The Reith Lectures (R4) | iPlayer
Reply All iTunes
Criminal thisiscriminal.com
This year’s Reith Lectures will perhaps make fewer headlines than Grayson Perry’s last year. Judging by the first lecture, there will certainly be fewer jokes. But a quieter approach seems more befitting of a doctor, and Atul Gawande is a surgeon and Harvard professor. In his first lecture, Gawande told a story about his son who, when 11 days old, was on the verge of death. When Gawande and his wife took him to the hospital, a small mistake by a medic meant that the little boy was on the verge of being misdiagnosed and, thus, dying. But another doctor realised that the medical equipment wasn’t being used properly, rectified the error and the correct diagnosis was made. So Gawande’s son received the proper treatment and lived.
Gawande, an engaging, thoughtful speaker, talked about human ignorance and ineptitude, and about our propensity for failure. He said that, when it comes to medicine, for a long time we were working from a position of ignorance: we didn’t know all that much about how our bodies worked or how to mend them. Now we have a lot of expert knowledge, but other factors, including ineptitude, mean that our knowledge is not being used properly. He thinks that the only way of making that knowledge more useful and available is for doctors to be more open about what they are doing, “removing the veil around what happens in that procedure room”.
This made me think of Reply All, a new American podcast about the internet from PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman. Vogt and Goldman are experienced podcasters – up until a few weeks ago they were the hosts of TLDR, another podcast about the internet. Anyway, so far they have made two episodes of Reply All, and the most recent discussed a smartphone app called Figure 1. Something like Instagram for doctors, Figure 1 is a visual app where medics (with the patient’s signed permission) take a picture of the wound/the growth/whatever is wrong and upload it for other medics to comment on or offer help. Or for non-medics to ick over, which is what we heard Goldman do when he came across a picture of a man’s foot after a rat had dined out on it. Figure 1 is definitely a helpful tool for medics to share knowledge, as well as a weird way for non-medics to pass their time while waiting for their lunch to microwave.
Reply All discussed Figure 1 in an entertaining way. It’s a podcast made very much in the accepted manner of American public radio docs and podcasts – this is not Reply All’s fault – I think I’ve heard a little too much of this manner over the past few months. The public radio journalistic delivery – clever, seemingly open and balanced, but also observational (“You know, I get this”) – is epitomised by Sarah Koenig in the podcast Serial, and her broadcasting approach has been much commented on. But actually it’s a generic “I’m a clever American person” presenting style: you find it in This American Life, in Radiolab, in several of the Radiotopia house programmes. Even the interviewees seem to talk in the same way.
Reply All is in the top 10 of iTunes podcasts at the moment, which is why I checked it out (it’s fine: short, mildly interesting, it won’t change your life). Another US podcast in the top 10 is Criminal, which sells itself as “a podcast about crime. Not so much the ‘if it bleeds it leads’ kind of crime. Something a little more complex” (see what I mean about the style?). Criminal is part of the Radiotopia school of shows, and has more substance than Reply All. The couple of shows I listened to were about a teenage hacker who brought down several websites, and a man who was blackmailed for years without telling anyone. They were well done, though the hacker’s story was well-known and the blackmailed man’s tale was a bit frustrating, as he wasn’t there to tell it.
Oh, I don’t know. I wonder how many more of this type of podcast there is space for. They are all based around storytelling, even the seemingly straightforwardly journalistic ones. They’re all trying to tell us human tales, stories about ordinary people whose lives suddenly change, or who are keeping a dark secret or who use the internet in strange ways. And they all try to understand a bigger point about life through these stories. I get it, I really do, but I think I need to stop listening for a while (except to Serial, which has a strange grip on my life). Also, I can’t sit through yet another advert for Squarespace. I need a big dose of Annie Mac.
