The Rest Is Entertainment Goalhanger
History for You With Douglas and Hugh Adrian Mackinder and James Devonshire
Seven Deadly Psychologies (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Eight Years’ Hard Labour Tortoise
I don’t want to get all Centrist Mum on you, but times are tough and I have extremely cheering audio news. Richard Osman and Marina Hyde have got a brand new podcast!
Do Osman and Hyde need introduction? Perhaps they do. Though Osman is now a bestselling cosy crime author, his real love is telly. He created and hosts BBC Two’s House of Games, created and used to co-host BBC One’s Pointless, and is an expert in how gameshows, quizshows and reality TV work, in their economics and trends and mechanics. Hyde is the Guardian’s funniest, most acerbic writer. Her weekly columns skewer politicians, celebrities, Fifa, the royals, anyone in the public eye with iffy morals, and she has a snapshot recall for damning details.
The duo’s new podcast, The Rest Is Entertainment, is, as you will have guessed, yet another two-hander chatshow from Goalhanger. I’m far from a fan of the other Rest Is… shows (History, Politics, Economics, Money – they all leave me a bit cold) – but the first episode of The Rest Is Entertainment, which bills itself as a weekly insight into pop culture, was, as you might hope, extremely entertaining.
There were three topics for them to chat about: Nigel Farage on I’m a Celebrity…; the American Vogue interview with Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos’s wife; and Netflix’s new Squid Game gameshow. If those don’t sound exciting to you, then you might want to move along. For me, the first two topics have dominated much of my recent WhatsApp chatathons, and the third, though I’ve not seen the programme, was made interesting by Osman’s explanation of what makes a great Saturday night gameshow, and how they need to change. (Essentially: they’re stuck in a 1980s format, where a cheesy host asks contestants where they’re from and what they do, when actually, the audience doesn’t care, so crack on with the game.)
Both were insightful about I’m a Celebrity…, discussing how Farage was a good booking but not a brilliant one, and how what he thought would happen (lots of bushtucker trial screen time, him charming the audience with “little ol’ Nigel” bonhomie) just hasn’t, because people watching could see that, actually, he’s quite boring. “In politics,” said Osman, “he is a charismatic man, because he’s more charismatic than other politicians. However, if you put yourself in a room with Sam Thompson from Made in Chelsea, you disappear.” And Hyde was sharp on the Sánchez Vogue feature, correctly analysing it as a complete stitch-up presented as a puff piece. Both she and Osman treat what is usually considered trivial with the utter seriousness it deserves, plus they don’t compete with each other, or try too hard to be chummy. In short, they’re great casting and the episode flew past.
Incidentally, there’s a very funny newish show that takes the mickey out of The Rest Is History, and all the other “posh chaps talking about the past” podcasts. History for You With Douglas and Hugh is subtle enough that when you first hear it, you wonder if it might be real. In fact, Douglas Wrattle and Hugh Canard are played by Adrian Mackinder and James Devonshire, and after a while, the details start to tell. In an episode about Jack the Ripper, somehow Douglas diverts to hairy-hand syndrome and how, when he took his young son “field testing” a gatling gun in Aldershot, “they insist, if you’re using military weaponry that’s over 100 years old, you have to shave your hands”. And Napoleon, apparently, had to have his food chewed into a paste in order to eat it. Properly, sneakily funny.
Another jolly listen is Radio 4’s new series about the seven deadly sins, Seven Deadly Psychologies. Hosted by Becky Ripley (she produces the show too) and actor Sophie Ward, this is a serious look at the psychology behind what we lust over or long for, enlivened by snappy production and witty hosting. A regular expert, the evolutionary anthropologist Dr Anna Machin, is introduced with a little ditty – “Anna Machin’s explana-shins!” – and Ripley and Ward have a warm repartee. In Greed, last week, there was a great discussion about how we, as a species, can’t cope with extreme wealth. “We evolved in environments of resource scarcity,” says Prof Paul Piff, a social scientist. “We navigated this… by forging strong relationships, that’s how we survived and thrived… The human brain has not evolved to deal with the resource abundance that we see operating in certain parts of the world.” Indeed.
Not many jokes in Tortoise’s new series Eight Years’ Hard Labour. It’s all too close and raw. David Aaronovitch, the author and ex-Times columnist, expertly leads a detailed investigation into the Labour party’s recent past. There’s a lot of hard work in here, presented in Tortoise’s fact-packed but highly listenable manner.
We start at the moment that Ed Miliband lost the 2015 general election, and we’ll end, with Keir Starmer, in the present day. The first episode detailed how Jeremy Corbyn, a backbench MP since 1983, who’d never even had a shadow cabinet position, somehow became the leader of the Labour party. There were some lovely details, and excellent shade. “If you’ve ever been on a walking holiday or a real ale thing, or you’ve gone to see a lower league football team, you’ve met someone a lot like Jeremy Corbyn,” said one Labour alumnus. “Someone who has some rather odd interests or collects something and is very polite and well-mannered in that English way.” Miaow!
