HINDSIGHT is a wonderful thing — but not as wonderful as foresight. As we pick over the details of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, Phase 2, we might bear in mind that foresight was not lacking. There were plenty of Cassandra-like warnings from many in the construction business about dodgy materials, complacent procurement, and outright dishonesty.

The BBC’s correspondent at the inquiry, Kate Lamble, has seen and heard it all. Grenfell: Building a disaster (Radio 4, weekdays of last week) distils the evidence, syphoning it off into 15-minute phials, which is about all one can take in one sitting, so outrageous and exasperating are the stories that emerge.

While never losing contact with the horrific events of 14 June 2017, the series spends much time with cladding and insulation, civil servants and contractors, and the individuals who could and should have made a difference to this story. The result, taken as a whole, is a listening experience in which bureaucratic politics appears more real than the resulting disaster, which is still unimaginable to spectators.

There are the peremptory emails and irritable brush-offs, sent in defiance of the first law of office politics: you do not send in an email anything that you would not announce through a loudhailer in a crowded street. More squirmy still is the behaviour of staff who, in deference to superiors, did not flag up problems with testing data, or were actively complicit in massaging such problems.

At the start of the series, Lamble declares this a story that “shows how Britain works, or perhaps doesn’t”, and asks us to reflect on the words of one of the Grenfell survivors: “The system wasn’t broken, it was built this way.” It is no great failing that the story presented here so expertly does not assume State of the Nation status, not because this is not one of the most atrocious examples of civic mismanagement in recent times, but because there are so many particularities to understand and process. Perhaps hindsight will help.

It would be unfair, none the less, for our descendants to look back at the Grenfell episode as demonstrating the inherent stupidity and wickedness of the present age. That, however, appears to be the default attitude taken by The Human Subject (BBC Sounds podcast, released Sundays), which promises to “investigate the threads connecting modern-day medicine to its often brutal origins”.

The stories told here by Dr Adam Rutherford and Dr Julia Shaw are of misguided doctors (generally white men) forcing their eccentric and dangerous procedures on patients (generally from minority and disenfranchised communities).

I was drawn to last week’s episode: “The Boy with an Ice Pick in his Brain”. This irresistible title turned out to be clickbait. The story was of Dr Walter Freeman, who pioneered the now discredited procedure known as lobotomy. It made one wonder which of our own medical interventions would, in decades to come, be regarded as similarly cruel and unethical.