The lady vanishes | 15 March 2018

‘Close your eyes and be absorbed by the storytelling,’ urged Jon Manel (the new head of podcasting at BBC World Service) as we settled into our chairs. We were just about to hear the ‘world première’ of the latest podcast from the BBC World Service, launched dramatically in the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House in front of a packed, expectant audience, with full surround sound, every raindrop magnified (and there was a lot of it). It was odd to realise quite how far podcasting has already transformed radio. Along with the usual Radio 4 crowd (who were surprisingly enthusiastic about the chance to hear this latest podcast), there were hosts of young people, podcast devotees, not bound by schedules and controller-led programming, who trawl the web or follow Facebook to find the latest trend. There’s even a Podcast Brunch Club who meet in central London – it’s ‘like a book club’ but for audio (other branches meet in Bristol and Leicester).

Death in Ice Valley, made as a joint production with NRK (Norway’s licence-funded, public-service broadcasting channel), won’t be broadcast at all via the normal schedules but can only be listened to as a podcast. It’s an obvious attempt to capitalise on the phenomenal success of NPR’s Serial podcast, which you may remember retraced in 12 carefully crafted, and slowly released, episodes a murder from the 1990s in Baltimore, Maryland, and got the whole world, it seemed, talking about the case. Would the conviction of Adnan Syed stand up in court now? Was he really guilty? But Death in Ice Valley carries this new podcast genre (a true crime that raises many unsolved questions) much further, by paying attention not just to the investigative journalism but also to the listening experience. This is finely crafted radio, using sound to create atmosphere and a sense of place, an immersive encounter.

In the Radio Theatre it began to feel very cold and wet as we were taken in our imaginations to a lonely hillside above a black-water lake not far from the Norwegian city of Bergen in a valley called Isdal.