Where It’s At: A Short History of Girl Bands (Radio 1) | BBC Sounds
28 Dates Later | iHeartPodcasts
Law in Action: Deepfakes and the Law (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Radio 1’s A Short History of Girl Bands is an easy, lively listen, with presenter Mollie King skimming deftly across the top of a neat script and some great interviews. It’s set in recent years (no Ronettes or Supremes), and journalists contextualise with insight, whether US journalist Julianne Escobedo Shepherd or British writer Michael Cragg. Cragg, who wrote the brilliant Reach for the Stars, about 90s chart acts, gives good context throughout, covering the Spice Girls, All Saints, Mis-Teeq, Cleopatra. Remember them? You do, once you hear the tracks.
This is a Radio 1 documentary, as opposed to Radio 4, so nothing is dwelt on for long. Interviews are trimmed into short, snappy clips; topics are dealt with in a couple of minutes. Actually, it’s refreshing not to have a point banged in hard (I’ve been listening to a lot of news podcasts, and the nail-it-high pomposity is getting worse), and though the underlying argument that all-female bands are never taken as seriously as all-male ones is made throughout, the individual nuances of each episode keeps this series fresh. We cover fashion, history, money and sex and move between the UK and the US, the Spice Girls and Destiny’s Child.
And, be still my beating heart, the second episode focuses on TLC and features interviews with T-Boz and Chilli. Where Spice Girls alluded to safe sex, TLC made things obvious by making safe sex a fashion statement (they pinned condoms to their clothes, and released Waterfalls, about drugs and the Aids crisis). Music is used beautifully, popping in and out across the show. This gives a naturally upbeat feel, even when the topics aren’t so cheerful. TLC went bankrupt a year after releasing the huge-selling LP CrazySexyCool because of their rubbish record deal: “We were all dolled up and we had all these Grammys, so it looked a certain way… but the real deal is we didn’t have any money,” says Chilli. A seemingly light series that is careful to make its point.
Grace Campbell is a youngish writer and standup comic who, until now, had not crossed my radar. She’s lively and confident, with an almost-posh north London drawl, and her new podcast series has a neat, though not original, concept. 28 Dates Later sees her go on dates with 28 people she would usually reject. Dating apps are boring her, she says in her intro: she’s worked through them so often that there’s nobody interesting left. So why not try the usually left-swiped? She’s joined on her quest for new dating fun by Ros, a good friend who’s been happily settled in a relationship for many years. Ros has never used a dating app, and is content to live vicariously through Grace. The scene-setting chat between the two is nice; we know where we’re going and why.
What we might call the meat of the show is a little disappointing, though. Grace’s first date is with a man the series calls the Sugar Daddy. He’s in his 40s and rich, and we hear snippets of his and Grace’s conversation throughout the show, interspersed with Ros and Grace’s analysis. The Sugar Daddy insists he lives off a trust fund, and spends every day doing what he enjoys, which is going to the gym, then going on a date, usually at a casino. He says he used to have three women, all of whom were his “girlfriends” and whom he took gambling every night. He also says he went out with 1,000 women in three years: a new one every evening.
Grace is good at keeping the conversation going, but she’s oddly naive. At one point she wonders if the Sugar Daddy wanted sex in return for paying for his three girlfriends to gamble their nights away. Well, duhhh, is all I’m saying to that one. Also, a trust fund man with a working-class accent is unusual, to say the least, but she doesn’t ask him about that. The Sugar Daddy is clearly lying about much of his so-called life and, though Grace considers this, she doesn’t delve deeply enough for us to find out anything worthwhile. It would have been more fun if she’d gone gonzo and taken the Sugar Daddy up on his offer of a proper night out. Too much chat, not enough action, is what I’m saying – which possibly says more about me than this gently entertaining podcast.
Law in Action is a nice example of what Radio 4 gets right and wrong, all in one show. Presenter Joshua Rozenberg is warm and exceptionally experienced, but not much jolts him out of his comfort zone. Last week’s main feature, Deepfakes and the Law, on some of the legal implications of AI, was interesting – essentially, existing laws can be used to prosecute anyone who uses AI to replicate someone’s voice or image – but was let down by some odd production decisions. The complicated teeing up of a feature where Rozenberg had to guess if a voice was AI or real made the actual guessing a bit of a letdown.
Radio 4 has so many of these established shows just ticking over, week by week by week: competent, long-running series that look at life and news through the lens of law, or media, or money. They’re all OK, though a little old fashioned. And I sometimes wonder if their specialist approaches can tell us anything important about today’s fast-moving, vast-scale world. It can feel like they’re trying to understand how a whole human works by only examining her big toe. Or a whole fake human, by only examining her voice.
