Covid Confidential review – is it too soon to be making pandemic podcasts?
Covid Confidential podcast, BBC Sounds
The great joy of making a podcast is that it can be whatever you want it to be. The BBC has had a tendency to think its podcasts must be ersatz-radio programmes, with all the production quality and tone of what appears on its normal radio channels. Brexitcast/Newscast partly put paid to that, and Covid Confidential certainly continues that trend. Presented by political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, it seeks to tell the story of Covid through five different moments in the crisis, using on and off the record interviews with people involved in developing government strategy. Sounds a bit dry, doesn’t it? In fact, it’s the complete opposite.
Most of us have found the last year very trying, to one degree or another. If I was still in publishing I would be very reluctant to publish a book on the Covid crisis on the basis that I don’t think people are very interested in reliving the experience. People want to move on, and not dwell on all the awfulness of the last twelve months. When I saw that Covid Confidential had been made, even I was a little reluctant to listen to its two thirty-minute long episodes. I am, however, glad that I relented and downloaded them.
Laura has her long term producer Paul Twinn alongside her as they give some behind the scenes colour to their involvement in some of the big moments of the last year. They lay bare the chaotic nature of their dual existence, and how they came to be at the centre of the unfolding dramas. It’s not just about them, though, it’s about how decisions were arrived at, the conflict within government, the reluctance of the Prime Minister to close down the country until the last minute. It’s about the way the politicians came to the decisions they did, having weighed up the scientific and economic evidence laid in front of them. It’s about the awful, dawning realisation in mid March of what was about to hit us. It’s about the agonies that both politicians and scientists have been through, realising that they made wrong decisions. All in all, it’s a very human story.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock, and leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, were the only politicians to give on the record interviews. Starmer might as well not have bothered given he told us nothing we didn’t know already. Hancock was a little (but not a lot) better, especially when his voice broke when recounting the story of the moment he learned that the vaccines worked. A true Eureka moment.
This podcast will never air on Radio 4. Or 5 Live. This is a pity because it deserves a wider audience than it will inevitably get on BBC Sounds or other podcast platforms. The chatty nature of the podcast ought to give it a much wider appeal than you’d expect from a political podcast, but how do you convey that in a marketing campaign without it appearing to be yet another dumbed down BBC programme designed to appeal to the ‘yoof’ market?