And so it is also for podcasts. In fact, the very first podcast I started listening to, way back in 2019, was a history podcast.

The British History Podcast

I like British history. My favorite history novel series, Rebecca Gablé’s Waringham novels, are situated in Medieval England.

And so, when I found The British History Podcast, I found myself in heaven. It’s a chronological retelling of the history of the British Isles, although it concentrates on the history of England, Scotland and Wales. It starts where every good history podcast does: In prehistoric times. From there, it goes from the Roman conquest, through the fall of the Roman empire to the Viking raids and finally the conquest - and it takes its time with each period, and doesn’t skip over “unpopular” parts like the Heptarchy. Jamie, the author and narrator, has a very nice way of weaving a story that’s engaging to listen to, but also adds in explanations of the different primary sources each period was mostly derived from, what other sources there are and so on.

He also has a very nice style where he doesn’t just tell the story of kings and emperors, but also tries to bring up how the common people experienced a time period. Those are a bit scattered, because naturally, the monks writing the histories at the time weren’t that interested on how Unfirth the peasant’s life was going, so sources can be a bit scarce.

Jamie is also a little bit like me - he has never written anything “short” in his entire life. 😁 He goes into really deep detail on things. How deep? Well, the podcast is on episode 485 now, and it’s still only at King William Rufus, the direct successor of William the Conqueror. And there wasn’t a single boring episode anywhere in there.

The episodes range wildly in length, some as short as 20 minutes, some over an hour, depending on the story currently being told.

The podcast is free of ads and entirely financed by listeners, and has been so for its entire duration.

If you’re even remotely into British History, I promise you won’t regret giving this one a listen.

The history of Rome

Another history podcast I greatly enjoyed was The History of Rome, by Mike Duncan. The guy knows his history and has an easy voice to listen to. He’s not quite as detailed as Jamie Jeffers from the BHP, but then again, he also has a lot fewer sources to work with.

The podcast leads through the entire history of the Roman Republic and Empire, from the mythical origins to the fall of Rome in the 5th century.

It’s 179 episodes in length, and each episode is around 30 minutes, and supported by ads, mostly embedded ones read by the author at the beginning of each episode.

Revolutions

Revolutions is another Mike Duncan podcast, this time about Revolutions all over the world. Similar to the history of Rome, the research and narrative are excellent. What I like about this one is that it moves around through different revolutions all over the world, so with each season, you get thrown into a different culture.

The revolutions discussed range widely, from the classics like the US and the French revolutions to others which are normally less covered in the western educational canon at least, like the Haitian revolution against French colonial rule.

One special thing is the (at time of writing) most recent season 12. Where all of the other seasons talk about historical revolutions, this one talks about the Martian Revolution. The events are entirely fictional, detailing the independence fight of a colony on Mars against a corporatist earth. It’s especially amusing when listening to the entire podcast in one go, because the author keeps the style of the previous, historical podcasts - just that the events he describes are entirely fictional. And he makes an excellent go of it.

Like history of Rome, this show has episodes hovering between 20 and 30 minutes. But there are a lot more of them, namely over 300. He takes over 100 episodes for the Russian revolution alone.

The podcast is currently on hiatus, but Mike Duncan announced that he wants to go on and continue with more, especially modern, revolutions.

More podcast reviews will be coming in the future. I hope at least a few of my historically inclined readers find something interesting in the above.

To me, there are roughly three kinds of podcasts I listen to. The first one is history podcasts - just some narrator telling me interesting tidbits from history. I will write about all of those in the next post. The second kind are what I’d call “current affairs” podcasts, e.g. news, politics, Open Source/Linux talk podcasts and such.

And the third and final kind is what I want to talk about today, namely fiction podcasts, or audio dramas. I think these are the most difficult to talk about, because I don’t want to tell too much, avoiding spoilers for the story.

I’m very much looking for feedback to this one - right now, I’m feeling like I don’t have even the faintest idea on how to write a review of a work of fiction. Perhaps the next couple of paragraphs are just going to end up variations on “I enjoyed it”. 😅

The podcast I’d like to tell you about is The Antique Shop. It’s written, produced and narrated by Ghostly Thistle, a Scottish writer. The podcast is told in the form of an audio journal from Maya, the protagonist. It tells the story of how she was looking for a job while studying at University and found a poster looking for an assistant in the window of the titular Antique Shop. After a little bit of time, Maya finds out that the shop’s proprietor, titled a Madam, is not actually an antiques dealer, but a servant of fate itself. And Maya had unwittingly become her apprentice.

The initial episodes of the podcast revolve around the customers coming to the shop. Some having been cursed and seek the help of Maya’s boss, others have been guided to the shop by fate looking for a specific item. Those items are often cursed themselves, and Maya records what happens to the customers after they bought the item.

I especially like the single narrator style, and the fact that the story is mostly told in episodic style. In the final few episodes, the meta-plot becomes the center of the narrative, but until then it stays mostly in the background compared to the “Customer of the week” narrative. I quite enjoy the more episodic style in fiction podcasts.

The author also has a good and clear voice that’s easy to listen to, and she has a Scottish, or more specifically, a Glaswegian accent. At least to me, this made a nice contrast to the otherwise mostly US or English accents in my podcasts.

The podcast has 50 episodes, with each episode somewhere around 20 to 25 minutes. Most episodes are capped off by a short blurb from the author, talking about some Scottish words in the episode or explaining some Scottish folk tale or some piece of history talked about in the episode. It is a finished podcast, which ran between 2020 and 2022.

The RSS feed can be found here.

So what do you think? Interesting enough? Too much info? Too little info? I probably should go and read a few podcast reviews to see how to actually write this kind of thing.