Under the Taliban, Afghan light entertainment accrued unusual weight

For a television talent show, Afghan Star had unusually high stakes. When it first hit Afghanistan’s screens in 2005, four years after the fall of the Taliban, it represented the triumph of music over those who had attempted to smother it. Even from the show’s somewhat chaotic inception, it galvanised a nation, sending supporters out on to the streets to canvas for their favourite performers.

The first winner, Shakib Hamdard, certainly deserved some luck: he had lost his father to a suicide bomb and his brother to a rocket attack, and was driving a taxi around Kabul to support his mother and sister. Here he recalls the raw excitement of hearing he had won, followed by the surreal vision of his fans fighting with those of the runner-up. Luckily it was with fists, he said, and not knives.

The story of Afghan Star is narrated by the US musician John Legend, himself a star of the television shows American Idol and The Voice. Legend understands something of religious restriction: he grew up in the bosom of the Pentecostal church, which was rich in gospel music but frowned upon the secular variety.

Yet it was still a world away from the energetic fanaticism of the Taliban, which restricted permissible music to that of the human voice, raised solely in chanting praise to an easily displeased God. The photograph that drew him into the story, Legend says, was of four Talibs looking on approvingly as a great pile of musical instruments burnt to a charred crisp.

The first episode of the podcast – always a challenge – sketches the big picture for a broad audience, with Legend’s declamatory style lending it the slightly over-polished feel of a cinema voiceover. By the second episode his narration has relaxed a little, and the story takes off as the Afghans caught up in this national drama get more time to speak.