The New World (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Imagining The New Truth (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Late Nights With Iain Lee: Women Only |TalkRadio
Still not quite in back-to-school mode, Radio 4 gave its weekday 9am slot over to an interesting series called The New World, where experts – cover your ears, Govey – tried to make sense of the recent past and what might be to come. What rough beast has slouched from the remnants of 2016? We heard about truth and post-truth, facts and fear, population and populism. And dotted throughout the week, like samples on a joke rap, we heard clips of the voices of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump.
To be honest, I approached the series with resentment. I don’t want to have to make sense of such awful times. I’d like to turn up my music and hide under the duvet, thanks very much. But that approach doesn’t help. Neither does arguing with people who don’t agree with you (as though we don’t know this already). In Monday’s programme, Nothing But the Truth, Jo Fidgen looked at the ways in which, recently, public discourse has changed. I jotted down some phrases. “We think we’re reasoning but we’re actually rationalising”; “We’ve been dressing up values as facts and then fighting over them as if there were some objective truth at stake, rather than competing beliefs”; “Facts and truth are not the same thing”. Essentially, we believe in people who reflect back what we feel is the emotional, rather than the factual, truth. It doesn’t matter if wild lies – utter untruths – form part of a political campaign. We only hear what we want to hear. ’Twas ever thus, of course, but now the internet and where we live (in clusters of like-minded people) have made us more divided than ever.
On Tuesday and Thursday, the programmes discussed how the US is ignoring the rise of China, and how rising population is associated with this. Friday’s was globalisation. All slightly too dry for me. But I enjoyed John Harris on Wednesday. He let us hear from reasonable people who voted Brexit, and pointed out how calling them racist doesn’t help. His programme chimed with, and added to, Monday’s.
After each programme, in Imagining the New Truth, a different international artist gave an insight into their world. (This slightly balanced up the middle-aged white guys at 9am. Four out of five! And yes, I always count.) Some of these programmes were whimsical, others self-satisfied. I enjoyed Cuban activist artist Tania Bruguera’s light but honest account of what it’s like living in post-Fidel Cuba. She made an art piece about interrogation and, as a result, was followed by the secret police, taken into custody and interrogated herself on many occasions. (This made Tuesday’s artist, German writer Daniel Kehlmann, seem a bit trivial. He wrote a drama about interrogation: always less scary than the real thing. Apart from that, though, he was a delight.) Anyhow, despite my caveats and my reluctance, I found this week’s 9-10am slot informative and refreshing. Although I still don’t know what we’re meant to do about any of this.
On Wednesday night, the wonderful Iain Lee decided to only allow women to call his phone-in show. He’s been kicking this idea around for a while – why don’t women phone such shows as often as men do? – and the resulting programme, though a little slow to start, had some properly memorable moments. A funny call from a mother who wrote a poem (which a teacher read out) when her daughter was bullied for joining in with boys’ football. A touching one from a woman who called to say how much Lee’s show meant to her husband, who suffered from mental health issues. Plus Janey Godley, whose rants always make me laugh. A success.
