Daisy Dunn | The Spectator columnists & writers

Made me buzz like an electron: Science – Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda reviewed

Given my affection for M*A*S*H, I can’t think why I haven’t listened to Alan Alda’s podcasts before now, besides the fact that they look quite uninviting. There is Clear+Vivid, on the power of communication, and Science: Clear+Vivid, on the power of scientific research. As someone who used to fall asleep listening to cassettes for A-Level physics, I am not easily excited by protons, and was prepared to give the latter particularly short shrift. Five hours on, however, Alda is still in my ears, and I am buzzing like an electron. Unlike many presenters, Alda, 85, doesn’t pretend not to know something just so that his interviewee will explain it to the audience, but nor does he strive to reveal how much he knows.

Fortifying snapshot of the gardener’s year: Saatchi Gallery’s RHS Botanical Art show reviewed

Elizabeth Blackadder, who died last month at the age of 89, was probably the most distinctive botanical artist of our time. Her paintings of lilies and irises, of cats poking their heads imperiously between poppies and freesias, are more alive than any such chocolate-box description could convey. The first woman to be elected to both the Royal and the Royal Scottish academies, Blackadder showed that botanical painting did not need to be twee and parochial. It could be as vibrant and interesting as narrative. The 15 artists and 19 photographers participating in this year’s Royal Horticultural Society exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery follow in Blackadder’s tradition. The Saatchi may not be the most obvious place to display their closely observed works from life, but then, it is in Chelsea, and the two week-long exhibition is timed to coincide with the Chelsea Flower Show just around the corner.

Must all history programming be ‘relevant’?

When it comes to history programming, television’s loss is increasingly audio’s gain. People moan to me most weeks over the lack of really good, rigorous, eye-opening documentaries on the screen, and I can only nod along in agreement. Oh for a Kenneth Clark-style lecture! More Michael Wood! There’s an especially strong appetite for the adventurous commissions of the 1990s and 2000s. It’s principally podcasts, now, that are pouring into this void. Stephen Fry’s Edwardian Secrets, a 12-episode sequel to his previous series on the Victorians, even sounds like an extended BBC4 documentary, replete with talking heads, choral background music and just a dash of Horrible Histories. Unfortunately, it also suffers from the malady of much modern history-making, with its explicit emphasis on ‘relevance’.

Floods you with fascinating facts: Trees A Crowd reviewed

Listening to Trees A Crowd, a podcast exploring the ‘56(ish) native trees of the British Isles’, solved one of childhood’s great mysteries for me. Why, when you plant a pip from one type of apple, does it grow into a completely different type of apple tree? The answer — one kind of apple tree will typically cross-pollinate with another variety to pass on a different set of genes — is less interesting than the next bit. Which is that if you do plant, say, a Braeburn seed, and it takes, you’re likely to end up with crab apples. The reason, as explained on the podcast, is that the wild crab apple of Britain, Malus sylvestris, and Malus sieversii, an apple native to the mountains of Kazakhstan, are the ancestors of almost all domestic apples we eat today.

The best food podcasts

You have to hand it to Ed Miliband. After bacon sandwich-gate, he might never have eaten in public again, but there he was, wolfing down cod and chickpeas, eggs and Za’atar on the chart-topping podcast Table Manners with Jessie Ware. Presumably he thought that audio would be a fail-safe medium in which to redeem himself. No cameras, no aggressive questioning (the show is co-hosted by singer Jessie Ware and her mum Lennie), no risk. Suffice it to say he underestimated this one. An early part of the conversation, in précis, ran like this: ‘What’s your go-to dish?’, ‘I’m a recipe-box follower and a recipe follower.’ ‘Which recipe books?’, ‘That’s a good question.’ [Some minutes later.] ‘What would be your last supper?’, ‘That’s really hard.

The joy of Radio 4 Extra

The best thing on the radio last week was, without question, Kind Hearts and Coronets. You may have missed it because it was on Radio 4 Extra, the poor, forgotten relation of the BBC’s main channels, which many regard as merely a Radio 4+1 for yesterday’s replays, when it is in fact home to the drama and comedy archive. Like the BBC4 TV channel, which is sadly ceasing commissioning, it hosts the sort of intelligent programmes people really enjoy, to the consternation of those who dismiss them as ‘old’. Fittingly, for Radio 4 Extra, Kind Hearts is all about a poor, forgotten relation who strives to reclaim his place within a family unwilling to acknowledge his existence. Adapted from the Ealing Studios screenplay of 1949 starring Alec Guinness, the radio drama, first broadcast in 1996, is one part Wilde to two parts Conan Doyle.

