A fascinating fortnightly show explores the darker side of the scare industry. Plus: five of the creepiest podcasts • Don’t get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Happy season of pumpkin-based food waste! Or, if you prefer, Halloween. Like all humans since the dawn of time, the extra hours of darkness that autumn brings will no doubt have many ask: “Where are the creepy podcasts at?” You’re in luck. We’ve got a run-down of the finest spooky listens, from horror podcasts to paranormal shows crowdsourcing blood-curdling experiences for a seasonal special. There’s a look at a new series that plunges into a suburban Halloween experience, which went from fun haunted house to such a traumatic experience we had to write a whole feature on it. Plus, they’re joined by an advice show hosted by two terrifyingly evil types: Harry Clark and Paul Gordon from The Traitors. Be warned: follow their tips at your peril. Alexi Duggins Deputy TV editor Continue reading...

The comedian bridges the gap between truth and fiction in Up in Smoke. Plus: five of the best podcasts with shocking twists • Don’t get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Have you been glued to Wondery’s latest true crime pod, Kill List? Tech journalist Carl Miller discovered a list of names on the dark web, which he learned was a murder-for-hire site. It turned out to be a money-making scam, but the people who paid up were deadly serious about getting rid of their targets – “Tell me the execution time in advance – I can’t be there,” was just one instruction found. In the podcast, Miller tracks down people on the hitlist and tries to get the authorities to take the risks to their lives seriously. Continue reading...

A gripping audio series about a killer-for-hire scam on the dark web is a reminder of how technology holds up a mirror to human nature This column comes to you as a break from listening to a riveting podcast series called Kill List. It’s about a secret website that journalist and author Carl Miller discovered on the dark web, the slimy underbelly of the internet. The site essentially runs what one might call an “assassination market” or a murder-for-hire service. Customers identify and profile someone whom they wish to have killed and pay (in bitcoin, natch) for the service they require. Hence the title of the podcast series. The story starts in 2020 in the early days of the pandemic lockdown when a gifted IT expert and hacker, Chris Monteiro, was browsing the site and found a security vulnerability that, once exploited, gave him complete access to it. Inside, he found a “kill list”, rather like an Excel spreadsheet, of 175 people all over the world whom clients wanted murdered. For each target, there was usually lots of detailed information – address, photographs, habits, routes regularly travelled etc. It looked, I guess, superficially mundane – until you read the “instructions” attached for each one. “How much bitcoin should I pay?” “Tell me the execution time in advance – I can’t be there.” “I would just like this person to be shot and killed. Where, how and what with does not bother me at all.” You get the idea. Continue reading...

The TV icon turned midlife expert hears from gutsy guests on their radical life changes in Begin Again. Plus: five of the best comfort listen podcasts • Don’t get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Only one show usually comes to mind when you think Adam Buxton plus podcast – and all you need to do is add a the to get its title. But one of the format’s big beasts is about to branch out … Well, sort of. Buxton’s upcoming drama Up in Smoke is done in the style of a true crime show but is actually a work of fiction, in which he plays a detective on the trail of a missing person. Its “host” is actor Mei Mac (currently starring in the glorious Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of My Neighbour Totoro), who is supposedly presenting an audio investigation of the mysterious incident. It feels like an exercise in genre and reality blurring that could either be spectacularly effective or … a bit odd. Which will it be? By this time next week, all should be revealed. Continue reading...

Google’s new tool NotebookLM lets you create podcasts at the click of the button. They’re way more realistic than you’d think … Anyone who grew up watching The Terminator or The Matrix knows that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. As the robots become smarter, it was thought, they will inevitably replace us, either by destroying us or mining us for resources. However, the age of AI is now here, and the truth is so much worse than anything from a dystopian sci-fi. You see, AI has decided to give us more podcasts. The world needs more podcasts like it needs to be kicked by a horse. Everyone’s got a podcast. Gyles Brandreth has a podcast. Paul Giamatti has a podcast. Your four or five worst friends all have podcasts, blathering endlessly into an environment already cluttered with too much content. Now Google has just created the first AI podcasts, and they’re as fascinating as they are superfluous. Continue reading...

Two journalists leaf through vintage magazines and reflect on their legacy in Mag Hags. Plus: five of the best US election podcasts • Don’t get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Podcast creators beware. This week Google released NotebookLM, an experimental tool to help with note-taking, which can create an audio “deep dive conversation” about any document you care to upload. Read: an AI-generated podcast. The results, frankly, are astounding. There are two hosts whose US-accented voices are almost impeccably believable as humans, and whose banter, digressions and personal interjections – as well as a tendency to pull in separate pieces of research to help explain your document – are almost indistinguishable from the work of humans. Assuming, that is, we’re talking about quite competent humans. Feeding in a recent Hear Here intro about the longevity of podcasts compared with that of TV had NotebookLM riffing about Off Menu due to its mention in the article (“I’ve literally listened to episodes of Off Menu in public and laughed out loud – like, full-on belly laughed!”). It also introduced some astute observations not included in the piece itself (“It’s interesting, isn’t it? I think that maybe traditional listener fatigue doesn’t apply in the same way, because podcast audiences are largely self-selecting – like, we choose what we listen to. We’re invested from the start”). I was less chuffed with the podcast it churned out in response to taking a look at a report about the damp in my home (“That sounds like something out of a horror movie!”). It may not be perfect, but it’s scary how impressive the results are. How long until a fully AI-generated show takes off? And how easy would it be to send somebody one of these audio files and convince them it was a legitimate human-created podcast? Continue reading...

