Podcast of the week: The Creep Dive

The experience of listening to a podcast is usually solitary: it’s just you and your headphones. So even incredibly popular podcasts can just not land for one person, when thousands of others are bubbling with enthusiasm for it.

For example, I never managed to connect entirely to the massively successful My Favourite Murder – even though it was composed of elements that, technically, I should love, notably smart women analysing the darker elements of humanity. Something about it always leaves me feeling on the outside of the conversation, instead of inside, in the subculture of it, belonging. So, when some of the smartest women I know told me that The Creep Dive had them hooked, that they were binge-listening and re-listening to episodes, I was hesitant. But then, I started listening and couldn't stop.

The stories they tell vary from the incredibly sad, to the incredibly weird

Cassie Delaney, Sophie White and Jen O’Dwyer host this immersive chat show, each episode about an hour long. Each host brings a story – a scandalous, supernatural or creepy headline that you may or may not recognise from the news or daytime television circuit – and deep dives it. They bring you all the background information to the clickbait: they’ve read the Wikipedia articles, and sometimes entire books on their subjects. This makes for enthusiastic, detailed storytelling, in the scrappy and lively tone of three very smart women sitting around a table together.

Group dynamics

What I massively appreciate is their group dynamic – whenever one or other of the hosts veers off subject, they’re immediately reined in, quite tenderly, by one of the others.

‘Jennifer Aniston cried in my lap’: the inside story of Friends

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Where would you shoot a child, the head or the heart?

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Shipwrecked: chiselled dullards, mouthy megalomaniacs and Kush

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The general feel of the podcast is of three people who want to be together, who want to talk about these awful and strange things and that enthusiasm is really easy to like. I am always cautious about offering this particular colour of recommendation but I found it uncommonly hilarious. Delaney, White and O'Dwyer's chemistry carries down the airwaves and I found myself laughing along with them: precisely the feeling I could never quite access from My Favourite Murder.

The stories they tell vary from the incredibly sad, to the incredibly weird, but they handle the darker and more violent stories with great respect. They cover subjects like conversion therapy with really detailed research and an unflinching dignity towards the people who have lost their lives to it; they are always reverent of those who have survived violence. However, when it comes to descriptions of Travis the chimp who violently mauled a human who displeased him, they are in ribbons of laughter and I challenge any listener to get through that segment without joining them. This is a rare show and I found myself unable to stop listening. I’ll be creep diving with them for quite some time.