#BBC radio 4

[invisibleicewands]

Please come and see me because I’ll be dead soon’: how Michael Sheen got sucked into a forever chemicals exposé

An opera-loving member of high society turned eco-activist who was forced into police protection with a panic button round his neck. A Hollywood actor who recorded said activist’s life story as he was dying from exposure to the very chemicals he was investigating. Throw in two investigative journalists who realise not everything is as it seems, then uncover some startling truths, and you have “podcasting’s strangest team” on Buried: The Last Witness.

On their award-winning 2023 podcast Buried, the husband and wife duo Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor dug into illegal toxic waste dumping in the UK and its links to organised crime. This time, they focus on “forever chemicals”, specifically polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and set out to discover whether one whistleblower may have been decades ahead of his time in reporting on their harmful impact.

“It’s amazing how big the scale of this story is,” says Ashby, as we sit backstage at the Crucible theatre, where they are doing a live discussion as part of Sheffield DocFest. “With this series, we don’t just want it to make your blood turn cold, we want it to make you question your own blood itself.”

It all started when Taylor and Ashby were sent a lead about the work of former farmer’s representative Douglas Gowan. In 1967, he discovered a deformed calf in a field and began to investigate strange goings on with animals close to the Brofiscin and Maendy quarries in south Wales. He linked them to the dumping of waste by companies including the nearby Monsanto chemical plant, which was producing PCBs.

PCBs were used in products such as paint and paper to act as a fire retardant, but they were discovered to be harmful and have been banned since 1981 in the UK. However, due to their inability to break down – hence the term forever chemical – Gowan predicted their legacy would be a troubling one. “I expect there to be a raft of chronic illness,” he said. He even claimed that his own exposure to PCBs (a result of years of testing polluted grounds) led his pancreas and immune system to stop working. “I’m a mess and I think it can all be attributed to PCBs,” he said.

However, Gowan wasn’t a typical environmentalist. “A blue-blood high-society Tory and a trained lawyer who could out-Mozart anyone,” is how Taylor describes him in the series. He would even borrow helicopters from friends in high places to travel to investigate farmers’ fields. Gowan died in 2018 but the pair managed to get hold of his life’s work – confidential reports, testing and years of evidence. “I’m interested in environmental heroes that aren’t cliche,” says Ashby. “So I was fascinated by him. But then we started to see his flaws and really had to weigh them up. My goodness it’s a murky world we went into.”

The reason they were able to delve even deeper into this murky world is because of the award-winning actor Michael Sheen who, in 2017, came across Gowan’s work in a story he read. He was so blown away by it, and the lack of broader coverage, that he tracked him down. “I got a message back from him saying: ‘Please come and see me because I’ll be dead soon,’” says Sheen. “I took a camera with me and spent a couple of days with him and just heard this extraordinary story.”

What Gowan had been trying to prove for years gained some traction in 2007, with pieces in the Ecologist and a Guardian article exploring how “Monsanto helped to create one of the most contaminated sites in Britain”. One was described as smelling “of sick when it rains and the small brook that flows from it gushes a vivid orange.” But then momentum stalled.

Years later, in 2023, Ashby and Taylor stumbled on a recording of Sheen giving the 2017 Raymond Williams memorial lecture, which referenced Gowan and his work. Before they knew it, they were in the actor’s kitchen drinking tea and learning he had conducted a life-spanning seven-hour interview with Gowan before his death. So they joined forces. Sheen isn’t just a token celebrity name added for clout on this podcast; he is invested. For him, it’s personal as well as political. “Once you dig into it, you realise there’s a pattern,” he says. “All the places where this seems to have happened are poor working-class areas. There’s a sense that areas like the one I come from are being exploited.”

Sheen even goes to visit some contaminated sites in the series, coming away from one feeling sick. “That made it very real,” he says. “To be looking into a field and going: ‘Well, I’m pretty sure that’s toxic waste.’” Sheen was living a double life of sorts. “I went to rehearsals for a play on Monday and people were like, ‘What did you do this weekend?’” he says. “‘Oh, I went to the most contaminated area in the UK and I think I may be poisoned.’ People thought I was joking.” Sheen ended up being OK, but did have some temporary headaches and nausea, which was a worry. “We literally had to work out if we had poisoned Michael Sheen,” says Ashby, who also ponders in the series: “Have I just killed a national treasure?”

