Goalhanger, Gary Lineker's production company, famed for having cornered the market in celebrity-hosted non-fiction podcasts 'The Rest is (Noun)' is branching into audio drama. 'Bear Hunt' is the first such production, heavily trailed on their other feeds. From the trailer, it's a spy thriller revolving around a British intelligence deniable 'black op' to assassinate the Russian president.

As far as I could make out, they are not leaning on their portfolio of celebrities, (you'd think a a cameo from Rory Stewart or Richard Osman would have been possible, though I suppose they do it for a fee, not the love of the craft) so they're not positioning themselves in competition with Audible, who's leaning a lot on famous names, if not voices, in their original productions. So it wouldn't be fair to evaluate it against that. It is not exactly competing with the BBC's own audio drama productions (I heartily recommend the 'Drama on 4' and 'Limelight' feeds), in that the intersection of target audiences is probably quite thin, for reasons which will become manifest as I actually review the podcast.

I suppose I am in this sliver of target audiences intersection, and I am uncomfortable with how much I enjoyed Bear Hunt - or maybe loved hating it. A longer synopsis: a BA flight is lost over the North Sea (or maybe the Baltic), because of Russian 'grey warfare' GPS spoofing. A wet blanket prime minister whose ressemblance with a recent one is, according to a disclaimer, coincidental, is facing a general election soon, and presumed to lose it to a leader of the opposition who sounds a lot like Kemi Badenoch if she was as pro-Russia as those to her right. The intelligence services, given their values and history (the 'great game' is inevitably name-checked) are worried at the prospect of a Kremlin-friendly (if not outright backed) PM. It has happened in America - again all ressemblance is presumably coincidental, and the US president is not going to be much help, diplomatically (a magistral move of the show is to give him lines in the style of Trump, content wise, but the voice and delivery of Biden - it is shocking how well it works). An old, grizzled spy dying of pancreatic cancer, and as a result completely comfortable with precipitating a geopolitical crisis the consequences of which he will not have to bear, starts brainstorming a hit on the Russian president. It is to be conducted by 'the best soldier in Britain', which conveniently turns out to be an S.A.S. sniper with whom the PM's chauffeur worked as a spotter, in an incident that showcase our operator's willingness to stick to the letter of the rules of engagements whilst disregarding their spirit. Oh, and they use a plan from the third and least successful novel by an ex MoD employee who stopped working for three years to publish increasingly poorly received spy thrillers. Reading back this description, this would also work as satire. Sadly, Bear Hunt takes itself very seriously.

I'll file it under guilty pleasure, like these efficiently written thrillers read on beaches, mostly by men. The writing and dialogue is akin to what you would get feeding the last decade of John Le Carre's work to ChatGPT - which in fairness could also be said of the BBC's second season of The Night Manager. Admittedly effective, at the expense of apparently unimportant things like depth, style or artistry. The sound design is decent, though falling short of state of the art in audio drama. There was budget for the score, and it shows, but the spatialisation is done in Atmos rather than recording on location in binaural - thankfully it is not spatialised much, because overdoing artificial spatial rendering can completely break the illusion (some of the otherwise very decent productions of QCode exemplify this well). Cleverly they're using binaural background ambiance in some outdoors scenes, which is a good compromise.

A stark contrast with all the other shows I have linked is a conception of diversity last seen in corporate boardrooms in the 1990s. In the first three episodes, beyond the leader of the opposition, we only hear two other women over a total of three scenes. It's not so much failing the Bechdel test as not even being eligible to sit it in the first place. All the voices are white, with the most exotic accents heard eastern European ones in the first 3 eps. Then in the fourth, S.A.S. man need to infiltrate the Chinese military apparatus via training contractors in Africa, so you can imagine how this comes out.

In short, the worse thing about this podcast may be what it says about what Goalhanger presumes its listenership to be: an idealised middle aged reactionary centrist dad, doing his quota of daily pondering of the Roman empire. Because it seems only such a construct would get behind effecting regime change in a sovereign nation by an illegal and un-authorized conspiracy for the political assassination of its leader, for the sake of democracy within the UK, and retaliation for 305 lives lost, as long as this is all done by the good guys. The endeavour is not quite framed as morally questionable as this description demands, although their are some dissenting voices, most notably the (female) acting director of MI6, so maybe the finale will show some degree of nuance. It concludes in a week, and I really hope they won't force me into reviewing a second season.