Policing Protest (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Dream Space Factory+
Sing It Pink Aunt Nell
Prom 21 (BBC Radio 3) | BBC Sounds
Hip-Hop Is History Questlove
Policing Protest is a three-part Radio 4 series about how the police manage crowds of unhappy citizens who gather to object to the status quo. What’s the best way for our uniformed law enforcers to go about their job? Should they pile in with truncheons and teargas? Should they drag people off the roads? Should they stand stony-faced and neutral, or talk to the protesters, or even give the thumbs up? What’s the best way to police protest?
A piping hot topic, you will agree. But the series, which finished last week, was made before the riots of the past few days, and so is mostly concerned with the Just Stop Oil and other climate crisis protests, and the rolling pro-Palestine marches that have been taking place in many cities every weekend since last autumn. Policing Protest is simultaneously highly relevant and completely out of date.
The BBC’s home editor, Mark Easton, presents with gravity and care. There’s something old-school about his tone, which is fair and decent and just a bit lofty: at the end, he solemnly announces that “the truth about modern Britain will be found at the barricade”. This, after a madly posh actor has given us a reading of the last few lines of The Masque of Anarchy, the poem Shelley wrote after the Peterloo massacre in Manchester in 1819. (You know it: the “Rise like lions after slumber” part that ends with “Ye are many – they are few”.) Peterloo is upsetting and enraging, but the story has been told many times over, and I’m not sure that a fruity declamation helps much with the retelling.
Still, there are many interesting and salient points made in Policing Protest, the most crucial being that the police are struggling to manage the sheer amount of protests now taking place. One interviewee calls it “chronic”: every weekend, police have to be called in from other areas just to manage what’s going on in London. Holidays and breaks are being cancelled; the police are at the end of their tether. (God knows how they’ve been coping over the past week or so.) Easton is good on the actual point of policing and the fundamental dichotomy at the centre of the job. The longstanding philosophy behind our police is that they police by consent. But actually, the force came about because the state wanted to quash dissent. These two tenets – controlling crowds and being a community service – are in opposition with each other and can clash in moments of protest. Or, as Easton puts it: “It’s about the limits we place on dissent – a debate we’ve been having for 200 years.”
There is so much packed into this short series: what the Riot Act actually was, how Thatcher increased police powers, how the Black Lives Matter protests were managed, how public space is being reduced. But everyone interviewed, from police to academics to protesters, is reasonable, educated, thoughtful. And, as we can see from recent events, sometimes people are just riled up and want to smash things: what happens then?
Now, a couple of gentle, slightly offbeat series to cleanse the palette. Gemma Cairney, whose enthusiasm and hard-to-pigeonhole attitude has led her to present a variety of shows on 1Xtra, 6Music and Radio 4, hosts Dream Space, a series for Factory International, the art producers based in Manchester. It’s yet another interviews-of-famous-people show, but Cairney’s upbeat sweetness makes it a lovely listen. Season one featured artists such as Es Devlin, Lemn Sissay and Maxine Peake; this one starts with the celebrated Mancunian DJ, DJ Paulette.
Paulette talks us through her ideal dream space, which involves water and music and her family, who all dance as soon as their song plays. It sounds silly written down, but because it’s audio it works: as Paulette speaks, we imagine, along with Cairney. We create our own images – our own dreamscape – to go along with Paulette’s.
Sing It Pink is a new podcast series executive-produced by the producers of The Log Books. It tells the history of the Pink Singers, the longest-running LGBTQ+ choir in Europe – they celebrated their 40th anniversary last year. I loved hearing about the origins of the choir, and the descriptions of ye olde Brixton scene. The second episode, about the devastation of Aids, is moving, especially the descriptions of performing for the sick at the London Lighthouse wards.
The songs can be a little musical theatre for my taste, and I would have liked some more dynamism in the telling (though this may come when the Pinkies go to sing at Pride marches in Warsaw and Kyiv). This is a lovely series and a history that definitely needs telling.
I’ve been dipping in and out of the BBC Proms and can recommend last Sunday’s Prom 21, conducted by John Wilson and played by the Sinfonia of London, which took on the works of 20th-century American composers, including Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. There’s something about massed strings and American composition that can feel a bit Disney, but this performance brought out the weird darkness beneath. Wynton Marsalis played a new piece, Herald, Holler and Hallelujah!; we also heard John Adams’s Harmonielehre, apparently inspired by a dream of an oil tanker rising out of San Francisco bay. Spectacular.
Finally, audiobooks don’t fall under my reviewer’s remit but I must mention one I’m really enjoying at the moment: Hip-Hop Is History by Questlove (of the Roots). The opening introduction, in which he describes the stress of putting together a special hip-hop performance for the Grammys, had me on the edge of my seat with tension and delight.
