Naga Munchetty (Radio 5 Live) | BBC Sounds
The Reith Lectures (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Help I Sexted My Boss Laugh Out Loud Stories
Now You’re Asking With Marian Keyes and Tara Flynn (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Listening to the radio on Wednesday morning was a strange experience, as both LBC and 5 Live toggled between Boris Johnson’s testimony at the Covid inquiry and what we might call their usual day jobs: James O’Brien monologuing and taking calls from listeners, Naga Munchetty summarising the news and then throwing to prime minister’s questions.
To be clear, the feverishness caused by tuning in was in no way due to the presenters, who did their jobs with aplomb. The weirdness was caused by hearing Johnson’s voice again: that cadence, those excuses, that pomposity… it was almost traumatising. When Munchetty cut away from the Covid inquiry to PMQs, I found myself expecting to hear Johnson’s voice as our prime minister, rather than Sunak’s. Brrrrr.
Anyway, after Sunak, who blithely apologised to the Hillsborough families for ignoring them for several years, the first MP to speak was Michael Fabricant, cheered from the Tory benches from the moment he said the words “Margaret Thatcher”. Fabbers was making a gotcha point about Keir Starmer. Starmer had used Thatcher’s dread name in a column he wrote for the Telegraph, and the Tories’ “ner ner ner, you wuv Maggie” was the level of political debate. God, the whole thing makes your ears itch. Surely there must be a better way than this to show us poor voters exactly who we’ve elected.
Let’s turn to Radio 4 for some calmer, more coherent thought. In his Reith Lectures, the political scientist Ben Ansell has been talking about Our Democratic Future. Which is… lovely, but not a massive audience pull. Even a politics student might not rush to this lecture. (By the way, his full job title is quite the mouthful: professor of comparative democratic institutions in the department of politics and international relations and professorial fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford.)
Last week, in his second talk, Ansell discussed security, as in feeling personally safe within a political system. The west’s old approaches to security are wobbling, he said, so should governments beef up our state rules, use cameras and AI in order to keep the bad guys in order? Because if we make those rules stronger, monitoring everyone in case they’re bad, “we’ve lost the trust that comes from friendship and from contact”. Well… yes. Ansell has a light speaking voice, an easy manner and is fond of a real-life example, hopping around the world, from the US to Brazil to Germany, for his anecdotes.
His lectures are fine, but only the most dedicated would say they’re gripping. Ansell’s reasonableness seems almost too reasonable, in these unstable, violent, ludicrous times. Actually, if you look back over the Reith Lectures, those that have worked best are odder, artsier, more personal, more personality-full, such as those by Grayson Perry, Hilary Mantel, Daniel Barenboim, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Ansell is clever, and his fluent answers to audience questions were thoughtful, but I kept thinking two things. One: if you want people to learn, you’d better be entertaining first. And two: who is this series of Reith Lectures for? High-ranking politicians? Will they change their approach to international relations because they’ve tuned in to Radio 4?
Undeniably entertaining is the double-act podcast Help, I Sexted My Boss. Featuring the posh-sounding etiquette expert William Hanson and the bouncy Burnley puppy Jordan North, the show has been going for around five years. It was always pretty popular but has exploded over the past 18 months, mostly through the pair’s intense TikTok and YouTube engagement.
It’s a warm, relaxed listen. North’s dippiness hides a highly experienced broadcaster with the chops to work around anything that’s thrown at him, as listeners to Radio 1 know. Plus, his laugh is madly infectious. Hanson, too, is funny, playing up to his upper-class role and acting as a steady anchor to North’s butterfly mind. Producer Ben Cartwright is their foil, giggling at their jokes, carrying the bags when they go on trips to, say, Benidorm. There are no guests, which I like, and as with many such podcasts, most of the laughs come from the listeners and the dilemmas they send in, supposedly about etiquette but often about slightly dubious sex situations (one of the most popular episodes concerns a sexual act during a Harry Potter theatre show).
Anyway, whatever the problem, Hanson gives the “correct” answer, and North’s is comically northern. You can predict both, really. A listener wondered whether she should steal a hotel’s breakfast buffet for food for her toddler daughter. North said “Get stuck in”, Hanson said she should wait until 10am and ask if the food would go to waste. You get the idea.
More listener dilemmas are solved in the return of Now You’re Asking With Marian Keyes and Tara Flynn, the closest thing Radio 4 gets to the warmth and daftness of a two-host chat podcast. Like Hanson and North, Keyes and Flynn answer problems, though the problems are more complicated, there’s much less messing about and they’re less predictable in their answers. There was a very thought-provoking section last week on mothers sneering at non-mothers, and a great bit about a listener losing the knack of making a good cup of tea (“Have you tried coffee?” suggested Keyes. “Plus, I’m a great fan of the elderflower cordial.”)
Yes, you’re right, I prefer this show over Sexted. It’s never treated that well by Radio 4, tucked away late at night. Next week there’ll be a new “mini podcast extra” for the show, just five minutes of Keyes and Flynn going in a bit harder than they do on the radio version. All of which makes me wonder if the pair should make the whole thing a standalone podcast of their own?
