The week in radio and podcasts: Lost Boy: In Search of Nick Drake; The Raw Pearl Bailey; The Big Idea

Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman fail to illuminate the fascinating stories of Nick Drake and Pearl Bailey

Lost Boy: In Search of Nick Drake (Radio 2) | iPlayer
The Raw Pearl Bailey (Radio 2) | iPlayer
The Big Idea (BBC World Service) | iPlayer

I have been mean about Radio 2 documentaries for many years now. Why? Oh, how can I put this? They’re rubbish. To be clear, I don’t blame the producers. Someone high up in the BBC clearly thinks Radio 2 documentaries should be made like cheap telly docs. So: select an interesting person. Then pay a producer a tiny amount to do all the research, all the interviews and cut the whole thing into an uncontroversial chronology of said interesting person. Finally, suddenly find a whole lot more money to pay a Famous Person to do the voiceover. Because… well, because they’re famous.

But this add-some-celebrity-sparkle-dust approach doesn’t work on radio. On radio, the presenter of a documentary isn’t merely a soothing narrator behind arresting images. The presenter is what we are listening to. They need to be active, not passive. They need to have an angle, to have interviewed friends, or to have helped to write the script, to be invested in the editorial. They need to bring something more than a familiar voice and an ability to read out loud. Otherwise, we can hear the distance. And if the space between the famous person and the documentary subject is too large, the space between the listener and the documentary becomes unsurpassable.

We had two of this type of Radio 2 documentaries last week. On Monday night, Morgan Freeman presented The Raw Pearl Bailey story; on Wednesday, Brad Pitt gave us Lost Boy: In Search of Nick Drake. I’ve heard the Pitt/Drake effort before: it was first broadcast in the mid-2000s, when it caused a flurry of media interest. Now, Radio 2 have brought Lost Boy back because Drake is being inducted into the station’s folk hall of fame.

So let’s have another listen, shall we? Actually, let’s not. Because I have and it’s still crap. At the start, Pitt tells us he’s a mad Nick Drake fan and he’s going on a journey. A journey from the recording booth to the coffee shop and back, possibly – because it certainly wasn’t a journey to interview anyone relevant to the Nick Drake story.

There’s some nice archive from Drake’s mum (so posh she says “prahd” for “proud”), and the interview with lovely Joe Boyd, who produced two of Drake’s albums, is great. But the doc begins with Norah Jones singing a Drake song, for some reason, and Brad Pitt reads in the same low-key, bedtime story mode throughout. If only someone actually involved, such as Boyd, had been asked to do the presenting honours.

The Pearl Mae Bailey documentary is much better. Producer Hayley Redmond clearly knows that we’re not going to fall for a Pitt-like snoozeathon, and Freeman begins the documentary by explaining that he knew Bailey and worked with her (in the 1967 all-black Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly!). Freeman is a much more active narrator than Pitt, but the programme still suffers because he doesn’t do any work. What is the point of hiring a presenter if they are uninvolved in the process? True-life podcasts have shown us how much better documentaries can be when they’re made by someone really interested in their chosen subject.

Freeman is good, but he’s never going to interview a critic, or an academic, and he needs to for this documentary to be excellent. All of this is not to detract from Bailey, a genuinely fascinating subject, who moved between entertainment, politics and self-education. In fact, I recommend you listen just to marvel at her fantastic life. Still, I really wish Radio 2 would stop pretending that famous people reading aloud is as good as actual presenting.

Just space enough to squeeze in The Big Idea, a 10-minute show from the World Service about, yes, big ideas. Last Saturday we heard about Monkey Money, which explained, via monkeys, why our natural aversion to losing out means we find it hard to save money. Yesterday’s episode concerned GMT. Both were a nice quick blast of cleverness from presenter David Edmonds, who interviews the relevant people himself, hooray.

Podcasts that take you for a walk on the weird side

Victoriocity
This funny, OTT podcast, from comedy writer-performers Jen and Chris Sugden, seems perfect for the Radio 4 6.30pm comedy slot… except that Radio 4 would never commission it, for some reason. Set in “even greater London” (the city stretches across the whole of south England), Inspector Archibald Fleet and budding journalist Clara Entwhistle investigate a murder. Victoriocity gives a classy, clever take on English history, with tropes familiar to anyone who has ever watched Sunday night telly dramas. I particularly enjoy the bellowing newspaper editor, Augusta Bell.

Grandma Guignol
The always amazing Anne Reid plays elderly Brenda, whose story starts off straight enough – “Hellooh, my name is Brenda” – but ends up being recounted “from some sort of slab… Cold. And ominously smooth. And I’m blimming well strapped to it. It’s not very comfortable.” Brenda has moved to Whitby, to open a B&B, and all her adventures with Effie, her nextdoor neighbour (and white witch), turn out weird. Reid plays her strange stories straight, like an Alan Bennett heroine, and Grandma Guignol develops nicely over its episodes. Slow, but worth your time.

The Walk
Though this podcast has been out since January, I’ve only just started listening, and I’m happily working my way through the multitudinous episodes. Written by Naomi Alderman, author of The Power and co-creator of the Zombies, Run app (now turned into a story for Audible), this puts the listener right at the centre of the action, as the protagonist, and takes you on a 28 Days Later-style adventure. Best enjoyed “out in the world” (walking or driving), The Walk needs you to invest, but once you do, you’re hooked.

Contributor

Miranda Sawyer

The GuardianTramp

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