Podcast review: The India Hicks Podcast

Hands up: Who thought Queen Elizabeth could be so practical?

I’ve been reading that the figures for podcast listenership have fallen since the coronavirus lockdown got under way in March. Apparently, regular listeners are falling out of the habit now that their usual work commute has been scuppered.

If it’s of any comfort to podcast producers and their advertisers, this listener will need a lot more than a global pandemic to put paid to her addiction to podcasts.

Bus commutes or no, I have no interest in being left alone with my thoughts all day.

However, I do need to shake things up a bit. I’m a bit too partial to that genre of pods where two vaguely woke middle-aged bros yammer back and forth about a subject. I’m a single straight woman, and now that I work from home, this is a substitute, I think, for the banter that used to be exchanged between colleagues in the office (if anybody remembers what an ‘office’ was).

I quite liked the rawness of Guys We F**ked, and I have a soft spot for the emotional honesty of My Favorite Murder when hosts Karen and Georgia discuss their own issues with mental health.

But I think I may have a new fave: The India Hicks Podcast.

Host India is the daughter of Lady Pamela Hicks, who was bridesmaid at the wedding at Princess Elizabeth in 1947 and had a front-row seat for some of the key moments in the Royal Family’s life over the next few decades. (India Hicks herself was a young bridesmaid at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981.)

If it’s a window into a different world, it has also left me with the impression that Queen Elizabeth is reassuringly down-to-earth and surprisingly ordinary.

Lady Pamela recalls that the then Princess Elizabeth dropped the use of kid-leather gloves, favouring cotton gloves instead.

‘She said, it’s such a waste,’ Lady Pamela says of the young royal some seven decades ago. Given how grubby gloves got over the course of a day, kid gloves were simply impractical, the princess noted.

‘So much easier just to have white cotton and then you just have new ones every morning.’

I’ve heard before that Queen Elizabeth is quite frugal in her personal habits but I’m most impressed that she apparently was able to switch from a wasteful convention that was perfectly acceptable to her contemporaries to a new practice that was more efficient and sustainable.

I have a fair idea that The India Hicks podcast is going to be a fixture in my life for the foreseeable. In the meantime, drop me a line if you know of anywhere that’s selling cotton gloves: with summer just around the corner, I think the former Princess Elizabeth may have hit on a partial solution to halting the spread of the coronavirus.

Anyway, Lady Pamela’s entire childhood and early life sounds impossibly glamorous - the perfect distraction at this time. Meanwhile, the relaxed nature of the format, with India guiding the conversation by gently prompting her mother, makes me feel like I’ve been invited to a leisurely afternoon tea.

* The India Hicks Podcast is produced by Lisa Francesca Nand and edited by Alex George