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The UK’s most prestigious radio and audio awards took place this week and Rob Burrow has scooped two significant and moving awards.
The former Leeds Rhinos rugby league hero, who now has motor neurone disease, won best new podcast and best new presenter awards at Arias for Seven. It is a BBC Sounds interview series.which is named after his jersey number, in which he, his wife and carer Lyndsay talk to other sports stars, including Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand, Kelly Holmes and Micah Richards, about life’s challenges.
“This is the first time someone like me, who has motor neurone disease and uses a gaze machine to communicate, has had the opportunity to host a podcast,” Burrow said as he collected his trophies. “(This) shows that nothing is impossible.”
“Rob using his voice to do a podcast is probably something that six or 12 months ago we wouldn’t have thought was possible,” Lyndsay added. “So it’s really special to receive this award and continue to raise awareness for people with MND.”
You can see all the winners of the night. here.
Back to the top podcasts I’m looking forward to this week, and my top pick is the first in Wondery’s new true crime anthology series, Happily Never After, which investigates bad romantic love stories gone wrong and the disgusting consequences.
And read on for our roundup of podcasts by the masters of the audio booth, including Jon Ronson, Alice Levine, and Hrishikesh Hirway.
Hollie Richardson
Television editing assistant
Picks of the week
Happily Never After: Dan and Nancy
Wondery+, weekly episodes then widely available starting June 3
Nancy Brophy was a romantic mystery writer married to chef Dan. After he was found dead with gunshot wounds in 2018, Nancy was found guilty of his murder. In this dark and juicy series, host Heidi Thretheway, who was in Nancy’s writing club, now asks: Were the investigating detectives confusing Nancy’s fiction with reality, or had she enacted her novels in life? real? Hollie Richardson
What happened in Alabama?
Widely available, weekly episodes starting Wednesday.
Black journalist Lee Hawkins grew up in a predominantly white Minnesota neighborhood and describes the family “watching our backs on the way home from school.” At night, his father would wake up screaming, tormented by his past in Alabama. Uncovering the lasting impact of slavery and segregation is vital, and Hawkins does so powerfully. Hannah Verdier
Chasing the mansion of Boaz
Audible, all episodes now available
Nobody likes cryptocurrency traders, which is why this story of hard-working scammer Boaz Manor is particularly delightful. Reacher star Serinda Swan chronicles his fall from an eager financial whiz kid to a criminal operating under a false name who was pursued by several people, including a high school enemy and a wronged former colleague. high voltage
Everything I know about myself: Gemma Collins
Widely available, weekly episodes.
From Towie’s glamorous car saleswoman to a stint on I’m A Celebrity, the powerhouse GC (pictured above) knows how to play the fame game. This five-part podcast, returning for a second series, is designed to squeeze every detail out of her life story and Collins delivers it in a way fans will appreciate, tempering the pain with quotability. high voltage
Home Detective
BBC Sounds, weekly episodes starting May 16
There’s no shortage of true crime podcasts, but what happens when you remove the host and let the amateur sleuths do the talking? In the case of Todd Matthews, you get an immersive story. He is the man who says that he became obsessed with the case known as “Tent Girl” and that he was determined to investigate the murder case. high voltage
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There’s a podcast for that.
This week, Raquel Aroesti choose five of the best podcasts from master podcastersfrom Jon Ronson tackling ideological battles to local scandals with My Dad Wrote a Porno co-creator Alice Levine.
Things fell apart
Jon Ronson has been making amazing radio for decades, and his enlightening, slightly left-wing approach to big social issues means his work has translated perfectly into podcast form. In 2017, The butterfly Effect documented the insidious rise of Pornhub in darkly gripping style; now he’s managed to improve it with Things Fell Apart, an investigation into how many of our most pernicious culture wars arose from unlikely root causes. Ronson is a meticulously impartial but deceptively bold host and interviewer, and this show is a necessary corrective to the bad faith ideological battles – from the anti-abortion movement to vaccine conspiracies – on which he reports.
Seeker
Nominally a show about the Internet, the cult podcast Reply All was really just an excuse for hosts Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt to chronicle contemporary American culture in a naughty and entertaining but very clever way. In the process, they produced some of the best podcast episodes of all time (the one about a scammer’s ever-growing search, the heart-in-your-mouth search to verify the existence of a barely remembered ’90s song). Reply All ended in 2022 amid controversy involving its parent company, but the spirit of it lives on in Vogt’s other work, which includes the fascinating explanation Crypto Island and Search Engine. The latter sees him tackle eclectic questions with complicated answers, such as: why do drug dealers kill their customers with fentanyl? And is airplane coffee safe?
Partners
Partners is not Hrishikesh Hirway’s best-known podcast: it would be the highly successful music analysis program explosion of songs – but it is another example of his ability to come up with simple but effective formats. Partners sees Hirway interview couples who work together and/or share their lives romantically. Past guests include Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger; designer Debbie Millman and writer Roxane Gay, married since 2021; and ice cream cousins Kim and Tyler Malek. If you want to delve deeper into Hirway’s back catalogue, try Home cookinghis award-winning collaboration with Salt Fat Acid Heat author Samin Nosrat.
The allusionist
Helen Zaltzman is a podcast pioneer: Answer Me This! was one of the first independent podcasts to gain a large following in the UK and the first to be nominated for a Sony Award. From 2007 to 2021, she and her college friend Olly Mann combined two foolproof approaches to the art form: comedy and answering listeners’ questions. Zaltzman still presents another full-length show, The Allusionist. It’s a podcast about words, but don’t expect a dry lecture on etymology: instead, our host uses all the irreverence and creativity at her disposal to make her linguistic forays into topics like planet naming, food brands, and the name Tiffany as fascinating as possible.
British scandal
Alice Levine began her career as a television host, but the podcast space is where she has really carved out a niche for herself. In 2015, she teamed with Jamie Morton and James Cooper to make My Dad Wrote a Porno, a scandalous, footnote-riddled read of an erotic novel by Morton’s father. It soon became one of the biggest podcast sensations of the decade thanks to Levine’s quick wit and, of course, the horribly clumsy material provided by the Belinda Blinked books. Levine followed up with the comedy role-playing game group Very Modern Quest and the 41 series. strong British Scandal, which retells stranger-than-fiction stories, from the Hatton Garden robbery to the death of Brian Jones, from the nation’s checkered past.
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