Steve Boggan Follow The Money

Annotation

What do you do if you want to get underneath the skin of a country, to understand its people and feel its heartbeat? You can follow the rest of the tourists, or you can take the advice of Watergate reporter Bob Woodwards source, Deep Throat, and follow the money. Starting out in Lebanon, Kansas the geographical centre of America journalist Steve Boggan did just that by setting free a ten-dollar-bill and accompanying it on an epic journey for thirty days and thirty nights through six states across 3,000 miles armed only with a sense of humour and a small, and increasingly grubby, set of clothes. As he cuts crops with farmers in Kansas, pursues a repo-woman from Colorado, gets wasted with a blues band in Arkansas and hangs out at a quarterbacks mansion in St Louis, Boggan enters the lives of ordinary people as they receive and pass on the bill. What emerges is a chaotic, affectionate and funny portrait of a modern-day America that tourists rarely see. Follow the Money will be 'Book of the Week' on BBC Radio 4 in July 2012.