Shadow World: Thief at the British Museum (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Memories from the Dance Floor | Damian Kerlin
The John Dredge Nothing to Do With Anything Show | comedy.co.uk
More or Less (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Thief at the British Museum is a warm, classy series that’s been ticking along daily on Radio 4 over the past two weeks. Though it’s true crime, it feels more like a whodunnit. There are Agatha Christie elements – an eccentric foreign detective, missing precious gemstones, a potential thief whose story appears to crumble through proper sleuthing – all enhanced by a suspenseful orchestral soundtrack. You will remember the news last year that hundreds of ancient artefacts from the British Museum went missing and were sold (on eBay!), but nobody at the institution had noticed. When the evidence was finally taken seriously, a senior curator from the institution was sacked (Peter Higgs, who denies the thefts but is being sued in a civil case by the museum).
Katie Razzall, the BBC’s culture and media editor, is our host: her script is neat and she strikes up a lovely rapport with the hero of the series, Dr Ittai Gradel. A Dutch dealer in antiquities, Gradel is perfect casting: charismatic and eccentric, with a mind like a steel trap. As a young man, he visited the British Museum repeatedly until he’d seen every single artefact on display; later, he acquired old museum catalogues, which he devoured. Because of his photographic memory, he retained all this information and a few years ago realised that some gems he saw on eBay being sold by a vendor called sultan1966 were actually museum property. Sultan1966’s real name, as shown on a PayPal receipt: Peter Higgs. The museum is not allowed to sell any of its artefacts.
Slam dunk, you’d think, but the tale doesn’t end with Gradel’s sleuthing. He has to persuade the museum’s high-ups to take him seriously. This proves more difficult than expected, mostly because the person that everyone reports to is, you guessed it, Peter Higgs. In episode nine, we hear Gradel packing up gems that he’d bought from sultan1966 to take to the museum, without warning the people who work there, so he can avoid “all this form-filling bollocks”. When artefacts return to the museum, the curators ring a bell to celebrate. We hear that bell. Delightful.
More sleuthing, but of the cultural kind. It’s Pride month and last week saw the return of Memories from the Dance Floor, an independent series about LGBTQ+ nightlife. The first series examined well-known London venues such as Heaven and the Black Cap pub, but for series two, we’re off to the gay scene in Wales and, for this opener, back to the 1970s and 80s. We hear the heartwarming story of Tecwyn Vaughan Jones, who moved from a rural town to go to Bangor University and recalled the first time he went to a gay club, in the North Western hotel in Llandudno.
“You could hardly see from one end to the other because of the [cigarette] smoke,” he remembered. “And the record that was playing on the jukebox was The Wonder of You by Elvis Presley.” It’s small details such as this that I love. Vaughn Jones described meeting a “very effeminate homosexual” at the bar, a fellow Welsh-speaker in mascara, lipstick, with long hair, wearing a cape. They got on fantastically. “It was a time in my life when my life changed,” he said.
We also heard from Zoe Balfour, who set up a lesbian phone line in Cardiff. There were lots of gay women who knew no other lesbians, so Zoe and her friends would meet them and they’d go to the clubs together, or just have a coffee and a chat. They set up their own women’s discos, because there were so few places for lesbians to go.
Damian Kerlin, who presents, gives a nicely judged overview of gay life, including the legal background, in between these stories. What’s appealing about this series is its sweetness; nothing particularly dramatic happens, but you get a sense of gradual blossomings, of people moving into their true selves, and it’s completely lovely.
Another excellent independent effort is The John Dredge Nothing to Do With Anything Show, from a comedian who always delivers. We’re on series six! Dredge is someone made for Radio 4, I feel, but never appears there: Radio 4’s 6.30pm slots are taken by established panel show types, or by up-and-coming comics. Dredge is neither, but his series are always hilariously silly – Chris Morris meets Milton Jones – and he makes best use of the medium by creating a madcap space that you can picture in your imagination but would cost thousands if it were a film set.
There are a lot of middle-aged references (John Peel, The Avengers, old Hollywood) and the jokes come at you fast, piling up on top of each other until you can’t help but giggle. At one point, he’s broadcasting from inside a jar of jam. Resistance is futile. Every line’s a winner.
Just space to mention the welcome unpicking of general election guff on Wednesday morning’s More or Less. The morning after the Rishi Sunak v Keir Starmer TV debate, Tim Harford and Kate Lamble looked at the stats referenced in the political encounter. Sunak had insisted that Labour would require every household to pay an extra £2,000, which Harford and Lamble called “an old election trick”, where a political party adds up what it says (speculates) its opposition’s policies will cost. They also examined Starmer’s claim about how much the Tories’ proposed abolition of national insurance and inheritance tax would cost (these are not Conservative policies, said Lamble, but ambitions). Their sensible analysis was both refreshing and reassuring.
