Best radio of 2015: Five top programmes and podcasts

From Radio 2 to BBC World Service and iTunes

On Air With Annie Nightingale, Radio 2

This glorious two-parter on the First Lady of Radio showed how a young musical journalist barged her way into the then male-dominated Radio 1 and changed the face of music broadcasting for ever. Fifty years later and Nightingale’s still showing the little blighters how it’s done.

The John Peel Lecture, BBC6 Music

Brian Eno, aka the Professor of Pop, told us that “art is everything you don’t have to do” in one of the most thoughtful and illuminating Peel lectures of recent years. These were big ideas delivered with wit, warmth and accessibility.

100 Women season, BBC World Service

The season of programmes on BBC World News and BBC World Service gave urgent and articulate voice to women of all ages, races and backgrounds. It had nothing to do with marginalising men and everything to do with highlighting female experience across the world.

Serial Season Two, Serialpodcast.org

The return of Sarah Koenig’s hit whodunit – in this case more of a why-did-he-do-it – briefly broke the internet, such was the rush to download it. With its confident storytelling and clever cliffhangers, this new series about the Bowe Bergdahl case proved that Serial is no one hit wonder.

Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review, Radio 5 Live

Little can compare to the film critic Mark Kermode in outraged mode, and his extended rant about Entourage, the movie version of the hit TV series (described here as “a foul, soul-sucking, horrible vacuum of vile emptiness”) was completely electrifying in its fury.

Turkey of the year

Conversation with Alanis Morissette, iTunes

The singer’s self-help podcast, in which she shared navel-gazey, jargon-flled thoughts on subjects including art, spirituality, psychology, health and love, was bum-clenchingly awful and made this critic long for an early death.