mattypenny

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

August

The World of Wodehouse Podcast by Nigel Rees - this is my favourite in this series of Wodehouse podcasts, as its largely made up of quotations, such as “It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine, and Lord Emsworth, gazing upon the dour man, was able to see at a glance into which category Angus McAllister fell.”

Origin Story: Shostakovich and Stalin – The Composer and the Dictator - I was a bit of a Soviet history geek, but i found the detail in this jaw-dropping

Iain Dale All Talk: 327. Lord Michael Heseltine - Heseltine says his proudest moment in politics was when the Labour council in Liverpool awarded him the freedom of the city. Boris Johnson once said he was a ‘Brexit-y Hezza’. I can see what Johnson meant, but i cant imagine he would ever have been awarded the Freedom of Liverpool. Was Heseltine the greatest Conservative Prime Minister we never had?

Origin Story: Rivers of Blood – How Enoch Powell poisoned Britain - I’ve always been fascinated by Powell. He said some interesting things, but he’ll only ever be much remembered for how wrong he was on race.

Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Hate Mail: A Scandalous History - includes the true story behind the film Wicked Little Letters.

Talk ’90s to me: George Michael! – From tabloid target to shamelessly gay pop icon - this is very interesting, particularly on the context of George Michael’s career. I remember reading an interview, which isn’t in the podcast, in which he was asked about the speculation around his sexuality. He replied something to the effect that he didnt know why so many people were interested, because statistically thet were all very unlikely to be affected one way or another.

Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Mussolini’s Favourite Daughter - with Caroline Moorehead, author of ‘Edda Mussolini: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe’. Edda’s husband was executed by the Germans. Mussolini could have prevented it, but didnt. Consequently, Edda’s son wrote a book with the title ‘Quando il nonno fece fucilare papĂ ’, which translates to “When Grandpa Had Daddy Shot”.

Mark Steel’s in Town - Salisbury - I didnt actually listen to this, this month, but it came up in conversation. Mark Steel researches and visits a town and does a whole stand-up show about that town. This is a recording from the night he came to my home town.I was in the audience,and it was fab

The Hated and the Dead - Joe Biden - this was fascinating, although it’s not much about Joe Biden, really. Allan Lichtman tals about his ‘13 keys’ model for predicting Presidential elections. Its worth istening to the podcast, and then looking at the Wikipedia page

TMS View from the boundary - Rory Kinnear - I have a friend whose parent was a TV and film actor, and I’ve wondered what its like to see a late parent popping up onTV. Kinnear has tracked down and watched many of his late father Roy Kinnear’s performances. He says he was pleased to recently find an ‘outtakes’ video from one of the shows he was in on YouTube, as he saw his father break character and be himself

TMS The ball of the century, 30 years on - some nice reminiscences about Shane Warne, and Mike Gatting facing an automated verion of that ball

Freah Air - Barbra Streisand - Streisand had an ‘interesting’ relationship with her mother. Her motherused to send her her bad reviews

The Rest Is Politics: US: 104. Trump’s Meeting with Putin and the Plot to Rig the Next Election - interesting discussion of gerrymandering - “the politicians are picking the voters, the voters aren’t picking the politicians”

Dan Snow’s History Hit - Hitler’s Early Years Hitler’s people were ‘brown shirts’ rather than ‘black shirts’ becuase Hugo Boss had more brown material

Witness History - Debbie McGee in Iran - Debbie McGee, best known as a famous magician’s assistant and for “So, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” was in Iran at the time of the revolution. Its sounds scary

Switched on Pop - The Beatles: “Now and Then” and Forever - i didnt listen to Now and Then properly when it came out, but both the song and this podcast are quite moving. One of the podcast guts suggests that the count of 1,2 at the beginning, rather than 1,2,3,4 refers to the number of Beatles still with us

Rocks Back Pages - Episode 164 : Kate Simon on Bob Marley + Sounds + Joni Mitchell - Kate Simon is a photographer. She was offered a lot of money to get a picture of Bob Marely lying in state. She said ‘yeah, sure’. Simon had no intention of doing so, but thought that saying that she would made it less likely that anyone else would do so

Hit Parade - This Ain’t No Party?! Edition How the first wave of CBGB punks became Billboard popstars, reshaping their knotty thrash into catchy bops. - Debbie Harry originally wanted to record The Tide is High with The Specials

