4 Great Podcasts & YouTube Series

It’s Alive with Brad Leone
Ever feel a bit like you don’t really know what you’re doing? That even though you have the knowledge, you’re just bumbling along as best you can? Well, this YouTube series is for you. Brad Leone is the test kitchen manager at food magazine Bon Appétit, and It’s Alive charts his experiments with fermentation and ‘live’ food. Sometimes experiments just straight-up don’t work, and Leone regularly ends up staring into the middle distance looking confused. And yet he’s always pushing forward, trying new things, cracking jokes, and readily admitting that the thing that should have happened… hasn’t. There’s a lesson in there, lads.

Homo Sapiens
An essential app for all you LGBTQIA+ students looking for a warm audio hug from none other than filmmaker Chris Sweeney and Pop Idol’s Will Young (some of you may not have been born when Young won Pop Idol, which now makes us feel a bit sad). They describe themselves as BBC Radio 4’s Woman's Hour for an LGBTQ+ audience. Each themed episode features an interview with an influential guest (including the likes of Marika Hackman, John Grant and Alan Cumming) over tea and biscuits and keeps you up to date with queer current affairs across the UK and beyond.

Imaginary Advice
This podcast from writer and spoken word performer Ross Sutherland isn’t going to give you any nifty solutions to your problems. Nope, Imaginary Advice is a place to expand your horizons and start to think about things a bit differently. One episode Sutherland’s teaching a neural network how to do stand-up comedy, the next he’s building an infinitely-looping poem to help you break up with someone, then he’s remixing Jay-Z’s The Black Album to talk about art galleries. Lay back, pop your thinking cap on, and prepare to become extremely interested.

Notes in Spanish
Need to learn on the move but don’t want to carry a grammar book heavy enough to be classed as a weapon? Well, how about you download something on to your phone that actually weighs nada? Created back in the early noughties by husband and wife dream team Ben y Marina, Notes in Spanish is your perfect side pal when you actually want to learn some real Spanish. They’ve got pods for all levels, and teach you the useful stuff that you can’t find in textbooks. With themed episodes, detailed explanations for why the hell there are about 50 Spanish words for mushroom and downloadable worksheets, you’ll be ordering una cerveza in no time…