The story gets even knottier. Gowan’s findings turn out to be accurate and prescient, but the narrative around his journey gets muddy. As a character with a flair for drama, he turned his investigation into a juicy, riveting story filled with action, which could not always be corroborated. “If he hadn’t done that, and if he’d been a nerdy, analytical, detail-oriented person who just presented the scientific reports and kept them neatly filed, would we have made this podcast?” asks Taylor, which is a fascinating question that runs through this excellent and gripping series.

Ashby feels that Gowan understood how vital storytelling is when it comes to cutting through the noise. “We have so much science proving the scale of these problems we face and yet we don’t seem to have the stories,” he says. “I think Douglas got that. Fundamentally, he understood that stories motivate human beings to act. But then he went too far.”

However, this is not purely about Gowan’s story – it’s about evidence. The Last Witness doubles up as a groundbreaking investigation into the long-lasting impact of PCBs. “We threw the kitchen sink at this,” says Ashby. “The breakthrough for us is that the Royal Society of Chemistry came on board and funded incredibly expensive testing. So we have this commitment to go after the truth in a way that is hardly ever done.”

From shop-bought fish so toxic that it breaches official health advice to off-the-scale levels of banned chemicals found in British soil, the results are staggering. “The scientist almost fell off his chair,” says Ashby. “That reading is the highest he has ever recorded in soil – in the world. That was the moment we knew Douglas was right and we are now realising the scale of this problem. The public doesn’t realise that even a chemical that has been banned for 40 years is still really present in our environment.”

To go even deeper into just how far PCBs have got into our environment and food chain, Ashby and Taylor had their own blood tested. When Taylor found 80 different types of toxic PCB chemicals in her blood it was a sobering moment. “I was genuinely emotional because it’s so personal,” she says. “It was the thought of this thing being in me that was banned before I was even born and the thought of passing that on to my children.” Ashby adds: “We’ve managed physical risk in our life as journalists in Tanzania and with organised crime, but more scary than a gangster is this invisible threat to our health.”

In order to gauge the magnitude of what overexposure to PCBs can do, they headed to Anniston, Alabama, once home to a Monsanto factory. “As a journalist, you have an inbuilt scepticism and think it can’t be that bad,” says Ashby. “But when I got there I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I hate to use words like dystopian, but it was. There is a whole massive school that can’t be used. There’s illnesses in children and cancers. It truly was the most powerful vignette of the worst-case example of these chemicals.”

It’s bleak stuff but instilling fear and panic is not the intention. “Obviously, we’re really concerned about it,” says Ashby. “And although the environmental crises we face do feel overwhelming, it is incredible how a movement has formed and how individuals are taking action in communities. The lesson to take from Douglas is that the response doesn’t have to be resignation. It can be agency.”

[hotdaemondtargaryen]

“I think the neighbors heard her scream. It reverberated through the foundations of the house.”

EWAN MITCHELL TALKING ABOUT WATCHING EP3 'THE BURNING MILL' WITH HIS MOTHER BUT NOT WARNING HER IT HAD A NUDE SCENE IN IT.

[hldailyupdate]

“It was a little— well we brought a TV in, very Glasto in some stones and a little stand. It was a little bit touch and go at time ‘cos the signal kept going in and out, but yeah, luckily we got the win. We pulled it off. Made up, made up.”

-Louis chatting with BBC News interviewer about how he brought a TV to Glastonbury in order to watch England’s game. (30 June 2024)

via BBC Radio 4

[ewanmitchellclub]

[procrastiel]

So good!

[richardarmitagefanpage]

New interview with Richard for BBC Radio 4 during the Bloody Scotland in Stirling, Scotland. (September 13, 2024)

[thekenobee]

Cabin Pressure + Poirot (Part 4 of many)

[a-man-for-hire-and-his-archives]

Andrew Wincott as Adam Macy in BBC Radio 4 "The Archers"

Source: BBC Radio 4, Radio Times, The Telegraph and the cherry one from adarlingmess on twitter (thank you!)