The KLF torched ÂŁ1m “and are haunted by it daily”. John Higgs knows why 7 Nov 2023 ¡ Word In Your Ear - The KLF made 3 or 4 great singles, then gave up pop, and burnt ÂŁ1,000,000 in 50 pound notes. Their biographer John Higgs says they would have lost another ÂŁ5,000,000 by deleting their back catalogue

The Media Show - Return of MasterChef, No. 10’s TikTok Strategy, Bluey on YouTube, Investigating Tesla - according to training materials leaked to SĂśnke Iwersen, Tesla employees are asked to ‘incorporate the DNA of Elon Musk into their daily work’

Bad King James VI & I - Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society | Acast - Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, the historians who created the ‘Bad Gays’ podcast and book, say that Henry VIII’s criminalization of homosexuality was bound up with anti-Catholicism and the dissolution of the monastries

The Medieval Bishop’s Sex Workers - Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society | Acast - “Outside Medieval London’s city walls, Southwark was a land without rules.” About the ‘Winchester Geese’

How the Trump administration made a sewage crisis ‘woke’ – podcast | Alabama | The Guardian - how Mr Trump’s war on woke has left people with back gardens full of sewage

July

Test Match Special - Joe Root goes second on the all-time list - the guest interviewee is goalkeeper Joe Hart. He’s interesting on choosing between football and cricket, and on saving penalties

Origin Story: ICE – How Trump built an American Gestapo - I didnt know that ICE agents are deliberately anonymous.They domt typically have ID numbers, and often use unmarked vehicles

Witness History - Inventing the black box Witness History - one of the management objections to the black box was that it would record ‘more expletives than explanations’

Word in your ear - Billy Sloan, the man who interviewed Grace Jones in a bath - before Covid, and PPE, and the whole story, Rod Stewart fell out with Baroness Mone

Lost Notes Returns with the True Story of ‘Tainted Love’ - I know a bit about the story of ‘Tainted Love’, but this is worth listening to anyway. There’s a great recording of the song played in a Northern Soul club….and also i never knew that Gloria Jones co-wrote ‘I havent stopped dancing yet’, with Marc Bolan

That remnds me - Victor Spinetti - Spinetti says that his grandfather walked from Italy to south Wales for work - there were no immigration controls. He also says he was only in the Beatles' films because George Harrison’s mum fancied him

Soul Music - Pata, pata - I very much like Miriam Makeba’s Pata Pata, its a wonderful song. I didnt know Pata Pata means ‘Touch Touch’

After dark - murder at Stonehenge - like Marmite, some people ‘get’ Stonehenge and some don’t. There’s not many people in the middle. I very much ‘get’ it, but i enjoyed this podcast parttly because its a conversation between someone who dies and someone who doesn’t. There’s a nice bit about going to winter solstice….although imho the proper experience is to walk from Amesbury not from the visitor ventre.

When it hits the fan - a Right Royal Whodunnit - a tabloid photographer was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to capture a brief meeting between Charles' representative and Harry’s representative. How did that happen, and why?

History Extra - The history of Jamaica: everything you wanted to know - the words ‘canoe’ and ‘hammock’ both come from indigenous Jamaican words

Straight Outta Cobham: The Athletic FC’s Chelsea show: Champions of the world! Chelsea stun PSG to bring home Club World Cup - worth listening to, especially for the bits of commentary at the start 😀

The Hated and the Dead - Robert Mueller - Tom talks to Devlin Barrett, author of ‘October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election’

Desert Island Discs - Katherine Ryan - Katherine Ryan was sent to an entirely French-speaking school as a child, despite not knowing any French

The Rest is Entertainment - the longest running show in the world is The Shipping Forecast, which has been running for 167 years and started via telegraph

HIST 116: The American Revolution Lecture 10 - Common Sense - Joanna Freeman - Thomas Paine says that the person supporting the crown “ought to be considered as one who hath not only given up the proper dignity of man, but sunk himself beneath the rank of animals, and contemptibly crawls through the world like a worm.”

