Podcasts have become a bit like the property market: the more listeners the whole industry seems to get, the more sure the doomsayers are that it’s all about to come tumbling down. But despite death-knell clangers aplenty this year, podcasting has continued to grow, with more than 540 million people worldwide tuning into this digital audio format in 2024.
If you can call it an audio format, that is. The year did herald some changes for the medium, accelerating the move to visual: Spotify alone now shows more than 250,000 video podcasts, and more than half of its top 20 podcasts include a video component.
Podcast production companies proliferated, elbowing out many of the independent podcasters of the early 2020s: gone are the days of two friends chatting at the table and throwing the resulting meander online, with podcasts now solidly in their slick-edits-and-sound-design era. And they’re a serious business – so much so that both of the main candidates in the US presidential election opted to appear on podcasts at crucial moments in their campaigns, Donald Trump on The Joe Rogan Experience and Kamala Harris on Call Her Daddy.
So much for clout, but what about content? For listeners, 2024 was another bumper year, with podcasts breaking new ground in format, in style and, often, in subject matter. Choosing the best is a fool’s errand, particularly when it’s impossible to wrap your ears around everything that’s out there. But after another year of heavy listening, here are my picks for the best new podcasts of 2024.
The Belgrano Diary
From the London Review of Books, The Belgrano Diary is a gorgeously crafted, meticulously sourced six-part account of the sinking of an Argentinian ship at the beginning of the Falklands War. It was an act greenlit by Margaret Thatcher, the UK prime minister, and the moments leading up to that decision, the political fallout and the diary written on the British submarine that sank the Argentinian vessel are at the heart of this finely textured piece of storytelling about the lies of the powerful and the legacy of one brutal act of war.
Keep It Tight
The rideyness of Hollywood A-listers. Pencil skirts. The connection between barbecues and the Roman empire. Vaginal numbness. It’s all up for conversation from the uproarious duo of Deirdre O’Kane and Emma Doran, who launched Keep It Tight in February. With a heavy dose of cop-on-to-yourself and some wild tangents, Keep It Tight is an antidote to grim, its hosts refreshingly real in their excavation of the bald-faced madness of modern life. Tightly does it. Read Fiona McCann on Keep It Tight.
Hysterical
In 2011 more than a dozen teenage girls fell strangely ill with symptoms that included stuttering, motor tics, vocal outbursts and loss of consciousness. That outbreak is at the centre of Dan Taberski’s Hysterical, and the politico and journalist’s skill at the craft and sensitivity to his subjects are what propel this absorbing seven-part series. Read Fiona McCann on Hysterical.
Who Replaced Avril Lavigne?
An Irish comedian takes on an internet conspiracy theory surrounding an early-2000s Canadian pop singer and goes raucously rogue in this BBC Sounds production. Joanne McNally Investigates: Who Replaced Avril Lavigne is a fever dream of faux-journalism and true comedy, which includes McNally roaming through Greater Napanee, in Ontario, to find witnesses to Lavigne’s early days, as well as to hire her own Doppelgänger, and attempts to get face time backstage with Lavigne herself after a concert by claiming she’s there for a “welfare check”. Read Fiona McCann on Who Replaced Avril Lavigne?
The Wonder of Stevie
As tributes to musical legends go, it doesn’t get much better than this: Wesley Morris, New York Times culture critic, goes wild and deep on Stevie Wonder, disassembling seminal tracks, holding up album-cover choices, illuminating the historical context for his work and pulling in some high-profile fans – you may have heard of the Obamas – to establish his subject’s genius. It’s all carried on Morris’s contagious enthusiasm and delightful penchant for big, bold statements. The Wonder of Stevie focuses largely on a run of albums Wonder released between 1972 and 1980 that Morris claims is “almost universally understood to be the most miraculous, most inspired streak in the history of American popular music”. With The Wonder of Stevie, he rests his case. Read Fiona McCann on The Wonder of Stevie.
The Bookshelf with Ryan Tubridy
Ryan Tubridy returned to our ears and eyes this year with a smack-dab-in-his-wheelhouse endeavour centring on his great loves of books and talking. The format of The Bookshelf: high-profile guests open their lives to us through their choices of three books – their childhood favourite, the one that made them cry and the one that changed their life. Guests from David Walliams to Vogue Williams to Paul Giamatti wax lyrical on subjects literary, with books as their galvanising force: Maurice Sendak’s hallucinatory In the Night Kitchen, Jeanette Winterson’s schema-changing Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the weight of consequence in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and more. Read Fiona McCann on The Bookshelf with Ryan Tubridy.
The Good Whale
In the feelgood flick Free Willy, from 1993, the titular whale jumps a breakwater to escape captivity and return to his pod to live happily ever after. In the real-life story of the whale that played Willy, an orca named Keiko, things turned out differently. This New York Times/Serial saga chronicles the very 1990s attempt by a group of environmentalists to reintroduce Keiko to the wild after years in captivity, spending tens of millions of dollars to move him from a Mexican amusement park to increasingly bigger bodies of water and, finally, to the oceans around Iceland where he’d first been captured. It’s a tale told with pathos and perception, elevated by the most bizarre and strangely successful stylistic turn in the penultimate episode that I refuse to spoil but insist you investigate once you finish reading this.
The Real Carrie Jade
This ever-twisting tale of a pathological liar who duped so many Irish people under all manner of aliases begins with the voice of Carrie Jade, who approached RTÉ to be interviewed about what she claimed was a failure to diagnose her Huntington’s disease. But the disease, the name she used and the stories she told were all fabrications – and so begins a careful investigation into her myriad lives and lies, with thorough reporting from RTÉ’s Documentary on One team and a terrifyingly convincing chameleon at its heart. Read Fiona McCann on The Real Carrie Jade.
Who Trolled Amber?
The journalist Alexi Mostrous and the team at Tortoise Media dig deeply and doggedly into why none of us could escape the 2022 libel action that Johnny Depp took against Amber Heard and how public opinion appeared to turn so resoundingly against the actor’s ex-wife. Who Trolled Amber? is a necessary and nuanced class on how easy it can be for someone – a foreign interest or a nefarious actor – to place their finger on the public scale, to fire up an army of bots and cover their tracks, and to make us stop questioning what we absorb from the algorithms. Read Fiona McCann on Who Trolled Amber?
How to Gael
Technically this one came out in 2023, but it was late enough in the year for me to bend the rules and make How to Gael part of this 2024 list. I can claim my reasons are purely educational, and there’s no doubt I’ve learned a lot from this bilingual podcast from the broadcasters and friends Doireann Ní Ghlacáin, Louise Cantillon and Síomha Ní Ruairc, which neatly expands my vocabulary as Gaeilge with a helpful glossary at the end of every episode. But I’m mainly here for the hangout with three smart, funny women who are easy on the air and in each other’s company and expound on everything from cultural traditions to social mores to how Christmas can be employed as an excuse for nigh on anything. Is í an Nollaig í, readers. What more needs to be said? Read Fiona McCann on How to Gael.
