This week I’m celebrating single programmes. Those one-off episodes that catch you unawares, knock you sideways as you’re making the tea, make you pull over in the car because you’re fighting back tears. My life is peppered by these aural moments: I have an interior/exterior map of places where I first heard a particular podcast. Often it’s in my local park. At the bottom of one hill is where I heard a wife speak on iPM about her husband’s unfaithfulness. Up towards the cafe is the spot where I listened to the final episode of S-Town. I cried about The Living Room episode from Love + Radio while jogging so slowly past a bench that the teenagers sitting on it pointed at me and laughed.

Anyway. There are certain long-running shows that will always give you a good listen. And sometimes they come up with something exceptional, an episode that stays with you for months, even years after you hear it. This American Life is a series that does this. Love + Radio is another. Radiolab; The Memory Palace. And Desert Island Discs, of course: Bob Mortimer’s episode is a recent classic.

I asked Twitter audio fans for one-off shows that they loved, and I got some brilliant suggestions. From This American Life, the episodes Three Miles (about a scheme to bring poorer kids into an elite private school); Very Tough Love (on prohibitive sentencing for drug users); The Super, about building managers; Dr Gilmer and Mr Hyde (on a strange doctor, presented by Serial’s Sarah Koenig); and Break-Up – especially the bit where Starlee Kine tries to write a break-up song with the help of Phil Collins.

I’ll mention three more from This American Life. Unconditional Love, a recently rescheduled 2006 episode, begins with a shocking revelation about how physical affection was once deemed bad for children, and continues with the most moving story of a Romanian boy, adopted at seven, whose start in life made it almost impossible for him to bond with his new parents. Then there’s The Room of Requirement, an uplifting programme about the power of libraries. And from recent episode Beware the Jabberwock, act two, Alex in Wonderland, about Alex Jones, who spread the idea that the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, in which Jon Ronson interviews Jones’s old schoolfriends.

Love + Radio is another podcast likely to deliver stay-in-the-mind audio. I recently listened to Coming Back, on a friend’s recommendation. It’s about a woman who has her brain stopped for a serious operation and who leaves her body and moves towards the light. There’s The Living Room, a Rear Window-style story – usually the first podcast episode I recommend for any newbies. Plus, A Girl of Ivory, about an American love affair, which has a proper oh-my-God moment.

The Memory Palace, which tells stories about the past, came up many times too. Several episodes were mentioned (Notes on an Imagined Plaque…; Roots and Branches and Wind-Borne Seeds; If You Have to Be a Floor (about… being a floor). But the one that sears itself on to your heart is episode 90, A White Horse, and it’s another show I recommend to new podcast listeners.

From Heavyweight, Jonathan Goldstein’s podcast about “the moment everything changed”, the episodes Julia, Gregor and Marchel. Radiolab’s War of the Worlds (about Orson Welles’s radio drama), as well as Lu vs Soo; Oliver Sipple; and Anna in Somalia.

If you like interviews, there are lots to choose from. Cariad Lloyd’s Griefcast episodes with Robert Popper, Sara Barron, Aisling Bea, Adam Buxton. From Richard Herring’s long-running live interview series RHLSTP, the episodes with Brian Blessed and Stephen Fry. The Two Shot Podcast interview with Joe Gilgun. And from Unfiltered, James O’Brien talking to Akala.

Oh, there are so many to choose from! But I’m going to leave you with two. One is Haven, a recent episode of Radio 4’s The Digital Human, another long-running show. It’s about Mats, a young Norwegian who suffered from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and his extended group of online friends. Uplifting and upsetting.

The other programme also came out of an excellent Radio 4 show, Short Cuts. A Twitter user mentioned it, and Short Cuts’ producer, Eleanor McDowall, pointed me to the original interview, which can be found on a little-known podcast, 2+2=5: The Dialogue Project. Scroll down to Prepared to Love, which tells the story of Adrian and how he decided to treat himself on his 42nd birthday. It’s about sex, romance and self-worth and it had me in absolute bits. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.

Three funny people doing interesting shows

Trolled

Actor Tracy Ann Oberman used to be a Twitter-lover. But over the past 18 months, as she’s increasingly used social media to highlight misogyny and antisemitism (she’s Jewish), Oberman has found Twitter less welcoming. She has, in fact, been heavily trolled, receiving appalling abuse and death threats so bad she’s had to involve police. This podcast is Oberman’s attempt to create something positive out of this awfulness, and in this first episode features MP Luciana Berger and Gary Lineker. Future episodes promise fellow trollees (trolleys?) David Baddiel and Al Murray.

We Have Ways of Making You Talk

A weekly show that looks at the second world war in a different way, with the comedian Al Murray (again) and historian James Holland as presenters. It doesn’t set out to be a comprehensive, event-by-event retelling of WWII, but rather a did-you-know? show. Each week, Murray and Holland will discuss a second world war thing as a kick-off point – such as, in the first episode, an extending piece of metal that’s actually part of a Spitfire wing. They also tackle how war films often use the wrong equipment. Listeners can send in questions.

Meet David Sedaris

David Sedaris is one of the funniest writers alive, and a new series of his essays started last week on Radio 4. The shows are simple – Sedaris just reads out his essays and some of his diary in front of a live audience – but they are guaranteed to cheer you up in these fun-free, panicky days. Episode 1, Father Time, is partly about Sedaris’s 95-year-old dad, and is hilarious and touching, as ever. (Nerdy fact: Sedaris’s sister, Amy, is an actor, and played Audrey Temple in Gimlet Media’s Homecoming podcast.)