Podcast bits worth listening to this month - Patrick Stewart, Ben Travers on WG Grace, AUKUS, David Kynaston, Disney, Coffin Ships,, some brilliant stand-up about Northern Ireland, the bloke from Judas Priest and a proto-fascist
Stuff I’ve enjoyed listening to
Fresh Air - Actor Patrick Stewart - Patrick Stewart says he is responsible for his colleague in Star Trek being pronounced as the English ‘day-ta’ rather than the American ‘dah-ta’
TMS View from the boundary - Ben Travers - the 93-year-old playwright remembers WG Grace as having a “curiously falsetto voive in such a large frame”
The Hated and the Dead - Australia’s Aukus sceptics - “Australia’s greatest defensive asset is distance…..Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney "
[1960s Britain: smashing the status quo?
- History Extra podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/bb/podcast/1960s-britain-smashing-the-status-quo/id256580326?i=1000631611944) - David Kynaston quotes Dominic Sandbrook’s “killer fact” - the best selling LP of the 1960s wasn’t Sgt Peppers, it was the Sound of Music
History Extra - Slave Traders - the men who built a brutal empire - a fifth of the enslaved people transported across the Atlantic died on the journey. A further sixth were too sick to sell once they got off the ship
History Extra - Disney at 100 I either didnt know or had forgotten that the Diney corporation wanted to create a theme park of American history, called Disney’s America. I’m not sure whether it would’ve been A Good Thing, but it might have been interesting.
Borderline: A postcard from the edge of the Union - “One day I’ll tell them all about their grandad, and what happened to them, but just not yet”. A very sad line from Patrick Kielty’s stand-up show on the BBC…but the rest is very funny. Information, education and entertainment in every line.
Wtf with Marc Maron - Rob Halford - apparently, the case against Judas Priest was based on a judge’s ruling that the First Amendment right to free speech wouldn’t protect backwards messages on records
The Rest is Entertainment - Titanic, tattoos, and Trade Wars - the Titanic film was pre-digital cinema. The reels for the film were three miles long
RTE The History Show - Myles talks to Cian McMahon, author of the book “The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine” - during the Famine there were cases of people committing small non-violent crimes so that they can be sentenced to transportation to Australia. The author says that conditions on some migrant ship were indeed dreadful, earning the description of ‘coffin ships’, but many weren’t that bad for the time.
The Hated and the Dead - Gabriele D’Annunzio - Fascinating podcast episode about Gabriele D’Annunzio, who Mussolini called “The John the Baptist of Italian fascism”