Yahoo News The week in podcasts and radio: Drilled; Discovery – Ecological Grief
Discovery: Ecological Grief (BBC World Service) | BBC Sounds
Drilled is a podcast that’s been going for a couple of seasons now. It bills itself, excitingly, as a “true crime podcast about climate change”, though the show is not quite as racy as that sounds. Rather than smack her lips over ruined corpses, the pleasantly fry-toned presenter Amy Westervelt goes into detail about the history of what she calls “big oil” (yes, she’s American). Her tale is of how fossil fuels became our fuels of choice, even once we realised that they were causing immense damage to the environment. True crime, unless you’re a Trumpian.
Westervelt’s approach is to research hard and then recount the story, and her show reminds me, a little bit, of Karina Longworth’s longstanding history of Hollywood’s golden years, You Must Remember This. It has that “one woman expert” feel, and the delivery is similar – not much emotion, few guests, the odd media clip, a few production tweaks. Like an extended essay, or an audio book.
Such an approach has advantages – it’s cheap, it gives everything weight – but it also means that the listener can drift off, especially when that listener (me) is a bit tired. I started Drilled’s new series three times before I realised I had to be walking around rather than sitting in order for Westervelt’s voice not to send me snooze-ward.
The new series, which looks at how fossil fuel companies use PR to make their products more palatable, is just two episodes in and I would recommend that you go straight to these: past episodes have suffered from shoddy production and repetition. In it, Westervelt looks at Ivy Lee, who became notorious in the 1910s as the PR guy who transformed business magnate John D Rockefeller from the US’s most hated man into, seemingly, a kindly philanthropist. Shockingly, Lee was subsequently hired by the Third Reich, not necessarily to promote it, but to teach Hitler and Goebbels how to soften their language and butter up foreign journalists so their ideas seemed less appalling and more palatable. Ugh.
Westervelt’s argument is that Lee’s PR approach forms the basis of how oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell and BP have been presenting their wares for several years. (Though of course, it’s not just them: it’s how most big commercial interests present themselves.) Techniques such as using green as a base colour for branding, calling the product not oil, but “natural gas”, making sure you have good media relationships who will present your case rather than question it … All very interesting, and Drilled is definitely worth a listen, despite its occasionally frustrating approach.
Over on Discovery, on the World Service, which along with Radio 4 has been highlighting many aspects of the current climate emergency, science journo Gaia Vince interviewed scientists who suffer from “ecological grief”. (She has talked about this in the Observer.) One, Steve Simpson, described how quickly and thoroughly his chosen topic of study – Australia’s coral reefs – went from thriving to, well, less so. In just a few months, through water over-heating and acidification, 80% of the reef died. A coral graveyard. Other interviewees spoke of out-of-date emergency smoke protocols in Canada. When bushfires sent lung-clogging smoke into cities, people were told to stay indoors with the windows closed. But the smoke lasted, not for a couple of days, but for months. What effect does that have on you? How small do you want your life to be?
Vince is a very traditional BBC presenter, and this programme is a very traditional World Service show: clear, workman-like, made so that audiences across the globe can understand it. No room for over-sentimentality. Still, Simpson, in the end, did have a tiny bit of good news. He played his old recordings of fish, made when the reef was still thriving, to tempt the surviving fish into areas where they could establish new habitats. Another interviewee, who works with indigenous people in Canada, talked about “action feeling better than anxiety”. Can they – can we – stem the crisis?
Three offbeat slices of satire
The Skewer
Jon Holmes, comedian and presenter, has a weirder side to him than you might think if you’ve just caught him on radio (he’s had various shows on the BBC, TalkRadio and Virgin). He started out with Chris Morris, and his new Radio 4 show is quite Morris-esque, featuring familiar people’s voices cut up and repasted into almost real conversations. The prime minister gets a remix, blasting Get Brexit Down to a dance beat. Trump’s backing is The Windmills of Your Mind… Nightmare, or dream? Funny and strange, like all good things.
The Bugle Presents… The Last Post
The Last Post offers more traditional satire than The Skewer. Aussie comic Alice Fraser (with a co-host, usually another comic such as Tiff Stevenson or Andy Zaltzman) chats through the main events of the day, including anniversaries, death-a-versaries, current international news and silly ads. Fraser zips through contemporary topics with impressive zeal and a clever script, to much cheeriness and chipping in from her co-host. Each episode is only about 15 minutes long, but absolutely packed. Like a sweary, sped-up News Quiz.
This City
This new podcast sees host Radio 1 presenter Clara Amfo talk to various famous people about their connection to London. OK, this isn’t really satire, as you might have noticed. But…! Amfo’s first episode is an interview with the brilliant Mo The Comedian, aka Mo Gilligan, who can make anything and everything funny. Gilligan’s skits on contemporary life are second to none, and if you want a skew-whiff, yet on point, dissection of who and what we are in the UK today, he’s the one to turn to.
