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Well, I'm back on the road with a microphone - but this time in my wife's nippy little Peugeot!     There are a so many aspects of customer service but one of them is how you explain what you're going to deliver and how you're going to do it and, given the stories in this episode, that is something that is very easy to get wrong!  Utlimately, clarity is king!   Cheers P. If you enjoy this podcast, please head over to Mastering Portrait Photography, for more articles and videos about this beautiful industry. You can also read a full transcript of this episode. PLEASE also subscribe and leave us a review - we'd love to hear what you think! If there are any topics, you would like to hear, have questions we could answer or would like to come and be interviewed on the podcast, please contact me at paul@paulwilkinsonphotography.co.uk.  Full Transcript: EP148 - Clarity Is King [00:00:00] So for those of you with sharp ears, you may have noticed that that does not sound like my regular Land Rover biscuit tin on wheels, and you'd be absolutely right about that. I shall tell you the slightly sorry tale of what's happened to my Land Rover, uh, later in the podcast. In the meantime, I'm heading up to the photography show in Sarah's car, which is, frankly, as nippy as hell. [00:00:26] It's like driving a go kart. It's tiny, it's quick, it's a lot of fun to drive. It's not my Land Rover, but hey, I'm Paul, and this is the Mastering Portrait Photography Podcast. [00:00:40] So hello one and all, it is a very, very wet Sunday here in the UK. It's one of those, it's one of those days when I look around me And everything looks monochrome. You. You wouldn't be certain if this was an entry in a photographic , competition, I'd be accusing the author of putting a, a plugin on it that has sucked the color, sucked the life outta the scene. The sky is well gray, the road gray, the walls. The trees and hedges as I drive past them, sort of a grey green. Even, even the bright yellow markers on the roundabout signs that I've just driven past are not iridescent yellow. They're sort of a dull ochre. [00:01:44] Everything about today, except for my mood, is grey. And actually, it's been a little bit of a mixed month. Now, I know I said at the beginning of the year, and this, I said also at the beginning of the year, You never set yourself. New Year's Resolutions, because they're impossible to live up to, and if you want to do something, just set out about doing it, whatever time of the year it is, just set about doing it. [00:02:05] I set about doing a podcast a week, and then crunched into some of the busiest couple of weeks, I think, I can remember, which I'm now, well, sort of surfacing from. It hasn't, it's not exactly clear As in, the diary isn't clear, there's a lot going on but there are also chunks like today when I'm gonna spend the best part of three hours sitting in a car. [00:02:26] Now I know three hours, to my American and Australian friends, is like driving down to Starbucks for a coffee. For us in the UK, that is not an insignificant amount of time. So I'm going to record a podcast or two and then maybe over the coming weeks I'll get back into the rhythm of it and get these things rolling. [00:02:44] But there is so much going on story of the Land Rover so let's deal with some of the slightly sadder news over the last couple of weeks or last month or so. It started with an accident. Excellent couple of days up with the BIPP, that's the British Institute of Professional Photographers, or Professional Photography up in Preston, and then had a great meeting and spent a lovely evening with the guys for, with Martin and the guys there. [00:03:12] Discussing things like the monthly competition, how we're gonna, promote it. It's been very successful so far but of course, there's plenty more we could be doing. And then on The following day, went across to record a podcast, went across with a friend and a photographer, Sean Conboy, to meet a photographer who I had never met personally, but knew about, a guy called Stuart Clark. [00:03:35] Now, Stuart is 97, nearly 98 years old, and one of the sharpest, most interesting photographers I think I've had the privilege of meeting. We sat in his lounge and recorded, probably about an hour and a half, I have a conversation about photography, his life in it, his history in it, the things he has seen change, and when I say the things he's seen change, I mean fundamentally, you know, he started on glass plate cameras, and is now in the digital age, I mean that's in one lifetime how far it's come. [00:04:11] Almost in one set of stories we've gone from the origins of photography, maybe not quite, there's a little bit before that of course, I mean it started in the 1850s. But you know, almost the origins of photography as we know it through to today, and it's a fascinating interview, and as much as anything else, just listening to his voice on the microphone, I sat at the beginning of this interview and we popped a microphone in front of him and I put some headphones on, and as he spoke, it was the most breathtaking sound, he's quite quietly spoken, But the mic, and the room, and the ambience, and the stories he was telling, I mean, it was electric in my headphones. [00:04:51] I actually gave the headphones over to Sean so he could have a listen, simply because it was so beautiful. I'll cut that down, it's just a long interview, and I need to just figure out how I'm going to share that. But it was a wonderful thing. Wonderful thing. And at the end of it, took a few portraits of the man with He said, oh, I've got all my cameras. [00:05:09] We said, oh, get them out, get them out. And of course, he went looking for them and couldn't find them in the attic. I mean, Sean and myself, slightly terrified that we've sent this 97 year old into his roof space to see if he can find a camera. Anyway, he eventually returned with a Raleigh, a TLR. [00:05:25] Twinlens, Reflex, Rolleiflex. Beautiful camera, and so I've got some pictures of him with that, so a little bit of his history. Anyway, roll o'clock forwards to that evening, I leave Leeds head down the M1, which is the in the UK, for, again, my listeners around the world. It's the motorway that runs straight down the middle. [00:05:44] of the UK connecting the north to the south. It connects all the way up to pretty well, it goes up to Scotland pretty much and then drops straight into London. And I was heading down the M1 when suddenly, 70 miles an hour, I'm in the fast lane, they, there is, there wasn't really a bang, but you felt this kind of thunk, and then the engine's vibrating, I can smell oil, oh man, the smell, it's, if you've owned cars for a while, And you've had them go wrong, you just know, when you can smell oil like that, there is nothing but trouble. [00:06:19] Coming I planted my foot on the brake pedal and manoeuvred my way across a couple of lanes of reasonably fast moving traffic. Sort of slan slapped it into the hard shoulder as quickly as I could, because if you're running an engine, You can smell oil, it's vibrating, the last thing you wanna do is keep going because you are at that point destroying what is left of your engine. [00:06:45] So I lifted the bonnet to have a quick look, just to make sure there wasn't anything obvious. Sure enough, there is oil everywhere. Engine's not good. That's not going. So, luckily, I say luckily, this is, it's my life. I spend my life in a car. And we have recovery, RAC recovery. So I rang the RAC. [00:07:04] They said they'd be there within an hour because I'm on, I'm in live, I'm on the edge of live traffic. This is the, probably the busiest motorway in the UK and I'm sitting on a hard shoulder in the pouring rain by now. And I keep getting the updates and, you know, it's like, it says it's going to be an hour, then it's an hour and a half, then it's two hours. [00:07:21] It's, it's four degrees, which is pretty chilly. It's raining and sleeting. So I've, thinking, well, I don't really, and this is a lesson, I don't have any rain gear in a car. Luckily, I had a couple of blankets in there that we use for, if I want to sit people, if I'm doing a shoot somewhere out and about, I've got it in the back of the car, just in case I need to sit somebody down on the ground. [00:07:41] So I wrapped myself in a pair of picnic blankets, sat under one of our wedding umbrellas. Luckily I got some battery packs so I could keep my iPhone charged up and sat and watch Netflix. And of course I'm watching the arrival time of the RAC and it keeps creeping out and creeping out. And eventually this orange van arrives he takes one look at the car, sticks his head under the bonnet and says yeah, you've blown your engine, that's not going anywhere. [00:08:04] I can't tow you, he tells me, because the limit for towing a car as heavy as the Defender is one mile, and I'm six miles from the next available exit. So, he says the next, they'll send the recovery vehicle, proper recovery vehicle out, and I say, well, am I supposed just to sit here in the rain then? And he says, yep. [00:08:24] And so, for the next couple of hours, yet again, I'm out in the rain, I keep my phone charged up, keep watching Netflix. It turns out Netflix, I like watching Netflix anyway, it's always on in the background while I'm editing. It turns out it's quite a useful distraction, because by the time the recovery vehicle turned up to actually put it onto the flatbed, the guy looked at me and he just said, Simply, get in the cab, get warm. [00:08:47] I could barely move, my legs were shaking, I was beginning to get hypothermic. You stay out of the car for safety reasons, but I'm beginning to think it was more dangerous being not in the car than it was being in the car, which is an absolute nightmare. He had to open the door for me, my hands were so cold I could barely pull the handle. [00:09:04] I climbed into the cab, which turned out to be like a sauna, and sat and defrosted as he hitched up the car. and took me halfway home. Yeah, halfway. Because I was so far away, they couldn't drive me all the way back to home. So of course I'm in touch with Sarah, I've told her what's going on. They parked me at Northampton Services where they're going to send another recovery vehicle out for me. [00:09:27] And again, it says it's going to be an hour and a half. And I wait and I watch as the time increases, two hours, three hours, four hours. It's not clear, they never, they're never clear about how long it's going to take. And they, they deliberately obfuscate, I think, so that you can't say, well you said you'd turn up then. [00:09:44] They give you a range and then they keep telling you the range is creeping out. And, apart from the gas, I'm not the only person that needs recovering. And the driver did give me a. a heads up. He said to me as he left, he said, you might be a while because you're no longer in live traffic, so you're no longer in danger. [00:10:02] You're just sitting in a services. Now I would agree with him about the danger bit, but sitting in Northampton services at what were we now? Sort of midnight, 11 o'clock I think I arrived there. Maybe 10. 30 we arrived. And it's not a place you'd want to sit. There's nobody else around. Then luckily for me, I have a, you know, guilty pleasure in McDonald's and KFC and things. [00:10:23] Can't help myself, the smell of it. And I thought, I'll get myself a McDonald's. And so I got, I did, I got myself a burger. Some coffee and some chips, and sat chewing on those. And within two minutes of me buying it and getting it, I noticed that McDonald's had changed their sign. The big signs outside say that it's open 24 hours. [00:10:43] Big sign. McDonald's. 24 hours. Five minutes after I buy my burger, they put up signs that say, Sorry, only serving coffee. So that's not Open. That's not, that's a complete breach of contract as far as I'm concerned. They said they'd be, I'm thinking it's alright, I'll just get a burger and if I need one in a few hours I'll get another one. [00:11:02] Nope, none of that. I could get a coffee but couldn't get a burger in spite of the sign saying 24 hours. I'm gonna come back to this point because it's quite important for us as photography businesses. Anyway, I'm sitting there. The great and good of those that probably need a little bit of help from mental support and social services came and went, came and went, came and went. One or two drug deals were going on out in the car park. I don't know how, the police don't spot it. You can see it a mile away. So it's a fairly lonely thing. So I recorded a podcast. I recorded what was going to be this podcast. I got my recorder because it was in the car. [00:11:37] Obviously, I'd been recording with Stuart. And so I sat and I recorded a pretty, I think it was a pretty good, quite emotive podcast, I sat clutching my coffee because obviously that's now all that McDonald's was serving. It's fairly lonely except for the rantings of one chap who was telling me all about his relationship with the Queen. [00:11:57] I don't think he was very well, if I'm honest. I also don't think he was sober. So I recorded this, what I think was a rather excellent podcast, very Radio Four very radio documentary, you know, lots of background sounds and lots of life real life going on. And at the end of it, I sat back and thought to myself, that, that is going to be an excellent podcast, and I noticed that I hadn't hit the record button. [00:12:23] I was just so tired by now and a bit stressed. just forgot to do it. And so that was the end of that really, and I never, I didn't have the heart to do it again, even though I did have the time, because I was there for another couple of hours. I think in the end I waited there for four hours front to back. [00:12:39] Recovery vehicle, the phone rings, he says, I'm here, but where are you? And I look across six lanes of moving traffic, and he's on the other side of the motorway. Heading North. So, I'm heading South, so I have to direct him somewhere. Surely the guys have told you where I am, and they had, but not very well. [00:12:58] And he had to drive up to the next junction, turn around and come back and pick me up. And then, on it goes, and, and, we drop the car, I nominate to drop the car at our next stop. The guys that service it, my local, well it's not local, it's about 10 miles away, but the garage that services the Land Rover on a regular basis. [00:13:15] I dropped it in there lay by, switched on the immobiliser, locked it all up and Sarah picked me up and I got home at just about quarter past four in the morning. Now having left Leeds at about Two in the afternoon to get home at four in the morning was, well, a little bit heartbreaking. By now I was fairly fed up, fairly cold, incredibly tired, and I knew I had to wake up really early to let the guys know at the garage they've got a service to land over and also to get on with our day that was already in the diary. [00:13:49] So rang up the garage the next day, he didn't sound at all surprised. I'm glad to hear from me having spotted my Land Rover and he knows If the Land Rover's there, it needs something doing. And, obviously I got the engine, I went over, I got the engineer out to have a look at it, and even he rubbed his chin a bit. [00:14:05] And the only good news was there was still oil in the engine, which gives you hope. If there's oil in the engine, you haven't seized it. That's the good news. Anyway, 24 hours later, I get a ring from the engineer who says Found the problem, you've got a hole in Piston 2. Now, I don't, I'm not a mechanic, but I've been around engines all my life, and I know that if you hear the line, you've got a hole in Piston 2, you're in trouble. [00:14:33] And so it has proved to be, because to get a piston out to replace it, you have to take the entire engine apart. There's no getting away from it. The engine has to basically be dismantled, almost certainly taken out and put back in. Or in a Land Rover, they can actually lift the bodywork and service the engine on the chassis, but it depends what they're doing. [00:14:53] On this, I haven't asked the guys, I haven't been back to get it yet, and this is three weeks ago. So, So he explained to me that if an injector is maladjusted and is running a little bit rich, the additional heat from the fuel burns a hole through the aluminium. And I said, well, should I have done something? [00:15:08] And he said, no, there's no way of knowing. It's just not something that you could detect. And it's something that used to go wrong a lot. He hasn't seen it for a while with the later engines, but this one, he said, we used to see this quite a bit. For the past three weeks, they have been replacing the hole or replacing the pixel. [00:15:22] Piston with the hole in it in my Land Rover. I got a phone call yesterday, Saturday, but unfortunately I was in a shoot, and this is how the phone call went. He said, We've road tested your Land Rover. It's ready to drive. You can come and pick it up, but please bring your piggy bank with you. I kid you not, he used the phrase, bring Piggybank with you. [00:15:43] So I couldn't pick it up yesterday, can't pick it up today, can't pick it up tomorrow because I'm running a workshop, so I'll go over on Tuesday. I still don't know how much it is because the garage hasn't told me, in spite of me asking because it's a labour led cost. So the parts have been 1000 plus VAT, I know that much. [00:16:01] The labour is 75 an hour and I reckon, he reckoned it was 4 5 days work. So I know I'm in it for quite a large amount of outlay. Unplanned, bad time of year. I've got to find, who knows, anywhere between four and seven thousand pounds, who knows. So again, no clarity. Something I'm gonna come back to. [00:16:27] However, rest of the week, not so bad. And Another story. I think about podcasts, right? I could just tell you the facts, but it wouldn't be that much fun to listen to. Well, I don't think it would be fun to listen to. I wouldn't listen to it. 20 years ago, and I only know this because I picked up the light that I still have and looked at the Flash Center's service and and Quality Assurance sticker on it, and the light I bought second hand was serviced by the Flash Centre in 2003. [00:17:00] There's a sticker on it, and I remember going to the Flash Centre in London, scratching my chin, and I can't remember the guy's name, he's still in the industry, he doesn't work with the Flash Centre anymore and I, he said, can I help? And I said, yes, I want my first strobe, please. He said, I said, I'm happy to buy second hand, I don't know whether this is something I'm gonna do, but Would you recommend? [00:17:20] And we looked at the shelves, and, and, if you've ever been to the Flash Centre in London, it was brilliant. It wasn't a posh shop. It was, in some ways, it was like the drum shops I used to go to when I was a working musician, and it's just got racks and racks and racks of stuff. You know, there'd be a posh rack somewhere with all of the new bits and pieces from then, Bowens and Elinchrom, but then there'd be sort of, you know, Shelves and cupboards with interesting little bits of second hand kit and cabling and softboxes and umbrellas And it was brilliant and I was like toy a kid in a sweet shop And he said I think this would do you and he lifted off the shelf a second hand Elinchrom 500 so that's an Elinchrom 500 as this is a A strobe but it's got the old school analog sliders on it. [00:18:09] There were two sliders, one that controlled the strobe power, and one that controlled the power to the modeling light. And if you wanted them to stay the same, you move the sliders together. The slider's been designed to be close together, so you move them up and down, which, to me, having worked on audio mixing desks for concerts in the music industry, was absolutely brilliant. [00:18:32] Perfect. It was absolutely brilliant because I knew, it felt completely natural. Now, of course, one of the things was you never had the same Bower twice. It was already a second hand light when I bought it, and not a new one. So, whenever you set the lights in the studio, you had to reset your aperture to suit. [00:18:51] Because the things, it didn't matter. It didn't matter that you put a mark against the sliding scale. The sliders were so worn that lighting power would go up and down all the time. But it was metal cased. It's got a fan. It was quite loud. It's quite loud. And I bought that light. I. I bought a big tripod and I bought an Octabox, a six foot Octabox. [00:19:14] That was the three things I bought. A tripod, an Elecrom 500, an Elecrom tripod, Elecrom six foot Octa. Took it home and for the next year or two, practiced lighting. It wasn't part of our business for quite a long time because I never really had the space to do it. At that time I didn't have a studio. [00:19:34] I just knew that was the road we were going to go down, or I thought I might go down. But I didn't understand studio lighting, and so I needed time to get my shit together. So, I used to practice, I bought a polystyrene head, so there's a shop in London called the London Graphic Centre, which sell stuff. They sell art pens and graphics and it's two glorious floors of anything you can think of to be creative. It's absolutely fantastic. And in there, for some reason, they sold polystyrene heads. I don't know what they're for. You know, if they were in a hat shop, I'd understand it. If they were in a wig shop, I'd understand it. [00:20:14] In a graphics shop? I've no idea. What do you do? Sit with your pen in your hand looking at a fictitious head going, What do you think of this? Having a conversation with Polybeads, and I don't know. Anyway, I bought one. It was like three pounds or something. Carved out the eyes like something from a CSI episode. [00:20:31] I got a penknife, carved out the eyes, got a couple of big glass marbles, and shoved them in. I mean, it was quite macabre, but if ever, I'm found out to be a psychopathic, sociopathic, you know, mass murderer. Everyone will go back to this head and say, Well, we could see it then. Look what he did to the eyes. [00:20:49] But I popped those in because what I wanted to understand was how I move light around, what happened to the face, And what happened to the reflections in these glass marbles? It was just a very simple way of me being able to, without having models, because I didn't have a reputation back then, I didn't have a client base back then, I didn't have a steady stream of people that would come to the house to be photographed, but I needed to understand it. [00:21:15] So this polystyrene head, with its macabre eyeballs, was my go to. I stuck it, I skewered it, like Queen Elizabeth would have done. And off with the head, I said! I skewered it on a pole of some description and stuck it in the middle of the room. And, that's how I learned to light. It was all with this Elinchrom 500, the, the, this brilliant bit of light, and I still own it. [00:21:40] I still have it, it's still in the attic, unfortunately the tube was blown, you can actually see that there's black in there. The rest of it I'm sure still works so if I actually sent it back for a replacement tube, I could probably get it working again. I don't know that I will maybe I will, maybe I will, because the footnote to this story is that last week, Elinchrom asked me if I would be an ambassador. [00:22:03] for them. Now, this comes off the back of a conversation where I'd looked at the Elinchrom lighting at the London the Society's Convention of Photographers in London, and got chatting to the guys, Simon Burfoot and the, and the guys, uh, at Elinchrom, people I've known for quite a long time. He used to work at the Flash Sensor, he's now looking after Elinchrom, so I got to chatting to him about the lights had a look over the product, had a look at what they're producing, both in terms of the technology, in terms of the roadmap in terms of the light that these things produce, and the light has the same quality that I remember with my Elinchrom 500. [00:22:38] Now the thing is, if you look at the cover of the box, Book, Mastering Portrait Photography. That was shot in a study in somebody's house with my very first light. It was shot with my Elinchrom 500, my 6 foot Octa, which was wedged in because the ceiling was only just 6 foot, so we had to wedge this thing in on its tripod in their room with some black velvet behind. [00:23:01] Pinned to the curtain rail, and it's still, to this day, one of my favourite ever shots. And, when you go to Elinchrom, one of the things I've always loved about them is the colour accuracy of the tube. Now, every time you ignite um, Xenon in a tube, it gives off a very particular light. For all sorts of reasons with the, to do with the design of the circuitry and the light, getting that right is really important. [00:23:26] And Elinchrom have always had this really beautifully consistent quality of light out of the units. Now I moved away from Elinchrom about six, seven years ago, I think to Profoto for the simple reason that And maybe it's a bit longer, but for the simple reason that when I went looking for a battery powered, rather than a mains powered monoblock. [00:23:48] Now a monoblock strobe is simply when everything is in the head, as opposed to a battery pack and the small flying heads. I didn't want that. I wanted something that was self contained. I wanted something with a battery. I wanted something with no cabling. And so when I went to Elinchrom at that time, they didn't do anything. [00:24:04] I think even now I have eight Elinchrom lights up in the attic. And I had to retire them because I went over to ProPhoto who produced the B1. The B1 is an excellent light. It's brilliant. There's, you know, it did everything and has done everything that I would ask of a light over the years. Beautiful kit, beautiful lighting, beautiful modifiers. [00:24:26] They're having said that I've kept all of my Elinchrom soft boxes because the Rotalux system is the best in the world and I still prefer it to my Profoto stuff. But nonetheless, you know, there's no doubting the quality of the Profoto units, and there's no doubting that I've created some images that I really like with it, But I've never felt the same nostalgia as I have with Elinchrom. And so when Elinchrom showed me their kit at the convention, it's you know what, I would absolutely love, love to switch back. It's about time that I thought about it. And so I asked the guys if I could get a price on a full rig of kit, switch over to Elinchrom and it went a little bit quiet if I'm honest. [00:25:12] I'd sent the email, I'd listed out what I wanted and then I got a quick message saying was I around the other morning, could they pop into the studio and come and see us, and Simon and Mark from Elinchrom popped into the studio, had a look around, and during that conversation asked if I would be an ambassador for Elinchrom. So for the first time in quite a long time I got a little bit emotional about kit. I do get attached to kit. Even though the Profoto stuff is brilliant, I've never felt that way about that. But with Elinchrom, it was that first light. It was that first moment that I learned to read and and understand Studio Lighting. [00:25:54] And to be asked to be an ambassador is, it has a couple of angles on it. I mean, the first and most important is that what an honor, you know, this is a lighting company who I have so much of an emotional connection with, and here I am 20 years after buying my very first secondhand light, here I am as an ambassador for them. [00:26:17] So I'm quite emotional about that. But also the kit is so. Phenomenal. There's something about the way it works, the way it operates. It feels like photographers designed it for photographers. So, I'm very happy. They've lent me some kit at the moment. Now, I have a bit of a challenge tomorrow. Tomorrow, I'm running a workshop. [00:26:35] It's a workshop. All around, using studio lighting of various types in small spaces. Because if you go out into location, you very often end up in a boardroom or a kitchen. Well, the other day we ended up in a storeroom for computer equipment. It was quite bizarre where we were working. And you have to very quickly read the room, figure out what you're gonna do, and create something. [00:26:59] Magical from it. So, that's what we're doing tomorrow. And of course, it's premised on using my strobes. Now, understandably and I suppose predictably, Elinchrom are not that keen that I continue to use Profoto kit, my Profoto lighting for my workshops. So at 9. 30 tomorrow morning on the day of workshop, I am expecting a delivery of a whole load of Elinchrom kit that I'm going to actually then use for the training day. [00:27:33] Interesting, huh? It's a good job that not only did I learn to use light, but I'm really quick to get my head round the technology. Now they did leave me the other day with an Elinchrom 5 and an Elinchrom 3. And fortunately I have a trigger. I have a dedicated Elinchrom trigger anyway. Bye! From some Rotolight kit, which also uses, thankfully Elinchrom radio telemetry. [00:28:00] So, I've got the, I've got the Elinchrom trigger. Now, as an aside, here's a little bit of detail, right? This is just a bit of detail. It doesn't, it has no bearing on anything, really. My Profoto dedicated Nikon trigger. The something or else, something or else. Is it AirTTL, TTL, TTL? Unit. If I leave the batteries in it, it goes flat in about 10 days, even if it's switched off. [00:28:25] I pulled the Elinchrom trigger out of its box, having not used it as a trigger in probably three years, forgot that I'd left the batteries in there, which is a dreadful thing to do, never leave batteries in kit when you store it, but I had, so I hit the power button thinking, oh, that's not gonna work. Nope, fired up instantly. [00:28:43] There is a joy when you're When someone designs kit properly, there is a joy in it. This Elinchrom trigger has had those batteries in it for as long as I can remember. I can't remember the last time I used it as a trigger, and it fired up instantly. I know for a fact my Profoto unit would have been dead in 10 days. [00:29:02] And as designers of kit, this is a plea to everybody who designs for our beautiful industry. It's for good. Goodness sake, think this stuff through properly. You know, if you're going to turn something off, it shouldn't be draining enough current to flat a pair of AAA's in 10 days. It just shouldn't. [00:29:21] Because many of us don't pick up our triggers in those kinds of time frames. Many of us would just be out, you know, location photographers that use the strobes intermittently. So think about that. Think about how, um, The kit is going to be used in design. Even the circuitry has to be designed in a way that makes sense. [00:29:40] You know, Elinchrom, this unit, it's been in its box. It's still boxed. It's been in its box for a few years. Powered it up because I'd forgotten to take the batteries out. Nope, quite happy. Right, where do I go? Downloaded the new firmware because it's so old that It doesn't actually know about or didn't know about 3. [00:29:57] They weren't on its list of recognized Elenchrom lighting. Connected it up, and off it went. Just genius. That's I'm sorry though, that is an aside. Anyway, tomorrow morning, tomorrow morning, I've got a handful of delegates we've got a room full of people, a couple of models, and some lights that I have never ever seen. [00:30:13] ever used in anger. It's going to be an exciting day. Other good news this week so that's, I mean that is my good news this week, but other good news this week is that I finally managed to get our broadband account sorted out. We live in funny times my broadband contract had come up a little while ago with BT. [00:30:32] Um, I've got both the house and the studio are on the same contract because primarily we use it. all of the bandwidth for when I'm working, and I like to be able to work from home a lot. And we're paying, I don't know, I think nearly, I think we're paying 300 quid a month for the two. So I'd rung BT a couple of weeks ago and said, right, it's time to renew because I'm out of contract. [00:30:53] I will stay with BT although there are other providers in the village now, their reputation is awful, so I can't build my business on that. And while BT might be a little bit dull. They're also the most reliable. This is British Telecom. It used to be British Telecom. Isn't it interesting how a brand evolves to be known as BT? [00:31:12] But it has to have such a long history. You know, if you say BA, we know we're talking about British Airways. If you say BT, you know you're talking about British Telecom. You know, I've no idea in any more what ICI Stands for, we know what it does though. Interesting to see if the BIPP, the BIP, or the British Institute of Professional Photography can evolve the same way. [00:31:33] Time will tell. Anyway, BT, so I rang them up spent the best part of half a day on the phone because you have to. I'm sorry, we're experiencing a very high volume of calls at the moment. Your call is important, and we will get back to you as soon as we can. Yeah, right. There's only, there's one call handler, but I have no idea, but there's certainly not enough. [00:31:52] So anyway, I got through a long conversation, got both contracts more or less nailed, or the one contract with both lines more or less nailed, and our bill came down by two thirds. My speed went up, I'm on a digital line, my bill came down. You have to think, maybe I was being stitched before, or maybe I built a bad contract before, but anyway, that was half a day well spent. [00:32:15] So, and it's, I mean, it's like, you know, it's 300 quid a month, or was. It's now for the two lines, 100 quid a month and I've got gigabit down, 100 megabit up, and life is pretty good. But the delivery cycle of it, I've no idea. I mean, I get random boxes, I get random texts from DHL, or FedEx, or Royal Mail, as to what's going to arrive when, it's I couldn't make head nor tail of it. [00:32:39] Sarah said, when are they connecting us? Well, I've got this date, Monday the 11th. Okay, Monday the 11th, that's brilliant. Monday the 11th, that's when they're going to connect everything up. Monday the 11th. Right, are we sure about that? Yeah, Monday the 11th, I've got an email here. Monday the 11th. F Thursday, before that, what's that, 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th, so Thursday the 7th, I get I walk into the office 10 o'clock, and Michelle says, phone line's dead, and I'm like, can't be dead. [00:33:05] Why would it be dead? I look at the hub for the broadband, the broadband's working okay, but no telephone, and they say, oh, you are kidding me. They've switched it over four days early. Now, I'd had some text saying the engineer was working on our line, and the engineer had completed his work, but at no time, at no time, did it tell me which of the two lines were being affected and what they'd done. [00:33:30] So I rock up on Thursday to find no telephone. Now, again, fortunately, we'd had the digital phones arrive. They were in their boxes, but I hadn't set anything up yet because I had been told it was all going to happen on Monday the 11th of March. Have I got those dates right? Yeah, I'm sure it's Monday the 11th of March. [00:33:49] Monday whichever day it was, only the Monday of March. And, so I'm very frantic, because at this point, anybody that rings us up isn't going to get through. I didn't know even if we had voicemail because I got, none of it is done as far as I'm concerned. So we rattly, a bit of a rattly morning as I sort of ripped out the old phones, put in these new digital lines, logged in, set it all up, got admin rights, because of course it's basically VoIP is nothing more than Zoom without pictures. [00:34:18] So. And I got all of that set up and all of it is now working, but it got me thinking, and here we go. This is the point of this bit of this podcast. Now, I don't know whether the second half of the podcast is gonna be the second half of this podcast as I drive back from the photography show or whether I'm gonna release that as an entirely self-contained episode. [00:34:39] I guess it depends how much news I find at the photography show. But let's assume. This is a self-contained driving to the NEC Podcast, and it's done. This is the point of this podcast. I've told you three stories, okay? I've told you about the RAC, I've told you about the garage, and I've told you about British Telecom. [00:34:59] All of these have been suppliers that I would say on the whole, I rate pretty highly, the RAC. They've got me out of a pretty horrible situation. I pay money for that. By the way. It's not like they're, they're definitely not a charity. It's not the NHS, but. They rescued me when I needed it. Admittedly, they weren't clear about when and how, and it took quite a long time, but I'd have been in a lot of trouble if I couldn't have got off that motorway, and the car was undriveable. [00:35:26] Our garage. I know they fixed it because they always fixed it. But I do wish they'd be clear. I do wish they'd tell me how much, to the best of their knowledge, it's going to cost me. I don't like obfuscation. I don't like not knowing how long it's going to take. They've had the car for three weeks to do a week's worth of work. [00:35:44] Again, I know they've had to order parts. In a sense, I'm an experienced buyer. And then there's BT, who They told me certain things and then did them in a different order on different dates and put me into a flat spin when they disconnected the phone line to my business. All of these are quite important. [00:36:04] It's about clarity. It's about being clear with your client. It's about When you say you're going to do something, you do it. Now there is a theory about under promising and over delivering. So being, having things connected early, in theory, should be a good thing. But it's only a good thing if your client's ready for it and their new phone's ready. [00:36:25] If they're not, what you've basically done is disable part of their business for part of a day. Clarity is really important. For me, even now, I go back through the BT, various texts and emails, and even I After the event, couldn't tell you exactly what was supposed to happen, and the order. I still have some stuff to do, I still have to send some kit back, but, because I've got these two lines into two different buildings being contracted at the same time, none of the emails make sense, because they send both emails, or rather they send emails for both lines, on the same contract number. [00:37:02] It's never clear exactly what is going on. It's not clear. that some kit is going to work and some kit is not going to work. It's not clear quite what should have happened. And that can't be a good thing. That can't be a good thing when I'm sitting here telling you about three suppliers who I rate actually pretty highly. [00:37:21] I've chosen them through years of experience, I've picked them out of the crowd, and I've decided who I'm going to use. Are they all working now? Well, as far as I know, they are. RAC rescued me, the garage has rung me to say the car is ready, and I have Absolutely electric connectivity in our building or buildings, but the confusion is unnecessary. [00:37:43] The confusion, had that confusion happened in the sales process, I don't know whether I would have bought. It didn't happen in the sales process, it happened in the fulfillment side. So the sales guys, they got it nailed. When I bought my RAC, Membership, I don't know how many years ago. The guy was utterly convincing. [00:38:05] When I bought my BT contract, the guys were utterly convincing and of course when I go to the garage, well, the first time I went to the garage, I went reputationally because somebody else had recommended them. I bought instantly because they were They were utterly convincing. The problem happens in the fulfilment stages. [00:38:27] And as such, I think we need to keep an eye on that. We need to be very clear to our clients, exactly what it is that we're going to do, and when we're going to do it. I was doing a wedding pitch yesterday. And I had to be, and I've, I mean I've well practiced at it, I've done it a long time. I say to them, okay, here's the process. [00:38:45] I actually talk them through the fulfillment process. We talk loads about the wedding, but then I go through to the fulfillment process, and I suspect occasionally I lose a gig because of it, because maybe it sounds just a little bit too boring. Precise. I don't know. But, I said to the client yesterday, who are buying with us, by the way, you come to the studio two to three weeks after your wedding. [00:39:10] That gives you enough time to have a short honeymoon. If it needs to be longer, or you want it shorter, we can do that. Two to three weeks, you're gonna come, you're gonna have lunch. During that meeting, we are gonna show you a slideshow. We're gonna melt your hearts. I do say this. We're gonna say, I'm gonna soften your wallet, [00:39:27] We are gonna make life very difficult for you to say no to any pictures. Then we're gonna bring up those pictures and we're gonna, we are gonna help you choose the pictures that are going to go in your album. It's a lovely process, but it's not an easy process, so we're going to give you some lunch. [00:39:42] It'll take a few hours. At the end of that, you're going to pay for the extra images you put in your album. I'd say that a little bit softer, but that's what I'm saying. You're going to settle up with us as to the images that are going to go into your album, on top of the ones you've already paid for as part of your initial contract. [00:40:00] Then, We're going to give you a USB that has watermarked images of everything we've shown you, and the slideshow of the, uh, that we showed you in that reveal. We license the music, by the way, with the MCPS, so you can have any music you like. So, you let us know what music you like. That's what your slideshow will be set to. [00:40:19] It'll be on a USB. At the end of the meeting, when you've settled up with us, that's what you take away with you. The next morning, we start working on that design. Within a week, maybe two, depending on what's going on in the studio, we will send you a PDF that shows that design. You have a look at it and decide whether you like it or not, or if there's anything you'd like to change. [00:40:40] And the things we're looking for from you are A. Do you like the design? And B. Is there anything in any of the images that needs additional retouching? Fire exit signs, those kinds of things. When you eventually sign off the design, and you can go backwards and forwards as much as you like, by the way, because the most important thing is that you love your album more than anything else in the world. [00:41:02] You're going to have that for the rest of your lives together. You must love it. You make as many changes as you want. Yes, okay, by iteration number seven or eight, we might be rolling our eyes at you. But we will still do it, and we will get it perfect for you. When you're happy, you sign that off. We will do two things. [00:41:20] Firstly, we will order your album and any copy albums you need. I don't say it like this, I'm saying it really clearly because I'm driving a car at 70 mile an hour and I'm trying to make this clear. But nonetheless, this is the process, right? Uh, I say we will order that album and any additional copies you'd like. [00:41:35] Eight weeks after that, as a maximum, you will have your album in your hands. The actual order time, by the way, is shorter than this, but we always say, 8 weeks, because then I'm under promising and over delivering. You will also receive a link online that has a link to the finished images. The edits that we've done for you without the watermarks, because part of what we do is any image a client puts in their album, we will give them a digital copy of that as part of the contract. [00:42:06] We charge quite a lot of money for this, so it's fine that they can have the files, but we only release the finished files. When the album design is signed off. Why do I do it that way? Well, it gives me a couple of things. Firstly, it gives me a lever to pull when people are saying, Can I have a file? And I say, Yeah, as soon as you sign off your album. [00:42:23] The second thing is, The only hi res files that go out are fully retouched and finished. There's no danger that an artist Unretouched image can end up in a big frame on someone's wall. So that's why we do it that way. And I'm really clear about that fulfillment process to the client. Now, I think there's other bits of our business where we're not so clear and I'm figuring out those areas and trying to work out and make sure that everything we do is super, super clear because the experience I've had with three suppliers who genuinely, I rate, genuinely. [00:42:58] I'm happy to pay for their services. I think it's been a little bit muddled and a little bit muddy. And that, well, that can never be a good. Do you know what? I'm going to round this podcast off there and I'm going to make the journey away from the photography show another edition which I might release at a later date because that gives me extra content, right? [00:43:20] For those of you, for those of you who are part of our workshop community, we released a new challenge last night. So we, inside, anyone that's been on our workshops, you get invited into a secret and private Facebook group. The only way you can get in there is by being on one of our workshops because that is creating a super concentrated little audience, a little community rather. [00:43:42] of like minded people who can ask questions in a way that is safe, a way that is positive, and you get feedback from others in there. It's a really nice community. On top of that, people like Simon and Mark from Elinchrom are inside the group, so that if you have any specific questions about flash photography not only will you get answers from people who run the group companies based around this kit. [00:44:06] Of course they're going to bias their answers towards Elinchrom, but hey, I'm an ambassador for them. So what else would you expect me to say? Likewise Jeremy and Miranda and the team from Neal and the team from Graphistudio are in there. So if you have any questions about albums and those kind of things, it's just a really nice place to be. [00:44:21] But we run these image challenges. The current challenge which I released last night is the one chair challenge. Take a subject, take one chair, just one chair, and pop a photograph into the community. And then at the end of the month, I have a run through them, pick out my favourite, do a video critique, and set a new challenge. [00:44:41] And we did this one because the article is featured in Professional Photo Magazine this month from us. We do an article every month, but this particular one is of Lucy in a chair, and it's just a simple shot of a teenager. Just looking super cool in what is my Nan's old throne, old armchair. So that's that community thing. [00:45:02] Workshops, if anyone's interested in any of our workshops, just Google Paul Wilkinson Photography Workshops. You will find them they'll pop up in Google and And then you can see what's going on at the moment. The tomorrow's workshop is all about small spaces and it wasn't, but it now is about how to use Elinchrom lighting in small spaces. [00:45:21] We'll see quite how that adventure goes, so to wrap up, let's overtake this tanker in tons of spray. Thank you for listening to this podcast. It's kept me entertained for at least half of my journey up to Birmingham. If you have any questions, please do email paul@ paulwilkinsonphotography.co.Uk. I've had a couple of really nice emails in the past few weeks. Apologies. I know I've been a little bit slow in getting back to everybody, but it really has been a . a tiny bit, a tiny bit crazy at the studio but also head across to masteringportraitphotography. com which has a heap of stuff all around this beautiful skill of ours or topic of ours the joy, the creativity and the business of portrait photography. [00:46:08] Head over to masteringportraitphotography. com and do please subscribe. Hit that subscribe button. I don't know how you're listening to this right now, but I'll lay you a bet there's a subscribe button there somewhere. Subscribe to the podcast and then it just arrives. You know, you didn't even know you were going to listen to me today, and there you are. [00:46:26] Forty minutes later, whatever it is, I've no idea how long I've been driving and talking forty minutes later, you are sitting thinking, Well, that was worthwhile! Do you know what? I'm really glad I hit that subscribe button. Also, if you get a chance, leave us a review. [00:46:39] If it's a nice review, stick it somewhere public. If it's not such a nice review, email it to me, and then we can make changes to make things better, which is a constant process of evolution. Me and Darwin, well, we'd be great mates. And whatever else, as I head my way north, be kind to yourself. Take care.

