Bets podcasts of the week: LeBron James’s relentless rise from hyped prospect to king of the NBA

In this week’s newsletter: How did the most talked-up teenager of a generation become maybe the greatest of all time? Find out in A King’s Reign

Awards are, for many of us, a strong indicator of the best culture we should be consuming – but does this include podcasts? This week, the British Podcast Awards 2023 (the Baftas of pods) announced their nominations shortlist. The News Agents received the most nominations (three), while the Guardian’s Pop Culture with Chanté Joseph and Today in Focus got nods, as did some of our favourites from last year including 28ish Days Later, Where There’s a Will There’s a Wake, Can I Tell You a Secret, Pig Iron and Ukrainecast.

However, there has been some discussion about how inclusive these awards are. “For us to enter even 50% of our shows, with the ticket entry and entertaining that comes along with it, it costs [nearly] £2000,” tweeted Luke Moore, the COO of podcast producers Stak. “Why should Stak repeatedly go up against companies like the BBC and Audible, companies whose resources are astronomical in comparison?” Talia Augustidis, of Broccoli Content, added that she’s excited to be nominated for the Rising Star Award but can’t actually afford to go: “What entry-level, independent audio producer could possibly pay £318 for a ticket?”

The BPAs have elevated new voices in the past, including George the Poet and Brown Girls Do It Too. It also offers a bursary to nominees who can’t afford to attend. But the submission costs and the same celebrity and big studio names on the shortlists don’t scream inclusivity. Since the first podcast was made 20 years ago, the beauty and popularity of the format has been down to the fact that anyone can make one. Hopefully they can continue to be for everyone – even in terms of awards.

Read on for the podcasts that have caught our ears this week. Plus: we’ve got five of the best podcasts with hosts worth winning awards of their own.
Hollie Richardson
Assistant TV editor

Picks of the week

First Dates: The Podcast
Widely available, episodes weekly
Best known as a waitress at the First Dates restaurant, CiCi Coleman takes her dating chat to this podcast, with Frankie Bridge (both pictured above) as her enthusiastic co-host. From niche green flags (“they’ve got to have a sister!”) to weird icks (“a man who takes a bath”) and how to tell a Bumble date you’re going through IVF, it invites guests to talk through everything involved in modern dating. And yes, there is a lot of shrieking. Hollie Richardson

Ghosted! By Roz Hernandez
Widely available, episodes weekly
Comedian Roz Hernandez delves into her obsession with the paranormal in this chat-based series where she interviews celebrity guests about the supernatural. It’s a lighthearted ramble: topics include stereos inexplicably turning themselves on and actor Busy Philipps’s belief that she is psychic. Alexi Duggins

A King’s Reign
Widely available, episodes weekly
The Athletic’s knowledgable reporters cover every aspect of LeBron James’s glittering career in this 12-part podcast. First, Joe Vardon goes back to the pre-hype days and James’s childhood in Akron, Ohio. Lively contributions from people in the know paint a rich picture. Hannah Verdier

Agatha Christie and the Dandelion Poisoner
Audible, all episodes out now
This true-crime series from the creator of podcast The Shrink Next Door profiles a 101-year-old murder case. It’s the tale of Major Armstrong, a lawyer from Hay-on-Wye convicted of poisoning his wife – which supposedly inspired an Agatha Christie story. A deep dive into Christie as well as an opportunity for the US host to observe the quaint old British. AD

Fiasco: Vigilante
Widely available, all episodes out now
Mid-80s New York is the start point for Fiasco’s new season, with Leon Neyfakh’s balanced storytelling at the fore. Crime rates were high, residents lived in fear and vigilantes were on the rise. But when Bernie Goetz shot four innocent Black teenagers, a nation was polarised: cold-blooded racist crime or self-defence? HV

There’s a podcast for that

This week, Stuart Heritage chooses five of the best podcasts with great hosts, from the sleep show with a soothing voice to a dissection of manhood with a model man.

Ologies With Alie Ward
Ologies is a podcast that covers a different scientific field each week. More often than not, a podcast with this sort of premise would run out of puff after a couple of months and expire completely within a year. The fact that Ologies is still vaulting from strength to strength after six years is almost certainly down to its host Alie Ward. Ward is an expert interviewer, letting her guests talk for extended periods of time, but never allowing them to wander into the weeds; something we can probably credit to her apparently boundless curiosity.

Drifting Off With Joe Pera
New episodes of Joe Pera’s podcast, designed to help listeners fall asleep, drop monthly, but typically I listen to them three times each. During the first – thanks mainly to composer Ryan Dann’s warm, cocoon-like soundscapes – I genuinely do drift off. In the second, I just tend to let Pera’s gentle, unhurried cadence wash over me. And in the third, finally, I listen closely for all the storytelling details and joke layers that Pera feeds into his scripts. The comic has such a perfect voice for something as intimate as a podcast that I could quite easily listen to him listing different shades of paint for hours on end.

Frozen Head
I am picking this podcast purely because it happens to be the most recent in the Ash and Alaina expanded podcasting universe. Alaina Urquhart and Ash Kelley are aunt and niece, one an autopsy technician and the other a hairstylist, who seemingly churn out podcasts as easily as most people sneeze. Their bread and butter is Morbid, a true-crime podcast, but they have also veered off into horror movies (Scream!) and TV (The Rewatcher: Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Frozen Head, meanwhile, is a limited podcast about a 90-year-old man hell-bent on achieving eternal life. That the pair can traverse so many subjects and make them all as interesting as the last is frankly astounding.

Rylan: How to Be a Man
In the wrong hands, How to Be a Man could have simply been half an hour of eating vegetables at gunpoint; a glum, box-ticking exercise in current buzzwords. What elevates it, though, is its host, former X Factor contestant turned national treasure Rylan Clark. A born interviewer, he is able to tease out revealing stories from his guests, without straying off topic or making the whole thing too earnest to stomach. As a result, this is arguably the defining podcast about modern masculinity.

R U Talkin’ RHCP Re: Me
Scott Aukerman (Comedy Bang! Bang!) and Adam Scott (Severance) have a long-running, intermittent podcast where they loosely review the work of significant bands, album by album. It’s a testament to their silly, teasing chemistry that each of these podcasts is just as compelling as the last. The pair have already covered U2, REM and Talking Heads, and their most recent run concerns the Red Hot Chili Peppers; it’s a podcast they initially scrapped after a few episodes because the early RHCP albums are so terrible. But, even when their choice of subject matter is awful, they still manage to be wonderful hosts.

Why not try …

Teen cancer sufferers enter another world in fictive fantasy Nightingale.

Could the abominable snowman be real? Andrew Benfield and Richard Horsey go on the hunt in new BBC Sounds series Yeti.

Former Reply All host PJ Vogt recently returned to the podcasting world with Search Engine, a new series on cultural mysteries that’s likely to pique the interest of many RA fans.