The Witch Trials of JK Rowling (The Free Press)
Dear Daughter (BBC World Service)
The Heart: Sisters (Mermaid Palace)
Gary Davies (BBC Radio 2)
The Witch Trials of JK Rowling is a strange podcast. Rowling’s careful, crisp mind contrasts with host Megan Phelps-Roper’s mushy Christian desire to be as kind and evenhanded as possible. That’s not to say that the podcast isn’t interesting – it is – just that it’s uneven and reeeally streeetched out. It needs a far tougher editor.
A bit of background. Phelps-Roper is known for being brought up in, and then leaving, the virulently homophobic Westboro Baptist church, her fundamentalist views changed by Twitter (I know!). Landing Rowling as an interviewee is a huge coup for Phelps-Roper, as Rowling is private, and we understand why when, in episode one, she recounts how her ex-husband tried to break into her home. We should also note that The Witch Trials comes from a production company started by Bari Weiss, a journalist who fell out with the New York Times over her provocative “anti-woke” stance on cancel culture. Because of this, and given the title, we assume that the podcast exists because Rowling has been disowned by many – some of her fans and others – for her views on women’s and trans people’s rights and how they can conflict. Perhaps we will get to this subject; however, it appears, only once Phelps-Roper has gone through every single US cultural permutation of the past 20 years.
The programme is in chronological order and follows Rowling’s professional history (her personal life is included to show how it shaped her work and how her work changed her life). The longueurs occur because we are also given the context in which her work was published. By work, of course, we mean Harry Potter, or Hairy Podder, as every American insists on calling it. There are a lot on this show. The second episode spends what seems like days on 1990s US Christian evangelists and their mad belief that the Harry Potter books truly promote witchcraft to children, that kids might “drink unicorn blood”. It’s hard to maintain interest throughout this lunacy.
The third episode, out last week, about the rise of internet message boards and their overspill into the mainstream, was much better. The two examined are Tumblr (essentially sweet and lefty) and 4chan (like a racist, Columbine-loving Andrew Tate). Tumblr gave many young people the space to define their own gender queer identities. And 4chan allowed its members to rail against societal norms in a different manner, paving the way for self-promoting feminist-baiters such as Milo Yiannopoulos.
This is Jon Ronson-style stuff, though Phelps-Roper is less sharp, journalistically. Really what The Witch Trials highlights is what happens to both artist and fans when a creation balloons into something unmanageable. Harry Potter – and via Harry, Rowling – became so popular that everyone, even those who with no stake in the game, decided on an opinion and all subtleties were lost. Rowling, as she says, may have hoped that the books’ message that humans are flawed, complicated, a mixture of good and bad, is what would resonate. But – and she sees this – that’s not what’s happened. Harry and Rowling became too famous for that. Now they’re seen as entirely good or utterly bad. There are four episodes to go.
A far cosier female-centred listen is Dear Daughter, winner of podcast of the year at last year’s British Podcast awards. The first episode of the second series came out last week as a podcast on BBC Sounds and will be a World Service programme starting on 11 March. Hosted by the positive, optimistic Namulanta Kombo, mother to a young boy and girl, it’s a sweet show that believes the relationship between mothers and daughters is special. Although last week, we heard from Marian, a journalist from Estonia, who had a distant relationship with her father and is very grateful for her husband’s much closer bond with their daughter. Both Marian and Kombo’s girls are still young: you wonder, a little, about teenage issues, also how the programme would differ if they had more than one daughter. This week, she will be interviewing writer Isabel Allende, not a woman to pull punches.
Here’s a show about more than one daughter: Sisters, from Kaitlin Prest, who is revered among podcast-lovers, especially North American women. Her podcast The Heart, a collection of different series, is beautifully made, intense and personal; she negotiates and understands the world via her own body and life. So it’s interesting that she is co-creating this beguiling, intriguing podcast with her younger sister, Natalie. Using recordings that Prest has made of her family over several years, the first three episodes cover Kaitlin and Natalie’s childhood, how Kaitlin was dismissive of Natalie, how Natalie thought her big sister was amazing and how they became close as adults. Now they are working together, and despite Natalie’s efforts to be her own person, everything still feels dominated by Kaitlin. Is there space for Natalie here? God, families are complicated…
Can we say the words Vernon Kay without the Radio 2 “family” falling apart? Now Ken Bruce has left (his last stint was on Friday), the mid-morning show will pass to Kay in a few weeks. He is a safe pair of hands, though perhaps a little blokey (despite its long love affair with the straight white male presenter, since Chris Evans left in 2018, Radio 2 has been almost entirely un-blokey). Safer still are the hands of the unacknowledged Gary Davies, there to smooth things over in between Bruce and Kay, to ensure that the world still keeps turning and the family still functions.
