Do men and women need different podcasts?

Do men and women need different podcasts? The notion goes against the unisex, every-sex, what-is-sex-anyway culture we have come to inhabit. Yet this week we find, on the BBC no less, a podcast dedicated to men’s problems and one satirising women’s problems. Some would say the pushback has begun.

Geoff Norcott’s Working Men’s Club is a recorded stand-up comedy act performed to a studio audience in Leeds. Norcott describes it as a place ‘to discuss proper bloke stuff’, by which he means beer, sport and masturbation (cue laughter), but much more than that, men’s physical, mental and emotional health (initial silence). He jibes at the male habit of squashing feelings and ignoring signs to visit the doctor. He makes a serious point, listens for the quiet, then makes an intentionally unsubtle effort to sweeten the pill with some laddish banter.

Could it be that women on the whole just aren’t as troubled as men?

It’s clever to play to a stereotypically tough crowd and to play up the toughness of that crowd. The audience certainly enjoyed Norcott’s gag about Leeds being a place ‘where sharing your mental health problems means sighing just before downing your pint’. Here, men are offered ‘a sort of safe space’ in which to explore ‘the actual experience of being male’. They’ll never bite, I thought on hearing these words at the start of the first episode. I soon realised I was wrong.

Some members of the studio audience readily admitted to hiding behind bravado. ‘I think I could take on the Sun’, says one chap, self-knowingly, about why he is among the 70 per cent of men who fail to use sunscreen regularly. (Norcott proposes rebranding it ‘Sun Bastard’ or ‘Radiation Armour’.) It is clear that, beneath the skin, many of these men feel just as uneasy as Norcott says.

The podcast offered a masterclass in knowing your audience. Laughs at women becoming ‘a bit screechy’ on hen-dos, being melodramatic when nursing hangovers and putting cushions everywhere were guaranteed. The northern crowd couldn’t care less that the phrase ‘man up’ has become poisonous in London media circles. Norcott’s proposal for reclaiming it to mean something along the lines of being less moany about the little things, getting on with it and showing some pride sounded like a pretty good tonic for the general male malaise.

The women’s offering, Time of the Week, is quite a different proposition. Sian Clifford, of Fleabag fame, plays fictional radio host Chloe Slack. Her programme – a spoof of Loose Women and the like – has been launched to put the ‘she’ in ‘BB-she radio’ and the ‘her’ in ‘report-er’. Slack is ready and waiting when women – by which I mean actresses – call in to share their problems.

Clifford is brilliant, but too often the series veers into the ridiculous and falls short of being funny. A consciously childless interviewee transpires to be a mother of two intent on disowning her sprogs for being too boring and sticky. The ‘British kiss’ is introduced as an alternative to the French. It involves inserting a sausage between your kisser’s lips. An outbreak of a new illness affecting only women hits the news. Its main symptom is the growth of feathers. The comedy works best when it addresses recognisable sources of tension between the sexes and generations. Do women feel the cold more than men, asks Slack, and are they thus victims of the office air-con? ‘We put one of each in a fridge to find out.’ A woman bored of scrolling for dates on her phone goes from looking down to looking up and instantly falls in love with a tree. ‘We’re both very chill, outdoorsy and have roots in Sussex,’ she gloats. Gen-Z influencers discover a new fashion trend inspired by the bubonic plague. The lewk, as they’d say, is sick.

The series does a decent job of mocking the inanity of most existing women’s programmes. What it fails to do is to make you think meaningfully about the women behind the jokey problems featured. Could it be that women on the whole just aren’t as troubled as men? Listening to the two programmes side by side, it’s difficult not to lean towards that conclusion.