This weekend marks twenty years since September 11th. If you are above a certain age, you’ll remember exactly where you were that day. 

There are a number of podcasts marking the anniversary. The Guardian’s Today in Focus did an episode on the 3,051 individuals who had lost a parent on that day. They also interviewed one of the 105 kids who lost their father, but were not yet born on September 11th.

On Channel 4 News podcast’s The Fourcast, host Jon Snow recollected what it was like to interrupt the regular programming for breaking news coverage: “The speed of the events were such that you didn’t have time to cry. You didn’t have time to think about the humans. You didn’t have time to work out just how many people had lost loved ones,” he said.

9/11 resulted in the wars of Afghanistan. Now two decades on, the Taliban are back in power. In A Wish for Afghanistan, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet speaks to a number of people who have been impacted by the US withdrawal and asks them to talk about their hopes and fears for the country’s future. “To be honest what is happening now is overwhelming,” she says. “My producers and I had been working on this for months and had no idea, most people had no idea, Kabul would collapse so quickly.”

NOTABLE NAMES ON PODCASTS THIS WEEK

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  • Jess Phillips MP has got her own new podcast called Yours Sincerely, starting with special guest the Rev Kate Bottley. Upcoming guests include Benjamin Zephaniah, Deborah Frances-White and Alistair Campbell.
  • On Celebrity Catch Up: Life After That Thing I Did, a podcast where a star from something that got them famous in the nineties or noughties talk about what they did next, speaks to Whigfield! They talk about what it was like to perform to a billion people and how their lives unfolded afterwards.
  • Anastacia is on The Gaby Roslin Podcast this week, talking about her twenty year music career (so far). She also talks about why she has been so open about her health issues, including her survival from breast cancer: “In the moment, didn’t I realize it was helping me, not so much. I was doing it to help others, so that’s always been my thing. My thing was, ‘Oh my God, I just found out all these statistics about breast cancer that I never knew, I gotta share it with as many people as I can before I die’. That was where I was coming from.’”
  • Finally, The Panto Podcast – Interviews with pantomime stars Rusty Goffe, who was an Oompa Loompa in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Here are our podcast picks for the week ahead

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CancelledAnother show from the smart team at Broccoli Productions, who specialise in shows that amplify minority talent in audio. At a time when the “cancel culture” is thrown around to the extent where it has nearly lost all meaning, this new series looks at notable ‘cancels’ over the time and why they have deserved their notoriety. The first episode looks at P**** M******, a man who, by habit alone, I asterisk every single time. 

“Whether it is people who agree with him, or people who can’t stand him, there’s something about him that gets people on-board by virtue of the fact that they don’t have a clue where he’s going next,” says Anton Ferrie, the podcast’s host. “His ability to get people watching, even if it is to scream objections at their TV set, is what gets him so much mileage.”

Breaking Breakfast – In the same week that The Big Breakfast made a return to Channel 4 (which was really rather good, by the way), there’s a new podcast looking back at another distinctive and memorable breakfast programme from the ‘90s, The Chris Evans Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 1. 

The radio show often made headlines for all of the wrong reasons, most memorably when Evans unexpectedly quit after his demand to take Fridays off was rejected by BBC bosses. Now 25 years later, in this mini-series full to the brim of nostalgia, members from the team including Holly “Hot Lips” Samos, Dan “The Sound Man” McGrath and “Johnny Boy” Revell have reunited to talk candidly about the show’s dramatic highs and dramatic lows

Spotify Podcast of the Week – Season 3 of Rose & Rosie: Parental Guidance returns exclusively to Spotify tomorrow and there’s a new addition to the family – baby Ziggy! The first two seasons of the podcast followed Rose & Rosie’s journey to motherhood and now Ziggy’s arrived, they’re playing by ear and can’t wait to tell us all about it. New episodes drop every Monday and you can join the conversation by using #RoseandRosiePG!  

The Line-Up with Shaun Keaveny –  If you are a BBC 6 Music listener grieving the departure of Shaun Keaveny from the afternoon slot, you’ll be pleased to hear that he’s gone straight into podcasting with a new series launching this week. 

Following a recent trend where podcast listeners are asked to curate their imaginary perfect pub or holiday, here guests are asked to come up with their perfect music festival. Everything from what they think would be the right act for the sundowner set to what they would have in their backstage fancy toilet. Upcoming guests include Tom Grennan, Imagine Dragons, Jodie Whittaker and Joy Crookes. It is also produced by Natalie Jamieson, a talented broadcaster also behind the books podcast Bestsellers.  

Power CorruptsOur final podcast pick for the week is the return of the British Podcast Award Bronze winning podcast Power Corrupts, which looks at the forces that shape our world, from vote rigging to money laundering. The third series builds on its compelling storytelling and narration with a range of near unbelievable stories, from a 2021 hacking attempt on an entire city’s water supply, to a story about people who catch other people who have faked their own death.

Finally, it has been seen to be a week where awards ceremonies have been back in full force, with The National Television Awards and the Mercury Music Prize being awarded in the same week. The Women’s Prize for Fiction was also awarded this week to Susannah Clarke for her book Piranesi. The judges said: “Susanna Clarke has given us a truly original, unexpected flight of fancy which melds genres and challenges preconceptions about what books should be.”

If you want to hear about the book’s themes and resonance, the Women’s Prize for Fiction Podcast Yomi Adegoke hosted a discussion featuring Bella Mackie, Nell Frizzell and Okechukwu Nzelu.

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Categories: Weekly Picks