The 2022 World Cup is finally upon us and football fans the world over are getting stricken with that quadrennial infection, World Cup fever. With a myriad of media platforms available to watch, hear about, talk about and generally obsess over the beautiful game the footy fan is truly spoiled for choice. Over at British Weekly towers, when we’re not watching the games we will be listening to podcasts and three in particular might be worth checking out. As usual the BBC are at the top of their game in coverage, via their World Cup Daily podcast, which typically features about 40 minutes of the latests news, analysis, rumors and more. Regular listeners to the Beeb’s Football Daily podcast will recognize regular hosts Mark Chapman, Kelly Cates, Steve Crossman, Emma Saunders and Darren Fletcher.
Also worth a listening is the Totally Football Show from the Athletic, which to our ears features some of the most insightful and stimulating commentary out there. Regular guests include Rafa Honigstein, Rory Smith, Natalie Gedra, Julian Laurent and Alvaro Romeo, all rightfully renowned journalists who specialize, respectively, in football in Germany, England, Brazil, France and Spain. Best of all the show is hosted with wit and aplomb by James Richardson, who some may remember as the host of Channel 4’s groundbreaking Football Italia back in the 1990s and who more recently was the voice of the Guardian’s Football Weekly before he joined many of the English-speaking world’s best journalists who have decamped to the Athletic stable in recent years. Richardson’s 30-second intros alone are small gems of wit and wonder, and he weaves the disparate voices and elements of each show together into a seamless and addictive whole. Thoroughly recommended.
But if football is not your thing, how about a bit of true crime? The podcast format seems made for this subject, and you are spoilt for choice in the UK’s history, both recent and distant, as the country has always contained a dark underbelly of crime, vice and murder.
Among our favorites are Murder Mile. Written, researched and performed by Michael J Buchanan-Dunne (pictured, right) this weekly gem is a true-crime podcast and audio guided walk of London’s most notorious (and often forgotten) murder cases, features more than 300 mysterious deaths, all set within one square mile of Soho, and featuring vivid descriptions, eye-witness testimony and authentic sounds recorded from the location itself, as well as a website full of photos, videos and maps, so that no matter where you’re listening to this podcast, you’ll feel like you’re actually there.
Formerly a program maker for both BBC and ITV, Michael says: “I’ve always been passionate about people, history and story-telling, and when I began researching Murder Mile Walks, I realized there were too many fascinating murder cases to pack into a two hour tour, many of which had either been forgotten, little was known about, or deserved to be told in full detail, hence the Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast was born. I hope you enjoy listening to them, as much as I enjoy making them”.
Also worth an extended binge-listen is They Walk Among Us, from the husband and wife team of Benjamin and Rosanna Fitton. The podcast started in September 2016, focusing on crime in the UK — delving into the crimes that are close to home, the criminal that sleeps beside you, lives next door, or delivers your newspaper. The podcast has won a British Podcast Award for best true crime podcast and a Lovie Award for best entertainment podcast. The couple wrote the book They Walk Among Us available through Virgin Books.
They Walk Among Us has been praised. The Guardian called the show “a cult hit”, The Financial Times referred to it as “sharply written”, The Evening Standard praised the “expertly understated storytelling”, and the New Statesman labelled it “the mysterious true crime podcast that’ll keep you up at night”.
All the podcasts listed above can be found at iTunes, Podcast Addict, Stitcher, Spotify, Acast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
