10 1GT Friday August 7 2020 | the times
podcasts
W
hen talking
about
someone as
universally
beloved as
Michelle
Obama,
there’s a
temptation to get all contrarian. But,
boringly, I agree. My friends love
Michelle Obama, my girlfriend loves
Michelle Obama, my mum really
loves Michelle Obama, and I do too.
She’s great. Statistically speaking, you
probably also love Michelle Obama.
The first episode of her new podcast,
an interview with Barack Obama, is
the best of the two so far released. At
times I almost laughed at the sanity
and basic human decency of the
Obamas. How did they spend almost
a decade at the pinnacle of global
power, yet stay so nice?
While I spent the first episode
filled with the Ready Brek glow
of Obama-ish goodness, I confess
I zoned out occasionally during the
second interview, which was with the
journalist Michele Norris. Because she
is lovely and a good person, Obama is
over-fond of inspiring platitudes about
how everyone has to be nice to each
other and rediscover the value of
family and so on. She’s quite right, but
this prevents her from saying anything
even slightly shocking or naughty.
Argh! How characteristic of the
cynicism of critics that I find myself
complaining about the immense
decency of another human being.
My only other complaint is that the
producers sometimes start playinguplifting piano music underneath
Obama’s more inspirational
conversational moments. Aside from
how it can make the show sound like
a slightly cheesy campaign ad (and
if it is a campaign ad, Michelle, please
go ahead), it also strikes me that
nobody’s casual conversation, not
even Obama’s, can stand having
uplifting music played on top of it
without a note of incongruity creeping
in. I wonder if she does it around the
house while telling her husband to
pick up his socks.
While Spotify rolls its big guns into
position, the BBC is spamming the
Sounds app with cheaply producedpodcasts. These are the disposable
foot soldiers in the audio arms race.
Who on earth is listening to
EastEnders: The Podcast or Obsessed
with Normal People? Are they just
commissioned to fulfil youth audience
engagement quotas?
Anyway, every so often one of these
shows catches my attention, and voilà,
the BBC has engaged another vital
youth audience member (presumably
increasing the total by a significant
percentage). Bad People, hosted by
the comedian Sofie Hagen and the
criminal psychologist Julia Shaw,
promises to explore why people do bad
things. This mostly entails goggling atthe bottomless iniquity of various
mass murderers rather than Moral
Maze-style philosophising.
No definite or compelling
conclusions are reached as to why
anyone would want to marry a serial
killer, and the show can feel a bit
aimless. In so far as it succeeds, it is
carried by Hagen, who is smart and
funny and whose slightly affectless
Danish accent makes her deadpan
humour even better, allowing her to
tread closer to the line of good taste
than an English comedian might have
been able to. If only the producers had
hired another researcher and given
her some proper notes, Bad People
could have been a hit.
It is the unfortunate fate of really
good ideas that they are turbocharged
into mainstream discourse, where they
become trite. Fake news is a prime
example. Who has anything new to
say about that? The answer is Peter
Pomerantsev. His new BBC Radio 4
podcast, How They Made Us Doubt
Everything, manages to find an
original and compelling angle.
We’re accustomed to think of fake
news as the work of malicious trolls or
Russian bot farms, but Pomerantsev
lays the blame at the door of big
corporations. His series starts by
looking at the ways tobacco companies
sought to protect their reputations in
the 1950s and 1960s by investing in
dubious science and manipulating
its findings to create confusion about
the effects of tobacco. Bombarded by
evidence from both sides, consumers
heard a message that was ambiguous.
By injecting a crucial element of doubt
into the debate, big tobacco managed
to buy itself time.
The same playbook, Pomerantsev
says, has been borrowed by oil
companies to confuse issues around
climate change. Particularly ominous
is his observation that in the early
1990s oil companies became interested
in taking out ad space on the shows of
conservative talk show hosts to target
“lower-educated white males” with
misleading science. Has he chanced
upon the origins of Donald Trump?Michelle Obama’s niceness prevents her from being even slightly naughty
Obama’s podcast
gives James Marriott
a warm glow, but the
music distracts and
it gets a bit cheesy
I love you, Michelle, but you’re too nice
PAUL R. GIUNTA/APNobody’s
casual chat
can stand
a backdrop
of piano
music
The Michelle
Obama Podcast
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Us Doubt
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