podcasts 🎙️

Audio that I have liked, or been moved to comment about, or both.

Note that I have put stuff in quotes sometimes…but these will only be approximations of what people have said. I’ve heard most of this stuff while running or walking the dog so I can’t be very precise

March

Cecil the lion - Witness History - the bloke who shot Cecil paid $50,000 for a hunters license. As they say in the podcast, this would have bought a lot of nature reserve land

Where There’s a Will: Finding Shakespeare Episode 8: Faith And Wonder - Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement ends when three stars are visible in the night sky. Also “Exit, pursued by a bear” comes from A Winters Tale.

The Rest is History - Walt Disney: The Great American Storyteller - Marge Champion was the ‘model’ for Disney’s Snow White. She married one of the lead animators, Art Babbett

Great Lives - Katherine Rundell on E.E. Nesbitt E.E. Nesbitt, who wrote the Railway Children and Five Children and It, was a founding member of the Fabian Society

Short History of….. Rasputin - the main source for the description of Rasputin’s assassination is similar to a death in Dostoevsky’s the Landlady

How The Fast Show and Cold Feet defined ’90s Telly with John Thomson - John Thompson describes the music in his parody music show as “fire in a pet shop jazz”. Nice.

The Lion, the Priest and the Parlourmaids: A 1930s Sex Scandal - The Rest Is History - Siegmund Freud visited Blackpool more than once, but I imagine the dates wouldn’t work for him to have seen the ex-Rector of Stiffkey in his barrel

Short History of….female spies in World War Two - the life expectancy of SOE radio operators after deployment was six weeks

Dan Snow’s History Hit - Folk Christmas: Yule, Solstice and Ancient English Traditions - in, I think, the early 20th century, ‘holly trains’ used to run to transport freshly cut Holly from the New Forest to London

Short History….of Hadrian’s Wall - during the Roman invasion of Britain, the Emperor Claudius turned up on an elephant

Origin Story: 15-Minute Cities – How Urban Design Entered the Culture War - the phrase ‘15 minute city’ was coined by a chap called Carlos Moreno in 2015. It seems to me like the daftest of culture wars.

Museum of Pop Culture with Josh Widdicombe: The Spice Girls (Part 4) - Geri wrote that

Ashley Blaker’s Hyperfixations - Professional Wrestling - Big Daddy had been previously known as ‘the Battling Guardsman’. The name ‘Big Daddy’ came from Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

How To Win The World Cup: David Seaman on the importance of squad harmony - in one match the police came into the Arsenal dressing room at half time after an altercation between Ian Wright, Seaman and a policeman

The Rest is History - The Assassination Of Abraham Lincoln - just after the Civil War, Lincoln read this speech from Macbeth to his travelling companions “Duncan is in his grave; After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well; Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing; Can touch him further. . .”

Cautionary Tales – Captain Coward and the Blame Game - one of the causes of the Costa Concordia tragedy was a tradition that ships sail closer to the coast when passing a senior crew members home. The maitre d' on the Concordia came from Isola del Giglio in Tuscany, where the ship hit rocks

BBC - You’re Dead to Me, Emma of Normandy - Emma of Normandy was twice queen of England. First as wife of Æthelred the Unready, then as wife of Canute. The ‘unready’ in ‘Æthelred the Unready’ is a pun on his first name, but ‘ræd’ means ‘advice’, so unready means something like ill-advised. His first wife was called Ælfgifu, which means gift of the elves. When Æthelred married Emma he renamed her Ælfgifu too

Hannibal: Roman Bloodbath at Cannae (Part 4) - this episode is pretty grim, but I was interested to learn that the podcast has about the same number of premium subscribers as the capacity of Villa Park. Villa Park holds 43,205. Multiplied by 7.99 subscription per month, The Rest is History would be earning £345207.95 per month, plus advertising. The guys must be comparatively well-paid historians. Good for them.

The Rest is Entertainment - Tim Davie on BAFTA, Mistakes and the BBC’s Future - Tim Davie says that the BBC has 300 employees who can’t return to their home countries, because they would be arrested

Short History Of…, C.S. Lewis - the Lewis family’s wardrobe is now in the Wade Center at Wheaton College in Illinois

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics - Let It Be - McCartney says that his mother, Mary, came to him in a dream and told him to ‘Let it be’

You’re dead tomorrow me - Old Norse Literature - the goddess Freyr had a chariot pulled by cats

The Book Club: 6. The Secret History: Dark Academia, Greek Myth, and Murder - I’d forgotten that the twins in The Secret History were called Charles and Camilla

February

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics - Helter Skelter - McCartney says something that hadnt crossed my mind. ‘Helter Skelter’ doesnt mean anything in the USA, or presumably in much of the rest of the world

Documentary on One: The Year General Franco Stole the Eurovision - some great detail in this. The original Spanish singer pulled out because he wanted to sing the song, called ‘La la la’ in Catalan. He could have been jailed for doing so. Phil Coulter, who wrote the UK entry, says that the Spanish song sounds a bit like ‘With a Little Help from my Friends’. I cant disagree

