How radio brilliantly evoked the pain of the credit crunch
Sometimes it’s useful to swivel the telescope of history in both directions. Point it one way, and you can see how a crisis – such as the collapse, 10 years ago this month, of America’s fourth biggest investment bank – ripples out into the future, upending stock markets, then economies, then old political certainties. Turn your lens the other way, and you can see what led up to the crisis; the long trail of policy decisions, human failings and unintended consequences.
Saturday was the unhappy anniversary of the day, in 2008, that Lehman Brothers filed for the biggest bankruptcy order in corporate history. On the World Service, Ritula Shah marked the occasion by pointing her spy glass in the direction of travel. In How Lehman’s Collapse Changed the World, she marshalled a panel of experts to explain how the banking crisis led to the Greek debt crisis, the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump, and to predict what might happen next.
They all agreed – one could almost hear the gloomy shaking of heads – that there is probably worse to come. Faith in capitalism and democratic politics is dangerously frayed. The wicked genie of populism is out of the bottle. Another financial crisis (most likely starting in Italy) could prove the last straw. “There must be something positive,” Shah begged her guests, but to no avail. The best that could be said of the credit crunch, offered historian Adam Tooze, is that “we saw the end of the world and we managed not to destroy ourselves”.
Lehman: A Backwards Collapse (Radio 4, Saturday) looked at the crisis from the opposite perspective. A rather unusual edition of Archive on 4, it told the history of the credit crunch in reverse. Each “chapter” moved further back in time, starting on the day of the Lehman Brothers collapse and hopping backwards through the build up to the sub-prime crisis, the credit boom of the New Labour years, and Thatcher’s Big Bang, finally landing in 1944, when the Bretton Woods agreement laid down the rules of post-war global capitalism.
This novel structure was made harder to follow by the lack of a narrator to introduce voices from the archive. Who was the interviewer being ticked off by American economist Milton Friedman for suggesting that society should look after its vulnerable? (“Excuse me! There is no such thing as society to provide anything. There are people.”) It was irritating not to be told. The sound effects were trying, too. Between chapters, a horrible cacophony of digital blips, squeals and static was used to suggest the rewinding of time. It was so painful to listen to that I nearly switched off.
But I’m very glad I didn’t. This proved to be the most evocative and thought-provoking of all the credit crunch specials. Sounds, like smells, seem to have direct access to our memories. Retracing history through its acoustics – the news pips of the Today programme, Robert Peston’s ululating explanations, or Margaret Thatcher’s genteel baritone – gives it the shock of the familiar. It makes you realise how ordinary, even cosy, history can sound while it’s happening. Hearing how The One Show covered the Lehman’s collapse (“Twiggy, what do you make of all this?” “I find it quite scary”) evoked perfectly that last moment of prelapsarian innocence, before the nation fully understood what we were in for.
The Ballad of the Blade (Radio 4, Monday) was billed as “the story of knife crime, written in verse by the weapon itself ”. Momtaza Mehri, freshly appointed Young People’s Laureate for London, gave the knife its voice. There were some striking images in her ballad – the knife hanging “upside down like a bat” inside the pocket of an Adidas windbreaker – but it was rather overpowered by the testimony of real people.
These voices, woven through the poem, described a youth culture of dizzying nihilism. One former gangster, who started working as a drug runner aged eight, reflected on how he became inured to violence. “I’m watching guys’ noses being bitten off, or a woman’s vagina being cut from side to side,” he reflected coolly, “and I’ve grown up around it so much that I eventually became what I saw.”
In this world – one that every city dweller lives alongside – the very landscape has different meanings. “You just see it as a shop. I know that in the back he’s got a rottweiler,” said one gangster. “I know that this is where so-and-so got stabbed. My friend.” It’s a world, as Mehri put it, “invisible to those who don’t live and die there”. Just glimpsing it was frightening enough.