If just like everyone else in the UK this week, you are wishing for a warmer climate and sunshine – and maybe are even considering a full on relocation just to get it – The Price of Paradise should be on your listening list.
The new limited series produced by Wondery and Forest Sounds, and presented by Alice Levine of British Scandal and My Dad Wrote a Porno fame, is a thrilling mix of adventure and true crime. Alice’s narration is as engaging as ever as she takes the listener on a journey of how Jayne Gaskin, a seemingly ordinary mother from Hampshire, buys an island off the coast of Nicaragua that soon terms into a personal nightmare.
In the year 2000, when Jayne traded in her family home for the tropical paradise, things quickly turn sour for the Gaskin family when they realise they are in the middle of a land dispute that has been going on for centuries. Listening to the first two episodes, the story truly is stranger-than-fiction as we hear Jayne’s family battle with the local Indigenous population who want to keep the land for the people, and even endangered turtles who also have claim to the island.
Justice is at first seemingly served in the face of a human rights lawyer Maria Acosta, who launched a campaign to reclaim the land for the Indigenous community only for it all to suddenly turn deadly.
And still, perhaps the craziest twist in this whole story is that the record of it was captured through a reality TV show, ‘No Going Back’ originally made by Channel 4. The podcast repurposes some of the footage to truly take you inside this story, and the effect is pretty horrifying as amongst many of the questionable decisions made, we even hear the Gaskin family call locals ‘racist’ for not accepting their island purchase.
Listen now wherever you get your podcasts, with first two episodes available for free and the rest on Wondery+.
