Surviving Politics With Michael Gove (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
In the Studio: Jonny Banger (BBC World Service) | BBC Sounds
Up in Smoke (Penny4) | Apple podcasts
Unfit for Service (Wavland/Vespucci) | Apple podcasts
I hesitate to recommend Michael Gove’s new six-part Radio 4 series, Surviving Politics, not because it’s bad – it’s OK – but because I find that too much talk of Westminster, and of how this country’s political class actually functions, is really not good for the mood. Everything and everyone is too polite and slippery. You can’t get a grip.
Gove is, as of the beginning of this month, the editor of the Spectator, but Surviving Politics leans into his political past, the 19 years he spent as MP, Brexiter and cabinet minister (as, variously, head of education, justice, environment, levelling up, as well as spells as chief whip and the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, whatever that is). There’s a fun intro. Gove remarks: “If politics is show business for ugly people, I was made for it!”, alongside some lively clips, including his stupid assertion that “the people of this country have had enough of experts”. He is quite likable and clever.
But the meat of the programmes is frustrating. Margaret Hodge is fairly – only fairly – interesting on how to work with people of differing politics in order to get things done, but Peter Mandelson’s iron-clad smugness proves impossible for Gove to penetrate. Arlene Foster is busy being Arlene, which means a lot of “I think you’ll find” clarification of the DUP position. Humza Yousaf is wordy and oddly chummy. Gove himself is hard to pin down, occasionally fessing up to a mistake, but with caveats. “There was no space left for nuance,” he says, when Hodge asks him about the truth of saying that Brexit would deliver £350m a week to the NHS. To a non-politician, the lack of direct honesty seems bizarre and troubling, to say the least.
The series is saved by ex-Tory MP Amber Rudd. Perhaps because she’s now out of politics, Rudd is completely open from the start. Gove’s first question is why she resigned as home secretary over the Windrush scandal. “It wasn’t your fault,” he says, jovially, “it was the civil servants’ fault!” He’s almost laughing, but Rudd just bangs in. “The British state had, for decades,” she says, “been treating people who were here legally as though they were illegal. And not just haphazardly but persistently, repetitively and… with racism as well.” Her moral clarity rings like a bell.
Rudd takes Gove to task for supporting Boris Johnson when he knew he was unreliable. She is excellent. Otherwise, though, this series does nothing to sell UK politics and politicians to us poor voters. Ugh.
If you want some more direct action, you’re going to have to take it yourself. Some tips may be found in the World Service’s In the Studio, the documentary series that looks at artists in their working environment. The latest episode showcases Jonny Banger, an off-mainstream artist/activist who creates stuff, with others, under the label Sports Banger. What does he do? “T-shirts, bootleg and rave, fashion, pop culture, art, DIY, anarchy, politics, class, activism – that is the world of Sports Banger,” he says. “It’s a ragtag collective.”
You might know Banger’s most famous creation: a T-shirt that mixes the NHS logo with a Nike swoosh. The T-shirt, which first came out in 2015, has proved very popular, and partly funds his other ideas, which include providing food for health workers during Covid, setting up a food bank, staging fashion shows (one of his dresses is made up entirely of whistles). Host Talia Randall, a poet, describes Banger as an old-school London raver, and much of his work has that wild DIY spirit. He’s about ideas: having nutty ones and then actually doing them. Long may he bang.
Up in Smoke is (yet another) spooky drama pretending to be a podcast. A fictional cold crime mystery story about a missing teenager, the show is carefully and convincingly staged – it has the production tricks of true crime podcasts down to a tee – though is occasionally let down by jarring, pull-you-out-of-the-story details. These include journalists interviewing children without a responsible adult present, or a paper calling someone a paedophile in a headline (unlikely to happen without the paper being instantly sued), and the UK weather in March 2014 being cold enough for a house to be snowed in so badly that emergency vehicles can’t reach it.
Nevertheless, this is an engaging series, with the excellent Mei Mac playing Kay McAllister, a local reporter convinced that the police have got the wrong guy as murderer. Her brilliance shows up a few stagier performances among the cast, though Adam Buxton is great as local policeman Roy Burgess. Up in Smoke is worth your time, even though it seems to think it’s a little more scary and original than it actually is.
More gripping, but rather too long, is Unfit for Service, a US documentary series about Randy Taylor, a highly decorated officer in the US army who served in the dark days of “don’t ask don’t tell”, when gay servicemen and women were allowed in the forces as long as they never mentioned their sexuality or did anything that might lead others to “suspect” (horrible word). Hosted by the warm Eric Marcus, who presented Making Gay History, Unfit for Service exposes the awful toxicity of making gay people unwelcome in the military, through the story of one very sweet man. Be warned: episode two, about the homophobic murder of another soldier, is harrowing.
