Where Are You Going? podcast review — a simple question for strangers prompts unexpected answers

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best ones. Nine years ago, the audio producer Catherine Carr took her microphone outside and put the same question to people in various parts of the world: where are you going? Their answers made up the terrific BBC World Service series Where Are You Going?, though after 16 episodes it mysteriously came to an end. Now, happily, it has been reborn as a podcast via the indie production company Loftus Media, with the same title and set-up of Carr ambling around with recording equipment, stopping strangers to ask about their plans.

Some of these encounters last 15 minutes, others are more fleeting. The first episode opens on a train from London to Brighton where Carr gets talking to a group of men on their way to catch a flight to Málaga. Once there, they will join fellow Brits in a bar to watch the Cheltenham Festival, one of the highlights of the British horseracing calendar. “It’s a northern thing,” says one of their number, acknowledging the oddness of travelling to Spain to watch a sporting event on television that is taking place back home. “You have breakfast, then you choose the horses and then you go to another bar and watch the races,” he continues. “By the end of the afternoon half of [us] are on the floor.”

Elsewhere, we find Carr in Grantchester Meadows in Cambridge where she meets a group of wild swimmers and a trio of school friends on a fishing trip. In Park Slope in Brooklyn, she encounters a defence-attorney-turned-photographer who has popped out to buy doughnuts to take back to her husband and toddler for breakfast. And on the London Underground she talks to a stylishly dressed, heavily tattooed man who works as an anchor engineer on superyachts, several of them Russian-owned and one (he says) belonging to Jeff Bezos. This man, who like everyone else here remains nameless, underwent three years of therapy after witnessing a colleague gruesomely killed on the job. Nonetheless, his happy place is underwater and has been ever since he went oyster-diving as a child in Tahiti. “I was the youngest oyster diver on the island,” he says, wistfully.

Along with strangers’ stories, Where Are You Going? finds beauty in the sounds that those who live with them invariably tune out: the hiss and crunch of shingle on Brighton beach; car horns in Brooklyn; the rattle and shriek of London Underground trains. It’s a reflection of Carr’s warm but direct approach that the people she accosts nearly always respond with openness. A simple “hello” and a coaxing tone elicit some remarkable confessions as well as more universal gripes about, for instance, the soaring cost of housing. These capsule portraits are at once ordinary yet utterly compelling and unique. They remind us that everyone has a story to tell, if only we think to ask them.

whereareyougoing.co.uk