The Radio Show Reviews That Never Happened

At the beginning of the year, I briefly considered devoting the last entry of each month to a review of a different programme from BBC Sounds. I listen to a lot of their audio comedy and drama, so it seemed like a workable idea at the time.

I abandoned the plan soon after, however, and there are a few reasons behind that decision. The saved draft from 19 January 2026 included a list of the shows I thought I might cover. Here they are in the order they were written down:

The list also illustrates the first problem with the idea: whatever I reviewed would need to be available at the time. Like most streaming platforms, BBC Sounds removes programmes after a set period.

The entries with links were still active at the time of writing this entry, so if I’d decided in January that the topic for May would be Clare in the Community, readers wouldn’t be able to listen for themselves.

Which brings me to the second factor behind the abandonment: how much time I have available to review them.

When I listened to each of these programmes for the first time, it was on an informal basis where I wasn’t necessarily taking in every word but gaining a general sense of the plot. By contrast, an effective review needs active listening, for which I would need to go back and take notes. Fukushima, for instance, contains more than three hours of script, time I doubt I would be able to spare.

When I was studying for my M.Litt Writing Practice & Study degree, I was roped into writing three book reviews for the university magazine. I say three, but for one of these, I’d written the review before the tutor told me she’d only lent me the book for interest; it was still accepted for publication, so my effort wasn’t wasted. It was rewarding to see the finished product, but there was so much input for an article that took five minutes to read.

My third and final reason is the most detailed one.

Let me take you back to a banner advert I used to encounter on the Internet in the 1990s. The headline was Tired of seeing movies based on one guy’s opinion? I’ve long forgotten the name of the service, but it would have been an early aggregator for audience reviews.

At the time, I thought this was a fantastic idea. If I was unsure about Titanic or The Matrix, then instead of relying on the film review in the paper, I could see what others thought before buying a ticket.

But with the crowd-as-reviewer model now the more dominant one, I can see the flaw in hindsight. That one guy, as they put it, generally understood structure, nuance and how to convey this to readers. He was worth a dozen armchair critics who instead based their reviews on the attractiveness of Kate Winslet or had a bee in their bonnet about the science of the titular Matrix.

As such, I asked myself whether we really need any more reviews, albeit in a more niche art-form than cinema. Taken with the other two reasons, my answer – at least for the moment – is in the negative.