Cillian Murphy’s Limited Edition (6 Music) | BBC Sounds
Short Cuts: Signal to Noise (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Beyond the Bathroom With Sali Hughes (Apple Podcasts)
Crypto Kingpins (Project Brazen and USG Audio) (Apple Podcasts)
“I’m very amenable to light housework – I find it therapeutic.” Yet another reason to love Cillian Murphy. An exceptional actor and funny, intelligent man, he has recently morphed into a sort of public cartoon: a combination of cheekboned Peak-enheimer hunk and God-another-interview boredom meme. A more human version of Murphy is to be found on 6 Music (“the best music station in the world”, he calls it, just before revealing his predilection for a spot of dusting) and, specifically, on Cillian Murphy’s Limited Edition.
The show, which airs from 10pm until midnight on Sundays, finds him creating a nocturnal playlist from his vast music collection. There’s a dreamy, avant-garde vibe that’s almost churchy at times – great to write to, or to shift from everyday mania into ambient half sleep. Murphy doesn’t talk too much, mostly giving snippets of information about whatever he’s playing. Last Sunday, quite sweetly, he told us how the Velvet Underground came up with their name, and also their nickname for Andy Warhol (Drella: a combination of Dracula and Cinderella); details that older listeners may well know, but perhaps not the casual Murphy fan, who’s tuned in because they fancy Tommy Shelby.
Anyway, music newbie or nerd, all will get their minds expanded. Murphy’s taste is wide, unusual and free: he played the surprisingly interesting No, no by Temps (one of comedian James Acaster’s many side projects), as well as the Supremes and the aforementioned Velvets. He thinks hard about how pieces of music work together: last week’s opening tracks by 24 Track Loop, Aphex Twin and Can worked wonderfully. Sunday was the opener for series three, set to continue for four weeks. Tune in quick, because, in common with many 6 Music shows, you can’t hear the old Limited Editions. Understandable, because of music rights, but most frustrating.
Another returning show, this time to Radio 4, is Short Cuts. Indulge me for a moment: I’m going to argue that this is one of the most important programmes on UK radio. The short-form audio documentary – sometimes experimental, sometimes conventional: a producer’s, rather than a presenter’s, medium – is one of my favourite creative formats, and there really aren’t too many places you can experience half-hour documentaries, let alone anything shorter. Radio 4 is one of the few outlets where you can, and Short Cuts uses its privileged, settled position (this is series 36) to encourage new, outsider creators into audio. You never know what you’re going to get: how many shows can you truly say that about?
Anyway, last Monday’s first episode of the new series featured Ross Sutherland, poet and producer (he makes the amazing Imaginary Advice podcast), and his touchingly weird piece about how he went suddenly deaf in one ear, just before his son was born, and later started experiencing aural hallucinations. “I started hearing my baby crying in traffic,” he says in the 12-minute segment. “It’s a bit like a detuned radio; the controller hovering right on the edge of a station.” (The noises he used gave me the fear, a bit, because they sounded very like my tinnitus, which he also suffers from.) After Sutherland’s contribution, Liza Yeager, an American producer, gave us a sideways investigation of grief, featuring oblique conversations and some beautiful plinky piano-playing. Finally, there was Fil Corbitt’s short, almost musical experiment with the starting point of a burning house and croaking frogs. You could imagine Murphy playing it on Limited Edition, actually.
One more returning show! Hello to Beyond the Bathroom, an interview podcast from beauty writer Sali Hughes. I’m not a beauty type so hadn’t previously listened, but this new series opened with the fabulous author and TV presenter Candice Brathwaite, who I love, so I thought I’d try it. Brathwaite didn’t disappoint. Her opening story – concerning a comment about her appearance as a young child – was shocking and horribly everyday, which of course made it even more shocking. Also, my mistake: the podcast doesn’t just concern itself with makeup and skin care. It’s about appearance, and so hair and clothes are discussed in detail, both much more my bag. Brathwaite described how she was brought up by an impeccably turned-out grandfather (he wore a three-piece suit to her sports day), and mused on how her decision to get a very short hair crop had affected her life. The warm and well-researched Hughes gently pushed her on details, and Brathwaite shone because of it. What a lovely, enlightening listen.
Rather less lovely is Crypto Kingpins, about rival crypto bros Sam Bankman-Fried (creator of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that collapsed) and Changpeng “CZ” Zhao (founder of Binance, a crypto exchange that preceded FTX). The telling of this tale is unsatisfying: the first episode whizzes through almost the entire story, skimming past details and summarising the plot without properly establishing the personalities involved. Host Tom Wright has direct access to CZ, which is a coup, but the podcast operates, at least initially, so much on the surface that we learn very little about him. Then the second episode goes back to the beginning – and starts once more with Bankman-Fried. It’s very odd.
Wondery’s Spellcaster tells the FTX man’s story in a far more gripping way. I wasn’t familiar with CZ, who supported Bankman-Fried in the early years, until his protege started doing the dirty on him; but unfortunately, Wright doesn’t really illuminate him either. There’s some nice music production, but even that doesn’t bring enough dynamics. There are many true crime/“schadenfraud” shows out there that are lip-smacking and dramatic. You hesitate to say it, but this one needs some of that personality to sell its tale.
