British podcasts are great — but there's a north-south problem

Times

12-07-2025

A few notable exceptions aside, podcasting can feel disproportionately metropolitan, often in accent, certainly in gaze. Much of the talent may originally come from afar (Alastair Campbell, Bradford; Emily Maitlis, Sheffield) but for many London feels like their pulpit.
Crossed Wires, the podcast festival that last weekend took over some of Sheffield's best-known venues, including the Crucible Theatre, seeks to redress that. It was founded by the podcaster Alice Levine (My Dad Wrote a Porno, British Scandal), the producer Dino Sofos (the creator of Americast and The News Agents) and the local impresario James O'Hara (the music festival Tramlines), and the ambition is to create a podcasting equivalent to the Edinburgh Fringe, albeit for just one weekend annually.
Sofos, however, wants to challenge London's cultural capital year round. He spent 14 years down south, pioneering BBC formats like Brexitcast. But to build his audio company Persephonica, he came home to Sheffield. Increasingly he perceives a north-south divide in career opportunities for young creatives, with the high cost of housing giving an unfair advantage to those already from the southeast. But podcasts can be produced from anywhere (as exemplified by two of Persephonica's highest-profile yet hardest-holidaying presenters, Dua Lipa and Lily Allen). Sofos dreams that others — perhaps even the BBC — will follow him to Sheffield and help to make England's sixth biggest city a centre for podcasting.
This year's festival had the BBC Radio 1 breakfast host, Greg James, as its creative director. First, he lured back one of the city's most beloved sons, Michael Palin. The natty 82-year-old reminisced about once alighting from the London train 'wearing one of those communist-style collarless shirts'. A gruff South Yorkshireman barked, 'Hulloo!' before declaiming sotto voce: 'Bourgeois are back.' Palin has never worn that shirt since.
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James hosted the Friday headliner Nobody Expects the Michael Palin Podcast. Then, a delightful Sheffield/Palin-themed edition of Rewinder. It was recorded at Cole Brothers, which for generations was Sheffield's destination department store, but since the closure of John Lewis in 2021 is a semi-derelict high street eyesore.
Last weekend it was reclaimed as a BBC hub. So, in a sense, the bourgeoisie were back (Radio 4's controller even popped along to settle a potentially unpaid Palin guinea fee from the 1960s). But the venue's bare bulbs and wires hanging from concrete girders made this a buzzy, down-to-earth space. 'A better audience than at the Hay Festival,' said Rob Lawrie, the bluff Yorkshireman presenter of the investigative hit To Catch a Scorpion.
North and south, privilege and poverty, the politics of a post-industrial landscape, all were recurring themes across a northern-accented weekend attended by more than 20,000. As Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett's guest on Dish, the Hull-raised comedian Lucy Beaumont was bleakly funny about the hunger-staving, cheap stodgy staples of Yorkshire cuisine.
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Audiences flocked to hear a recording of Jarvis Cocker reading the Shipping Forecast. His Pulp bandmate the drummer Nick Banks joined Drunk Women Solving Crime. At the gateway to the Peak District, the novelist David Nicholls discussed his hiking romance You Are Here with Sara Cox ('delighted to be on my second favourite side of the Pennines').
At the festival's stimulating finale Pod Save the UK, Oliver Coppard, the mayor of South Yorkshire, dealt impressively with shouts of 'shame on you' for saying his office would not turn away arms manufacturing jobs, given local levels of long-term unemployment.
Crucially, Crossed Wires events were great fun. The Saturday evening headliner was the class-riffing comedy Help I Sexted My Boss, presented by the Capital Radio breakfast host Jordan North and the etiquette expert William Hanson. Even before curtain up at the sold-out 2,200-capacity City Hall, its bars had run dry of 'G&D', the show's signature tipple of gin and Dubonnet.
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Its innuendo-laden humour harks back to a pre-Palin(lithic) age. 'I'm more City Hall — you're sod all,' was Hanson's opening salvo to North, as if he were a snooty southern pantomime villain talking to Buttons. To cheers, North (born in York, brought up in Lancashire) explained Sheffield to Hanson (Bristol) as the city of Pulp, Arctic Monkeys, Self-Esteem and Sean Bean. For the second half's opener, he and the producer did a 'full Monty', stripping to gold lamé briefs. Hanson, more demurely, unveiled a half Sheffield United, half Wednesday strip, then came good officiating the marriage proposal of Tristan to Shona. You'd have to have been a right misery-guts to have not been borne along.
Edinburgh's festivals have been pivotal to the careers of some mentioned here, including Palin. Although this was much smaller in scale, it felt like there were parallels — another walkable festival in a university town girded by hills. I hope Sheffield's Crossed Wires succeeds and helps to devolve more podcasting power to the regions.
What podcasts have you enjoyed recently? Let us know in the comments below