The History Podcast: Invisible Hands with David Dimbleby (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Artworks: Talk Talk – Living In Another World (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
White Hot Hate: Agent Pale Horse CBC
Luigi Wondery+
David Dimbleby is a broadcasting quality mark, isn’t he? Not just a guarantee of intelligent content delivered succinctly and with style, but a host who’s at once establishment and outsider. His eminent career – hosting Question Time and general elections, as well as commentating on royal jubilees and state funerals – means he is intrinsically connected to Britishness and holding Britishness to account.
His new Radio 4 series, Invisible Hands, unpicks a real establishment fundamental: capitalism and the free markets. Many people in Britain – me included, and I’m hardly a spring chicken – can barely remember a time when this country wasn’t in thrall to the idea that the best way to run an economy is by handing power to a market where everything – strappy sandals, war weapons, water supplies – is up for sale.
The series starts with Antony Fisher, a second world war RAF pilot who took up farming after 1945. There’s a touch of Jon Ronson in picking Fisher: the pinpointing of a flapping butterfly event that cascades into a future that could never be imagined. Here, the flap is to do with Fisher’s frustration with the postwar Attlee government and its meddling in everything. “The heavy hand of state,” says Dimbleby. “Government bodies with dreary bureaucratic names like the Milk Marketing Board and the Egg Marketing Board.” At some point Fisher reads a Reader’s Digest article by Prof Friedrich Hayek, in which Hayek argued that the government’s micromanagement of the economy was actually “pretty well what the Nazis had proposed”, and actually what the allies had been fighting against. A light goes on in Fisher’s head. The butterfly flaps its wings.
By the end of episode one, Fisher is in the US at a competition called the Chicken of Tomorrow(!) and everything is about to change. Invisible Hands covers a lot of ground, but it’s well paced, and Dimbleby makes it all enjoyable and easy to understand. Politics students may be familiar with the Fisher story but I didn’t know it, and the programme is an engaging way to learn how the Chicken of Tomorrow became the State of Today.
Also on Radio 4 last week, Elbow’s Guy Garvey, the warm and eloquent 6 Music presenter, hosted an episode of the excellent series Artworks. The subject was British pop group Talk Talk and, specifically, their 1988 album Spirit of Eden: a great work, completely at odds with the times.
Garvey is a romantic, and he clearly delights in the bucketful of romantic tropes in this tale. Mark Hollis, Talk Talk’s leader, was a musical genius unaffected by (capitalist) dreams of fame and fortune. After three albums, as stardom beckoned, he turned left; made a deliberate retreat from the commercial in favour of art. Spirit of Eden took nine months to make and was done in the literal and metaphorical dark. Every note had to be spontaneous, insisted Hollis, who kept the bad guys (the record company) at bay by simply locking them out.
The result? An album so groundbreaking and out of sync that the record company had no idea how to sell it. Talk Talk became unmarketable, Hollis and EMI sued each other (EMI said the album was “not commercially satisfactory”: lovely use of words there) and Hollis bid a retreat. And – yep, you guessed it – almost 40 years on, Spirit of Eden is lauded as a masterpiece.
It was interesting to hear the effect on Tony Wadsworth, then head of marketing at EMI, who worked his way up to become the company’s boss. “It was a great lesson that came in very useful later on with artists like Radiohead,” he said. And Hollis, a man who, outside the studio, was affable and companionable, said this: “I can’t imagine not playing music, but I don’t feel any need to record music or perform it.” A message that’s often forgotten: it’s in the doing that the delight in art is found.
A couple of shows about US antiheroes for the single-minded-obsessive lovers among you. Actually, the first, White Hot Hate: Agent Pale Horse, about an undercover FBI agent called Scott Payne, reveals his very un-loner-ish approach. Though Payne is tattooed, bearded and leather-jacketed – all things that freak out many Americans – he’s a fun guy, able to make friends easily. And his look and demeanour have meant that he has been able to infiltrate neo-Nazi cabals, biker gangs, dodgy fringe groups – though always with the fear of being discovered. Payne is painted as a tattooed angel on the side of the righteous, but whether or not you enjoy this show will depend on how much you warm to his convivial but rather egotistical company.
Finally, brace yourself, ladies, there’s a podcast about Luigi Mangione. Of course, no show can ever go deep enough on the man accused of killing the CEO of United HealthCare in December. The circumstances – and, to be honest, Mangione’s looks – trump any banal insights offered by friends and neighbours. He might have been brought up with “a strong foundation of community”, have been “a friendly, lovely young man” with “intelligence and ambition”, and had “a relentless, grinding struggle” with back pain, but that’s not really why people will listen. It’s for Mangione’s hood-up smile before he allegedly committed the murder, and for the Italian loafers (no socks) he wore while in court. Fans can never get enough of this kind of thing, it seems. Still, this four-part series has the right amount of silly schlock to keep the Luigi legend bubbling.
