Looking for podcasts that are both like and unlike The Truth
July 14, 2016 12:17 PM   Subscribe

Looking for podcast recommendations. Using The Truth as a jumping off point, here are my special snowflake desires:

Stuff that I like from The Truth
- Fictional
- Short (20 minutes or so is ideal).
- Stand-alone, non-serialized stories
- Atmospheric use of sound other than voice (music, sfx, etc.)

Stuff that I rather not have from the Truth
- I'd prefer it if the stories were not horror/creepypasta/twilight-zoney stuff.
- I'd prefer it if the stories had a more-scripted, less-improvisational feel.

Older/not currently updating material is fine. Thank you!
posted by HeroZero to Media & Arts (5 answers total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
Selected Shorts? they normally do a couple of stories per episode that may be thematically linked but not otherwise. No atmospheric sound, but some fantastic readers reading some fantastic stories.
posted by janey47 at 1:38 PM on July 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: BBC Radio 4 has the Drama of the Week for download. The two current ones (they're available for 14 days at a time) are around 45 minutes each, but sometimes they're shorter.

RTE (Radio Ireland) has Drama on One, similar to above.

ABC (Australia) has Radiotonic, which is a mix of short non-fiction and fiction radio pieces--you'll need to sort through the archives to find what you're looking for.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 3:50 PM on July 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


Best answer: X Minus One and Dimension X are two 1950s sci-fi radio series featuring stand-alone SF material based mainly on short stories. They occasionally enter the Twilight Zone genre, but mainly because TZ is rooted in the same SF tradition. These are scripted radio dramas, with multiple castmembers and sound effects, music, etc.

Escape Pod is a podcast that exceeds your length requirement most of the time, but it's basically an audio publication of SF Short stories. It has spinoff podcasts: Pseudopod (Horror) and PodCastle (Fantasy.) Mostly just readings of the stories. Along the same (SF) lines, there's StarshipSofa.
posted by Sunburnt at 10:11 PM on July 14, 2016


Response by poster: I should clarify: I'm looking for radio plays rather than stories read aloud, so the BBC radio dramas and X Minus One are good fits. Thanks all!
posted by HeroZero at 5:30 AM on July 15, 2016


BBC Radio 4 has the iPlayer for current/very recent stuff, but be sure to also poke around BBC Radio 4 Extra (formerly "BBC7"), which has always(?) been an internet-only station which recycles Radio 4 content; a good mix of old and new-ish. They'll play Radio4 dramas from years ago, but that'll be new to you. Same shows, probably, as mentioned above.

LA Theater Works does weekly 2-hour radio dramas that air on public radio (through the PRX network). Great quality and brilliant casts. Apparently it can be consumed in podcast form, each as 2x 1-hour parts, through SoundCloud, but I've never done the work to figure out how, so maybe it's easy, maybe it's complicated.
posted by Sunburnt at 12:30 PM on July 15, 2016


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