Colin Murray (TalkSport)
Moral Maze: The Summer of 2016 (Radio 4) | iPlayer
The Clintons (Radio 4) | iPlayer
On Tuesday, Colin Murray returned to his consistently spirited and inventive mid-morning slot on TalkSport in order to work out a month’s notice. He’d been on holiday since resigning over the fact that News Corp had bought the station last month. Murray, a Liverpool fan whose show has always been steadfast in its support of the Hillsborough campaigners, couldn’t stomach the prospect of cross-promotion with the Sun, which Rebekah Brooks suggested as an obvious byproduct of the takeover.
In his three years at the station, Murray, alongside his rotating guests – from the gnomic Daley Thompson to the irrepressible Bob Mills – has subtly changed the sometimes shouty and impossibly blokeish TalkSport tone to something far more generous and inclusive. Along with Stan Collymore, who has seen his contract withdrawn by the station after suggesting the Sun should be shut down in the wake of the Hillsborough verdict, Murray and his guests also offered a passionate corrective to some of the Sky-hyped nonsense of the Premier League and its coverage. There was a slight air of mourning, particularly from sidekicks Martin Kelner and Stuart Pearce. Murray himself, insisting that he would “make the most of every minute of his last 22 days”, resisted the opportunity to rant at his new bosses – or perhaps he’s saving it up.
On the last in the current series of the Moral Maze, Will Moy, director of Full Fact, “a fact-checking charity”, suggested that “we have been living in a post-truth world for nearly 30 years” (I wondered in passing if he was dating it to Kelvin MacKenzie’s infamous Hillsborough front page). The Mazers were trying to make sense of the political convulsions of the summer, from Brexit to Trump to the Labour leadership. Are these populist times “an assertion of the independent-minded… or a brainless twitch by people bored with issues and complexity,” Michael Buerk asked. Why are we “bringing on the mavericks and the clowns”? Cue Milo Yiannopoulos, self-obsessed libertarian provocateur, still heady from the “joyful” Republican convention. He welcomed the “existential threat” of Trump – “we want the entire system to burn,” he said, of fact-based democratic politics and the hated “mainstream media”. Giles Fraser, the excitable C of E cleric, appeared quite buoyed by the prospect of at least “a bit of burning”. He cheerfully celebrated the “cracks in the enlightenment project” of reason and experts and judgment that Brexit and Trump revealed. Good God, I thought.
The first episode of Jonathan Myerson’s three-part drama The Clintons opened with a family discussion of the latest “bimbo eruption” as Bill prepared to run for the White House in 1992. A fateful decision was made for him and Hillary to appear on primetime television to refute the claims of former lover Gennifer Flowers and address, Princess Diana-style, the difficulties in their marriage to the nation. Myerson casts Bill (judiciously voiced by Corey Johnson) as the weak-willed creation of his ambitious and brilliant wife (played by Fenella Woolgar). There is a flashback to Bill sobbing after losing his Arkansas governor election, and Hillary Rodham providing a bit of Lady Macbeth backbone. “What does pragmatic mean?” Bill subsequently asks an adviser; his wife needs no definition. “Why did you have to ruin it all!” she yells at her husband.
Myerson’s staging of those family dramas, inevitably a little contrived, feels of another time and place entirely. With Bill Clinton on the Democratic stage now a shadow of his former self and Hillary the desperate last hope of sanity, it seems almost irrelevant to look back on the presidential philandering – though the impeachment process was undoubtedly where the poisonous spirit of current Republicanism began. Clinton himself could see that future all too clearly in this telling; Gennifer Flowers was only the start. “All the policies and the insight, and this is what they care about?” he asks. The cracks in “the enlightenment project” were only just beginning.
