Revisionist History | revisionisthistory.com
Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People | earwolf.com
I don’t know about you, but a good proportion of my summer holidays is spent in the car. Driving seven hours to get to a campsite/B&B/mate’s house in a place that is mildly sunnier or more beautiful than where we live. Sitting in queues waiting to get on to a ferry or a motorway. Negotiating an impromptu traffic jam that’s arisen around two lorries playing overtake-me-overtake-you on a dual carriageway. All of which can be a strain, if I’m not alone. On my own, I’m completely fine, happily listening to my music or my podcasts or my chosen radio stations, zoning in to the moment. But with the family… well. The times I most long for a quickie divorce, from every single person I live with, are always in the car.
And if we’re abroad, things get worse. Hardly any of the music on my phone will play because I forgot to download it properly and there’s no Wi-Fi and I refuse to pay for data roaming. The kids want to play the same CDs over and over. I can’t use iPlayer. The radio stations are terrible. If you ever want to weep with gratitude for the healthy state of the UK’s airwaves, just try listening to French radio from Dover to Perpignan. I turned off one station when it played a song celebrating the rape of a 16-year-old (honestly).
Anyhow. It turns out that podcasts are the answer. Not always (the five-year-old gets restless after a while), but often the right podcast will enthral three out of the four of us. Which is good going, given our ages range from 10 to 53 and our interests sprawl far further. Our biggest recent success has been Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History. This is a relatively new podcast and I reviewed the first episode when it came out. I liked it, but was rather put off by the second, which laboured a point about confirmation bias and the Vietnam war. I didn’t come back after the third. I was wrong.
Because now, Gladwell is fully in to his stride. Not only is he nicely unpicking Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, he’s put out a three-part mini-series which focuses on the state of education in the US. All three of the episodes are shocking, absorbing and angering: the first one, Carlos Doesn’t Remember, especially. And Gladwell seems to go through the same emotions while presenting them. He gets properly outraged. His sarcasm bites. He almost shouts. It’s great to hear. What upsets him is unfairness and stupidity. He finds plenty to keep him riled.
Another podcast that kept us gripped is Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People. This is a strange show that consists simply of comedian/actor/talkshow host Chris Gethard having a telephone conversation with someone he doesn’t know. They talk for a while – Gethard isn’t allowed to hang up – and he finds out interesting things about them. That’s it. No names, no follow-up, the end. The format is a little long for my liking – I’m a half-hour-to-45 minute gall; these are over an hour – but the show is really good. “Every conversation is an onion and I’m just peeling back those layers until we’re all crying,” says Gethard, and this is often true.
The most recent episode, where he says this, is one of my favourites. At the start, Gethard answers listeners’ questions (no, he doesn’t know who anyone is; yes, he’d like more diverse callers), and then a lovely chap starts to talk. About how he’s left his job, is setting up by himself, how he likes to go running but he keeps crying when he’s finished… it’s great. But be warned, both this and Revisionist History had me wiping tears while traffic-jamming. Still, it’s a more memorable way to pass the time than another round of I-spy.
