Podcast Canon: Retreat to the stealthily cozy Wooden Overcoats

There’s no use beating around the bush, it feels like some new strain of malevolence has been unleashed on the world of late and it’s changing the way I think about podcasts. Sure, things have felt rather bleak for years, but 2025 is somehow still plumbing new depths. My listening habits started to reject anything that reflected the realities of the present moment. On the other side of a global pandemic, and now enmired in the political and social morass of the day, escapism has become more important than ever. And so this feels like the exact right moment to share one of my favorite audio oases for respite in troubling times. It’s found in a tiny village located on an island called Piffling out in the English Channel, home to this month’s entry into the Podcast Canon, the superlatively cozy British audio sitcom Wooden Overcoats. 

Created and largely written by David K. Barnes, Wooden Overcoats sports a premise so archetypal of classic British sitcoms that it’s hard to believe it didn’t exist already. In the tiny village of Piffling Vale, the only funeral home is run by Rudyard Funn and his twin sister Antigone, until one day Eric Chapman, a charming stranger with a mysterious past, arrives on the island and opens up a competing mortuary practically next door. This being a sitcom of course hijinks ensue. Piffling’s motley collection of villagers fall for Chapman seemingly immediately, igniting an asymmetric war of sorts between the misanthropic Rudyard and his effortlessly charming counterpart which simmers throughout the series’ 34 main-feed episodes across four seasons. 

The ongoing adversarial relationship setup is a tricky one to navigate in serialized fiction because audiences risk checking out if they don’t find themselves capable of rooting for both characters. Luckily the show manages to strike an agreeable equilibrium between Rudyard’s pinch-penny pragmatism and Chapman’s annoying perfection by fleshing them out considerably. Much of this is down to the winning performances from the core cast. Felix Trench’s Rudyard is winningly peevish, a man who has seemingly never had to try at anything in his life facing down someone who has seemingly never failed at anything. Trench makes Rudyard obtuse in all the right ways, the metallic tang of his tone signaling the bland, ordered precision with which he sees the world. Tom Crowley’s Chapman on the other hand is pure Golden Retriever, gleefully heightening in search of continued adulation, but never fully escaping the forlorn glimmer in his eyes. 

Rounding out the main quartet, Beth Eyre manages to turn Antigone from a sort of Edward Gorey fantasy—a mortician at once so pale as to be nearly translucent, yet so preternaturally swaddled in shadows that she often escapes notice in otherwise unoccupied rooms—into a fully realized woman constantly at odds with her desires to exist in the world and run far away from it at the same time. Ciara Baxendale’s turn as the Funn Funerals’ sole employee Georgie Crusoe is maybe the show’s real heart however. Georgie is among the more normal residents of the village, but she finds herself inexplicably loyal to the Funn siblings, turning them into a sort of chosen family unit for her. They’re a constant source of friction in her life, but in spite of it all no one makes her feel quite as useful or appreciated. 

In addition to the core four characters, the world of Wooden Overcoats is filled with a cadre of characters that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Restoration comedy (complimentary), in both personalities and names alike. The town’s fretfully agnostic clergyman Reverend Wavering (voiced by Andy Secombe), the ineffectual mayor Desmond Desmond (portrayed by Steve Hodson in Season one, and Sean Baker for the remainder of the run), more interested in getting the village upgraded into a town than in performing any actual responsibilities of the job, and Miss Scruple (Ellie Dickens), the local prudish scold. The audio medium allows the show’s creators to make Piffling Vale into a vibrant and varied world with minimal expense. Whether it’s Chapman’s funeral home growing to eventually encompass a cafe and a monorail, or the arthouse cinema dedicated to only screening the most depressing French films, a local sweets shop run by the island’s constable, and two hospitals forced to share the island’s lone doctor.

A little detour, if you’ll allow, to discuss audio fiction in podcasting more broadly. As a critic I spent the better part of my career either focused on narrative audio documentary podcasts or improvised comedy programs, but gave short shrift to fiction podcasting. I think that part of it is a matter of personal taste, but equally I think it comes down to a certain alchemy in these shows’  production, something I think of as a “grand unified theory” of audio drama.