Intrigue: To Catch a King is investigative journalism at its most thrilling

The investigative journalists Sue Mitchell and Rob Lawrie are a strange but effective team. Mitchell, an independent audio journalist, has made some brilliant series over the past few years: Million Dollar Lover (about a rich elderly woman and her unexpected boyfriend); Girl Taken (a do-gooder smuggles an Afghan refugee into the UK); and The Grave Robbers (criminal gangs trick people out of their housing inheritance). In each, she starts with a situation that feels wrong, then takes us through her investigation to uncover a scam that goes under the authorities’ radar. Her democratic, dogged approach pays dividends.

Lawrie is different. A bombastic, idealistic aid worker and former soldier, he was the subject of Mitchell’s 2020 series Girl Taken, when he was volunteering in a Calais refugee camp and decided to help a four-year-old Afghan girl reach her relatives in Leeds by smuggling her through customs in his van. (He was caught and got a suspended sentence.) He and Mitchell are now friends, and they combined their talents to make 2024’s excellent series To Catch a Scorpion, in which they tracked down Barzan Majeed, a human trafficker known as Scorpion. Their work eventually resulted in his arrest. 

Intrigue: To Catch a King is their latest series, and it’s doing something similar. Over the past few months, people smuggling across the Channel has become even more lucrative and sophisticated, and a network called the Ranya Boys has brought thousands of people to the UK illegally. The police have a lot of the details about the Ranya Boys and have found their leader, nicknamed Kardo Ranya, who’s making shocking amounts of money from charging migrants for a place on a boat or in a lorry. They can’t find him in real life, however, because he uses so many aliases. So the police ask Mitchell and Lawrie to help.

Armed with the name Kardo Ranya and not much more, Mitchell and Lawrie do their thing, beginning in a refugee camp in search of a particular young man who disappeared while trying to get across the Channel. We hear them asking questions of other refugees. Lawrie, who has the contacts, barrels in like a happy labrador, charming people with his direct friendliness; Mitchell is equally fearless but more specific about details. They are both amazing at their job. 

Within two episodes, they’ve discovered what happened to the young man; found a Middlesbrough restaurant linked to the smugglers; located a Parisian hotel where refugees can acquire illegal passports; been informed that the people smugglers are also transporting guns; and have spotted a man apparently moving ammunition across France on public trains. It’s a gripping, well-paced tale but, because of the presenters’ personalities and Mitchell’s production skills, it never seems anything but human. No tense music, no dramatic scripting, nothing that isn’t rooted in reality: To Catch a King is utterly thrilling.

Perhaps you like your thrills delivered in a different way? On a faraway pitch, with a ball and 22 young men chasing it around? In which case, I recommend The History Podcast: Sixty Years of Hurt, a series about English football, the World Cup and national identity, hosted by the comedian and Three Lions lyricist David Baddiel. Even if you don’t like the game, you may well enjoy this series, which is packed full of clever, funny people being clever and funny about this most trivial and most important national pursuit. 

Baddiel’s script is a delight because his thinking is a delight: he nails the English inclinations to muddle through and knuckle down, to expect to triumph and also to lose, to feel as though we brought the ball so we’re entitled to the trophy, but also, if Scotland wins, that’s our win too, all at the same time. The second episode, about managers and mavericks, is particularly great (he talks to Rodney Marsh!). 

Other interviewees include many well-informed football journalists, fans and famous types, among them the Welsh comedian Elis James, who points out that “discomfort with being English is often a very [English] middle-class thing”, and Jean Williams, a football historian, who’s brilliantly articulate and informed. “Very deep in the British psyche … there is a love of fun, a love of excess and playfulness, and – to put it frankly – arsing about,” she says. Who would dare disagree?

Photograph by BBC