The week in radio and podcasts: Today; 1619

John Humphrys finally takes a bow from the Radio 4 flagship, while a New York Times podcast illuminates US history

Today (BBC Radio 4) | iPlayer
1619 New York Times

It was John Humphrys’s last ever Today programme on Thursday. The best-known and most controversial member of Today’s current presenting team, Humphrys is also the only one who was born working-class. He has been at Today for 32 years. For many people he is the Today programme, for better or worse.

Though he’s come under attack recently (for being out of touch with modern culture, for going in too hard on the wrong people, for interrupting, for being pro-Brexit, though I don’t think he is), Thursday’s programme reminded us of what we’ll miss. Not the uncomfortable jokes (a section with Dame Edna Everage was excruciating), but the persistent, intelligent questioning of politicians. Humphrys took Cameron to task in the 8.10am interview, and for a moment we remembered a different politics; he got Tony Blair to explain the difference between political promises and actually making difficult decisions.

I could have done with some more women for him to talk to (was Everage meant to represent women? God, I hope not), not just the handful among the ex-Today presenters all chuntering at the end. But Humphrys’s own final words, where he talked about how much he appreciated the listeners and the BBC, and how he hoped that “Today matters for tomorrow”… well, they were exemplary. I was left with a lump in my throat. As Kathy Burke tweeted, what with shouting at him three mornings out of five, it was like we were married to John Humphrys. She also said: “Think I’m gonna miss the miserable old git. Good luck to him.”

I once spoke to a BBC insider who told me that the reason Humphrys didn’t retire in 2016, when everyone thought he would, was because the only job that he wanted was to present the Today programme. I hope the BBC lines him up with something more interesting than Mastermind.

Speaking of which, I’ve always thought that Mastermind would be better if the audience were given the topics a couple of weeks earlier, so they could shout: “Duuuurrr, everyone knows that,” like a group of sneering nine-year-olds, when the contestant gets a question wrong. I also think that, if you were to go on Mastermind, you should only pick a subject that has its own podcast. I’ve learned a lot about the world simply by listening while pottering. I can tell you how the game of billiards spurred the invention of plastic (99% Invisible); I am well informed about the origins of words (The Allusionist); I’m all over the OJ Simpson case (Confronting OJ Simpson). And thanks to the New York Times’s 1619, I now know a lot more than I did about the history of black people in the US.

1619 is presented by Nikole Hannah-Jones, and it begins with the docking of a ship in Virginia. The ship held enslaved Africans, and 20 or 30 of them were bought by Virginians. The people who bought them were not yet fully American; America was still a colony of Britain. In the opening programme, Hannah-Jones, gradually, skilfully, tells us the tale of American independence, and how black people became the citizens who fought for true democracy. She points out the contradiction baked into the original American constitution: a horrible compromise born of the fact that, though it spoke of how all men were created equal, it neglected to mention that slavery existed. In fact, Abraham Lincoln, in 1862, invited five black men to the White House and said that he was minded to end slavery, but that if he was to do this, did they think that the newly freed black people would mind if they were shipped to another country?

Hannah-Jones is a warm, intelligent presenter, who weaves her own family history through this podcast. So far we’ve learned about the fight for democracy, the economy, the birth of American music and the US health system. All viewed through the lens of black experience. It’s an entirely new history, a new and truthful telling of the story of the US. Wonderful stuff.

Three non-murder shows about missing women

Passenger List
This is a terrific new drama series from Radiotopia. We begin at Heathrow airport, where a Bulgarian child appears to have lost his mother, and things spiral from there, with Kelly Marie Tran (Rose Tico from Star Wars: The Last Jedi) on the trail of her dead brother. Cleverly produced and acted with realism, the story is so close to several real-life news events that you initially wonder if it’s a true crime podcast. It’s created by John Scott Dryden (Tumanbay), and written by Lauren Shippen (The Bright Sessions) with sound design by Mark Henry Phillips, who wrote the score for the first season of Serial.

Mary Portas: On Style
OK, so Portas is hardly invisible, but, as she points out, she’s never had a series on Radio 4 before. This is a new, larky show that flips between Portas’s fairly serious interviews with designers and style directors such as Tom Dixon, Deyan Sudjic and Mateo Kries, and vox pops from YouTube drag sensation Miss Jason, last week chatting to stylish people in Liverpool about whether they ever buy secondhand. The designers are a bit dull, to be honest, but Portas livens things up with her own dash and brio and Miss Jason and the people of Liverpool are fabuloso.

The Missing Cryptoqueen
Tech writer Jamie Bartlett presents this weird true-life story. For a few years, the glamorous and charismatic Dr Ruja Ignatova went around the world persuading people, both high-worth business types and normal punters, to invest in a type of crypto-currency called OneCoin. Then she disappeared. Bartlett’s presenting style is grating to start with, and he does that awful BBC thing of telling us how he’s always been interested in how tech makes us behave (who cares?), but once he calms down and just tells the story, this is a fascinating tale of how scammers scam us and why we let them.

Contributor

Miranda Sawyer

The GuardianTramp

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