MY Name Is … (Radio 4, Monday), which set out to investigate the conspiracy theories surrounding Covid-19, was one of the most distressing things I heard on radio this week. Distressing because of the madness of those theories and because of the raging certainty of those espousing them.
Dr Fozia Hayat, who described herself as a “Scottish-Pakistani-Muslim consultant anaesthetist at Bradford Royal,” had herself been told that she was taking money for making false diagnoses of coronavirus and that the virus didn’t even exist. As a result, she wanted to learn more about this kind of false news in an effort to find out how best to combat it.
I’m not sure she did in the end. But she did uncover a miasma of disinformation including the idea that antibody tests and vaccinations are, according to social media, a way for Bill Gates to microchip people. Dr Hayat even spoke to an Anti-5G campaigner who accused members of the NHS of effectively committing “genocide.” It was not, I think it’s fair to say, a meeting of minds.
The problem with programmes like this is in trying to get to the root of false news there’s the danger that they amplify it by bringing it into the mainstream conversation. But can you ignore it?
One of the pleasures of radio is those encounters with things you didn’t know you needed. Like a history of the foghorn, for example. Jennifer Lucy Allan’s Life, Death and the Foghorn (Radio 4, Tuesday) wasn’t quite that, but it certainly piqued my interest in this now abandoned form of life-saving warning (invented by 19th-century Scottish expat, Robert Foulis, who doesn’t get the credit he deserves in his home country).
If I’m honest I could have done with more of a historical grounding. But Allan, it turns out, was more interested in the poetry and musicality of that familiar mournful bellow. And so, this half-hour documentary she spoke to musicians and poets and harbourmasters about the idea of the foghorn, what it represented, and how it was remembered in literature and popular memory.
These days, there are fewer than 20 large-scale foghorns in operation around the British coast. It has become the victim of satellite technology. A digital fog has rolled in over them.
Listen Out For: Radio 2’s Virtual Folk Festival, tonight, 8pm
In lieu of any field-based festivals this summer you can always fall back on BBC Radio 2’s gather-up of archive sessions and new home recordings from the likes of Suzanne Vega and Yusuf (Cat Stevens as was).
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