As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of BBC radio programs. Yes, yes, there’s no doubt that the news reporting is dependably full of reflexive anti-Israel and anti-American bias, but most of the cultural programming is just on a whole other level.  There’s a level of intelligence and respect for the audience that you just don’t find in American media, and yes, friends, that includes NPR.
I only listen to podcasts, and only when I exercise. It’s turned into a mind-game, psychological-association kind of thing. I don’t think of exercise time as “Oh, I have to go exercise now. Bleh.”…partly because I don’t hate exercising at all, and secondly because I’ve trained myself to think of the time instead as, “Oh, I get to go listen to my shows now.”
(What is it, 1962, and I’m waiting for the soaps? At least I didn’t say “stories.”)
The only bad thing about the BBC programs – which is probably part of the reason they’re good – is that the series aren’t 52-weeks a year in an unending cycle. Just like the BBC television programs, they’re presented in shorter seasons, with more focus.
My favorite – a program which I absolutely love and fantasize about imitating in a “Catholic” media setting (dream on) is In Our Time, a program that’s focused on history. Melvyn Bragg hosts. Each week there’s a topic and three experts are brought on to discuss it. The experts have contributed possible questions and directions of discussion beforehand, Bragg does his own research, but the final product is anything but canned. The experts are all passionate about their subjects, often have divergent views and always have their pet theories, about which they would obviously go on if Bragg weren’t there to hurry them along.
Well, the long summer In Our Time drought finally ended last week. Miracles was the topic – not “are they real” or “Why do ignorant religious wackos still believe in them, please tell us Bill Maher?” but simply the way the miraculous has been understood in Judaism and Christianity. The experts varied in their attitudes about the veracity of the miraculous, and despite their reticence about that particular point, you could tell who was willing to give more or less credence to the miraculous – here the person most generous in her understanding of miracles was Janet Soskice, Reader in Philosophical Theology at Cambridge University.
Each week’s programs are available for listening on the Internet forever, but for download only for a week, so you have about 12 hours, at this writing, to download “Miracles.” The new program, airing Thursday, concerns the Translation Movement:

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the movement of classical Greek ideas out of the Byzantine Empire and into the Islamic world from the 9th century onwards. The infusion of Greek thought introduced the Islamic world to new concepts and required the creation of new words, before being transferred through Arabic into the Latin of western Europe.

Also good:
Start the Week – which begins again next Monday. Writers and other figures come on to discuss their work, which usually have current relevance (the book is being published that week, the gallery show is opening). The thing I like about the program is that once the host queries one guest for a bit, each of the other guests have their turn, having done their homework of read the book or seen the film in question as well.
Excess Baggage – A travel show – always interesting. It introduced me to James Holman, the fascinating “blind traveller” of the early 19th century.
Great Lives is another favorite, which an unusual structure – a well-known contemporary figure is invited to discuss an historical personage whom they particularly admire, assisted by an expert on that. For example, this was a good one:

George Osborne, who became shadow chancellor at the tender age of just 33, chooses the founder of the Tudor dynasty, Henry VII. The winner of the battle of Bosworth was famous for his attention to the accounting books, but was he really the founder of the modern state? Dr Steven Gunn offers an academic’s view.

Unfortunately, these shows aren’t archived – so each episode is available online listening and downloading for seven days from broadcast. This week, just aired on Tuesday:

The editor of Private Eye, Ian Hislop, is this week’s guest, and his choice of life is that of fellow satirist William Hogarth. The art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon joins the discussion.

Others: The Best of Natural History Radio. Documentaries from the BBC World Service. Any of the science programs.
In comparison, most of what airs in the US falls short. Dramatically. In the American context it seems impossible to communicate without irony, without knowing winks, without ideology, without trying to relate every single topic, no matter how obscure to contemporary politics, alerting us to how those right-wingers have always been the ones to watch out for or the battle against obscurantist religion is still with us, isn’t it? Sure, the BBC World Service is one to watch out for and is undependable, to say the least,  in certain areas of reporting, but these cultural programs just can’t be matched.
(There’s also the music programming, naturally. Most of that is not available for download, only computer-listening, unfortunately. The Early Music Show is my favorite: “A Musical Day in the Life of Louis XIV” – who can beat that?)