Check out the transcript here.Medical Gaslighting: Multiple Sclerosis' Dirty Little Secret? Authored by Rachel HorneWith thanks to Rachel Horne.Rachel Horne is a journalist and MS advocate. Rachel was diagnosed with MS in 2009, age 43. She has written extensively about the disease and has co-authored a number of papers published in The BMJ, Neurology, Nature Reviews Neurology and other prestigious journals. Rachel has also appeared on BBC's Radio Four to talk about living with MS. In 2022, she set up the Rachel Horne Prize for Women's Research in MS – an international, annual award which recognizes a woman scientist for their outstanding contribution to women's health-related research in MS. Rachel is an Honorary Research Fellow at Queen Mary University, London and has a strong interest in promoting gender-equality and diversity in the MS community. She is on social media: @rachelhorne19. Have you experienced medical gaslighting? We'd love to hear from you, get in touch to share your comments and suggestions about this episode, or for future guests and episode topics by emailing education@ms.org.au  Reach out for support:MS Plus Connect 1800 042 138 or email connect@msplus.org.au

Thank you for listening to Write On! Audio, the podcast for writers everywhere brought to you by Pen to Print   Our listener contribution this month is from Millie Murray.  Born in 1958 to Jamaican parents. Millie has lived all of her life in the east of London.  She writes fiction and non-fiction for both young people and adults. Her first attempt at short story writing, ‘The Escape', was published in the 1986 anthology Watchers and Seekers. Many other short stories followed, including ‘A Passage of Time' for Radio Four's Caribbean Drift.  Millie;s career has spanned, acting, dance and theatre production.  She works with Community and Youth Services in the London Boroughs of Newham, Barking and Dagenham offering creative writing and motivational development workshops in schools.     You can follow Millie on Instagram here https://www.instagram.com/milliemurray_writes   Find out more about Millie Murray's books at her Goodreads page here https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/566833.Millie_Murray   and visit her Royal Literary Fund biography here https://www.rlf.org.uk/fellowships/millie-murray/      We're always delighted to read your contributions so if you'd like to see your words in Write on! or hear them on this podcast please get in touch. Please submit to:  https://pentoprint.org/get-involved/submit-to-write-on/   Thank you for listening to Write On! Audio. This edition has been presented by Tiffany Clare and produced by Chris Gregory. Write On! Audio is an Alternative Stories production for Pen to Print.   This podcast is produced using public funding from Arts Council England    

Vesna Goldsworthy is a novelist, memoirist and poet with many years' experience in teaching creative writing and English literature. She came to academia after a career at the BBC and she continues to produce and present radio programmes. Her first novel Gorsky (2015) was the New York Times Editor's Choice and Waterstones Book of the Month, as well as being long-listed for the Baileys Prize and serialised as Book at Bedtime on BBC Radio Four. It has been translated into fifteen languages. Her second, Monsieur Ka (2018) was one of the Times' 'Summer Reads' choice of best new novels.Her internationally best-selling memoir Chernobyl Strawberries (2005) was serialised in the Times and read by Goldsworthy herself as Book of the Week on Radio Four. The Crashaw Prize-winning poetry collection The Angel of Salonika (2011) was one of the Times Best Poetry Books of the Year, described by J.M. Coetzee as a 'welcome new voice in British poetry'.Goldsworthy's Inventing Ruritania: the Imperialism of the Imagination (1998) is recognised as one of the key contributions to the study of Balkan and European identity. Described by Slavoj Zizek as an 'extraordinary book', and by the Washington Post as containing 'enough research to found an academic department', Ruritania is a much translated volume which continues to be taught at universities worldwide. If you like what you hear please share, like and subscribe so these stories can reach more people.⁠ To support the podcast make a one time donation using PayPal: https://paypal.me/beinganddoing Find all the links to connect with me in one place: Linktr.ee: https://linktr.ee/being_and_doing This podcast represents my own and my guests views and opinions. The content here should not be taken as medical, financial or any other advice. The content is for informational purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult the appropriate professional for any specific questions you have. Thank you for joining me on this journey

Rachel Wagstaff wrote the book for multi-award winning musical, Flowers for Mrs Harris (Best Musical, UK Theatre Awards 2016) which transferred to Chichester Festival Theatre, directed by Daniel Evans, in September 2018 after a run at the Sheffield Crucible. Her critically acclaimed adaptation of Birdsong opened in the West End, directed by Trevor Nunn, and enjoyed four UK tours with the Original Theatre Company and Birdsong Productions. With Duncan Abel, she adapted Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train, which had a record-breaking UK tour and West End run in 2019 and her new adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Mirror Crack'd toured the UK produced by the Wales Millennium Centre and Wiltshire Creative, followed by a tour of India.  For radio, Rachel adapted Sebastian Faulks' novel The Girl at the Lion d'Or for a five part series for Woman's Hour on Radio Four, transmitted in 2009. Her Afternoon Play When I Lost You, also co-written with Duncan Abel, was transmitted on Radio Four in July 2013. Moonshadow, the musical she co-wrote with Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), opened at the Royal Albert Hall in 2010, and then was produced at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne in June 2012. That Girl, was produced at the Soho Theatre in June 2012, by DryWrite. Rachel also wrote the book for the original musical Only the Brave, which opened at the Wales Millennium Centre in March 2016 with music composed by Matthew Brind.

SJ PARRIS chats to Paul Burke about ALCHEMY, Giordano Bruno, religion, heresy, politics,  science and alchemy in the sixteenth century world, Hilary Mantel & Sophia 1599. ALCHEMY: Prague, 1588.A COURT IN TURMOILThe Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, wants to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, and his court is a haven for scientists, astrologers and alchemists. His abiding passion is the feverish search for the philosopher's stone and thus immortality. The Catholic Church fears he has pushed too far, into the forbidden realm of heresy – and the greatest powers in Christendom are concerned about the imperial line of succession.A MURDERED ALCHEMISTGiordano Bruno is sent to his court by Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I's spymaster. His task: to contact the famous English alchemist and mystic John Dee, another of Walsingham's spies. But Bruno's arrival in Prague coincides with the brutal murder of a rival alchemist – and John Dee himself has disappeared.AN UNFORGIVING ENEMYOrdered by the emperor to find the killer, Bruno's investigations bring him face to face with an old enemy from the Inquisition. But could the real danger lie elsewhere? Amidst the jostling factions at court and the religious tensions brewing in the city, Bruno has to track down a murderer as elusive as the elixir of life itself.SJ PARRIS is the pen name of Stephanie Merritt who began reviewing books for national newspapers while she was reading English literature at Queens' College, Cambridge. After graduating, she went on to become Deputy Literary Editor of The Observer in 1999. She continues to work as a feature writer and critic for the Guardian and the Observer and from 2007-2008 she curated and produced the Talks and Debates program on issues in contemporary arts and politics at London's Soho Theatre. She has appeared as a panelist on various Radio Four shows and on BBC2's Newsnight Review, and is a regular chair and presenter at the Hay Festival and the National Theatre. She has been a judge for the Costa Biography Award, the Orange New Writing Award and the Perrier Comedy Award. She lives in the south of England with her son.RecommendationsThe Name of the Rose Umberto EcoHilary Mantel A Perfect Spy John le Carré THE FRAUD ZADIE SMITHPaul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover and the European Literature Network. He is also a CWA Historical Dagger Judge 2023.Produced by Junkyard DogMusic courtesy of Southgate and LeighCrime TimeCrime Time FM is the official podcast ofGwyl Crime Cymru Festival 2023CrimeFest 2023&CWA Daggers 2023

Juliet and Terence: watch 'Beef' on Netflix; Radio Four and the disappearing baby boomers; a quick quiz; and farewell to Chas Newby, Andy Rourke, and Tina Turner. {Alloa Town Hall}

This episode features selections from the Greater Harvest (NJ) Choir feat. Arlene Pleasant, Swan Silvertones, Radio Four, GMWA Mass Choir, Madame Mattie Wigley, Gospel Crusaders of LA, Rev. Oris Mays, and others.

Welcome to Episode 1280 in which Marc Millon interviews Andrew Jefford, award winning wine and travel writer in this installment of Wine, Food & Travel with Marc Millon on the Italian Wine Podcast. Today's interview is part of a special sub-series dedicated to some of the most influential wine personalities in the business. If you are interested in purchasing a copy of Andrew's latest book, please visit: https://academieduvinlibrary.com/ and use code ITALIANWINE in the coupon option at the checkout to receive £5 off your purchase! More about today's guest: The son of a Church of England clergyman and the eldest of three brothers, Jefford grew up in Norfolk, England. He was educated at Gresham's School, the University of Reading (where he read English, awarded First Class Honours) and the University of East Anglia, where his post-graduate studies were jointly supervised by the late Sir Malcolm Bradbury and Guido Almansi. At UEA he obtained an MA in the 19th and 20th Century novel (awarded With Distinction), then worked for two years on a PhD thesis on the short fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, which was not completed. Career He began work as an editor with Paul Hamlyn's Octopus Group, and his passions for wine and writing led to articles and books on wine, after four years in publishing in 1988. He was the drinks writer for The Evening Standard, the evening newspaper for the London region, between 1992 and 2002, worked as an occasional presenter for BBC Radio Four's The Food Programme and other programmes on BBC Radio Three and Radio Four (1992-2007), and has written widely for The Financial Times on wine and travel (2003-2021). He is a Contributing Editor to and writes a monthly column for Decanter magazine. Jefford is also contributing editor to the quarterly magazine The World of Fine Wine for which he writes the One Bottle column and regularly takes part in tastings. He is one of the four co-chairs for Decanter World Wine Awards, and works as Academic Advisor to The Wine Scholar Guild. To learn more about Peter Vinding-Diers visit: https://www.andrewjefford.com/ More about the host Marc Millon: Marc Millon, VIA Italian Wine Ambassador 2021, has been travelling, eating, drinking, learning and writing about wine, food and travel for nearly 40 years. Born in Mexico, with a mother from Hawaii via Korea and an anthropologist father from New York via Paris, he was weaned on exotic and delicious foods. Marc and his photographer wife Kim are the authors of 14 books including a pioneering series of illustrated wine-food-travel books: The Wine Roads of Europe, The Wine Roads of France, The Wine Roads of Italy (Premio Barbi Colombini), and The Wine Roads of Spain. Other titles include The Wine and Food of Europe, The Food Lovers' Companion Italy, The Food Lovers' Companion France, Wine, a global history. Marc regularly lectures and hosts gastronomic cultural tours to Italy and France with Martin Randall Travel, the UK's leading cultural travel specialist. He is soon to begin a regular series on Italian Wine Podcast, ‘Wine, food and travel with Marc Millon'. When not on the road Marc lives on the River Exe in Devon, England To learn more visit: quaypress.uk/ marcmillon.co.uk vino.co.uk quaypress.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marc-millon-50868624 Twitter: @Marc_Millon Let's keep in touch! Follow us on our social media channels: Instagram @italianwinepodcast Facebook @ItalianWinePodcast Twitter @itawinepodcast Tiktok @MammaJumboShrimp LinkedIn @ItalianWinePodcast If you feel like helping us, donate here www.italianwinepodcast.com/donate-to-show/ Until next time, Cin Cin!

With a remit set out in law to be “the guardian of the interests of future generations in Wales”, Sophie Howe is the world's only Future Generations Commissioner. Her role is to provide advice to the Government and other public bodies in Wales on delivering social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being for current and future generations and assessing and reporting on how they are delivering.Sophie, a mum of five named number five on Radio Four's Woman's Hour's Power List, took up post in 2016 and has led high profile interventions around transport planning, education reform and climate change challenging the Government and others to demonstrate how they are taking account of future generations. Her interventions have secured fundamental changes to land use planning policy, major transport schemes and Government policy on housing – ensuring that decisions taken today are fit for the future. Co-hosted by Alex Sobel MP, Shadow Environment Minister to the UK Government, in this episode we explore the role of the Future Generations Commissioner in Wales, what the plans are for similar roles in the devolved nations of the UK and more broadly, how we consider our future generations through our policy and legislative routes. Hear Sophie's TED talk here - https://www.ted.com/talks/sophie_howe_lessons_on_leaving_the_world_better_than_you_found_it?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare We discuss the Office for Environmental Protection Report - you can read it here - https://www.theoep.org.uk/report/progress-improving-natural-environment-england-20212022This episode has been audio transcribed. Visit PlanetPossible.eco to read the transcript.

Links from the show:* Connect with Frank on Twitter* Read Frank's newsletter* Frank's booksAbout my guest: Frank Furedi is a sociologist and social commentator. He is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Since the late 1990s, Frank has been widely cited about his views on why Western societies find it so difficult to engage with risk and uncertainty. He has published widely about controversies relating to issues such as health, parenting children, food and new technology. His book Invitation To Terror; Expanding the Empire of the Unknown (2007) explores the way in which the threat of terrorism has become amplified through the ascendancy of precautionary thinking. It develops the arguments contained in two previous books, Culture of Fear (2002) and Paranoid Parenting (2001). Both of these works investigate the interaction between risk consciousness and perceptions of fear, trust relations and social capital in contemporary society. ​ Frank has also written extensively about issues to do with education and cultural life. His book, Wasted: Why Education Is Not Educating (2009) deals with the influence of the erosion of adult authority on schooling. On Tolerance (2011) offers a restatement of the importance of this concept for an open society. Authority: A Sociological History (2013) examines how the modern world has become far more comfortable with questioning authority than with affirming it. ​ Frank is committed to promoting the ideals of a humanist education and his writings on higher education are devoted to affirming the value of the liberal arts. His forthcoming book is titled Democracy Under Siege: Don't Let Them Lock It Down! and will be published by Zer0 Books in October 2020. The book offers a positive affirmation of the principle and the value of democracy. ​ At present he is engaged in a research project that explores the history of the relationship between the problem of identity and the difficulty that western society has in engaging with issues pertaining to morality. His work has as its focus on the process of socialisation and intergenerational relations. Furedi's studies on the problem of morality run in parallel with his exploration of the problem of cultural authority. Since Authority, A Sociological History (Cambridge University Press 2013) he has published a study a study The First World War: Still No End In Sight – which interprets this event as the precursor of today's Culture Wars. His study, Populism And The Culture Wars In Europe: the conflict of values between Hungary and the EU, discusses the sociological implications of the tension between populists and anti-populist political currents. His forthcoming book, Why We Need Borders seeks to explain the significance that physical borders and symbolic boundaries have for providing communities with meaning. ​ Frank's books and articles offer an authoritative yet lively account of key developments in contemporary cultural life. Using his insights as a professional sociologist, he has produced a series of agenda-setting books that have been widely discussed in the media. His books have been translated into 13 languages. ​ Frank regularly comments on radio and television. He has appeared on Newsnight, Sky News and BBC News, Radio Four's Today programme, and a variety of other radio television shows. Internationally, he has been interviewed by the media in Australia, Canada, the United States, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Brazil, and Germany. His articles have been published in New Scientist, the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, the Wall Street Journal, the Independent on Sunday, India Today, L'Espresso, The Times, The Sunday Times, the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, the Globe and Mail (Toronto), the Christian Science Monitor, the Times Higher Education Supplement, spiked, the Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Business Review, Die Welt and Die Zeit, among others. Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on January 1st 2023 VISION ON SOUND's old friend SANDY McGREGOR is back again this week to take a look at another of the serious television dramas that he enjoys so much and likes to talk to me about. This time it's PETER FLANNERY'S epic nine-part drama OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH that he has been watching. It's a story based upon the original scripts created for a stage show version, written whilst FLANNERY was writer-in-residence at the ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY, and which, when it came to be produced, was such a huge production that it was allocated half of the BBC's DRAMA BUDGET for the entire year it was made in. The story unfolds across a quarter of a century. The story starts in 1964 and the TV version, unlike the stage play, which ends in 1979, takes the story on to the year 1995. The series follows the lives of four friends who grew up in NEWCASTLE, GEORDIE PEACOCK, NICKY HUTCHISON, MARY SOULSBY and TOSKER COX as played in career-making roles by DANIEL CRAIG, CHRISTOPHER ECCLESTON, GINA McKEE, and MARK STRONG, in a variety of hairpieces and make-up. The series is set around the backdrop of seismic and significant political and social upheavals, and we meet these characters in several historically significant years as they grow up and grow apart, and as their lives continue to cross and diverge over the decades, and we witness the various triumphs and disappointments that they meet along the way. Much like in real life really. With a supporting cast of acting greats like PETER VAUGHAN, MALCOLM MACDOWELL, ALUN ARMSTRONG, DAVID BRADLEY, TONY HAYGARTH, PETER JEFFREY and DONALD SUMPTER on the roster, this was the definite “must see” event drama of the year 1996, and won the BEST DRAMA SERIAL BAFTA AWARD in 1997 with several of the actors also being nominated, alongside nominations in several technical categories. In 2022, the story was rewritten, and updated as a radio series for RADIO FOUR featuring different actors LUKE McGREGOR, JAMES BAXTER, NORAH LOPEZ HOLDEN and PHILIP CORREIA, featuring a tenth chapter written by ADAM USDEN which was set in 2020, so I think, like a lot of the very best sagas, this is a story that keeps on getting more fascinating as the years pass. PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.

