Musician and folk singer Jon Boden fronts the acclaimed 11-piece band Bellowhead, which he founded with John Spiers in 2004. The pair also tour as Spiers and Boden. On Midsummer's Day 2010, Boden launched A Folk Song a Day, pledging to post the performance of a traditional song online every day for one year to promote the art of "social" (or communal) singing. On Tuesday, he'll be performing Elvis Costello's song cycle The Juliet Letters with the Sacconi Quartet as part of Bristol Proms, which takes place across the city from tomorrow until 3 August.

Ed Harcourt: Back Into the Woods

I've always loved Ed Harcourt's voice, but his previous albums have been quite heavily produced. Back Into the Woods demonstrates that it's nice to have just him and a guitar or a piano. The Cusp & The Wane, the first track, is lovely and lyrical, constructed poetically around one pithy phrase.

Wolf Hall

I've got into listening to audiobooks and Hilary Mantel's novels have been the biggest hit – I listened to Wolf Hall and loved it. Reading audiobooks has a lot in common with singing folk songs - you need to remember not to over-dramatise because you then risk drawing attention to yourself rather than the story. Simon Slater, who read Wolf Hall, is great. He just gets Thomas Cromwell and is gruff and conversational, which comes across well.

The Shore

A half-hour film that won an Oscar in 2012. It's a simple story set in Northern Ireland: a chap coming back to his home village after 25 years is reunited with his ex-fiancee and best friend, who are now married. I like films that have modest aims and achieve them. The backdrop is lovely too.

The Daily Mash

When posts from this satirical fake news site pop up on Twitter, they always tell a joke I feel I've always known but they've articulated perfectly. They're good at headlines that put down middle-class arty types. That's amusing, to have your own character crucified. I have to stop myself retweeting every single thing they publish.

Foyle's War

My partner and I don't particularly have the same taste in television programmes but we did both recently enjoy watching the Foyle's War boxset. It's a police drama set in England during and after the second world war and has a real sense of time and place, especially the earlier ones that focus on the people left behind, showing how life carried on even though soldiers were off fighting. The appeal of it was the way the actors, directors and producers gently evoked that odd existence, one that was strangely fundamental to our contemporary psyche and a huge part of people's experience of that period of history.

Count Arthur Strong

I wrote the music for the TV remake of this Radio 4 series, which I was a fan of, and though I did wonder how it would translate to TV, it has been done well. Co-written by Graham Linehan of Father Ted, it's quite a silly, old-school sitcom that references the likes of Steptoe and Son. Count Arthur Strong is an out-of-work variety performer who has a habit of mangling language a lot and going on escalating flights of fancy… well, not so much fancy as disaster. Rory Kinnear is fantastic as the straight man, an author called Michael who is trying to write a book about his comedian father who used to be in a double act with Strong.