Private Eye podcast - Nigel Farage spends 22 hours per week on jobs other than being an MP

History Extra - Killers of the Flower Moon - the history behind the film

Round Britain Quiz - features a great music question. I recognised the songs - Mother and Child Reunion, Dream Lover, and Hong Kong Garden - but had no idea about the connection

BBC World Service - Witness History, Osmondmania, When Donny Osmond fans collapsed Heathrow balcony - The Osmonds were banned from Heathrow airport after a balcony collapsed when fans came to meet them

BBC Radio 5 Live - Midnight Meets With Colin Murray, Martin Fry - ABC’s first promo for their single When Smokey Sings was on Dutch TV. On the same show, and in the next-door dressing room, was Smokey Robinson

June

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 - 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.Im 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”

May

Rocks Back Pages - Episode 162 : Billy Bragg on forty roaring years + Skiffle + Woody Guthrie - “in the folk music community, you’re actively encouraged to grow older”

One Year: 1955 - the Hiroshima Maidens - this is in different parts tragic and heart-warming and shocking

Witness History - The Amoco Cadiz oil spill - the oil from the oil spill had ‘the consistency of chocolate mousse’

Poet Safiya Sinclair On Her Rastafari Roots - an uncomfortable listen, largely, about women’s subservience in Rastafarianism. There are no canonical texts, Rasta is primarily an oral thing, but women are excluded from the discussion. Sinclair also says how shocking it was to come from Jamaica, where all the statues are rebel slaves and abolitionists, to Virginia where the statues are slavers and Confederate soldiers

Great Reputations - Gandhi one of the speakers refers to the Attenborough film as “the Santa Clause-ification of Gandhi”

Word In Your Ear An Insider’s Guide To Goth by Cathi Unsworth (via Cruella De Vil and the Cure) - what Unsworth sees as Goth isn’t quite what I’d see as Goth, but i enjoyed this chat, and I’m very much enjoying the book

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics Eleanor Rigby - one of the interesting things in this episode is a discussion of the names in ‘Eleanor Rigby’. McCartney says ‘Eleanor’ comes from Eleanor LeBron, and ‘Rigby: comes from the name of a shop in Bristol. Father Mackenzie was originally ‘Father McCartney’, but he decided that wasnt right, so they picked ‘Mackenzie’ by starting at McCartney is the phone book and going forward. McCartney now knows that there is a gravestone for an ‘Eleanor Rigby’ close to one for someone with the surname ‘Mackenzie’ in Woolton cemetery, and believes that he must have seen it

Nick Drake – a whole new perspective by Richard Morton Jack - interesting chat about Nick Drake. Richard morton Jack interviewed 200 people for the book, but he says one of the best was someone who initially couldnt quite remember who Nick Drake was, and had no idea of his posthumous fame. Also includes a story about skinheads invading a Genesis show and getting the band to play the Hokey Cokey

Apple Podcasts -The brutal WW2 battle for Italy - James Holland is interesting on the dufference between interviewing veterans and reading their diaries and letters at the time. My grandad lived in the sames small village as Holland, and he was in both North Aftica and Italy. Its a shame their paths wouldn’t have crossed

Is Karen Carpenter pop music’s saddest story? - Lucy O’Brien’s book is called Lead Sister: The Story of Karen Carpenter. The ‘lead sister’ bit comes from a typo which Karen had made into a T-shirt

That reminds me - Maureen Lipman - top level anecdotage, involving Hugh Jackman, Maggie Smith, and the Queen

Short History of…..the modern Olympics - at the first modern Olympics in 1896, the winners of each event got a silver medal

April

One day in the British empire -History Extra - the saying is that the sun never set on the British Empire. An Irish politician’s version of this was ‘the blood never dries on the British Empire’

Naomi Klein - Full Disclosure with James O’Brien - Naomi Klein’s grandfather was a cartoonist who worked on Bambi and other Disney stuff. Walt Disney had him sacked and blacklisted for being involved in a strike

Not Just the Tudors - Witches of St Osyth - Marion Gibson says that “History without empathy is only ever half a story.”

Short history of Titanic - the ship of dreams - at the time of her launch, the Titanic was the largest moving object ever built

Ashley Blaker’s Goyish Guide to Judaism - 2 - this will be available online sporadically as and when the BBC repeats it over the airwaves. It’s very funny. Ashley Blaker simultaneously celebrates and pokes fun at his flavour of Judaism

Hit Parade - Insert lyrics here - Chris Molanphy discusses the rise and fall of instrumentals. “Hocus Pocus by Focus” is indeed fun to say.

