Podcasts... Serial, spy stories, and sinking the Belgrano
There’s “exciting news for audiophiles”, said Fiona Sturges in the FT. Serial, which kicked off the boom in true-crime podcasts ten years ago, is back for a fourth series. The show made its name with a “whodunnit” – the story of the murder of a Baltimore high-school student and the potentially unsafe conviction of her ex-boyfriend. Since then, Serial has broadened its range to examine other aspects of the US criminal justice system. The new series is about Guantánamo Bay, the US naval base in Cuba where hundreds of suspected terrorists have been detained. The subject has been covered by other podcasts, not least Radiolab’s The Other Latif. What
Serial brings to it is many gripping new interviews with former employees – including interrogators, guards and chaplains, as well as several one-time detainees. Their accounts are sometimes “raw and shocking”. Serial covers it all with “methodical reporting” and a “thoughtful observational tone”. “It’s good to have it back.”
A second ten-part edition of the stylish Second
World War espionage series History’s Secret Heroes “parachuted” onto BBC Sounds last week, said Tristram Fane Saunders in The Daily Telegraph. As before, the show – which follows a “one spy per episode” format – is scripted by historian Alex von Tunzelmann, and narrated with “characteristic intelligence” by Helena Bonham Carter. The opening episode is “a corker”, featuring clips of a 1981 interview with Ida Cook, the author of more than 100 Mills & Boon novels, who (with her sister Louise) helped dozens of Jewish families to escape Nazi Germany in the 1930s. “I never had a husband,” she says. “I never had a car, I never had a television set, I never even had a washing machine, but it’s been a marvellous life.”
Andrew O’Hagan is “an amazingly busy man”, said James Marriott in The Times. His state-of-the-nation novel Caledonian Road has just been published – and barely a week later, he has launched a terrific podcast that is “scarcely less ambitious”. In the six-part
The Belgrano Diary, O’Hagan explores whether the Thatcher government lied about the sinking of the Argentinian battle cruiser General Belgrano during the Falklands War in 1982. What might have been a dry affair – parsing evidence of the ship’s direction of travel, and definitions of “exclusion zone” – turns out to be “an enthrallingly novelistic tour of British society in the early 1980s”. We hear from plummy grandees, “cantankerous publishers, Thatcher-hating activists, flag-waving British patriots and Argentinian servicemen”, and even Michael Heseltine, who’s still “formidable” at 91. The central character is most compelling of all: Lieutenant Narendra Sethia, the supply officer in HMS Conqueror, the submarine that sank the cruiser.