The week in audio: Sara & Cariad’s Weirdos Book Club; The Coming Storm; Proms 2024

Sara & Cariad’s Weirdos Book Club Plosive
The Coming Storm (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Proms 2024 (Radio 3) | BBC Sounds

I’m not one for a real-life book club, so I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Sara Pascoe and Cariad Lloyd’s audio version, Sara & Cariad’s Weirdos Book Club. Not that I don’t love both Pascoe and Lloyd as performers, and Lloyd’s long-established Griefcast is a wonderful thing (it’s on hiatus at the moment). Anyway, last week saw the start of Weirdos Book Club’s second season and I’ve heard the first two episodes, both of which I loved, despite not knowing either of the books discussed: Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny and The Whale Tattoo by Jon Ransom. Maybe I just slot right in with the weirdos (no one involved is that weird, really. Maybe Pascoe, a little bit).

Heiny’s novel came out in 2017, Ransom’s in 2022 – and both, judging by the podcast, are excellent. For the Heiny discussion, comedian Roisin Conaty joined Pascoe and Lloyd; for Ransom, it was comedian Andrew White. The Heiny, said Conaty, was a “comedy of manners, very easy reading”; Pascoe: “I had a reassurance that nothing bad’s gonna happen”; the Ransom is about a working-class queer man and, according to Lloyd: “There’s lots of cool, subtle, metaphorical things – quite hard to do in a not annoying way.” Such quotes might make their discussions sound slight: actually, they’re funny and revealing, and punchily produced in terms of time and topic (no unnecessary rambling, swift at-the-top explanation without too many spoilers, straight into opinions).

All in all, a really lovely way to spend 45 minutes, and the shows led me to check out previous episodes and to buy both Heiny and Ransom’s books. Result! Other novels in the pipeline include Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (which I’ve read, hooray), plus novels by Dawn O’Porter, Cathy Sweeney and (who she?) Cariad Lloyd.

Another returning success is The Coming Storm on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. In the first series, which came out in 2022, Gabriel Gatehouse used the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 as a kick-off point to dive deep into the mad conspiracy sludge of US politics. It was a sprawling, absorbing epic that, at times, was hard to make sense of, though Gatehouse managed to tie everything together at the end. I’m hoping for a similar ride from this season.

Episode one of season two starts with Gatehouse finally watching The Matrix to understand the red pill/blue pill rhetoric that has dominated the loopy, macho side of the internet for the past few years. (Am I wrong for judging him, a bit, for not having seen it before?) This quickly takes him back to the Capitol and to a chap called Alan Hostetter, who was part of the mob that tried to get in. We hear how Hostetter was once a police officer, then a seemingly lovely yoga type, and then, after Covid, an anti-government conspiracy theorist. By the end of episode two Hostetter is clearly paranoid (he concocts an elaborate theory that everything, pretty much, is staged by the government in order to fool him).

We also meet another conspiracy lover called G Edward Griffin, who believes that the Federal Reserve is a tool of some world-running cabal. Oh, and a now-dead, commie-hating Democratic representative, Larry McDonald, who chaired a club called the John Birch Society that also hates the Federal Reserve. Honestly, I couldn’t quite tell you why. Investigating conspiracy theorists makes for very tangled programmes.

There are only two episodes out so far; it didn’t take long before I was flailing in the weeds again. Why is Gatehouse spending so much time on this particular conspiracy theorist? What’s so special about any of these people? The overall aim, at least as far as I can understand, is to work out why the red pill lot are obsessed with getting rid of the CIA, the FBI, the Federal Reserve, all US institutions. Or maybe it’s to work out whether such people really do believe that the world we live in is a simulacrum? Or… something else conspiracy-ish, such as both the left and the right think that the government doesn’t really have true power, but someone else does and they might eat babies? I’m not entirely sure.

Gatehouse is an excellent journalist, though I find myself missing the light touch of Jon Ronson, whose podcast Things Fell Apart covers similar topics. I have a feeling that Gatehouse’s conclusion will be: loads more people than you think believe in at least some form of conspiracy and it’s all to do with the John Birch Society. He will, I’m sure, pull everything together in the end. In the meantime, I’m lost, but still enjoying the ride. Hey-ho.

The Proms are close to finishing for this year, and overall have been deemed a success. Some were upset at the more democratic commissions: Prom 2: Everybody Dance! The Sound of Disco was both hugely well received and thoroughly derided. I’ve been tuning in, on and off, and, though I was a disco Prom naysayer, have found myself enjoying almost every single thing I’ve heard. So much so that I went to see one live – Prom 69, the Florence + the Machine performance, with Jules Buckley and his orchestra, of their first LP, Lungs, on Wednesday night. It was fabulous – Florence Welch’s swooning, swooping music is ideal for orchestration – and the atmosphere was wild. Such wonderful artistry, and all for £8 if you’re standing. The opposite of dynamic pricing; a true public service.