[familyparadox]

Yep that’s right these two organisations are the two most prolific creators of Audio Drama. Together they have made Doctor Who the radio drama based on licensed media to have the most audio dramas in the world (I think it may be the franchise with the second most audio dramas a afetr the Archers.

[totallyhussein-blog]

Winnie the Pooh is inspiring Manchester’s kids to read

It's great news from Wood Street Mission and the Books Forever Appeal! Over 8,000 children's books have been donated so far and amongst them are the stories of Winnipeg the Bear -aka the real life Winnie The Pooh- and the Canadian veterinarian Harry D. Colebourn.

I'm positive that books like these will inspire Manchester's young people to read and with more WSM Book Roadshows planned in our city's schools, Wood Street Mission are still in need of brand new or good condition pre-loved books for children and young people.

In 2022, WSM distributed over 20,500 books to disadvantaged young people across Manchester and thanks to support from the public, it's brilliant that each child gets to take home 5 books to keep. Through such acts of kindness, you are helping to overcome barriers that children in low-income families face.

But did you know that donating to Wood Street Mission’s 'Books Forever Appeal’ couldn’t be easier? You can drop off a book in person or have it delivered direct to the Wood Street Mission, 26 Wood Street, Manchester, M3 3EF, The UK.

Wood Street Mission is located next to the John Rylands Library on Deansgate. You can also visit woodstreetmission.org.uk for more information or to make a secure online donation.

[pers-books]

For fans of Julian Simpson, here's the latest news on the Pleasant Green Universe (PGU).

Pleasant Green

Hollywood being in the doldrums right now, I have decided to make Pleasant Green my life for at least the next few months. I'm very happy with that decision, because there is a LOT I want to do in this universe and I am finally carving out the time to get some of it done. In the past I have been a little coy about plans because, well, the nature of this business is that everyone is a little secretive about projects but NO MORE. I am showing my work now!

First up, there's going to be a movie of BAD MEMORIES. This has been in the works for a while (truth be told, it's still in the works because these things take AGES to come together) but I can tell you that the script is written (and re-written, and re-written) and the action has moved to the US. This is partly for commercial reasons and partly because it lets me set the story in Arkham-country, which is really exciting to me. The story is an adaptation of the original radio play, not a straight translation, but the whole thing is going to be creepy as hell. We have actors attached to play Rachel and Jim, but that's the one thing I do have to be coy about for contractual reasons. I can tell you that I LOVE these two actors and they are going to be incredible.

Then there are THREE (count 'em!) movies coming up behind that (quite a bit behind because I'm only writing them now). THE SHADOW WORLD is a supernatural espionage story that is going to be crazy-dark. It tells the story of Marcus Byron and Victoria Ness, who both featured in The Haunter of the Dark, and explores the weird liminal space that we call "The Breach". Behind that are two interlinking movies, one big, one smaller, that are going to be set in Paris and revolve around the activities of the Levesque Institute. I'm super-excited about all three of these, but it's going to be a long old journey from here to when we start selling tickets.

On the TV side, there is a show tentatively titled WENTWORTH, which I'm incubating right now. It's set on the Suffolk coast (of course it is) and it's going to be intersecting with the Pleasant Green Universe from a different angle, as a London cop (it's British TV, the main character has to be a cop, that's the law) heads back to her home village to investigate the death of a schoolteacher, which leads her down a trail into her own, very dark, family history. I want to do this show on a new model; 30 minute episodes, low-budget (like an indie movie) and financed independently so we get the freedom to make it right. I imagine that's going to take a while to come together, but it'll be worth it if we can make it work, and I want to sprinkle a few familiar characters into it too.

More immediately, the latest installment of the Saltmarsh storyline will be going up on the Pleasant Green site, for paid subscribers, in the next few days. This story is getting weirder and scarier from here on in.