Subscribe to Electric Island Radio on mixcloud here: https://www.mixcloud.com/DJPolarOfficial/electric-island-radio-ep-004-four-on-the-floor/Subscribe to Electric Island Radio Playlist here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3GTeVEAJ31VEnckKX2ckJh?si=08da3df03d1d4201Follow Polar here: @djpolarLeave Me Alone (I'm dancing) - Roland Clark, Dean MickoskiWork That Body - Kurd Maverick, SiegeHouse Thing - SoakThe Rhythm - Earth n DaysDr. Melon Ball - DeetronI Want You - Sam Divide, KormakWhisper (John Summit Remix) - Dennis Ferrer, James Yuill, DisciplesWhere's My Phone? (Marco Faraone Remix) - Sailor Jane, R.E.A.DPalm Beach Banga - FISHERI Can't Go For That - Mark Knight, Gene FarrisSave Me - Alex Person, SiegeFeeling - Jack BackLose Control - OFFAIAH, Guilty EmpressPranayama - DilbyDaydreamer - KC Lights, Leo StannardLet's Go Deeper - Ross CouchIt Is what It is (Vintage Culture Remix) - Vintage Culture, Elise LeGrowMore Love - Secondcity, Noizu

Bobby Seagull is a school maths teacher and Cambridge University Doctorate student. Before moving into education, he was an investment banking trader at Lehman Brothers & Nomura, and qualified as a Chartered Accountant from PwC. He's an ambassador for the charity National Numeracy, a presenter for an Open University course on personal finance for young adults, a regular contributor to Radio Four's Puzzle For Today and a columnist for the Financial Times. Bobby is the author of The Life-Changing Magic of Numbers (which reached #50 Amazon UK best sellers over Christmas 2018) and co-presenter of the podcast Maths Appeal. With my University Challenge friend. He co-wrote The Monkman & Seagull Quiz and co-presented a BBC TV series Monkman & Seagull's Genius Guide to Britain. Outside of maths. In this episode of Things I Forgot Were Good For Me, he talks all about growth mindset and how we can tap into that place where we can find our passion and purpose in life. 

Jacob Hawley is a comedian.He has written for The Sunday Times, The BBC, and is a regular columnist for The Metro.Jacob has two hit podcasts, Jacob Hawley: On Drugs, and Jacob Hawley: On Love, both on BBC Sounds. The series have had over half a million downloads and earned Jacob a SILVER ARIA AWARD FOR BEST NEW PRESENTER and can be listened to here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07ds1zj . He also presents the hit new podcast Last Night Out, which can be heard here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/last-night-out/id1626986781He has created two Radio Four stand-up specials, Welcome To Britain, and Class Act, which broadcast to rave reviews and features in The Guardian and The Independent. One of them can be listened to here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000tcl3Jacob tours around the country, to reviews similar to those below, and is currently preparing a new show, Bump, which you can see at the Edinburgh fringe at Hive 1, 13:25.‘Intelligent and important, his self-aware set sees him explore themes of class and identity in the modern world expertly.'The Sunday Post ‘A down-to-earth talent who's got it in spades, it's an impressive, strong debut show that makes it feel like he's already been doing this for years.'The ListSee Jacob at the Fringe or on tour! https://www.jacobhawley.co.uk/liveThanks for watching! Like, subscribe, drop a comment, all the good stuff.Subscribe to Patreon for early access to episodes PLUS a bonus solo episode every week

Many people complain about bike infrastructure in America, and yes, there are a lot better places, but there are also a lot worse places in the world. In this episode, we talk to people who are moving out of America for the Netherlands, hear from people who have traveled all over the world, and an organization dedicated to helping people travel by bike all over the world. BIKE LIFE Radio is a show on KWNK where we talk to people about their bikes and lives. Presented by Ky Plaskon & the Truckee Meadows Bike Alliance. Ky has been commuting by bike to work for more than 30 years. He also worked in radio and TV for more than 20 years from Alaska to San Diego, Las Vegas, Reno and Sacramento. He wants to bring a lighter and funnier feel to bike discussions. For more information and to contribute to TMBA, go to https://bikewashoe.org/

In this episode, founder and executive producer of Green Wave Radio, Hayden Kim '22, candidly reflects on his time at Delbarton and specifically his work on Green Wave Radio.

This week we're going back to the eighties, a time of momentous change, as chronicled by John Walsh in his new book Circus of Dreams. John, renowned literary editor, journalist, author and popular panellist on Radio Four's The Write Stuff, persuades us that the eighties were probably the most exciting time to work in the literary world. The decade was hit by a tsunami of talent as new authors like Martin Amis, Rose Tremain, Jeanette Winterston, Hanif Kureshi, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Sebastian Faulks, Douglas Adams and Salman Rushdie and many more exploded onto the scene and changed the literary landscape forever. Together with Sally Emerson, who was then Editor of Books and Bookmen and is now an award-winning and highly acclaimed anthologist, novelist, short story and travel writer, John takes us on a highly entertaining journey back to the days before computers when business was done in pubs or parties, office life was ramshackle and fun and writers were the great glittering stars of their day. John brushed shoulders with everyone from Andrew Neil and Rupert Murdoch to every author you've ever heard of. It was an exciting time and John and Sally transport us back to it with their insider knowledge, much laughter and hilarious anecdotes.

Sir Billy Connolly will be honoured with a BAFTA fellowship; his old friends Dame Judi Dench and Sir Michael Parkinson tell us why. We've the UK wide verdict of the recent elections from Sir John Curtice. We ask if a new Left Leaning alliance is on the way with the co-leader of the Greens, and the latest on beergate. It's ten years since the coastal path was opened in Wales - we roam the Bangor section in our ongoing series. A BH listener solves the frequent drop outs on Radio Four news programmes. Hello Are You there? Our headliners - activist Ash Sarkar, former footballer Nedum Onuoha and Patrick Maguire, Times Red Box editor.

This month host Matthew Ablan speaks with Jeremy Radio from Four Finger Records. The two discuss Jeremy's music background, how Four Finger Records formed, it's devotion to the Charlotte music scene, his band Thousand  Dollar Movie and so much more! _________________________________________________ Four Finger Records Website Instagram  Facebook  _________________________________________________ Jeremy Radio  Instagram Thousand Dollar Movie _________________________________________________ Matthew Ablan website Instagram  Facebook _________________________________________________ Sponsors Middle C Jazz Midwood Guitar Studio _________________________________________________ Local Partners Records on the Wall Reporting From 20XX Queen City Live Music Charlotte New Music    

In a blatant rip off of the iconic Radio Four series, Desert Island Discs, we've "borrowed" this format, and given it a flaming fake piano, a man in a hamster wheel and that final Eurovision polish, we've given it a key change, and will be bringing to your podcast client of choice, the "brand new idea", Desert Island Discoteque. Have you ever wanted to be on a Eurovision podcast to talk about your favourite Eurovision songs? Well, message us on Twitter @ThinkAboutEuro or email us at thinkabouteurovision@gmail.com

40 - The Freaky Chairs of Monarchs, the Importance of Napping and Periods We discuss babies, Nadal's success and the importance of sanitary products in hospitals. Rhiannon has been reading about the importance of sleep whilst Alex has found her sleep impacted by the ninth book in the Outlander series. Rhiannon has been listening to the moving stories of diagnoses that turn lives upside down on Radio Four. And finally, we are so excited about our book club on the 10th March, where we will be reading The Song of Achilles. We are an accessible podcast so find transcripts on our linktree in our instagram bio @thegrandthunk. Follow us on social media @thegrandthunk or email us - thegrandthunk@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you! Subscribe, rate, review and tell all your friends. See below for a full list of what we discuss: BBC Article - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-60081504 Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Go Tell The Bees I Am Gone by Diana Gabaldon Outlander TV Series Room 5 on Radio 4 (Episode 3 - Serena) Whenever It Kicks with Jessie Cave We Can't Talk About That Right Now This is Us Dolly Alderton's Love Stories (podcast) This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes Spencer The Song of Achilles - Book club book!

This week, Jake and Caleb are staging a radio play! John Finnermore's Double Acts are short comedy-drama two-handers written for Radio Four. Penguin Diplomacy, the story of a British and Danish diplomatic forming a bond as they argue the toss over a small island in the South Pacific, is the focus of this episode. We blast through everything from casting to costume to lighting to rewriting as we swiftly stage this neat two-hander.Listen to the radio play here.Don't forget to rate the podcast in app and get in contact if you have any thoughts about our staging. Hit us up on our socials, or email us:Twitter/Instagram: @maybeulikeitFacebook: @maybeyoulikeitEmail: info@maybeyoulikeit.co.ukCaleb is on twitter, instagram and letterboxd @caleblebsterJake is on letterboxd @jakereesh, instagram and tiktok @jakeymorry and on twitter @jake_morryFind out more about us at https://www.maybeyoulikeit.co.ukMusic is from Kavana CrossleyMaybe You Like It, Maybe You Don't Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Following in the footsteps of St Colomba, presenter and adventurer Ben Fogle has been on a pilgrimage across the Hebrides to explore themes of community and spirituality, He joins Edward Stourton to describe a personal journey that can be seen in a four part series on BBC One called 'Scotland's Sacred Islands with Ben Fogle'. A survey by Muslim Census has found that large numbers of Muslim students feel compromised by having to take out non halal student loans. The student loan scheme charges interest on money borrowed and under Islamic law interest bearing loans are forbidden. Sadiq Dorasat from Muslim Census exclusively reveals the results of his research. Ahead of the ‘Day of the Scientist' on Radio Four, Edward talks to two scientists with a religious backgrounds who reflect on the relationship between religion and science – Dr Yadvinder Malhi is professor of Ecosystem Science at Oxford and Dr Monica Grady is professor of Planetary and Space Science at the Open University. Producers: Helen Lee Olive Clancy

This episode includes music from Sara Jordan Powell, the Johnson Ensemble, Radio Four, Elder E.J. Duncan, Mighty True Friends, another selection from "The King of Gospel Music," and more.

Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa), whose Anglo name is Donald Trent Jacobs, is a professor at Fielding Graduate University and formerly the Dean of Education at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He was selected by the Alternative Education Resource Organization as one of 27 visionaries in education, he received the Martin-Springer Institute Moral Courage Award for his Indigenous-based activism, and was involved in creating first the Marine No Take Zone on Pacific Coast of Mexico. He is an American Indian activist and author of 21 books and numerous articles and chapters about Indigenous worldview applications to contemporary world issues. His most recent book is Sitting Bull's Words for a World in Crises. In it he shows readers how to use the "CAT-FAWN connection" to move from dominant to Indigenous ways of understanding our place in the world, a technique Dr. Michael Fisher refers to as a "dehypnotizing technology" in his biography entitled Fearless Engagement of Four Arrows* which was published recently.

