The English Disease (Stak)
Mag Hags (Franki Cookney and Lucy Douglas) | Apple Podcasts
Parents vs the Internet (The Daily Mail) | Spotify
Between the Ears: A Pond of No Consequence (BBC Radio 3) | BBC Sounds
The English Disease, a new podcast about football hooliganism, is a strange nostalgia trip for anyone my age. Not because I was into “football-related disorder” – the official term – but because, during the 1980s and 90s, hooliganism was all over the news, and everyone knew someone who knew someone in decent trainers who spent their Saturdays in a rolling street-by-street fight with supporters from a different team. Even if you hated it (and I’m no fan of violence), it was considered to be just part of everyday life.
Is this sort of aggro missed today, in these modern-game times of Saudi Arabian owners, made-for-concerts stadiums and never-ending match analysis? Well, yes and no. No, because kicking people’s faces in is obviously horrible. And yes, because an anything-can-happen atmosphere can bring cheap thrills into a dull life and even duller corporatism. In The English Disease, journalist Sam Diss allows both sides of the story to be told. He and his friends grew up with The Football Factory and he went to West Ham games with his dad, including the last match in the Hammers’ old Upton Park home: “It was aggy and angry and weirdly joyous and celebratory in this strange ceremonial sort of way,” he says.
In the first two episodes, Diss talks to academics and the writer Bill Buford (who wrote Among the Thugs), as well as ex-hoolies Jack, who supports West Ham, and Charlie, who’s a Nottingham Forest supporter. Jack, in particular, is very articulate as to why anyone might want to be involved, though it’s Charlie who comes up with the killer quote. “It’s how we communicate with ourselves, through violence,” he says. “That’s how we are born, it’s how we are bred. Look at middle-class guys; they’re born with richness, wealth, money, mixing – they turn out that way. But we’re not. We’re born in different fires. We answer to a different fucking god.”
Diss lets the subject stretch, articulates his own mixed feelings in his excellent script. It’s his lyricism and understanding that makes this series more than just chin-scratching aggro porn (see: Ross Kemp). The whole show reminds me of the features in the Face in the 90s by writers such as Gavin Hills. It takes a particular aspect of working-class culture seriously – wondering why something is happening, picking at the data, testing the feelings as well as the facts – and in doing so, gives it a status, if not a pass. Rather than dismissing it as something to be stamped out and legislated against. Highly recommended.
Here’s some more “heyday of magazines” references for you. New series Mag Hags concerns itself with women’s glossies of yore. Hosted by Franki Cookney and Lucy Douglas, the first episode started off a little stiffly and poshly, but once Cookney and Douglas got stuck into analysing an actual issue, a 1982 edition of Cosmopolitan, it became richly interesting. One article, about women’s contraceptive options, was written by a man, featured only male experts and didn’t have any case studies; another piece featured Erin Pizzey (who started Refuge) and her then husband Jeff Shapiro offering “advice” to some poor guy called David about his sex life. Pizzey and Shapiro met David face to face to do this, in 1980s Esther Perel style, except they were really mean to him and kept telling him to put up and shut up. Poor David. “He’s really been stitched up,” says Cookney. “It’s completely unhinged,” says Douglas.
There’s a fun advert section, where Cookney and Douglas read out the adverts in the magazine, which made me laugh. It’s all good stuff, though it would be nice if they had the odd guest. On occasion, just because of their youth, they make assumptions that would be challenged if they talked to an editor from the time they’re discussing. So they wondered if Aids would have affected the contraception piece (no, not in 1982) and commented, re a Tampax advert, that Charles made his excruciating tampon phone call to Camilla back then (that didn’t come out until 1993). Still, this was an entertaining dive into the social mores of the time, which are all too easy to misremember (if you’re older), or misunderstand (if you’re younger). Well worth a listen.
Esther Ghey, whose daughter Brianna was killed by two of her fellow school pupils in 2023, has a new podcast with the Daily Mail, Parents vs the Internet. In it, she and Mail journalist Liz Hull explore the two areas that Ghey has made her focus since her youngest daughter died: bringing meditation into schools and taking phone companies to task about keeping children safe online. (She has a website if you want to find out more.)
In the first episode, Ghey and Hull spoke to Emma Mills, the head teacher at Brianna’s old school. Mills had some practical solutions to the phone safety problem, including a pouch that kids put their phone in during school hours; a sim card that parents can buy that restricts access to the web. The discussion was smart and relevant, though I would like to hear a little more from Ghey herself. Perhaps as the series goes on, she will grow in confidence and ask more of the questions.
Just space enough to mention a 14-minute “miniatures” episode of Between the Ears that came out last Monday, A Pond of No Consequence. It’s produced by Erica Heilman, the audio journalist who made Finn and the Bell, the single most astonishing audio episode I’ve heard in several years. (It won a Peabody award.) This is her and her friend Claire, splashing about in a Vermont pond, chatting about ageing parents, baby frogs, short summers, life. Wonderful.
