Given their respective backgrounds – maverick political high-flyers, each with their own distinctive hinterlands – theirs is a penetrating gaze.
Campbell, a prolific journalist and writer best known as Tony Blair’s acerbic spin doctor, knows No 10 from the inside. Stewart, Secretary of State for International Development in Theresa May’s Cabinet and an early public critic of Boris Johnson, is also a best-selling author, academic and royal tutor.
I say this not simply to air my grievances but to recommend a defence against such snobbery. Pandora Sykes and Sirin Kale’s new 10-part podcast, Unreal: A Critical History of Reality TV, makes a thorough case for the genre’s cultural significance, without turning a blind eye to its shaky ethical foundations.
It probably sounds strange, but there’s no better way to put the brakes on your own racing thoughts than to listen to two grown men lying in a bunk bed, rambling on about life and death and everything in between.
That’s the basis of their podcast, Bunk Bed, which first aired on BBC Radio 4 in 2014 and has just finished its ninth series. There’s no structure, only what they describe as a “stream of semi-consciousness,” which gives rise to any number of random thoughts, often silly but sometimes quite profound.
In Things Fell Apart, he excavates the battlegrounds of the American culture wars to find their origin stories, and explains how, exactly, things fell apart and left the country so fractured and polarised. Abortion, homosexuality, cancel culture, Satanism – he picks the biggest and most violent battles. But the episodes start in such obscure places and take such unexpected turns that each one is a revelatory listen.
The concept sounds standard enough: actor and comedian Seth Rogen asks famous friends to tell a personal story. But Rogen transforms the stories into breezy “audio documentaries” that are, by turns, wholesome, funny and surprisingly revelatory.
The first episode, Glorious Basterds, is a definitive rejection of that old adage, “never meet your heroes”, as comedian Quinta Brunson recalls her chance encounter with Paul Rudd at a matinee of Inglourious Basterds, where he inspired her to leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses to pursue freely a career in comedy.
Twenty years on, Russell T Davies’s storytelling is just as impactful as it was when it first aired on Channel 4.
Originally a podcast for the US version of the show, which spanned five series and 83 episodes in the early 2000s on Showtime, Still Queer as Folk’s American hosts, Patrick Randall and Matt Dominguez, return to the original UK series to give an unfiltered analysis of each episode.
Either way, it doesn’t matter. The podcast picks up where episode six would probably have left off – lost and confused in their realm of glorious nonsense.
The duo abandon logic and linearity to present a hotchpotch of ludicrous stories with the utmost seriousness. Think Baynham and Chris Morris’s surrealist satires such as The Day Today and Brass Eye.
So, if ever the fans of a TV series might have pleaded for a podcast that deconstructs each episode, Inside Inside No. 9 answers that call.
Becoming even more granular than the series itself, the two creators and stars, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, dissect each episode after it has aired.
Every week, the masters of misdirection are joined by a different member of the Inside No. 9 team to talk about the making of the programmes.
The next Fleabag or Line of Duty tossed into the television abyss, taking with it the awards buzz that might have surrounded the breakout stars and the flood of fascinating fan fiction that could have gushed from a new global fan base.
Everything is cryptic; minor characters from three series ago suddenly pop up on screen; and half of the dialogue is in acronyms. Yet viewers still can’t get enough of Jed Mercurio’s perplexing police procedural.
The series delights in plunging viewers into the darkness as they fumble to their own (often wrong) conclusions. Luckily for us, BBC Sounds’ companion podcast Obsessed with… Line of Duty is on hand to offer illumination.