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is  Kelly Molson, MD of Rubber Cheese.Download our free ebook The Ultimate Guide to Doubling Your Visitor NumbersIf you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcastIf you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this episode.Competition ends August  27th 2021. The winner will be contacted via Twitter.Show references:https://cheshire.bewilderwood.co.uk/https://twitter.com/bewilderwoodchrhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-monteverde-456475aa/Hannah MonteverdeHannah is the Top Banana (aka Park Manager) of the newly opened BeWILDerwood Cheshire site. A 70 acre WILD woodland home to the literary characters from owner and creator Tom Blofeld’s books, the park centres its offering on nostalgic, technology free play. With slides, treehouses, zip wires and rope bridges, alongside daily interactive storytelling and craft sessions it is a full family day out for families with children between the ages of 2-12. Leading the management team and ensuring that visitors have the best day, along with the commercial success and strategic development of the business are Hannah’s key focuses.Starting out as a seasonal staff member at BeWILDerwood Norfolk in 2012, Hannah swiftly worked her way up through the organisation taking various operational roles with progressive levels of responsibility to see her become the Deputy General Manager of the BeWILDerwood Norfolk site in 2018. Shortly after this the opportunity arose for Hannah to become Top Banana, relocate to Cheshire and lead the operational setup and opening of the second BeWILDerwood site based in the North West. This has been Hannah’s primary focus for the past 18 months.The site opened to national acclaim in April 2021 and continues to be a resounding success, with a sell out season likely ahead.Hannah is passionate about demonstrating a positive working and parenting life balance to her three year old daughter and when not running WILD at BeWILDerwood enjoys spending time adventuring with her family outdoors, listening to live music, and devouring full books in just one sitting. Transcription:Kelly Molson: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in or working with visitor attractions. I'm your host, Kelly Molson. Each episode, I speak with industry experts from the attractions world. These chats are fun, informative and hopefully, always interesting. In today's episode, I speak with Hannah Monteverde, Top Banana, aka Park Manager, at BeWILDerwood in Cheshire. We discuss how the pandemic impacted the opening of BeWILDerwood Cheshire and all of the learnings that have come from that happening. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue. Kelly Molson: Hannah, thank you for coming on the podcast today. I'm really excited to have you on. Hannah Monteverde: Thank you. I am excited to be here. Kelly Molson: Good. I know how busy you've been the last couple of weeks as well, which we'll get to in a minute. I am really grateful of the time that you've been able to give us today. Kelly Molson: As ever though, we are going to start the podcast with our icebreaker questions. So Hannah and I had a little chat a few weeks ago, a little pre-podcast interview chat just to see what we could talk about and how we got on. We discovered that we're both big fans of rising up other women, and girl power and all that schiz. So I want to know, who is your favourite Spice Girl and why? Hannah Monteverde: Oh, do you know what? I'm going to throw a curveball right at the beginning. Kelly Molson: Is this going to be an unpopular opinion? Hannah Monteverde: Well, it's not my unpopular opinion but it may well be. I wasn't a Spice Girls girl. Kelly Molson: What? Hannah Monteverde: It was all about Bewitched for me, I'm afraid. Kelly Molson: Double denim. Hannah Monteverde: Okay, let me think about the Spice Girls. I think, if I had to pick a favourite, it's got to be Sporty Spice, I think.Kelly Molson: Yeah, she rocks. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. Yeah. Kelly Molson: She rocks. All right, okay. Hannah Monteverde: Sorry about that. Kelly Molson: No, that's okay. But, I want to delve a little bit deeper into the whole Bewitched. Hannah Monteverde: Oh, gosh. Kelly Molson: What was it about Bewitched? Was it the outfits? Was it the Irish dancing? Hannah Monteverde: I don't know. I think it was a bit of both. I can't remember the name of their first album, but it had that little orange cover. I must have probably been about, I don't know, I was probably far too old to admit, probably about 11. You know, they were all jumping on the cover and looking like they're having the best time. I wanted to be one of them. Kelly Molson: If it came on the radio now though, I would definitely get up and dance, wouldn't you? Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. Yeah, and you know all the words. Of course. Kelly Molson: For sure. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. Kelly Molson: All right, I'll let you off the Spice Girls just because of that little glorious nugget of information.Kelly Molson: What is the top of your bucket list? Hannah Monteverde: Oh. I think a trip around Iceland in a camper van. Kelly Molson: Oh yeah. Hannah Monteverde: We always said we were going to go to Iceland on honeymoon, and we got married nearly five years ago now and somehow, we've still not managed to do that. I think yeah, that. Or, New Zealand I think. Really back to basics, nothing fancy. No fancy hotels or anything, just being able to drive where you want, and park up where you want and enjoy that, I think. Kelly Molson: That whole idea of just opening your camper van doors and being in the middle of nowhere, sounds incredibly enticing right now, doesn't it? Hannah Monteverde: Absolutely. Yeah, right now. Kelly Molson: Okay. Last one. What's your favourite movie quote? Hannah Monteverde: Oh no, this is one of the ones that we said if you ask me this question I will not have an answer. Because the only thing I can think of is, "I'll be back," from Terminator and I've never even seen that film.Kelly Molson: I'll take that as your favourite quote, despite you never watched it. That's fine. Hannah Monteverde: Oh no, it couldn't have gone worse. My husband said in the car, he said, "Oh, do you know any quotes from Chalet Girl, because that's your favourite film isn't it?" If you've not seen Chalet Girl, then that's a can of worms to open up. I can't even remember any quotes from that. Kelly Molson: Oh gosh. Sorry listeners, Hannah, she even tried to prep for the icebreaker questions. I just caught her out with a curveball there. Kelly Molson: All right, let's park that then. What's your unpopular opinion? Hannah Monteverde: Okay, now this, if any of my colleagues ever listen to this podcast, which I'm undecided whether I'm going to tell them about or not, this is not going to go down very well with them. Houseplants are overrated. Kelly Molson: Oh.Hannah Monteverde: I just can't get behind a houseplant. Kelly Molson: Is it because you can't keep them alive? Hannah Monteverde: Partly, I think. I think if I tried, I could keep them alive. But, I think I much prefer if someone buys you flowers, they're bright and they last for a few weeks if you're lucky. And then, they're done. As you say, a houseplant you've got to look after it. Kelly Molson: A responsibility. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. Someone was telling me the other day, actually, I think. You know when you buy a nice peace lily or something, and it's got lovely flowers? It only flowers because they put loads of hormones in it before you buy it. So you think, "Oh, that looks lovely." And then, we've got a peace lily which sat at home, which we've had for years, which we can't kill no matter how hard we try, but it's never flowered again so it's just left. Kelly Molson: Oh. I didn't know that. I don't think I've ever had a peace lily. I 100% would have killed it because this mantelpiece was full of houseplants, which I then promptly killed every single one of. I'm kind of with you on that. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. Kelly Molson: Faux houseplants, all the way. Hannah Monteverde: Maybe that's the way to go. Yeah, we recently moved and my sister, she was really kind and she sent us a houseplant from Norwich where she lives, it came in the post. That was really exciting because sending plants in the post. But I have to say, I can probably count on my hand the amount of times I've watered it since we've had it, so that's not going to last very long. But yeah, houseplants are overrated. Sorry, everybody. Kelly Molson: I like that. Good unpopular opinion. We've not had that one, either. It's a fresh take on it.Kelly Molson: Right. Okay, let's get into our questions. Hannah, how did you get to be the top banana, aka park manager, at BeWILDerwood in Cheshire? Tell us about your career. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. Well, I don't tell this story that often to be honest, but I quite often tell this story as if it's an unorthodox story and it's unique. But actually, I think when I was thinking about this in prep, it's probably fairly common within the industry. Hannah Monteverde: My career within the attractions industry sits with BeWILDerwood and BeWILDerwood alone. When I graduated uni in 2011, I think, I started working at BeWILDerwood, just picking up seasonal work because I needed something to tide me over until I found a real, proper job. I did that for a couple of years, and then I went and I trained to become a teacher, that was going to be my proper, serious job. I was going to have a career, and I was going to be a teacher.Hannah Monteverde: That lasted about six months before I unceremoniously dumped that. It didn't work out well for my mental health, and there were some things I found more important. And, I knew that I enjoyed working at BeWILDerwood. So I think it was March 2014, I went grovelling back to the ops manager at the time. I was like, "This hasn't worked out. Have you got any seasonal work going?" They had me back, thankfully, and I just came back and I started working seasonally again. I loved it and I didn't really want to leave. I was at a bit of a point where I was like, "Well, I might as well do what makes me happy." Hannah Monteverde: I guess, the rest of it almost, in a sense, it's a series of happy accidents and, I guess, being in the right place at the right time. I was working front of house, letting people into the park, making sure that everyone was having fun, having the best day ever. And then, I progressed from that into a site supervisor role, so that's what we call our duty managers. So taking care of the site on a day-to-day basis, making sure that all our visitors are happy, dealing with any queries, any issues, all that kind of stuff. And then from there, I moved upwards into the operations manager position, I spent quite a few years doing that. And loving that actually, it's where I first started managing staff and things. We've got quite a big team of seasonal staff. This was in Norfolk at the time, so it was managing up to about 100 people in a season, which was great fun and I really used to enjoy it. Hannah Monteverde: I then, somehow, luckiest catch of all I think, I managed to land a promotion to the deputy general manager whilst I was on maternity leave. Not really sure how that happened. Kelly Molson: Nice work. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. Go and have a baby, and then come back as a deputy general manager, which was great. It was then, that must have been about 2018, it was then when the talk of Cheshire first started to become a thing and started to become something that we could almost believe. It had been going around the houses for a little while, and there'd been rumours about Cheshire. We always knew that we wanted to open a second park, and by that point, it was at a point where it was becoming real, and things were getting put in the ground and we got planning permission. We could really believe that it was going to happen. Hannah Monteverde: I remember I was having chats with Ben, our General Manager, around that time. He was saying, "You know if that's where you want your career to go if that's something you want to do, have a think about it. Maybe if you try this deputy general management position for a year, we'll see how it goes. We'll give you the opportunity to have a crack a running a park for a year," which was fantastic. It was the most amazing opportunity. I had his support, literally right there, but he allowed me to do my own thing and run the park. Hannah Monteverde: And then, moving on from there, that in essence, as I said, my trial run for a year. Obviously, didn't do too bad a job because they asked if we wanted to come up to Cheshire and run the park here. Which of course, I would have been mad to say no. We moved up here in December 2019. Yeah, December 2019. Obviously, I'm sure we'll talk in a bit about the curve balls that last year and things have thrown at us. But, the plan was to move up here, December 2019, and work with Ben to set up the park operationally, and then moving forward, run the park as top banana/park manager. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah, that's me. We often say that I'm the poster girl for that, within BeWILDerwood. That I'm the one that started out as part of the Twiggle Team, as part of our seasonal staff, and then have worked my way up through the company. Which is lovely, and it's everyone. No, I don't think everybody would want to be a poster girl. But, what I think is even lovelier with BeWILDerwood, and with the company, is that that's not unique, it's not just me as said poster girl who done that. Hannah Monteverde: So whilst there aren't lots of people running BeWILDerwoods around the country because we've only got two, there are lots of people especially in Norfolk, in management positions who have started out as part of the Twiggle Team and then have made their way up through the company. So our marketing manager, she was part of the Twiggle Team. Our operations manager in Norfolk now, and the assistant operations manager, they've all come from working within the Twiggle Team. Which is something that I think is so important, and it's really important, I think for me as well, setting up Cheshire, and setting up the ops team and things here, is that we champion that, giving people the opportunities to grow and to develop.Hannah Monteverde: And I know, speaking about me and from my experience, it probably would have been far easier for them to appoint an experienced general manager who had all these whistles and bows, and feathers in his hat to come and run the park. But actually, being able to send someone from Norfolk who got the knowledge and the understanding of what BeWILDerwood is, both as a brand and as a business, I think especially given everything that's happened this year, it's been so beneficial, that we can be able to bring that brand to a brand new audience. And yeah, it's been massively challenging and it's been an amazing learning curve for me. I've done so many things that I probably wouldn't have been able to do anywhere else. Yeah, that's what makes it fun, isn't it? All those challenges and things. Kelly Molson: Yeah, absolutely. Hannah Monteverde: That's where I'm at. Kelly Molson: That's where I want to pick up the story. I'm going to come back to this in a minute, because there's a couple of questions I want to speak to you about, around that topic of being the poster girl, like you said. I think the more attractions that I speak to, the more I see that the organizations themselves are really keen to bring people on, almost like from a grassroots level. They're really keen to have people that progress and move their careers on through that organisation. They've had real hands-on experience of every kind of level of engaging with the guests, like you say, being a Twiggle from that level there. And then moving up through marketing, and management, and et cetera. I think that's a really fantastic thing for attractions to be able to do. Kelly Molson: But, you mentioned poster girl. One of the things that I've been looking at recently is trying to keep the diversity of the guests that come onto the show quite even. I find that quite difficult because it seems to me, there's still a bit of a dis-balance around men and women in the sector. I wanted to ask you, do you think that there's a little bit of a lack of women at that senior level in attractions? Is there anything that can be done about that? It seems like BeWILDerwood is doing really great things, in terms of moving people through their organisation, from promoting inside. But, are there any things that you've been involved in that you could see as a real positive benefit to women in the industry? Hannah Monteverde: That's a really interesting question. I don't know if we break the mould in that, actually, within BeWILDerwood, we are predominantly female managed and run. At the board level, which perhaps maybe is a different subject and a different conversation probably for a different day. At the board level it's different and I don't know that's reflected elsewhere, and whether that's unique or not. But, I would say and from my, obviously as I said, BeWILDerwood is my attractions life, so my very limited experience, I think either we break the mould or no, actually we don't. I don't see a lack of women in senior leadership roles. Hannah Monteverde: I think, obviously, it's a really big conversation at the moment, and it's a conversation that I need to educate myself further in. Because I don't think I understand enough, or know enough, about women and diversity within leadership. I think it's really important as well to remember that, I guess, in a sense, that the glass ceiling isn't just women. I guess, in a way, it's anyone who's not straight, male or white, probably. It's encouraging the ... As you said, I think the diversity that we have within our society should be reflected within our workplaces, and within leadership and at every level. But yeah, it's something that I think I need to go away and do some more work on, and more understanding and more research to be able to speak about it eloquently. But yeah, it's definitely something. Hannah Monteverde: I think it's a conversation that is being had, which is great. We need more of that, we need more of the gender pay gap reporting, and the championing flexible working and all of that kind of thing. But, I think it's important that it's not just women, it is anybody. It's making sure that diversity is represented and society is represented. Kelly Molson: Absolutely. Hannah Monteverde: If that makes sense? Kelly Molson: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it absolutely does. I've been thinking about actually running a panel session on this, and bringing that to the forefront of some of the things that we talk about as well.Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. I think, for me actually, one thing because I don't know, from my limited experience, it doesn't seem to me that way. But actually, if that's not the case then for me, it would be really interesting to speak to other people and find out whether what we're like is reflective of other places and things.Kelly Molson: Absolutely. Well, let's carry this conversation on further. Hannah Monteverde: Lets. Kelly Molson: But for now, I would like to go back to December 2019. You've left your life in Norwich, you've moved to Cheshire, it's Christmas time, you've got a young family at home. And, you're just about to start possibly the most exciting part of your career so far. And then, we get whacked with the Coronavirus. Hannah Monteverde: The Rona. Kelly Molson: The Rona comes and smacks us on the ass. Tell us about what's happened, because I think the attraction was due to originally open last ... Was it May time, March time last year? Hannah Monteverde: May 23rd, 2020, was the big date. As Tom's been saying, Tom Blofeld, the guy that owns BeWILDerwood, has been saying recently in lots of his interviews and things, what I've heard him saying, "We couldn't have possibly picked a worse date," and he's so true. May 23rd, 2020, was when it was going to be. We, as you rightfully said, we moved up to Cheshire in December 2019. That was lovely. There I was bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, ready to build the team. We're going to open BeWILDerwood Cheshire, it's going to be wonderful. Hannah Monteverde: And it was great, it was great for the first few months. We started building the team, we got the managers in, we got our maintenance guys in. Everything started progressing and ticking along, we were making all those big, long lists about what we still needed to do, working with the contractor and things, all going for this May 23rd date. We just announced to the public and to all our wonderful visitors that we were going to open on the 23rd May 2020. We had all the graphics and things designed, we put the leaflets out to print. Hannah Monteverde: I will always remember, it must have been the middle of March. Obviously, we were all starting to talk about Coronavirus by this point, and I noticed ... I'm a member of the Visitor Experience Forum on LinkedIn, so I noticed they were doing, I think it was a [inaudible 00:17:48] they called around COVID-19. I thought, "Oh yeah, this will be a nice trip out of the office. I'll get the train down to London, and I'll go and meet some other people and we'll talk about this Coronavirus thing. And maybe, we'll talk about how we might have to close our attractions for a week or two, and that will be a shame. But, it'll be a nice rest for us all." Hannah Monteverde: There I go, down on the train, really excited, a nice trip out. I remember sitting in this room, and I think it was Phil Donahue was just ... I just felt like a balloon being slowly deflated across the course of the morning. I remember sitting on the train on the way back, typing up my notes, and messaging people like, "Oh, Lordy." Kelly Molson: Oh my gosh.Hannah Monteverde: "This is a big deal." Yeah. Obviously, there were elements. I was probably over naïve and over-excited about what we were doing. Yeah, quickly after that, I guess it was probably the week or so after that, everyone was told to work from home. We sent our minimal, I think there was probably about five or six of us in the office by that point, so we sent them home. We kept our maintenance guys on. But then, within a week or two of that, it became very apparent very quickly that actually, we wouldn't be opening in May. Hannah Monteverde: Initially, what we did, we initially decided to delay it until July. And then, I think as lockdown progressed and proceeded, and there was no end to it, again very quickly, we didn't have to take long to make the decisions which was quite a nice thing, in a sense. We made decisions quickly, we made the right decisions, and we made sure that we kept the guys informed. But yeah, very quickly it became apparent that July actually wouldn't be achievable, because, by the time we came back out of lockdown, we'd have to get people back into the office. We'd have to start out from where we left off. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah, July 2020, then, very quickly became spring 2021. But, we have opened, so we are now open which is brilliant. Yeah, it was all together a rather strange few months for me, especially I think. Kelly Molson: I can imagine how life-changing that was as well because you've done a big step in moving to a different area and having to establish yourself there in a personal sense. And then, you're establishing yourself in a new role in a new place, and you're building a new team around you as well. That must have been pretty horrendous, right? You would have had to have recruited, ready for the opening. And then what happens? Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. I just feel like, almost in a sense, like the whole of my last 18 months have felt like a recruitment Groundhog Day. It's awful to say that because it felt like it was never-ending. And the poor people who are on the other ends of the sticks, it was far worse for them, they had the worse end of the stick. Hannah Monteverde: But yeah, much of last year for me, and also remembering that I was coming into this with a huge amount to learn anyway ... So much of last year was, in a nutshell, it was just a masterclass in management skills, and techniques that you really wish that you don't ever have to use. So really, unfortunately for us, while I had the horrible task of having to let go all those people that we had recruited because unfortunately, the way that the furlough scheme cut off, we just got people in within weeks. So that within weeks of that deadline, so we couldn't furlough anyone. It was a case of we need to save this business, there were really worrying points last year.Hannah Monteverde: Yeah, in about May I think, we had to let the team go. We did keep them on for as long as we could, keep supporting them and things, but we did have to let them go. And then, from May to January last year, it was me and a couple of Boggle Builders, our maintenance team that we kept on to caretake the site. Thankfully, I wasn't completely on my own. We did keep coming into the office, they obviously had work that they needed to do around the site and things. Yeah, it's a 70-acre site so it did feel a bit strange with just the three of us rattling around. I did learn some skills in how to use a jigsaw and stuff.Kelly Molson: Good life skills to have. Hannah Monteverde: Exactly, something to add to my CV. But yeah, and for myself, I was really lucky, in a sense, that once lockdown eased, because we are BeWILDerwood, we are one company, I was able to go back down to Norfolk and help support the guys in Norfolk with their reopening. And then, I actually ended up helping them put together their COVID secure Lantern Parade that they put on for October half-term, so that was really nice. For me personally, it was really lovely to actually be able to go back somewhere and feel like I was part of a team, not three people rattling around somewhere. Yeah, I think I probably would have lost my mind a bit if I didn't manage to do that. