The week in audio: Lockdown's Legacy; Journey Through Time; IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson

The Guardian

22-03-2025

Lockdown's Legacy (Radio 4) | BBC SoundsJourney Through Time Goalhanger IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson Higher Ground
The BBC has done an admirable BBC thing and commissioned several sensitive, exploratory programmes about lockdown – those strange, Covid-triggered, stay-at-home times of 2020 and 2021 – and its lasting effects on people. And by people I mean us all. Lockdown popped up on regular shows such as More or Less and Women's Hour last week, as well as several specially commissioned programmes, right across Radio 4.
Three episodes of the four-part Lockdown's Legacy – The Children, The Teachers and The Medics – each half an hour long, were presented by Catherine Carr, of Where Are You Going? Carr is a lovely interviewer of those who are unused to being interviewed, and these shows were sympathetic and subtle. She spoke to year 11 children who were in the final year of primary school when the first lockdown began in March 2020. They never went back. 'There were some friends I never saw again,' says one. 'Not ever.' Their first year of secondary school was disrupted too, with the social distancing and on-off lockdowns of autumn 2020, followed by the single day back in January 2021, then full lockdown again. Early 2021: those dark winter months indoors when time grew heavy and it genuinely felt as though normal life could never return.
Some of the children's recollections were sweet (one staged a guinea pig sports day in his garden), some devastating ('I know someone who got an eating disorder from it,' says another, 'and still has it.') Teachers remembered the clear differences between the kids' circumstances – how several were happily holding toys up to cameras while others showed them holes they'd punched in the bedroom wall. Others were drifting further and further away. The medics episode cut straight to the heart: 'In the early days there was this unnerving silence,' said one hospital doctor. 'Suddenly children had become invisible.' A GP: 'We went from 10,000 children per hour consult[ing] with GPs across London face to face to one per hour.' The children weren't coming in. They just disappeared.
One of the teenagers that Carr spoke to, when asked about how he would describe lockdown to kids who didn't go through it, responded: 'I think I would just exaggerate it for the plot. Like… back in my day we couldn't even step out the house! You wouldn't even last a day!'
I felt I needed some of that vim while listening to new Goalhanger offering Journey Through Time. (Yep, another history podcast.) Hosted by historians David Olusoga and Sarah Churchwell (he's British Nigerian, she's American), the opening two-parter about the Black Tom Island explosion in New York in 1916, where a munitions factory off Jersey City was blown up by German saboteurs, was fine but surprisingly academic.
Exciting, right? Unfortunately, the first episode doesn't offer up anyone interesting enough to grab the attention. Instead, we learn about the supposedly then-neutral US making money from sending weapons to anti-German forces. Not until episode two, when we meet Martha Held, an opera singer turned bordello owner, does the story take off. 'Bombs were being brought into the dining room,' said Olusoga. 'Guests sang German patriotic songs, including Deutschland Über Alles [sic].'
Both Olusoga and Churchwell are good: chatty and fluent, with information packed into every sentence. But as well as more grabby human stories there's a need for some decent production: some energy and contrast; some audio drop-ins (archive sound? A short musical sting?). The overall dynamic is… steady. It makes the listening experience airless, like an afternoon lecture in a hot room. Your mind wanders.
At least Journey Through Time gave us actual facts. Not so Michelle Obama's new podcast IMO, which she hosts with her brother, Craig Robinson, who's an executive director of the US National Association of Basketball Coaches. IMO stands for 'in my opinion', but as neither Obama nor Robinson seem to have any unusual takes, it's hard to work out why. Michelle ('Meesh' to Robinson) is an immensely impressive person, but her 'go high' positivity is reduced to platitudes here. And worse, in the first episode proper, to dull gender cliches. Hey people, ya know that men just don't talk about emotions! They like to watch sports instead! Ugggghhhh.
Pity the poor IMO advice-seeker, Eva, who sent in an honest and touching letter about how she'd been dropped by a friend because that friend felt Eva hadn't been supportive enough during a tough time. Obama, Robinson and second-episode guest Issa Rae were almost dismissive – 'Eva was like, hit or miss,' said Rae. 'That's a violation!' – and their recounting of their own experiences around friendship were dull. You can feel like a friendship is 'off' without wanting it to end; you can feel guilt and relief and hurt at the same time. Or, if you're on IMO, perhaps you can't.
There was the odd insightful moment: I enjoyed Robinson saying that he went out regularly with two male friends for drinks and they would set up a 'chair of angst' where one of them could sit and talk about what was bothering them. But Michelle's 'revelation' that she likes to spend seven hours sitting at a table talking with a friend when they come to stay, including one hour's discussion per child, sounded even more boring than the show. Obama's children are adults! What is there to say? Plus, whatever happened to having fun?