How Serial turned the podcast into an art form
Even those of you who only listen to traditional “linear” radio – who wouldn’t know a podcast if it broke into your house, smashed up your trusty Roberts, jammed a pair of headphones onto your head and pressed Play – even you must have heard of Serial. Season one, released in 2014, was the first podcast to bust through the membrane of cult listenership and become a mainstream phenomenon. It has since been downloaded more than 170 million times, won all sorts of awards and created a template for a new kind of investigative journalism.
Season three, I think, might turn out to be even better. The subject matter looks, at first glance, audaciously dry. Whereas season one investigated a murder and possible miscarriage of justice, and season two (less successfully) the high-profile desertion of US soldier Bowe Bergdahl, this time there is no obvious drama attached. There isn’t even a central protagonist. Instead, presenter/producer Sarah Koenig fixes her enquiring eye on an institution: the Justice Center in Cleveland, Ohio. This is a cluster of “hideous” high-rise buildings containing everything the American legal system requires, from a sheriff ’s office to a jail block. Koenig and her co-producer Emmanuel Dzotsi spent more than a year here, recording the people and stories passing through.
In episode one (only two have been released so far, with another episode added every Thursday), Koenig set the scene with a glorious riff about travelling in the lifts of the building where the court rooms are housed. This, she mused, is “one of the few places left in our country where different kinds of people are forced into proximity”; lawyers, defendants, stenographers, police officers, crime victims and their relatives, of every class and race. Up and down they go, squashed together silently, “with our sensible heels and Timberland boots and American flag lapel pins and fake eyelashes and Axe cologne and orthopaedic inserts and teardrop tattoos and to-go coffees – and when the elevator doors open up, spilling us out onto our floor, the fact that no one is bloodied, or even in tears, is a small, pleasing reminder that we’re all in this together”.
This introduction was accompanied by jaunty, staccato violins, of the kind you’d normally hear at the start of a BBC costume drama – it seemed surprisingly fitting. Koenig, who started out as a newspaper journalist, has a Dickensian flair for detail, balanced by a Trollopean sympathy for complicated characters. Courtrooms, of course, are full of those. The judge featured in the second episode is almost a caricature of self-satisfied pomposity – except that he is wellmeaning too, and sometimes kind.
But the most complex character of all is the system itself. By following individual cases, Koenig and Dzotsi are able to show how things really work in American justice: why, for example, 96 per cent of convictions in Cleveland come from plea deals; and why, even when justice appears to have been done, it can ruin your life. Podcasts, being both intimate and expansive, are the perfect medium for this sort of detailed, long-form journalism. What Koenig does is raise it to an art.
The BBC’S forays into podcasting have been, to put it kindly, variable. There’s an awful lot of young folk sitting around in studios sniggering at rude words. Ironically, the best attempts at this new medium have come from old hands: BBC veterans with a deep knowledge of their subjects. The Assassination, Owen Bennett-jones’s investigation into the murder of Pakistan’s former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, is a splendid example. So is Brexit: a Love
Story?, Mark Mardell’s study of Britain’s prickly relationship with the European Union (which is available on iplayer and Apple Podcasts).
Mardell, who was the BBC’S first Europe editor, lays bare the deep roots of discord over Europe, in both the Labour and Tory parties. But he is also brilliant at excavating the humanity from the rubble of history. He shows us Edward Heath, immediately after the 1973 Commons vote to join the single market, playing Bach on his clavichord in a transport of joy. Mrs Thatcher’s indignation at Britain’s outsized contribution to the EU’S budget was, notes Mardell, “honed to an edge” by the condescension of Europe’s (all male) leaders, who dismissed her as a “fishwife” and a “grocer’s daughter”. World events, he reminds us, are often shaped by the chemistry between people as much as their ideology. If you want to understand how we got into our current mess, this podcast is essential listening: a clever, wry history of a doomed romance.