politics 💼
Podcast episodes I enjoyed in March - Pat Nevin, the Irishness of Kate Bush, Nazi sterilizations, Mike Leigh, Nicholas Parsons, Naomi Klein, ice cream, the Taj Mahal, Boy George, Oliver Cromwell, and Lenny Henry's influence on Theresa May and Caitli
Word In Your Ear - Pat Nevin - “Pat Nevin has musical memories even better than scoring a diving header against Arsenal”….a sentence that could keep Socrates, Plato, and every phone-in host on every radio station busy for years
BBC Witness History - Nazi Eugenics - horrific, tragic and weirdly banal. A tough listen. “In July 1933, Adolf Hitler passed a law requiring the sterilisation of Germans with physical and mental disabilities. Helga Gross was one of those sterilised.”
Word in your ear - Nick Duerden’s talked to 50 pop stars about life when the big time’s behind you - Eddie Tenpole-Tudor (of the Swords of a Thousand Men, and Who Killed Bambi) got down to a shortlist of two for the Richard E. Grant role in Withnail and I
Give Kate Bush back to the Irish - Kate Bush is judged to score 9.5 on the Irish-o-meter
This Cultural Life - Mike Leigh - on the night of the second or third repeating of Abigails Party, the weather was dreadful, a strike had taken out ITV, and BBC2 was showing something ‘very esoteric’. 16 million people therefore watched Mike Leigh’s show
BBC - Political Thinking with Nick Robinson - The Theresa May One - the former PM relates how hearing Lenny Henry changed her mind about the Windrush scandal. Henry was giving a speech at a memorial for Stephen Lawrence and he said that the Windrush people had to produce four pieces of documentation for every year they had been in the UK
BBC - This Cultural Life - Caitlin Moran - aged 13, Caitlin Moran somewhat optimisitically applied for the job of Managing Director of Comic Relief. Lenny Henry replied “You wouldn’t want to be MD of Comic Relief, it’s really boring, but I’m sure you will fly like a comet through British society’’”. Moran says she lost the letter but knows it off by heart
Hancocks Half Hour - The Blood Donor - perfect, in my opinion
That Reminds Me - Nicholas Parsons - originally the host of Just A Minute was going to be Jimmy Edwards, but he was unavailable when the pilot was recorded
WTF with Marc Maron - Naomi Klein - “conspiracy culture often seems like it’s anti-establishment…its a gift to the establishment”
BBC Radio 4 - Archive on 4 - Scoop - Mr Whippy ice cream was based on the American Mr Softy. Mrs Thatcher didn’t invent either
This Cultural Life - Jarvis Cocker - Jarvis Cocker says that the lady in Common People is not the wife of the Greek Finance Minister
Linda Smith’s A Brief History of Timewasting - I’ve only heard one of these but it was very funny. There was a great line from Margaret John (Doris from Gavin and Stacey) to the effect that if life was a Countdown puzzle then she’s in the bibbedy-bibby-boo bit rather than the boom-diddy-boom bit. Or words to that effect.
Cardew ‘The Cad’ Robinson? Comedy’s great lost heroes remembered by Robert Ross - The Word in your Ear podcast - lovely chat about old semi-forgotten comedians, like Roy Jay, the “Spook Spook Slither Hither” chap. The podcast / book needs to be a multi-part BBC4 series
EP99: Yoon Suk Yeol–The Hated and the Dead - South Korean presidents can only serve one term. Not having any prospect of re-election seems to be a bad thing
Dave Rimmer’s classic Culture Club book is republished. Boy George hated it “as it was all true” - Word in Your Ear - Culture Club split their songwriting royalties equally, like U2 and REM
History Extra - Great Reputations - Oliver Cromwell - Oliver Cromwell’s was voted the 10th ever Greatest Briton in a poll in 2002. I guess ‘great’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘good’?
A short history of the Taj Mahal - the poet Rabindranath Tagore described the Taj as ‘a teardrop on the cheek of time’
I tried out the instance of Deepseek that’s being hosted by Nvidia
It’s still reluctant to answer questions about Tiananmen Square
David Hepworth in this week’s Radio Times
What makes 2025 a unique year is what won’t be happening. Nobody is currently making or even planning a James Bond film. It’s said the rights holders can’t agree on the gender, let alone the identity of the next actor to play 007. But the reason nobody is in a rush to regale cinema-goers with a further tale of how the fate of poor suffering humanity is in the hands of a sinister cadre of power-crazed tyrants flipping a coin to see who gets Mars, is this: it’s all come true and we all know it.
Nazi photo of Salisbury Cathedral
I found this on archive.org.
