Revolutionary Letters (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
A Living Leg-End (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Today in History With the Retrospectors | The Retrospectors
Bodies (Allison Behringer) | KCRW
The Island of Brilliant! | Podbean
The Arias
In a world of clear-your-schedule binges, long true crime serials and previous episodes that run into the hundreds, the single audio documentary may seem a specialist listen. A bubble that floats, bursts and disappears – a folly, almost. But half an hour of beautifully produced factual audio – an hour at a push – has always been one of my favourite listens.
When I first started reviewing podcasts, it was the single docs, mostly from the US, that kept me coming back; ones from Love + Radio’s Nick van der Kolk, or This American Life or Radiolab. In the UK, radio – particularly Radio 4 – has always been sprinkled with excellent one-off documentaries from producers such as Alan Dein and Cathy FitzGerald, or previously Piers Plowright and Charles Parker. Great recent examples include last year’s Time Flies, a whimsical Radio 4 tale of two brothers who look after cuckoo clocks, and Louise Tickle’s Tortoise documentary Fallen Women, about women “falling” from balconies, both of which really stayed with me.
Eleanor McDowall and Michael Segalov produced the cuckoo clock documentary, for Falling Tree productions, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Founded by Alan Hall, the company is now one of this country’s leading proponents of single documentaries; you know that if a show is made by Falling Tree, it’s going to be great. Co-directors Hall and McDowall have an excellent creative network, working with interesting audio-makers across the world, and they let the right person tell the story. Plus – importantly – they work hard on how that story is told, the spaces left, the pacing. Hall and McDowall have a belief in audio’s imaginative possibilities. “It can reconfigure the world around you, move you through inner landscapes or sink into your dreams,” they say, in an email.
You can catch Falling Tree’s work on Radios 3 and 4 (often in Short Cuts). Last Sunday, on 4, McDowall gave us Revolutionary Letters, a multi-voiced portrait of the late Beat poet Diane di Prima. Revolutionary Letters were her short, radical, sometimes practical pieces, to be read at political rallies (her previous poems weren’t punchy enough to work between a fiery speaker and a singalonga folkie). Then on Tuesday, in A Living Leg-End, Segalov showcased Lavinia Co-op, a seventysomething drag queen legend (pronounced “leg end”) who started off in Hackney, moved to NYC and came back a few years ago. The interview was mostly in Lavinia’s flat, though we also heard her do a turn at London drag haven the Glory; there was some gorgeous audio overlap of the clamour of her live performance with Segalov being buzzed into her home.
There are no morals to these tales, other than the morality of actually telling them, the focus of the microphone on outsiders. Oh, and did I say these docs are like bubbles? They are, but there’s a Falling Tree archive, plus they host the occasional audio live show, often held in the dark. Happy birthday to them.
Another birthday: daily podcast Today in History With the Retrospectors celebrates its second this week. The Retrospectors are Olly Mann, Rebecca Messina and Arion McNicoll, and every day they find something interesting to talk about that happened on that date. So last Tuesday they considered constellations, 88 of which were labelled in Rome on 2 May 1922. The discussion that followed was fun, interesting and properly edited (my favourite type). It galloped through Ptolemy, China’s belief that the heavens are a reflection of life on Earth, and early-20th-century western biases (one constellation was called “the Microscope”) … all in 15 minutes. Sharp!
And here’s another documentary strand where the creator really cares, for her subjects and about the production. Bodies is a documentary series about medical mysteries from Allison Behringer and LA-based station KCRW. It’s been going since 2018. (You could arguably connect Helena Merriman’s Room 5 and India Rakusen’s 28ish Days Later to Bodies.) An inclusive, explicitly feminist show – the first episode was called Sex Hurts – there have been revelations about female bodies that have blasted open my mind. Season four began with a show about touch – “the only sense that’s reciprocal” – and continues this week with one concerning an adult woman’s ADHD diagnosis. The touch show featured a blind man, a woman who had scarring on much of her body due to scalding, and a woman with autism who hated being touched lightly but found firm holds both reassuring and highly sexy. Fascinating and – sorry – very touching.
Not a one-off, but a sweet new independent podcast series is The Island of Brilliant!, hosted by Frank Cottrell-Boyce and Nadia Shireen, both eminent writers of children’s books. The conceit is that they’re on a desert island, the Island of Brilliant, where there is no wifi or any form of entertainment other than children’s books. So, they recommend what they’re reading, as do others (the first show features Cressida Cowell, of How to Train Your Dragon fame). The conceit and artwork make The Island of Brilliant! seem like a children’s show, but it’s not. It’s actually packed with information and may benefit from being shorter, with some features offered as extras. But it’s a welcoming listen, with Shireen in particular a lovely audio presence.
Finally, it was the audio industry’s Oscars, the Arias, on Tuesday evening. Big winners were Radio 4 (network of the year, plus best drama, comedy, factual series, news coverage and new radio show) and National Prison Radio, which scored four awards across different categories, including Life After Prison’s Zak and Jules, who won best new presenters. Hooray to that!
