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The week in audio: The Secrets Hotline; The Log Books; Bed of Lies

The Secrets Hotline | Luminary
The Log Books
Bed of Lies | The Telegraph

Do you like secrets? Of course you do. Juicy, banal, upsetting, appalling: other people’s secrets make us feel less mad, more empathic, no matter what those secrets are. I’ve spent a week listening to strangers airing their cupboard skeletons and I feel all the better for it.

The Secrets Hotline is a new podcast from Nick van der Kolk, creator of Love + Radio and intimate podcaster extraordinaire. It’s mostly just a series of messages left by American and British listeners on The Secrets Hotline’s answerphone. Some are brief, like the wife who takes a quick two minutes to say she can’t bear her husband and wishes she didn’t have kids. Others take a little longer: a gay woman gives us a detailed revenge tale that had me punching the air at the end.

Van der Kolk also includes short interviews with experts such as Dan Savage, host of the long-running sex problem show Savage Lovecast. Savage is interesting (as ever) on when and why couples should share secrets and when and why it’s not the best idea. The second episode features the sociologist and writer Tressie McMillan Cottom, who wonders why keeping secrets has become such a contemporary taboo; the third, Queer Eye’s Karamo Brown, who disagrees with Savage about the desirability of not always being honest: “I’m calling BS!” Everything is beautifully produced, sounds ebbing and flowing in our ears, giving us time to savour these wonderful intimacies.

More secrets in The Log Books, the podcast that uses the records of the old London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard to explore the lives of queer people. Having won best new podcast at this year’s British Podcast awards, hosts Tash Walker, Adam Smith and Shivani Dave devote the first three episodes of their new series to an exploration of the lives of those who were diagnosed HIV positive in the 80s and early 90s, as documented by the logbooks. The stories are harrowing and uplifting; beautiful memorials to those who should have lived longer. They brought me to tears several times. We heard from Lee, a gay man who worked as a nurse during the times when Aids patients were treated like lepers; from George, who is in his 70s and HIV positive. George’s partner died of Aids-related illnesses after they were together for just eight years, and his speech on love will stay with me for a very long time.

“To see your grand passion die in agony and degradation, as so many of us did in the bad days, was awful, awful,” said George. “I still carry him with me… When I was going through this MRI scan, I visualised him and pulled him around me like a suit of armour… Those we’ve lost and love, I still pull them up and bring them to me when I’m in crisis or scared. Those that we love and lose, we don’t really lose them… When we need them, we can pull their energy and their love and their memories to us, to stabilise us, to strengthen us, to give us equilibrium. And to love us still.”

The third episode considers the era’s scaremongering media approach to people with Aids (not just the tabloids, but Woman’s Hour!). No wonder people kept secrets, including Switchboard volunteers. Here are the entries written by a volunteer who has an HIV diagnosis but can’t bring himself to “come out” about it, even to his fellow volunteers. Terrible times, which should be remembered.

And another podcast full of secrets. In Bed of Lies, we hear from seven different women who formed relationships with undercover policemen who joined leftwing activist groups in the 1990s and early 2000s. The practice began being exposed in 2010, but the effects are still felt by the women involved. We’re a few episodes into this gripping, complicated tale. Presenter Cara McGoogan and producer Sarah Peters are careful to tell the stories so that we can follow them: the differences and similarities between the histories are exposed. Each man seems unique and yet they all act in the same way with the women they seduce, gradually ensnaring them into a life that seems wonderful but is built on pathological dishonesty.

After their boyfriends disappear into thin air, some of these women transform into incredible sleuths, calling up old birth certificates, sitting in a pub watching for people entering undercover premises, travelling abroad to log a missing person with the authorities. Their stories are shocking and heartrending. This is a must-listen series.

Three weird Radio 4 traditions that have had their time

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney
Bank of England Governor Mark Carney

The Reith Lectures
This week, the former head of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, gave the first of his Reith Lectures, and very dull it was too. Carney seems like a nice guy, and what he’s saying is admirable, if obvious: that the world would be better if capitalist values weren’t applied to everything. (Duh.) But why the Reith Lectures are still on Radio 4 is anybody’s guess (yes, I know who Lord Reith is). They appear to be the station’s equivalent of an OBE: once you’ve passed some unseen suitability test, you’re offered one, for “fun”. If you want to listen to other, more interesting Reith lecturers, try Grayson Perry, Hilary Mantel or Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Thought for the Day
Ah yes, the regular 7.50am interruption of the station’s flagship news programme with five minutes of written-out waffle, as read by a Venerable. Though the waffling is nominally religious, the messages seem to be moving towards Instagram-lite sloganeering, à la “be nice to other people, you don’t know what they’re going through”. If TFTD is to continue (it shouldn’t), it should either be more religious or completely agnostic – maybe by listeners instead of religious leaders. While we’re at it, let’s rethink the whole Today programme. Why does it have a selection of presenters, for instance? Why not just two regulars, like every other breakfast news show?

The Archers
Were someone to press its restart button, would Radio 4 still commission a daily soap opera? Perhaps it would. Perhaps it would even commission an everyday story of country folk. But if it did, it would surely ensure that the writing was witty, the situations realistic and the acting at least plausible. The Archers, as proved during this year’s first lockdown, is packed with unauthentic characters wandering around an unrealistic, indoor-sounding village for no proper reason (pretending to be a gambling addict?). The recording is old-fashioned, the writing likewise. The Archers is 70 years old. It needs a proper kick up a cow’s bum in order to make it to 75.