they both sat on tiny milking
stools in Davos. But this was
different: interesting, tense,
fast-paced — Trump peered
out beadily from a carapace of
make-up, like a poo-coloured
chameleon, later calling Piers
a “slimeball”. I’d forgotten
how much I missed Trump’s
turn of phrase. Who uses
“slimeball” unironically?
This was an assured first
outing for the new channel,
which is shiny and intensely
American. It beckons you
with a kind of sock-it-to-’em
fantasy of spinning slogans
(“the world’s gone nuts”) not
unlike The Day Today, plus
shafts of glowing yellow,
which in a certain light look
like cascading, electric wee.
Morgan seemed thrilled
to be back in gainful
employment and was far less
deferential to Trump than he
has been, asking him if he
could really beat Biden. “I
think you could beat him
right now,” Trump snapped.
On Putin the “preserdun”
was fascinating: he told us
he’d “threatened” the Russian
dwarf “like never before”.
One question Piers didn’t ask:
why are the Russians so bad
at killing people? It was a
question raised in Navalny,
a stunning documentary on
BBC2. Rasputin, Sergei Skripal,
Navalny himself — they try to
poison or axe people, fail, and
everyone finds out.
The film captured the
Russian opposition leader at
the moment he was poisoned
by Putin’s goons. On a flight to
Tomsk we heard the horrible
groaning. Navalny, who will
definitely be played by Jude
Law in the film of his life,
survived after being flown to
Germany. Once better, he
decided to find out who had
poisoned him. It was the best
ten minutes of TV all week.
Calling a chemist — it
turns out even Russia’s top
scientists look like Shrek — he
posed as a member of Putin’s
bureaucracy. He wanted to
know why the operation had
gone wrong. The chemist had
no idea. “We even applied
extra,” he moaned. They
had lavished it on “the
underpants” and specifically
“the codpiece”. If the plane
hadn’t made an emergency
landing Navalny would be
dead. It was gripping.
Gaslit is a drama about
Watergate. It felt promising:
Julia Roberts plays Martha
Mitchell, the “completely
insane” wife of Richard
Nixon’s campaign manager,
John. I hadn’t heard of her, but
it turns out she was one of the
few people to start talking to
journalists about “dirty tricks”
after John set up Watergate.
Whereupon she was
kidnapped on his orders,
beaten and left permanently
scarred. This was the “darker
side” of the Watergate
scandal, we were told — as if
there were a lighter one.
Roberts has a helluva lot
of fun, appearing with hair
piled up “like a holiday ham”.
Dan Stevens is one of her
husband’s co-conspirators, a
junior attorney named John
Dean. He produces a terrific
performance as the preppy,
right-wing “flaxen-haired
dog” who suggests Mitchell
hire the unhinged FBI agent
G Gordon Liddy. Confronting
one spod at the White House,
Liddy rasps: “You’ve never
tasted your own blood?”
“Pardon me?” he responds.
I barked with laughter. cNonstory Angela Rayner,
a woman with legsBody politics and pants
Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour
started the week on fighty
form discussing women’s
bodies, as how we dress (or
even, allegedly, comport
themselves to befuddle
Tories) made headlines.
“Good to know that having
legs, as a woman, at work, is
news,” Emma Barnett began
Monday’s programme
sarcastically, in the wake of the
Angela Rayner farrago. She
went on to introduce the MP
Caroline Nokes, who explained
how carefully she felt she had
to dress to confound the basic
double standard “that male
MPs will be reported upon for
what they say, and female MPs
will be reported upon for how
they look and what they wear”.
Historic hypocrisies, lustful
leaders and how those in
power have always sought to
control and fetishise sex are
topical themes running
through Betwixt the Sheets,
a new podcast from History
Hit with the brilliant wheeze of
making the long story of sex,
scandal and society its fruity
subject. Its merrily mucky host
is the sex historian, Yorkshire
woman and Leeds academic
Kate Lister, proprietor of the
popular Twitter handle
@WhoresofYore.
Her first date, with the
medievalist Eleanor Janega,
was a doozy. It was no dark
age, insisted the enlightening
Janega. Yes, a celibate Catholic
hegemony sought to curb
people’s pleasures by
mandating against all but
penetrative, procreative sex
(including, surprisingly,
orgasms for both parties)
within the sanctity of
marriage. “But we are wrong
to assume people were that
compliant with the church’s
edicts,” Janega explained.
“Rather, we should assume
the church is telling people
not to do things because
loads are.”
Or, as Lister had it: “They
were a bunch of mucky
buggers.” Anything otherthan procreative sex was
classed as sodomy. And there
was a Hieronymus Bosch
helluva lot going on, not
least in monasteries and
convents — even churches
(one of the few places you
could find privacy).
Women were perceived
as the more illogically
libidinous sex. A 9th-century
bishop’s manual suggested
some more arcane
aphrodisiac practices virginal
priests should expect to
confront in the confessional.
What punishment, for
example, for a woman who
admitted to inserting a live
fish into her vagina then, after
it had suffocated, cooking it
for her husband’s supper “to
make the man more ardent in
their love for them”? Two
years of penance on feast
days, apparently.
Pilgrimage, however, was
a free-for-all protected by
plenary indulgence. The
podcast’s most eye-popping
colour came when
describing pilgrim badges,
which Janega suggested
people wore on tour to show
“they were up for it”. Some
left nothing to the imagination:
“a vulva wearing a crown
being carried around on a
litter by three phalluses...
a woman wheeling a dick in
a wheelbarrow”. I wondered
if Chaucer’s Wife of Bath
had one.
The next two episodes, on
voodoo and the appetite ofQueen Victoria (sexual and
culinary), felt less uniquely on
topic. But this Tuesday’s
release, on the century-
spanning history of boob jobs
with Professor Ruth Holliday
(“we’re now in quite a
democratic space for breasts”)
felt more embonpoint.
Of course, our bodies and
minds — and how we may
improve them — are a
perennially popular
podcasting area. One of the
very best programmes in this
overcrowded field, Just One
Thing — with Michael
Mosley returned to BBC
Radio 4 and Sounds last week.
Its first entertainingly
informative episode was
about beetroot, a proven
natural performance-
enhancer for athletes, also
potentially an aphrodisiac.
What I love about this
programme is its brevity and
brisk can-do positivity.
A deeper dive is provided
by The Huberman Lab,
hosted by Andrew Huberman,
a Stanford professor of
neurobiology. The impressive
Huberman’s schtick is that he
is committed to
supplementing his own best
life with the latest medical,
sports and nutritional
research. His often two-hour-
plus conversations with
experts are not so much in
depth as Mariana Trench-
level explorative immersions
into a particular subject, eg
heat exposure or optimising
your hormones.
If, however, you fancy a
more discursively waspish
approach to wellness, then
The Wellbeing Lab with Will
Young, exploring subjects
such as shopping addiction,
body dysmorphic disorder
and equine therapy, is chatty,
revealing and often funny.
Young, as it happens, was
on Radio 4’s Saturday Live last
weekend. So was my friend
Harriet Atkinson, speaking
poignantly about being
reunited with her late
grandmother’s precious
20th-century-spanning photo
album. Zooming in from
home, Young was — hazarded
those in the studio — in his
pants. Now imagine if a
woman did that. cPATRICIA
NICOL
Exposing sexist double standards, right back to medieval times
| RADIO & PODCASTS
JACK HILL/THE TIMES
1 May 2022 15