Lives Less Ordinary (BBC World Service) | BBC Sounds
Don’t Log Off: Daria – Love and War (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Lady Killers With Lucy Worsley (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Other people. Strange, aren’t they? Strange, and much more interesting than yourself. If you’re in search of these fascinating weirdos, then Outlook is – was – a daily World Service interview programme that provides hundreds of interviews for you to binge, each programme featuring the story of one riveting ordinary person, from a disaster expert to a turtle custodian. Some of the stories were covered elsewhere (trans man Freddy McConnell’s tale of giving birth, for example), but Outlook held its own.
It was a lovely show, but quite old World Service. Its nicely vowelled interviewers politely probed their subjects in a cool BBC manner. Which is fine, but not as ear-catching as it might be. But now the show’s been rethought and – ta-da! – emerged last week having morphed into a weekly podcast called Lives Less Ordinary. A much better title, and, perhaps because there’s more time on a weekly show, the production team has added other contemporary details. Some dashes of background music for tension, a spot of recreated atmosphere. Plus, there’s a new host, Mobeen Azhar, joining Jo Fidgen and Emily Webb, two Outlook veterans.
It’s Azhar who kicks off Lives Less Ordinary with a crackerjack tale: that of Tom Justice, a middle-class American who, in the late 1990s, started robbing banks, for no particular reason at all. (And yes, his tale has been covered before, notably on Love + Radio’s Choir Boy.) Justice didn’t need the money. He had the talent to do something better – he was an expert cyclist. But somewhere along the line, he’d watched two films that got under his skin. First, the grunge romcom Reality Bites, which clicked with his slacker mentality, and, second, Heat, the gloss-to-the-max Robert De Niro/Al Pacino vehicle that gave him the idea: “It unlocked the fantasy in me.” Justice had nearly made it to the Olympics but hadn’t had the discipline. Robbing a bank was, to his mind, more him. Somewhere deep inside, he thought he was a film antihero.
As you can imagine, it all goes wrong, though not as quickly as you might assume. Justice’s story is a great ride (he confesses to being more scared of his mum than the police) and Azhar is an excellent interviewer, his upbeat, cheeky approach masking the fact that he asks all the right questions. We’re left with a cliffhanger, to be concluded this week (another contemporary podcast trope). An excellent start.
Over on Radio 4, Alan Dein, extraordinary interviewer of ordinary people, is back with another series of Don’t Log Off. Dein is the expert at talking to unknown heroes, teasing out their stories, making them shine. His series Lives in a Landscape, also on Radio 4, has provided several of my favourite radio moments; Aftermath, too. And Don’t Log Off is always worth a listen. It started 20 years ago, as Don’t Hang Up, where the redoubtable Dein called random phone boxes across the UK and tried to talk to whoever picked up. After a decade, he swapped to Don’t Log Off, and chatted to people online (actually talking, not just texting). He’s kept in touch with some.
One of these is Daria, who lives in south-eastern Ukraine. Dein first connected with her in 2012, and we meet her again now. She is delightful, a living ray of sunshine, though her life is not without difficulties: she’s in a wheelchair, she had cancer, she once had a tricky relationship with her dad. Since February, of course, her life has become even more difficult, though she is still, unbelievably, a happy audio presence. I was very moved by her description of her boyfriend, from how they met to how they live now, with her parents, ears always open for the sound of sirens. Sometimes he has to pick her up and carry her to the air-raid shelter. She dreams, she says, of travelling in the future, “as a tourist – not, God forbid, as a refugee – as a proud Ukranian”, and of meeting Dein in person. Unmissable.
Also on Radio 4, historian Lucy Worsley has a new series, Lady Killers, about female murderers of the past. Women don’t tend to kill, so you can’t call these women ordinary, but the first case, at least, was very domestic. Florence Bravo was a Victorian woman who became rich when her first husband died. When she married her second, things went a bit off, and one evening husband No 2 ended up dead, from poisoning. So: did she or didn’t she?
Worsley went through inquest records, and in the manner of The Long View asked lawyers and experts how such a case would play out in court and in the media today. The result was fun, if rather inconclusive. Today’s coercive control laws might have helped Bravo. But the media’s sneery picking over of how a woman presents herself (Bravo was deemed to be past her prime) does not seem to have changed all that much.
