Poodunnit: an Amsterdam crime saga with a scatological twist

The victims: a newly married couple, Karen Whitehouse and Helen McLaughlin. The scene of the crime: a boat in Amsterdam, on which they were wed. The suspects: an ex-boyfriend, a former boss, an artist with a penchant for potty talk, the bride’s mother, a pregnant attendee, a bombastic Irish party planner who skipped town, and a member of the wedding band. The investigator: Detective Lauren Whitby. The crime: defecating on the floor.

The result is a locked-room drama of a rib-cracking podcast that first aired in 2021 and has managed in the past few weeks to accelerate up the charts to No 1 slots in the UK and US. No wonder: it’s charming, pleasingly shambolic and often snortingly funny, anchored by the deadpan delivery of Detective Lauren Whitby and her two bridal foils.

Who Shat on the Floor at My Wedding? begins with the perfect nuptial day – the bright, glorious weather, Karen’s dress billowing in the breeze, the champagne flowing, perhaps a little too flowingly. “Two beautiful brides, Helen and Karen, made the appropriate assumption that their wedding day would be the most memorable day of their lives,” intones Detective Whitby, who defends her claim to that professional title by virtue of her own criminal past and the fact that she enrolled in an online private investigator course to which she has “already received an introductory email”.

Turns out the day has indeed become memorable in large part because of the infamous faecal deposit, described over the course of this podcast as “whippy”, a “nugget”, and “the size of a small fist”, in repeated plunges into the scatological lexicon undertaken with winning intent. Whitby enlists a crack team of experts to assist in her search for the culprit, among them a clinical psychologist, a forensic scientist, a cognitive ecologist and primatologist, a criminal lawyer, a somatic sexologist, and even a codebreaker, this last turning out to be Whitby’s mother, whose qualifications run to being good at the cryptic crossword.

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We are witness to several interrogations, as Whitby stretches into the roles of both good and bad cop, using a lie-detector test sourced on the internet and some police procedural techniques made famous by television dramas. She insists on a visit to the crime scene, and in the absence of sniffer dogs takes it upon herself to nose the floor and then later investigate a vacuum cleaner filter, which turns out to be a dead end. There are attempts at persuasion involving money we are assured cannot be construed as bribery because of a legal loophole she employs to unconvincing effect, and there is the introduction of a real lie detector test and a psychic as the team pulls out all the stops to get to the bottom of mystery compounding on mystery.

Why did Henk spend four hours hanging around the ladies’ bathroom? How offensive is it when 13 per cent of the wedding guests describe themselves as indifferent to their hosts? Is the fact that an ex-girlfriend was “straight straight straight straight” until after dating you enough motive for vengeful defecation? Why on earth were sea lions introduced?

With canny sound effects, sizzling chemistry between the hosts, the right mix of chutzpah and true mortification, the up-for-it-ness of a surprising number of experts and wedding guests, and the levelling directness and repetitive particularity of the past participle “shat”: it all comes together as both entertaining parody and kind of poignantly human truth. How many poo puns can you get into one podcast? Shit tons, turns out.