I have long been appalled by the number of adults seemingly happy to be seen reading J. K. Rowling’s oeuvre. These are books for children; the closest grown-ups should get to them is reading them to children. Anything else is worrying.

So what makes mugglenet.com a Podcast of the Week? Two reasons: first, because this site dedicated to all things Potter is compiled by young people. And secondly, because it’s nice to find that much youthful energy being channelled into something fundamentally harmless, even if one must admit to a certain frisson at hearing one of them wondering whether recent publicity pictures of Emma Watson for her TV film Ballet Shoes would show her wearing naught but the shoes. “You’re being immature,” commented another caster. No he wasn’t, he was being creepy. This is Hermione Granger we’re talking about.

Today there will have been 142 weekly episodes of the cast. That is a lot of musing over the years, particularly as each cast lasts 90 minutes. In fact, so thin is the available material in between books and films that the weekly analysis of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, chapter by chapter, has been shortened from two chapters to one. That way they can spin it out until July at least.

Each podcast begins with an introduction, including an excellent electric guitar version of the movie theme. Then it’s eyes down for Potter news, some of it factual (a US intercollegiate Quidditch competition has begun, in which undergraduates run around lawns on broomsticks) and some of it fanciful, such as the “news” item about Albus Dumbledore’s son being arrested for running an illegal goat fighting ring.

Rowling being given something called a James Joyce Award had the smack of fantasy, too, but it was true and, once one had found that Michael Palin, Eddie Izzard and Rory Bremner had also been thus honoured, didn’t seem so unlikely. It did, though, give one of the mugglecast people the chance to give his considered opinion of Finnegans Wake. It doesn’t make sense, apparently. And this from a man who has no problem dealing with the idea that Draco Malfoy is now in the possession of Dumbledore’s wand.

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