It gives me the chills. It’s an unusual view of the Cathedral, which sets up a certain dissonance, but more significantly it was part of a pack created for the Nazi invasion of the UK.
I wonder who took it, and when.
I think the house in the foreground is Rangers House. It’s on one of my running routes
People in Salisbury can, finally, pick up litter again should they want to.
Mr Putin stills owes me a pair of trainers that I threw away though.
I just finished the Walk-In. Great show about fascists and the anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate - very, very grim at times, but hopeful
I particularly enjoyed the brief appearance by the guy from Mrs Brown’s Boys (am I the only person in the UK that likes Mrs Browns Boys?)
I read in this month’s Record Collector magazine that:
[David Essex’s] performance of Che Guevara in Evita led to a personal invitation from Fidel Castro to meet in Cuba.
It seems odd that Fidel would want to meet someone mainly because they’d played the part of his comrade on stage
According to the Times, Kemi Badenoch has appointed 20 whips to look after her 121 MPs
According to Google, the DFe says that it’s good to have 1 adult for every 6 to 10 kids on a primary school trip…so Kemi is at the top end of that
A thought that consoles me a bit, hearing about the President Elect’s various appointments
Populists don’t tend to keep things together for very long
These people will soon have fallen out spectacularly and be condemning each other as incompetent, or closet socialists, or lizard-people, or something
Calling monarchs by their first names makes them seem cuddly
I’m listening to this excellent podcast episode about Anne Boleyn.
It occurs to me that part of the reason that King Henry VIII isnt always seen as the monster that he was is that we refer to our monarchs by their first names
You wouldn’t often hear a historian refer to ‘Benito’, or ‘Joseph’ or ‘Adolf’, but Henry Tudor is typically just ‘Henry’
It puts us on first name terms.
I wouldn’t compare the two, but it reminds me of the argument that people shouldn’t have called Boris Johnson just ‘Boris’, as it made him seem more mate-y and cuddly than he actually was
I read or heard a thing about the British class system recently. I don’t know where but it’s stuck in my head
if you shower before work then you’re middle class, if you shower after work then you’re working class
That’s what girls have to think about all the time
I was half-listening to Graham Norton the other night but I missed this
In a development that absolutely must not catch on, something interesting has happened on a TV chatshow....
Redmayne’s revelation that he was shown how to use a phone as a weapon if attacked proves quite the hoot, with Mescal riffing on the absurdity – “Who’s actually going to do that, though?” – Norton chiming in, and Denzel laughing along. Ronan is trying to say something but she gets honked over, before managing to cut through with a line for the ages: “That’s what girls have to think about all the time”.
Opinion - I don’t expect stone-cold truths from a chatshow, but Saoirse Ronan delivered one - Marina Hyde - The Guardian]
“The British constitution is puzzling, and always will be” - Queen Elizabeth, on a visit to a new college building, to a politics seminar
Desert Island Discs - Peter Hennessy
James Cleverly has been knocked out of the Conservative leadership race
This seems like fantastic news for Labour, and probably also for Nigel Farage….but it doesn’t seem like great news for the country
Good quote: “Churchill was a racist and an imperialist, and also the most important anti-fascist who ever lived”
Origin Story - Churchill, part 1 - Rebel Without a Cause open.spotify.com/episode/4…
It would be a shame if Joe Biden is mainly remembered as the guy that enabled the second Trump presidency
In defence of Rishi and Kier
A bloke called Robert, a member of the audience in the debate last night, got a lot of applause for asking this question
“Are you two really the best we’ve got to be the next prime minister of our great country?”
One of those two had a successful career in finance, the other had a succesful career in law, eventually running the CPS.
Both gave up very lucrative careers to go into politics. Both went onto lead their parties, replacing politicians who could be seen as disastrous
I don’t know what Robert has done with his life, but I’ve not done enough with mine to ask a question like that
I like a good , flowery political metaphor, and this is a particularly vivid one, from Andrew Rawnsley
“Rather than scotch Reform, going early flushed out Nigel Farage to play the role of smirking fire ship smashing into the side of the creaking Tory hulk.”
www.theguardian.com/commentis…
Allez les bleus!
Don’t vote for the far right, French sports stars urge public
From a bit in last week’s Times in which various writer-y types recommend books for the new Prime Minister (I hope)
The last thing the next prime minister should do is to read a book about political history. He’ll draw all the wrong lessons - they always do - then spend the next five years worrying about how he’ll be remembered. Since one of the most important political assets is a sense of humour, he’d be much better off with PG Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters, a valuable reminder that behind the stern façade of even the most formidable politician, there lurks the potential proprietor of a lingerie shop.
Dominic Sandbrook historian and columnist
