movies (*cough* Eagle Eye *cough*).
posted by theDrizzle at 2:11 PM on June 22

Well, if you have even a passing interest in video games beyond reviews and talking about current news relating to it, you should listen to A Life Well Wasted (mefi post here). I only wish all the podcasts I listen to were as well thought out and professionally produced.
posted by slimepuppy at 2:26 PM on June 22

Slimepuppy, my SO is a gamer and speaks highly of Idle Thumbs. Heard One Life Left isn't bad either.
posted by mippy at 7:29 AM on June 23

OK, so here's what I tried..posted to my LJ.

A lot of podcast recommendations have come my way, and so I've been sampling a few...

The Definitive Word - I downloaded as this promised a discussion on the definitive top five sitcoms, which sounded like good meat for a funny discussion. I love Danny Baker's 606 as although it's a football show, it's not actually about football - it's just blokes ringing in with stupid stories tangentially related to the beautiful game and it's brilliant. However, this one sounded like some friends pretending to record a radio show on a C90 tape in someone's bedroom, and not in a good way. It seemed to be imitating the format that has spread through the 6Music schedules of late, that of a presenter getting his friend in to chat together between records, and that always comes across as a wee bit insular to me, and leaves me cold. Gave up on it when they started namechecking 80s celebrities for cheap yuks. Yawn.

The Flophouse - I don't get to see movies as much as I should, but really, for a podcast ripping on bad films all you really need is to have seen the trailer for Bride Wars thirty-seven times as I have done. They had a guest member of the team for this episode so it may be different when I listen again, but it was funny, engaging, clever-silly and the right side of laddish, and crucially for any snark-based media, showed they had a genuine love for their subject matter and treated excoriating the awful as a public service.

You Look Nice Today - Described on Metafilter as "the hardest sell as it's the hardest to describe. Three guys pretending that the very funny things that they are saying are not funny at all, are a very serious matter and a potentially lucrative business venture? I guess that's a start." I wasn't feeling this at all. The sketch format it had seemed more appealing to me than the unstructured bantering of The Definitive Word, but I wasn't getting it. It reminded me oddly of Then We Came To The End, which didn't totally do it for me either. I suppose the title 'A journal of emotional hygiene' had me expecting something very spoofy, along the lines of Neil Mullarkey's L Vaughan Spencer.

Craftlit - This was billed as a podcast for crafters who like books. Just up my alley, no? But while the presenter was very engaging, the books (taken from an external site) were recorded with poor quality audio and I was really looking for complete stories rather than chunks. I preferred The Bill in half-hour format - same principle to my audio stories.

Yet to try:
Answer Me This!
Jordan Jesse Go
Bad at Sports
Cast On (short stories - aimed at knitters, but looks like the kind of thing I can listen to whilst sewing)
le show
Wait Wait...Don't Tell me
Stuff Mom Never Told You
This American Life
WFMU's The Best Show
WNYC's Radio Lab
A Way With Words
Widely Ranging Interests
The 40 Year Old Boy (though am worried it is an Overdose of Whimsy)
posted by mippy at 5:17 AM on June 24

The Flophouse ... They had a guest member of the team for this episode so it may be different when I listen again

That show was pretty much the way the way the others are. Actually the missing contributor Eliot is a writer for the Daily Show, so he often has some devastating quips to make. The earlier shows are a bit rougher and sometimes they get too drunk or too bummed out by a really bad movie to find their groove, but it's generally a light, entertaining listen.
posted by outlier at 10:20 AM on June 26