Stolen objects are given voice in The Museum of Bad Vibes — podcast review

In the BBC’s The Museum of Bad Vibes, a series of artefacts come to life and tell us their thoughts and feelings. Yes, I know how that sounds. There is no better way to ruin a piece of narrative storytelling than by shoehorning in hammy dramatised segments. They are a very BBC mannerism, having also appeared lately in Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley and Fake Psychic, about the fraudster M Lamar Keene. While those fictionalised moments could feasibly have taken place, here the listener is asked to go further in suspending their disbelief.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Museum of Bad Vibes is part of BBC Sounds’ Audio Lab, a new strand devoted to unearthing fresh talent and showcasing diverse voices. Our guide is Hanna Adan, who tells the stories behind a series of objects housed in British museums. But this isn’t your regular educational tour told from a curator’s perspective, since the artefacts in question are stolen.

Among the items under discussion are a bronze staff looted from the kingdom of Benin (now part of south-west Nigeria) and currently in storage in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford; a Chinese ancestral tablet from the Horniman Museum in south London; and an Akan gold weight in the shape of a sankofa bird from pre-colonial Ghana, which now lives in Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland.

Adan’s aim is to discover what the pieces meant to those who made or previously owned them, how their origin stories have been obscured and what could or should be done by way of restitution. She does this with thoughtfulness and equanimity. Adan is not anti-museums, though she is, quite reasonably, against theft. “Museums are not neutral spaces,” she says. “What some of us don’t realise is that many of these objects we so casually glance at as we pass from one room to the other are inherently spiritual in nature . . . The sterile environment of most museums makes it difficult to appreciate [their] sanctity.”

And so to the dramatised parts. In the opening episode, the Benin bronze issues muffled shouts from inside its box before busting its way out and revealing its past life as a ceremonial staff shaped into a bird of prophecy, a nod to a legend in which a bird foretold how Benin would lose a battle with the Igala people. These exposition-filled interludes are clearly intended to bring texture and character to a series that, given the many contributions from academics, might otherwise feel dry. But for me, they are a grating and unnecessary distraction.

The Museum of Bad Vibes isn’t the first podcast to tell outrageous stories of colonial theft. Stuff the British Stole, from ABC in Australia, is an illuminating and often uncomfortable podcast in which the writer and journalist Marc Fennell relates how specific artefacts, from a dodo skull to the Parthenon Marbles, ended up in British museums.

bbc.co.uk; abc.net.au