Into the Dirt | Tortoise
The Retrievals | Serial Productions
Taste (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Walt Disney: A Life in Films (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Into the Dirt, a new podcast from Tortoise, is a strange show to explain and understand. It concerns a man called Rob Moore, who used to work in media. He was a producer on Brass Eye, the groundbreaking, madly funny Chris Morris TV series that foreshadowed Sacha Baron Cohen, Black Mirror and many other shows. But when, at the end of the 90s, Moore’s career ground to a halt, he found it hard to get another job. He retrained to become a gardener. Then a chance encounter with an old colleague on a Cornish beach (this is very 1990s meeja, by the way) led to Moore’s new career. As a corporate spy.
A corporate spy is someone who goes undercover at an organisation to find out information for a rival. It’s like James Bond, except you’re not a public servant. Instead, you’re paid by a private spying agency. Moore is asked to go undercover by an agency called K2, to investigate the to-ings and fro-ings in a campaign against the manufacture of asbestos. Moore pretends to be a film-maker interested in making a documentary about the campaign. He makes friends with lots of well-meaning activists, genuine people working hard to make the world better.
And then something changes. Suddenly, Moore thinks: these activists are right! I shouldn’t be working against them, I should be working for them! At least that’s what he says: “On the side of the angels”, is his quote. Moore loves talking about himself. He’s a tricky person, clever but utterly self-obsessed, one of those types that grab you in a pub and says: “You’re a journalist? Here’s a story for you!” and the story is just… them. Still, it has to be said, his story really is interesting: essentially, he continues to work for K2, but doesn’t give them much info because now he’s had his revelation, he’s decided to be a double agent and work for the activists instead. Sounds great! Except he doesn’t tell the activists…
Like I said, a strange story. Luckily for us, Into the Dirt is researched and hosted by Ceri Thomas, ex-editor of the Today programme, who recently presented the excellent Radio 4/Tortoise series Nazanin, about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. And Thomas is brilliant at storytelling: his care, warmth and dogged journalism rescues this weird tale from being a narcissist’s poor-me rant and turns it into an absorbing examination of what truth is. Can one person ever hold the whole truth? When Thomas talks to other people about Moore, Moore pulls out of the podcast. Into the Dirt is much better – more interesting, more gripping, more true – because of this. No single person, especially not the hero-cum-villain, can tell a story in the round. Plus, as Thomas continues to delve into the world of corporate spying, we start to realise just how horrifyingly prevalent it is. Recommended.
Looking at a story from all sides is of course the USP of Serial podcasts. And that’s whether a Serial show is examining a cold crime, investigating the life of an oddball or – as in its new series – diving into the awful experience of women at a prestigious Yale fertility clinic. The Retrievals is a distressing tale. I’m not going to tell you the big reveal in the first episode, the plot point that flips the storyline, but the show quickly turns into an exploration of how contemporary medicine treats female patients: when, and if, women’s concerns are heard.
Even the women themselves are confused. Several patients describe a situation familiar to many of us: where we know, through our work or experience, that something isn’t right, but we believe the story told to us that everything’s just fine. Host Susan Burton, from This American Life, says this of one of her interviewees: “Like other patients, Katie had expertise that gave her knowledge. But she and others pushed that knowledge aside. They decided not to know what they knew, in order to keep going.” Oof.
This is an American story, but the themes – how the medical establishment treats women’s pain – apply in the UK too, and probably across the world. Burton does an excellent job, and this grim tale, which I’d usually hesitate to recommend, is an immensely rewarding listen.
Taste, a four-part series on Radio 4, came to an end last week. Starting off with musical taste – surely the most subtle and hilariously snobby of all – it has expanded out to examine clothes, objects and arts institutions, and has been delightful throughout. Host Zakia Sewell is curious and open to learn, and it’s been lovely to hear from younger people talking about how taste has affected them or their tribes. The second episode, about fashion, chimed with many of my experiences 30 years ago: how fashion houses, and the rich, hijack working-class style in a search for authenticity, while also snubbing working-class people when they re-work high-class style. “Good” taste is always exclusionary.
I turned excitedly to another Radio 4 documentary series last week, the 10-part Walt Disney: A Life in Films, but oh dear, I was sorely disappointed. Host Mel Giedroyc is examining the career of Walt Disney through 10 of his greatest works, beginning with 1937’s Snow White and ending with The Jungle Book. What a great idea! What a delight! Except that Giedroyc is not examining Disney’s career: she’s just reading from a script, in a singsong bedtime story manner. Someone else has done all the research, someone else has written her words. We are back to ye olde Radio 2 days of getting celebrities with no connection to a subject to read aloud to us, and I am not happy about it at all.
