The best of Monocle Radio this week, including an interview with the director of Netflix series ‘The Perfect Couple’, and a preview of Konfekt’s autumn issue. Plus: we report from Maison et Objet and Paris Design Week. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello and welcome to the curator of Monocle Radio with me, Fernando Gustapa Checo.
Over the next 60 minutes, I'll be bringing some of the very best interviews and reports from the past week of coverage on Monaco Radio.
This week we speak with Suzanne Beer, the director of Netflix new murder mystery series the Perfect Couple.
I think all my work, whatever it's been, there's always a lot of tension there and that works very well for Murder Mystery.
Plus a little preview of Confact's autumn issue.
All that and much more in the next hour here on the Curator with me, Fernando Gustava.
We start the show with a foreign desk explainer.
As Germany enforces tougher checks on all its borders, Andrew Muller questions what this will mean for the schengen area.
In 1985, five countries France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg signed an agreement in the settlement of Schengen, symbolically located where Luxembourg's border intersects with those of France and Germany.
It was the inauguration of an era in which residents of and visitors to continental Europe have become accustomed to coming and going across land borders in particular as they please, without being halt at forbidding checkpoints and asked by querulous sentries for their passports, papers or the purpose of their journey.
All 27 members of the EU other than Cyprus and Ireland, are now members of what has become known as the Schengen area, as are Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein officially, and the microstates San Marino, Andorra, Monaco and the Vatican.
Effectively, Schengen is the definitive manifestation of the European dream, an eutopia, if you will, a continent united by free movement and frictionless trade, to the point that it scarcely seems remarkable that people might live in one country and work in another.
In Luxembourg, actual and spiritual home of Schengen, perhaps half its workforce commutes daily from a neighbouring nation.
As more than one utopia has discovered, however, such delirious visions have a way of getting rumbled by reality.
Starting next week, on September 16, for at least six months, Germany will resume checking the credentials of new arrivals.
Germany had already imposed controls on its land borders with Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Switzerland.
It will now extend these measures to all its other land borders, I.e.
those with Denmark and its fellow OG Schengen states of France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
The reason for this is a long, simmering issue which has been brought recently to the boil.
There was always an inbuilt shortcoming with Schengen, which was that from one day, week, month or year to the next, its member states would have no real idea who is on their territory.