Good Chinese Podcast Recommendations

Don't know any other than the Cultural Interviews with Chinese-Speaking Professionals with video from UTexas that have been mentioned before. I was checking the bbcchina.com.cn website (mainly geared at Chinese studying in the UK but has a lot of little articles, and background should be easy) as I remember watching a few, but only found one and I can't get hold of it anymore :-( As I was going through their site though, I came across their wordmaster , a game to test (English) vocabulary skills: 你是否已经掌握了BBC词汇大师要求的词汇量？ 快来试试这套互动词汇游戏吧！数千条词语供你练习 But nice template for ChinesePod vocab drills...

Well, just to give you the exact opposite of what you were asking for, here are some language-learning non-video podcasts: http://www.cslpod.com/ http://www.imandarinpod.com/ http://www.chineselearnonline.com/ http://www.melnyks.com/ CSLPod and iMandarinPod are all spoken in Chinese, no English. They do a lot of talking though, so you get exposed to considerably more intermediate-level Chinese speech than with the average ChinesePod intermediate lesson. Both provide transcripts of the lesson material, and CSLPod even provides transcripts of the (one-person) "banter". In addition to intermediate-level lessons, CSLPod also provides advanced-level lessons, though unlike intermediate there is no grammatical material at the advanced level, which consists basically of providing the text of a news article and reading it out loud. ChineseLearnOnline is also intermediate level, but with more English explanations, they seem to be based in Taiwan, and provide pinyin only unless you subscribe. MelnykS.com is also intermediate, has lots of English and repetition, and follows a linear sequence where new lessons build on older material, although lessons can also stand on their own, but you have to subscribe to get any kind of transcripts or written lesson material. Some of these may be useful supplements to ChinesePod.

Here are a couple of Chinese equivalents of YouTube: http://www.youku.com/ (优酷) http://www.tudou.com/ (土豆) There may be some interesting stuff here, but I haven't looked too closely.

I was thinking more a long the lines of a comedy show or something.

a few interesting ones on CSLPod but politically very correct, nothing as subversively useful as 本地 （běndì） this place ：））

Hmmm, comedy is the sometimes the hardest thing to understand in a foreign language. Lots of wordplay, slang, cultural references. Even in the same language, British and Americans often don't understand each others' comedy.

I listened to half a dozen CSLPod lessons, the advanced feel a bit like news reading of standard topics,with nodiscussion. But I find that there are a few things ChinesePod could borrow from ttheir intermediate. Dialogs are rather elementary, but the explanation is all in Chinese, includin grammar, and to me that's very good practice, no crutches - I haven't looked are the trnascripts, not sure how they handle it. In comparison, ChinesePod only gets to full Chinese at upper intermediate, and only advanced does it end to end. Of course , choice of subjects has an impact, but I thought it would be worth considering, maybe an additional hybrid level/service