Have You Heard George’s Podcast? (BBC 5 Live) | BBC Sounds
The News Agents Investigates: Hunting a People Smuggler | Global
Sidetracked With Annie and Nick | BBC Sounds
Uncanny (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
George Mpanga, AKA George the Poet, is an unusual person. He moves – sometimes smoothly, sometimes with more personal difficulty – between north-west London, where he grew up (“the ends”) and more elite arenas such as Cambridge University, where he studied; between the UK and Uganda, where his parents are from. He loves poetry, learning, music, parties. He refuses to stereotype people. Recently, he organised a poetry competition for van drivers (his father, brother and uncle have all driven vans for a living) and is about to publish a book of the best 30 poems. He’s … different.
And his beautiful, hard-hitting, wildly soundscaped, multi-award-winning podcast, Have You Heard George’s Podcast?, is also unlike anything else out there – even now, half a decade after the first series, there are no imitators. Series four started last week, and Mpanga is looking at African history, specifically the independence movements of the 1960s and their legacies today. (You could argue that movement is Mpanga’s constant topic: how people move between and within places, how their minds change as they change their scenes, how they dance, with and around each other.)
Last week’s episode was about Ghana, its freedom struggle and its first post-colonial president, Kwame Nkrumah. I have heard a few more episodes: Mpanga considers the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other former French colonies of west and equatorial Africa, even Jamaica and its former prime minister . Each show shifts between documentary and poetry, music and history, between Mpganga talking to friends, or asking you, the listener, to hear and understand. His voice is delicious, his truths hard-hitting.
It’s all immensely detailed, layered, subtle stuff, a little like Adam Curtis, though less conspiratorial. Packed with information and explanation, it’s perfectly timed for Black History Month. If I were a secondary school history teacher, I would use every single one of these episodes; though, of course, they wouldn’t fit into the current curriculum. Mpanga makes these shockingly recent histories sing, this time with the accompaniment of the BBC Concert Orchestra playing the compositions of his collaborator-in-sound, Benbrick. Unmissable, as ever.
More movement. This time that of people travelling in hope, from where they grew up, in search of a better life elsewhere. The News Agents – the daily podcast hosted by Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall – launched a spin-off last week called The News Agents Investigates. For the first episode, Goodall went to the northern coast of France, around Dunkirk, to take a proper look at how and why people are risking their lives to cross the Channel in small boats. Though actually an undercover journalist (not Goodall) did much of the legwork, pretending to be looking for a way across the Channel, talking to the people-smugglers. They promised to get his fictional Indian relative over to England for £1,500, and advised him on how the relative should claim asylum: “Good case, political. Say Bombay mafia.” No one had heard about Rwanda.
The episode’s most shocking moments, though, were not these. The first was the French authorities’ apparently deliberate effort to ignore the problem. An expert explained that the French only paid lip service to cracking down on the vast, vile refugee camps, because why would they bother? They wanted refugees to leave for Britain, they didn’t want them in France. This expert was an undercover operative who had been working with refugees for 27 years. He said this, too: “The smuggling operations change and adapt to whatever restrictions are being enforced. The only way I can see to stop them is to open legal routes for people to come here to claim asylum, allow people to apply from their own country.” If only the politicians would listen.
I have a problem with The News Agents: not with the journalism, which is excellent, but with the way the presenters bang out all their points in BIG POMPOUS CAPITAL LETTERS, in case we do not understand. That doesn’t entirely disappear here, but this was a really interesting programme and a great flagship show for the new series.
Annie Macmanus and Nick Grimshaw, two of my all-time favourite former Radio 1 presenters, are doing their own thing these days. Macmanus has her successful podcast, Changes; Grimmy has one too, Dish, with chef Angela Hartnett. But the BBC has tempted these excellent hosts back into the fold with a new show on Sounds. Sidetracked with Annie and Nick is a ramble-chat between the two about the week in music. And the first episode is fun, though Macmanus is a leeetle shouty if you’re wearing headphones. There’s much funny discussion about Usher and Doja Cat, as well as Keith Richards, who sent in a question, a big coup for the first episode. “Could vinyl actually be uh uh the future?” wondered Keef. For Grimmy, the answer is “Yes, Keith”, but in a longer, more hilarious form. This is, after all, a show about being sidetracked.
And … Uncanny is back! Danny Robins’s entertaining take on real-life spookiness returns to Radio 4, before a TV spin-off due soon. To reassure the show’s many fans, it’s still the same as ever: someone has an inexplicable, possibly otherworldly experience, Robins makes them tell their story in little stages, while he “oohs” and “ahs” and “bloody hells” and asks two experts, one a sceptic, one a believer, what they think. The formula is very far from broke, so why fix it? Last week: a spooky sad man in a trilby and mac kept popping up in a teenager’s bedroom. Bad enough, but then other people started seeing him too …