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. I guess, in a sense, thinking about the positives, there are positives that have come out of it. I managed to spend time on, in a sense, the more paperwork-y side of stuff. So managing to get all the health and safety things all ticked off and out of the way whilst it was quiet in the summer, and you didn't have loads of stuff running around and happening. But yeah, as I said, it felt like Groundhog Day of recruitment. Yeah, 18 months of recruiting people and then letting people go, and then re-recruiting people. Hannah Monteverde: What was lovely actually, though, is that we had ... I was going to try and work out the percentage, but I ran out of time. We had a huge percentage of the people that we let go in May came back. Kelly Molson: Oh, that's fabulous. Hannah Monteverde: Obviously, we kept them in the loop and things. I quite enjoyed going around taking pictures and being able to send people updates of what was going on around the site. It was so nice. Yeah, we'd obviously recruited a bunch of people who shared the passion for what we were doing. And after everything, for them to say, "I want to come back, I still want to work with you," that was lovely. It was really nice. Kelly Molson: That's testament to how you obviously managed that process, in terms of keeping in touch with them, and the empathy that you showed them with the situation that you were in. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah, I hope so. It was tough. It was really tough. But yeah, as you say, it was so nice that they'd come back. And actually, now that we have finally opened, that they have all got to be involved in it. I imagine last May, everyone that thoughts of, "Is this place ever going to open?" And to now be sat here, having actually opened it. I think if someone had said to me last July, "Do you reckon you'll be sat there next April with a park that has opened to resounding success?," I would have confidently been able to say yes, so that's nice. Kelly Molson: Wow. Yeah, that is really nice. What's it been like? What's the response been like from the general public? Hannah Monteverde: Do you know what, it's been absolutely phenomenal. It's been so amazing to open. For one, the weather was absolutely perfect for the whole week. Obviously, as you can imagine, we are an outdoor attraction so we are quite a weather dependant. There's so much fun to be had in the rain, but people don't often understand that. But yeah, to have a week of amazing sunshine and really warmish weather was perfect, that's absolutely perfect for us. And then, just to see people in the park, it was the cherry on top of the cake that everybody loved it, because everybody did love it, which was amazing. Hannah Monteverde: But, to see people running around the park that you've spent so long working on. The weirdest thing was it was seeing people using the park, and I turned and said to someone on day one, I was like, "This feels so normal." But yet, yesterday I was running around like a headless chicken with a screwdriver, putting signs on things. For the past three years, this is what we've been working towards. And all of a sudden, you fill it with people and it just felt normal. Kelly Molson: Yeah. Hannah Monteverde: I mean, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things that we need to work on. I always say to the team, for us, it wasn't going to be perfect when we opened it. If we did feel like it was perfect, then we'd probably done something wrong. We've got lists and list of things that we want to improve and things that we want to change. But, to see visitors playing in the park, and enjoying the park, and seeing the feedback that we got from the visitors, it was just the best thing, to be honest.Kelly Molson: Ah, that's incredible. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. Yeah, it was. I think we were mindful, and I was always a bit mindful, that we've moved to a new area, it's quite a niche concept. It's really hard to explain without being able to see what BeWILDerwood is. But, to have visitor reviews that are saying things like how amazing the staff are, to sit there and read that, and things saying how brilliant the facilities are, and how much fun they've had. Yeah, I can't lie, it was brilliant. It was such a relief and just so lovely to ... Yeah, it was great. Kelly Molson: What a massive morale boost for the team as well. To have gone through so much in that year, especially for those poor people that have been made redundant, and then they've come back, and now they're in the thick of it, that must be just music to their ears right now. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah, absolutely. The past couple of weeks before we opened, I think they must think I'm completely mad, we ended up doing these stupid Monday motivational meetings. Where we'd all get together at nine o'clock on a Monday morning and I'd say something stupid and irritate them all, probably, with some silly little motivational saying or something. But, one thing that I really believe in, and I have to tell myself to do it as well sometimes, but I was saying to them in the weeks before, "Remember when we open to take a step back and just watch and see what people do. And, to take a step back and think about everything that you have done, and just think about that impact that's had on everyone else."Hannah Monteverde: It's so easy to get lost in what you're doing in the day-to-day, and the grind, and how many hours you're putting in, and how much hard work you're putting in. Because everyone has worked phenomenally hard, and it's not just the guys in Cheshire as well, it's the guys in Norfolk, too. As I said before, we are BeWILDerwood, one team, and that's true. The guys in Norfolk, they also reopened on the 12th. But, the effort that they also put into helping us get open in Cheshire, even though, in a sense, when we had our team up here start, we couldn't travel down to Norfolk and get them to see the site. Hannah Monteverde: That was initially the plan. In a sense, I would induct them into the company, and we'd do our Cheshire induction up here. And then, the first thing that they would all do would be to go down to Norfolk, and to meet their counterparts in Norfolk, and see the sight in Norfolk, and understand what BeWILDerwood is and how it works. When you're in lockdown, you can't do that. Yeah. We had fun trying to think up ways we could get people talking to each other remotely and to get people to understand the brand and things.Kelly Molson: How did you do that? That would be interesting. Because that's great isn't it, just the fact that you'd been able to send people and shadow them. "This is your role in this park, this is what you'll be doing." But, how did you do that virtually? Hannah Monteverde: Everyone came into the office, and we put loads of stuff in place to make it COVID secure and things. In a sense, up here, we did our induction like that. Again, I played some really silly motivational games, which I'm sure they probably all hated. We had Two Truths and a Lie, and I got them all to send them in in advance and found out really interesting things about people, which is quite funny. Kelly Molson: We should disclose some of those on the podcast. That'd be better than the unpopular opinion.Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. And then, I guess in a sense, it was working remotely so used quite a lot of Microsoft Teams and things, and making sure that we're checking in and chatting to people. And doing it like we're doing now, so face-to-face over a video call. I, a year ago, would never have imagined that I would be on a webcam with headsets talking to be people because it was my worst nightmare. Getting people to embrace that. And then, I think we even did silly things as full teams. I remember we did a show-and-tell activity or something, we got everyone to bring in something that was personal to them, and then we all stood in front of a camera and talked to each other for half an hour. Hannah Monteverde: I think this year has proven that there is so much that can be done remotely. But, I also think it has also proven that there is so much that can't be done remotely. There are bits and pieces that we want to pick up now that we can travel, and now that we are open and things. It's really important, before May half-term and the summer, that we get our guys down to Norfolk so they can understand where BeWILDerwood comes from and exactly what it is because that's going to be so much more beneficial to them than a load of waffle and a load of words from me, trying to explain it because it's really hard to explain.Kelly Molson: I still want to pronounce it BeWILDerwood as well. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. Kelly Molson: I want to shout the wild bit. I know I pronounced it wrong earlier in the podcast. Hannah Monteverde: We get people asking. My dad asked this weekend. I've worked at BeWILDerwood for nine years, so if my dad can't pick it up in nine years then ...Kelly Molson: I'm all right, let me off. Hannah Monteverde: I'll let you off just this once. Kelly Molson: Okay. It's a phenomenal story. I can't even begin to imagine how tough the last year must have been for you, with everything that you've got going on. Not just the effects of the Coronavirus and having to not open the attraction, but having moved to a new area as well. And suddenly, being in lockdown with a young family. That must have been so overwhelming for you. I think it's so lovely to hear such an incredibly positive story come from something like that. Kelly Molson: I wonder if you could share with us ... You started off this podcast by saying I'm going into this new role, and there was a load of things that were still new and learning for me. You've really had-Hannah Monteverde: I've had no choice. Kelly Molson: You've really been dropped into the deep end, haven't you? If you can cope with last year, you've peaked. You can cope with anything now. Hannah Monteverde: I hope I've not peaked. I hope I just keep going that way. Kelly Molson: There's more to come. Okay. Hannah Monteverde: I hope so. Kelly Molson: What do you that's been your biggest professional and personal learning from last year? Hannah Monteverde: I think personally is easier to understand. Obviously, I've had a chance to think about these. At one point, I have learned personally that I am certainly not a hobbyist. I'm not a person for hobbies. I love the idea of a hobby, and I go all in and I buy everything I need to start it. So I buy the knitting needles, and I buy the wool, and I buy a pattern and I'm going to knit something really lovely. And I get two days in and I'm like, "God, this is boring." Kelly Molson: Can you tell us what you've tried? Have you tried knitting? List the things. Hannah Monteverde: I've got a half-knitted cardigan. Kelly Molson: Excellent.Hannah Monteverde: Now to be honest, with knitting I did manage to knit Lyra, my daughter, a jumper. She's three, so I've knitted a three-year-old's jumper. But then I was like, "Right, now's the chance to do something for me. I'm going to knit myself a cardigan." I've knitted half of aside, so I've done that. Hannah Monteverde: We had a sourdough starter for a while. Kelly Molson: Excellent. That's a standard Coronavirus necessity, I'll be. Yeah. Hannah Monteverde: Then, that went moldy. Actually, I'd probably say I've got two true hobbies, which are probably reading and running. But reading, this year, the reading hobby has turned into a buying books hobby. I don't read any, they just sit. I've got a really nice pile of books. Kelly Molson: They look beautiful. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. I am trying really hard though, actually, to read more because that's good for me.Hannah Monteverde: What else have I tried? Oh. I can't think of anything else off the top of my head. I've definitely tried a fair few. Podcasting, I've tried to listen to podcasts. I listen to a few, and then six weeks later I'll say, "Oh yeah, I was listening to that podcast." Kelly Molson: But you've been listening to this one. Hannah Monteverde: Of course. Yeah. Kelly Molson: Now that you're a guest on it. Oh God, that's all good. Hannah Monteverde: No, I had to do my research on this one. Of course, I listened to this. Hannah Monteverde: What else have I done? I can't think. Lots of things, I'm definitely a really faddy person. Oh, I probably buy a diary every year, and I get as far as writing my address in it. That's about as far as it goes. Kelly Molson: But, it's good. I think that's a good thing to learn about yourself. Hobbyist, no, but there are other things that you can focus your time on. Hannah Monteverde: No. And then, I think more seriously, in a post-COVID, had quite a fair amount of time to reflect, and think about myself and things. I think one thing from this year, personally, that's resonated with me quite a lot is in a sense that not comparing your feelings to others, I think. And, not trying to rationalize or justify your feelings with others. Hannah Monteverde: We've been enormously lucky this year, as a family, and my friends. We've not suffered enormous emotional or financial suffering. But at the same time, we've all had our struggles. I think this years' been difficult for everyone and difficult for everyone for all sorts of different reasons. I think it's really easy, and I found it really easy this past year, to try and diminish your own feelings by looking at someone else and saying, "Well, you're not struggling as much as them, so it's not okay for you to struggle." Hannah Monteverde: I think for myself, personally, I've tried really hard, especially in the past few months, to not compare myself to others. If you're feeling those feelings, you're feeling those feelings. Just because person X has got more going on, or maybe feels different about the same thing, that doesn't diminish your feelings or make your feelings any less feeling-y. Kelly Molson: Yeah.Hannah Monteverde: Do you know what I mean? Kelly Molson: It's that validity, isn't it?Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. Kelly Molson: If someone is having a really, really difficult time, and you can see they're clearly going through it, it doesn't make your feelings of, "Well, I feel really challenged by the things that I'm going through," and they're minuscule in comparison but they're still valid. Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. Kelly Molson: You can feel okay to feel like that.Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. I think for me, that's the biggest thing for me personally. I think that's something that I think will continue to work on, in a sense. Hannah Monteverde: I think professionally, as you said, if I was to try and stop and think about what I've learned this year, I don't think I could even scratch the surface. I have learned so much, and it has been unique and exciting, and it's been an amazing opportunity. There are so many ways I can turn everything into a positive, all the things I've had the chance to learn, the chance to do, the chance to jump feet-first in and give it a go. And, the things that I've been thrown in the deep end and have just had to get on with. The amount of learning I've got out of those challenges, I will forever be grateful for, I think.Hannah Monteverde: It's been a massive rollercoaster. There have been some really, really high, high points. But at the same time, there have also been some really worrying low points, at the same time. I think the two things I came back with when I was thinking about it, is it's learning to adapt, which is something I've never been great at. I've always been a lists person, and I've always been a planner. Hannah Monteverde: When I was in the ops role in Norfolk, we always used to jest at me when we got to. We shut over winter, so we shut from November to February. Everyone used to have a laugh at me. In the first couple weeks of the winter, I would literally print out 10 weeks of weekly planners, and I would plan my winter. It didn't always go to plan, but just by doing that exercise, I would sit there. I'd be like, "Right, okay. On this day, I'm going to look at the staffing. And we're going to do this, this, and this." That's just how my brain works. Hannah Monteverde: But, I've had to learn this year that, when things change, and they change again, and they change again, you just have to be able to adapt. You have to be able to think fast on your feet, and you have to be able to make decisions. Sometimes, they have to be quick decisions. But if you can justify them, and make everyone aware of why those decisions are being made even if they're tricky ones, I think people appreciate that. Yeah, being able to adapt was one. Hannah Monteverde: And then, I think the other thing that I've learned about myself is that there is nothing I love more than a challenge. And, that despite everything that's gone on, there is nothing that beats the feeling of having to work to a hard deadline, and getting there, and achieving it. I know we quite often joke, every day's a school day and there are new challenges every day, but for me, I think that's really important. I thrive off being able to learn and being to grow and develop, and I think I've probably done a certain amount of that this year and I really enjoyed it. Kelly Molson: Good. I think that's a huge positive to take from it and I completely agree with you. I think there would be a lot of our listeners, and myself included, that would say that that's probably the biggest thing that they've learned about themselves this year as well. Kelly Molson: What's next, then? What's next for BeWILDerwood Cheshire? And, what's the next big challenge that you've got? What exciting things have you got coming up this summer? Hannah Monteverde: I think what's next for BeWILDerwood Cheshire, there's a lot of work to do between now and summer, to make BeWILDerwood feel like BeWILDerwood to BeWILDerwood. It's fantastic that the new audience and our new visitors and things love us and get us. As I said before, that was one thing I was mindful of. But, I think internally, there is so much more that we can do to make BeWILDerwood BeWILDerwood, so that's going to be, I think, one of our focuses. Hannah Monteverde: There is a big focus on our Lantern Parade at the end of the year, which I think will probably be the next big challenge. I know I'm having a wander around with our ops people at some point this week, to discuss October, which is great. Kelly Molson: That sounds really far away at the moment as well. Hannah Monteverde: I know.Kelly Molson: October, gosh. Hannah Monteverde: Who knows what could happen by then? Let's hope things have settled down a bit more. Obviously, there's thinking forward to the post-COVID world. What happens when we don't have to limit our numbers? How do we deal with that? Do the facilities cope, does our infrastructure cope? What can we cope with? And, if we don't think we can cope with what we're going to get, how can we develop? How can we grow? How can we make it work? What exciting things can we put in next? Where are we going next?Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. There's loads of question at the moment. I think short term, we get through the next few weeks and then we really can start developing and growing, and thinking about what comes next. Kelly Molson: Maybe you can come back on in a year from now, and share the next instalment of Hannah's career progression and crazy life that's going on up in Cheshire. That'd be awesome.Hannah Monteverde: What is Hannah doing now? Oh, dear. Kelly Molson: Okay, well we're at the end of the interview. But, there is one last question that I always ask all of our guests. And, it is a book, a book that you love, hopefully, that you've read and isn't sitting in that lovely stack that's next to your bed right now. But, would you have a book that you'd recommend to our audience? Hannah Monteverde: I've been greedy and I've got two, I hope that's okay. Kelly Molson: You know what, people do this all the time. It blows my marketing budget consistently. Hannah Monteverde: I'm so sorry.Kelly Molson: But, you go for it.Hannah Monteverde: You'll probably be able to pick at least one of them up fairly cheaply. I think the first one you might not even need to buy because it's a really popular one, and most of your listeners will probably be familiar with it. But, for me this year it's been a really important one, I think. The first one is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Macksey.Kelly Molson: It's a great book. Hannah Monteverde: It's not a leadership book, it's not anything fancy like that. It's not going to tell you how to get a million visitors to your visitor attraction. But, I found it so useful this year for putting things into perspective. This will get a bit personal anyway, but the few days I did work from home this year, my husband would pick out the book and set it out on a page on my desk, each morning. I'd be like, "Yeah, I can do this." Kelly Molson: That's lovely. Hannah Monteverde: "I can do this." Something different to read. Hannah Monteverde: I did want to mention, there's a really lovely audio version of it that I think they put on Radio Four over Christmas, which I really enjoyed. That's a really nice another way to listen to it. Hannah Monteverde: And then, the other one, this one I hope you'll laugh at this, otherwise you'll just think I'm really weird. Kelly Molson: Is it the Spice Girls annual? Hannah Monteverde: No, I'm afraid not. It's not Bewitched, either. This is one that I panic bought when you asked me to come onto this podcast because I was like, "Oh, God." Kelly Molson: Oh, the pressure. Hannah Monteverde: "I'm on a podcast with all these attractions professionals, and there I am, hello I'm Hannah, and I work at BeWILDerwood." I was like, "What book can I recommend?" Oh my goodness, nothing was highbrow enough or anything. Hannah Monteverde: So I did some research, and I bought an anthology of speeches called She Speaks. It's put together by Yvette Cooper. It's basically ... I've got it sitting next to me, so I can remember what it says. Its tagline is, "Women's speeches that changed the world." It's an anthology of famous women's speeches. But, I read it at breakfast when I feel like I need a kick up the ass for that day. I pick a page at random. What's really nice is that there's no agenda behind it. You've got people from completely different walks of life, but just copies of their powerful speeches. Yeah, I've found it hugely inspirational. I think at times it's quite moving, and I think it demonstrates, really succinctly, the power of words. So, that one. Kelly Molson: What a fantastic book. I've never heard of that book, either. I think that's one that I'm going to have to grab a copy of. Read it in the morning, that's a really self-motivating thing to set you up for the day as well, isn't it? Hannah Monteverde: Yeah. Yeah, I read that and I think, "Look at what all those amazing women have achieved." And then think, "I could do that." Kelly Molson: I am heading to BeWILDerwood and I'm going to do the same. Hannah Monteverde: Exactly.  I did threaten to my guys on one Motivational Monday that I'd come in and read one, but thankfully for them, I haven't subjected them to it yet. Kelly Molson: Well to be fair, when we were talking about hobbies earlier, I did actually make my team learn how to do crochet. Hannah Monteverde: Actually, that is another one I've tried. I got stuck on Insta, talking about magic circles or something. Is that right? Kelly Molson: It's really hard, a magic circle. That is a really difficult skill.Hannah Monteverde: I tried to crochet a cactus, and it didn't work out too well.Kelly Molson: Okay. See, all of my team were male at that point as well, so it was an interesting day of me trying to ... Well, it was a lunchtime of me trying to teach them how to do that. Hannah Monteverde: One thing I did, I did some macrame. I made a macrame wall hanging, but I've only made one wall hanging and that's it. I've ticked that off now, don't need to do it anymore. Kelly Molson: Oh, but it's on the wall. There's the achievement, you don't need to do anymore. Look what you did. I love that, thank you. Kelly Molson: Hannah, it's been so lovely to have you on. I've really, really enjoyed this interview. I genuinely do extend that offer, it would be really great for you to come back maybe a year from now, and let us know what the next stage is of what's happened up there and how it's all gone. It would be really good to hear from you. Hannah Monteverde: Thank you. I'd love to come back.Kelly Molson: Awesome, thank you very much. Kelly Molson: Well, if you as ever, listeners, if you want to win Hannah's books that she's mentioned today, if you head over to our Twitter account and you retweet this episode announcement with the comment, "I want Hannah's books," then you'll be in a chance of winning them both. Kelly Molson: Awesome, Hannah. Come back soon, and good luck with the rest of the season. Hannah Monteverde: Thank you. Kelly Molson: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five-star review, it really helps others find us. And, remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, rubbercheese.com/podcast.

