The week in audio: Virtually Parkinson; The Con: Kaitlyn’s Baby; The Pitcairn Trials; Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban – review

Virtually Parkinson Night Train Digital
The Con: Kaitlyn’s Baby BBC World Service/BBC Sounds
The Pitcairn Trials Wondery
Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban Radio 4/BBC Sounds

In new podcast Virtually Parkinson, an AI version of Michael Parkinson interviews celebrities. Or, if we’re being snotty – and, OK, I am – an AI Parky asks questions at celebrities. Not to them. At them.

Jason Derulo was the first. For older readers, Derulo is an American R&B/pop singer. Oh, and for younger readers, Michael Parkinson was a British chatshow host – like Graham Norton, only less saucy – who died in 2023. His son Mike Parkinson Jr thinks it might be a good idea to keep his dad’s job going through AI. (We don’t know why. Is there money in this? It seems unlikely.)

Anyway, the Derulo interview. AI Parky gave an insultingly brief introduction before starting with this non-banger: “Growing up in Miami, with your Haitian heritage, how does your upbringing influence the way you approach music and your career?” God. Poor Derulo did his best. Over the edited half-hour he gamely filled in the longueurs with mildly interesting personal info, but the result was not, by any stretch, an interview. Devoid of personality, insight, humour, delight, it could have been done on email.

Interviews are about listening, and AI Parky was programmed to do that. But its listening skills simply led it to make a summary of what Derulo had just said (yes, we know about his asthma, we just heard him talk about it!) and then move on to the next banality. Proper interviews, as the real-life Parkinson showed, are about connection, conversation, understanding or lack of it; an in-the-moment spark between two personalities. A familiar voice and a set of statements with question marks do not an interview make.

Anyhow, if you manage to slog through, then there’s also a post-interview chat between Mike Parkinson and the two producers, Ben Field and Jamie Anderson. This is more interesting. All three were delighted with this first effort, though what made it exciting for them was the jeopardy: there was much hilarity about AI Parky not working until they plugged in a cable. We learned that someone called Bryony did the Derulo research with which AI Parky was programmed. It all reminded me of a group of maths students trying to get their smart fridge to order pizza. Fun idea, but a lot of effort when you could just do it yourself.

And it made me think that our AI future will just be apps talking to themselves. When the newly AI’d NHS sends you an inevitably wonky appointment text, ChatGPT can send a slightly off reply, and they can chunter away at each other. Leave them to it. And give these interviews to Bryony. She’s done all the real work.

Speaking of interviews, Louis Theroux is back, and his first episode of season four is with Willem Dafoe. It’s not entirely successful – Theroux goes off course and Defoe is serious and hard to break down – but that’s what makes the conversational battle interesting. “What do we do with the fact that we want transgression, but we also want to be kind?” asks Theroux, after a discussion about live onstage pooping.

Anyway, enough. The World Service’s The Con, home to the fantastic Love Janessa investigation, has a new series out, Kaitlyn’s Baby. It’s a strange affair. It concerns a Canadian woman, Kaitlyn Braun, who pretends to be pregnant with a child, over and over (she never is), and hires doulas to help her give birth. There seems to be a sexual element, and it’s all definitely a con, but to what end?

In order to find out, you have to get through the first episode, much of which is taken up with Kaitlyn going through 40 hours of contractions, being ferried to and from hospital, giving birth to a stillborn baby, then (and this is where you may find yourself making a scoffing noise) having an emergency hysterectomy, followed by another life-saving operation. A lovely doula is on the phone to Kaitlyn throughout. Even if any of this were true, birth tales are like dreams, in that they are hugely meaningful to the person who goes through them, but not so much to those listening. A tighter edit might have helped us through to the rest of the series, which is nicely made and interesting; though not, to my mind, interesting enough for six episodes.