Clara’s Verdict
Comedy podcasts that are also genuinely informative about their subject matter are considerably rarer than they should be. Most make a choice: entertain or inform, but not both, and not simultaneously. Future Tense – an Audible Original pairing Richard Ayoade’s militant pessimism with Warwick Davis’s inexplicable cheerfulness as they examine technologies we’ve been told to be excited about – is one of the better examples I’ve encountered of a production that refuses to make that choice.
Ayoade in particular is a genuine pleasure here. His public persona is carefully constructed around the appearance of a very intelligent person who has thought about things too long and arrived, reluctantly, at comprehensive despair. Applied to questions about AI relationships, digital immortality, and self-driving cars, that sensibility turns out to be surprisingly and exactly suited to the material. The questions themselves are genuinely large, and the comedy provides a form of access to them that earnest documentary treatment struggles to achieve.
About the Audiobook
Future Tense is a six-episode audio series, produced by Audible Originals, in which Ayoade and Davis – assisted by science communicator Helen Keen, who serves as the series’ intellectual anchor, and a series of expert guests who are responsible for the actual facts – descend into the fictional Future Tense lab beneath Audible HQ to interrogate six technologies that the media tends to present as inevitable and desirable: robots, immortality, the future of holidays and tourism, food production, self-driving cars, and AI relationships.
Each episode runs at roughly forty minutes, making the series well-suited either to daily listening across a week or to binge consumption across an afternoon. The format mixes genuine expert contribution – professors, technologists, industry analysts, and other specialists – with comedy dialogue that probes the same subjects from less reverent and more human angles. What distinguishes this from straightforward comedy is that the science engagement is real: you actually learn substantive things about each topic, which is more than most genre-adjacent content manages, and you emerge with a clearer sense of the genuine complexity involved.
The immortality episode is particularly effective: both hosts engage seriously with the ethical and practical implications of digital replication and life extension before Davis inadvertently provides the episode’s funniest moment. The food episode has Warwick reluctantly consuming insects while Richard advocates, with characteristic conviction, for a future in which eating becomes entirely optional. The AI relationships episode is the most prescient of the six: recorded before the current wave of AI companion applications became mainstream consumer products, it now reads as slightly prophetic about the questions society is beginning to struggle with.
A content warning for adult language and themes is appropriate for the series – the material and the performers both skew towards an adult audience, and some of the discussions touch on genuinely weighty ethical territory.
The Narration
This is a performed audio series rather than a narrated book, and the distinction matters. Ayoade and Davis are both accomplished performers with considerable experience in audio, voice, and live performance. Ayoade – whose career encompasses The IT Crowd, his directorial films, and a genuinely excellent book about cinema criticism – brings a quality of considered specificity to the comedy that rewards careful listening. Davis’s warmth and enthusiasm function as a necessary and effective counterweight to Ayoade’s elaborately maintained gloom, in a dynamic that doesn’t feel forced.
The production values are high throughout. Expert guests sound naturally integrated rather than awkwardly spliced into a comedy framework. At just under four hours total for all six episodes, the complete series fits comfortably into a long journey, a day of gardening, or several evenings of pleasant company.
What Readers Say
This Audible Original has accumulated 306 ratings – substantial for a relatively niche format and for a series that is neither a novel adaptation nor a familiar celebrity memoir. The volume of engagement suggests the series has found a genuine audience beyond the existing fan bases of both Ayoade and Davis. The Audible Original model suits this kind of production well: it is too episodic for a conventional book format but too substantial and too carefully structured for a straightforward podcast.
Who Should Listen?
Ideal for fans of either performer, but the format extends well beyond existing fan bases. Anyone interested in technology commentary that doesn’t take itself entirely seriously – or that takes itself seriously in unexpected and productive ways – will find this a strong fit. If you’ve listened to programmes like The Infinite Monkey Cage or No Such Thing as a Fish and wished they were funnier, or if you enjoy QI-style entertainment where the laughs come with actual substantial information attached, this delivers on both counts.
The series is also well-timed for anyone who wants to think carefully about the ethical dimensions of AI and technology without being lectured at by someone who already knows how you should feel. The comedy provides the kind of productive distance that allows genuine thinking to occur alongside the entertainment.
Listen on Audible UK: Get Future Tense with Richard Ayoade on Audible UK. Also available on Kobo, Scribd, and Storytel.
