Things Fell Apart (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
The Queen’s Reading Room The Queen’s Reading Room
Who Do You Really Think You Are? (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
The author and podcaster Jon Ronson is back, hooray, with a new season of Things Fell Apart, his excellent Radio 4 series in which he considers various battles in the culture wars. In the first series, which came out in 2021, he unpicked US abortion rights, conservative Americans banning books in schools, evangelical Christians’ attitude to gay men during the Aids crisis and more.
I loved it, and much of what made the first season so special is here too. There’s the careful structure: Ronson holding back just enough information for there to be a “No way, what!” moment in each show. There’s the amiable interview style: his scalpel-sharp journalistic mind comes wrapped in disarming, diffident warmth. There’s the general “Ooh look at the weird Americans” vibe (Ronson is British but has lived in the US for many years). And there’s the belief that everything strange and upsetting in today’s shouty, trigger-happy world has a starting point. A small, precise moment of misunderstanding or misinformation that has consequences that ripple out in ways nobody could have ever imagined. It’s those moments that Ronson searches out.
The eight episodes of season two, all on BBC Sounds, have their roots in the first eight weeks of lockdown (late March to May 2020). Topics covered include antifa (the US anti-fascist movement), Black Lives Matter, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and transgender rights. He begins in 1980s Miami, with the mysterious deaths of 32 women, mostly sex workers. I guessed where it would end up, though the episode deliberately disguises it. Still, the structural pull-back-and-reveal in no way lessens the shocking revelation at the programme’s heart.
Further into the series, Ronson also gets to the UK: Chipping Norton, in fact, to discuss 15-minute cities, still somehow a hot topic for conspiracy theorists. And, most incredibly, in the final show, he finds a man who connects all of the previous episodes. Mikki Willis believes he is engaged on a “hero’s journey” that starts when “a reluctant hero suddenly gets a call to adventure”, he says. Then, as a hero, he overcomes all obstacles and, finally, is “thrust into battle with whatever the villain is… and slays the dragon”. The hero’s journey is actually a story structure often found in literature, film and video games, but Willis believes that it’s the basis of his life and is acting accordingly. (His call to adventure was 9/11, if you’re interested.) And his dragon – the villain – is everything and everyone we’ve heard about previously in the series, plus another innocent person in the American public eye, who I’m not going to name because you should listen.
Having binged the entire season in one go – possibly not a good idea – I found myself feeling sad and frustrated. All these ludicrous conspiracy theorists with their ego-based misinformation, creating all this awful misery! To his credit, Ronson himself ends by listing all the lies we’ve heard. He also says this: “When untruths spread, the ripples can be devastating. It feels more important than ever to try to hold on to the truth, like driftwood in the ocean. Because if not, we might drown.” Indeed we might.
After the dense, intelligent analysis of Things Fall Apart, may I present you with something almost entirely witless? Et voilà: The Queen’s Reading Room. Sorry, The Queen’s Reading “Rum”, according to Vicki Perrin, our podcast host, who, you may have noticed, is not Queen Camilla. Camilla has a book club and charity called the Queen’s Reading Room, and this is a show designed, one presumes, to promote reading. And perhaps it will, if only by being so dull we stop listening and pick up a paperback. Clever!
Still, if you call a podcast The Queen’s Reading Room, then listeners expect to hear a) the Queen and possibly b) a description of said room. But we never get b), and a) comes very late on, after an interminable interview with Ian Rankin about books. A lively and interesting man, Rankin does his very best, but a 20-minute talk from anybody is a drag if the only audio punctuation is some drippy classical music. The producer’s questions are cut, so there’s no intimacy, and the recording quality is ropey too.
Camilla actually shows up at the end of the show, in a vowel-munching 2021 clip of her talking to the author Peter James. “How on arth d’yuh think of new plots?” she asks, like a well-read seven-year-old. Then we’re treated to one more quote, garnered specially for the series, about how she read Harry Potter to her kids but didn’t do the voices. You’ll have already seen this in all of the papers. And that’s it from Camilla! Off she pops to the reading rum, or the drawing rum or wherever. Certainly not the recording rum. A waste of everyone’s time.
Not a waste of your time is Who Do You Really Think You Are?, a fun Radio 4 show originally broadcast on New Year’s Day and repeated last Wednesday. In it, the geneticist Dr Adam Rutherford, with the help of ace mathematician Hannah Fry and the historian Martyn Rady, proves that we are all – all of us in Europe – descended from royalty. Specifically Charlemagne, king of the Franks, who was around in the late 700s and early 800s. How he does this feels like a brainteaser tricklike one of those puzzles where the rules are simple and you understand them, but the result doesn’t make any sense at all. Anyway, it’s very enjoyable, and now I am queen, why not come to my reading rum? I promise it’s more fun than that other queen’s.
