This is Stephen Fry's Seven Deadly Sills.

Episode 1.

An introduction.

Hello, my dears.

I don't know how much you listen to podcasts.

Maybe this is your first ever, but I listen a lot.

I try to go for a longish walk every day, you know, swinging those creaking hips and pointing those sagging,

but ever hopeful nipples into the wind in my restless quest for peace, ease, fitness and balm for the soul.

In the countryside, bird song and day nature in her ever-changing collection of seasonal frogs are usually enough,

but in the not-shus burp and bump of the big city, I find all the books and podcasts are the happiest way to eat up the miles and earn the weirdly addictive health app rewards, badges and medals that are on offer these days.

And generally, you know, keep myself motivated to stride on without getting bored and mentally restless.

Perhaps you're the same, although you will most certainly have perky nipples.

It's dispiriting, to me at least, to note how many of the most popular podcasts these days, especially the American ones, it must be observed.

Keep picking at the scabs of what are called the culture wars, you know, and feasting on all the blood and pus that oozes from that terrible wound by the wound of the culture wars.

I mean, of course, the Grand Canyon, that great fissure that has opened up in public discourse in the politics and all other aspects of life in the West especially.

A seismic crack that grows wider every day, and as it widens, the armies on each side shriek more and more incontinently at their perceived enemies on the other side across the divide,

their gestures and insults growing ever-hugeer, cruder and louder.

Of course, as the chasm widens and the distance between the two sides increases, and the chance of either group hearing or interpreting the other, even if they wanted to, which they don't, decreases daily.

The hatred, the contempt, distrust, fear and abhorrence, each feels for the other is absolutely movable, implacable, visceral, frightening.

I and millions like me do not have a place on either side, you can find us cowering down in the ravine below while the arm is clash, clatter and screech above.

And what are these two mighty clashing forces? On the one side arrange the newly energised battalions of the populist right or alt-right or nativist right, for whom what they call political correctness, globalism, internationalism and the ideals of social justice are dragons to be slain by their fearless, taboo-busting white knights of the cross.

They claim to stand for ordinary people tired of the failures, the moral relativism and all the virtue-signalling piety of progressive politics and to champion values that often magically combine Christianity or even Buddhism with anti-state libertarianism.

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