The Observer
25.08.19 43A major league
strike force
The American novelist John
Irving once described baseball as
“a game with a lot of waiting in
it ”. For Michael Sand el , political
philosopher and life long Boston
Red Sox fan , the waiting is a crucial
element of the game’s appeal, the
leisurely pace of play allowing those
watching to engage in intimate
conversation even amid the
hubbub of a packed stadium. As if
by way of illustration, On Baseball
allowed him to wax lyrical with his
guests about the game’s cultural
symbolism and singular place in the
American collective imagination.
Sand el is a mix of old-school
charm and lightly carried intellectual
curiosity. His backdrop was the
former Olympic Stadium in east
London, where the fi rst ever major
league baseball game to be played in
Britain – the Red Sox v the Yankees- was unfolding in the background.
Guests included former cricketer
Ed Smith and former Labour leader
Ed Miliband , who, it turned out,
had started supporting the Red Sox
aged 12. Given their 86-year spell as
also-rans , this, in retrospect, did not
bode well for his future career.
It was Miliband who bravely
brought up the subject of
ignominious failure, which,
in baseball as in politics, is a
possibility both unthinkable and
omnipresent. The mood shifted
when the American sports
writer Claire Smith held
forth on racism in the
sport, pointing out that
black players were
not admitted to the
Major League until
1947. If, as Sande l
insisted, “baseball is a
way of understanding the
country that produced the
sport”, the romanticism that still
surrounds this most American of
games suddenly seemed as much a
smokescreen as a nostalgic aura.
Intimate conversation of a
different kind unfolded in Troubles
Shared , in which journalists Peter
Taylor and Fe rgal Keane revisited
Northern Ireland. As outsiders –
Taylor is from Yorkshire, Keane
grew up in Cork – they had
witnessed the confl ict at close
hand and recalled the atrocities
and the carnage, but also the small
quotidian details of a steadfastly
parochial place. Keane recalled
the way sound carried across
the Belfast rooftops, whether thethudding of Orange drums or
the thump of a car bomb several
streets away. Revealingly, what
baffl ed him most was an atrocity
he had witnessed but could not
now recall in any detail. “I wiped
it out of my mind,” he said of the
terrible aftermath of one bomb. “I’m
struggling to remember it... and that
tells its own story.”
There were other similarly telling
moments. At one point, when they
were trying to locate a memorial
to six British soldiers who died at
the IRA’s hands in Lisburn , Keane
admitted: “I’m still reluctant, with
my accent in this largely Protestant
town, to ask where the bomb went
off.” His reticence spoke volumes
about the differences that still
divide – and to a degree defi ne – the
province. Inevitably, Brexit loomed
large in their thoughts and with
it the possibility of a hard border.
“I have this deep unease that we
could be plunged back through a
mixture of British carelessness and
nationalist impetuosity,” elaborated
Keane. In that, he is not alone.
The Hang podcast does what i t
says on the label, the supremely
affable jazz singer Gregory Porter
(above) hanging out and hanging
loose with a like-minded guest
with often surprising results. With
saxophonist Kamasi Washington
there was an immediate and deep
connection that harked back to their
shared gospel background. With
Annie Lennox the conversation
quickly moved into deeper waters:
solitude, not belonging, adapting
to survive as a gifted, working-
class child. It was riveting stuff that
Porter instinctively connected with
(“It’s something the black people
do, that we have to do in order to
traverse the terrain of American
life”). Deep easy listening.
The big radio event of the week
was Timberlake Wertenbaker ’s
dramatisation of Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time , the
French literary classic
condensed to a mere 10
hours and featuring
the quintessentially
English voices of Derek
Jacobi , Simon Russell
Beale and Frances Barber.
On the evidence of the
fi rst instal ment, the act of
listening to, rather than reading,
those elaborately elongated sentences
has the magical effect of making
them seem much shorter. This is a
blessing, but not even Jacobi’s dulcet
delivery could endear me to the
neurotically nostalgic narrator and
his lost world of privilege.
There were passages of luminous
recall, of course, but on balance I’m
still siding with Germaine Greer,
who defi antly equated temps perdu
with time wasted – “time that would
be better spent visiting a demented
relative, meditating, walking the
dog or learning ancient Greek”.Miranda Sawyer is awayMookie Betts
strikes out
in the London
series between
the Red Sox and
the New York
Yankees in
June. Red Sox
fans include
On Baseball host
Michael Sandel
and Ed Miliband.MLB via Getty
ImagesBELOW ‘Online fantasy crashes into
real-life misery’: Hunter Schafer
and Zendaya in Euphoria. HBO
Podcasts & radio
Audio
Mindhunter
has always
been as much
about the
troubled
hunters
as the hunted
( Christos Stergioglou ) enough to
take over the family business, but
thus far has been foiled by the brash
new manager ( Dustin Demri-Burns ),
and Stath’s bitchy, ambitious former
fl ing C arole (Katy Wix ).
There’s a side-plot involving
a fl irtation between Sophie and
her bashful colleague, Al (Alastair
Roberts) , which could yet turn into
the greatest fi ling cabinet-fl anked
romance since Tim and Dawn in
The Offi ce. For now, most of the
comedy revolves around Stath’s
innate stupidity – on fi nding
out that Carole was “preggo”, he
gasped: “Are you the mother?”
Well, I laughed.
Sam Collyns’s The Day
Mountbatten Died was a gruelling,
affecting documentary marking the
40th anniversary of the day Louis
Mountbatten, last viceroy of India
and second cousin once removed
to the Queen , was blown up on
his holiday boat in Mullaghmore ,
County Sligo, Ireland , dying
alongside his daughter’s mother-
in-law, his young grandson and
a local teenager, Paul Maxwell.
This was a wide-ranging
documentary, featuring everybody
from the bereaved (Mountbatten’s
granddaughter, India Hicks ,
was still visibly affected, as was
Paul’s mother, Mary Hornsey ), to
rescuers, bystanders, and former
IRA members, who saw it as an
execution.
Others died, hours later, when
more bombs killed 18 British
soldiers at Warrenpoint , in the
biggest single loss of life for the
British army in Northern Ireland.
In TV footage from 2012, the Queen
was shown shaking hands in the
spirit of reconciliation with the
late Martin McGuinness,
one of those said to have
authorised the 1979
bombings. Journalist
Olivia O’Leary noted that
the problem with peace
such as that in Northern
Ireland was that “ you
had to keep working
at it”. A thought that
should be ringing loud
and clear today.Euan Ferguson is awayOn Baseball Radio 4
Troubles Shared Radio 4The Hang With Gregory
Porter PodcastMarcel Proust’s In Search of
Lost Time Radio 4Sean
O’HaganBELOW
Co-writer Jamie
Demetriou as the
‘desperate, delusional’
Stath in Stath Lets Flats.
Channel 4
IRA member
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