IN ONE of those popular questionnaires aimed at assessing whether you are a psychopath, I should think you earn points for choosing to undergo major surgery without anaesthetic. Louis van Schoor, the so-called “apartheid killer”, boasted to the presenters of World of Secrets (BBC World Service podcast, all episodes now available) that he was fully awake when his legs were amputated. He was fascinated by the sound of the soldering iron, and the smell of meat burning.
If such flippancy seems inappropriate in a case that involved at least 19 murders, then I might redirect your censorious finger to the programme itself. It comes with all the schlocky clichés of the genre. The series opens with the excavation of a dead body. “Who is the man in the plastic bag?” our presenter asks, as if his audience had lost all power of ratiocination. And it is with such rhetorical thuds that the story is marked, its pacing constrained by an addiction to the regular dramatic fix.
The podcast is set on the South African coast, in the beach resort of East London. Van Schoor was a security guard who protected the properties under his care with a murderous enthusiasm, and during the 1980s was responsible for many disappearances. It is a uniquely grim story, which might have benefited from treatment that broke with convention. With the wealth of material that the producers had accumulated, there were any number of options here. But the characters in this drama rarely break out of pre-assigned roles, while the soundtrack is indistinguishable from Serial, the podcast series that is the fons et origo of the True Crime podcast genre. The result fails to disrupt our accustomed mode of listening enough to comprehend true crimes.
In his interview with Bill Gates for The Life Scientific (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week), the presenter Jim Al-Khalili appeared to be invoking another broadcasting archetype. Indeed, as this soft-soap encounter progressed, one expected Al-Khalili to invite the tech billionaire to introduce his first choice of music. We heard about Bill’s childhood, his first computing ventures, what he liked to do in his spare time.
The Life Scientific is a strand that engages leading scientists in discussion of their research and careers. It works best when it unpacks the challenges of deriving game-changing outcomes from clever ideas, and gives us laypeople a sense of the business of science. Presumably Mr Gates was approached because of the Gates Foundation, and its patronage of scientific research over the past two decades. And it would have been interesting to hear how a large cheque turns into the eradication of polio, and what effect a dollar sign has on the neural-processing speed of your average laboratory researcher.