Hold or Fold, a series about gambling made by the Prison Radio Association, a charity best known for broadcasting into prisons, was named Podcast of the Year at the British Podcast Awards 2026 on Thursday 1 October. It also took Best Factual, ahead of entries from the BBC, the big commercial networks and every celebrity-fronted show in the room.
The tenth British Podcast Awards, held at Indigo at The O2 in Greenwich and hosted by the comedian Jake Bhardwaj, handed out 31 awards. A small charity production taking the top prize is the headline. The full list says more about where British podcasting now stands: Bauer and JamPot took the mainstream categories with Pete Wicks and Jamie Laing, the BBC World Service was named best network, and the one award decided by the public went to a pair of YouTubers.
The winners
The Prison Radio Association is a registered charity that runs National Prison Radio and has twice been named Audio Production Company of the Year at the Audio Production Awards. Its own listing describes Hold or Fold as a look at gambling as a hidden addiction, with a focus on people caught up in the criminal justice system. The organisers’ announcement says the judges singled it out for candid storytelling and depth. It is a factual series with no famous host and no network sales team, which is precisely why the win matters.
Bill Nighy was named Best Host for ill-advised, his agony-uncle show from EYEPOD Studios. Bauer’s Pete Wicks’ Man Made took two awards, Best Health and Wellbeing and Best Interview, for a run of guests that included Keir Starmer, Russell T Davies and Jameela Jamil. NewlyParents, the JamPot production fronted by Jamie Laing and Sophie Habboo, won Best Entertainment. Get Birding, made by Peanut and Crumb and presented by Sean Bean, took both Best Lifestyle and Best Video Innovation.
The Spotlight award went to Dish from Waitrose, the Cold Glass production with Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett, which the organisers say has passed a billion combined downloads, views and listens since it launched in 2022. That figure is the organisers’ own and we have not seen it broken down, but it is the clearest sign in the list that a supermarket-funded podcast now competes on reach with anything the broadcasters make.
News and current affairs went the way of established publishers. The Intelligence from The Economist won Best Daily, The Wargame from Sky News and Tortoise won News, Politics and Current Affairs, and The Guardian’s The Birth Keepers took Best Documentary. The BBC collected four: the World Service, home of the Global News Podcast, was named Best Network or Publisher, The House at Number 48 won History, SEND in the Spotlight won Impact and Legend: The Bruce Springsteen Story won Arts and Culture.
Elsewhere, That Peter Crouch Podcast from Marvellous won Sport, Coining It from Free Turn won True Crime, and When The Cops Say No, We Say Yes from A Step Too Far Productions won Comedy. Bottoms Up! with Alan Carr and Lee Peart took the new Food and Drink category, Do I Detect A Problem? was Best New Podcast, Georgie Styles of Frontline Foodcast was named Rising Star and The Dementia Perspective received the Specialist award. Project Bläckfisk won Fiction, Talking Rubbish won Education, the ADHD Women’s Wellbeing Podcast won Parenting and Hanes Mawr Cymru won the Welsh Language category.
The one award the public decided
The Listeners’ Choice award, the only category decided by a vote rather than a jury, went to Hard Launch with Dan & Phil, the Studio71 show from Dan Howell and Phil Lester. When the second round of voting opened in July, it ran for the first time only on Spotify, the award’s partner, and that detail drew complaints from listeners who use other apps. The result rather answers the complaint: the winning show comes from two creators who built their audience on YouTube over more than a decade and whose fans will vote wherever they are told to.
Our reading is that this is the pattern to watch. The jury prizes went to craft and to subject matter, and in most categories to teams a British listener over 40 would recognise. The public prize went to a show that most of that audience has never heard of, and that is not a failure of the vote. It is a reasonably accurate picture of where listeners under 30 are, and of how little the two halves of the market overlap.
What the list says about the industry
The longlist published in July drew 409 entrants across 27 categories, and the organisers said nearly half of the selected titles were independent. The winners bear that out. The Prison Radio Association, Free Turn, Sync Clap, A Step Too Far, Steve Duke’s The Factory Next Door and Kate Moryoussef’s ADHD Women’s Wellbeing Podcast are all small operations, and several are effectively one or two people.
What is not on the list is just as telling. Goalhanger, which holds four of the ten most-listened podcasts in the UK, does not appear among the 2026 winners, and neither does Global. The awards have never been a chart, and the judges have always leaned towards editorial ambition over scale. Even so, a winners list with no Goalhanger show on it, in the year the company reported £38 million of revenue, is a reminder that the two measures of success in British podcasting now sit a long way apart.
The partner list shows who is paying for the evening. Spotify backed the Listeners’ Choice award, with Acast, Audible, Canon, Logo Studios, Secret Media Network and STV as partners, Campaign as media partner and the British Red Cross as charity partner. Apple and YouTube are absent, which is consistent with YouTube taking the headline slot at the rival Independent Podcast Awards next month. The likely effect is that the two British ceremonies drift further apart: one aligned with Spotify and the established production companies, the other with YouTube and video-first creators.
What happens to the winners now
An award of this kind rarely changes a show’s audience by itself, but it changes who takes the call. For a Bauer or JamPot show the win goes into the next sales deck and into the pitch for a second season. For Hold or Fold the likely consequence is different: a charity series about gambling has no advertising to sell, so what the trophy buys is attention from commissioners and funders, and perhaps a broadcast slot. The Prison Radio Association has turned awards into production work before, and that suggests it will again.
For listeners the practical point is that the list is a good shopping guide for the autumn, and a better one than any chart. Most of the winners are quiet, mid-sized shows that will not be pushed at you by an algorithm. Producers can already register interest in the 2027 awards on the organisers’ site, and if this year is a guide, a producer with a strong factual series and no network behind it has a real chance of ending up on the stage at The O2.
Share:
