Ten to the Top (BBC Radio 2)
Ken Bruce (Greatest Hits Radio)
The Debutante (Audible)
Firecrotch and Normcore: A Succession Podcast (Acast)
Aside from relegation-zone football commentary and documentaries about the impending global apocalypse, the bleakest place to be on the radio today is any weekday morning at 10.30am on Radio 2.
Here you’ll find a new pop quiz called Ten to the Top, created to fill the Arctic half-hour void left behind by Ken Bruce, who departed the station in early March, 17 days early at the BBC’s behest, taking PopMaster, AKA the best radio pop music quiz of all time, with him. Temporarily warming the presenter’s chair until Vernon Kay arrivesin May is Gary Davies, a man with all the dated charm of a suave rascal on the waltzers. To his credit, Davies is desperately trying to defibrillate this already ailing format.
He faces problems. Any wrong answer sees the score hurtling down to one point. The questions range in difficulty randomly. A joker can also be played, but it seems as useful to the contestants as memory erasure. “The joker just didn’t go your way,” Davies says, remorsefully, to Laura from the Wirral on bank holiday Monday. “Never mind,” she replies numbly. Does the BBC’s cruelty know no bounds?
But over on Greatest Hits Radio, Ken Bruce is thriving. One week into his new job, his bank holiday playlist runs like a soundtrack to a defiant self-help manual (Wham!’s I’m Your Man, Elton John’s I’m Still Standing, Queen’s We Are the Champions). But you can get this stuff anywhere. The everyday grit in the show is what makes Bruce’s personality so pearly. Never has a man sounded happier giving shoutouts to the traffic office in “not-so-sunny Spalding… oh dear!” or pontificating on how north Norfolk’s seals should be nursing lukewarm coffee in seaside cafes, given the weather.
Bruce’s appeal is that of a sparky old teacher who everybody would rush to hug at the school reunion. It cannot be easily quantified by progress charts or management reports. It exists in the comforting routine of having a genuine, warm voice accompanying our days as our worlds move and change. Bruce also lightens the dull, shared details of our lives, things that will never be cool. Things like daft jokes and kindness seem naff when we’re young; we realise how essential they are as we get older. Note to radio bosses: we all get older.
Hearing Bruce surrounded by commercials is odd (Greatest Hits Radio is run by corporate behemoth Bauer), but thankfully the PopMaster half-hour has been kept clear of interruptions. A subscription to the (slightly clunky) app’s Premium service also delivers him ad-free. The quiz (thank God) survives unchanged and remains as much about Ken encouraging Jo from Warrington to tell us how she “adopted” Chesney Hawkes on a cruise as it is about naming three Bee Gees top 10 hits in 10 seconds. Although that remains satisfying in its joker-free simplicity too. I couldn’t help but think of the BBC as I shouted mine: I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You, Alone, Tragedy.
Another radio legend whose style is far from bombast returns this week: Jon Ronson with his new podcast for Audible, The Debutante. His 2021 series for BBC Sounds, Things Fell Apart, was his best work yet: a series of half-hour dispatches from the origin stories of the culture wars, untangling the knotty roots of the anti-abortion movement, the wave of book-banning in American schools and much more.
He takes this approach again to the story of Carol Howe, the titular debutante of the series. She wasn’t a debutante for long. Becoming a white supremacist in the early 1990s, then, less terrifyingly, an intelligence informant, she was ignored after telling authorities about an extremist rightwing plan to blow up a federal building. A few months later, the Oklahoma City bombings killed 168 and injured more than 680.
“Carol Howe was offering that rarest thing,” Ronson says, his tone as always one of beguiling, often unnerving, childlike wonder, “a momentous conspiracy theory that might actually be true.” His wide-eyed approach to his subjects continues to work because he never sensationalises them and because of his rigour – he tracks down Howe’s old friends and ex-boyfriends and archive recordings to dig into her story. He also leaves some threads tantalisingly untied, respecting the audience’s ability to retain information. All 10 episodes have been released simultaneously. I can confirm the first two are brilliant.
Some light relief to conclude. My favourite show of recent years, Firecrotch and Normcore: A Succession Podcast, continues its filthy, killer form for the blockbuster show’s final season. Titled after nicknames for the Succession couple Tom and Shiv, it’s hosted by the best husband-and-wife team in town: brilliant, potty-mouthed, Chicago-born standup Sara Barron and her gentler husband, Geoff Lloyd. Best known for co-hosting Reasons to Be Cheerful with Ed Miliband, he would be Ken Bruce’s Radio 2 successor in a kinder, better world.
Their main F&N show, out on Tuesdays, is divided into the couple’s opening “brain dumps”, impeccable Succession episode dissections, and a slot with a guest interviewee (this week has an incredibly revealing, joyful interview with show writer/executive producer Lucy Prebble). A follow-up for listener contributions, Friday Sprinkles, arrives three days later (the email address for correspondence is hilarious).
But it’s the couple’s raw, fizzing rapport that provides the solid audio gold. After Prebble explains how Matthew Macfadyen (Succession’s Tom) is a gentleman actor, Lloyd’s question to his wife had me howling. “How’s your vagina doing over there?” Barron’s response is as succinct, NSFW and perfect as Succession itself.
