The best podcasts of 2025

There are so many excellent podcasts to choose from it can be tricky deciding what should be top of your list. From illuminating interviews to gripping investigations and celebrity gossip, here are some of our favourites.

Train Tracks

As a celebration of 200 years of rail travel in Britain, you couldn’t do better than BBC Radio 3’s “Train Tracks”, said Barney Horner in The New Statesman. This nine-hour extravaganza is presented by Petroc Trelawny as he journeys from Inverness to King’s Cross aboard the Highland Chieftain; at each stop he’s met by another Radio 3 presenter, who introduces music by train-mad composers such as Johann Strauss. There are also specially commissioned pieces, live performances on platforms and interviews with ordinary railway workers. Trelawny, though, is the star, offering a commentary with all “the crispness and limpidity of the Highland brooks and streams he shoots past”. Despite occasional hitches and service delays, the podcast serves as a welcome reminder that Britain is not “a nation in spluttering distress”, whatever the far-right might claim.

Instant Classics

Which Roman emperor does Donald Trump most resemble? That’s a question that Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins are often asked at parties, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer – and it’s one they explore in the first episode of their “fascinating” new podcast “Instant Classics”. Beard insists that for “101 different reasons” it is not useful “to compare the American president with a Roman emperor”. But when really pressed for an answer, she plumps for Elagabalus, who suffocated his guests under an avalanche of rose petals. Higgins nominates Caligula, who made his horse a senator. The podcast, which is infused with the infectious enthusiasm of these two experts, has a main weekly episode (the second is about a day at the charioteer races) and a “quirky second string” – a book club focusing on Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey. It’s like a “free weekly Oxford tutorial from two eccentric dons. I’m in.”

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Wanging On with Graham Norton and Maria McErlane

Graham Norton and Maria McErlane used to run an agony aunt feature on Norton’s Radio 2 show on Saturday mornings. “Now, like almost everything else in the world, their double act has been turned into a podcast,” said James Marriott in The Times. It’s called “Wanging On with Graham Norton and Maria McErlane”, and it’s highly entertaining. The best agony aunts are “sceptical of their correspondents’ motives” and alert to their “subtly self- justifying” omissions, but Norton and McErlane “go one better and treat their correspondents with cheerful hostility”. A man who’s fretting about taking his fiancée to his mother’s house for the first time – owing to the presence there of a number of “lewd pictures” painted by his step-father – is given amusingly short shrift. A woman miffed at not being invited to the wedding of an old friend she hasn’t seen much of in recent years is given a ticking off. The podcast’s only misstep is to invite paid subscribers to offer their own “rather dreary” opinions via voicenote.

Rosebud with Gyles Brandreth

I stumbled across "Rosebud with Gyles Brandreth" while browsing for an alternative to the politics podcasts that I usually listen to while jogging, said Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. And it was a "revelation", twice over. The amiable Brandreth turns out to be an "interviewer of genius, nudging his guests, coaxing them, almost sashaying through the conversation of their lives". I kicked off with the Gary Oldman episode and imagined that he might be "a bit of a self-obsessed thesp". Instead, I discovered him to be a man of uncommon humanity and wisdom – and listening to him describe his turbulent life "moved me, elevated me, edified me". Since then I've listened to episodes featuring John Cleese, Ed Balls, Judi Dench, Chris Patten, David Jason and Boris Johnson. In each case I was impressed by Brandreth's "light, textured, immersive" style. But the Oldman episode provided on that sunny day a moment of unexpected joy that will stay with me for ever; and I am profoundly grateful to both him and Brandreth for providing it.

What's My Age Again? with Katherine Ryan

One of the best podcasts of the year so far is "What's My Age Again? with Katherine Ryan", said The Guardian. In each episode, she interviews a celebrity guest about their age, their attitude to ageing and its impact on their personal or professional lives. She also gets them to take a "nifty test", which involves taking a blood sample to analyse their biological age (which, depending on how well your body is faring, can differ significantly from your chronological age). The results are then discussed with biologist Dr Nichola Conlon, who also sheds light on the science of longevity. Guests so far have included former professional footballer Jill Scott, pop star Sophie Ellis-Bextor and comedian Romesh Ranganathan. "It feels low-stakes enough for casual listening, but – like most things Ryan is involved with – that initial breeziness belies its frankness", as guests open up about adoption, addiction and more.

Chasing the Sound

Genuinely excellent music podcasts are "vanishingly rare", not least because securing the rights to play the music can be tricky, said Fiona Sturges in the Financial Times. Perhaps that's why "Chasing the Sound", a cracking new series by the British writer and director Kirk Flash, comprises so disappointingly few episodes. Each of the four takes a single song and uses it as a springboard for a musical – and literal – journey. The Specials' "Free Nelson Mandela" takes Flash to Soweto, to explore South African dance music. The Gipsy Kings' "Bamboléo", a slice of flamenco pop rooted in Moroccan culture, takes him to Marrakech and the scene that has sprung up there around Arabic rap. The other episodes focus on Mumbai and London. Flash is a superb host, "charismatic and full of witty asides, who uses his own musical memories to spark storytelling and discovery" while interweaving historical and geopolitical context. Encore!

Illuminated: The Organ Symphony

"What does your liver sound like?" Or your kidneys, lungs, heart or brain? Not the bodily squelch of fluids mixing or air pumping. But as music. What if our vital organs, and our relationship to them, were reconceived as musical notes and instruments and composed into a symphony? What might that sound like? The question might seem so eccentric as to be almost nonsensical, said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. But it's the premise for a "bizarre and brilliant" Radio 4 special titled "Illuminated: The Organ Symphony". Maia Miller-Lewis spoke to five people, each with a special relationship with a different one of the five vital organs – one participant had donated a kidney to her husband and written a novella about it; another's lungs had both collapsed within the space of two years. She then made a soundscape of their stories, which composer David Owen Norris turned into classical scores, with each organ assigned a section of the orchestra. Performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra, these pieces are "eerily surreal yet emotive".

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Plain English with Derek Thompson

I realise that “Plain English with Derek Thompson” “sounds like the most boring podcast in the world”, said James Marriott in The Times, hosted by a man with an appropriately “dull moniker”. In fact, Thompson – formerly of The Atlantic – is the very opposite of dull; and so is his outstanding podcast, which is not about grammar but about science and “big ideas”. He talks, for instance, about “super-ageing” with the Alzheimer’s researcher Sandra Weintraub; about our age of overdiagnosis with the doctor Suzanne O’Sullivan; and about the ways in which smartphones are changing our personalities with the data guru John Burn-Murdoch. The series is a “veritable oasis of intelligent thought amid the desert storm of hot air and egotistical blather that is the modern podcasting landscape”. I guess “it would have been unfair of God to have given a man with such interesting ideas an interesting name on top of it all. You can’t have everything.”

Looking for more podcast recommendations? Take your pick from our round-up of the best true crime and political shows.