STATUS is “the craving that dare not speak its name”. Yet it speaks volumes for the status of the author Carl Honoré that he gets his name in the title of his radio series Status by Carl Honoré (Radio 4, weekdays of last week). If he gets lucky, he could reach the level of a Michael Portillo and achieve above-the-title billing. Carl Honoré’s Status reads so much better, don’t you think?
It is the presenter’s contention that we hate to talk about status, since it is so much more complex than just money, education, or whether you get to do TED talks. Anyone who has tried to read Bourdieu will tell you as much. One can at least learn from Honoré something of the art of status-building on Facebook. The “humble brag” — such as expressing ennui at the length of the check-in queue at some exotically far-flung airport — is an excellent tip. Yet Honoré ends up making his own simplifications, equating status with such conditions as good standing. Whether you like him or not, you cannot claim that Donald Trump does not possess status.
The Olympic opening ceremony provided the question for last week’s Moral Maze (Radio 4, Wednesday of last week): “Is anything sacred?” And those hoping for a good old ding-dong were not disappointed, although it took until the latter stages of the programme for polemical energies to be fully released, by which time we had moved from the progressive pantomime of The Last Supper (News, 2 August) to the theology of the incarnation.
Just as the retro-engineered explanation of the offending tableau — as an evocation of a Graeco-Roman image – has failed to convince, so the philosophical abstraction on display here failed to cloak the problem that is on so many people’s minds. Namely, do these same arguments hold true for other religious traditions and their sacred objects? The discussion was held within an almost exclusively Christian framework. The episode would have been much stronger had it included at least one witness of a different faith (a humanist, however distinguished, does not count).
As the podcast universe gets ever denser — in both senses of the word — it is no small triumph to be one of those stars around which so many lesser planets revolve. Miss Me? (BBC Sounds, released twice weekly) is one of the most successful buddy-chat podcasts out there. Even your reviewer — who is categorically not in the core demographic — can appreciate why the childhood chums Lily Allen and Miquita Oliver have attracted such a devoted audience.
Cheeky and chatty, the two never seem fatigued by the relationship. Although the profundity of their discourse hardly necessitates the transcript that accompanies each episode, it provides observers such as your reviewer with documentary evidence for the opinions of Gens less advanced than their own. And so I dipped in to get their take on the Olympic opening ceremony. Perhaps my own was superannuated. “S***” was the reassuring verdict. Case closed.