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The Guardian
22-03-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
The week in audio: Lockdown's Legacy; Journey Through Time; IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson
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?
Telegraph
19-03-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Five years on, we're only just starting to understand how much lockdown damaged our children
Far more illuminating, yet arguably even more depressing, was Monday's analysis of the long-term impacts of lockdown, particularly on children. On Woman's Hour we heard about babies not learning to point or wave; in the trio of reports titled Lockdown's Legacy, children, teachers and medics lined up to lay bare just how scarring that period of isolation was for the young; on Start the Week we learnt that adults whose mental health suffered in lockdown have largely recovered – but children haven't. 'We had this haloed image of kids doing Joe Wicks videos in the garden and sitting doing their homework,' said one doctor, 'but for many children that was just not the case.' Those children, he said, are the ones we should worry about. Later he spoke of seeing 'Victorian levels of abuse and neglect' when lockdown restrictions eased. The day was a parade of anecdotes about stunted development, poor educational attainment, malnutrition, mental health epidemics, spiralling standards of behaviour and a lost generation. We heard statements such as, 'Many believe this [lack of social development in reception-aged children] is because of Covid-19' and, 'It's clear a year out of traditional schooling will have lasting impacts', and while it was all largely convincing you yearned for a bit of roughage in your diet: where was the data to support all this? Step forward the excellent More or Less, Tim Harford's wonderfully clear-eyed, no bulls--t programme that sloughs away anecdote and asks what the numbers are actually telling us. It gave Monday's day of programming a spine of steel. It was, and I mean this as a compliment, quite boring at times. Harford was not about to allow an eye-catching statistic to go unchallenged or a strong statement to be uninspected. He wanted to know what damage we did to our young when, with the lockdown, we sought to protect the adults – the 'intergenerational transfer of harms' as Harford called it. It was bleak. For children who started school in 2020, there's an appreciable drop in learning attainment, just as there was for older primary-aged children (though the data showed the pupils could recover that loss). Absence has rocketed – 10.5 per cent of children missed 10 per cent or more of school days in 2019. In 2023, it was more than 21 per cent. Suspensions have doubled. The truly depressing aspect was how lockdown acted as an 'amplifier', with more affluent children coping well, while the disadvantaged suffered even more. 'A decade of progress in closing the educational attainment gap was wiped out,' said one academic. 'We should never, ever have closed the schools,' said a teacher. More or Less's refusal to supply easy headlines – on lockdown's impact on university students: 'We just don't know yet' – makes it all the more powerful when it finds hard evidence. Throughout the day we heard emotive stories about young people's mental health, and while they were affecting you wondered what the true picture was. More or Less had data to show it's every bit as bad as the anecdotes suggest, and it's getting worse: 'The figures are a gut-punch.' One in 10 young people showed signs of a mental health illness before the pandemic. Now it's one in five – and rising. Radio 4 gave us all sorts of perspectives on lockdown and, in the main, the farmers, parents, teachers, artists and Icelandic concert pianists have managed to roll with the punches. For the young, however, it came at an enormous cost. And we're only just beginning to learn how much.
The Guardian
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Love's Labour's Lost (More or Less) review – lads on tour in Ibiza swear off sex
Standards have declined. When Shakespeare set his characters a challenge in his early comedy, he measured it out in years. In a bid to lead a life of contemplative study, the king of Navarre persuades his friends to join him in a three-year regime of abstemiousness, requiring them to renounce women and cut back on food and sleep. Now, by contrast, playwrights Elizabeth Godber and Nick Lane have revisited the material but cut the pledge down. Their young men have to last a whole three days. For a show opening at the start of Lent, that seems pretty feeble, although, to be fair, the context has also changed. Berowne (Thomas Cotran), Long-Dumain (Linford Johnson) and Ferdy (Timothy Adam Lucas) agree to avoid the company of women not just anywhere, but in Ibiza, the throbbing heart of 1990s hedonism. For every other party of lads flying out of Manchester airport, meeting women is the point. Returning to the blueprint of 2023's The Comedy of Errors (More or Less), a jokey rehash of Shakespeare with a pop-song setting, the writers have reunited with director Paul Robinson to put Love's Labour's Lost in the decade of Blur, the Spice Girls and Pete Tong at Manumission. This one is even less reverent than the last, not only substituting almost the entire script for modern-day urban poetry, but also beefing up the women's roles to make them equal partners with the men. Alice Imelda, Annie Kirkman, Alyce Liburd and Jo Patmore rise gutsily to the occasion. They are now on a mixed-up stag-and-hen weekend (with additional hired-assassin subplot), while a lovelorn Armado (David Kirkbride) is the Sun Park holiday resort's resident pill supplier. So far so flippant, but is it irreverent enough? A truly modern comedy on this subject, apart from being an hour shorter, would have made more of the island's temptations. To be puritanical in Ibiza would take some doing. Resisting would be funny. But by clinging on to Shakespeare's plot, Godber and Lane minimise the men's dilemma. The comic stakes are too low. Still, the audience delights in the old songs, dance routines and outrageous Cher costumes, not to mention the energetic silliness of it all. At Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot, until 22 March, then at Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough, 27 March-19 April.
