This week in audio: Escape from the Maze; State of Play: Summer Games; Today With Tonies – review

The History Podcast: Escape from the Maze (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
State of Play: Summer Games | Global Reporting Centre
Today With Tonies | tonies

Jail breakouts. Doncha just love ’em? Generations of films, such as The Great Escape , The Shawshank Redemption and Paddington 2 , have made us regard them as capers; fun sprees where we root for the crazy, freedom-seeking escapers rather than the dull prison officers. In Radio 4’s The History Podcast: Escape from the Maze , host Carlo Gebler asks us to consider our reactions to a very particular jailbreak. He wants us to take in the whole story, the differing accounts of officers, prisoners, politicians, journalists. He wants us, especially, to consider the context.

The breakout he’s discussing was the biggest ever in British and Irish history, and the biggest in Europe outside the second world war. In 1983, 38 prisoners escaped from HMP Maze, 10 miles west of Belfast, in a breakout organised by prisoner members of the IRA, including Brendan “Bic” McFarlane, Gerry Kelly (now a Sinn Féin MLA) and Bobby Storey, all of whom made it out; we hear from them all here. IRA inmates at the time regarded themselves as prisoners of war, with a duty to escape, so they had been planning this for months. The organisation required to get even one person out was staggering. The Maze was a multi-walled fortress, with lookout points staffed by the British army.

Gebler is admirably sober and even-handed, without the establishment bias of the BBC broadcasts of the time. He has his own insights: he was a teacher at the Maze during the 1990s (“the most important experience of my life”), and, hailing from a place where everyone tries to work out where you’re from, makes himself hard to pin down. He says he’s Irish, but has an English accent and a non-denominational name. (He’s Edna O’Brien’s son, interestingly, though this isn’t mentioned.) Very early on, he pronounces the letter H (in “H-Block”) as “haitch” rather than “aitch”, and, as he mentions, the way you pronounce the letter can define you as either Catholic or Protestant. (He chooses not to reveal explicitly to listeners which he is.)

The breakout was not a jolly caper. It was deadly serious, and the men involved were both deadly and serious

The excellent interviews, a mix of archive ones and newly recorded exclusives, include IRA commanders, prison officers and an ex-governor of the Maze. Gebler points out when stories don’t concur; he picks at the ridiculousness of saying someone “was shot” rather than saying who shot them. But what he’s really good at is making us understand that the breakout was not a jolly caper. It was deadly serious, and the men involved were both deadly and serious.

The escape took place just two years after the death by starvation of 10 republicans who went on hunger strike in the Maze. It was an extremely heavy time. During the breakout, officers were shot and stabbed; one died of a heart attack. And in the event’s immediate aftermath, many remaining inmates ended up with injuries, including dog bites, yet none of the prison officers can recall seeing any violence.

This is an excellently researched and presented series that conveys the grim excitement of the escape, and what happened to everyone afterwards. “On and on it goes,” says Gebler. Essential listening. (And if you want another take on Northern Irish politics, former first minister Arlene Foster appeared on James Naughtie’s excellent Reflections (Radio 4) on Thursday morning. She was… herself.) The History Podcast has a couple of other series you could try: D-Day : The Last Voices , in which Paddy O’Connell hears from veterans who were there, and Shadow War , with Gordon Corera, about the relationship between China and the west.

Not essential, but interesting enough, is new six-part podcast State of Play: Summer Games , which takes a sceptical look at the legacy of the Olympics. Canadian journalist Andrea Crossan starts in Vichy-sur-Seine, Paris, at the largest squat in the city, home to hundreds of refugees. It’s April of this year, and the police have arrived to move everybody out (the Olympics organisers say it’s nothing to do with them). Crossan speaks to Nada, an 18-year-old student from Sudan who lives in the squat with her mum and dad. Her family and some other squatters have been offered alternative accommodation, but it’s a long way from the city centre and is only guaranteed for five weeks. Plus, it’s miles from where Nada goes to school and also her dad’s workplace.

We hear from another person who has moved out of his squat and ends up sleeping in a station. He can’t get a job unless he has a home, which seems topsy-turvy. But then much of what surrounds the Olympics is upside down, says Jules Boykoff , a former football player who has written extensively about the Games. “You might call the Olympics an exercise in trickle-up economics,” he says. “The money tends to flow up to the people who are already doing quite well, economically.”

I’m always a bit suspicious of specialist tech hardware, given that most activities these days are done better on your phone. I make an exception, though, for children’s technology; many parents don’t want to give a smartphone to under-10s, and want something entertaining that won’t, with the wrong swipe, lead to Peppa Pig being blasted away in a hail of bullets. The Toniebox is designed to do just that: it plays stories and short audio shows and looks a bit like a small cuboid radio. The 10-minute programmes arrive loaded up in plastic cartridge in the shape of a cute character that you slot into the top.

The Toniebox has been around for a while, and recently launched an accompanying daily podcast, Today With Tonies . It’s fine, though hosts Sam and Tim are so upbeat it makes your eyes water, with their terrible jokes about giraffe’s smelly feet, plus facts (did you know there’s a different collective noun for penguins when they’re in water as opposed to when they’re on land?) and the “big bubbling bucket of challenges” (fun games). You don’t need a Toniebox to tune in; you can just get a weekly taster episode wherever you get your podcasts. But to hear it, you have to use a phone or a laptop – and that’s not the point, is it?