A serial killer strikes the seaside town in The Margate Murders. Plus: five of the best Guardian audio long reads • Don’t get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up here This autumn marks 10 years since we launched the Guardian long read. Looking back now, it is hard to remember how counterintuitive the idea seemed at the time – this was a moment when more and more people were wondering whether readers still had the appetite for anything longer than a few hundred words, or even 140 characters. Creating a dedicated space within the Guardian for multiple pieces of 5,000 (or more) words a week – many of which would take months, even years, to produce – seemed like a quixotic project. Thankfully, our readers felt otherwise, embracing our deeply researched stories about everything from the “cruel, paranoid, failing” Home Office and the battle against Islamic State to the strange world of competitive ploughing and the rise of hygge. Just a few months after the long read launched, our audio team had the brilliant idea of launching the audio long read podcast. The idea was simple: get a great voice actor to read the articles aloud. That was it. It turned out that listeners loved it. (A few years ago, I briefly met Ed Miliband, who told me he liked to listen to the podcast when swimming lengths in the pool.) Continue reading...

Slow Burn returns for a new season, examining the phoenix-like rise of the American media giant. Plus: five of the best reality TV podcasts • Don’t get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up here There’s a consensus for how many seasons to give a hit TV show before calling it quits. Two is probably the optimal number for a comedy – think The Office, Fleabag, Fawlty Towers etc. For dramas, you’re probably pushing it beyond five (Breaking Bad) or six (The Sopranos). There are notable long-running exceptions – It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Curb Your Enthusiasm etc – but as a rule, they tend to drop off a cliff. For podcasts, the template is yet to be established. Given how easy it is to make a great show with the right people and the right format, it’s hard to see an end in sight for uber-popular shows in a way that similar TV entertainment franchises can’t manage (Bake Off jumped the shark around the time it left the BBC in 2016, and even Taskmaster began to wane after Mike Wozniak gave himself piles seven seasons ago). The Guardian’s own Comfort Eating With Grace Dent just returned for its eighth season (episode one is with Rag’n’Bone Man), while Off Menu – whose success is now so all-pervasive that a new recycling podcast we review this week features a segment where they riff on its classic “Poppadoms or bread?” catchphrase – is on to its 11th. Louis Theroux has just launched his third season on Spotify, after two on the BBC, kicking off with a typically candid episode with former adult actor Mia Khalifa. Shagged Married Avoid seems to have done away with seasons entirely and just be on an endless march to the climax of time itself. Continue reading...

The Oscar-winning actress goes back to her roots in Mind Your Own. Plus: five of the best comic book podcasts • Don’t get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up here All journalists know that what they produce matters, but sometimes it can be easy to forget just how much. The man who fell to earth, an excellent episode of the Guardian’s Today in Focuspodcast, tells the story of how Esther Addley reported on an airplane stowaway whose dead body was found in a west London car park – only to be contacted by the deceased’s brother 23 years later. The reason: his family had kept her article as a family treasure for decades, prompting him to learn enough English to be able to read the account of his much older sibling’s life – then travel to the UK on his trail. “It is genuinely one of the most powerful and emotional things anyone has ever said to me about my work,” says Addley. “It brings home the responsibility of every story we do.” Continue reading...

Radio host Carmel Holt explores the singer’s cross-generational impact in The Road to Joni. Plus: five of the best podcasts about the future • Don’t get Hear Here delivered to your inbox? Sign up here We love a totally unhinged investigative pod at Hear Here. Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding? is an all-time great (yes, I’m going to commit the cardinal newsletter sin of linking to my own interview with the creators here); the duo behind that hit have since made another deeply peculiar show, The Case of the Tiny Suit/Case, solidifying their rep as some of the most serious detectives of the least serious crimes ever committed. Also ploughing a similar furrow is Joanne McNally. Early this year, she was trying to find out whether Canada’s first lady of pop-punk Avril Lavigne had actually been replaced, as per internet conspiracy theories, and now she’s asking whether Furbys – those menacing talking toys that were all the rage in the 90s – were actually spying on us. As someone who was absolutely terrified of all interactions with my incredibly needy Furby I will be listening to every second. That’s below, along with the rest of the picks of the week, which include a new show I’m really excited to listen to from S-Town’s Brian Reed. Continue reading...