The BBC finally has a true crime podcast to rival Serial
Death in Ice Valley is said to be the BBC’S “answer” to the podcast Serial. That, in itself, feels slightly dispiriting. Almost four years after a not-for-profit production company in Chicago produced the most popular podcast series of all time – a word-ofmouth sensation that helped spawn a mass market for the emerging medium – our national broadcaster is only now lumbering to its feet to offer some serious competition.
To make the comparison especially direct, Death in Ice Valley (released weekly on BBC iplayer and Apple Podcasts) is, like Serial, a cold-case investigation about a murdered woman – but this time with added Scandi-noir. The dead woman in question was found in 1970 in a remote, wooded spot in Norway’s Isdalen (or Ice) Valley. She had been partially burnt, and all the labels on her clothes removed. Her luggage was later discovered in Bergen railway station: its contents included wigs, fake spectacles and a notebook full of mysterious codes.
The conceit here is that two investigative journalists – Marit Higraff from the Norwegian public radio station NRK, and Neil Mccarthy from the World Service – will try to crack one of Norway’s most famous unsolved crimes, with a little help from the audience. Amateur sleuths are encouraged to post any leads or theories on a dedicated Facebook page. New episodes are still being made, and the producers evidently hope that the public will lead them to a satisfactory conclusion.
I started listening to this in a mood of deep scepticism. It seems so optimistic – not to say childish – to hope that Joe Public can solve a mystery that has defeated the Norwegian police for almost 50 years. And everything about this show – even down to the international detective double-act, nicked from the cult TV series The Bridge – sounded so derivative.
But after two episodes, I’m hooked. It’s a great story, imaginatively told. Its elusive heroine – known in Norway as the “Isdal Woman” – is emerging as a possible Cold War spy, with a touch of Cruella de Vil: dark eyes; red, unsmiling lips; a gold tooth and a fur hat. She travelled alone, dressed beautifully, spoke with a strange foreign accent, and – according to several witnesses who met her – trailed a horrible smell behind her.
Of our two detectives, Higraff is the expert: she had already spent two years investigating this case when the World Service suggested a collaboration. Mccarthy’s role, which he performs winningly, is to follow her around Norway asking pertinent questions. But perhaps the biggest star of the show is its sound designer, Phil Channell.
Successful podcasts have to be pleasing to the ear, because most people listen to them through earphones: a much more intimate, enveloping experience than pottering about in the kitchen with the radio on. Channell has created a lush soundscape of crunching footsteps, buffeting winds and the pattering of rain on anoraks. I’m less keen on the suspenseful music – especially the ladies wailing “Aaaaaoooooooooo” in the background, like a chorus of ghostly Enyas – but the overall effect is so immersive that you can almost feel the mossy floor of the Isdalen Valley beneath your feet.
Death in Ice Valley went to the top of the Apple Podcast charts this week: number one in Britain and number two in America. That is a huge deal for a British podcast, and proof that, at last, the BBC is mastering this wonderful art.
Thought for the Day (Radio 4) is very far indeed from the cutting edge of radio: 48 years old and widely considered a pointless anachronism, a daily puff of religious hot air into the secular atmosphere of the Today programme.
But when Rabbi Jonathan Sacks took the microphone on Friday, it briefly became essential radio again.
“I’ve been doing Thought for the Day for 30 years,” he began, “but I never thought that in 2018 I would still have to speak about antisemitism.” What followed was three minutes of brilliantly measured fury. Political extremism on the left and right, he said, had revived the ancient hatred: antisemitic incidents on Jews in Britain have risen to their highest level since records began in 1984. This “dysfunction” in our culture should frighten everyone, “because the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews”. Mere unease is no longer enough, he warned. “All it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing. Today I see too many good people doing nothing, and I am ashamed.”