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Life Sentence (Mags Creative) | apple.comA Mother Tongue (Radio 4) | BBC Soundsdot com: The Wikipedia Story (Crowd Network) | acast.comSupergreat Kids Stories (Wardour Studios) | apple.comStorybooth Daily (Parcast for Spotify Originals) | SpotifySweet Bobby (Tortoise Media)

Life Sentence is a new podcast that explores the climate crisis in a different way. Its a drama, sort of, and a soundscape, sort of, and a call to action (as all climate crisis shows are). Written by the acclaimed young playwright Tabitha Mortiboy, it features characters, but they arent who you expect. In the first episode, Rainforest, we hear from Mo (Jordan Stephens), a benevolent, exasperated god/creator of the universe, who teases us humans about our general idiocy: You are less than halfway to understanding the true frenetic beauty of foundational creation. After a while, the Amazonian rainforest, played by Jade Anouka, speaks too. You wont be surprised to hear that shes feeling upset at her current treatment. Later on theres a human couple, Will Mellor and Stacy Abalogun, who use their Alexa-like device to switch on rainforest sounds so they can sleep (their stagey banter is this episodes least successful element).

Does this read like a tricky listen? Its absolutely not. Its beautifully produced, a rich headphone experience, with sounds, music and words playing off and interweaving around each other. In fact, its production reminds me of Have You Heard Georges Podcast?, especially because Stephenss words keep threatening to turn into rhyme, a la George.

The episode is 78 minutes long, representing the 78 years the Amazon rainforest will survive, if we continue to raze it to make space to farm cattle and grow palms for palm oil. The drama is over in 20 minutes and the rest of the programme is given over to an amazing rainforest soundscape. Later instalments also use this technique, each shows length reflecting how long the subject will last before extinction, using minutes rather than years. So, Ocean is just 29 minutes long it will take 29 years at todays rate of overfishing and extinction for the worlds oceans to be entirely empty of fish. I could make a joke about my kids not having left home by then, but Im too depressed to do so. Life Sentence is an admirable attempt to drive home specific climate crisis points in an artistic, memorable manner.

Equally lovely on the ears was A Mother Tongue on Radio 4. Made by the brilliant audio producer (and creative director of sound for Guardian podcasts) Axel Kacouti, it used interviews and atmospherics to explore the idea of how talking in different languages affects the speaker. (The same topic was explored, more prosaically, in The Flipside With Paris Lees.) A Swedish and English speaker describes how her queer identity is more easily expressed in English; a Spanish and English speaker says his playfulness comes out far more when he speaks Spanish. Some of the most interesting contributions come from a man who uses sign language. Kacouti himself speaks both French and English: You know English because your parents pointed at a map and said, Here we will settle You know French because you and your family were born in a land where the French pointed on a map and said, Here we will settle. He uses sound in a textual and textural way weaving recorded chatter from his infant son or his grannys attempt to teach him Anyi to express the emotional gap between identity and language. Wonderful.

Some of that texture and nuance would have been useful in dot com: The Wikipedia Story. Dot Com is a new podcast series about the people of the web, and this is a deep dive (five episodes already!) into Wikipedia, the search engine thats among the most visited websites in the world. Host Katie Puckrik is excellent as always: wry, insightful and a great interviewer. But the production needs more vim. Many of her interviewees are nerds (the natural character of the Wikipedia editor) and they speak well, but not always dynamically. Though Puckrik does her witty best, the show needs more varied sound dynamics a sense of location and time. When, in last weeks episode, she visited Wikimania, a festival for all things Wiki, it would have been nice if shed delivered lines such as Its big and its bananas! on the spot, rather than them being slotted in later. This is a dense, interesting show, given levity, if not purpose, by its presenter.

A few short shows to end: Supergreat Kids Stories is a sweet, old-fashioned storytelling podcast aimed at younger children (from five to 105 apparently. Argh!). It tells traditional tales from around the world, so we get not only The Three Little Pigs (a sanitised version where the wolf doesnt come down the chimney to land in a cooking pot and the first two little pigs survive), but also The Magic Orange Tree from Haiti and a Norse tale of Loki. Its a nice 20-minute bedtime listen for little uns. For older children, Spotify Originals has just launched Storybooth Daily, a spin-off from those weird animated, real-life stories on YouTube beloved by tweens and teens. Here, unidentified young people describe particular crises theyve been through, from toxic friends to smoking weed. The tone is too American for me, and some stories upsetting, but this has the potential to help many young people feel less alone.

Finally, like many, Ive been hoovering up Tortoises catfishing doc Sweet Bobby, but I fear weve hit the fade-out part of the tale. True crime podcasts tend to sustain momentum for just a few episodes, and unless the fraudulent villain talks (which I am sure it wont), then Im afraid we may well be doomed to a couple of episodes of expert opinion before this fascinating firework of a story fizzles and dies.

Originally posted here:
The week in audio: Life Sentence; A Mother Tongue; dot com: The Wikipedia Story and more - The Guardian