The Retrievals is disturbing but essential listening

The Retrievals, Season 2 takes the central injustice of the first season – women were not listened to when they said they were in pain – and discovers it somewhere else: childbirth. Reporter Susan Burton – careful, calm – tells the tale as if we were watching a medical drama, describing the camera moving in and out, and introducing the characters, who work at a Chicago hospital.

Her audio camera seeks out women who work as birth nurses, one of whom, Clara, is pregnant. Burton describes her at work – “we see her emerging from the locker room in grey scrubs” – and then giving birth to twins via caesarean section in the same hospital. Clara is induced and begins a vaginal birth, but ends up having an epidural before an emergency caesarean section.

This is not an unusual occurrence – I had the same. I had an epidural and an urgent C-section for both my children, though the second was not induced. This is an operation that many women go through to give birth to a baby without it being hurt – and without them being hurt too.

Though, obviously, your abdomen is cut open, your muscles sliced, your organs pushed to the side, your uterus cut into, the baby taken out, your placenta removed and then everything all stitched up again.

Oh, and sometimes your uterus is taken out of your body (still attached), wiped and checked before your abdomen is rinsed out, and the uterus sewn up and popped back in. Quite a procedure – but, hey, you get a baby at the end of it! (Babies, or the potential of having them, always seem to trump women’s experience. Your body is less important than the infant’s.)

My pain relief worked. Clara’s did not. During the birth, she screamed and puked, and the anaesthetist tried to alleviate what was going on with ketamine, which made Clara hallucinate. Burton, with Clara and the other nurses who were there, tells the tale without dramatics, but with drama. After all, birth, even when it’s straightforward, is full of drama. A medical birth where the woman feels everything is a horror story.

“Cutting someone’s body open and then operating when they can feel it – that is not supposed to happen,” says Burton towards the end of the episode. “That’s from history or from war.” Then she drops the bombshell. “But in the US, it happens 100,000 times a year.” Yes, 100,000 times a year!

She knows this because someone has done a study. It is the first one ever undertaken into pain during C-sections in the US and Canada, despite the fact they are the most frequently performed major surgery in the world: about 1.2m of them are performed every year in the US.

The next few episodes will focus on solutions to this appallingly common problem. The Retrievals is, again, essential listening.

Here’s another excellent repeat performer. The redoubtable investigative reporter Sue Mitchell has made some of the best audio series of the past five years. She’s covered people-smuggling across the Channel in Girl Taken and To Catch a Scorpion; scammers of elderly people in Million Dollar Lover and The Willpower Detectives.

And in Shadow World: The Grave Robbers, she’s unearthed another scam. Again, it’s to do with elderly people, but this time round, the person in question – Christine, the aunt of two sisters – has died, supposedly leaving her home to a “friend” who nobody seems to know. Seemingly, Christine signed over her house to this friend, even though at the time the will was dated, her husband was still alive and was her main carer.

The will is clearly faked: the signature isn’t Christine’s and neither are the signatures of the supposed witnesses, neither of whom Christine knew. Yet it was accepted by the probate service. Mitchell tracks down the son of one of these witnesses, who confirms that the signature on the will is not his mum’s. (How did the scammer find the signature to imitate? Unbelievably, from the internet.)

But when Mitchell and others take their evidence of this crime to the probate service, nothing happens. Still, I have faith in Mitchell and her calm, honest reporting.

A new offering from Global, The Crime Agents, sounds more exciting than it is. Its first episode brought a journalistic coup – the unsettling revelation that 540 people convicted of terrorism offences are now out of jail and living in the UK. Our hosts are the investigative journalist Andy Hughes and the former Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Neil Basu, both likable.

Basu clearly has a lot of insights, given his past job. But The Crime Agents lacks a sense of jeopardy: this is the difficulty of reporting on issues that have been going on for a while. No doubt the show will feel more vital when it addresses a newsworthy crime that’s taking place now. And, yes, I know that’s an odd thing to write.

Photograph by Getty