Jon Ronson lifts the lid on his forthcoming Things Fell Apart stage show in Sheffield

In a career dating back close to three decades Jon Ronson has never shied away from tough subjects.

The research for his books and broadcasting has brought him into contact with terrorists, Ku Klux Klan members, psychopaths and adult industry moguls.

For his latest work the Welsh-born writer and broadcaster has taken on one of the weightiest subjects to date: the culture wars.

The term, referencing the battle for values, morals and ideas engulfs almost every aspect of our society, encompassing gender, race, abortion, conspiracy theories and extremism.

Ronson examines the phenomena in his latest BBC podcast series, titled Things Fell Apart. The podcast was well-received and is now potentially to be renewed for a second series. Before that however Ronson has turned the podcast into a live show, which comes to Sheffield next month for two nights at the City Hall.

Taking on a subject as divisive as the culture wars could have been a daunting task for many journalists but Ronson, with a proven track record of handling difficult subject matters with discretion and fairness, reports the battle with impartiality and discretion.

When approached by the BBC to produce the series, he had no compunctions about accepting given its pervasive nature.

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post on Zoom from his apartment in upstate New York, where he now lives, he said: “It is so in the air. People are falling into irrational spirals where their thought processes don’t work any more.

“I am very much stating the obvious but so many writers and journalists are writing about these topics.

“We are living in a dark period. Someone said to me it all went wrong when David Bowie died. It is one thing after another.”

On some level the culture wars are a personal one for Ronson. It is a condition that impacts both the left and right of the political spectrum and one that has its epicentre in the States.

“In my own life and in other people’s lives I noticed people falling apart,” he says slowly. “Families were splitting up, husbands and wives were leaving each other – all because one of those people had got involved in fighting whatever cultural battle in an overly intense way.

“It was the intensity. I don’t know anyone who has been lost to QAnon but I know from the perspective of people who are fighting their particular culture war with such intensity it is having a genuinely deleterious impact on their mental health and home lives and so on.”

Rather than tackle the impact of the culture wars in modern society, Ronson instead looks back to their genesis. In the eight episode series he instead looks back to the start of the movement, saying he wanted to, in his own words, “to go back to the pebbles being thrown in the pond” in an attempt to shed light on what is happening to us today.

I suggest to Ronson that an overarching theme to those swept up in the culture wars is that they all seem to have been given a sense of meaning by taking up the cudgels of their own conflicts.

“I think there is very little bad intention, but many social scientists have shown we behave more violently and more irrationally when we are fighting a moral cause. It mainly begins in the 1970s with the battle between Christian Evangelists and progressives [in America]. It then proliferated and took over the world, and now every major thing that happens in the world people define themselves along their pre-existing culture war line. That happened with mask wearing, it happened with vaccination.”

Ronson however does not view the entire culture war prism as necessarily been a bad thing. He sees the movement as having helped enable gay marriage, for example, and says greater levels of equality having been made possible by this fight.

He also shows in the series that it has in some rare instances brought people together. In one emotive episode he recounts an incident that occurred in 1985 when Steve Peters, a gay minister who had then recently been diagnosed with AIDS, appeared on a television show hosted by Christian evangelist Tammy Faye Messner. One would have expected a devout evangelist like Ms Faye Messner to have conducted a confrontational interview with Mr Peters. Instead she and Mr Peters relate to each other on a personal level, founded in their Christian faith.

At its conclusion Ms Faye Messner emotionally told Mr Peters that she loved him and addresses her viewers saying: “How sad that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth, we who are supposed to be able to love everyone, are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care.”

The interview’s impact was seismic with Mr Peters, who is interviewed for the podcast, saying that he was inundated with messages of support, particularly from fellow AIDS sufferers who said it gave them the strength to become public about the disease and indeed to fight it.

“That probably had the best response of all the episodes,” says Ronson with a smile of genuine pride.

“People told me they were listening when driving on the motorway and had to pull over because they had tears in their eyes. It made me think why are people so moved by that episode.

The message of the story is about connection and warring factions coming together. So I thought another reason people like this episode so much is that people are sick of conflict and want people to come together.”

Ronson has been a broadcaster for many years but he is chiefly known as a writer. However of late his work has centred on podcasts, leading me to ask if this was now his preferred medium.

“I do love the narrative freedom of non-fiction podcast storytelling,” he says. “If it is sincere and engaging you can really mess around with the form. But at the same time I feel the same way about books. I am really proud of all my books and I can’t think of anything worse than getting up on stage and trying to sell to an audience a book that I don’t love.”

Which brings us to his impending trip to Yorkshire next month. It is a common practice for the journalist, having done a stage version of most of his works over the past two decades.

“I finished writing the stage show yesterday and I am very happy with it,” he beams. “There is new writing, stuff that no human has ever heard before. I am showing some really interesting audio and video clips which again people won’t have seen.

“I am threading together some of the stories from Things Fell Apart in a way that feels almost seamless and it almost gives it a new narrative. And I have a mystery guest who will appear every night.

“I feel very happy to bounce on stage and tell this story.”

Jon Ronson’s stage show will tour the UK for much of April but what next for the writer?

“I started a project for Audible before the pandemic,” he said. “When the pandemic happened I shut it down. So there first thing I am immediately going to do is finish that.

“I was really having trouble with making it work so when the pandemic happened I felt some relief that I would shut it down and take some time to think about how I can make it work. And I did and I have.

“I might be doing another series of Things Fall Part. I really want to write a book, there is one drama project that I have been working on that’s still around.

“So a follow-up Things Fall Apart, finishing this other project and hopefully a book.”

Jon Ronson will bring Things Fell Apart to Sheffield City Hall on April 5 and 6.