time the real-life villain Anna
Delvey. It offered another
arresting but entirely different
performance from the actress
Julia Garner as Anna.
The opening credits
immediately alerted you to
the sheer oddness of the main
character. “This whole story,”
Anna says, her German accent
knifing through, “is about
MAY. MAY. You know MAY. I’m
an icon.”
Delvey’s crime was to have
“embarrassed” a number of
banks and hotels by fleecing
them of hundreds of thousands
of dollars to pretend she was
an heiress. We are introduced
to a flurry of characters who
claim to have believed her.
She couldn’t have been poor,
moos one person, because of
her “basic, peasant face”. “No
one who looked like that could
get away with being poor, not
in our world.” It is zinging.
It is one of those shows that
plunges you straight into the
heartless world of the very,
very rich and it is fascinating.
The soundtrack, like
Succession’s, alerts us to a
product that is very cool
indeed. In America — where
money can buy you anything
— it is almost as if people
like Anna, and indeed, the
fraudulent star of The Wolf of
Wall Street, Jordan Belfort,
are not outcast, but lionised
and celebrated.
It helps that they’re funny
— as a sociopath, Anna has no
problem telling people they
revolt her. Sitting opposite
Vivian, a journalist who is
trying to get her to tell her
story, on Rikers Island, she
asks: “Are you pregnant or are
you just so very, very fat?”
I watched Rooney, a
documentary about the
footballer, mostly out of
curiosity — what would they
find to say about the man
David Beckham calls “Wazza”?
It began unpromisingly: he
was shown boxing in the
half-dark of the garage of his
strange little toy town
gingerbread stately home in
Cheshire. The nod to Raging
Bull was almost too obvious.
“I wouldn’t say I was a
bully,” he mused uncertainly,
but he did get “some
enjoyment” out of
relentlessly attacking people
and smashing them. “I
remember I got my jaw
snapped in Manchester,” he
said. He was 13.
A range of clearly still
terrified former opponents
were then funnelled in to
reminisce about the matches
in which they were put up
against this mad dog who
drove his studs into people’s
shins, calves, balls and
“attacked for his life”.
What I found amusing was
the lengths everyone then
went to to tidy away Rooney’s
obvious psychopathy,
explaining that anyone who
grew up playing football on
the “streets” was like that.
The prostitutes, his wife,
Coleen, said, was just
something Rooney did, but
“I’ve moved on,” she said,
“and you’ve moved on.”
Rooney sheepishly nodded.
Why didn’t anyone ask
where that fascinating “anger”
came from? Why, even now,
did he look to his dead nan
for reassurance rather than
his parents? Meanwhile, the
makers threw themselves
up and down the pitch
desperately trying to set him
up as an elder statesman of
football. Isn’t he a bit more
interesting than that? cChina beyond the Games
The “high stakes” of China’s
hosting of the 2022 Winter
Olympics were recently laid
bare on The Intelligence
podcast. Nothing to do with
new events such as the
monobob or ski big air, or
even fears that China’s
snow cannon might misfire.
Instead, from his long march
through security towards the
Bird’s Nest stadium, David
Rennie, The Economist’s
Beijing bureau chief, reflected
on the source of popular
unease. “In a country which
has decided to try and crush
Covid completely, they’ve
admitted 30,000 foreigners.. .”
China’s hosting, and the
diplomatic and environmental
fallout from that, is, dare I
say it, more interesting than
the curling. At present
the most insightful audio
commentary on the People’s
Republic comes from
Chinese Whispers, a
fortnightly podcast from
The Spectator. Its impressive
twentysomething presenter
is Cindy Yu. Born in Nanjing,
she was nine when her family
moved to London — after
a neighbour dobbed her
mother in for being pregnant
with a second child. Yu went
to Oxford University to read
PPE then did a master’s in
contemporary Chinese
studies. Fear not, her podcast
is not intimidating but
enlightening and expansive.
It goes high and low: expect
analysis of Beijing’s treatment
of the Uighurs, but also topics
such as the Chinese love of
drinking, and the social media
platform Weibo. Its mission is
to not just be a talking shop
for seasoned Sinophiles, but
to also ask: “How do the
Chinese see these issues?”
A recent episode titled Why
Does China Care About the
Olympics? revisited the era of
ping-pong democracy and the
showpiece ceremony of the
2008 Beijing Olympics, but
also discussed, touchingly,
how those Games promptedan explosion in people
learning English — back then
when people welcomed
visitors. In last week’s episode
on the “Xi-Putin Alliance”,
her guest Alexander Gabuev
from the Carnegie Moscow
Center emphasised how
cordial relations between
Moscow and fuel-hungry
Beijing had facilitated Putin’s
redeployment of troops to
the Ukraine border. They also
discussed what makes the
two totalitarian strongmen —
fathers of daughters, and sons
of Second World War veterans
— “age mates and soul mates”.
“The secret sauce” binding
them? US hostility.
Returning briefly to The
Intelligence, David Rennie
spoke of the Chinese public
being “very, very focused
on the outside world as a
source of infection, and
disease, and chaos”. If that
elicits a hollow laugh, you
may enjoy the hawkish
conspiracy theory of What
Really Happened in
Wuhan, a ten-part series,
concluding today, from The
Australian. It is presented by
the investigative journalist
Sharri Markson, a spin-off of
her 2021 book of the same
title. She is convinced
Sars-CoV-2 leaked from the
Wuhan Institute of Virology,
possibly as early as autumn- She also argues that the
international scientific
community’s hostility to
that hypothesis stems, at least
in part, from America’s
divisive politics.
Narratively this could tell
its story more compellingly.
Instead of offering a chain of
events, each episode focuses
on a single interviewee, such
as Donald Trump, Mike
Pompeo, the former head of
MI6 Richard Dearlove, the
former director of US national
intelligence John Ratcliffe and
the Chinese dissident Wei
Jingsheng. In the first episode
Trump is reliably contentious
and therefore entertaining,
claiming sole credit for
vaccines, describing Anthony
Fauci as an “A+ promoter, but
a C, D doctor” and lambasting
China’s “gross incompetence”:
“There were body bags
outside of the lab.”
Other speakers, such as the
Washington insider Dimon
Liu, would serve more
purpose feeding into findings
rather than anchoring an
episode. Still, you do feel
more invested in this than in
most conspiracy stories.
Historic British-Sino
relations were celebrated in
Paul French’s fascinating
Sunday Feature: A Chinese
Odyssey: Artists, Poets and
Exiles in Interwar London
on Radio 3. It recounted a
now little-known group of
Chinese artists and
intellectuals who, fleeing
the disruption of the
Sino-Japanese war, settled
in northwest London. One,
Hsiung Shih-I, wrote a hit
West End play, Lady Precious
Stream. As “the Silent
Traveller”, the artist and poet
Chiang Yee earned acclaim
for his English landscapes in
the Chinese style. When
Japan became a common
enemy, some were enlisted
into the BBC’s war effort.
A lovely listen.
Finally, for those
who do think curling is
more interesting than
China: seek out the
Winter Olympic
Mile podcast on BBC
Sounds. It includes
Aimee Fuller’s
likeable interviews
with many medal
hopefuls, including
the no-nonsense
women’s curling
captain, Eve
Muirhead. cPATRICIA
NICOL
Podcasts to shed light on the world’s biggest dictatorship
| AUDIO
Impressive
Cindy Yu
of Chinese
Whispers13 February 2022 15