49 best podcasts of 2023 – podcast reviews

The summer’s Ashes series has caught the public’s imagination like few cricketing contests of recent years. As a result, “Test Match Special” is “piling on the runs”, said Patricia Nicol in The Sunday Times – notching up record audiences on BBC Sounds. In podcast world, Alison Mitchell, TMS’s first female commentator, is also the “superbly assured host” of “Stumped”, a weekly survey of the international game from the BBC World Service.

How about this for an unusual career change? In the 1990s, said Fiona Sturges in the Financial Times, Rob Moore was a TV producer working on Chris Morris’s series Brass Eye, a slick media satire that pranked credulous politicians and celebrities. But he felt he’d hit a wall. “I basically know how to wire up a room and make something stupid happen in the middle of it, and that is a non-transferable skill,” he explains in “Into the Dirt”.

But he was wrong: his skills were highly attractive to the corporate espionage sector, and this Tortoise podcast explores his work in it. At first, you think the podcast is going to be about “skulduggery in the asbestos industry”. But it’s “bigger and more compelling” than that. “It is about truth, perception and the stories people tell themselves to justify their actions.”

With summer holidays beckoning, here are two of the most bingeable podcasts of the year so far, said The Guardian. Anyone who became addicted to Jamie Bartlett’s hit “The Missing Cryptoqueen” will race through “Believe in Magic”. This “multi-layered mystery” unpicks the story of Megan Bhari, a teenager who, inspired by her own cancer diagnosis, launched a charity in conjunction with her mother that granted wishes for desperately ill children. It’s a murky, complex and ultimately tragic tale.

With the honourable exception of “The Skewer”, the late-night hit that has just returned for a new run, I have often “despaired” at the toothlessness of BBC radio comedy, said Patricia Nicol in The Sunday Times. “Call Jonathan Pie”, however, is a welcome step up in quality. Indeed, to my ears it’s the “most consistent, compelling satire and sitcom to have been aired by the BBC this decade”. 

The creation of actor Tom Walker, Jonathan Pie is a “choleric” political hack who “rants blisteringly off-camera” before delivering “anodyne, equivocating” pieces on screen. He has already developed an online following owing to clips posted on social media. The set-up for this ten-part BBC Sounds series is that Pie has been parachuted in as a late-night radio phone-in host – which enables him to range freely over a variety of contemporary talking points. “Sharply observed and close to the knuckle (especially about the BBC), it is a spoof that speaks truth to power.”

For an intellectually bracing take on the world’s problems, “serious-minded listeners” should not miss “Martin Wolf on saving democratic capitalism”, said James Marriott in The Times. To non-economists, Wolf’s writing in the Financial Times can seem a bit dry – but he proves a “charismatic talker”.

In the opening episode, he surveys the crises of capitalist democracies across the world, focusing on how wealth inequalities fostered by unchecked markets can destabilise governments. In search of a resolution, he talks to Hillary Clinton, the sociologist Larry Diamond and the journalist Anne Applebaum, conversations that are “enlivened by Wolf’s honest pessimism”. His family’s history, as refugees from Nazi Germany, is a reminder to him that “there is no bottom to which politics can go if they get sufficiently demented”. This is “superb broadcasting”.

The hottest of hot-button issues right now is the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), said Emma Dibdin in The New York Times. The NYT’s own series “Hard Fork”, in which reporter Kevin Roose reflects on his memorably disconcerting Valentine’s Day encounter with a rogue chatbot, is one of several tech podcasts covering the subject. 

Others worth seeking out include “Radiotopia Presents: Bot Love”, which also focuses on human relationships with AI companions; and “In Machines We Trust”, from the MIT Technology Review, a weekly examination of how modern life is being transformed by AI. In addition, the long established “Tech Won’t Save Us” podcast has been dominated by AI topics of late. “For anyone alarmed by all of the widespread predictions about AI swallowing whole entire job sectors, the show’s measured coverage might prove reassuring.”

If “Filthy Ritual” were a work of fiction, you’d “think it too far-fetched”, said Fiona Sturges in the FT. This riveting new series tells the astonishing story of Juliette D’Souza, who in 2014 was jailed for conning “well-to-do Londoners” out of hundreds of thousands of pounds. D’Souza had gained the confidence of her victims by “telling them – and stay with me here – that she was a shaman who had a special connection to a source of power deep in the Amazon rainforest”. 

The series delves into themes of class, wealth and coercion – and thanks to the clever storytelling of hosts Suruthi Bala and Hannah Maguire (the duo behind the hit true-crime podcast “RedHanded”), it is “wonderfully addictive”. Wryly funny, yet underpinned by tragedy, this is, “by some distance, the best podcast I’ve heard this year”.

“Drama is the hardest, most labour intensive audio to get right,” said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer, but Fun Kids (the children’s radio station that also hosts The Week Junior podcast) consistently nails it. Its latest success, “Badger and the Blitz”, is an “engaging and slickly produced” podcast set in the first few weeks of the Second World War, when hundreds of thousands of household pets were put down over fears of impending food shortages. (It didn’t help that many owners mistakenly believed that the government had ordered a cull.) The story centres on 11-year-old Jack, who runs away with his dog Badger, rather than see her put to sleep. Devon Francis is “great” as Jack, and the “always fab” Kerry Godliman narrates.

The TV presenter Rylan Clark, he of the sparkling white “gnashers” and glowing tan, started out as an “overwrought comedy contestant” on “The X Factor”, said Patricia Nicol in The Sunday Times. A decade on, he’s in demand on TV and radio – a “mononym star”, billed simply as Rylan. As someone who finds this “stratospheric” rise a touch perplexing, I approached “Rylan: How to Be a Man”, in which he talks to 10 high-profile people about their notions of manliness, with a degree of cynicism. But it’s a belter: a thoughtful, and at times moving and inspiring, podcast about masculinity. 

Guests include boxer Amir Khan, comedian Phil Wang, the “popinjay interiors guru” Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, and Jake Daniels, the UK’s only openly gay male professional footballer. Clark has a gift for putting them at ease, and “then – often half-joking – asking probing questions that elicit candid answers”. Teenagers might find some of it embarrassing to listen to with a parent, but many might be “grateful to be steered towards it”.

“Promenade”, an “elegantly produced” podcast about memories, and the role they play in shaping us, is back for a welcome second season, said Fiona Sturges in the FT. Curated by Andy Gaffney, the show offers “beguiling” self-portraits in which individuals “reflect on the sounds, sights and smells that transport them to different times”. 

We meet, for example, Peter Pallai, a Hungarian Jew, who as a boy was kept hidden by “courageous gentiles” and survived the Holocaust, unlike many members of his family. Pallai describes hearing Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” being played through a window of his apartment building at the end of the War. “I had never heard anything that beautiful before. It gave me a powerful feeling of peace having broken out. There would be no more killing, no more danger, no more hiding.” 

Ranging widely across the world, from Australia to Jamaica to Ireland, the “episodes are short – between three and 15 minutes – but rich in detail and atmosphere”.