Griefcast
Scienceish (Radio Wolfgang)
Woman’s Hour (Radio 4) | iPlayer
Comedians are a strange combination of truth and anecdotes, able to talk honestly about emotions and then disguise their feelings with a gag. Their presentation skills are in place, their egos are big, yet fragile enough to want to talk in public. This is all to explain why there are so many comedians making podcasts, talking about comedy on podcasts, discussing culture or sport on podcasts, being interviewed on podcasts, or doing the interviews themselves. (Let’s not even mention panel shows…)
But there aren’t so many podcasts where the comedians talk only about death. Griefcast is a small show, hosted and created by the comedian Cariad Lloyd (right), in which she gets a funny person to talk about a death that has affected them. That’s it. It’s only been going since last year, and Lloyd took a break when she had a baby, so there are just a few episodes available, but they are all fascinating. There’s nothing more interesting than a story where the storyteller is willing to go deep.
Last week’s episode featured DJs/ presenters/ writers the Mac Twins – twin sisters Alana and Lisa Macfarlane – who spoke compellingly about their father’s sudden death three years ago. One remembered everything; the other nothing much at all. Little details after the death: them being obsessed with getting the right black dress, their mum chucking bouquets out of the window, shouting “We don’t need any more fucking flowers!” Lloyd’s own father died when she was 15, and for a while, as is often the case, she said she felt defined by it. “The girl with the dead dad,” she called herself in her head, and she would simultaneously rebel against and be subordinate to that definition. There is definitely a feeling with death – as there is with birth – that a door shuts behind you and there is no way back. So how do you negotiate your new space? Griefcast, with other interesting interviewees including Adam Buxton and Sara Pascoe, does a good job of trying to find out.
Another podcast I’ve been enjoying is Scienceish, on Radio Wolfgang, a new and admirable attempt to combine podcasting with a) an online community and b) funding. These are obvious fundamentals for podcasting, but the mediums used are usually already established: Twitter, Facebook, crowdfunding sources, the licence fee. Radio Wolfgang is different. It says to its audience: you can get three episodes of any of our podcasts for free. Or you can pay a subscription, and not only do you get all of our podcasts, you get to suggest subjects we might make podcasts about. Your ideas are debated within the community and then a vote is taken: Radio Wolfgang makes podcasts according to whatever its subscribers are most interested in. It’s refreshing, although – as with anything to do with the internet – the most dedicated keyboard-tappers will always have the most sway.
Anyway, Scienceish won an award at last week’s British podcast awards. It’s a great show: presenters Rick Edwards and Dr Michael Brooks unpick almost anything you might think of… the science of dating, the state of surveillance, what we know about Mars, whether we can fall in love with an operating system. They often take their cues from films or, less frequently, books, so you don’t feel too left out of the conversation, and their rapport is thoroughly entertaining. All good, meaty stuff, and you come away knowing more than you started. Good.
And finally, a short item on Woman’s Hour last Thursday stopped me in my tracks. Ex-street prostitutes from Hull have put their stories into an anthology, and towards the end of the programme four of them spoke for a short time. God, it was sad listening: women turning to prostitution because they wanted money for their kids’ uniforms, or because their mum died and they went back to heroin, or their boyfriend was beating them up for money. One had been working all hours in a chippy for £60 a week. She just wanted some more cash for her children. Well done, Woman’s Hour for letting us hear their stories.
