Love Is a Crime Vanity Fair/Cadence13
The Great James Bond Car Robbery Spyscape
The Reunion: The Day Today BBC Radio 4 | BBC Sounds

Joan Bennett may not be a Hollywood name that readily trips off the tongue. Blame an incident in 1951, when the man she was with, her agent and lover, Jennings Lang, got shot twice – once directly in the groin. Before it, Joan was a pioneering film-noir femme fatale, star of the films of Fritz Lang. She’d also just played Liz Taylor’s mother in Father of the Bride, and was building a career in TV. After the shooting, her career collapsed, never to fully recover. Lang’s attacker continued his career much like before. He was the film producer Walter Wanger, Bennett’s husband, to whom she would stay married for the next 14 years.

As befits the old-school glitz that still surrounds Vanity Fair like a diamond-speckled shawl, Love Is a Crime – the magazine’s first ever narrative podcast series – is flashy, starry stuff. Look at that cast! Zooey Deschanel plays Bennett pursed-lipped, all caustic and complex. Jon Hamm resuscitates his Mad Men-era jawbone glam as Wanger. There’s also Griffin Dunne from An American Werewolf in London and Mara Wilson, once the child star of Matilda (not so A-list, but you wouldn’t expect either of them to pop up on The Archers). And then there’s film critic Karina Longworth, creator of the gamechanging, hugely popular film history podcast You Must Remember This. Since 2014, she’s busted myths surrounding 20th-century cinema and liberated women’s stories, while toeing a line between education and seduction in her presentation.

Longworth’s voice is a star of this show before we get to her research savvy. I’ve loved it since YMRT’s first season, when I was a new mum, her lazy vowels transporting me from London’s grimy streets, pushing a buggy, to studio lots and dimly lit bars. The voice has become more knowingly languorous over the years: I imagine she now records on a chaise longue, vintage mic hanging above her, after her third negroni of the morning. Sometimes her dreaminess is too much – I found it so in the Charles Manson’s Hollywood season, too distracting when the material is so disturbing – but when it works well, it draws the listener in before cleverly unravelling all preconceptions.

For Love Is a Crime, Longworth has teamed up with the film-maker Vanessa Hope, granddaughter of Bennett and Wanger, to tell Joan’s story (Hope’s contributions neatly cut through the gloss: she used to tell friends on her school bus that “my grandfather shot the balls off my grandmother’s lover in a parking lot in Beverly Hills”). Episode one is up now, and it’s a gripping combination of personal insight, old-fashioned thorough research, archive and theatrical reconstructions. The latter are occasionally unsettling: a traumatic scene from Bennett’s childhood is replayed as provocative cinema, which makes for an uncomfortable listen (although this is also the point: Longworth says in the intro that Bennett’s story is “film noir that played out in real life”). The script elsewhere is great, full of waspish flourishes about the influences of men’s behaviour on women’s later lives and choices. “Walter was able to speak out of both sides of his mouth quite fluently” is one of several perfectly pitched Longworth lines. I’m in for the next nine episodes, no question.

Another Hollywood mystery is explored, albeit in jauntier fashion, in The Great James Bond Car Robbery. It’s about what it claims to be “the most famous car in the world” – the Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger, the one with the ejector seat and machine guns – stolen in 1997 from a secret hangar in Florida, possibly by military plane, never to be seen again.

This premise felt a little rusty initially, and if another person described the vehicle as “iconic” one more time, my axles would have broken off. But episodes one and two romped along nicely, and some of the guests are great, especially art recovery specialist Christopher A Marinello, an art school dropout turned attorney who has tracked down stolen Picassos and also loves cars (he calls the DB5 his “white whale”). Better still is the show’s presenter, Liz Hurley – Liz Hurley! – who is an absolute hoot, guiding us through this shady world with absolute relish, but never collapsing into Austin Powers parody mode. The idea of her hosting an investigative podcast would have surprised me six months ago, but after Vanilla Ice’s documentary about Shergar for BBC Sounds – surely a lost idea from an Alan Partridge pitching session – I now know that anything goes.

Which brings me to last Sunday’s brilliant episode of BBC Radio 4’s The Reunion, which brought together most of the main cast of 1994’s TV news satire The Day Today, though not the ever elusive Chris Morris. Steve Coogan was down the line from the Lake District (presumably on a windy fell outside a restaurant from The Trip, while Rob Brydon ate pudding). Patrick Marber joined via Zoom too, while Armando Iannucci, Doon Mackichan and David Schneider were in the studio with Kirsty Wark. The recollections were riotous and giggly, but also instructive about how the news has changed. They didn’t think Morris’s interviewee-baiting, surreal vox pops would have worked now (“The power’s now with whoever’s stopped at the market,” Schneider suggested). I also loved Wark teasing Coogan about ingesting helium to play a thinly veiled parody of Gerry Adams, whose voice was disguised on TV at the time. “You’ve never done dangerous substances before?” “Well, I have,” Coogan replied, “but not ones that are funny.”