US Edition
It’s a worthy idea on paper. In The Documentary: Whose Truth? (BBC Sounds), four Nobel Prize-winners speak about the dangers of misinformation in their fields, from journalism to war. Listeners, though, might feel short-changed.
The series begins next week, but is already up on Sounds to binge in any order, so I started with an episode on climate change denial, featuring Paul Nurse. Sir Paul is a widely respected figure, but a slightly odd booking here, being a geneticist rather than a climate scientist. (His Nobel, back in 2001, was for work on protein molecules, though he commissioned a climate report some years ago for the Royal Society.) I wondered if the producers had tried and failed to get hold of the scientists who were made Nobel laureates in 2021 for their work on climate modelling.
Still, Nurse was able to speak in broad, general terms about the scientific method. What dogmatic climate change deniers sometimes forget, he said, is that science’s “central pillar” is “to constantly attack your own ideas and your own position”.
He had good points to make, but was bizarrely only given about four minutes to make them, being squeezed in as one voice among five in a 17-minute episode. When you’ve got hold of a Nobel laureate for each episode, underusing them in this way feels like a colossal missed opportunity.
Any one of the other guest climate-experts could have filled the episode on their own. Instead, this quarter-hour jumped frantically between them, trying to cover everything from UK schools, where pupils are surprisingly being encouraged to re-educate their teachers, to farms in Uganda, where activist Nyombi Morris is trying to convince local sceptics that flooding is, in fact, down to environmental factors, and not the punishment meted out by an angry god.
Episodes on Covid vaccines and the Russia-Ukraine war were stronger, having a narrower scope. The propaganda in the latter was harrowing: the Russian Defence Ministry kept denying that the Bucha massacre happened, even after satellite images showed the masses of dead bodies were visible from space.
An episode about the online abuse used to smear female journalists reminded us that social media is a cesspit – but simply didn’t have space to debate solutions. It’s a series as well-intentioned as it is frustrating.
Some problems just can’t be solved in a quarter of an hour. Those bitesized slots beloved of radio commissioners rarely give us the full picture. At best, they’re an intriguing snapshot – which is exactly what author Max Porter (Shy, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Lanny) gives us in each 15-minute chapter of his new novella-for-radio, The Photographer (Radio 4). It’s a captivating study of guilt, in blacks, whites and greys.
Across five episodes, a depressive photographer retells the story of his life in slant fashion, by closely describing five of the shots that made him famous. The way he speaks about them – slowly, carefully, drawing our attention to one detail after another – you’ll be convinced you’ve seen them before. The last photo, we’re tantalisingly told at the beginning, shows the death of his closest friend; for the how and why, you’ll have to wait till the final part.
Porter tried something similar with his short, strange book The Death of Francis Bacon, which presented each chapter as a stream-of-consciousness “portrait” of the artist. As surreal and nightmarish as Bacon’s own paintings, it wasn’t an easy read.
The Photographer couldn’t be more different. Like its subject, it’s outwardly straightforward – this “point-and-click” protagonist isn’t given to philosophising. His specialism, he tells us, is: “The weird emptiness. The shocked after. The awkward before.” He’s famous for black-and-white war scenes, but happiest when shooting “giant metal beasts crouched over unremarkable English fields… I took that nice shot of Jodrell Bank in the electrical storm”.
He’s been taking EMDR therapy: “The moving pen thing, you know? Not hypnotism, just… repetition.” We hear that exact line in more than one episode – both a concession to the mini-recaps required by the radio serial format, and a sly joke about repetition.
The prose is self-consciously poetic at times – Porter’s tends to be – but always believably in keeping with the character’s voice. If the odd line sounds obvious or heavy-handed (“I have become my camera”, he declares), the man himself rings true. This is largely due to the narrator, Blackadder’s Tim McInnerny, who gives a performance so brilliantly grounded and quietly despairing it might finally banish my mental picture of him in silly tights as Lord Percy once and for all.
The BBC’s new disinformation podcast is less informed than it thinks it is
The Documentary recruits four Nobel Prize-winners to discuss dangers of disinformation in climate change, Ukraine, journalism and Covid