Podcasts of the week: Slavery, Britney and the blues
Featuring Pieces of Britney, Human Resources and The Vanishing of Harry Pace
- 1. The Week’s pick of the best podcasts to listen to in July 2021
- 2. July podcast picks: online rage, taboos and obesity
- 3. July podcast picks: Slavery, Britney and the bluesCurrently Reading
- 4. July podcast picks: from racism in football to self-driving cars
- 5. July podcast picks: on Knausgaard, music and the Raj

Britney Spears performing at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards
Scott Gries/ImageDirect
Spotify’s terrific Human Resources podcast explores the formative role of slavery in shaping various aspects of British life – from our buildings and cultural institutions to what we eat and drink, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer. In recent weeks the series has looked at subjects including Robert Peel, the origins of the Greene King brewery, and how Liverpool is “grappling with its slave-trading past”.
The presenter is the journalist and author Moya Lothian-McLean, who grew up in Herefordshire, the daughter of a white British mother and a black Caribbean father. She’s an “engaging” presenter, with a knack for conducting nuanced and illuminating interviews that make us reconsider our assumptions. Any teenagers frustrated by the way they’re taught history at school “should try Human Resources for another approach”.
Much has been written and said about the US pop star Britney Spears, and the “extraordinary legal conservatorship” that has controlled her life since 2008. Even so, a gripping new podcast on the subject is well worth a listen, said Patricia Nicol in The Sunday Times. The “sharp-witted” eight-part BBC documentary Pieces of Britney shot to the top of the download charts when it was released at the start of the month.
Writer and presenter Pandora Sykes begins the “riveting, troubling” tale in 2008, then winds back to chart Spears’s rise to fame from “hardscrabble Louisiana childhood to being the pop princess of post-Aids, post-Clinton America, to a humiliated, silenced woman funding her own sequestration”. Sykes “makes a compelling moral case” for the story’s importance. My only caveat: the dramatised vignettes of scenes from Spears’s life are “toe-curling”, with the actors “sounding like interlopers from a Tennessee Williams play”.
PIECES OF BRITNEY my 8-part documentary for @BBCRadio4 drops as a boxset on @BBCSounds tomorrow. It's the story of Britney Jean Spears + how we treat women in the public eye. Produced by the brilliant @AnneIsGrr @Yodashenko. Subscribe/ trailer > https://t.co/AWXyFXTnDr
— Pandora Sykes (@PINsykes) June 30, 2021
The US blues pioneer Harry Pace made a “huge contribution to US culture – then seemingly vanished”, said Fiona Sturges in the FT. An outstanding new podcast from WNYC, the makers of the acclaimed 2019 series Dolly Parton’s America, asks how and why it happened.
A hundred years ago Pace, a young African-American businessman, started Black Swan, a groundbreaking record label featuring only black artists, and with Ethel Waters’s Down Home Blues transformed American music. But within two years, white rivals had squeezed him out of business. Pace sold up, left the music industry and retrained as a lawyer.
The second episode of The Vanishing of Harry Pace is the story of the post-Black Swan years. We follow Harry’s life to the very end when he makes a decision that his family wouldn't discover for generations. Listen now in the Radiolab feed on @Spotify: https://t.co/HrLnBXPAFO pic.twitter.com/XiFXNLfC7b
— Radiolab (@Radiolab) June 19, 2021
Like the Parton series, The Vanishing of Harry Pace “documents one person’s rise while telling a broader story about society and culture”. This five-part series “is rich in detail and immaculately produced and researched. The narrative rarely ends up where you think it will and provides a masterclass in storytelling.”
- 1The Week’s pick of the best podcasts to listen to in July 2021
- 2July podcast picks: online rage, taboos and obesity
- 3July podcast picks: Slavery, Britney and the blues - currently reading
- 4July podcast picks: from racism in football to self-driving cars
- 5July podcast picks: on Knausgaard, music and the Raj
Continue Reading
- 1The Week’s pick of the best podcasts to listen to in July 2021
- 2July podcast picks: online rage, taboos and obesity
- 3July podcast picks: Slavery, Britney and the blues - currently reading
- 4July podcast picks: from racism in football to self-driving cars
- 5July podcast picks: on Knausgaard, music and the Raj