A new Radio Four spoof from Mackenzie & McGuire. On Radio Hoo hah today: In My Mind delves into the thoughts of Leonora Velvety Constable-Wheeler, and her passion for Pugs, Shakespeare and taking her clothes off when she totally doesn't realise. Popular soap opera The Burgers has a few surprises in store this week when Mrs White slips on some conditioner in the hairdressers, and What's New has an exclusive look into Dorothy Ahlwhala's latest novel “Raspberry Ripple, Iron Hoof”, the latest theatre and music releases, as well as handling the political hot potato – Globalisation. Contains lots of bad language. And swearing.

At the very heart of the debate about the future of work in the UK is this week's Oven-Ready HR guest. Matthew Taylor is the outgoing CEO of the Royal Society for Arts Manufacturers and Commerce, more commonly known as the RSA, and the former interim director of Labour Market Enforcement, the body created to tackle non-compliance with employment legislation. His 2017 independent report into modern work practises, commonly referred to as The Taylor Review, was the basis of the government's Good Work Plan. In this interview, Taylor argues for a change in the UK tax system to stop exploitation of workers in the gig economy as he considers them particularly vulnerable to unscrupulous firms.  He's also unconvinced that the recent Surpreme Court judgement in the Uber case will have any lasting impact.  He argues that case law isn't the same as a change in the law and the Government have essentially outsourced employment law legislation to the courts.Taylor is also a former Director of Policy and Chief Advisor on Strategy to the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, a former Director of the Think Tank, The Institute for Public Policy Research, and a regular panellist for BBC's Radio Four programme, The Moral Maze.  Matthew was awarded a CBE in 2019 for services to employment rights

Join host Kevin Mackey this week for the second installment of the four agreements.  Listen and learn how these four simple agreements can totally transform you and your relationships. 

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Do you know what you DON'T know? How can that hurt your retirement? Listen to my podcast and find out the 4 most important "unknowns" that could be holding you back.  Stay safe (and warm!) Eric

2021 BRAND NEW MUSIC

Maths Week Ireland has been launched by Minister for Education, Norma Foley TD. The annual festival of maths returns from the 10th to 18th October with a range of largely virtual/online events and is set to attract participation by schools and people all over the island. Over 15 years Maths Week Ireland has grown to be the biggest such festival in the world in the world and is now replicated in Scotland and England. A fun, all-inclusive celebration, Maths Week promotes and develops a positive attitude towards maths in young people and a wider awareness of the importance of maths across all sectors of society. Cross-community and cross-border participation is an important part of Maths Week. Now in its 15th year, this year’s celebration will look a little different with health restrictions meaning few physical events can take place. However, the fun and magic of maths week will be replicated in lots of virtual events across the week. Running throughout the course of the week will be the new ‘MathsWeekTV’ which will be hosted by a range of engaging and entertaining personalities and be watched by primary and secondary school audiences. The lineup of MathsWeekTV presenters includes Bobby Seagull, popular TV presenter, and Maths teacher. Bobby is a regular contributor to Radio Four’s Puzzle For Today and a columnist for the Financial Times and co-presented a BBC TV series Monkman & Seagull’s Genius Guide to Britain. Other presenters include highest-selling maths author Kjartan Poskitt, who has sold over 5 million ‘Murderous Maths’ books, leading STEM presenter Ken Farquhar and Caroline Ainslie, who is a co-organiser of the Global STEAM Lesson who aims to teach the mathematical fundamentals of shape, space and measurement with the use of soap bubbles and giant balloons. Being online means Maths Week can bring YouTube star Tom Crawford from Oxford or “Mathematician at Large” James Tanton into schools across the island from his base in Arizona. There will also be many local presenters and fun activities for the schools and the home. Additional highlights of the week include: Maths Week Magic workshops – schools across the island will have the chance to join in online workshops learning about the magic of maths. Online Family Scavenger Hunt with Maths Week enthusiast Steve Sherman. Get the entire family involved and spend Maths Week solving problems in the most unusual ways. Does your family have what it takes to join the adventure? Hands on Maths – every day Maths Week Ireland will be recommending hands on maths activities that teachers can share with their students and for parents to do at home. Connected Classrooms – primary schools all across Ireland will connect online with each other and with schools in Africa for a maths workshop Nationwide Daily Maths Challenges will be taking place in schools across the country throughout the course of the week. Maths Week Ireland Award Ceremony 2020 – The recipient of the Maths Week Award 2020 will be announced for their contribution to Raising Public Awareness of Maths. Minister for Education, Norma Foley TD said, “I’m delighted to launch Maths Week 2020. We use maths in every aspect of our lives including practical everyday activities in school, at home and beyond. Therefore, engaging children with maths and numeracy from an early age nurtures the skills of inquiry and problem solving, in turn helping them to make informed decisions and to understand the world around them. Maths Week helps to prepare our children for their future lives. To succeed at any subject area a positive attitude is essential, and Maths Week has been very successful in helping to build a positive attitude towards maths for all. I am delighted to see primary and post-primary schools, universities, institutes of technology and partners north and south working together with government and industry to achieve this. I wish this year’s festival every success, and I encourage everyone to get invo...

