Josh Widdicombe’s Museum of Pop Culture is ludicrous, uplifting and laugh-out-loud funny

There’s not much to keep you cheerful in January, is there? Especially not this January. But worry not, glumsters, here comes 90s icon Mr Blobby to put a smile on your face, or if not, to fall on to your coffee table, smash up your sitting room and take your mind off everything. Remember Mr Blobby? No? Well, the cheery comedian Josh Widdicombe is here to tell you all about him. Widdicombe, co-host of the chart-topping podcast Parenting Hell, has started a new twice-weekly podcast, Museum of Pop Culture. And Blobby, that anarchic, yellow-spotted, living pink blancmange, is the museum’s first exhibit.

Actually, it’s Mr Blobby and Noel Edmonds, the telly presenter being Blobby’s Dr Frankenstein (Blobby was part of the Saturday evening entertainment show Noel’s House Party) and Widdicombe, with the help of fellow comic Tom Craine, goes in deep. The Rise and Fall of Mr Blobby and Noel Edmonds lasts for four hour-long shows. Before we even get to Edmonds’s career, Widdicombe goes into detail about how British pop radio came about in the 1960s; in the third episode, he takes a long detour into the impressive professional life of Roland Rat, another British on-screen puppet of astonishing popularity. These meanderings are an endearing part of the show: one of the three – three! – Blobby theme parks (Crinkley Bottom, “just off the A303”) was abandoned after a while, only to be reclaimed by urban explorers and used as a venue for illegal raves. Excellent research underpins the many laughs.

I’m usually an impatient listener: most true crime series are two episodes too long for me. And I’m always shouting “get to the point” at news analysis shows. But four hours on Blobby felt right. Widdicombe’s sincere delight in the ludicrousness of British light entertainment is uplifting and there are some properly laugh-out-loud moments. The music production trio Stock Aitken Waterman are his next topic. Perfect.

The singer and actor Marianne Faithfull was the opposite of this particular strain of popular culture – though for me and for many, she is both pop and a star. Jude Rogers, writer of this parish, interviewed her in 2018, and when Faithfull died last year, Rogers dug out her interview tapes. They form the basis of last week’s Archive on 4: Paris with Marianne, and lovely listening they make too. We hear the pair in Faithfull’s Parisian flat, discussing the pictures on the wall (paintings by Anita Pallenberg, a photo of Mick Jagger by the loo), also meeting her housekeeper, and flipping through her past. There are some great additional interviews, with Faithfull’s grandson Oscar Dunbar; musician Ed Harcourt, a frequent collaborator; and, especially, with Sally Oldfield, who was her best friend at school. I loved Oldfield’s descriptions of Faithfull when she was young, how clever and brave she was, how able she was to “jump into opportunities”. So much more generous than the clips from the time. (“And what does Mick Jagger think?” a pompous man asks Faithfull about her theatre work. Ugh.) Faithfull, as we hear from Rogers’ tapes, remained undiminished until the end, and this is a nuanced and insightful record of an often misunderstood artist.

The third series of Self Help from Scottee is out and I recommend it thoroughly. Scottee, an actor, writer and performer now known for his yoga and running as much as his creative work, is an immensely funny and charismatic presence. Self Help, “an amateur’s guide to staying alive”, consists of him going off into nature and walking for hours while talking into his microphone about whatever’s on his mind. It’s not as random as that sounds – he has thought hard about what he wants to discuss – but there are random elements. “Is that a sheep or a cow?” he wonders.

Scottee is on Dartmoor for this series, tramping five hours a day, often through terrible downpours. At one point he uses a pair of his pants to protect his microphone. And he discusses various topics: walking as wellness, the bed as a place of refuge, men in gyms, and “what I want to say about being mental … much more cheery than it sounds!” Every time, he has an angle you don’t quite expect, always from “the perspective of the patient”. The show is made for people who can find the world difficult, through mental health difficulties or not fitting into “acceptable” society. But even the blithest normie would enjoy a few hours spent with Scottee.

Just room for an unusual show on an unusual station. It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned Resonance FM, a place where art meets dedicated presenter-curators. Ben Thompson, an excellent music journalist and ghostwriter, who hosts The London Ear, has made a two-parter about, of all things, Lord Mountbatten, great-uncle of King Charles.

Mountbatten was an undeniably problematic figure, assassinated by the IRA in 1979 on a boat off the coast of Mullaghmore in Ireland. In a junk shop, Thompson found a triple album of the soundtrack of a TV show, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, which he discusses, and intercuts cleverly with music such as Vic Godard’s tribute to Louis Armstrong (chorus: “how do you do it, Louis?”). It’s riveting, both appalling and oddly charming. Rather like Mountbatten himself.

Photograph by Mirrorpix/Alamy