The week in audio: Fixing Britain With Louise Casey; Self Help; Pet Classics; Colin Murray – review

Fixing Britain With Louise Casey (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds Self Help | Scottee Pet Classics with Katie Breathwick | Classic FM Colin Murray (Radio 5 Live) | BBC Sounds

If 2023 left you feeling a little hopeless, then I recommend Louise Casey’s clear-headed, bracing series on Radio 4, Fixing Britain. Every weekday last week at 9am – star billing – Fixing Britain found Baroness Casey of Blackstock working her way through some of the UK’s most depressing and dreadful problems, and demonstrating how they might be fixed – or at least alleviated. Rough sleeping, hunger, children in care, violence against women, cohesion (meaning social cohesion) were her chosen topics, each a seemingly intractable difficulty, yet she made them all appear solvable. I could feel my optimism awakening as she spoke.

For those who don’t know her, Casey, in the third episode, calls herself “a troubleshooter for government”. But she doesn’t say what she’s done, so I will. Over the past 25 years, she has been head of the rough sleepers unit, the anti-social behaviour unit, the Respect task force, and she was the first ever victims’ commissioner. Most recently, she led the independent review into the culture of the Metropolitan police after the murder of Sarah Everard. Pragmatic and experienced, a crossbench peer who has worked with Labour, Tories, the Lib Dems… you can hardly believe Casey exists, and that even within this death-defyingly incompetent government she’s still getting things done.

You feel, listening to her, as though anything is possible. This series is essential listening for… well, the entire country

Anyhow, what you notice about these programmes is how grown-up and compassionate they are. No hand-wringing or blame. Casey talks to experts, whether politicians such as Tony Blair (who, as PM, prioritised ending homelessness) and Nicola Sturgeon (who tried to change the lives of children in care when she was first minister), or people who have been at the sharp end of policy, such as Darren, a rough sleeper so troubled that even during Covid no one could get him off the streets. (He has his own place now.) Casey travels to places affected by government policy: a beautiful English village where many children don’t have enough to eat; a Scottish care home; a food bank in Doncaster.

At every turn, she is kind and polite, but also steely. “If anyone wanted to do anything different to what you were proposing, there was no compromise,” remembered one civil servant who worked with her. As a side issue, Casey makes it clear how well government can work when a priority is set, the prime minister is behind it, and those on the frontline have a clear set of goals and know how to achieve them. And also, how government can fail when a law is passed but there’s no focus regarding its implementation, or when ministers don’t talk to people whose lives are affected by their policies.

Casey begins by saying that she wants to offer some lessons to whoever may be in charge after the election, and – told you she was pragmatic – she numbered the lessons, so that anyone could follow them. “We know we can fix it,” she says, in the show about homelessness, and you feel, listening to her, as though anything is possible. This series is essential listening for… well, the entire country.

Fixing Britain considers big issues, nationwide systems, societal structures, institutional collaboration. Here’s a show that seems to be the opposite. Self Help, a short series by artist/performer Scottee, is a deliberately small podcast, independently made by Scottee and inspired by his own experience (he’s working-class, queer and fat, with mental health difficulties, and all of this informs his work). “An amateur’s guide to staying alive”, he calls it, tramping around remote Scottish countryside talking to himself: unpicking the self-improvement industry, wondering if self-pity might be a good idea, or if going for a walk can be a bad thing.

‘A delightful companion’: Scottee. Photograph: Lucy Ridges

“I get lost in my thoughts and the landscape,” he says. “Mad artists like myself have long roamed the landscape trying to find ourselves and answers… Us nutjobs are constantly being fucking coerced out of our beds and into the hills.” Ah, he makes you laugh as well as think. In clumsier, less charming hands, Self Help might seem indulgent, but it never does because Scottee is clever, cheeky, has done his research and thinks differently. Discussing the benefits of walking, he jokes, of those who, like him, hike around areas of natural beauty, that some will be “hobbyist career lesbians with a degree in North Face jackets”, but he also considers the repercussions of too many people going for a walk. If hill-walking is prescribed as a way to manage mental illness, then, with everyone doing it, how will the landscape survive? Scottee is a delightful companion and I loved this series.

Katie Breathwick. Classic FM

On New Year’s Eve, I hopped about from show to show, landing for a while in the strange world of Pet Classics on Classic FM. From 7pm, Katie Breathwick played soothing sounds for household animals feeling freaked by the fireworks. (Our dog ignored them.) She also took dedications from their owners, some of which were extensive. “A big thank you from all the guinea pigs,” she read out from one listener. “Their names are Lenny, Pumpkin, Doobie, Betty, Minnie, Elvis, Holly, Honeybee, Tiggy, Piglet, Stormy, Hugo and Peanut. And hello, too, to Bunty, Freda and Speckles, three pet chickens.” All very lovely, if odd.

Breathwick’s show ended at10pm, which seemed… two hours short? And so at midnight I found myself with Colin Murray on 5 Live. Far more fun, as he always is, though I could have done without the never-ending “this show is so brilliant because the listeners are amazing” stuff. Still, after the midnight bongs he played the 1812 Overture, and, soon after, Nina Simone’s Feeling Good: a dog-pleaser if ever I heard one.