There’s been a couple of podcasts that have been suggested to The Great British Podcast Newsletter in recent weeks that have been entirely made by AI. Made in AI, a satirical comedy co-written and co-produced using artificial intelligence. And then there’s Synthetic Stories, where not only has the script been made by AI, but also the description, the music, the artwork accompanying the podcast and even the voice introducing the episode. Unnerving, both of them!
The Climate Question podcast looks at whether artificial intelligence can help farmers adapt to the threats posed by climate change. ELEVATE Your World looks at the possibilities that AI can help in the creative process.
For a deep dive into the ethics of artificial intelligence, I would recommend listening to DeepMind: The Podcast, presented by Dr Hannah Fry, which looked at the opportunities and ethical dilemmas posed by AI.
Just in case you are wondering, this newsletter has not been written by AI (although to be honest, the AI would say that.)
NOTABLE NAMES ON PODCASTS THIS WEEK
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- The talk show host Jerry Springer is on Celebrity Catch Up: Life After That Thing I Did, looking back at his controversial daytime chat show.
- The singer Frankie Bridge is on Alan Carr’s Life’s A Beach.
- And the singer Kim Petras is on Table Manners with Jessie and Lennie Ware.
- The team behind the hugely popular No Such Thing As A Fish are on PodPod, a podcast that explores how to sharpen up your own and help build an audience. They talk about how the podcasting world has evolved since they first debuted.
- Roman Kemp and Sonny Jay are on This Is Not What I Asked For, a new podcast where celebrities visit the stylist Jonathan Andrew.
- Bimini is on Where There’s A Will, There’s A Wake with Kathy Burke.
- Penn Badgley from You is on the Radio Times Podcast this week.
Here are our podcast picks for the week ahead
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Cover Up: Ministry of Secrets – Accusations of a cover up are often thrown about on social media, but what about stories of actual cover ups dating back decades?
This new series, presented by historian and presenter Giles Milton and producer Sarah Peters, looks at the strange disappearance of a deep sea diver on a Cold War mission seven decades ago. This story is so strange that the official truth of what happened is expected to be concealed until 2057, a hundred years after it first took place. The first three episodes are available to listen, with the rest of the series currently available on subscription, and the first episode features an interview with the possible last person who is still alive connected to the incident, an interviewee that Milton has been tracking down for twenty years.
“This story is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the 20th Century,” says Milton. “It is so sensitive, so secret, there are people out there still covering up the truth. I’m going to find out why.”
Terri White: Finding Britain’s Ghost Children – “There is a crisis amongst our kids that we all need to be talking about,” says the journalist Terri White at the start of her new podcast. More than 100,000 schoolchildren are regularly absent from school, often referred to in the news as ‘ghost children.’ Children may be absent because of mental health reasons or because of educational needs, but some of these children are likely to be vulnerable. And not only that, but there are a possible 100,000 additional children who are not registered and are unaccounted for.
White knows the importance of schools in terms of safeguarding. Having experienced neglect and abuse as a child, she found school as a sanctuary and a place of safety. Following the murder of six year old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, White investigates what can be done to ensure that other children can be protected, a problem that has worsened after the schools closed during the pandemic. New episodes are out every week.
Black Prose – This new series features the journalist Yolanthe Fawehimni interviewing and amplifying some of the best Black writers in the country.
“Some of the most talented writers of our generation are also found in the Black music scene,” says Fawehimni, “including rappers who take inspiration from beats, rhymes and life.” In a recent episode she speaks to the rapper and songwriter Jords, aka. Jordan Edwards-Wilks, about his music career and his upcoming EP.
Movers and Shakers: a podcast about life with Parkinson’s – Our final podcast features six friends who have all started a podcast together to talk about their everyday experiences of Parkinson’s, after meeting up at the pub over the last couple of years. The friends are the journalist Jeremy Paxman, the former BBC technology expert Rory Cellan-Jones, the journalist Mark Mardell, the judge Sir Nicholas Mostyn, the lecturer Gillian Lacey-Solymar and the writer Paul Mayhew-Archer.
I learnt a lot from listening to the surprisingly entertaining first episode, such as how people experience Parkinsons in different ways and that there is still a lot we don’t know about this illness. “Some of the symptoms such as stopping us walking, stopping us speaking, stopping us being able to write clearly … all these things stop us communicating,” says Mayhew-Archer. “What we’re doing is fighting back by trying to talk about Parkinson’s whilst we still can and explain as much as we possibly can.”
