The lingering smell of the smoke from Grenfell
Iwanted to avoid Grenfell: Dust on Our Lips (Radio 4, Tuesday, repeated Sunday) but I couldn’t. I live near enough to the Grenfell Tower to have smelled the smoke last June, to see its black skeleton now. I am also old enough to remember the 1941 Blitz, bombs falling, ruins smoking, holes where houses were yesterday, people left with nothing. But that was Liverpool in wartime when Germany was the enemy. This is west London now, with blame raining down on the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. This meticulously constructed documentary, produced by Deborah Dudgeon, for independents Whistledown, was a revelation.
More about effect than cause, it talked about coping with now, what might help in the future. I am so glad that I heard it. The reporter was Faisal Metalsi, who knows the estate. That showed, in his careful questioning of residents and their open responses. We also heard from police directly investigating what happened and those who dealt with the immediate after effects. There was good counsel from a south London estate that also suffered a tragic fire and from those who dealt with the consequences of New York’s 9/11 disaster. One big question was answered: what to do with the ruin of the tower so that it does not remain a daily reminder of June 14? It will, by next June, be completely wrapped in white canvas. This programme was linked by a local priest reading his poem, its title. It made the whole thing linger like a bitter kiss.
In the same 8pm slot on Wednesday night came We Need to Talk about
first of a trio of brisk explorations by Joan Bakewell. Unsentimental, practical and precise she began with bodies and why people bequeath them to science. Medical students need them, research scientists too. It was illegal for centuries, hence grave robbing.
It took two world wars to change minds about it. Kindly note: it can’t be just any body. Age doesn’t matter but wholeness does (no post mortems, please.) Legalities must be observed, proper consent forms signed. Would she do it? Maybe. Would I? I’m seriously thinking about it.
Again in that slot on Thursday came my latest best-friend programme, The Briefing Room.
This is the 1,000 calorie diet of news, exactly enough to be informationally nourished while imparting a zest all of its own. Compare and contrast someone on Today trying to prise pearls of information from the reluctant oysters of politics. Actually, that’s not fair. News programmes have to maintain strict balance. Politicians and pundits go on Today and The World at One specifically to put or oppose an argument. This programme, hurried along by David Aaronovitch, sets a single question, gives the background, calls in experts. The agenda is tight and time is short, concision is all.
The subject last week was what we know, for sure, about Russia’s covert interventions in world affairs. Quite a lot, it seems. It’s been in the news for a year but, Aaronovitch asked, what is speculation, what is fact? BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera said that there is evidence of Russian interventions in France, Germany, the UK, the USA, but it’s different in every case. The general aim is to plant discord, encourage distrust of governments by using social networks to promote falsehoods. Is the Kremlin involved? Yes. Is this disruption working? Yes, in several ways. It’s war, but without Russia sending in the tanks, not full scale but ongoing. Dangerous, too, because it undermines Nato, puts Russia back onto the world stage (after the “humiliation” of the Cold War) and keeps Putin in power. Aaronovitch, who grew up in a dedicatedly Communist family, showed that it was something to be taken very seriously. And there was I, thinking such things were just the stuff of Netflix series.
Mark Lawson is back on Radio 4 on Thursday mornings with Thinking Outside the Boxset: How Technology Changed the Story, an explanation of why some of us love Netflix for its long form dramas (House of Cards and The Good Wife, in my case). It’s because, as with sonnets, form dictates content. TV dramas used to come in short series, one episode per week. With streamed TV, such as Netflix, series can be longer and also constantly, wholly available. As we will pay to gorge on these, their value therefore increases. Lawson quizzes British practitioners here for the secrets of constructing stories that will hold audiences faster, tighter, longer. Watch out. He’s a playwright himself. Maybe he’s already hatching a fiendishly Lawsonian stretchable plot.