The Hated and the Dead - Barack Obama - “Obama was often the smartest person and the room, and he knew it”. I wonder if Obama struggled to work with people who were (a lot) less smart

History Extra - The shoemaker who helped slaves escape the South - this is about Thomas Smallwood, an previously enslaved guy who helped to run the Underground Railroad. He wrote satircal pieces under the name of Dickens’ character Sam Weller

The Hated and the Dead - Barack Obama - “was he ready to be President? ……nobody ever is”

‘Swingtime for Hitler’ explores the Nazis use of jazz as a propaganda tool - Scott Simon has an audiobook called ‘Swingrime for Hitler’ in which he discusses the Nazis creating jazz records with propaganda and racist lyrics. One of the main guys in the band on the records went on to to be head of Polydor in Germany.

Word in your ear - Hooray! Tim Riley has a theory about everything in rock! - Tim Riley says that the Rolling Stones, and to a much lesser extent The Beatles, successfully sold African-American music back to America because, being white and English they had license to be more down and dirty, more rough and raw and more rock and roll than the orginal artists

March

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 ro 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’

February

BBC - Micky Flanagan: What Chance Change? - episode 1, the 1970s - Micky Flanagan talking about class. He talks to a sociologist (I think) who says something like ‘school is an interruption to working class culture’

Decoder Ring - What’s Really Going On Inside a Mosh Pit? The etiquette, science, and enduring appeal of a concertgoing ritual - the word ‘mosh’ possibly derives from someone mishearing Bad Brains saying ‘mash it down’

BBC - Independence Day UK - this is something of a curiosity. A 1996 “audio drama ‘midquel’ of the film Independence Day”. It’s fun to listen to bith for the story, and to hear the radio personalities and sounds of the time

Word in your Ear - Alexis Petridis - esteemed music critic Alexis Petridis says that Steppin' Out by Joe Jackson is the best single of all time. I can’t see it myself.

Word in Your Ear discussing ‘Pledging My Time - Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members’ with author Ray Padgett - Bob Dylan is asked why he signs autographs left-handed. Answers “if i signed right-handed they’d analyze my handwriting and find out all about me”

BBC - Whats so funny about….Comic Relief - the highest rate of donation during Comic Relief isn’t when the comedians are on, it’s when there’s a musical interlude. I guess people can more easily listen to music and donate at the same time. The highest ever rate of donation was while Adele sumg Somebody Like You

‘Fresh Air’ celebrates 50 years of hip-hop: Jay-Z - I like to hear successful people crediting their school teachers, both because its good that teachers get a bit of credit, and because it implicitly recognizes the luck involved in the person’s success. The happenstance of the right person having the right teacher at the right time. Here Jay-Z recognizes the impact that his English teacher, Miss Lowden, had on his life.

Sodajerker on Songwriting - Keven Rowland - the main guy from Dexys Midnight Runners talking about songs. He says he writes down the point he’s trying to get across at the bottom of the page before he writes the words for a song.

Revisionist History Guns Part 1: The Sudden Celebrity of Sir John Knight - part of the reason that Americans have guns is because, in 1686, a guy called Sir John Knight took his gun to a church in Bristol, although he seems to have left it at the door. On the podcast they say it’s a Common Law thing.

BBC Mastertapes - Paul McCartney - McCartney says part of the attraction of relocating to Kintyre was that it made it impossible for him to get to business meetings arising from the breakup of the Beatles

How Tickled Am I? - Ken Dodd - BBC - i regret not going to see Ken Dodd. At the time of typing this show isnt available…but hopefully it will reappear at some stage

Dan Snow’s History Hit - Charlie Chaplin - Chaplin had his first real success as a ‘drunk act’. He sat in a box in the theatre and interrupted and interacted with the performers. His biographer, Paul Duncan, compares it to the old guys, Waldorf and Statler, in the Muppets

On the trail of a Nazi war criminal - History Extra podcast - Josef Mengele was, for a time, listed under his real name in the phone book in the Argentine town in which he lived

BBC book club - Philip Pullman - Northern Lights - I’d either forgotten, or I never knew, that the title of Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy comes from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. “Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,”

Will Hodgkinson on 70s Singalong Pop - Word in your Ear - Middle of the Road, who had hits with Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep and Soley Soley, were for a time Sophia Loren’s backing band. The story goes that she started listening to their music after going to complain about the noise

Midnight Meets - Stephen Morris - “[Blue Monday] was great for DJ’s because it was so long they could put it on, then go to the toilet. So it worked on many levels”

Little Atoms 847 - Anna Funder’s Wifedom - interesting and persuasive suggestion that Animal Farm was, to a greater or lesser extent, a joint work by Orwell and Eileen O’Shaughnessy

Did our ancestors really think the world was flat? History Extra with James Hannam - Aristotle proved the earth was shaped like a ball, not like a disc, or any other flat thing

