Considering that she suffers from prosopagnosia, the condition known as “face blindness”, which is the polar opposite of “never forget a face” syndrome, it says a great deal for the liberal hiring policies of the British press that Mary Ann Sieghart ever got a job as a parliamentary lobby correspondent. Every morning she would find herself surrounded by the same middle-aged white men in grey suits who would have to introduce themselves to her all over again. As she says, it helped that she was a young woman. In Who Are You Again? (Friday, 11am, Radio 4) she talks to fellow prosopagnosia sufferer Stephen Fry, who has been known to switch into autographing mode when stopped by relatives in the street, which is embarrassing. Of course, fame on the Fry scale does odd things to a body’s relationship with the man on the street. People such as Paul McCartney and the Queen tend to assume they know everyone because experience has taught them that everybody knows them.
Don’t Log Off (Monday, 11pm, Radio 4) takes advantage of the fact that, thanks to the miracle of Skype, Alan Dein can now make contact, and record a broadcast-quality interview, with light sleepers all over the world. Interviewees range from a young Nigerian sharing a room with a dozen others in a labour camp in Abu Dhabi, where the summer temperature reaches 50C, to a grounded test pilot in Canada. There’s something about late-night voices that always sounds poignant, whether they belong to Peter Curran and Patrick Marber on Bunk Bed (Wednesday, 11.15pm, Radio 4) – who are this week joined by Kathy Burke – or Dein’s distant correspondents.
I listen to most broadcast discussions about modern music business models with the drumming fingers of impatience and the eye roll of disbelief. This is because I have enough grounding in the subject to know that one of the people talking, usually the interviewer, is having the wool pulled over his eyes by the other, who usually has something to sell. This is where the podcast comes into its own, because it is allowed to credit its audience with sufficient knowledge not to have to begin at the beginning and enough smartness to fill in the blanks with further research. This is why Peter Kafka’s conversation with Michael Rapino on the Recode Media podcast was like a jolt of espresso after years of watery instant. Rapino is the boss of Live Nation, which means he effectively runs the worldwide live music business. He’s not asking you to love him, and how could you since he’s the guy you curse when you can’t get tickets, but as he points out he’s in the only business where the product increases in value the minute he sells it. This should be required listening for anybody seeking to understand how entertainment works in the era of the smartphone. That probably means you.
