From Jo Brand on Table Manners to the eight-part drama Blackout: This week’s top podcasts

Table Manners 

Every week on this big-hearted podcast, singer Jessie Ware and her mum Lennie invite a celebrity guest to Ware’s home in east London to chew the fat and tuck into a three-course meal. 

The back catalogue is rammed with stars, from Ed Sheeran to Emilia Clarke, but start with the recent episode with comedian Jo Brand, who is wonderfully frank about life as a ‘fat person’ whose favourite snack is a baguette spread with butter and salad cream. 

 

Blackout 

Eight-part podcast drama that stars Academy Award-winning actor Rami Malek. He plays a radio DJ from a small town in New Hampshire. When the power grid goes down across the US, he must fight to protect his family from the ensuing chaos. 

The series came out last year but feels very ‘now’, for obvious reasons.

 

Castaway 

This podcast takes listeners through the looking glass by looking at podcasts themselves. Every week, Laura Whitmore interviews a guest to discuss their favourite shows. 

As with Desert Island Discs, digging into what someone listens to is a good way of uncovering what they’re really about. The second season kicked off last week with a great interview with Dermot O’Leary, whose favourite podcasts range from an Arsenal show to Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s own interview podcast. 

 

The Coronavirus Podcast 

Podcasts on the pandemic are sprouting like mushrooms, but this new BBC show is the one to rely on. Episodes are hosted by medical correspondent Fergus Walsh, and explore the latest developments in the virus upturning lives across the world. 

As Walsh notes, ‘virus chat’ tends to be dominated by those wailing that ‘this is the end of society’, and those who can’t see what all the fuss is about. This cuts through the noise and the fear-mongering.