Spectator Out Loud

Leo McKinstry, Emily Hill and Daisy Dunn

19 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Leo McKinstry, Emily Hill and Daisy Dunn

19 min listen

On this week's episode, Leo McKinstry starts by arguing that having to sell the family home to pay for social care is not an injustice. (00:50) Then, Emily Hill reads her piece. She's not looking forward to the return of hugging. (08:00) Daisy Dunn finishes the podcast by examining the underappreciated art of asparagus. (12:30)

The art of the asparagus

Manet’s ‘Botte d’asperges’ are probably the most famous asparagus in the world. The artist painted the delicious white- and lilac-tinged spears for the collector Charles Ephrussi in 1880 before invoicing him for 800 francs. Ephrussi was so delighted with them that he paid Manet 1,000 instead, to which Manet responded by sending a second picture. ‘One appears to have escaped your bunch,’ the painter quipped in his accompanying note. The new canvas featured a single asparagus. Manet was in the last decade of his life when he began sending small paintings of fruit and flowers to his friends. While Ephrussi received asparagus, the muse Méry Laurent got apples, and artist Berthe Morisot violets, like those Manet had included in his portrait of her in mourning.

Seldom less than gripping: Banged Up podcast reviewed

Prison-based podcast Banged Up, now in its second series, is far more uplifting — and less soapy — than its name suggests. It begins with the tacit assumption that, if you haven’t personally been incarcerated, you probably have at least a dozen questions you’d want to ask someone who had. Is the food really awful? How likely are you to be beaten up? Is there a lending library? (I’d start with the last.) Banged Up has the answers to plenty more besides. The podcast is hosted by a prison lawyer named Claire Salama and two ex-inmates, a former footballer, Mike Boateng, known as ‘Boats’, and university-educated Rob Morrison, who describes himself as ‘probably not their [prisons’] target market’. While Claire takes the back seat, dropping in the odd bit on the criminal justice system and steering the discussion, Rob and Boats speak honestly about life behind bars.

Refreshingly unfettered: LRB Podcast’s Close Readings on Patricia Highsmith

I’d forgotten what a rich and deep and characterful voice John le Carré had. Listening to author and lawyer Philippe Sands’s Archive on 4 programme on him last week, I was struck by how much more engaging it was than almost every other male voice on the radio these days. Le Carré’s weren’t simply the measured tones of a mid--century public schoolboy. There was a real spirit in his voice, something melodic, which, in a world of Nick Grimshaws and Greg Jameses, stopped me in my tracks. Le Carré’s voice was undoubtedly part of the armoury that enabled him to win people over, even ‘to manipulate crowds’. This, his youngest son, the writer Nick Harkaway, told Sands was an ability he had inherited from his own father, the notoriously dodgy Ronnie.

Barack Obama will make you cringe: Renegades: Born in the USA reviewed

Barack Obama wants the world to know how much he loves singing. In his new podcast, which takes the form of a series of conversations with Bruce Springsteen, he’s rarely without a tune on his lips. ‘Further on up the road…/ you been laughing, pretty baby…’ A shower-singer, a bedroom warbler, an Air Force One air guitarist with an okay voice, the former president is proof that you really can be embarrassing without feeling an ounce of embarrassment. Oh, to have seen his daughters’ faces when he broke into ‘Let’s Stay Together’ in front of Al Green. The sound team at the fundraiser in Harlem urged him to do it, he tells Springsteen, but no one’s buying it. We’re not five minutes into the third episode before he’s crooning ‘Let’s Get It On’ and ‘Me and Mrs Jones’ — songs he’s been practising, to the bemusement of his grandmother, since he was ten years old.

It’s not easy running a stately home: Duchess podcast reviewed

The Duchess of Rutland, Emma Manners (née Watkins), grew up on a farm in the Welsh Borders before becoming proprietress of Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire. ‘On so many levels I was ill-equipped for the job,’ she reflects in her new podcast, Duchess. ‘I so remember opening a door and hearing the butlers downstairs saying: “Have we broken her yet?”… I felt like a ball they were bouncing.’ Thirty years after coming to Belvoir — pronounced ‘Beaver’ — the Duchess is ready to talk candidly about the difficulties she and other women have faced as custodians of stately homes. Following in the footsteps of Lady Carnarvon, who launched a podcast of her own from Highclere last spring, the Duchess dotes on the Downton and Bridgerton brigade, while highlighting the real existential threat faced by many historic estates.