Have you ever traveled to the Parthenon in Greece and seen the big pillars? Those pillars hold everything up safely. Did you know that your retirement plan should have four pillars holding up your plan? Listen to my podcast and learn why you need to have these pillars and what each one does. Thanks for listening! Eric

Episode ninety-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "The Twist" by Chubby Checker, and how the biggest hit single ever had its roots in hard R&B. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Viens Danser le Twist" by Johnny Hallyday, a cover of a Chubby Checker record that became the first number one for France's biggest rock star.   Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/   Also, people have asked me to start selling podcast merchandise, so you can now buy T-shirts from https://500-songs.teemill.com/. That store will be updated semi-regularly.   ----more----   Resources   As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.    Much of the information in this episode comes from The Twist: The Story of the Song and Dance That Changed the World by Jim Dawson.    This collection of Hank Ballard's fifties singles is absolutely essential for any lover of R&B.   And this four-CD box set contains all Chubby Checker's pre-1962 recordings, plus a selection of other Twist hits from 1961 and 62, including recordings by Johnny Hallyday, Bill Haley, Vince Taylor, and others.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   Today we're going to look at a record that achieved a feat that's unique in American history. It is the only non-Christmas-themed record -- ever -- to go to number one on the Billboard pop charts, drop off, and go back to number one again later. It's a record that, a year after it went to number one for the first time, started a craze that would encompass everyone from teenagers in Philadelphia to the first lady of the United States.   We're going to look at Chubby Checker, and at "the Twist", and how a B-side by a washed-up R&B group became the most successful record in chart history:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "The Twist"]   One of the groups that have been a perennial background player in our story so far has been Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. We talked about them most in the episode on "The Wallflower", which was based on their hit "Work With Me Annie", and they've cropped up in passing in a number of other places, most recently in the episode on Jackie Wilson. By 1958, though they were largely a forgotten group. Their style had been rooted in the LA R&B sound that had been pioneered by Johnny Otis, and which we talked so much about in the first year or so of this podcast. That style had been repeatedly swept away by the newer sounds that had come out of Memphis, Chicago, and New York, and they were yesterday's news. They hadn't had a hit in three years, and they were worried they were going to be dropped by their record label.   But they were still a popular live act, and they were touring regularly, and in Florida (some sources say they were in Tampa, others Miami) they happened to play on the same bill as a gospel group called the Sensational Nightingales, who were one of the best gospel acts on the circuit:   [Excerpt: The Sensational Nightingales, "Morning Train"]   The Sensational Nightingales had a song, and they were looking for a group to sing it. They couldn't sing it themselves -- it was a secular song, and they were a gospel group -- but they knew that it could be a success if someone did. The song was called "The Twist", and it was based around a common expression from R&B songs that was usually used to mean a generic dance, though it would sometimes be used as a euphemism for sexual activity. There was, though, a specific dance move that was known as the twist, which was a sort of thrusting, grinding move. (It's difficult to get details of exactly what that move involved these days, as it wasn't a formalised thing at all). Twisting wasn't a whole dance itself, it was a movement that people included in other dances.   Twisting in this sense had been mentioned in several songs. For example, in one of Etta James' sequels to "The Wallflower", she had sung:   [Excerpt: Etta James, "Good Rockin' Daddy"]   There had been a lot of songs with lines like that, over the years, and the Sensational Nightingales had written a whole song along those lines. They'd first taken it to Joe Cook, of Little Joe and the Thrillers, who had had a recent pop hit with "Peanuts":   [Excerpt: Little Joe and the Thrillers, "Peanuts"]   But the Sensational Nightingales were remembering an older song, "Let's Do the Slop", that had been an R&B hit for the group in 1954:   [Excerpt: Little Joe and the Thrillers, "Let's Do the Slop"]   That song was very similar to the one by the Nightingales', which suggested that Little Joe might be the right person to do their song, but when Little Joe demoed it, he was dissuaded from releasing it by his record label, Okeh, because they thought it sounded too dirty. So instead the Nightingales decided to offer the song to the Midnighters.   Hank Ballard listened to the song and liked it, but he thought the melody needed tightening up. The song as the Sensational Nightingales sang it was a fifteen-bar blues, and fifteen bars is an awkward, uncommercial, number. So he and the Midnighters' guitarist Cal Green took the song that the Nightingales sang, and fit the lyrics to a pre-existing twelve-bar melody.   The melody they used was one they'd used previously -- on a song called "Is Your Love For Real?":   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "Is Your Love For Real?"]   But this was one of those songs whose melody had a long ancestry. "Is Your Love For Real?" had been inspired by a track by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, "Whatcha Gonna Do?":   [Excerpt, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, "Whatcha Gonna Do?"]   That song is credited as having been written by Ahmet Ertegun, but listening to the gospel song "Whatcha Gonna Do?" by the Radio Four, from a year or so earlier, shows a certain amount of influence, shall we say, on the later song:   [Excerpt: The Radio Four, "Whatcha Gonna Do?"]   Incidentally, it took more work than it should to track down that song, simply because it's impossible to persuade search engines that a search for The Radio Four, the almost-unknown fifties gospel group, is not a search for Radio Four, the popular BBC radio station.   Initially Ballard and Green took that melody and the twist lyrics, and set them to a Jimmy Reed style blues beat, but by the time they took the song into the studio, in November 1958, they'd changed it for a more straightforward beat, and added the intro they'd previously used on the song "Tore Up Over You":   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "Tore Up Over You"]   They apparently also changed the lyrics significantly -- there exists an earlier demo of the song, recorded as a demo for VeeJay when Ballard wasn't sure that Syd Nathan would renew his contract, with very different, more sexually suggestive, lyrics, which are apparently those that were used in the Sensational Nightingales' version.   Either way, the finished song didn't credit the Nightingales, or Green – who ended up in prison for two years for marijuana possession around this time, and missed out on almost all of this story – or any of the writers of the songs that Ballard lifted from. It was released, with Ballard as the sole credited writer, as the B-side of a ballad called "Teardrops on Your Letter", but DJs flipped the single, and this went to number sixteen on the R&B chart:   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "The Twist"]   And that should have been the end of the matter, and seemed like it would be, for a whole year. "The Twist" was recorded in late 1958, came out in very early 1959, and was just one of many minor R&B hits the Midnighters had. But then a confluence of events made that minor R&B hit into a major craze. The first of these events was that Ballard and the Midnighters released another dance-themed song, "Finger-Poppin' Time", which became a much bigger hit for them, thanks in part to an appearance on Dick Clark's TV show American Bandstand:   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "Finger-Poppin' Time"]   The success of that saw "The Twist" start to become a minor hit again, and it made the lower reaches of the chart.   The second event was also to do with Dick Clark. American Bandstand was at the time the biggest music show on TV -- at the time it ran for ninety minutes every weekday afternoon, and it was shown live, with a studio audience consisting almost entirely of white teenagers. Clark was very aware of what had happened to Alan Freed when Freed had shown Frankie Lymon dancing with a white girl on his show, and wasn't going to repeat Freed's mistakes.   But Clark knew that most of the things that would become cool were coming from black kids, and so there were several regulars in the audience who Clark knew went to black clubs and learned the latest dance moves. Clark would then get those teenagers to demonstrate those moves, while pretending they'd invented them themselves. Several minor dance crazes had started this way, and in 1960 Clark noticed what he thought might become another one.   To understand the dance that became the Twist, we have to go back to the late thirties, and to episode four of this podcast, the one on "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie". If you can remember that episode, we talked there about a dance that was performed in the Savoy Ballroom in New York in the late thirties, called the Lindy Hop.   There were two parts of the Lindy Hop. One of those was a relatively formalised dance, with the partners holding each other, swinging each other around, and so on. That part of the dance was later adopted by white people, and renamed the jitterbug. But there was another part of the dance, known as the breakaway, where the two dancers would separate and show off their own individual moves before coming back together. That would often involve twisting in the old sense, along with a lot of other movements. The breakaway part of the Lindy Hop was never really taken up by white culture, but it continued in black clubs.   And these teenagers had copied the breakaway, as performed by black dancers, and they showed it to Clark, but they called the whole dance "the Twist", possibly because of Ballard's record. Clark thought it had the potential to become something he could promote through his TV shows, at least if they toned down the more overtly sexual aspects. But he needed a record to go with it.   Now, there are several stories about why Clark didn't ask Hank Ballard and the Midnighters on to the show. Some say that they were simply busy elsewhere on tour and couldn't make the trip back, others that Clark wanted someone less threatening -- by which it's generally considered he meant less obviously black, though the artist he settled on is himself black, and that argument gets into a lot of things about colourism about which it's not my place to speak as a white British man. Others say that he wanted someone younger, others that he was worried about the adult nature of Ballard's act, and yet others that he just wanted a performer with whom he had a financial link -- Clark was one of the more obviously corrupt people in the music industry, and would regularly promote records with which he had some sort of financial interest. Possibly all of these were involved.   Either way, rather than getting Hank Ballard and the Midnighters onto his shows to perform "The Twist", even as it had entered the Hot One Hundred at the lower reaches, Clark decided to get someone to remake the record. He asked Cameo-Parkway, a label based in Philadelphia, the city from which Clark's show was broadcast, and which was often willing to do "favours" for Clark, if they could do a remake of the record. This was pretty much a guaranteed hit for the label -- Clark was the single most powerful person in the music industry at this point, and if he plugged an artist they were going to be a success -- and so of course they said yes, despite the label normally being a novelty label, rather than dealing in rock and roll or R&B. They even had the perfect singer for the job.   Ernest Evans was eighteen years old, and had repeatedly tried and failed to get Cameo-Parkway interested in him as a singer, but things had recently changed for him. Clark had wanted to do an audio Christmas card for his friends -- a single with "Jingle Bells" sung in the style of various different singers. Evans had told the people at Cameo-Parkway he could do impressions of different singers, and so they'd asked him to record it. That recording was a private one, but Evans later did a rerecording of the song as a duet with Bobby Rydell, including the same impressions of Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, and the Chipmunks that he'd done on Clark's private copy, so you can hear what it sounded like:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker and Bobby Rydell, "Jingle Bell Imitations"]   It was that Fats Domino imitation, in particular, that gave Evans his stage name. Dick Clark's wife Barbara was there when he was doing the recording, and she called him "Chubby Checker", as a play on "Fats Domino".   Clark was impressed enough with the record that Cameo-Parkway decided to have the newly-named Chubby Checker make a record in the same style for the public, and his version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in that style, renamed "The Class" made number thirty-eight on the charts thanks to promotion from Clark:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "The Class"]   Two more singles in that vein followed, "Whole Lotta Laughin'" and "Dancing Dinosaur", but neither was a success. But Checker was someone known to Clark, someone unthreatening, someone on a label with financial connections to Clark, and someone who could do decent impressions. So when Clark wanted a record that sounded exactly like Hank Ballard and the Midnighters singing "The Twist", it was easy enough for Checker to do a Ballard impression:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "The Twist"]   Clark got Checker to perform that on The Dick Clark Show -- a different show from Bandstand, but one with a similar audience size -- and to demonstrate the toned-down version of the dance that would be just about acceptable to the television audience. This version of the dance basically consisted of miming towelling your buttocks while stubbing out a cigarette with your foot, and was simple enough that anyone could do it.   Checker's version of "The Twist" went to number one, as a result of Clark constantly plugging it on his TV shows. It was so close to Ballard's version that when Ballard first heard it on the radio, he was convinced it was his own record. The only differences were that Checker's drummer plays more on the cymbals, and that Checker's saxophone player plays all the way through the song, rather than just playing a solo -- and King Records quickly got a saxophone player in to the studio to overdub an identical part on Ballard's track and reissue it, to make it sound more like the soundalike. Ballard's version of the song ended up going to number twenty-eight on the pop charts on Checker's coattails.   And that should, by all rights, have been the end of the Twist. Checker recorded a series of follow-up hits over the next few months, all of them covers of older R&B songs about dances -- a version of "The Hucklebuck", a quick cover of Don Covay's "Pony Time", released only a few months before, which became Checker's second number one, and "Dance the Mess Around". All of these were hits, and it seemed like Chubby Checker would be associated with dances in general, rather than with the Twist in particular. In summer 1961 he did have a second Twist hit, with "Let's Twist Again" -- singing "let's twist again, like we did last summer", a year on from "The Twist":   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "Let's Twist Again"]   That was written by the two owners of Cameo-Parkway, who had parallel careers as writers of novelty songs -- their first big hit had been Elvis' "Teddy Bear". But over the few months after "Let's Twist Again", Checker was back to non-Twist dance songs. But then the Twist craze proper started, and it started because of Joey Dee and the Starliters.   Joey DiNicola was a classmate of the Shirelles, and when the Shirelles had their first hits, they'd told DiNicola that he should meet up with Florence Greenberg. His group had a rotating lineup, at one point including guitarist Joe Pesci, who would later become famous as an actor rather than as a musician, but the core membership was a trio of vocalists -- Joey Dee, David Brigati, and Larry Vernieri, all of whom would take lead vocals. They were one of the few interracial bands of the time, and the music they performed was a stripped-down version of R&B, with an organ as the dominant instrument -- the kind of thing that would later get known as garage rock or frat rock.   Greenberg signed the Starliters to Scepter Records, and they released a couple of singles on Scepter, produced and written like much of the material on Scepter by Luther Dixon:   [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, "Shimmy Baby"]   Neither of their singles on Scepter was particularly successful, but they became a popular live act around New Jersey, and got occasional gigs at venues in New York. They played a three-day weekend at a seedy working-class Mafia-owned bar called the Peppermint Lounge, in Manhattan. Their shows there were so successful that they got a residency there, and became the house band. Soon the tiny venue -- which had a capacity of about two hundred people -- was packed, largely with the band's fans from New Jersey -- the legal drinking age in New Jersey was twenty-one, while in New York it was eighteen, so a lot of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds from New Jersey would make the journey.   As Joey Dee and the Starliters were just playing covers of chart hits for dancing, of course they played "The Twist" and "Let's Twist Again", and of course these audiences would dance the Twist to them. But that was happening in a million dingy bars and clubs up and down the country, with nobody caring. The idea that anyone would care about a tiny, dingy, bad-smelling bar and the cover band that played it was a nonsense.   Until it wasn't.   Because the owners of the Peppermint Lounge decided that they wanted a little publicity for their club, and they hired a publicist, who in turn got in touch with a company called Celebrity Services. What Celebrity Services did was, for a fee, they would get some minor celebrity or other to go to a venue and have a drink or a meal, and they would let the gossip columnists know about it, so the venue would then get a mention in the newspapers. Normally this would be one or two passing mentions, and nothing further would happen.   But this time it did. A couple of mentions in the society columns somehow intrigued enough people that some more celebrities started dropping in. The club was quite close to Broadway, and so a few of the stars of Broadway started popping in to see what the fuss was about. And then more stars started popping in to see what the other stars had been popping in for. Noel Coward started cruising the venue looking for rough trade, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Tallulah Bankhead were regulars, Norman Mailer danced the Twist with the granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook, and Tennessee Williams and even Greta Garbo turned up, all to either dance to Joey Dee and the Starliters or to watch the younger people dancing to them. There were even rumours, which turned out to be false, that Jackie Kennedy had gone to the Peppermint Lounge – though she did apparently enjoy dancing the Twist herself.   The Peppermint Lounge became a sensation, and the stories all focussed on the dance these people were doing. "The Twist" reentered the charts, eighteen months after it had first come out, and Morris Levy sprang into action. Levy wanted a piece of this new Twist thing, and since he didn't have Chubby Checker, he was going to get the next best thing. He signed Joey Dee and the Starliters to Roulette Records, and got Henry Glover in to produce them.   Henry Glover is a figure who we really didn't mention as much as we should have in the first fifty or so episodes of the podcast. He'd played trumpet with Lucky Millinder, and he'd produced most of the artists on King Records in the late forties and fifties, including Wynonie Harris, Bill Doggett, and James Brown. He'd produced Little Willie John's version of "Fever", and wrote "Drown in My Own Tears", which had become a hit for Ray Charles.   Glover had also produced Hank Ballard's original version of "The Twist", and now he was assigned to write a Twist song for Joey Dee and the Starliters. His song, "Peppermint Twist", became their first single on Roulette:   [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, "Peppermint Twist"]   "Peppermint Twist" went to number one, and Chubby Checker's version of "The Twist" went back to number one, becoming the only record ever to do so during the rock and roll era. In fact, Checker's record, on its reentry, became so popular that as recently as 2018 Billboard listed it as the *all-time* number one record on the Hot One Hundred.   The Twist was a massive sensation, but it had moved first from working-class black adults, to working-class white teenagers, to young middle-class white adults, and now to middle-aged and elderly rich white people who thought it was the latest "in" thing. And so, of course, it stopped being the cool in thing with the teenagers, almost straight away. If you're young and rebellious, you don't want to be doing the same thing that your grandmother's favourite film star from when she was a girl is doing.   But it took a while for that disinterest on the part of the teenagers to filter through to the media, and in the meantime there were thousands of Twist cash-in records. There was a version of "Waltzin' Matilda" remade as "Twistin' Matilda", the Chipmunks recorded "The Alvin Twist". The Dovells, a group on Cameo Parkway who had had a hit with "The Bristol Stomp", recorded "Bristol Twistin' Annie", which managed to be a sequel not only to "The Twist", but to their own "The Bristol Stomp" and to Hank Ballard's earlier "Annie" recordings:   [Excerpt: The Dovells, "Bristol Twistin' Annie"]   There were Twist records by Bill Haley, Neil Sedaka, Duane Eddy... almost all of these were terrible records, although we will, in a future episode, look at one actually good Twist single.   The Twist craze proper started in November 1961, and by December there were already two films out in the cinemas. Hey! Let's Twist! starred Joey Dee and the Starliters in a film which portrayed the Peppermint Lounge as a family-run Italian restaurant rather than a Mafia-run bar, and featured Joe Pesci in a cameo that was his first film role. Twist Around the Clock starred Chubby Checker and took a whole week to make. As well as Checker, it featured Dion, and the Marcels, trying desperately to have another hit after "Blue Moon":   [Excerpt: The Marcels, "Merry Twistmas”]   Twist Around The Clock was an easy film to make because Sam Kurtzman, who produced it, had produced several rock films in the fifties, including Rock Around the Clock. He got the writer of that film to retype his script over a weekend, so it talked about twisting instead of rocking, and starred Chubby Checker instead of Bill Haley. As Kurtzman had also made Bill Haley's second film, Don't Knock The Rock, so Checker's second film became Don't Knock the Twist.   Checker also appeared in a British film, It's Trad, Dad!, which we talked about last week. That was a cheap trad jazz cash-in, but at the last minute they decided to rework it so it included Twist music as well as trad, so the director, Richard Lester, flew to the USA for a couple of days to film Checker and a couple of other artists miming to their records, which was then intercut with footage of British teenagers dancing, to make it look like they were dancing to Checker.   Of course, the Twist craze couldn't last forever, but Chubby Checker managed a good few years of making dance-craze singles, and he married Catharina Lodders, who had been Miss World 1962, in 1964. Rather amazingly for a marriage between a rock star and a beauty queen, they remain married to this day, nearly sixty years later.   Checker's last big hit came in 1965, by which point the British Invasion had taken over the American charts so comprehensively that Checker was recording "Do the Freddie", a song about the dance that Freddie Garrity of Freddie and the Dreamers did on stage:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, "Do the Freddie"]   In recent decades, Checker has been very bitter about his status. He's continued a career of sorts, even scoring a novelty hit in the late eighties with a hip-hop remake of "The Twist" with The Fat Boys, but for a long time his most successful records were unavailable. Cameo-Parkway was bought in the late sixties by Allen Klein, a music industry executive we'll be hearing more of, more or less as a tax writeoff, and between 1975 and 2005 there was no legal way to get any of the recordings on that label, as they went out of print and weren't issued on CD, so Checker didn't get the royalties he could have been getting from thirty years of nostalgia compilation albums. Recent interviews show that Checker is convinced he is the victim of an attempt to erase him from rock and roll history, and believes he deserves equal prominence with Elvis and the Beatles. He believes his lack of recognition is down to racism, as he married a white woman, and has protested outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at his lack of induction. Whatever one's view of the artistic merits of his work, it's sad that someone so successful now feels so overlooked.   But the Twist fad, once it died, left three real legacies. One was a song we'll be looking at in a few months, and the other two came from Joey Dee and the Starliters. The Young Rascals, a group who had a series of hits from 1965 to 1970, started out as the instrumentalists in the 1964 lineup of Joey Dee and the Starliters before breaking out to become their own band, and a trio called Ronnie and the Relatives made their first appearances at the Peppermint Lounge, singing backing vocals and dancing behind the Starliters. They later changed their name to The Ronettes, and we'll be hearing more from them later.   The Twist was the last great fad of the pre-Beatles sixties. That it left so little of a cultural mark says a lot about the changes that were to come, and which would sweep away all memory of the previous few years...

