Better Podcasts

My first attempt at subscribing to podcasts led me down one very short and one dead end path. The Nordic bagpipe music podcast has only one installment to date and the Orson Welles radio podcast is definitely limited by the fact that Orson Welles has been dead for some time.

So tonight I set out in search of new, more promising podcasts. I was quickly gratified to find two podasts that satisfy my fantasy that all this new technology can bring us back, in some ways, to the good old days. They are:

“The Backwards of Maine”

and

“The Paranormalists”

The first is an old-timey talk show, podcast “from the edge of a potato field on the east side of Mt. Katahdin.” Somewhat similar to Garrison Keilor’s “News From Lake Wobegon,’ this show is a lighthearted monologue about life in a small, rural community, filled with homspun wisdom and curious country characters. The podcast’s website encourages listeners to ‘tune in every once in a while” and lists episodes as “Numbah One,” “Numbah Two,” etc.

A recurring motif of the show are references to outhouses. The show’s website offers a live view of Mt. Katahdin from an “outhouse cam.” Because I visited the site at night, the image was completely black, so I had to take it on faith that I was really looking at midnight in the backwoods of Maine.

When I was growing up, my family had a collection of record albums of Maine humor called “Bert and I.” I memorized a lot of stories from these and learned to imitate the Maine accent. In later years I started a small career as a sort of standup comedian, dressing in a flannel shirt and suspenders and performing some of these old time stories in retirement homes around Seattle. I ended this short career in front of an enthusisatic audience at the Folklife Festival in 2002 and decided to retire on a high note. Now, as a retired Maine storyteller, I’m glad to see that the tradition lives on in podcasting.

The second podcast, “The Paranormalists,” is a terrific comedy/drama from the U.K. that is very much in the tradition of old radio drama. Making full use of sound effects, music and a troupe of talented actors, this podcast tells the tales of a group of English “Ghostbusters” who chase around investigating paranormal phenomena, including the Abominable Snowman and the Ghost of Elvis. What makes the show especially funny is that it is set in the rural West Country of England, amongst a lot of cows and hay ricks. The characters are often discovered chatting about rural matters in dialects not too far from Chaucer, until their cellphones begin to chirp and they must rush off to join their team for a new paranormal investigation. Jolly good fun!