The jaw-dropping histories of our modern-day culture wars
It’s not often that I’m listening to a radio programme and I find myself having to pause it – one of the benefits of listening online – to tell whoever I happen to be with the extraordinary thing I just heard. But that happened almost every few minutes while listening to the first episode of Things Fell Apart
(Tuesday, Radio 4), the second series of Jon Ronson’s enthralling journeys through the culture wars to suggest the surprising origins of some of our most divisive contemporary debates.
Ronson’s voice always reminds me of the gentle intonations of an ardent National Trust tour guide, even when he’s outlining chilling real-life stories of murder, rape and terrible injustice. Listening to him can be a disarming experience, then, but the effect is certainly striking. Here, combined with the talents of producer Sarah Shebbeare, this exquisitely puttogether series repeatedly performs a remarkable magic trick: it starts off somewhere totally unfamiliar, with a strange story that you’ve probably never heard before. And then it slowly leads you through time and introductions to key players, towards a familiar place indeed, with a whole new perspective on how we got there.
Each of the episodes in this series, which are all now available as a box set on BBC Sounds, focuses on the story behind something that happened during lockdown in 2020.
So, in episode one, we began with a murder mystery from the 1980s. Thirty-two women in Miami, who worked as prostitutes, were separately found dead, their bodies posed in the same position. Yet the state forensic pathologist who examined them was convinced they all died spontaneously from a novel medical condition for which he was all but the lone theorist: something he called “excited delirium”, a fatal condition which he proposed occurred in women during sex after they had taken cocaine. There was scant evidence for this condition actually existing, but the doctor’s word was widely accepted by authorities.
It was only later, when the women’s bodies were exhumed for a new investigation, that different doctors conclusively determined they had in fact all been choked to death by the same identifiable man, a known rapist.
But despite being disproved, this extraordinary theory of the existence of an altered and fatal state of mind called “excited delirium” has, for some reason, remained accepted in some significant circles, including American law enforcement, despite being widely rejected by medical science. The theory went that, in men, the condition caused them to act with “superhuman strength” in a kind of psychotic fit of aggression that seemed to be, wouldn’t you know it, particularly prevalent in black men who died in police custody.
All of which led us to 2020, and the death of George Floyd, after a police officer deliberately kneeled on his neck during arrest. Did a widespread belief in the rejected theory of excited delirium influence the use of excessive force that caused his death?
This was one of those programmes that makes you clap your hand over your mouth in shock that people could do such a thing or think something so bizarre when strong evidence exists to the contrary. This maverick medical theory sounded just as quackish as a diagnosis of demonic possession, so how did it become accepted by so many, when much more plausible diagnoses were readily available?
Ronson’s unravelling of this story and how it sowed the seeds of today’s culture wars, in this case the Black Lives Matter movement, was utterly compelling, sensitive and troubling.
In much cheerier radio this week, what could be nicer than a new dramatisation of one of Graham Greene’s best novels for a Sunday afternoon? Our Man in Havana
(Sunday, Radio 4), adapted by Jeremy Front and starring Rory Kinnear as Wormold, was, in fact, even more welcome for the fact that it also starred Miles Jupp. The comedian is making a return to broadcasting following his diagnosis of a brain tumour. Very happily, the surgery required to excise the benign tumour was successful and his recovery doesn’t seem to have dimmed his formidable comic skills at all. Here, Jupp played the British intelligence officer Hawthorne with a perfect mixture of beautifully English stiff-upper-lip stoicism and ruthless – if not always entirely adept – spycraft. Kinnear is also on winningly naive form, and the two-part adaptation plays out handsomely with sumptuous direction from Tracey Neale.
As an actor, Jupp has played many a right-hand man or posho wonk with aplomb, but he is at his best on radio, where his mild, often slightly baffled tone of voice can contrast deliciously with surprisingly sharp asides. It’s a delight to have him back to his best.