Three Million (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Who Trolled Amber? | Tortoise Media
Who We Are Now | Global Player
A Muslim & a Jew Go There (Instinct Productions) | Apple Podcasts
Three Million, from Radio 4, is about the death of 3 million people. They died long ago, in 1943, during the second world war, but they weren’t lost in battle. They died of starvation in Bengal. I knew nothing about this, and from the start, Three Million’s presenter, Kavita Puri, careful and dogged, makes it clear that the Bengal famine is rarely discussed. Three million people died, but “there’s no memorial to them”, she says, “there’s no plaque”.
The famine has been forgotten, and news of its existence at the time was suppressed. Puri and her producers have done some remarkable research and tracked down unheard testimonies of people who were there. Some of this is on old tapes, but some of the speakers are still living (more than 80 years on!) and have never been interviewed before about this terrible thing. We hear from English and Indian people who can still remember with devastating clarity how emaciated people were, the dead bodies in the streets.
A quick explanation of what took place. Bengal, now Bangladesh and West Bengal, was then part of the British empire, which was at war. The Japanese occupied Burma and the British decided to remove or destroy all the rice in the Bengal districts near Burma, and to requisition all vehicles so that rice couldn’t be delivered. (This was to stop the Japanese from getting Bengal’s resources if they invaded.) Then there was a bout of terrible weather, which didn’t help. Neither did the official British and Indian refusal to call the famine a famine. Soldiers’ letters home were censored; when the BBC reported on the famine, the British government censored the worst parts; local newspapers were actually banned from using the word. The Statesman, an English-language newspaper, eventually got round the ban by publishing shocking photos that made clear what was happening.
But the really shameful part is that the British declined to help. In fact Winston Churchill and others in the war cabinet made several deliberate decisions not to send over grain to save the starving Bengali people. Why? Well, Max Hastings, a huge Churchill fan, says: “It seems to me that you can’t possibly deny that Churchill was racist… He saw Indians as a sort of subspecies. He certainly didn’t regard them as the equivalent of white men.”
Three Million is great radio, not just because of the story, which is awful and enraging and needs to be heard, but because of Puri’s presentation – measured, dedicated, beautifully voiced. She’s almost old-school BBC, but there are moments when her emotion breaks through. At one point she tracks down some extremely visceral drawings of the famine victims. One shows a dead man being eaten by animals. The artist gives the man a name – the first name of a victim that Puri has seen, after all her research, and her voice cracks.
There’s more dedicated digging on Tortoise Media, but into far more recent history. Alexi Mostrous, presenter of Sweet Bobby and Hoaxed, is back with another sexier-than-yours investigative podcast, Who Trolled Amber? This time he’s tackling the 2022 US trial of Johnny Depp v Amber Heard. Another madly click-friendly topic, though Mostrous spends a lot of time in the first episode telling us that, actually, he’s not interested in celebrity and barely even noticed the trial taking place.
What dragged Mostrous into considering the lives of famous people was a friend of his, also clever and into investigations, who woke up one morning and found that his social media timeline was filled with Amber hate. This shouldn’t have been happening, given that his friend is a liberal: the algorithm should have given him pro-women content. The friend, who knows how such things work, attempted to go into his feeds and clean them up. But he couldn’t.
With the help of this friend and other clever data analysts, Mostrous finds that, actually, more than half of the millions of anti-Heard posts on Twitter – now X – TikTok and Instagram were created by bots. And this might well have influenced the jury in the case, given that they were not sequestered, so like everyone else could go home after a day’s work and see anti-Amber bot-hate all over their timelines too. Mostrous looks into other cases and finds that it costs almost nothing to hire these bots. Just $100 to swamp the internet with pro- or anti- posts. There are many podcasts about how the internet is changing the world, turning lies into truth and vice versa. This has the potential to be one of the most chilling.
Just time to mention a couple of new pods on the block. The first, Who We Are Now, which features Richard Hammond and his daughter Izzy wondering about who he is and how he should go about his life, is… OK. They’re both great presenters but this is thin fare. Hammond worries that wearing white trainers is too much of a statement for a middle-aged man (really? I don’t know any man who would give this a second thought!), and they extrapolate from such banalities.
Much more interesting is A Muslim & a Jew Go There, from David Baddiel and Sayeeda Warsi, which, in its first episode, tackles recent political Islamophobia from the Conservatives as well as antisemitism in the Labour party. Both madly articulate and well informed, they explain the nitty-gritty of Rochdale’s byelection palavers, unpick the wider meanings and motivations, and somehow do it all in easy, conversational style. “A lot of this is about language and certain recurring ideas,” says Baddiel early on. Lady Warsi later: “Don’t weaponise antisemitism to beat the left, and don’t weaponise Islamophobia to beat the right. Stop using us as pawns in your political games.” Civilised and civilising.
