The week in podcasts: This Is Love; The Hotbed: Swipe Left Swipe Left!

This Is Love Radiotopia
The Hotbed The Hotbed Collective
Swipe Left Swipe Left! swipeleftswipeleft.com

Valentine’s Day has been and gone in a flurry of sateen knicks and romantic meals spent eavesdropping on next table’s marital breakdown. Love is far stranger and less easy to diarise than this mad commercial event. Here are a few podcasts that understand this.

First up, This Is Love, is a new spin-off from Radiotopia’s Criminal. Its opener tells the sweet tale of David and Jessie: how they met, how they married, what happened next. It spans several years and is beautifully paced, with memorable details (one speaker says, of a loved one who dies: “She’s vague but she’s always there.”) A heartening, fairly traditional way to open the series. Next week’s episode is very different: a young woman, swimming in the California sea, becomes conscious of something underneath her – a mass, a body – that’s causing a hollowing out of the water below her legs. She is being followed…

The blurb about the show informs that This Is Love is “an investigation into life’s most persistent mystery”: it will be interesting to see how far the producers stretch the idea (you note the words “investigation” and “mystery”, especially as the podcast comes from the makers of Criminal). Either way, I recommend This Is Love – it’s a gorgeous listen.

More prosaic is The Hotbed. This, another newbie, is an enjoyable show – friendly, realistic, upbeat – let down by bad organisation, slack journalism and an assumption that the listener is already in on both the joke and the subject matter (everyday sex). We don’t even get surnames for the introductions. “I’m Lisa,” says one presenter. “I’m Anarchy,” says another. “AND I’M GERI!!!” shouts the third, sounding uncannily like a cross between 90s-era Ginger and Scary Spice.

They turn out to be journalists and bloggers Lisa Williams, Anniki Sommerville and Cherry Healey, but I had to Google to find this out. They have a well-liked Instagram account and website, and they certainly have a catchphrase: “We’re making life better, one orgasm at a time.”

But, in this episode at least, there are few actual specifics. Anniki informs us that she is wearing edible knickers, but as this results in… nothing, no ha-ha follow-up about her partner having her for pudding, no report that her pants melted on the bus, we can assume that she isn’t. Later, we hear clips from a Hotbed live show, which offers nothing much until an actual doctor, Karen Gurney, speaks. Gurney says that female desire has been badly defined for years, and new research is taking a different approach. Ooh! A fact (at 22 minutes into a 40-minute podcast). But then she’s cut off, by music. I really want to like this podcast, but it’s going to have to work harder to properly engage.

Swipe Left Swipe Left!, however, is an attention-grabber. Its true (short, well-produced) stories are about relationship adventures and dating failures. Last week’s episode, Happy Endings, is the one I recommend. Because – sorry kids – it’s hot. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a real-life podcast that is actually sexy before… Jen goes on a solo holiday to Barcelona and has what we might call an “encounter”. Ladies, enjoy.

Podcasts for the angry unromantic

For a Bad Time, Call…
forabadtimecall.squarespace.com
Only six episodes, but every show is full of anger. For a Bad Time invites raging women to call a US number (669-BAD-TIME) and rant about whatever is bothering them. Which is often – surprise! – men. The calls cut into each other; they’re not always articulate, not always polite. Some make you sad: “I don’t know what to do, other than to laugh at it.” Almost every woman, you notice, just wants to be left alone to live her life unhassled.

Grumpy Old Geeks
gog.show
Jason DeFillippo and Brian Schulmeister aren’t that grumpy, to be fair. They’re just middle-aged men having a chat about the internet, movies, TV shows. Both wear their experience slightly heavily (“40 years of online experience!”) but as hosts they’re easy to listen to and, if you’re an older techy type, this may be the show for you. Actually, they remind me of The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy – they have the same, slightly superior, overinformed, nitpickety geek attitude – but that’s not a completely bad thing.

ASMR Radio
iTunes
ASMR is a tingly, relaxing feeling that some people get from certain repeated sounds (the tap of long nails) or rituals (carefully folding towels). If you’re like me, such things wind you up rather than calm you down. There are a lot of ASMR podcasts out there, but this one is my favourite because it really drives me mad. There are episodes featuring the sounds of eggs over fried rice (yuk), or the noise that a dog makes when licking another dog (argh). Utterly rage-inducing.