From the useful new Coronavirus Global Update to Mel Giedroyc Is Quilting: This week’s top podcasts


From the BBC’s useful new Coronavirus Global Update to Mel Giedroyc Is Quilting and Blackout, this week’s top podcasts

Coronavirus Global Update 

Covid-19 may have come from China but its spread has been horrifyingly global. This useful new BBC podcast takes a step back from what’s unfolding in Britain and explores how the virus is being tackled abroad. 

Covid-19 may have come from China but its spread has been horrifyingly global. This useful new BBC podcast explores how the virus is being tackled abroad

The show draws on interviews with experts, ordinary people and BBC correspondents. Episodes are thrillingly compact at only four minutes, so it’s ideal for anyone wanting to dip just a toe into corona coverage.

 

Mel Giedroyc Is Quilting 

This new podcast is proper comfort food, served up weekly by radio presenter Andy Bush and Mel Giedroyc. Every week, the two friends make low-key jokes for half an hour or so as they sew a patchwork quilt. 

Listeners are urged to send in scraps of fabric for the pair to incorporate into the quilt, or at least weave into their meandering conversation. It’s an odd premise for a podcast, but Giedroyc radiates such warmth and cheer that it works. 

 

Feel Better, Live More  

There’s something indefinably reassuring about this podcast hosted by Rangan Chatterjee, a GP and TV presenter. Every week he interviews health experts and fellow doctors, covering everything from sleep cycles to the importance of breathing through your nose. 

The two-hour episodes are reliably intelligent and measured.

 

Blackout 

This eight-part drama stars Academy Award-winner Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody), who plays an ordinary radio DJ from a backwater town in New Hampshire whose life is abruptly turned on its head. 

This eight-part drama stars Academy Award-winner Rami Malek (above), who plays an ordinary radio DJ from a backwater town in New Hampshire whose life is abruptly turned on its head

This eight-part drama stars Academy Award-winner Rami Malek (above), who plays an ordinary radio DJ from a backwater town in New Hampshire whose life is abruptly turned on its head

When the power grid goes down across the United States, he must fight to protect his family from the ensuing chaos. The series came out last year but feels creepily ‘now’, for obvious reasons. Prepare to feel tense – and gripped.