Rnz: The Podcast Hour

A true crime parody in 'This Sounds Serious', 'Extremities' takes you to the world's most isolated places. Solving screen time struggles in the ABC's 'Parental As Anything', and reviewing every Black film ever made in 'The Micheaux Mission'.

Robert Monroe emailed us at pods@rnz.co.nz to tell us about his favorite podcast, "The Micheaux Mission". The show's name comes from the pioneering African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux and in it hosts Len Webb and Vince Williams are on a mission to watch and review every single Black film ever made. We play some of 'The Micheaux Mission' episode about 'Daughters Of The Dust', an independent film from 1991 that's written, directed and produced by Julie Dash, and set on an island off the coast of South Carolina in 1902

How to manage screen time is a delicate topic in many households: like how much is too much? Are some screen-based activities better than others? And how can parents make sure they stick to the rules themselves and don't end up looking like total hypocrites!? The ABC's 'Parental As Anything' tries to find some helpful tips and solutions to everyday parenting dilemmas. And with research suggesting that children in Australia are spending 8 hours every day in front of a screen,the show's host, parenting educator Maggie Dent, asks digital wellbeing expert Dr Kristy Goodwin to tackle some of the challenges of raising kids in the digital age.

With 50 people, 75 buildings, and an occasionally dark past, Pitcairn Island's about as isolated as it's possible to get on Earth; more than 5,500 kilometres from New Zealand and just about slap bang in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean. A new show called 'Extremities' finds out what it's like to live in some of earth's most remote and extreme settlements. And Pitcairn- this tiny British Overseas Territory with close ties to New Zealand- is the show's first stop.

'This Sounds Serious' is a comedy fiction show sending up the true crime genre and its conventions. In 'Missing Melissa', host Gwen Radford finds herself on the trail of America's most missing person: Melissa Turner's a 28-year-old from Idaho who goes AWOL so often she's earned the nickname 'Mel-issing'. Every other time it's happened she's shown up unharmed, but with Melissa going walkabout yet again there are fears that this time something sinister might have happened to her.

Featuring 'The Shrink Next Door', 'Inside The Comedian with David Reed', 'True Crime New Zealand' and 'Borrowed'.

'Borrowed' from Brooklyn Public Library in New York shares the stories happening between the shelves that hold the more than 4 million books in its collection. Like any good library it has reading recommendations, but it's not all about the books! Recorded in the library's own recording studio that you can book with your library card, 'Borrowed' also celebrates the other things libraries do for their communities...like helping to record and archive local history. We play some of an episode of Borrowed called 'Oil Spills and Moldy Paper' hosted by Krissa Corbett Cavouras and Felice Belle, and written and produced by Virginia Marshall.

A new locally produced true crime show- made by a husband and wife team in their spare time- has been rising up the New Zealand podcast charts to appear alongside big names like Joe Rogan, Stuff You Should Know, and The Daily. We speak to Sirius Rust (not his real name!) who initially thought that success would be getting just a few listeners.

Do you ever hear celebrity interviews that sound a little bit forced and scripted, like they're trotting out the same old answers to questions they've heard a hundred times before? If so, try a dose of 'Inside The Comedian' with David Reed. It's an interview show with a refreshing difference: the host and the guests all ad lib and make up the questions and the answers on the fly! We play extracts from two episodes of 'Inside The Comedian' featuring Max and Ivan and John Finnemore,hosted by David Reed and produced by Ed Morrish.

Doctor: patient, lawyer: client- there are some special relationships where we trust a professional to do the right thing and to act in our best interests at all times. The relationship between a psychiatrist and the person going to see them shouldn't be any different. But as 'The Shrink Next Door' shows, things can go badly wrong when we turn to the wrong person for help. We share some of Part 1 of 'The Shrink Next Door' called 'Welcome To The Neighbourhood' written and presented by Joe Nocera and produced by Wondery in partnership with Bloomberg.

'Revisionist History' challenges conventional wisdom. Then what humans can learn from the animal kingdom in '30 Animals That Made Us Smarter', 'The Beautiful Brain' investigates the link between head injuries and sport and music, fandom, and the creative process is explored in 'I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats'.

The Mountain Goats' front man, the singer and songwriter John Darnielle, talks about the songs on his latest album 'In League With Dragons' with the writer and podcaster Joseph Fink. Fink's long-running audio series 'Welcome to Night Vale' imagines life in the very strange desert town of Night Vale, through news reports, announcements and ads on the local radio station.

'The Beautiful Brain' (Audible) is a series about the brain and how it gets affected by the sports we play. The show focusses on the degenerative brain condition called CTE (short for chronic traumatic encephalopathy) which shows up in an increased risk of dementia, problems with memory, depression, aggression and personality changes. We play some of Episode 2 of 'The Beautiful Brain' called 'An Inconvenient Truth' featuring interviews with Dr Bennett Omalu, the man who made the breakthrough linking CTE to repeated blows to the head in sport back in 2002, and Ann McKee, the director of Boston University's CTE Center.

From designing better camouflage to making quieter trains, we humans can learn lots from the animal kingdom. This growing area of research- called biomimicry- is explored in a series called '30 Animals That Made Us Smarter' (BBC World Service).

With the fourth season of Malcolm Gladwell's popular show 'Revisionist History' (Pushkin Industries) starting this week, we share two past episodes. 'Divide and Conquer' tells the story of how a single punctuation mark could have changed the course of US history. And in 'Analysis, Parapraxis, Elvis', Gladwell plays musical detective, enlisting the help of the musician Jack White to understand why Elvis Presley kept botching the lyrics to one of his most famous songs.

Getting to grips with death and bereavement, the problem with tiki bars, why parole fails, an obsession with escalators, and the challenge of designing Indian army rations.

Feeding an army during wartime's always been a huge logistical challenge. And those challenges were magnified for the Indian army in the Second World War. From an Indian podcast called 'The Intersection', which explores stories at the meeting point of culture, science and history, we share some of an episode called 'War And Peas'.

'People Movers' is a one woman passion project, an independent podcast mining a very particular niche: escalators! Lindsey Green was commuting through Melbourne station when she started noticing that some escalators seemed to be moving faster than others, depending on the time of day and how busy it was. So in her spare time outside her job in community radio she's researching this often overlooked form of public transport.

Parole- that intermediate step between prison and freedom- doesn't get much interest or positive coverage in the mainstream press. In the northeastern US state of New Hampshire, about half of all people on parole end up back in prison within three years. So in 'Supervision' (New Hampshire Public Radio) reporter Emily Corwin considers why parole goes wrong for so many people by following someone going through the process himself.

With their blend of kitsch decor, exotic drinks, hula skirts and loud shirts, nothing said fun quite like the tiki bars and Polynesian-themed cocktail lounges that sprang up in the US back in the Fifties and the Sixties. Paola Mardo's an audio producer based in California whose show 'Long Distance' tells stories about the Filipino diaspora. She first got interested in tiki bars when she found out about all the Filipino bartenders who got jobs at these drinking spots. She even did her university thesis about them! And with these bars now experiencing a bit of a revival, she reviews their problematic cultural heritage.