Young Again with Kirsty Young (BBC Radio 4) | bbc.co.uk
The Today Podcast | BBC Sounds
McCartney: A Life in Lyrics | Pushkin
Ooooh, lovely Kirsty Young is back to purr into our ears. Also, to conduct interviews with famous people. She’s very good at this, as we know from her years hosting Desert Island Discs. But it’s been a long time since she’s been able to do her job; she was forced to quit work in 2019, due to her fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis, and has only recently started to make a return.
Now she has a new podcast/Radio 4 series, Young Again, where she “takes her guests back to meet their younger selves and asks: if you knew then what you know now, what would you tell yourself?”. At least, that’s what it says in the press release. In reality, the premise is paper-thin: it’s a play on her name, and she interviews famous people when they’ve got something to promote. So the first three programmes feature Linda Evangelista (promoting a book, Linda Evangelista Photographed by Steven Meisel), Daniel Kaluuya (plugging The Kitchen, a film he wrote and directed) and Jamie Oliver (a new recipe book). Young does manage to get the “what would you tell your younger self?” bit in, but only just, in the case of Evangelista. Essentially, these are straightforward interviews with famous people.
That’s not to say they aren’t good. Young is always well prepared, charming and quick. And the Kaluuya episode is excellent, simply because he is excellent: honest, funny, charismatic, razor sharp. But the opening show, with Evangelista, is less successful. The supermodel doesn’t really engage with Young’s questions, but blasts through, on her own tip. Young tries her best, but it isn’t a brilliant listen: Evangelista’s just too scattered and anecdotal, with that weird way that celebs can have of implying heavy significance to slight stories (she didn’t take a line of cocaine at a party and lied about it, because everyone else was doing it). Kaluuya is great, as I said; and Oliver’s pretty good too, though I feel as if I already know his backstory inside out. Really, I missed the discs of Desert Island Discs, the punctuation of the music, that tight structure. But then, DID is the best radio format ever. Young Again is just another celebrity interview show, like Louis Theroux’s, like The Diary of a CEO. A high-class one, hosted by a superb interviewer – but the flimsy format means it’s occasionally wobbly.
One of the first things I did when I started reviewing radio (this was pre-podcasts! Remember then?) was to spend 24 hours at the Today programme, then the flagship programme of Radio 4. It was the era of John Humphrys, Sarah Montague and James Naughtie, and the whole thing was madly impressive. The production team worked overnight to set up stories for the morning; when the presenters arrived, at 4am, they ripped through a lot of that work and set up their own interviews; then, when the programme was going out, everyone on the team reacted to it, in the hot moment of actually making it. The adrenaline! It was intoxicating.
Back then, in 2006, Today was highly respected, listened to by everyone important. We’re in different times now: Today is not the only show in town, and recent audience figures revealed that it had lost a million listeners in the year to May. Perhaps this is why the BBC has come up with a new spin-off show, a straightforward, if rather tardy, brand extension. (What’s next? Official hats and mugs?) The Today Podcast features Nick Robinson and Amol Rajan – the show’s very own The Rest Is News middle-aged dude duo – to give some behind-the-scenes insights, to take one of their big stories of the week and dig in deeper.
The first programme was strong: Robinson had just interviewed Rishi Sunak for the radio show, and Robinson and Rajan talked with wit and insight about it, with clips from the radio show inserted. There was also a chat with Armando Iannucci, who is never less than fun. But, with the best will in the world, only the highly politically engaged will want much of this nitpicky governmental shenanigans. The second, much shorter, show, was more human. Rajan and Robinson revealed their morning routines (Robinson’s up at 3.45am; Rajan at 3am) and also, rather sweetly, just how much they value their jobs at Today. Rajan confessed to finding it so stressful that he rarely sleeps the night before, and Robinson said he’d cried after his first time hosting, because he thought he’d messed it up so badly.
More for emotional older men: Paul McCartney has a podcast out. A Life in Lyrics is born out of The Lyrics, McCartney’s extremely hefty gift-for-Christmas-2021 memoir. This podcast is made from the recorded conversations he had with poet Paul Muldoon for that book.
Whenever I hear him, I’m always a bit surprised by the leisured pace at which McCartney speaks. He likes to reminisce, and he knows the stories he wants to tell. This, along with Muldoon’s mellifluous floweriness, means that you have to slow down for this show, adjust your settings to “relaxed”. (Plus, there’s too much Muldoon and too much explanation: when McCartney talks about the “bob-a-job” days he did when he was young, I’m not sure that we needed old news coverage to explain what bob-a-job-ing meant.) But it’s still a delight to hear one of the titans of our age speak about his work, from Eleanor Rigby – “I thought this was a cracker”– to Helter Skelter – “the lunatics were taking over the asylum … we put little things in for our own amusement, it was an effort to not be bored”. Plus, you know: the music.
