The internet has made gambling even more devastating – the government must act
Matthew is on the phone to his regular betting company, asking to withdraw some money as quickly as possible. His small children call for him in the background. He ignores them. Desperate Calls (Radio 4, Sunday) was the chilling record of how Matthew (which is not his real name) sank into gambling addiction.
It was a documentary pieced together from an extraordinary primary source: recordings of the many phone calls that Matthew made to bookmakers William Hill while in the grip of his addiction. Matthew received the recordings – over 80 of them – after making a personal data request to William Hill. Matthew then sent them to journalist Lydia Thomas, believing that they clearly depict an addict in the grip of a downward spiral. Matthew has now received treatment for his addiction, following the realisation that he might lose his family. He had already lost friends and was £70,000 in debt. Nobody trusted him any more.
Thomas’s resulting programme, on a complex and emotive topic, was pretty scary, but impressively restrained. As she played the calls in Matthew’s presence, she gently asked him to reflect on what he heard. This was a rare and sharp way of hearing how addiction changes a person. Because Matthew is not a stupid man. He works as a teacher in south Wales, and, in conversation with Thomas, he was sensitive, self-aware and articulate, deeply saddened by the reality of his own behaviour. On the calls to William Hill, however, he was monstrous: panicky, angry, rude, self-important, a liar. He threatened and swore at the staff and was fixated on the next bet.
Thomas commented that, at points when they were listening to the calls, Matthew had his head in his hands. The sound of the addiction is so obvious, and so terrible. And yet, he was able to keep betting. Most of Matthew’s bets were on horse races. There was a stark contrast in listening to Desperate Calls in the same week as coverage of the Cheltenham Festival, with its rarefied atmosphere of the fashionable and well-to-do casually having a flutter. Gambling will always be part of human behaviour. The daily tip is a staple of the Today programme on Radio 4, for one thing.
But, as Lydia Thomas reported with nuance, in the last 10 years, with the rapid growth in availability of instant online gambling and saturation of betting within sports broadcasting, something has changed. So much so that there’s a much-delayed government white paper due to be published soon. Hearing Matthew’s calls, however, it’s hard not to conclude that expecting gambling companies to take responsibility for their own clients is like asking tobacco companies to monitor the lung function of smokers.
Another striking new perspective on human behaviour came in Talking of Michelangelo – The Poet (Radio 4, Thursday), in which Andrew McMillan explored Michelangelo’s secondary career as a poet of homosexual love. Here was a trove of glittering literary treasures: love sonnets written by Michelangelo to a man decades his junior, which, when translated into English over the centuries, invariably had the pronouns changed to hide the truth.
Some reveal insights into Michelangelo’s painting: in one, he laments the physical contortions necessary to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. McMillan, a poet himself, placed Michelangelo’s poems within the context of a canon of gay love poetry up to the present, which had mixed results. The comments made by contributors were less interesting than the beautiful poems themselves, which formed the real reason to listen to this programme, in a translation by James Saslow and read by Simon Russell Beale, whose voice, gently rasping around each revelatory phrase, became like a paintbrush, revealing the figure of a man in all its contradictions and delights.
Speaking of great voices, it’s a tonic to hear the return of Debbie Aldridge (Tamsin Greig) to The Archers (Radio 4, Sunday to Friday). Debbie has been silently farming in Hungary for years now, while Greig has enjoyed a busy career as a TV actress, but she’s never been written out entirely. And her return is a reminder that Greig is a stunningly good actress. In conversation with Debbie’s half-brother, Adam Macy (Andrew Wincott) about the family’s plans and Adam’s burgeoning edible forest garden project (a story for another day), she has sounded loving, faltering, brave, steeped in grief for her mother, afraid, glad to be home but also hating it, proud of her family and exasperated by them, all at once. Oh Debbie, could you be tempted to move back permanently? Ambridge misses you.
