Ear Candy

As traditional media grapples with this digital age and professional criticism loses its prominence, new forms of curation arise. Three colleagues of Chayka’s at The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry and Alexandra Schwartz, have adapted by adding a weekly podcast to their beats. Critics at Large is much more digestible but offers no less brainfood than the dense intellectual workout of the magazine (I can’t be the only poser who got more use from the free tote bag that comes with a subscription).

At least, that was the case in 1951, when the CIA carried out its first coup in Iran at the request of an oil-thirsty British government. This audacious Anglo-American venture makes for the perfect introduction to a podcast on espionage co-presented by a British journalist and an ex-CIA agent.

Armed with redacted documents and candid memoirs, Gordon Corera and David McCloskey drolly transport us to a time of analogue tradecraft, when coded messages were delivered via BBC radio programmes – and chased with a vodka lime or three.

And that’s probably about 99% of the population: the recent series of The Traitors, with all its bad actors and diplomatic bachelors, was certainly the talk of the town.

But a married couple of podcasters have proved themselves a cut above all of us amateur tattlers. Benedict and Hannah Townsend’s analysis in Talk of the Townsends was so enjoyable, and so thorough, that some of their listeners weren’t even watching The Traitors.

For more than half a century, film and television makers have been drawn to the novels of John le Carré. The 2016 serialisation of The Night Manager, soon to re-emerge as a co-production between Amazon Prime and BBC TV, was the latest in a long line of TV treats inspired by le Carré’s prose.

Alec Guinness’s portrayal of George Smiley, the donnish, bespectacled spook who wouldn’t look out of place in a rural rectory, remains a defining performance of the television age.

Speaking as someone who has suffered his fair share of silent treatment on the Underground, it’s refreshing to hear this rule so flagrantly broken, and with such profoundly moving results, in singer-songwriter Tom Rosenthal’s podcast, Strangers on a Bench.

Tone is a vital ingredient of a TV show but one of the hardest to define. And as far as tonal tightropes go, adapting a Jilly Cooper “bonkbuster” for a modern audience is one of the great high-wire writing acts of recent times.

Turning a TV franchise tussle into a gripping battle of fragile (male) egos, Rivals is both a riotous celebration of the 1980s and a depiction of disturbingly backwards sexual politics.

It taps into our tribalism and elicits the knee-jerk reactions and extreme opinions that are catnip for the algorithms. How else can we explain the rise of Arsenal Fan TV? 

After sensitively tackling the crisis of masculinity in How to Be a Man, Rylan is now asking his guests How to Be in the Spotlight. And despite our exposure to a lot of very public breakdowns, including Rylan’s own, it can be hard to empathise when the spotlight also brings with it such enviable perks: his first guest, the actor Daisy May Cooper, boasts: “You can get your Sofology delivery within a week when you normally wait 13 weeks.”

As if on cue, as I write this, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is launching the Conservative manifesto, and he has just pledged to “halve migration as we have halved inflation”. And all the big parties in the general election are busy advocating their own policies to “stop the boats”.

How timely it is, then, to have a podcast air on BBC Sounds that so rigorously and compellingly dissects the smuggling trade.

Perhaps it’s all the scientific and tactical progress that is stifling their self-expression, as irascible managers reduce them to mere cogs in their ruthlessly demanding, “high pressing” machines.

Or the fact that they are having to surrender their personal lives to relentless fixture lists while their very personalities are sanitised by “media training”. 

And woe betide anyone who does a Marcus Rashford and pulls a single sickie after a boozy night out.