Oil, stale beer and murder: the podcast that reveals all
Just to warn you, the first half of this column is going to be about the Chippendales, and the second half is going to be about John Keats. Radio truly is a broad church. First to the Chippendales, which are the subject of Welcome to Your Fantasy, a new serial podcast made by Pineapple Street Studios and Gimlet Media. Everyone probably has a rough idea of what the Chippendales are, or were: very beefy and rather cheesy, like a lunch at Mcdonald’s. They’re also representative of a certain kind of febrile Eighties sexuality dolled up as a progressive feminist frontier. They are, essentially, a long-running male strip show, a parade of “oiled-up muscular dudes in g-strings”, in the words of the podcast presenter, historian Natalia Petrzela.
Anyone charting the history of the Chippendales has the potential to revel in the silliest excesses of Eighties camp: the topless guys in bow ties, cuffs and collars, and the ladies screaming in delight. But Petrzela goes much deeper than the showmanship and explores how the Chippendale brand’s corny reputation actually masks a messy story of murder, organised crime, bitter feuds, drugs, arson, and, inevitably, a huge amount of sex.
It takes a historian, and Petrzela is a very astute one, to use the Chippendales as a lens through which to view social changes around sex and crime over the past 40 years. True crime podcasts abound but this one rejuvenates the format by being funny, sharp, entertainment-focused and expansive, while still affording dignity to all its major players.
Petrzela has an extraordinary ear for story and character, and the podcast is enthralling as a result. There are only three episodes released so far and the story is set to get darker from here: Petrzela is yet to approach how the Chippendales co-founder Somen “Steve” Banerjee, an Indian immigrant to the United States who idolised Hugh Hefner, died in 1994 after pleading guilty to charges that included orchestrating the murder of his business partner, Chippendales choreographer Nick De Noia.
Petrzela isn’t the first storyteller to see that the true Chippendales tale is as dramatic as any gangster film. Dev Patel is reportedly due to star in a movie version of it directed by Craig Gillespie, although the story has already been in Hollywood development for 20 years.
Petrzela’s podcast is a spirited way into it in the meantime. In her unforgettably entertaining telling of the Chippendales early years, you can smell the oil, the stale beer, the cigarettes and the carefully maintained peppermint breath of the dancers that stooped to kiss any woman in the audience who waved a dollar bill their way. It’s a story of female objectification turned on its head, physical sexual liberation and the American Dream distorted, a sparkling, sad, and ultimately wise Ode to a Chippendale.
Ah, and here we are. John Keats was intimately familiar with the physical human form, as we learned in the beautiful two part series John Keats: Life and After-life
(Radio 4, Thursday), commemorating 200 years since the death of one of the greatest English poets of all time, at just 25. The presenter was the poet Sasha Dugdale, who chose to focus her portrait of Keats on the fact that he trained as a doctor before devoting his short life to poetry. He learned how to use a scalpel before he perfected his use of a pen, and studied anatomy in a horror-filled dissection room where rats were known to nibble on the vertebrae of unfortunate cadavers.
Keats the medic-poet was, Dugdale argued, uniquely positioned to speak to us in the Covid age. He nursed his mother and brother as they died, before he himself succumbed to a painful death from tuberculosis. Keats’s poems and letters were read with nuanced understatement by Thomas Brodie-sangster (who once played Fanny Brawne’s younger brother in Jane Campion’s 2009 Keats biopic, Bright Star), and there were thoughtful contributions from a range of relevant people: doctors, Keats biographers, literary academics, and Bob Geldof, who is the Keats-shelley200 Ambassador.
I wanted Dugdale, as a fellow poet, to get her hands deeper in the poetry itself and, like Keats with his scalpel in the anatomy room, tease it apart and show us how it works, revealing more of how Keats’s medical training might have shaped not just the man he was, but the way he wrote. But the programme was a beautiful and literary memorial for an immortal writer, a world away from glamour and full of the really important stuff: beauty and truth.