Don’t Say A Word doesn’t say enough

Don’t Say A Word is a new podcast that explores today’s shifting societal norms and the grey areas of what we feel we are and are not allowed to say. (Of course, we can say whatever we want, within legal limits.) It’s a hot-button topic, already covered extensively in radio series such as Woke: The Journey of a Word, Free Speech and Strong Message Here. Not to mention umpteen standup routines, phone-in shows, newspaper columns and family gatherings involving a drunk uncle. I should also note that it’s the subject of several recent BBC internal investigations, including into the broadcast of this year’s Baftas, where Tourette’s activist John Davidson involuntarily shouted out a racial slur that was not edited out before airing.

But we’re not here to worry about affront! Nicky Campbell (top right) is our host and Don’t Say A Word is intent on being fun. Perhaps this is a good thing: a friendly approach helps those many people who are afraid to discuss such a topic for fear of causing offence. But it also means that nothing in this show goes very deep. The conversation stops when anything gets knotty or unpleasant.

In the first episode, we skip through the etiquette of asking black British people about their heritage, then skim across comedy. (Who’d have thought that some old TV shows contain bad words, and are also funny?). There’s rap lyrics and, separately, the words that might be offensive to people with epilepsy. Punctuating this wild mix are song snippets, in various styles with lyrics such as “it’s so absurd, one little word and the whole world goes crazy”. These songs, it turns out, are written by Campbell and performed by him and others in the manner of “funny” rugby club dinner skits. Still feeling light-hearted?

The show is strongest when the joviality is turned down. The journalist Inaya Folarin Iman is interesting when describing her reaction to people asking “but where are you really from?” But the comedy section was woeful: unenlightening waffle, including one comedian who claimed it’s great that Ricky Gervais and JK Rowling are well known and rich because it means they can say what they think.

The second episode is better: Stuart Maconie is nuanced and informed on dodgy lyrics in the Beatles’ Run For Your Life; likewise, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on Dickens’s antisemitism. The actor Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis, was astute on directors casting able-bodied performers in disabled roles. Campbell is a smooth and accomplished broadcaster. But there is no true desire to get into really difficult conversations.

Fraudacious is yet another true crime series about a scam – we can’t get enough of them! – that, oddly, seems to wrap up in the first episode. Ekaterina Barrett, a seemingly rich woman, borrows a vast amount from Bridget Hutchcroft, owner of a Knightsbridge clothes boutique (and by vast, I mean a sum so big that when it was revealed, I found myself swearing out loud.) At the end of the episode, Hutchcroft decides to take her to court to get her money back.

But Ekaterina will not go down easily, and Fraudacious has plenty of legal ins and outs to report. Ekaterina has bags of strange charisma: if listening to what I like to call schaden-fraud podcasts teaches you anything, it’s that you should never trust anyone who dazzles a room. Share their company, not your bank details.

In Novel Idea,Radio 1 weekday afternoon presenters Matt Edmondson and Mollie King have decided they’re going to write a book together. Each will draft alternate chapters, and take a week to write each one … OK? Sounds fun, but why make a podcast about this venture? They’ve enrolled the amiable Steffan Powell to help, who reads each chapter and gives some editorial steers, deciding they should write a murder mystery. (Is there anyone famous out there who isn’t writing a murder mystery?)

Edmondson’s first chapter sets up the main character Ian Chalk, named mainly in service of a joke about someone else called Brie Roquefort (chalk and cheese, do you see?). King’s chapter brings in women called Antonia Du Beck and Raffaela Ladal, and it’s all very jolly – though not as jolly as the amount of laughter indicates. As the book progresses, listeners can suggest what happens next, so the laughter-packed jollity will never end! Until, thankfully, the book does.

Photograph by BBC