Radio brilliantly captures the complexity of humans
Keeping up with online culture is always a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you need to at least dabble in social media to understand where Western society is heading. On the other hand, the more you know, the harder it is not to panic.
I adopted the brace position before tuning into Monday’s episode of BBC Trending, the World Service series that examines what’s happening online. The title – Inside the Dark
World of Incels – promised to take us somewhere I had no desire to go.
Incels (short for “involuntary celibates”) are young men consumed with anger and despair about not getting laid. They believe the genetic odds have been stacked against them: they think they are, and always will be, ugly, awkward and repulsive to women. They meet online to commiserate, and in some cases to plot revenge. Last month, Alek Minassian, proclaiming the start of an “incel rebellion”, drove his van into pedestrians on a Toronto street. Ten people, mostly women, died.
Reams of column inches have been expended on the incel movement since then. But nothing I have read explained it as effectively as this programme. Jonathan Griffin and Elizabeth Cassin – co-producers and presenters – waded deep into the swamp of Reddit and other conspiracy-filled forums, as well as recording interviews with three self-proclaimed incels.
The scariest was “Liam”, a 19-yearold English boy with polite, selfdeprecating manners. Incel forums, he told Griffin, are effectively support groups for “people who are like you – well, like me,” he laughed shyly, “not like you probably.” It’s “nice,” he said, to be able to talk about your troubles. I felt sorry for Liam. I wanted to give him a maternal pep talk, confiscate his laptop and push him out into the daylight, where he might actually meet a girl.
But then his muddle-headedness began to look more alarming. Griffin pointed out to him that incel forums aren’t actually very supportive. Suicidal members are routinely egged on to kill themselves. Less often, but still commonly, they are urged to take down “normal” people with them, like Elliot Rodger, who in 2014 murdered six people in California before shooting himself, did. “It’s fine,” shrugged Liam, suddenly full of bravado. “I don’t think it was even that wrong, what he did.”
Radio is so brilliant at capturing human complexity. In print, Liam would have come across as a twodimensional weirdo. But being able to hear the nuances in his voice, shifting from doubt to defiance, made him fascinatingly familiar. It illustrated how thin the membrane is between ordinary psychological afflictions (loneliness, self-pity, boredom) and nihilistic anger. It helped me understand not just incels, but all the other disaffected men – trolls, jihadists, neo-nazis – made dangerous by the online company they keep.
What a relief to travel back in time with Radio 3’s The Listening Service this week, as it posed the question: “What does ancient history really sound like?” Presenter Tom Service supplied the answer up front: no one knows, but it’s fun to speculate. Some of the caves occupied by early humans have red ochre markings in particularly resonant areas, suggesting that people may have sung or banged the walls in order to hear the echoes – perhaps believing them to be replies from a spirit world inside the rock.
The earliest musical instruments ever discovered are Paleolithic flutes, made from the bones of mammoths and griffon vultures. To understand how they might have been played, flautist Anna Friederike Potengowski visited some formerly inhabited caves and stood in the darkness absorbing the acoustics. Her resulting composition – ranging, as she said, from “sweet melodies” to “strong screams” – was ravishingly eerie. It’s a pity that the second half of this programme got bogged down in modern composers, and how they reimagined Roman music. The first half was a wild imaginative ride.
Here’s a bold experiment: The Grenfell Tower Inquiry with Eddie Mair. This new BBC podcast promises to report daily from the inquiry into last year’s terrible fire. The judicial process itself doesn’t start until June, after two weeks of testimony from the bereaved, but Mair has already started setting the scene. There are obvious dangers in exploring such a raw tragedy through a medium usually associated with entertainment. Some of the more podcasty touches – the woo-woo background music, and Mair’s gently amused voice – need to be toned down. But the idea of reinventing court reporting for the modern age is clever. The flexibility of a podcast – it can be made to any length, depending on what needs to be covered – could make it just the tool for the job.