Mistresses is a romp through the history of ‘the other woman’

The show follows a now-familiar format: the story is told by one presenter, while the other one interjects with jokes or the kind of questions that any listener might have. Lister is the teller here, Jamil the interjector, though both are quick-witted enough to take on either role. There are also contributions from TikTok historian Katie Kennedy, who proves hilariously to the point: “Louis was always destined to be really, really up himself,” she says of Louis XIV, the privileged Sun King of France of the late 1600s. “He’s all about the opulence.”

Louis makes his appearance because our first mistress is his: Madame de Montespan. Her full name is Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, but Lister and Jamil refer to her as Françoise. We find out some excellent facts about her, including how much she indulged her taste for life’s finer things when she became the king’s mistress. This involved having her very own chateau built on the palace grounds, with a fully stocked farm, which, according to a visitor’s diary, was “stocked with the most passionate turtle doves… the fattest sows, the fullest cows, the frizziest sheep and the goosiest possible geese” (love that). “She’s Samantha in every way!” crows Jamil (she means Sex in the City’s Samantha). Beautifully edited and produced, Mistresses has more in common with British Scandal than The Rest Is History (a compliment): you learn things while laughing at how the story is delivered.

Gaps in the Dial is a six-part series about pirate radio made by Tayo Popoola for the Barbican, which is hosting several exhibitions about sound at the moment. Popoola is an audio ace: great producer, excellent interviewer and good host all rolled into one. Pirate radio is a topic that, for oldies like me, feels quite well covered already, but Popoola manages to tell new tales and avoid cliches. Though, be warned: anyone not completely au fait with underground 1980s dance music might get name-dazed by the number of musicians and DJs mentioned, some without context. There’s also not that much music in these shows (you’ll have to go to the exhibition for that).

In episode one, I enjoyed learning about Invicta, a very early station I knew nothing about, which launched the careers of a teenage Gilles Peterson and, soon after, jazz man and podcast supremo Jez Nelson. I liked Peterson’s story of being inspired to set up his own mini-transmitter with his dad and playing out a pre-made tape on it. An episode on Kiss FM explores the consequences of the station finally acquiring a legal licence. It was everything they had worked towards, but many of the DJs found they didn’t like it when Kiss turned legit.

Last Saturday, Archive on Four turned to football chants, with academic Les Back, a Millwall fan who now lives in Glasgow. Back canters through “the unruly energy” of this very specific canon, one that folk musician Martin Carthy insists is “the one surviving embodiment of an organic living folk [music] tradition”. There are some revealing moments. The Northern Irish Manchester United goalie Harry Gregg survived the Munich air crash that killed eight of his teammates, and was hailed as a hero for helping save some of his fellow passengers. He tells of how, just a few weeks later, on the pitch, “it was back to normal: you Irish bum, get back to Ireland”; and Back points out that, ever since, Munich has become a way to taunt United in football chants.

More cheerfully, we meet Ceylon Andi Hickman, a player for Dulwich Hamlet Women, who explains the fans’ chant “Hills”. It’s based on the Beastie Boys’ Girls, and gets singers to name south London hills and finish on “we’ve got Champion Hill”, where the team is based. When, last year, Dulwich Hamlet Women won the league, all the players got “Hills” tattoos.

Amol Rajan has (yet another) new job, this time hosting his own podcast, the slightly cringily named Radical with Amol Rajan. It’s on the same feed as the now-defunct Today podcast, which he hosted with Nick Robinson. That is no more: Robinson is concentrating on his Political Thinking podcast, and Rajan will be doing this show, which apparently will “go inside the zeitgeist” as “a podcast about tomorrow from Today” (geddit). I’m not quite sure what that means, but his first episode features the feminist campaigner Laura Bates, who talks about her new book on AI and misogyny.

For someone who professes to be very well informed about AI, Rajan seems strangely unaware of risks it poses to women. He didn’t know there are apps that allow you to feed in a screenshot of a woman (or girl) and it will produce a highly realistic AI image of her nude. I did: but then, although I’m not an AI expert, I am a woman. Much of what Bates does is educate perfectly nice men like Rajan as to what is actually going on.

“Thank you so much, Laura, for coming in and for your radical thoughts,” Rajan says at the end: a weird way to label Bates’s diligent research. Her point is that online apps and social media are normalising extreme sexism. That isn’t radical, it’s the truth.

Mistresses Audible Originals

Rebel Radio: Gaps in the Dial Barbican

Archive on Four: Here We Go! The Art of the Football Chant BBC Radio 4

Radical with Amol Rajan BBC Radio 4

Photograph by Audible