The week in radio: Electioncast; Emma Barnett Gets Answers; LBC News; Grenfell: Flat 142

Electioncast | BBC Sounds
Emma Barnett Gets Answers | Radio 5 Live
LBC News | LBC
Grenfell: Flat 142 | Radio 4

At a recent conference, I sat, with others, in front of a selection of PowerPoint slides that depicted various radio stations’ “reach” and “share”. (Yes, the life of an audio critic is constant glamour.) It was all, as you can imagine, utterly thrilling, and I was just at the point of dozing off when a speaker pointed to a big jump in a line on a graph. “What caused that?” he asked us. What was the event that was driving up listeners? The answer – and, God, I wish it were different – was Brexit.

There is no doubt that our febrile, silly, disappointing recent political times have provided what we could reluctantly describe as media “opportunities”. Brexitcast, the successful 5 Live podcast, briefly turned into Electioncast (and also branched out on to telly). It brought you daily news of the election, such as: “He has driven through a wall that says Gridlock on it, with a special Get Brexit Done excavator.” That was last week, from Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC political editor and one of Electioncast’s regular hosts. She must never sleep.

Emma Barnett on 5 Live and James O’Brien on LBC have enjoyed powering through the election; especially the former, who makes the most of her live political interviews and has had them collected into a newish BBC podcast, Emma Barnett Gets Answers. Barnett’s tone is so brilliant with politicians: friendly, factual, but never far from withering. (You do wonder why the BBC doesn’t do this kind of thing more: curate its radio content into a bite-size podcast format. It’s so easy, as the content is already there.)

And O’Brien’s host station, LBC, has pulled in a couple of coups over the past few weeks. Boris Johnson used to have an occasional show there, hosted by Nick Ferrari, where listeners called in to ask Johnson questions. Thus Ferrari’s breakfast show was one of the few news programmes that the prime minister didn’t back out of in the run-up to the election – although the video of him making slicing moves at his neck wasn’t quite the media takeaway Johnson intended.

Does that seem from another age? It was two and a half weeks ago. News is moving faster and faster, it seems. Perhaps inevitably, Global, who own LBC, recently launched a new rolling news station, LBC News, with the slightly scary does-what-it-says-on-the-tin slogan “Where the News Never Stops”. LBC News has less personality than the main LBC station, but does cover everything newsalicious, in the manner of a scrolling Twitter feed.

And it’s this that seems to be the media takeaway from this election. No matter the result, no matter who’s designated as winner, the news – on social media, on the radio, in podcasts – continues to be reported all the time, without filter or relevance check. It reminds me of school: everything that happens is important, whether it’s your actual GCSE results or the fact that Miss looked at Stella weird when Stella called her Mum by mistake, God, I could have died laughing. Whatever it is, the world must know. The News Never Stops, and our news providers have become a constantly updating teenage WhatsApp group.

So shall we turn to some slower forms of reporting? On Radio 4 on Tuesday, Kate Lamble presented a heartbreaking half-hour documentary, Grenfell: Flat 142, about a single family – that of Kamru Miah, his wife, Rabeya Begum, and their grownup children Mohammed Hamid, Mohammed Hanif and Husna Begum. They all lived in flat 142 on the 17th floor of Grenfell Tower. On the night of the fire, the firefighters did not reach them, though the family called 999 four times in one hour. The information about them went through at least six emergency service workers, but somehow that information went missing. And nobody came.

Lamble’s presentation is exemplary, her reporting exact. Everything we hear comes from this year’s Grenfell inquiry, which Lamble attended every day. A firefighter cries when he hears the evidence. The story ticks on through the night. The phone calls that Husna Begum makes to the emergency services are voiced carefully, from a transcript, without emotion. They are devastating, as real news is.

Three celebrity podcasts

At Home With the Williamses
When Robbie Williams has a podcast, we’ve reached some sort of aural tipping point, surely? Williams and his wife, Ayda, plus Nana Gwen and Papa Pete and other family members, chat away jovially about their celeb-style Christmas. (They don’t know how to put up a Christmas tree, because someone else always does it.) The show is upbeat and slick, produced (very well) to within an inch of its life. Brian Blessedprovides bonkers narration. This series is really a promo for Williams’s Christmas album, which is No 1 at the time of writing, so it worked.

The Gemma Collins Podcast
I can’t stand former TOWIE star GC, but I appear to be in a club of one, as BBC Sounds and Radio 1 have been promoting the shizzle out of The Gemma Collins Podcast for the past few months. Her presentation is ponderous, laboured and stupid, based solely around herself. Listeners write in with “dilemmas”, resulting in anecdotes that make Brexit look snappy and comments that display all the insight of a snoozing labrador. It says something about today that this woman dares to call herself a diva. Especially when the word “dullard” is available.

Here We Go Again With Stacey Solomon
The charming Solomon is a singer, Loose Women presenter and a winner of I’m A Celebrity. She had a baby in May, with partner Joe Swash, to join the three others that they already have from previous relationships. This podcast is sweet and informative, describing all those early-days problems that new mothers suffer. Her breastfeeding episode is particularly evocative – “I just got it totally wrong,” she says at one point, near tears – but she is willing to talk to and learn from experts. Recommended to all new mums getting through that mad, I’ve-got-it-all-wrong phase.