Exposed: The Ashley Madison Hack (Vespucci) | Audible
Making Sense of Social Housing | Tortoise
Ian Hislop’s Oldest Jokes (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Exposed: The Ashley Madison Hack, an Audible series, is made by Vespucci, and at first sight seemed right up my nosy old boulevard. Ashley Madison, if you don’t remember, is an online dating service that launched in 2002, specifically for married people looking for affairs. It was hacked in 2015, to enormous media sensation, with the unknown hackers publishing the names and details – including the intimate messages – of millions of users of the site. It was a huge story, and who wouldn’t want the inside grift? Perfect podcast fodder.
And Exposed, hosted by Canadian actor Sophie Nélisse, starts well. We’re introduced to an adulterous pair who met on Ashley Madison; we get the insight of expert tech journalists who corresponded with the hackers at the time; we follow the whys and wherefores of AM’s founder himself. There’s some good, revelatory stuff here, especially around just how many Ashley Madison subscribers there were, and how many of those were real-life women (clue: not many).
And then, somewhere around episode four, things start to go wrong. We meet a couple of other Ashley Madison-ers, but keep returning to our original couple. The hackers just sort of… disappear, as do the founders. Interesting tales, such as that of “Paul”, an army veteran who started using the site after he was paralysed from the waist down, are dismissed more brusquely than the central couple. We never discover quite why the hackers decided to expose the users, or why they targeted the heads of the Canadian owner company, Avid Life Media. There’s a clumsy attempt to equate being an adulterer asking for a spouse’s forgiveness with Ashley Madison’s post-hack rebrand, which doesn’t work.
In short, Exposed starts to run out of steam (ho ho). Plus, the script is weirdly moralistic. “I know what you’re thinking,” says Nélisse, but I really wasn’t. Perhaps this virtuous finger-wagging is because it’s a North American show, but it becomes irritating very quickly. It might seem obvious, but if this series wants us to stick around in a long-term, six-episode relationship, it needs to give us a lot more hot, sexy action.
Not a hot and sexy topic, but one that keeps popping up in audio documentaries: housing and what to do about it. It’s still only January and I’ve already written about two “whither housing” programmes, on Radio 4 (Fixing Britain with Louise Casey) and the World Service (The Documentary: Ending Homelessness the Finnish Way). Now, Tortoise has brought one out. A three-parter, Making Sense of Social Housing is a good summary of how and why we got where we are today. The central fact, really, concerns Thatcher’s “right to buy” legislation of the 1980s, where council house and housing association tenants were given the chance to buy their rented accommodation at a reduced price. When the houses were sold (more than two million of them!), a lot of the money went into central government coffers instead of back to the councils or the housing associations, which meant they didn’t have the money to build any more homes. “More than 40 years later, we’re still living with the consequences,” says reporter Jeevan Vasagar. “There were never plans in place to replace the housing that was lost,” agrees a housing association worker.
So now we’re struggling. A letting agent tells us that they get 800 applicants for every available property. We hear from Jake, who went blind aged 49 and has been in temporary accommodation (a bedsit, now a hotel) for a few months. He needs a guide dog but can’t get one because he has to have a permanent home so the dog can learn its way around. He’s stuck. So is a family who can’t locate their landlord, living in a house where water runs down the walls. To cheer us up, we hear about a new initiative from Crisis and Lloyds Banking Group that’s pressing for a million new homes for social use, and you suddenly recall that this series was made “with the help of Lloyds Bank”.
What this means is that Lloyds will have paid Tortoise a certain amount to make this series. Independent audio production houses often make podcasts for corporate sponsors; it’s an important income stream for them, alongside adverts and paid-for listener subscriptions. The results can be iffy – a sponsor might push their own podcasting ideas or script – but this one is pretty good. One interviewee, who runs an ethical letting agency, Homes for Good, in Glasgow, is perhaps given a couple of minutes too much airtime in episode two. (She’s setting up a similar letting agency in London “as a joint venture with Crisis, supported by Lloyds Banking Group”.) But this is nitpicking really. This is an interesting, optimistic show, and at least Lloyds is bothering to put its money where the government won’t. Saved by the bank, who’d have thought it.
On Radio 4, Ian Hislop has a jolly 10-parter in the 15-minute weekday lunchtime slot, Ian Hislop’s Oldest Jokes. At least, Hislop makes it jolly. As you might have guessed, he’s on a search for the oldest jokes, the most ancient evidence of the much-vaunted British sense of humour. Which means he starts with Latin, and then Chaucer, ruffling up the dry academics with his cheery giggling and delight in fun. He’s great. The first episode, about punning, is a bit dull (the first pun turns out to be that one about the Angles looking like angels), but the next two, which concern themselves with double entendres and jokes about people being drunk, are a complete joy. Here’s one of the former. “A curious thing hangs by a man’s thigh… in its front it is pierced, it is stiff and hard… he intends to greet with the head of his hanging object that familiar hole which is the same length and which he has often filled before…” “Not exactly subtle,” says Hislop, giggling away. (It’s a key!)
