Over the Top Under the Radar (Unedited/Skin in the Game Productions)
Home Sleuth | BBC Sounds
The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam (BBC World Service/CBC) | BBC Sounds
Beyond Five Senses (Audible)
Not every new podcast sets out to remind you of the weirdest public art idea of all time: a giant Queen Mother on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. “It’s an equestrian plinth!”, says Orwell-prize-winning journalist Gary Younge, as his co-host, Carys Afoko, creases up with laughter. “She would have been this colossus, like a huge centaur figure with a handbag.”
Younge’s recalling his time chairing the fourth plinth committee in early 2002, when, he explains, the Daily Mail had its own idea for a Queen Mum memorial: Ma’am looming in stone next to Nelson. They weren’t particularly happy to find out that the person in charge was “a young – and I was young back then – black, leftwing Guardian journalist”, so Younge’s past was dug into to find some dirt to discredit him. His way of describing that time is refreshingly nonjournalistic: “It was proper mental on every single front.”
Over the Top Under the Radar is a new weekly show that explores over-reported and under-reported stories in the news, with this story being brought up in a discussion about the rightwing media mauling of Angela Rayner. Alongside the younger, spirited Afoko (a former adviser to Lisa Nandy MP with a weighty CV as a public affairs professional), Younge is a wise, warm, avuncular figure, nicely nuanced on the question of different levels of tax-dodging in the UK, and startling on black voters’ support for Donald Trump in a recent US poll: “Twenty per cent!… the highest level of support for any Republican presidential candidate since the civil rights act in 1964.”
The meaty topics of Diane Abbott and Natalie Elphicke’s places in the Labour party and Asda’s building of social housing are also given airtime, but the production is somewhat rough around the edges, the voices overlapping, points occasionally repeated. First-week rawness is allowed, though, and they’ve got a glorious, summery theme tune. I’ll definitely be tuning in again – a new post-election episode dropped just after this piece went to press.
Over at the BBC, an obsession with true crime continues. A regionally produced BBC Sounds strand, The Crime Next Door, launched earlier this month, while last week brought the first episode of Home Sleuth, in which the storytelling itself is given over to amateur detectives, speaking alone for most of the show. That’s an ethical minefield you can hear buzzing in the distance.
In episode 1, the microphone is passed to Todd Matthews, his accent a rollercoaster of lilting Tennessee vowels. He begins by talking about meeting his wife, Lori, when he was a schoolboy. “Why we were meant to be was the story she told me next,” he goes on, before describing her tale of the “tent girl”, an unidentified young woman found wrapped in canvas on a Kentucky highway in 1968. As chat-up techniques go, I’ve heard better.
Matthews’s obsession with the case as a “parallel adventure” to his love story with his wife makes for an unsettling listen, and without a questioning voice in the mix feels exploitative at times. Then we hear of his infant siblings who died. His psychological makeup gains colours. Matthews, who died in January, became one of the original web sleuths in the dial-up-modem days of the 1990s, and created a community of like-minded souls, the Doe Network, trying to solve similar crimes.
The producer of Home Sleuth, Alice Fiennes, takes back the mic in the show’s final 10 minutes, talking to the web sleuth expert Rachel Monroe about how childhood trauma pushes people towards these endeavours, and how citizen investigations boost interest in dusty old cases. It’s all interesting stuff, but the sense of the BBC having their (indulgent) cake and eating it sat awkwardly with me throughout. Also, I’ve had enough of murdered young women as plot points. Haven’t we all?
Instead, let’s enjoy some good old-fashioned fraud in a balmy Indonesian jungle with a cast of proper rogues. I was sceptical that The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam would make compelling, multi-episode listening, but quickly became hooked by this tale of a small Canadian mining company “finding gold” in a remote corner of Indonesian Borneo.
And what a cast we meet. A charismatic geologist known as the Dutch Indiana Jones. A strip club-obsessed Filipino man found dead after falling out of a helicopter. A hedge-fund manager with “piercing blue eyes” who gets suspicious and becomes an intrepid explorer himself. And lots of ordinary Joes who, for a while, think they’re wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.
Presenter Suzanne Wilton’s glacially North American style takes some getting used to, and I don’t think I’ve heard the phrase “vast whorehouse” on the BBC before. But this is a rich, vivid story. All nine episodes are out now.
We need some decompressing after all that, and the podcast Beyond Five Senses is here to help us. Hosted by the cognitive scientist Katherine Templar Lewis and the designer Robyn Landau, it explores the seemingly superhuman capabilities of our bodies, and how music, culture and art can support our deeper wellbeing.
From its surprisingly coherent mixture of narrative, interviews and occasional mindfulness exercises, I learned a lot. I met a profoundly deaf DJ who tunes in to deep vibrations and drones to get a room dancing. I discovered that the relaxing frequencies of pink noise, one of nature’s most calming soundscapes, can be replicated by frying bacon. Templar Lewis and Landau also have a great sense of their own silliness: after humming in harmony, a relaxing, grounding action, they collapse in laughter. I encourage you all to turn it on, tune in and drop out.