Englishness vs California dreaming: Meghan and Harry’s Archewell Audio reviewed

On Archewell Audio, Harry and Meghan’s new podcast, ‘love wins’, ‘change really is possible’, and ‘the courage and the creativity and the power and the possibility that’s been resting in our bones shakes loose and emerges as our new skin’. There’s no room for Christmas — the first episode dropped as a ‘Holiday Special’ — but there is for kindness, compassion and more than a few bromidic interjections of ‘So true!’ The podcast purports to ‘spotlight diverse perspectives and voices’ and ‘build community through shared experiences, powerful narratives, and universal values’. Turn down the volume and what you’ll actually hear is the most tremendous tussle between Englishness and California dreaming. There are no prizes for guessing which comes out on top.

The grumpy genius of Raymond Briggs

Raymond Briggs has often spoken of his annoyance at being associated with Christmas. His Snowman may fly across our screens each Christmas day, but in the book there is no Father Christmas, no sleigh, and certainly no figgy pud. The North Pole scene featuring the jolly elf was written into the story for John Coates’s TV adaptation in 1982 and struck Briggs as rather mawkish at the time. As readers and viewers of Father Christmas know, Briggs’s Papa Noël is anyway rather a grouch at this time of year. As if the cold isn’t enough for him to contend with, there are the chimneys, the tasteless presents, and, oh yes, ‘blooming Christmas’ itself. If he had a favourite character, you could bet it would be Scrooge, and a favourite song, ‘Fairytale of New York’.

The genius of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue

I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue has just been voted the greatest radio comedy of all time by Radio Times, ahead of Hancock’s Half Hour and the brilliant Round the Horne. The first two episodes of series 73 (can you believe it?) are also the last Tim Brooke-Taylor recorded before losing his life to coronavirus earlier this year. Brooke-Taylor was part of the original cast of the self-styled ‘antidote to panel games’, which first aired in 1972 with Bill Oddie, Jo Kendall and the show’s deviser Graeme Garden as fellow performers (Barry Cryer joined during the first series and Willie Rushton two years later). When Brooke-Taylor’s voice broke through this week, it was as green as ever, ooh-ooh-oohing the lyrics of ‘The Funky Gibbon’ to the tune of ‘On Ilkla Moor Baht ’at’ in Huddersfield Town Hall.

The shocking story of Charles and Mary Lamb: Slightly Foxed podcast reviewed

The Slightly Foxed podcast, like the quarterly and old bookshop of the same name, is almost muskily lovely. It’s the sort of thing you can imagine listening to with a dog at your feet and whisky by your side in a draughty Mitfordesque folly. Ordinarily, you might attribute its homeliness to the fact that it is recorded around a kitchen table. But with the hosts now socially distanced across the country, and it feeling just as cosy, you realise that the atmosphere must derive from something else. In the latest episode, Philippa, Hazel and Gail were joined down the line by biographer Felicity James to discuss the early 19th-century writers Charles and Mary Lamb. Perhaps best known today for their Tales from Shakespeare, the siblings, of whom Mary was the elder by a decade, earned some notoriety in their own time for their bond following a terrible family drama.

Alan Partridge should replace Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour

In the week Jenni Murray left Woman’s Hour, I was listening to Alan Partridge on his new podcast, From the Oasthouse, and imagining what he might have been like as her successor. As I chuckled through half a dozen episodes of awkward Norfolk frippery, it occurred to me that, short of taking him on, the BBC could do wonders for its reputation in the wake of Murray’s departure by taking a leaf out of the Partridge playbook. Partridge, played by Steve Coogan since 1991, has moved with the times. Although he hasn’t changed, his horizons have, and he is doing his best to retain his cringe-inducing record. Ousted from his radio station following ‘an issue with a colleague’, and crippled by the mortgage on his seven-bedroom home, he has down-sized to a mock ‘oast-style’ house from which he is now streaming an 18-part series on his life.

