Best Podcasts Made in Scotland (2026 Listening Guide)
Scottish podcasting listening guide
The best Scottish podcasts to listen to now.
Seven shows that deserve your time. From comedy to crime, charity to corporate, comedy to change communication. A guide to the Scottish podcasts shaping how people listen.
Crime and culture
Crime and Culture
Glasgow Crime Stories
Hosted by local journalist Russell Coulthard, Glasgow Crime Stories explores the real events behind Glasgow's most infamous historical crimes, from the curious to the genuinely troubling. Episodes cover everything from Edinburgh's serial killers to high-profile corporate scandals and the Lockerbie bombing.
What makes the show work is Coulthard's obvious passion for the detail and context of each story. He does not sensationalise. Instead, he builds atmosphere, explains motive, and treats his subjects—victims, perpetrators, families—with respect. The production is clean and the pacing is excellent.
Where to start: Any episode featuring a crime that genuinely fascinates you. The show is best enjoyed as a series, but individual episodes are entirely standalone.
Check One Two
Check One Two is the podcast from Cahonas, the testicular cancer charity. It gives listeners the lowdown on testicular cancer through survivor stories, health conversations and honest discussions around topics men often avoid, including fertility, IVF, early detection and the emotional impact of diagnosis.
This is the one from the Scottish Podcast Awards shortlist where we handle both recording and post-production. Being shortlisted in Community Impact & Charity and Best Podcast Artwork is genuinely meaningful because the show has a clear purpose: making difficult conversations easier to start.
The Canmore Trust Podcast
The Canmore Trust Podcast shares conversations of hope, support and connection. It deals with grief, suicide prevention, survival, resilience and the experience of families affected by suicide, with the aim of helping people talk about what is often left unsaid.
One recent episode features John Gibson speaking with John Bell about the loss of his son Jake to suicide, grief, anger, and the struggle to keep going. It is heavy subject matter, handled through calm, human conversation rather than sensationalism.
Business
Business
The Scottish Business Podcast
Hosted by Sebastian Mackay, The Scottish Business Podcast brings together Scotland's leading CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs to talk about how they built their businesses, with guests sharing insights, challenges, defeats, and successes.
The show is strongest when Mackay leans into the specifics of the Scottish context: what it means to build a company in Edinburgh or Glasgow rather than London, how the Scottish funding ecosystem differs, and how Scotland's relatively small business community creates both tight networks and unusual opportunities.
Guest quality has been consistently strong, with conversations covering everyone from games industry founders to hospitality and tech entrepreneurs. Honest about failure in a way that more polished business podcasts tend not to be.
Where to start: Any episode featuring a founder from the Scottish games industry, where the gap between global cultural impact and local recognition is most striking.
Culture and history
Culture and History
Scots Whay Hae!
The oldest show on this list and, in many ways, the one that most clearly defines what a distinctly Scottish cultural podcast can do. Hosted by Alistair Braidwood, Scots Whay Hae! describes itself as the place to discuss modern Scottish culture, wherever and whatever that may be.
In practice, that means literature, theatre, music, film, poetry, and any other cultural form that Braidwood finds worth investigating, always with an emphasis on work that is rooted in or connected to Scotland. The show has been running since 2011, which, in podcasting terms, makes it practically ancient, and the back catalogue is an archive of Scottish cultural conversation with no equivalent anywhere.
Episodes with Bloody Scotland crime writers, Edinburgh Fringe artists, and publishing figures have made it an essential part of the Scottish arts calendar.
Where to start: The annual "best books of the year" episodes with Publishing Scotland's Vikki Reilly, which cover Scottish fiction and non-fiction comprehensively and function as a reading list in their own right.
Love Scotland
Love Scotland is a fortnightly podcast from the National Trust for Scotland, hosted by TV star, expert broadcaster, and NTS president Jackie Bird, with each episode delving deep into Scotland's history, wildlife, and landscapes. The production values are high, Bird is a genuinely skilled interviewer, and the subject matter ranges from the witch trials of the 16th century to the restoration of St Kilda's 200-year-old church.
It's the kind of show that takes what sounds like institutional content and makes it feel personal, partly because Bird is clearly invested in the material rather than merely presenting it. Guests have included Sam Heughan, Alan Cumming, and a rotating cast of historians, archaeologists, and conservationists who know their subjects thoroughly. The show won podcast awards before there were Scottish podcast awards to win.
Where to start: The Glencoe episodes, which cover one of the most significant events in Scottish history with the kind of depth that only a two-part podcast format can provide.
A note on production
A Note on Production
Working in a professional podcast studio, I notice production quality in a way that most listeners probably don't consciously register, but definitely feel. The shows on this list range from the polished, professionally produced (Glasgow Crime Stories, Love Scotland) to the intimate, self-recorded feel that some of the comedy and conversation podcasts deliberately cultivate. Both approaches can work.
What matters is that the production serves the content, and that the audio isn't fighting the listener.
Glasgow has become increasingly important as a place where podcast production is taken seriously. At Podcast Studio Glasgow, we've produced corporate podcast content for clients including Scottish Water and NHS Education Scotland, and we work with independent creators who want broadcast-quality results from a base in the city. If any of the shows on this list have made you want to start your own, or take your existing show to the next level, that's where we can help.
The bigger picture
The Bigger Picture
The inaugural Scottish Podcast Awards, with entries open until 9 March 2026 and a ceremony at Glasgow's Old Fruitmarket on 25 June, will give some of these shows a platform for recognition they've long deserved. More importantly, it will make the Scottish podcast scene visible to audiences, commissioners, and funders who might not have realised how much is being made here.
Scotland has always produced strong media. The shows above are evidence that podcasting is no exception.
