Matt Blease recommends his favourite podcasts of the month

Podcast of the Month with Matt Blease

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Our favourite podcasts

Once upon a time we used to have spaces in the day, perhaps when travelling to work, going for a run, sitting in bed, when we might spend some time reading a book, listening to music, or vacantly gazing into space, thinking about nothing in particular. Not any longer, nowadays many of us are filling that time with podcasts.

But there are so many podcasts out there, how do you decide what to listen to? We often go by recommendations from friends and colleagues. So, we thought each month we’d ask one of our friends and colleagues at Breed about which podcasts they’d recommend.

For Dec it’s: Matt Blease

How do you discover new podcasts?

Word of mouth, recommendations from friends, things that pop up on Twitter, and overhearing people’s conversations on the bus. I’m always open to suggestions.

Do you have favourite subjects that you seek out?

I love human interest podcasts. They can be so expertly crafted and produced that you come away feeling like somebody has literally been playing back-to-back Nirvana songs on your heartstrings.

When do you listen to them?

When I’m working, but only really once I have the idea and it’s more a case of inking in a final illustration. Otherwise I get a little distracted and have to keep on skipping back to bits that I missed.

Which three podcasts would you recommend?

There are so, so many, it’s hard to choose. Josie Long’s podcast ‘Short Cuts’ on BBC Radio 4 is brilliantly produced and is more of a soundscape than a generic spoken word podcast. One of my favourite episodes is from series 13 called ‘Duet’. The poet/comedian John Osbourne and his ‘Late Night Radio Phone In’ poem steals the show.

Also, I love, love, love ‘This American Life’. The presenter Ira Glass has become a bit of an icon in our house! We have pretty much listened to the whole back catalogue. One of the presenters from ‘This American Life’ went on to start his own podcast service called Gimlet, the podcasts are so good that three of them have made it onto my top three, so not to sound like a Gimlet superfan but…

Heavyweight

Jonathan Goldstein takes people back to ‘the moment everything changed’ in their life and gets them to confront that moment so they can move on. This runs from getting his dad talking to his long-estranged brother again to someone asking Moby to give him back CDs borrowed 20 years earlier.

Find it here.

Mystery Show

Named best podcast of 2015 by iTunes, Mystery Show is hosted by Starlee Kine, who investigates one of life’s little mysteries in each episode. Mysteries like why a local video store closed or where an unusual belt buckle came from, often disappearing into digressions along the way.

Find it here.

Reply All

Running to 131 episodes at the time of writing, Reply All looks at how people engage with the internet, including sections where co-hosts PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman explain internet trivia and where they examine the odder problems listeners have come up against.

Find it here.

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