This week in audio: a nightmare on the ocean floor, cold-war basketball and cheeky-chappy chat

Pipeline: Left to Die
Daily Mail

Amazing Sport Stories: Bill Walton’s The Grateful Team
BBC World Service

You About?
BBC Sounds

Hold on to your headphones: new podcast Pipeline: Left to Die is quite the listen. Its second episode is one of the tensest things I’ve ever heard; every terrifying detail all true, all lived, burning itself unforgettably into your brain.

Investigative journalist Isabelle Stanley reports on four divers – Kazim Ali Jr, Yusuf Henry, Fyzal Kurban, Rishi Nagassar – who died in February 2022 while fixing an underwater oil pipe off the coast of Trinidad. Just as they were finishing up their work, the men were sucked with enormous force into the pipe they were mending and dragged hundreds of feet inside it under the sea. If I tell you they were stuck in that pipe for hours, trapped but alive; that the pipe was less than a metre wide; that they could have been rescued but weren’t… none of this comes close to conveying the intensity of what you hear. There’s a GoPro recording and, unbelievably, a survivor – a fifth man who managed to escape and who gives us every devastating detail. His name is Christopher Boodram.

He describes how he was smashed along the pipe like a ball; how he found all four of his compadres alive and how they tried to inch themselves out. Sound effects add to the horror, and his voice trembles as he talks. “To me, that was hell,” he says. “You read the Bible… and it says [hell is], you’re in fire. And my body was burning all over, I’m in pain all over. Pitch black…” It’s a nightmare that seems even darker after the gentleness of the opening episode, where Stanley meets the families of those who died. “Not a problem in the world,” says Kurban’s wife, Celisha, “in 38 years of marriage.”

Paria, the firm the men were working for, is part of Trinidad’s state-owned oil company, and immediately after the accident armed guards were allegedly placed at the entrance to the pipeline to prevent a rescue mission. Nobody thus far has been held responsible for the men’s deaths. None of the families have received a penny in compensation.

Later on we meet Kamla Persad-Bissessar, who has recently become prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. She has promised to bring about justice and she surely must. Days later, I’m still thinking about those poor men and their terrible, preventable deaths. This meticulously made podcast is an unmissable electric shock of a show.

Anything that follows Pipeline needs to be jolly, so here’s a World Service series to cheer us up. Hosted by US basketball player and presenter Bill Walton, who died just after finishing his voiceover (he was 71), Bill Walton’s The Grateful Team is an Amazing Sport Stories three-parter that combines basketball, the cold war and the Grateful Dead.

We meet Šarūnas Marčiulionis, a Lithuanian basketball player who in 1989 leaves his country for the US to play for the Golden State Warriors. This wasn’t easy, as Lithuania was still part of the Soviet Union and Marčiulionis had played for the Soviet team. Soon after, Lithuania breaks free from the Soviet Union and Marčiulionis plays for the Lithuanian national basketball team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Actually, he almost single-handedly creates his country’s team, sourcing kit and negotiating sponsorship deals, including – you guessed it – from the Grateful Dead. “They were the underdogs, and we love underdogs,” says Dennis McNally, the Grateful Dead’s PR. Then Lithuania have to play the Unified Team, made up of former Soviet republics…

This is a sweet story, made sweeter by Walton’s positive presenting style. At certain moments it might have been nice to get more variety in his delivery – everything is a little “Gee whizz” – but The Grateful Team will keep your cockles toasty and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Roman Kemp, who quit his Capital Breakfast show last year, is back with a new podcast, You About?, hosting alongside cheeky chappy pop sensation Tom Grennan. Like a younger lads’ version of Lily Allen and Miquita Oliver’s Miss Me? – one presenter, one pop star, both pals – this show, like all two-handers, relies on Kemp and Grennan’s on-air chemistry. And it’s strong: they really are friends, of seven years (not as long as Allen and Oliver, who’ve known each other all their lives). They’re close but not so tight that they don’t each have something different to bring to the show.

There are some funny anecdotes – one, about Grennan driving his posh car into a too-low underground car park is ridiculous – but there are also strands of conversation that aren’t followed up (what happened after the car disaster, for instance, and what Grennan had to do to make things right). We hear the pair became close at various parties, but those parties aren’t described.

Still, Grennan’s tales are great: he tells one, about getting into another famous person’s car, that really made me laugh. Kemp, also funny, is more philosophical, wiser about celebrity, as he comes from famous parents (Spandau Ballet’s Martin Kemp and Shirlie of Pepsi & Shirlie). “Up until I was about 13,” he says, “if we’d go on holiday, we were never allowed to go on the beach, because you’d see a boat… quite far out, stop, and there’d be a long lens camera.”

Perhaps it would be better if Kemp steered a little more, and I’m never convinced that celebrity social lives are interesting enough to fill a weekly podcast, but this was a fun way to spend half an hour. Clearly, BBC Sounds is banking on You About? becoming an arena-filling success, and on this showing, you wouldn’t bet against it.

Photograph courtesy of BBC