Podcasts sweeping the boards at awards spells a change for radio

Flintoff, Savage and the Ping Pong Guy is a weekly sports discussion show from Radio 5 Live. Produced primarily as an hour-long podcast, it is also broadcast in an edited half-hour version, which goes out on 5 Live on Monday nights.

Last Thursday, it became one of the most feted programmes in British radio, when it won an almost-unprecedented three Gold awards at the Arias, the radio industry’s big annual awards, for Best New Programme, Best Podcast and Best New Presenter.

There is more than a whiff of madness about this. The series comprises three blokes – Andrew Flintoff, Robbie Savage and the journalist and former table tennis champion Matthew Syed – talking about sport and swapping anecdotes.

It is perfectly entertaining, provided you’re interested in blokes and sport, and aren’t already subscribed to one of the several other podcasts that do the same thing.

Monday’s edition featured a long conversation about how young athletes nowadays have things too easy; and a segment which asked “Who are the best sports team ever?” (Syed: “the All Blacks”; Savage: “Leicester City”). As feature ideas, neither would have seemed out of place on an Alan Partridge phone-in. The highlight of the episode came when Flintoff – whose wit and candour are by far the best things about the series – told a self-depreciating story about exposing his privates in a medical clinic. 

I don’t hate the show. But if this is a sign of the kind of rigour we can expect from awards juries in 2017, then John Humphrys should put himself forward for Sports Personality of the Year. He’d have a fighting chance.

It was easier to get behind the gong for Best Music Presenter (Non-Breakfast), which went to Radio 1’s Annie Mac. John Peel once observed that many Radio 1 DJs have no interest in music at all, but instead see their jobs “as a stepping stone to a career in crap TV”.

This may be true for some of the radio stars today, but not for Mac. The Dubliner, who has been at the network since 2004, brings much infectious passion, a profound knowledge of contemporary music, and a bloodhound’s nose for originality to its weekday evening slot, which she took over from Zane Lowe in 2015.

Where Lowe shouted and raved, Mac enthuses and persuades; I regularly come away from her show in a good mood, with the names of several songs scribbled on a piece of paper. Fans of John Peel’s Radio 1 output may remember the feeling.

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is a marvel of novelistic invention, philosophical depth and seat-of-the-pants storytelling. I became slightly apprehensive when I learnt that he was writing a prequel trilogy. As fans of the original Star Wars films will know, these things can easily go wrong.

But my apprehension melted away on Saturday afternoon, when Radio 4 broadcast The Book of Dust – a feature-length abridgement of the new trilogy’s first volume, read with seemingly effortless grace by Simon Russell Beale.

Set in a half-familiar but magically altered Oxford 10 years before the events of the first books, it centred upon a brave young lad called Malcolm, who found himself caught up in a dark conspiracy – and has coloured my imagination since.

In any other week, Living with the Gods (Radio 4, Monday) would have been the headline story.

This is a new 30-part series about the ways in which religion has shaped human society; and is the fourth major collaboration between Radio 4 and the British Museum, following on from A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010), Shakespeare’s Restless World (2012) and Germany: Memories of a Nation (2015).

Like its predecessors, the series is presented by Neil MacGregor, the Museum’s sparklingly erudite former director, is structured across a long arc of 15-minute episodes, and uses objects – artworks, currency, documents, tools – as a means of exploring and illuminating its topic.

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Monday’s opening instalment focused on a 40,000-year-old carving of a human body with a lion’s head – which, MacGregor explained, is the first known instance of man giving physical embodiment to something he could never have seen. I sat, enraptured, as the details began to gather.

MacGregor is a master of this craft; lucid, unpretentious, with a painterly eye for the small detail that unlocks the picture, and an ability to call on the world’s most distinguished experts for help.

The next six weeks stretch out promisingly. 

• Gillian Reynolds is away