The Monocle Weekly

Big fan of the Magazine and, by enxtension, of the podcast, but am not blinkered enough to be able to ignore any shortcomings. In this case it is culture editor Rob Bound's selection of music. Rob other cultural work is highly recommended but muscially it is vapid & without imagination. Most is nordic or japanese reworking of soft jazz. Of course, music reviews are aplenty and I suppose credit should be given to any attempt to avoid the obvious high profile releases, but the selection is so soft as to be akin to elevator music. Sorry Rob!

Great podcast... I never miss one.. the best in news and culture around..

Every week this show gets better! Already a well established, consistently improving internet based radio station.

The new, two-hour format of the Monocle Weekly, launched in conjunction with the new radio station, is unfortunately a step backwards from what had been a pretty solid podcast. The first edition last week was blighted by the foolish decision to include "news" headlines at the beginning; fine if you're listening live, but useless when you're listening three days later (the fact that the newsreader kept fluffing his lines didn't help). In this week's show they've ditched the news, thankfully, but problems remain: the sound quality is pretty poor, and the slow fade out, then fade back in, on the musical numbers is irritating beyond belief. If you don't have the rights to the music, just play a quick snippet then fade quickly out, as you did before. The jingles between sections are also a bit of a mess -- there's one moment when, after about six seconds of silence, the jingle played over the introduction of the next section, which sounded pretty amateurish. Hopefully these things get sorted out as I was enjoying the Weekly in its previous incarnation, and so far the new version is not proving its worth.