Homecoming (Gimlet Media) | Gimlet
The Kids Who Decide What All The Other Kids Talk About (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Radio drama. I know I’m always horrible about it, but every time I check it’s still bad. Though there are honourable exceptions, all of which slip my mind, 99% of radio drama is sterile, stagey and stupid. At least, the BBC offerings are: those terrible series that cut Woman’s Hour down to 45 minutes; the one-offs that you switch on by mistake on a quiet afternoon; the pompous, star-studded adaptations of worthy books. All awful. (The Archers has improved, but I still only listen when something is going badly wrong.) Let’s have a look at the week’s Radio 4 offerings, shall we? Which do you fancy: a drama about Brexit? A comedy about dementia? A cop show? All is issue-based commissioning peppered with bad accents, silly situations and not a single unobvious idea. Plus, actors who keep acting. Argh.
I don’t know what kind of drama BBC producers and directors enjoy, but surely some of them have watched Stranger Things or Happy Valley? Breaking Bad? Modern Family? Toy Story 1, 2 or 3? If not, here’s a new show for them to try. Homecoming, from Gimlet Media, the US podcast powerhouse, is a drama that actually has me hooked. In fact, I hesitate to recommend it to you, because I think it might be best to listen to it all in one go, after the series has finished. It seems designed for the full-on, hour-after-hour binge listen.
No plot-spoilers here. Just some elements. A decent person caught up in something bigger than she realises, an unscrupulous boss, the threat of government involvement, an unsettling, unfolding mystery… Also, Homecoming expects you to concentrate. The story jumps from past to future. The script works like a proper thriller. The actors, who include Catherine Keener, David Schwimmer and Oscar Isaac, play characters who are contemporary and real. And no one crowbars in an explanation or calls someone by name in a situation where nobody would in real life.
As with any Gimlet offering, a lot of thought has gone into the programme, and after each episode there’s a section that shows that off. It unpicks what you’ve just heard, through a discussion point or interview: a little like the “how we did it” bit after each Planet Earth.
I’m not madly keen on such extras – once I believe in the wizard of Oz, I don’t want to see the little old man – but I listened to the first one, where Gimlet founder Alex Blumberg asked Homecoming writer Eli Horowitz about the use of long-distance phone conversations in his episode. Horowitz talked about bad connections, awkward pauses, the way each person is also doing something else at the same time and how that affects the status of the people on the phone. All stuff that never usually makes its way into drama and yet is part of everyday life.
I like contemporary life. I enjoy social media. So I was interested to hear about Social Chain, a company set up and staffed by young people (average age: 22). Social Chain owns more than 400 of the most popular social media accounts and uses them to advertise brands. It says it can get a topic trending on Twitter within half an hour. In The Kids Who Decide What All The Other Kids Talk About, Paul Mason, a frothing-mouth columnist but an excellent reporter, talked to Social Chain’s founders, all of whom proved jolly and sane. Mason and other commentators worried that young people didn’t always know when they were being sold to. Mason worried that the business might collapse. The Social Chainers didn’t, though, and I rather liked them for that.