BBC Great Lives - Sophie Scott on Hattie Jacques - Hattie Jacques was nicknamed ‘Hattie’ either because she liked hats, or because in blackface she was supposed to resemble Hattie McDowell

Full Disclosure - Polly Toynbee - Ms Toynbee says something like “Ever since Ancient Greece people have been in love with the idea of democracy, but they havedespised the people that do it”

Word in your ear - Robbie Robertson, Billy Connolly, Bridge Over Troubled Water and the “fake history” of Punk - Michael Parkinson’s last interview with Muhammad Ali didnt go well. Parkinson’s dad was a big fan of Ali, and agreed it was a poor interview. Parkinson asks his father what he thinks he should have done differently….“you should’ve thumped him”

January

ABC Conversations with Anna Funder - The invisible Mrs Orwell - “I lost my habit of punctual correspondence during the first few weeks of marriage because we quarrelled so continuously & really bitterly that I thought I’d save time & just write one letter to everyone when the murder or separation had been accomplished.” Eileen O’Shaughnessy, six months after marrying George Orwell

The Hated and the Dead - Golda Meir - Golda Meir fled Russian pogroms as a child, but went on to become Prime Minister of Israel

BBC - When it hits the fan - Inside the Sun’s historic apology to Prince Harry - “'reputation'' is partly about what others think of you, but as importantly its about what you think of yourself”. David Yelland talks about his time as editor of The Sun

CBS You Are There - The Charge of the Light Brigade - i was surprised that the Charhe of the Light Brigade was a big enough event in the USA for CBS to make a show about it

Word in Your Ear - Will Hodgkinson - after discussing the cover of a Roxy Music record, “we’ve had quite a cohort of people of your age whose first memory of pop music was that they found it rather frightening”

BBC Bookclub - Val MacDermid - Val Mcdermid says something like “we all know, in our heart of hearts, that this isnt the way in which crimes are solved

BBC Witness History - Brownie Wise: The creator of Tupperware parties - the sales director of Tupperware was called Brownie Wise, which seems quite appropriate

A short history of….. Highwaymen - Dick Turpin was originally a butcher, who fenced poached venison. He was eventually arrested after shooting a rooster.

The Most Conservative Country Songs of All Time (“Try That In a Small Town” is just the latest) By Rolling Stone - the songs are largely a mixture of cynical, sad and stupid imho, with at least one the exception of ‘Okie from Muskogee’. Includes a nice story about Nixon asking Johnny Cash to cover ‘Okie’, and something called ‘Welfare Cadillac’…and Cash doing ‘What is truth?’ instead

BBC Book Club - Simon Armitage on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - I found a footnote in an old periodical once that said the small bit of land where my great-grandmother had a house was once the home of Gawain’s descendants….honest!

BBC Great Lives - Stamford Raffles - I didnt know Raffles founded London Zoo

BBC Book Club- Ben McIntyre on Agent ZigZag - on Eddie Chapman, a safe-cracker who got recruited by German intelligence during World War Two and won an iron-cross, but then started working for MI5

Smokey Robinson : Bullseye with Jesse Thorn - there’s a nice story in this about Tracks of My Tears. The ending was changed after what sounds like a it was a weekly team meeting at Motown. I dont think ive ever been in a meeting thats been quite that productive

BBC Book Club - Art Spiegleman on Maus - Spiegelman was originally planning a book about race in the USA, featuring Ku Klux Kats

A Short History of the Fukushima Disaster - I’m not sure about whether nuclear power is a good thing, but the bravery of the Fukushima workers was incredible

Joel Stein - Story of the Week - The Implosion of a Leading Anti-COVID Vaccine Group - Joel Stein gets interviewed about a story he’s written for the FT about a populist anti-lockdown outfit

EP93: The Arctic Five - The Hated and the Dead The Arctic Five are the five countries with coastlines on the Arctic Ocean. They are: Canada, Russia, Norway; through Alaska, The United States; and Denmark, through Greenland,

A Short History of…the Irish Potato Famine - there was a lot of this, too much of this, to be honest, that i didn’t know

Previous years' recommendations are at:

2007

How to win a duel | The National Archives - listened to an interesting National Archives podcast on duelling

In Conversation with The Rt Hon Sir John Major KG CH - London School of Economics and Political Science - listened to a podcast of “In Conversation with The Rt Hon Sir John Major”. Interesting