A belter of a podcast, featuring a mad South African: Smoke Screen reviewed

I go back and forth on tobacco companies. On the one hand, they are merchants of death. On the other, cigarettes are fun and delicious. On the one hand, they push cigarettes on children, which is unconscionable. And on the other, I remember how I would gather in the park with other children to collectively venerate a ten-pack of Marlboro Lights, our soft, pink fingers shivering and struggling with the lighter mechanism, our untutored lips puffing ineffectually at the speckled filter, all of us beginning to grow woozy from the acrid smoke filling our virgin lungs as we stood there and thought: this is the life.

Luckily, Smoke Screen sidesteps this question to focus more squarely on corporate espionage within the tobacco industry. The show, by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, is of the longform-article-turned-podcast variety. And while the Bureau are understandably keen on their investigative chops, the podcast wins so convincingly because of a cast of star characters. At its centre is the mystery of the show’s anti-heroine, a woman called Belinda Walter.

Walter is a white South African woman who, over the course of eight engrossing episodes, entangles herself with journalists, investigators, security services, tobacco firms and government watchdogs. In each case she makes contact with someone and earns their trust before withdrawing, recanting and turning on a power-hose of false allegations. Seemingly on impulse she becomes a triple agent, working as an attorney for small tobacco firms while spying on them for the South African security services and, separately, BAT. She then has a love affair with the man investigating BAT for tax fraud, an exceptionally straight investigator who asks her if she’s tax-compliant on their first date. She turns the hose on him and contacts a journalist, threatening to expose the entire arrangement.