Some fiction, some fact
What I've been listening to this week
A quick post to give a shout out to two podcasts that gave me a rewarding few hours over the past week.
I returned to the latest season of Slow Burn, a podcast that I followed closely when it first started in 2017 with a look at the Watergate scandal and kind of gave up on after Season Two (the Clinton-Lewinsky story which was excellent) only because so many other shows consumed my attention, and I needed something other than a focus on US politics and journalism. Six years on the show in its eighth season unpacks the life and times of US Supreme Court Justice Thomas Clarence, someone who has acquired a reputation for being among the most conservative voices on the bench, and whose appointment followed some serious allegations of sexual harassment that have never been fully resolved. Perhaps unsurprising, but it continues to amaze me that the issues raised at that confirmation hearing are still salient. Anita Hill, whose experience with Thomas brought up the harassment charge, was cross examined by a panel of all male judges, and despite her damning testimony Thomas was voted in. We saw something similar happen a few years ago with another US Supreme Court nominee, who also was voted in despite allegations of sexual assault. The four-episode series, Becoming Justice Thomas, is about more than the confirmation hearings, and explores the nuances of black conservatism in the United States.
I rarely listen to fiction podcasts (other than Indian Noir when I’m in the mood for darkness or The Writer’s Voice from The New Yorker when I’m looking for what’s new) but a promo on the BBC’s Global News Podcast intrigued me and I went looking through the audio-shelves. Rosamund Pike and Hugh Lawrie star in this limited series (in OTT terms) show called People who knew me produced by BBC Sounds, based on the novel by Kim Hopper. Pike plays a woman who reinvents herself after faking her own death in the aftermath of 9/11 and then must confront the truth of her past when she is diagnosed with cancer. It’s a simple but engrossing plot line and in some ways perfect for Pike, who seems to find it hard to escape the persona of Gone Girl, a character whose deviousness is mirrored in some of the other film roles she’s played. But People who knew me is also about vulnerability and the tangled web of lies that can be woven almost unconsciously once the first untruth is told—by ordinary people who in the process create complex traps for themselves. Interestingly, the audio format allows actors to play roles that may otherwise never be offered to them. As Pike remarked in an interview in The Guardian, “On screen I’d only get to play the new version [of the character] in her 40s. But because it’s audio, I can be the girl in her 20s, too.”
That reminds me of my first encounter with audio—rather, with voice work—as a host for All India Radio’s Yuvavani show Listener’s Choice (way back when). After I’d hosted a couple of shows the station director summoned me to his office and told me that I’d have to modulate my voice if I didn’t want to sound like “a pre-pubescent boy”! I smarted, of course, but then that quality of voice led to me my own first role in an audio drama—where I played a 12-year-old boy!
That relationship between voice and age? It’s complex, clearly.