By If you're at a loss for what to listen to, now's a good time to get into The Log Books: a teaser for the second season has landed ahead of its release this autumn, and it's just won gold at the British Podcast Awards for Best New Podcast.
The Log Books rifles through the archives of Gay Switchboard (these days, simply known as just Switchboard), a helpline for LGBTQ+ people which found a base under Housmans bookshop in Islington in 1974. Those log books include notes scribbled by volunteers as they listened to callers from all over the UK, which now stand as an intimate and affecting record of the daily lives of people who felt rejected by Britain at large.
That garlanded first season spanned from Switchboard's founding in 1974 to 1982, and like all the best podcasts, it's not just about the interviews or a decent host, though Tash Walker and Adam Smith are both great. It's an expansive collage of sound which evokes a sense of time and place, meshing archive audio and new interviews with Switchboard callers and operators. Some memories are mundane, some joyous, some desperately sad, and all give life to the day-to-day of queer Britain in the Seventies and Eighties.
The second series will track 1983 to 1991: a period of deep trauma for LGBTQ+ communities. On one side, there was the Thatcher government's Section 28 legislation, which censored knowledge and acknowledgement of LGBTQ+ identities and sexualities within schools. To that other, there was the spiralling HIV and Aids crisis against the backdrop of homophobic discourse in much of the media. And this season of The Log Books will look at the marches and protests that followed. This season will look at the marches and protests which followed too.
"It really pulled the community together, but it was hugely rough," former Switchboard volunteer Diana James remembers in the season two preview. "It was a desperate time, but it was also a time when we all pulled together."
The Log Books is a brilliant example of how podcasts are beginning to change how history is retold, using sound and voices to lend texture and humanity to an under-acknowledged but vital part of modern Britain's evolution. It's a leaping off point for exploring a social history which is, still, unknown to many and generally ignored in the foreshortened, City-boys-and-Thatcher-and-strikes-and-riots view of the Eighties which still prevails. It's proof too that despite the common bombast of many history podcasts, audio can grant these stories a certain level of intimacy, delicacy and immediacy that other mediums can't touch.
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