The gentle genius of Mervyn Peake

To be a good illustrator, said Mervyn Peake, it is necessary to do two things. The first is to subordinate yourself entirely to the book. The second is ‘to slide into another man’s soul’. In 1933, at the age of 22, Peake did precisely that. Relinquishing his studies at the Royal Academy Schools to move to Sark, in the Channel Islands, he co-founded an artists’ colony and took to sketching fishermen and romantic, ripple-lapped coves. He put a gold hoop in his right ear, a red-lined cape over his shoulders, and grew his hair long, like Israel Hands or Long John Silver. The incredible thing was that he had yet to receive his commission to illustrate Treasure Island. By the time the job came through, in the late 1940s, he had been sliding into more piratical souls for more than 20 years.

The Archers is a masterclass in how not to write a monologue

If you’ve been listening to The Archers lately, you’ll know how tedious monologues can be. The BBC has received so many complaints about the stream of soliloquys that has dominated the episodes since lockdown, that Mohit Bakaya, controller of Radio 4, has been compelled to issue an apology. The new format — introduced so that the cast and crew could follow social-distancing rules — has proven especially unpopular because, as some listeners have pointed out, the producers might easily have stitched recordings together to keep the drama going. Instead, they’ve more or less dispensed with dialogue between characters in favour of a watered-down talking heads approach. Given that it’s usually recorded in a dedicated studio with live sound effects, The Archers was bound to be different in the Covid era.

Hats (and knickers) off to the hosts: The Naked Podcast reviewed

I spent half an hour this week listening to a woman make a plaster cast of her vulva. Kat Harbourne, co-host of The Naked Podcast on BBC Sounds, opened a recent episode by buzzing her bikini trimmer over the microphone before squatting over a British Airways peanut dish. Jenny Eells, her partner in crime, stood close by offering to hold up her dress. ‘I feel a bit like a voyeur, almost,’ she said, as if surprised at herself. ‘Thanks for letting me be a part of it.’ Then the mould-maker, Phoebe, put a porridgy alginate in Kat’s dish, and Jenny thought it looked ‘tasty’. Jenny and Kat are used to seeing each other naked. Most weeks, they invite on a female guest, and encourage her to strip off with them so that they can have a chat in the nude.

The best podcasts for all your corona-gardening needs

The American diet was probably at its healthiest in the second world war. Fearing interruption to supply chains, Washington launched a national Victory Gardening programme within a fortnight of Pearl Harbor, and saw two thirds of the population heed the cry to fill their backyards, rooftops and window boxes with veg. The scheme was so successful that, by 1943, home-gardeners were producing 43 per cent of all fresh food consumed. ‘Dig for Victory’, the latest episode of Gastropod, a superbly researched food and science podcast, opens with the co-hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley rustling bags of manure as they attempt to plant tomatoes, peppers and ‘urbs’ in a tiny patch of earth in New York. The pandemic has seen a rush on garden centres on both sides of the Atlantic and revival of the Dig for Victory tag.

Adapting Wodehouse for the radio is a challenge – but the BBC has succeeded brilliantly

Everyone knows a Lord Emsworth. Mine lives south of the river and wears caterpillars in his hair and wine on his shirt and has just occasionally written for this magazine. That doesn’t much narrow it down. When you look at him, you understand a little better why P. G. Wodehouse is topping the lists of authors to read during lockdown. It’s not just that the books are funny. With an Emsworth or a Bertie Wooster you’re guaranteed that idling and dithering will land you somewhere. Even if it is in the soup. Adapted for Radio 4 this fortnight, Leave it to Psmith, the second in Wodehouse’s Blandings series, sees the dithering Earl invite a prospective thief into his home after mistaking him for a Canadian poet. Emsworth’s sister, the imperious Constance, has arranged for the Earl and the poet to have lunch.

The author who made a living measuring the legs of lice

Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion, real name Bruce Frederick Cummings, earned his living measuring the legs of lice in the Natural History Museum. ‘To the lay mind how fantastic this must seem!’ he exclaimed in his journal, before enumerating his enthusiasms for Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, names like ‘Mr. Hogsflesh’ and ‘Pickle Herring Street’, and Petticoat Lane on Sunday mornings. The young naturalist had a habit of landing himself in embarrassing situations. He once spotted a pretty woman at the theatre and composed a notice for the classifieds in a bid to find her. The editor sent his missive back supposing he was a white-slave trafficker. Another time, a new mother with a ‘large, red udder’ and an uninterested infant offered to suckle him on the bus.

