Podcasts – Maddie Grigg

Ironing made easy

It’s bizarre really.

I always used to hate ironing, really hate it, but since the advent of podcasts, I love it.

There is nothing finer, especially when it’s raining outside and you’ve caught up on all your freelance work and you’re not feeling particularly creative, than popping the pile of unironed clothes on one side and churning out neatly pressed garments on the other.

And all with the aid of the latest podcast.

There are several on which I’m hooked at the moment, with many more in the listened to and recommended pile.

The Rest is Politics is one of them, with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart but particularly the US version with broadcaster Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci, who was Trump’s director of communications for ten days in 2017 and is now a candid opponent of the former US president.

My brother put me on to that one. It’s laugh-out-loud brilliant, and hugely informative. The latest episode, in which the listener learns of Scaramucci’s surprising role behind the scenes for the Democrats at this week’s big debate, is revelatory.

From there, I went to The Rest is History, a programme hosted by two very amiable historians, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, whose banter is delightfully schoolboyish in its delivery.

I was glued to their series about The French Revolution, and also the one about the Piltdown Man. But the latest one about beards through history is astonishing.

For example, in 1698, Peter the Great of Russia brought in a beard tax, which men had to pay for the privilege of wearing a beard. To prove they’d paid, they had to wear a beard token featuring the lower part of a face with a beard.

Who knew?

I certainly didn’t.

Other fascinating podcasts to which I’ve listened in recent months include the BBC’s To Catch a Scorpion, a real-life search for a people smuggler who transports migrants from the European mainland into the UK; The Ratline, a story of love, denial and the Nazis, and Worse Than Murder, about the kidnapping and murder of Muriel McKay in 1969. The men who took her thought she was the wife of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

Then there’s Marianna in Conspiracyland, about the rising tide of misinformation on social media, and The Gatekeepers, a truly terrifying account of ‘how social media allowed a new digital elite and their platforms to conquer the planet and control what we see’

I get through a lot of ironing.

Women Ironing, by Edgar Degas (1834-1917). I suspect the woman on the left is drunk on podcasts and the other one has earphones hidden under bonnet.

Watching and listening: Slow Horses and Bad Women: The Ripper Retold

We’ve finally got around to watching Slow Horses, the Apple TV drama that everyone’s been talking about.

Set against the backdrop of the iconic London skyline, the series has just finished its third season. We’re only two episodes into that, so please don’t tell me what happens.

It’s British drama at its best. This spy thriller centres on a dysfunctional team of MI5 agents who have been thrown together because each of them has mucked up one way or another.

Heading this bunch of misfits is Gary Oldman, whose portrayal of the seedy Jackson Lamb, with greasy hair, fag hanging out of his mouth and a terrible wind problem, is masterful, especially when set against the ice queen coolness and poise of Kristin Scott Thomas as his nemesis in an A-line skirt.

The script is excellent, the characters believable and the cast superb. The series carries just the right weight of tension, comedy, gore and mystery. We’ll be very sad when we reach the end.

I’m currently listening to Bad Women: The Ripper Retold, a BBC podcast by author and historian Halle Rubenhold about the untold story of the victims in the Whitechapel murders of 1888.

I’ve always been interested in the story – who isn’t? – and remember looking through the 1888 file of my own local newspaper at the columns and columns devoted to the grisly details of these terrible crimes.

The story is known all over the world and various theories have sprung up over the years. We think we know all about it, but Rubenhold looks at it from a completely different perspective. It’s shocking, really, that this hasn’t been done before.

A few years ago I read her book, The Five, on which this podcast is based, and it was a real eye-opener. A terrific amount of research went into this work of non-fiction.

‘Ripperologists’ will tell you otherwise, but it doesn’t matter that we don’t know the identity of the murderer or probably never will. The thing that has been overlooked in this story, time and time again, are the women he killed.

In Rubenhold’s hands, they become real people, who lived and loved, with early aspirations and hopes. They married, had children. And then they fell on hard times and met a dreadful end.

I’ve been watching and listening to…

As well as consuming books as if they were chocolates, I am also an avid listener of music, podcasts and watcher of television.

One of my Christmas presents was a set of wireless headphones. You can’t imagine how delighted I am to be working at my laptop, playing my electronica full blast without anyone saying: ‘I’m sorry, but what kind of music is that?’

To be honest, you probably can imagine how delighted Mr Grigg is at not having to listen to my musical choices. I think if he has to hear one more minute of BBC Radio 6 Music, he’ll probably take a short walk off a long pier.

It won’t surprise you, then, to learn that he’s the one who gave me the headphones.

They are very handy for listening to podcasts of my choice.

This week, I’ve been glued to the BBC’s Intrigue: Million Dollar Lover, which tells the true story, in real time, of an 80-year-old rich woman and her 57-year-old companion, who turned up penniless and homeless in her Californian beach town, became her gardener and then her lover.

Hats off to the reporter, Sue Mitchell, who, with the couple’s consent, began recording them, just because the idea of their relationship piqued her curiosity. Little did she to know that an incredible story – with equal elements of love, dark secrets, family discord and manipulation – was about to land in her lap.

You can listen to the entire series on BBC Sounds.

I’m not giving anything away but I thoroughly recommend this podcast, which was scripted by the always reliable Winifred Robinson.

I’m now into Episode 3 of June: Voice of A Silent Twin, which tells the strange and tragic story of Black twins June and Jennifer Gibbons, who in 1982 were sent to Broadmoor after a crime spree in rural Wales. At the age of 19, they were the youngest women to be incarcerated at the notorious secure unit.

It’s a fascinating and sad story with which I’m familiar, but what makes this different is hearing directly from June herself, who now lives a quiet life in Wales. Jennifer died at just 29, not long after the sisters were moved from Broadmoor to a more open clinic in Bridgend.

The series is currently unfolding on BBC Sounds.

On the telly, I’ve been watching, open-mouthed, Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, which has been on ITV every night this week, with all episodes available on ITV X. It’s very uncomfortable to see how a once much-loved British institution completely wrecked the lives of hardworking sub-postmasters and mistresses across the land.

A great British cast and efficient script plonks the viewer firmly on the side of the underdog. How could the Post Office treat people so badly? And doesn’t it show that if you work in isolation, with no-one on your side to turn to, how destructive corporate bureaucracy can be?

It’s an astonishing true story of arrogance and incompetence and now, thanks to television, millions more people know about this terrible injustice. The repercussions are still being felt.

I’m hoping to catch Wonka in the cinema before Timothee Chalamet disappears behind his chocolate factory gates. The BBC says it’s ‘relentlessly wacky and over the top’, which, to be fair, sounds just like my kind of film.

Just before Christmas I saw the Stranger Things prequel, First Shadow, at The Phoenix Theatre in London with my thirteen-year-old granddaughter.

I’ll save that experience for another post

Have a great weekend.

Maddie x