Radio review: Hackney Podcast

Hackney resident Francesca Panetta, presenter and producer of the Hackney Podcast

This article titled “Radio review: Hackney Podcast” was written by Elisabeth Mahoney, for The Guardian on Tuesday 26th July 2011 19.29 UTC

The whole of London was coated in a crust of garbage,” we heard. “There’s a guy who looks like a murderer,” a citizen reported. “It’s absolutely littered with cans of Polish beer.” No, this wasn’t LBC listeners calling in to Boris Johnson’s phone-in hour; it was the bubbling drama of the latest Hackney Podcast .

This is a dystopian vision of life after The Flood, made specifically for listening on canoe boats on the Thames, but equally enjoyable in a grisly, slightly creepy way, wherever you listen. And it isn’t all poison and urban detritus: Hackney is green after the flood. Hawthorn now flourishes in “the lanes once lined with kebab takeaways”.

It’s a cacophony of local voices, recorded in situ, and led by narrator Frank Burnett, whose commanding voice is a cross between the mayor and Will Self. Everyone talks about layers of the city, revealed and renewed by the water, and there’s a strong theme of urban rebirth, for all the chaos and devastation.” You can see the sinews and fibres under the surface,” we’re told, as if the city is a wrecked body. But some things never change. “If my mother could see me now,” a young man says, “she’d be bitterly disappointed.”

This evocative fiction hovers over such moments in an imagined future to make haunting, magical radio.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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