I’ve lost patience with podcasts and their presenters

‘To be recognised and accepted by a peregrine,’ wrote J.A. Baker in 1967, ‘you must wear the same clothes, travel by the same way, perform actions in the same order. Like all birds, it fears the unpredictable.’ Sitting around in the same old clothes, performing chores in the same order, travelling by no way at all, I’ve found comfort in Baker’s assurance that I may at least prove attractive to birds in my slovenly purdah. Sir David Attenborough read The Peregrine beautifully on Radio 4 just before Christmas, but if you were too busy steaming puddings to listen, you may find this a good time for enjoying the series online. I recommend it because, while Baker’s diary begins in October, when the peregrine soars over the fields and flicks acorns ‘like a potter spinning’, it culminates in the most joyful descriptions of spring.

Every bit as well observed as Rembrandt – and often funnier: Nicolaes Maes reviewed

Nicolaes Maes (1634–93) relished the simple moments of daily life during the Dutch Golden Age. A woman peeling parsnips over a bowl; a young girl threading a needle; a peasant lugging pails of milk to sell on the doorstep. His paintings are sensitive, not showy, and, as you would expect from a pupil of Rembrandt, rendered with the most exquisite use of light. Maes was apprenticed to the Dutch master for about five years in his teens. He returned to Amsterdam later in life, but worked for two decades in his hometown of Dordrecht, 11 miles southeast of Rotterdam. Several of his paintings, including ‘The Apostle Thomas’ and ‘Christ Blessing the Children’, have wrongly been attributed to Rembrandt over the years. But there is no mistaking Maes’s genre paintings.

Why do writers enjoy walking so much?

Writers like walking. When people ask us why, we say it’s what writers do. ‘Just popping out to buy a pencil,’ we cry, before tootling along the tarmac à la Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin or George Sand. BBC Radio likes walking, too, to judge by the number of programmes dedicated to the pursuit this fortnight. Some revolve around mental health and the environment; Clare Balding saunters over Berkshire’s Winter Hill in Ramblings with Steve Backshall and Helen Glover discussing wellbeing, parenthood and sewage. More involve the walking writer, with five authors retracing memorable ambulations on Radio 3, and Professor Jonathan Bate taking us on an altogether more dreamlike journey for In Wordsworth’s Footsteps on Radio 4.

What really happened at Troy?

Heinrich Schliemann had always hoped he’d find Homer’s Troy. Although he had no archaeological background to speak of, he did have money, and spades, and in the 1870s this would do. Tipped off as to the probable location of the ancient citadel — beneath Hisarlik on the west coast of modern Turkey — the Prussian businessman got zealously to work, pushing through the soil until he struck what he assumed to be the treasure of King Priam himself. In the Iliad the Trojan king lived lavishly. His palace was ‘surpassingly beautiful’. Its 50 rooms were built of ‘polished stone’. The terracotta wares Schliemann lifted from the ground did not quite evoke such splendour. There were fat-bellied pots with nipples and navels and rustic two-handled cups.

Did Radio 2 really need to give us four days of the Beatles to celebrate Abbey Road?

This Changeling Self, Radio 4’s lead drama this week, clearly ought to have gone out in August. It’s set — and was recorded — at the Edinburgh Festival and would have been a gift to marketing. ‘I love the festival!’ coos She. ‘All these millions of conversations, listen, listen, oh and stories, lots of stories, the different ways of telling…!’ No one in the real world speaks like this. But it’s just about OK, because she isn’t quite real either. She is a Fairy Queen, come to Edinburgh to spirit away a young pianist named Tam, as in Tamlin, who is a bit wet but really rather nice. The story is a modern retelling by Linda Marshall Griffiths of an old Scottish ballad that couldn’t be better suited to radio. The Fairy Queen, breathy yet exuberant, steals the heart of the gentlemanly Tam (Sacha Dhawan) when she picks out the notes of his song on her violin.

Up Pompeii!

One afternoon in AD 79 an unusual cloud appeared above Vesuvius in the Bay of Naples. ‘It was raised high on a kind of very tall trunk,’ recalled Pliny the Younger, likening it to an umbrella pine tree, ‘and spread out into branches.’ When, finally, the cloud collapsed and the sky grew dark, some people raised their hands to the gods. Others reasoned that ‘there were now no gods anywhere and that the night would last for ever and ever across the universe’. There are corners of the ancient cities that have not seen daylight since they were buried in volcanic debris. While excavations officially began in Pompeii and Herculaneum in the mid 18th century, there remains much to uncover, and still more to restore. Next month, an exhibition dedicated to the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum will open at the Getty Villa in LA.

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