HAVING the satirist and writer Armando Iannucci as the presenter brings a star name to Strong Message Here (Radio 4, Thursday), the programme aimed at “decoding the baffling world of political language”. This is clearly a part of Radio 4’s output aimed at challenging podcasts for their audience share, including an overlong first section during which, as in too many podcasts, the presenters waffle verbosely about personal ephemera before getting into the subject.
Iannucci started last week’s programme with a chinwag with the stand-up comedian Phil Wang, before inviting the BBC’s social-media correspondent, Marianna Spring, on to a more serious, three-way discussion, “Elections Aren’t Won on Twitter”.
The shooting in Minneapolis of the unarmed Renee Good by immigration agents (News, Viewpoint, 16 January) framed a conversation about “ragebait”, and the increasingly foul and hysterical language used by politicians who seek to build their audience in an overcrowded online-attention economy.
Yet, it seemed simplistic for Ms Spring to put the increasing tendency of people to participate in the “in- or out-groups tribal thing” down to X’s algorithm, awful though Elon Musk is. The internet pioneer Jaron Lanier noted the tendency of people to form “mean mobs” on electronic bulletin boards in the 1980s, long before social media and their algorithms. Indeed, the tendency to tribalism is something constitutive of human nature which long pre-dates computers.
So, too, is objectification. Another discussion was on the AI nudification of images (News, 16 January) — but that was probably an inevitable development, as soon as it became technically possible. Technology is an amplifier. It gives us more power to do good, and also more power to do evil, something that could usefully have informed the programme’s final discussion on AI, but didn’t.
And they never got round to discussing whether elections were, or were not, now won on X/Twitter.
In the context of an “explosion” of Bible sales in the UK since the turn of the 2020s, Sunday (Radio 4) began a mini-series of features on young adult Christians by interviewing four of Generation Z who go public about their faith online.
One was Matilda Draper (from the TV programme Love Island in 2024), who said that she never felt closer to God than when cut off from the world on the island; since then, prayer had led to improvements in her struggle with social anxiety.
The writer Lamorna Ash (Features, 16 May 2025) reported that an “attitudinal shift” of young adults to scripture was occurring, as so few outlets provided trustworthy reading.
Richard Yarr presented the first in a new series of Sounds Sacred (BBC Ulster, Sunday), with its usual mix of traditional hymns, anthems by the likes of Andrea Bocelli, choral mass excerpts, and Celtic worship music. The running order acknowledged the season of Epiphany, and this gently presented show even had space for Johnny Cash and Ella Fitzgerald singing old-time gospel. It was a tonic in our rage-filled information environment.
