I looked, and there's more than 1000 available episodes of IOT on the BBC, they're all (at least every one I've heard) brilliant.

I'm curious if anyone here has any particular favourites?

I remember really enjoying the Plankton episode because it took me the classic IOT route of "That doesn't sound interesting, but I'll give it a listen" to looking up all the reading list.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001r1t5

I recently listened to the episode on The Antikythera Mechanism and found it quite fun - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0024x0g

Also, I wanted to mention something interesting - back when LLM-driven applications were just emerging, someone posted on Hacker News about how they categorized In Our Time episodes using the Dewey Decimal System with LLMs. Cool stuff - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35073603

As I've listened to more and more of it, I start to gravitate not to particular topics, but to particular experts. There are many guests who are regulars when topics in their field come up, and the good ones make any topic in that field interesting. For instance, if there's an episode about religious history and Martin Palmer is on it, it's bound to be a banger (listened to one on Augustine's Confessions recently, for instance, and it was great). Same with Ancient Greece and Paul Cartledge and Angie Hobbs. If I'm looking for something to listen to, I just put one of those three into the search field of my podcast player, and I'm never disappointed.

I'll do the opposite: The P vs NP episode is aboslutely horrid. Probably the first and last time that they had any informatics people on the show. One major issue is that the experts didn't explain what we mean by "hard". Melvyn thought, as normal people do, that 'hard problem' means you've gotta be real clever to solve it, not that it takes a lot of steps to solve (and how the number of steps increases as the problem gets larger). When they had the example of purchasing Christmas gifts as a stand-in for maximum bipartite matching, coupled with Melvyn's misconception, the train wreck was a fact.

That's my memory of the event, that was a frustrating lunch walk.

There is an episode on the Epic of Gilgamesh which is absolutely fascinating. Highly recommended.

I can't pick a favourite, but "Consciousness" (1999) definitely sticks in my mind as one of the most amusing due to the prickly debate.

The one about Victorian sewers is fantastic.

One of my favorites was the one on the evolution of crocodiles [1].

Aside from being surprisingly fascinating, I thought the guests were excellent. IOT's academics can sometimes be bone dry (sometimes not a problem if the subject matter is good, but sometimes it can sink the episode), and in this episode all three guests were both energetic and articulate, and there was some good banter.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000zmhf

Calendar was brilliant. I think it was the first time I fully appreciated the misery of the human mind in the face of various orbit periods that aren't simple integer ratios of one another. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00548m9

Great Fire of London too. Pepys burying his cheese! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ft63q

Politeness. Social barriers were coming down, you were interacting with people of different rank, how do you not get into a swordfight? Also, the letter from the wife complaining about her husband! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004y29m

I think they did all the big interesting things in history and then struggled with a lot of minor events that were hard to find interesting angles on.

I remember one about randomness/probability was my favourite

The Photon

Climate Change

Cryptography

Electrickery

The one about Shakespeare featuring Harold Bloom.

The Taiping Rebellion

Crocodiles