Podcast episodes I enjoyed this month - The Tower of London, Trevor Noah, accents, Paul McCartney, Harry Worth, Mother Shipton, Hitler, Bush vs. Broccoli, Spotify, Steve Rosenburg, Steve Coogan, Shane MacGowan, Karl Marx, Glen Matlock, Apollo13, Hun

These are the podcast episodes that I particularly enjoyed last month.

Episodes I’ve enjoyed previously are on the podcast pages for this year, for 2024, 2023, and for 2022 | mattypenny

Dan Snow’s History Hit - The Tower of London - the three lions of the the England shirt are probably based on three leopards that were in tthe Tower. Also….it does seem like the Krays might have been the last people imprisoned in the Tower, before they were (in)famous

The Louis Theroux Podcast: S3 EP3: Trevor Noah on growing up during Apartheid, landing ‘The Daily Show’, and being friends with Bill Gates - Trevor Noah speaks highly of the 1970s UK comedy ‘Mind Your Language’

Little Atoms 873 - Rob Drummond’s You’re All Talk - there is very little regionality to Australian-English accents, probably because English is relatively recent there, and had little time to develop before the spread of TV and radio. My accent is unusual in English-English because of its ‘roticity’ - I pronounce the ‘r’s in arm and car

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics Too Many People - McCartney says that there was some discussion of the band carrying on as the Three-tles immediately after Lennon left. I think i remember they referred to themselves as the Three-tles at the time of the Anthology series

How tickled am I? - Harry Worth - Harry was advised to ditch his ventriloquist act and concentrate on stand-up by Laurel and Hardy

After dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Mother Shipton: Tudor Prophetess of England’s Doom - Mother Shipton is like a Yorkshire Nostradamus, although the history is sketchy. The first written record of her existence is from 100 years after her death

Did Michael Keogh Save Hitler? - it seems that he did…. although one of the contributors says that an Irishman wouldn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. In any case he had an interesting life

George H.W. Bush and broccoli: The president’s war against a vegetable. - George Bush Senior didn’t like broccoli. He said that it probably killed the dinosaurs.

A Very Australian Scandal - Sir Eugene Goosens was the inspiration behind the Sydney Opera House but he was forced to leave Australia after a scandal involving importing pornography and occult material. The architect of the building, Jørn Utzon, didn’t attend the opening ceremony as he had fallen out with the politicians involved. BBC reporter Trevor Philpott said “It was a score of towering shells. It was a cluster of seagulls spreading concrete wings. It was a huddle of sailing boats with billowing concrete sails. And it was an unmitigated bitch to build.”

The rest is entertainment - Do actors really lose the weight and are you paid for playing dead? - to earn the UK minimum wage from Spotify you need to have 567,000 monthly streams. The closest to that figure that the podcast guys could find was Alison Moyet

BBC Media Show - Steve Rosenberg, Zanny Minton Beddoes, new Victoria Beckham documentary and the ethics of secret filming - BBC Russia correspondent says Russian newspapers are a lot more free to discuss problems in Russia than the TV is. Putin doesn’t really care about the newspapers

The Louis Theroux Podcast: S6 EP1: Steve Coogan on falling out of love with Alan Partridge, playing Jimmy Savile, and sobriety - the weirdness of playing Jimmy Savile was increased by Coogan having a flat in the old TV Centre, and then travelling to act on a set which was a replica of the old TV Centre

BBC How tickled am I - Norman Evans - Norman Evans earned £1,500 per week as a pantomime dame in the 1940s or 1950s…..mind you a good pantomime dame would be well worth it

A drink to Shane MacGowan, Spinal Tap rebooted and lunch with Randy Newman …Word Podcast 287 - “Pop music occasionally throws up someone of outrageous intelligence. Shane MacGowan was one of them”

Word In Your Ear - Pauline Murray’s kids have finally found out what Mum did in the Punk Wars Ep. 584 - Murray says that if you asked people to stop spitting, then the spitting typically increased. I tend to forget about the spitting of those days, and the violence

Word In Your Ear - Glen Matlock and the ‘Sliding Doors moment’ that sparked the punk rock fuse Ep. 583 - the Sex Pistols got banned from most of the venues on, I thin, the No Future tour. They still had to traipse across the country and turn up at each venue to stand any chance of getting paid

Origin Story: Karl Marx – Part One – The Fighter - In the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote that “Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common”. He did talk rubbish, sometimes.

A Short History of ….Apollo 13 - I confess i use the Short History podcasts to get to sleep. The production is mellow, but they are all interesting enough that if i dont drift off I enjoy learning something. This episode however kept me wide awake. It was far too exciting

The Hated and the Dead - Hun Sen - Cambodia was one of the greatest victims of the Cold War [between the Soviet Union and the West] and it could be one of the greatest victims of a second Cold War [between China and the West]

Angela Barnes Cold War Secrets - Barnes interviews Anna Funder, author of ‘Stasiland’, who says that 1 in 7 East Germans was a Stasi informant