Shattered By Hanif Kureishi (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
The Hidden 20% | hidden20.org
Begin Again With Davina McCall (Flight Studio) | Apple podcasts
The Joe Rogan Experience (Joe Rogan) | Spotify
In times of distress it can be useful to gain a different perspective on life. It’s also comforting to have someone read you a story aloud. With this in mind, why not listen to Art Malik reading Hanif Kureishi’s new book, Shattered, on Radio 4?
The funny, engaging, super-sharp Kureishi is known for his fiction, plays and screenplays (The Buddha of Suburbia, My Beautiful Laundrette, The Mother), but he’s also the author of devastating nonfiction, and Shattered is very definitely written from life. On Boxing Day 2022, on a holiday in Rome, while sitting at a table, Kureishi passed out unexpectedly and fell. He woke up, he writes, “in a pool of blood, my head in a grotesquely twisted position”. Convinced he was about to die, he saw “a scooped, semicircular object with talons attached scuttling towards me”. It was his hand. He’d somehow both stretched and banged his neck, with the result that he became instantly paralysed, unable to control his limbs.
Kureishi’s brain was unaffected, and he uses his clear, clever mind to describe his new life. Unable to walk or use his hands, to sit up unaided or “vacate his bowels”, as the nurses have it, he is entirely reliant on others. He’s acute on the simultaneous power and helplessness of his new dependent state, how he has to “seduce” his friends and family into helping him with the simplest of tasks: sending a text, drinking a cappuccino.
Where once he would take his cup of coffee up the stairs to his office, pick up one of his beloved pens to write on a nice thick piece of paper (he describes all this beautifully), now he has to dictate his words to his partner or one of his sons. They laboriously type them into their phone, or laptop. A new form of writing.
People appear in Kureishi’s life – fellow patients Miss S and “the Maestro” in Italy, John in the UK – and then depart, as he is shunted between institutions, eventually returning to his own house, now adapted so that he can live there (with care workers). He’s open about his own failings: he tries to avoid someone he dislikes in the street and, when he can’t, writes a succinctly nasty description of them; he doesn’t buy his caring, endlessly supportive partner a Christmas present (that, I did find shocking). He remains ambitious, with the clarity, selfishness and humanity of a true writer. “My world has taken a zig where previously it zagged,” he writes. “It has been smashed, remade and altered, and there is nothing I can do about it. But I will not go under. I will make something of this.” You believe him.
The recent British Podcast awards seemed to have morphed from what we might describe as an indie knees-up into an all-out big media celebrity celebration, but there were a few pleasant surprises among the famous names. One of which was The Hidden 20%, winner of best interview podcast. Hosted by entrepreneur Ben Branson, the show concentrates on the 20% of people who are neurodivergent (Branson himself was diagnosed with autism and ADHD as an adult). Interviewees range from the humongously famous (Kit “Game of Thrones” Harington) to the not at all (the most recent interviewee, Abigail Agyei-Jones, is an ex-civil servant turned adviser for inclusion). In all cases, Branson is thoroughly positive and pleasant, without pushing the ever-tricky idea of neurodivergence being a superpower.
On occasion, though, like many modern interviewers, he strays into simple sympathising. No one is listening to The Hidden 20% for Today-style confrontation, but too much gentleness can lead into generalisation rather than the specifics that come with probing more deeply. Jon Ronson, Louis Theroux and Annie Macmanus are all able to ask tricky questions without being mean. Still, the recent show with comedian Marcus Brigstocke, who talked about his dyslexia and addictions, was excellent, as was the one with Dr Rayyan Zafar, which discussed how different drugs, including psychedelics, can have an effect on someone with ADHD.
And I don’t want to have a go at Branson, because even someone as experienced as Davina McCall can end up oversympathising. Her new podcast, Begin Again – about women in midlife – opened with an almost unctuous interview with Fearne Cotton, both women cooing over each other’s strength and general fabulousness. Ugh. But over the next two episodes, McCall is much better; particularlywhen she talks to relationship coach Paul C Brunson (he’s on Married at First Sight), who is genuinely interesting, if prescriptive, about how long-term relationships can work (he insists that you should both be working through relationship-improving books together – yes, he is American).
Which brings me to Joe Rogan, the biggest podcaster in the world. His demographic, broadly, is youngish men, and he interviewed Donald Trump and Elon Musk a few days before the US election. Rogan asked Kamala Harris for an interview too, but she declined, saying she didn’t have the time. His podcasts are about three hours long. Middle-aged women like to be busy and productive. Was Harris wrong? You have to wonder.
I listened to both the Trump and the Musk interviews. I couldn’t get through the whole of Trump’s but I listened long enough to know that the Rogan interview was better than nearly every one I’ve heard with the orange man-baby, simply because Trump sounded relaxed. Almost low-key. And Musk’s was similar. He told Rogan that he (Musk) is one of the world’s greatest at “diablo”. Initially I thought he meant the spinning juggling prop that hippies chuck in the air – but of course he meant a video game. Rogan and he connected on free speech and censorship; Musk professed that he loves the factchecking “community notes” on X, even when they say his posts aren’t accurate (this might be because his post will already have gone viral).
Rogan, for his part, asked some decent questions – he almost got Trump to admit that he lost the last election, for instance – but the show’s loose, rambling format meant that these were conversations rather than debates. You came away with the impression that: oh, these people aren’t monsters. They’re human. They just think they’re right about absolutely everything. Sorry. Have I made things worse?
