The funniest current affairs show since Brass Eye: Into the Grey Zone reviewed

It was something a friend said to me about The Revenant, Leonardo diCaprio’s bloody-minded and brutal Oscar vehicle: ‘The problem with the film is once you start laughing, you can’t stop. And for me, that moment was the second time he fell off a cliff.’

I thought about this a lot listening to Into the Grey Zone, a new podcast hoping to educate its audience about the new forms of constant pseudo-warfare that modern states engage in. This is the world of nerve poisoning in Salisbury, airspace incursions over Taiwan, cyberattacks, mass disinformation and remote interference. None of these things can be considered open warfare but taken together, the podcast implies, they do not suggest we are in a state of perfect peace.

I should stress that I believe these things are important, that they deserve public discussion and attention. But Into the Grey Zone, having set out on its virtuous mission, gets one foot stuck in a bucket, the other clamped in a waffle iron, falls down the stairs and ends up accidentally becoming the funniest current affairs show since Brass Eye.

The grey zone, we’re told, is ‘a place where there are no rules, and literally anything can be, and is, used as a weapon’. The podcast has a particular skill for overstating its case in a way that not only undermines its arguments, but contains a small, sweet note of the completely absurd, provided in that last sentence by the use of the word ‘literally’. The grey zone is variously described as being everywhere, encompassing everything, affecting everyone and happening every minute. Its omnipresence, immanence and omnipotence give God a decent run for his money.

Every threat is inflated to insane proportions.