We have to sit down and figure out the crowdfunding stuff over the next month or so, but the plan right now involves two audio series and I'm not sure what order we're going to fund them in. Obviously one is the fifth season of The Lovecraft Investigations. That's expensive, relatively speaking, because I want to do a full series of 30 minute episodes and really dive back into the world properly. You all have an idea of what story I'm adapting for this, but you have NO IDEA where we're going to take this one...

The other audio series is more modest, but I think it's going to be really good. Throughout the Lovecraft Investigations, we have continually made reference to the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley, and it occurred to me that there is more than enough material there to create a non-fiction audio series detailing Crowley's life and very weird exploits; birth to death, soup to nuts, the whole thing. We'd make it entirely factual BUT we would present that information within our own framework ie. Kennedy and Heawood would host the show, with the occasional guest interviewee (a certain professor of folklore, for instance) for added colour. I'm really excited about this idea, as a kind of Lovecraft Investigations 4.5, but the format lends itself to a whole strand of occult non-fiction ideas as well.

Knocking around on the periphery of all this is THE VERY RUINE OF THE WHOLE LAND, which is a feature-length audio piece telling the origin story of a character called Karen Whybrew, who no one but me has met yet (readers of the Saltmarsh storyline will be encountering her very soon). The idea here is to do something absolutely spectacular with sound, like a weird, spooky art movie on headphones - something that will really push the boundaries of the medium.

Meanwhile, I'm working to set up the premium "Department of Works" membership tier on the Pleasant Green site (Ghost does not make it easy to do this stuff in the background without publishing everything, but I'm getting there). I had wanted to offer high-quality audio downloads of the shows to that membership level, but we have a boring issue with distribution rights at the moment, so that may take a while. In the meantime, I am delving through behind-the-scenes photos and notebooks etc to put together a really good package for The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. When I've got that together, I'll launch the tier and then start assembling and posting material for the other seasons, one by one. I'm also going to include downloadable PDFs of all the series scripts. We're also talking about putting a few bits and pieces of merch together.

The future of the Pleasant Green site is looking pretty good at the moment. The Saltmarsh storyline is leading into some other fiction ideas, and a recent trip to Amsterdam yielded an interesting notion about an organisation known only as The Cabal, which Parker is investigating and which intersects with the aforementioned Karen Whybrew storyline.

AND ANOTHER THING, which I may have alluded to before; dust off your D20s because I'm going to be working with Pelgrane Press to create a Pleasant Green supplement for their stupendous Trail of Cthulhu game system. That's in the early stages (because I have been slow getting off my ass and providing material) but it is now happening just as fast as we can manage it.

Like I say; full immersion in the Pleasant Green Universe for the next few months. I can't wait.

As we move forward on all these fronts, there will be plenty of opportunity to help out and get involved. Cartoon Gravity will be the place to learn about it all first, so if you know people who like the world, make sure they know to sign up here (it's free). Our best chance of getting a head of steam is to bump up the subscription numbers on this site, so we can launch membership and crowd-funding initiatives in a big way. The more people you can hook in now, the more we can get done.

Oh, I almost forgot - ALDRICH KEMP AND THE ROSE OF PAMIR starts on Radio 4/BBC Sounds on Friday 22nd November. This is our best series so far. I'll post the trailer just as soon as it's available.

[hotdaemondtargaryen]

video of ewan mitchell talking about watching aemond's nude scene with his mother on the bbc radio 4 podcast.

[tchtra]

WHEATLEY IS ON THE RADIO

it's Stephen merchant, his voice actor, but still

Only because of an actors passing but still

He sounds exactly like Wheatley, so so so British

[ewanmitchellclub]

[nonesuchrecords]

"Since I was a kid, I was in love with the sky, the beauty of it, the freedom of it, like I could just float up forever," Laurie Anderson tells BBC Radio 4's Front Row presenter Tom Sutcliffe in a conversation about her upcoming album, Amelia, due August 30 on Nonesuch. "I remember as a kid doing that, running into the dark … the ecstasy. Your arms are out like a plane, and you close your eyes and you run." You can hear their conversation here.