Articles of Interest is a consistently great podcast about what we wear. Hosted by the wry and clever Avery Trufelman, and part of the Radiotopia podcasting network (a badge of quality), the series has been running since 2018, and has never been anything less than fascinating. In each episode, Trufelman takes a deep dive into an aspect of clothing – how it’s made, why we wear it, what it all means – and every one is revelatory. The first few instalments considered kids’ clothes, pockets and punk. A later one was called The Corduroy Appreciation Club. It’s ace.
Trufelman occasionally does a special series – check out her seven-parter on American Ivy League style – and at the moment, she’s presenting one called Gear, which considers how American menswear, especially the faux-outdoorsy boots/gilet/let’s-go-yomping-in-a-small-beanie look, has been affected by military clothing. Duh, you may think, of course! But Trufelman goes further. We start with 19th-century city boys visiting nature in their special buckskin suits – suede co-ords with swishy fringing, rip-offs of the clothes worn by indigenous people. These part-time outdoorsmen would try and shoot wild animals, while sporting dinky little two-pieces made from actual animal hide.
Trufelman is funny. “Oh wait, you’re really not fucking around!” she says, when she visits Buck Mason, a vintage-inspired clothing company, and walks into a conference room “dripping in old clothes … piles on the table, dangling from racks, hanging from the walls”. Buck Mason’s designers copy tiny details from this collection of army surplus gear; “grafting a little character on to a new piece of clothing”, as Trufelman has it.
Every episode is a delight. I found myself fascinated by the awfulness of a quartermaster, General Robert Littlejohn, who was responsible for the clothes worn by the US army in the second world war. He refused to order suitable jackets for his men, because he thought they weren’t smart enough. He rejected the specially developed M63, the classic green four-pocketed army jacket that we all wear a version of today. Instead, he made his troops wear short wool jackets, of his own design, utterly unsuitable for European winters. When the soldiers wrote to their families complaining that their toes were literally falling off because of the cold and wet, the scandal was dubbed “the cold weather crisis” by the press. The US army had to quickly order the M63s, months too late for many, and Littlejohn’s failure was hushed up by General Eisenhower.
BBC Radio 5 Live has long been in love with wrong ’uns. And now, in its latest series, Gangster Presents… Sex Drugs & Cell Block Parties, the network has found the human equivalent of itself. Meet Amy, who was working as a therapist in HMP Lindholme in north Yorkshire when she found herself falling for one of the inmates, Joe, a “cheeky chappy” from Bradford, who ends up being a little trickier than that sounds. We meet Joe’s parents, who are sweet, if resigned. “I said to him many times, you’re not any good at being a criminal so why don’t you pack it in?” says his dad. “There weren’t many things that Joe got up to that he never got caught for.” By the time Joe was 30, he had 29 criminal convictions for 50 offences. Also, a wife and four kids.
It’s hard to tell who is the more vulnerable in this relationship. Is it Amy, who’s recovering from an emotionally abusive ex, or Joe, a drug addict with mental health issues who attempts suicide while in prison? They’re both lost, though Joe is the cannier of the two. Once they fall in love, he gets his hands on a mobile phone and he and Amy chat in the evenings, when he’s in his cell and she’s home from work. They talk about their future. “He made a few hints about fetching stuff in [to prison], saying we’d make some money before he gets out, for our future,” says Amy. Her innocence is heartbreaking and infuriating.
Host Amber Haque is an engaging presenter, taking us through the story bit by bit. As with all these shows, there’s a withholding of information until necessary, which means that the pacing is a little slow. Still, it’s quite the yarn. Amy and Joe’s romance does not end well. But that won’t stop 5 Live, like Amy, falling for another bad guy in the future.
There were a couple of nice offerings on Radio 4 last week. First, a re-edit of the writer Katherine Rundell’s delightful A Carnival of Animals, broadcast just a month ago in five-minute instalments. Now made into 15-minute episodes, each featuring four animals, they are a cheering listen on grim days.
The charismatic Giles Martin has somehow made a short doc, Okay Computer?, about music and AI that doesn’t make me feel depressed. Giles’s father was Beatles producer George Martin, and he finishes his programme with this. “What made the Beatles so great? Was it my dad? Was it Abbey Road? Was it John Lennon or Paul McCartney, was it George Harrison, was it Ringo’s drumming? And the answer is, it was this strange combination of characters and individuals, and complete randomness. The fact that Paul and John met, the fact they fired Pete Best, that George was at school with Paul, the fact that every single record label turned them down so they got this weird posh producer to come and work with them … There’s no sense in it. There’s no sense in any of it.” Thank goodness for that.
Photograph by Tif Ng