Hello friends! Do you fancy listening to “a new type of time-shifted amateur radio”? No? How about a brilliant podcast? Of course you do.

Fifteen years ago, Macworld, a magazine for fans of Apple products, announced, with limited fanfare, that Apple was about to add podcasts to iTunes, its music download offer. Unfortunately, few readers knew what a podcast was, hence Macworld’s “time-shifted radio” definition. In June 2005, the idea of having thousands of ready-to-hear audio shows, anything from true-crime documentaries to all-chums-together comedy, to up-to-the-minute news to gripping drama to revealing interviews, and being able to listen to these shows whenever you want, wherever you are – well, that wasn’t quite happening. So Apple’s move didn’t seem important. Nor did the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary added “podcast” to its lexicon in the same year, after tech journalist Ben Hammersley came up with the term in 2004 (which was also the year the BBC launched a downloadable version of In Our Time).Podcasts were new. It takes time for the new to become everyday.

Podcasts were mostly unheard of, except by the tech savvy. They were either downloadable versions of existing radio shows or they were chatty riffs, made by amateurs who knew how to upload their aural blogs online. Still, they were interesting. At least to me. Soon after podcasts’ iTunes debut, I started a new job as the Observer’s radio critic. Great job – except there was a limited choice of programmes for me to review. Radio schedules rarely changed. Presenters stayed in their jobs for years. The BBC dominated speech radio, aside from phone-ins; hardly any other broadcaster had the money to make documentaries or drama.

Podcasts rescued me from aural monotony; I wrote my first piece about them in the summer of 2006. Apparently Coke Machine Glow and The Dawn and Drew Show were the ones to look out for (me neither, now). The podcast I do recall from then is The Ricky Gervais Show; this dominated the brand new iTunes podcast chart for weeks. Initially free, in early 2006 it switched to a pay-per-listen model and proved both a forerunner and an outlier: since then, much podcast uptake has been driven by comedy, but most shows are still free to listeners, paid for by adverts that appear during episodes.

Today, the iTunes podcast chart is bustling with old hands and new kids on the block. Here are No Such Thing As a Fish, Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place, That Peter Crouch Podcast, Katherine Ryan: Telling Everybody Everything. Here are sections for new and noteworthy, cultivating calm, keeping the kids busy. There are lists of the top 10 episodes, top 10 shows; all aside from the 19 other regular categories: news, arts, true crime... So many podcasts! There are oodles of shows, too many to ever get through.

(Adapted from https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/may/03/its-boom-time-for-podcasts-but-will-going-mainstream-kill-the-magic)

In the underlined sentencesin the second paragraph, there are ____verbs used in the pasttense.