Why the best radio has great stories from small beginnings
Voices are like shoes: they generate strong, and often unreasonable, first impressions. Polly Weston’s voice – soft, smiling, slightly childlike – irked me so much that I almost gave up on the first episode of The Patch. But all was soon forgiven, because her programme was so interesting.
The idea behind this new Radio 4 series is to help our fractured nation get to know each other again. Using a “random postcode generator”, Weston will descend on a different part of Britain each week and try to uncover a story that we might otherwise never hear. It’s a bit like an updated version of the Light Programme’s Down Your Way, given new relevance by our Brexit-induced identity crisis.
For the first episode, on Thursday, Weston alighted on TQ8 8 – otherwise known as Salcombe, the Devon tourist spot beloved of Breton-clad middleclass mums like me. It was September, though, and we had all gone home. So Weston chatted to the locals, most of them crab fisherman. They’d had a terrible summer, grumbled one – no crabs to be found anywhere. Had they been culled by the Beast from the East? Or by a plague of crab-eating cuttlefish? “I wasn’t sure where the mystery of the disappearing crabs would take us,” cooed Weston, “but it felt like a start.”
And so it was. Crabs, it turns out, are an enigma even to those who spend their lives hunting them. Stocks go up and down without any obvious reason, making the life of a crab fisherman a perpetual gamble. But even a small catch can make a decent return these days. The price of crab is soaring, thanks to the appetites of the Chinese middle class. This year, the UK exported £17m-worth of crab to China – twice as much as the year before. “I don’t think, with everything caught in this country, you could ever satisfy that market,” reflected one of Salcombe’s most successful fishermen. In the background we heard the squeak of polystyrene as his live catch was packed into boxes to be flown east.
This is what great radio can do: unearth a big story from small beginnings. As Weston’s co-producer, Jolyon Jenkins, concluded: “It’s what you’re finding all over the world: the Chinese moving in and extracting national resources. They’re doing it in Africa with minerals, and they’re doing exactly the same thing in Devon with crabs.”
On the subject of eating animals: would you be brave enough to watch your dinner being killed? Global meat-production has doubled over the past 50 years, yet industrialisation means that most of us never have to see an animal being slaughtered for food.
Inside the Abattoir (Thursday, World Service) set out to open our eyes – or at least, our ears. Producer Emily Thomas visited an abattoir to witness the death of a cow. This was not, it should be said, a typical slaughter. Most of Britain’s livestock gets killed in vast, semi-automated abattoirs that process thousands of animals every day. But no big abattoir would let Thomas in. So she went instead to one of the last small slaughterhouses in the country.
Kelly Budden, the owner of Tideford Abattoir, is a former farmer who switched profession after being “mortified” by the carelessness with which her own livestock had been slaughtered. “I wanted to take my animals somewhere they’d be looked after and respected,” she told Thomas. She treats the animals with exemplary kindness; but still, there’s no getting around the gory bit.
“I’ll pop you in the corner,” said Budden cheerfully, having led Thomas into a bare white room with chains, hooks and saws hanging from the ceiling. We could hear the scrape of knives being sharpened. A bullock was led up the ramp in silence. His death was quiet, too: just the clunk of a bolt through the head, the thump of his body hitting the ground, the blood bubbling from his slit neck.
Even without the visuals, it made me feel a bit dizzy. Yet this was a good death. As Thomas reflected, “Most animal slaughter doesn’t take place in small, family run abattoirs in front of watching journalists.” More’s the pity.
It was a busy week for Brexit podcasters – of whom there is now a profusion. Radio 5 Live’s Brexitcast, Remainiacs, Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, this newspaper’s Chopper’s Brexit Podcast: all provided excitable but useful analyses of Prime Minister Theresa May’s “deal”. To see the bigger picture, however, I recommend Professor David Runciman’s podcast, Talking Politics. Scholarly but never impenetrable, Runciman sniffs his way round global politics from every angle.
His most recent Brexit episode,
How Bad Could It Get?, is full of surprising insights. Whether you want to leave or remain, this is the podcast to confound your prejudices.