Blood and Gold (with Dan Snow) | Cautionary Tales - King John of Bohemia was killed at the Battle of Crecy. He had been blind for many years, but said “Far be it that the King of Bohemia should run away. Instead, take me to the place where the noise of the battle is the loudest. The Lord will be with us. Nothing to fear. Just take good care of my son”

The Great Train Robbery - Dan Snow’s History Hit | Acast - there was no physical evidence linking any of the Great Train Robbers to the train they robbed. The physical evidence, fingerprints, was all at the farmhouse that they stayed in afterwards. It’s likely that they wore gloves during the robbery, but most of them took off their gloves at the farmhouse

BBC Sounds - Short History Of…, Alexander the Great - it had somehow escaped me that Alexandria was named after Alexander. Also, he had a Macedonian father, Philip, and an Albanian mother, Olympias

January

Revisionist History - Blue Seattle with Cameron Crowe | Development Hell - Leon Russell: why do you keep making these shitty movies. Elvis Presley: last thing I remember….I was driving a truck. Great podcast in which Cameron Crowe talks about and plays the demo’s from his unmade Elvis film

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics - Give Ireland Back to the Irish - Give Ireland back to the Irish was number one in Ireland and Spain. It was written after McCartney had hear John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s The Luck of the Irish. imho, the Oko/Lennon song is better

Short History of…..Venice - Venice was never conquered by so-called “barbarians”, so the Venetians “viewed themselves very much as a kind of a Rome unfallen”

The Rest is Entertainment - David Walliams, Podcasts on Netflix & National Treasures - “I must say to all those armchair media analysts who always thought they understood talent pay and that the BBC had spent years overpaying Gary Lineker. I wonder, do they think he’s getting paid less by Netflix than he was paid in a year by the BBC? the answer might shock you…… if you’re an idiot”

Little Atoms 969 - Natalie Haynes' No Friend To This House - the Golden Fleece was really a Golden Sheepskin. Bad news for the Golden Ram.

Witness History - Diary of life in a favela - Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote a best selling diary of her life in a favela in Sao Paulo, called ‘Beyond all pity’ in the UK. Her neighbours were angry about what she said about them, and threw stones at the family when they moved out. She was originally from Sacramento, Minas Gerais

Word in your ear - How Springsteen went “six deep”, fictional rock hacks and who’s more conservative than Liam Gallagher - “you can’t have a snappy conversation with Bruce Springsteen, because, Lord, he was born a rambling man”

The Penguin Podcast: episode 6 – books to screen with Robert Harris - Harris says that having a film made of one of his books is a bit like becoming a grandparent - you get a lot of credit with none of the responsibility

The Hated and the Dead - Nayib Bukele in El Salvador - H.L. Mencken’s said that “The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe”. Ricardo Avelar explains how this idea is being pushed to extremes in El Salvador

Little Atoms 904 - Jon Savage’s The Secret Public - David Bowie was seen as a one-hit wonder until he hit with Starman, which came out a few months after he declared he was gay. Until then being gay would have been seen as death to a career in pop.

The Rest Is Politics: Leading: 169. Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia vs. Musk, AI, and the Battle for Truth - Jimmy says he tests LLM’s by asking about his wife, who has some profile on the internet, but not an exhaustive one. The LLM typically comes up with things that are very plausible but not true. Possibly the least plausible bit of information has been that she is married to Peter Mandelson

Short History of the Pinkerton Detective Agency - Alan Pinkerton was incolved with Chartism in the UK, then in the Underground Railroad in the US before working to suppress trade unions in later life

You’re dead to me - The Bloomsbury Group - according to Dorothy Parker, the Bloomsbury Group “lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles”

Betwixt the sheets - Real Wives of Dictators | Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s Wife - i didn’t know that Nadya’s suicide followed a public row with her husband, during which she threw something at him

Short history of….the partition of India

Evil Genius with Russell Kane -Serge Gainsbourg - the fictitious Melody Nelson came from Sunderland. Gainsbourg liked the sound of the word ‘Sunderland’

Origin Story: Socialism: The Finale – What’s Left? - “George Orwell was the patron saint of socialists who find other socialists annoying”

The Louis Theroux Podcast: S6 EP8: Jimmy Carr discusses the secret to his comedy, being a late bloomer, and controversial stand-up gigs - Jimmy Carr justifies playing in the Riyadh comedy festival because he likes Saudi Arabia’s ‘direction of travel’

Short History of….. Shakespeare - Shakespeare’s father was a ‘family friend ' of Robert Catesby, the leader of the Gunpowder Plot

Talk ’90s to me: Stay Another Day – The story of East 17’s accidental Christmas classic with Tony Mortimer - Tony Mortimer says that at least some of the lines in the song are about the death of his brother

Americana Music Live with Drew Holcomb and Malcolm Gladwell | Revisionist History - “people in Memphis have a hatred of Nashville baked into their childhoods”

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics - Band on the Run -McCartney on the first WINGS tour “we only had 11 songs…so we had to repeat some of them”