LRN No.35: six more gifts
Plus: nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition script
Series Two of The Gift is finally out in the world. You can listen to all six new episodes wherever you listen to podcasts - or you could wait for them to go out one by one BBC Radio 4 every week, on Wednesdays, at 9.30am.
The first two episodes tell the story of how a gift of a DNA test, taken on a whim when Tony’s weekly round of golf was rained off, led to the discovery that his family had taken the wrong baby home from the hospital when his sister was born, 55 years previously. It is the first case of babies being switched at birth ever to be documented in NHS history.
I know about this because Tony’s mother, 83-year-old Joan, listened to the first series of The Gift, found the form on my website, and filled it in with her story. I was waiting for a Philly cheesesteak at Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market when her message landed in my inbox. When I saw it, I had to leave the queue and find somewhere to sit down to take it all in.
I went on the Today programme to talk about what had happened to these two families. The clip we played, from Tony’s biological sister, brought a tear to Mishal Hussein’s eye. Both families are still struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of the switch. It was an honour to be trusted with their story.
I hope you like the episodes in Series 2 as much as me and my producer, Conor Garrett, do. They are all very different (episode three is about how one woman’s quest to find out whether she had the breast cancer gene variant ended up exposing how babies were born to be sold in 1950s Canada) but they all start from the same, simple premise: a gift of a DNA test is a pandora’s box.
Ever since series two launched at the weekend, other people who’ve taken tests have been finding the form on my website. My inbox is groaning with new stories.
A couple of weeks ago, I got to sit down with the New Yorker’s Sam Knight and the BBC’s Harriett Gilbert to discuss the books we want everyone else to read. Our episode of A Good Read goes out on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 11th November at 3pm, and will be online after then.
It was hard to pick a book. We had to choose something that we loved, that was no longer than 300 pages, and that hadn’t been discussed on the programme before. That meant The Journalist and the Murderer was out. So was Empire of Pain, and Young Mungo, and Absolutely and Forever. In the end, I settled on Tara Westover’s Educated - a little longer than 300 pages but they made an exception, probably because they were sick of sending me rejection emails, and also because it really is a very good read.
Things that have caught my eyes and ears:
Forgot to say that a couple of weeks ago I went on a tour of the treasures of the British Library on my birthday (yes, that’s how I roll). Saw the Magna Carta, Shakespeare’s first folio, the largest and the oldest and the most expensive books in the world, and Michael Palin’s handwritten script of the Spanish Inquisition sketch. Strong recommend
Absolutely adored Anthony McCall: Solid Light at the Tate Modern, although it made me nostalgic for when you used to be able to smoke in clubs
Held my family tight after watching Super/Man, the Christopher Reeve documentary. Our lives hang together on nothing, really
Am loving the audiobook of Hollywood director Ed Zwick’s memoirs (read by the author, of course). Funny, insightful and fabulously indiscreet