Today (BBC Radio 4)
Don’t Cross Kat (Wondery)
Dying for Sex (Wondery)
Inside Counter Terrorism Policing (Counter Terrorism Policing)
It’s Monday 31 March, Anna Foster’s first day as a Today presenter, and she’s not in W1. She’s in Thailand, in Mae Sot, on the border with Myanmar, reporting on the 7.7-magnitude earthquake. (Nick Robinson is in the rather cushier seat in Salford.) Foster’s opening link features a clip of a pre-recorded interview she’s done – “The aftershock,” says a survivor, “is the whole town is in panic” – and later in the programme she talks to people on the ground, as well as experts trying to get aid into the right areas. The earthquake only took place a couple of days previously. She’s been working hard.
As longtime 5 Live listeners will know, Foster is a gem. Co-host of Drive on the station for almost a decade, first alongside Peter Allen, then with Tony Livesey, she left in 2021 to become the BBC’s Middle East correspondent in Beirut; hardly a soft-soap appointment. Last year she was also made one of the presenters of News at One. She is proper.
And on Today on Monday, Foster came into her own. Her reporting meant that even a foreign news numbnut like me came away feeling better informed, and with huge empathy for the many Thai people whose families were just a few miles away over the border (yards, in some cases), but who couldn’t get into Myanmar to help. Due to the country’s civil war, Foster couldn’t get in either – “If it was up to me, Nick, I’d be there right now,” she said – but she visited Bangkok at 2am, to report on a collapsed skyscraper and the search for survivors. “It’s an operation that’s going on right through the night,” she said, describing “painstaking work” to find people alive in a “great pile of rubble… five, six storeys high”. Foster might not be as well known as some of her Today colleagues, but she’s a great asset to the show – disciplined and human, like a well-informed but unpanicky friend. I might start listening again.
Wondery have a new female-focused series, Don’t Cross Kat, about a beautiful Brazilian wellness influencer who – surprise! – turns into a dark guru/scammer and takes several other attractive young women down with her. This is a good show, well told and hosted by Chico Felitti. But there have been a few stories like this recently – tales of female wellness groups that turn into sexual exploitation – and, God, I find them depressing. Still, if that’s your bag (and it really is a lot of people’s bag), then this is a solid listen.
While we’re on the subject of women, an old podcast, Dying for Sex, has come back into focus now that it’s been adapted for a Disney+ series starring Michelle Williams, which launched this week. You may have seen quotes from Williams saying things like “I’ve never masturbated on film before” and wondered what was going on. This is the podcast that will tell you.
The show is hosted by real-life friends Molly Kochan (played by Williams in the series) and Nikki Boyer, and though it’s ostensibly about sex, it’s actually about dying, and living. The two women made the series after Kochan was diagnosed with terminal cancer and decided to end her marriage of 15 years to embark on a journey of sexual exploration. It’s an excellent show, funny, touching, properly moving at the end, buoyed throughout by genuine kinship and mordant wit. Kochan realises quickly that many of her hang-ups about intimacy can be dispensed with. “What’s the worst that he can do, kill me? I’m dying!” she says.
Online flirtations move to real-life encounters, and an early one involves an up-for-it guy who gets a little too excited when he and Molly are getting fruity in his car. He’s forced to quickly open the door and relieve himself on to a manicured lawn outside. Simultaneously, the car alarm goes off. It’s a great anecdote made even funnier by Boyer tracking the man down for an interview. There are foot fetishists, those turned on by tickling, and so much more (the last episode features Kochan’s mum and is a thoroughgoing tear-jerker). No doubt the TV series will be a smash hit; but if you haven’t tried the podcast, I thoroughly recommend it.
And if you’re interested in women having a life outside sex then you might try new series Inside Counter Terrorism Policing. Our host is Amy, who sounds reassuringly like Alice Levine. In the first episode, Amy speaks to Emma (no one uses their real name, for obvious reasons), and we learn about Emma’s job. At one point she’s tracking down child-abuse suspects, at another helping agents to follow suspects, but what she does now is work with what she calls “covert human sources”. Emma finds people who can tell her stuff about other people who might be terrorists and gets them to come over to her side. “It’s about communication,” she says, which is one way of putting it.
Due to the nature of this job, Emma can’t always talk specifics. But you are left in no doubt that she loves what she does and that it’s vital, important work. This series is made by the UK’s counter-terrorism policing unit and is, essentially, a long advert for joining, but, you know what? If you’re not currently busy embarking on a sexual odyssey or falling for wellness guff, then, ladies, this sounds like really interesting work.
