Instead of listening to the ones on the website, I found the podcast on Spotify and played their episode titled “Maps.” The image is just a person with their eyes closed, and has a pattern of clouds being closed by the stars in the background. The break in the clouds probably represents some kind of a path, the “short cut,” and maybe the person closing their eyes enjoys listening to the different documentaries the podcast features. The tagline is “Short documentaries and adventures in sound,” which I would say is completely accurate. This episode presented three completely different stories, and how maps can relate to one’s life, not just directions for getting around a physical place.

The format consists of some interviews, but it’s mostly one person telling a story. The interviews the episode does have are the host probing so the documentary subject explains their topic a little more. It’s split into three noticeable sections: first is a story about how someone started writing about the Mario map and trying to explore it in real life, when they started writing about their mother’s early death, and the grief it caused for them. The second story was the one I found the most interesting, which was like a robotic GPS voice from the late 2000s/early 2010s that would announce significant life events as someone drove around their hometown. For example, when the GPS got past their first boyfriend’s house, the driver probably wanted to reminisce and stop for a moment, but the GPS warned not to, as they may still be living there with their parents.

The length of the podcast is pretty reasonable at around 30 minutes, which is probably meant to be listened to on a commute. However, since it’s broken into a few smaller stories, it can probably be listened to on a short walk outside and continued without losing anything by stopping.

As I mentioned previously, there are three different stories. They don’t really mirror a well-known structure, though. They follow the format of a map, and in the case of the first one, a game map. The first story used different Mario levels to describe phases in life, from the map itself to which world Mario may be in. The second one told the story of a person within a space by navigating around the space and pointing out significant events. I found this one really interesting, as you can kind of imagine it happening to yourself, rather than telling a story that you cannot really relate to. It invokes a kind of spatial memory, so if I went back to my high school I might think “oh that was the room I failed that exam in” or “oh that was the lunch table I sat at my freshman year.” Even just driving around a neighborhood, you can think of good times and bad times you may have had in certain areas, just by looking at a place. And, with a GPS giving you directions, you can visualize where you are from its directions.

In terms of how the podcast is supported, it has a website and seems to be available on many major podcast providers. I can’t find social media for it, but I’m assuming since it’s a part of the BBC Radio podcast family, it won’t need as much marketing to be successful as an independent podcast.