Episode ninety-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Twist” by Chubby Checker, and how the biggest hit single ever had its roots in hard R&B. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Viens Danser le Twist” by Johnny Hallyday, a cover of a Chubby Checker record that became the first number one for France’s biggest rock star.   Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/   Also, people have asked me to start selling podcast merchandise, so you can now buy T-shirts from https://500-songs.teemill.com/. That store will be updated semi-regularly.   —-more—-   Resources   As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.    Much of the information in this episode comes from The Twist: The Story of the Song and Dance That Changed the World by Jim Dawson.    This collection of Hank Ballard’s fifties singles is absolutely essential for any lover of R&B.   And this four-CD box set contains all Chubby Checker’s pre-1962 recordings, plus a selection of other Twist hits from 1961 and 62, including recordings by Johnny Hallyday, Bill Haley, Vince Taylor, and others.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript   Today we’re going to look at a record that achieved a feat that’s unique in American history. It is the only non-Christmas-themed record — ever — to go to number one on the Billboard pop charts, drop off, and go back to number one again later. It’s a record that, a year after it went to number one for the first time, started a craze that would encompass everyone from teenagers in Philadelphia to the first lady of the United States.   We’re going to look at Chubby Checker, and at “the Twist”, and how a B-side by a washed-up R&B group became the most successful record in chart history:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “The Twist”]   One of the groups that have been a perennial background player in our story so far has been Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. We talked about them most in the episode on “The Wallflower”, which was based on their hit “Work With Me Annie”, and they’ve cropped up in passing in a number of other places, most recently in the episode on Jackie Wilson. By 1958, though they were largely a forgotten group. Their style had been rooted in the LA R&B sound that had been pioneered by Johnny Otis, and which we talked so much about in the first year or so of this podcast. That style had been repeatedly swept away by the newer sounds that had come out of Memphis, Chicago, and New York, and they were yesterday’s news. They hadn’t had a hit in three years, and they were worried they were going to be dropped by their record label.   But they were still a popular live act, and they were touring regularly, and in Florida (some sources say they were in Tampa, others Miami) they happened to play on the same bill as a gospel group called the Sensational Nightingales, who were one of the best gospel acts on the circuit:   [Excerpt: The Sensational Nightingales, “Morning Train”]   The Sensational Nightingales had a song, and they were looking for a group to sing it. They couldn’t sing it themselves — it was a secular song, and they were a gospel group — but they knew that it could be a success if someone did. The song was called “The Twist”, and it was based around a common expression from R&B songs that was usually used to mean a generic dance, though it would sometimes be used as a euphemism for sexual activity. There was, though, a specific dance move that was known as the twist, which was a sort of thrusting, grinding move. (It’s difficult to get details of exactly what that move involved these days, as it wasn’t a formalised thing at all). Twisting wasn’t a whole dance itself, it was a movement that people included in other dances.   Twisting in this sense had been mentioned in several songs. For example, in one of Etta James’ sequels to “The Wallflower”, she had sung:   [Excerpt: Etta James, “Good Rockin’ Daddy”]   There had been a lot of songs with lines like that, over the years, and the Sensational Nightingales had written a whole song along those lines. They’d first taken it to Joe Cook, of Little Joe and the Thrillers, who had had a recent pop hit with “Peanuts”:   [Excerpt: Little Joe and the Thrillers, “Peanuts”]   But the Sensational Nightingales were remembering an older song, “Let’s Do the Slop”, that had been an R&B hit for the group in 1954:   [Excerpt: Little Joe and the Thrillers, “Let’s Do the Slop”]   That song was very similar to the one by the Nightingales’, which suggested that Little Joe might be the right person to do their song, but when Little Joe demoed it, he was dissuaded from releasing it by his record label, Okeh, because they thought it sounded too dirty. So instead the Nightingales decided to offer the song to the Midnighters.   Hank Ballard listened to the song and liked it, but he thought the melody needed tightening up. The song as the Sensational Nightingales sang it was a fifteen-bar blues, and fifteen bars is an awkward, uncommercial, number. So he and the Midnighters’ guitarist Cal Green took the song that the Nightingales sang, and fit the lyrics to a pre-existing twelve-bar melody.   The melody they used was one they’d used previously — on a song called “Is Your Love For Real?”:   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Is Your Love For Real?”]   But this was one of those songs whose melody had a long ancestry. “Is Your Love For Real?” had been inspired by a track by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Whatcha Gonna Do?”:   [Excerpt, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Whatcha Gonna Do?”]   That song is credited as having been written by Ahmet Ertegun, but listening to the gospel song “Whatcha Gonna Do?” by the Radio Four, from a year or so earlier, shows a certain amount of influence, shall we say, on the later song:   [Excerpt: The Radio Four, “Whatcha Gonna Do?”]   Incidentally, it took more work than it should to track down that song, simply because it’s impossible to persuade search engines that a search for The Radio Four, the almost-unknown fifties gospel group, is not a search for Radio Four, the popular BBC radio station.   Initially Ballard and Green took that melody and the twist lyrics, and set them to a Jimmy Reed style blues beat, but by the time they took the song into the studio, in November 1958, they’d changed it for a more straightforward beat, and added the intro they’d previously used on the song “Tore Up Over You”:   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Tore Up Over You”]   They apparently also changed the lyrics significantly — there exists an earlier demo of the song, recorded as a demo for VeeJay when Ballard wasn’t sure that Syd Nathan would renew his contract, with very different, more sexually suggestive, lyrics, which are apparently those that were used in the Sensational Nightingales’ version.   Either way, the finished song didn’t credit the Nightingales, or Green – who ended up in prison for two years for marijuana possession around this time, and missed out on almost all of this story – or any of the writers of the songs that Ballard lifted from. It was released, with Ballard as the sole credited writer, as the B-side of a ballad called “Teardrops on Your Letter”, but DJs flipped the single, and this went to number sixteen on the R&B chart:   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “The Twist”]   And that should have been the end of the matter, and seemed like it would be, for a whole year. “The Twist” was recorded in late 1958, came out in very early 1959, and was just one of many minor R&B hits the Midnighters had. But then a confluence of events made that minor R&B hit into a major craze. The first of these events was that Ballard and the Midnighters released another dance-themed song, “Finger-Poppin’ Time”, which became a much bigger hit for them, thanks in part to an appearance on Dick Clark’s TV show American Bandstand:   [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Finger-Poppin’ Time”]   The success of that saw “The Twist” start to become a minor hit again, and it made the lower reaches of the chart.   The second event was also to do with Dick Clark. American Bandstand was at the time the biggest music show on TV — at the time it ran for ninety minutes every weekday afternoon, and it was shown live, with a studio audience consisting almost entirely of white teenagers. Clark was very aware of what had happened to Alan Freed when Freed had shown Frankie Lymon dancing with a white girl on his show, and wasn’t going to repeat Freed’s mistakes.   But Clark knew that most of the things that would become cool were coming from black kids, and so there were several regulars in the audience who Clark knew went to black clubs and learned the latest dance moves. Clark would then get those teenagers to demonstrate those moves, while pretending they’d invented them themselves. Several minor dance crazes had started this way, and in 1960 Clark noticed what he thought might become another one.   To understand the dance that became the Twist, we have to go back to the late thirties, and to episode four of this podcast, the one on “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie”. If you can remember that episode, we talked there about a dance that was performed in the Savoy Ballroom in New York in the late thirties, called the Lindy Hop.   There were two parts of the Lindy Hop. One of those was a relatively formalised dance, with the partners holding each other, swinging each other around, and so on. That part of the dance was later adopted by white people, and renamed the jitterbug. But there was another part of the dance, known as the breakaway, where the two dancers would separate and show off their own individual moves before coming back together. That would often involve twisting in the old sense, along with a lot of other movements. The breakaway part of the Lindy Hop was never really taken up by white culture, but it continued in black clubs.   And these teenagers had copied the breakaway, as performed by black dancers, and they showed it to Clark, but they called the whole dance “the Twist”, possibly because of Ballard’s record. Clark thought it had the potential to become something he could promote through his TV shows, at least if they toned down the more overtly sexual aspects. But he needed a record to go with it.   Now, there are several stories about why Clark didn’t ask Hank Ballard and the Midnighters on to the show. Some say that they were simply busy elsewhere on tour and couldn’t make the trip back, others that Clark wanted someone less threatening — by which it’s generally considered he meant less obviously black, though the artist he settled on is himself black, and that argument gets into a lot of things about colourism about which it’s not my place to speak as a white British man. Others say that he wanted someone younger, others that he was worried about the adult nature of Ballard’s act, and yet others that he just wanted a performer with whom he had a financial link — Clark was one of the more obviously corrupt people in the music industry, and would regularly promote records with which he had some sort of financial interest. Possibly all of these were involved.   Either way, rather than getting Hank Ballard and the Midnighters onto his shows to perform “The Twist”, even as it had entered the Hot One Hundred at the lower reaches, Clark decided to get someone to remake the record. He asked Cameo-Parkway, a label based in Philadelphia, the city from which Clark’s show was broadcast, and which was often willing to do “favours” for Clark, if they could do a remake of the record. This was pretty much a guaranteed hit for the label — Clark was the single most powerful person in the music industry at this point, and if he plugged an artist they were going to be a success — and so of course they said yes, despite the label normally being a novelty label, rather than dealing in rock and roll or R&B. They even had the perfect singer for the job.   Ernest Evans was eighteen years old, and had repeatedly tried and failed to get Cameo-Parkway interested in him as a singer, but things had recently changed for him. Clark had wanted to do an audio Christmas card for his friends — a single with “Jingle Bells” sung in the style of various different singers. Evans had told the people at Cameo-Parkway he could do impressions of different singers, and so they’d asked him to record it. That recording was a private one, but Evans later did a rerecording of the song as a duet with Bobby Rydell, including the same impressions of Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, and the Chipmunks that he’d done on Clark’s private copy, so you can hear what it sounded like:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker and Bobby Rydell, “Jingle Bell Imitations”]   It was that Fats Domino imitation, in particular, that gave Evans his stage name. Dick Clark’s wife Barbara was there when he was doing the recording, and she called him “Chubby Checker”, as a play on “Fats Domino”.   Clark was impressed enough with the record that Cameo-Parkway decided to have the newly-named Chubby Checker make a record in the same style for the public, and his version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in that style, renamed “The Class” made number thirty-eight on the charts thanks to promotion from Clark:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “The Class”]   Two more singles in that vein followed, “Whole Lotta Laughin'” and “Dancing Dinosaur”, but neither was a success. But Checker was someone known to Clark, someone unthreatening, someone on a label with financial connections to Clark, and someone who could do decent impressions. So when Clark wanted a record that sounded exactly like Hank Ballard and the Midnighters singing “The Twist”, it was easy enough for Checker to do a Ballard impression:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “The Twist”]   Clark got Checker to perform that on The Dick Clark Show — a different show from Bandstand, but one with a similar audience size — and to demonstrate the toned-down version of the dance that would be just about acceptable to the television audience. This version of the dance basically consisted of miming towelling your buttocks while stubbing out a cigarette with your foot, and was simple enough that anyone could do it.   Checker’s version of “The Twist” went to number one, as a result of Clark constantly plugging it on his TV shows. It was so close to Ballard’s version that when Ballard first heard it on the radio, he was convinced it was his own record. The only differences were that Checker’s drummer plays more on the cymbals, and that Checker’s saxophone player plays all the way through the song, rather than just playing a solo — and King Records quickly got a saxophone player in to the studio to overdub an identical part on Ballard’s track and reissue it, to make it sound more like the soundalike. Ballard’s version of the song ended up going to number twenty-eight on the pop charts on Checker’s coattails.   And that should, by all rights, have been the end of the Twist. Checker recorded a series of follow-up hits over the next few months, all of them covers of older R&B songs about dances — a version of “The Hucklebuck”, a quick cover of Don Covay’s “Pony Time”, released only a few months before, which became Checker’s second number one, and “Dance the Mess Around”. All of these were hits, and it seemed like Chubby Checker would be associated with dances in general, rather than with the Twist in particular. In summer 1961 he did have a second Twist hit, with “Let’s Twist Again” — singing “let’s twist again, like we did last summer”, a year on from “The Twist”:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “Let’s Twist Again”]   That was written by the two owners of Cameo-Parkway, who had parallel careers as writers of novelty songs — their first big hit had been Elvis’ “Teddy Bear”. But over the few months after “Let’s Twist Again”, Checker was back to non-Twist dance songs. But then the Twist craze proper started, and it started because of Joey Dee and the Starliters.   Joey DiNicola was a classmate of the Shirelles, and when the Shirelles had their first hits, they’d told DiNicola that he should meet up with Florence Greenberg. His group had a rotating lineup, at one point including guitarist Joe Pesci, who would later become famous as an actor rather than as a musician, but the core membership was a trio of vocalists — Joey Dee, David Brigati, and Larry Vernieri, all of whom would take lead vocals. They were one of the few interracial bands of the time, and the music they performed was a stripped-down version of R&B, with an organ as the dominant instrument — the kind of thing that would later get known as garage rock or frat rock.   Greenberg signed the Starliters to Scepter Records, and they released a couple of singles on Scepter, produced and written like much of the material on Scepter by Luther Dixon:   [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Shimmy Baby”]   Neither of their singles on Scepter was particularly successful, but they became a popular live act around New Jersey, and got occasional gigs at venues in New York. They played a three-day weekend at a seedy working-class Mafia-owned bar called the Peppermint Lounge, in Manhattan. Their shows there were so successful that they got a residency there, and became the house band. Soon the tiny venue — which had a capacity of about two hundred people — was packed, largely with the band’s fans from New Jersey — the legal drinking age in New Jersey was twenty-one, while in New York it was eighteen, so a lot of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds from New Jersey would make the journey.   As Joey Dee and the Starliters were just playing covers of chart hits for dancing, of course they played “The Twist” and “Let’s Twist Again”, and of course these audiences would dance the Twist to them. But that was happening in a million dingy bars and clubs up and down the country, with nobody caring. The idea that anyone would care about a tiny, dingy, bad-smelling bar and the cover band that played it was a nonsense.   Until it wasn’t.   Because the owners of the Peppermint Lounge decided that they wanted a little publicity for their club, and they hired a publicist, who in turn got in touch with a company called Celebrity Services. What Celebrity Services did was, for a fee, they would get some minor celebrity or other to go to a venue and have a drink or a meal, and they would let the gossip columnists know about it, so the venue would then get a mention in the newspapers. Normally this would be one or two passing mentions, and nothing further would happen.   But this time it did. A couple of mentions in the society columns somehow intrigued enough people that some more celebrities started dropping in. The club was quite close to Broadway, and so a few of the stars of Broadway started popping in to see what the fuss was about. And then more stars started popping in to see what the other stars had been popping in for. Noel Coward started cruising the venue looking for rough trade, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Tallulah Bankhead were regulars, Norman Mailer danced the Twist with the granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook, and Tennessee Williams and even Greta Garbo turned up, all to either dance to Joey Dee and the Starliters or to watch the younger people dancing to them. There were even rumours, which turned out to be false, that Jackie Kennedy had gone to the Peppermint Lounge – though she did apparently enjoy dancing the Twist herself.   The Peppermint Lounge became a sensation, and the stories all focussed on the dance these people were doing. “The Twist” reentered the charts, eighteen months after it had first come out, and Morris Levy sprang into action. Levy wanted a piece of this new Twist thing, and since he didn’t have Chubby Checker, he was going to get the next best thing. He signed Joey Dee and the Starliters to Roulette Records, and got Henry Glover in to produce them.   Henry Glover is a figure who we really didn’t mention as much as we should have in the first fifty or so episodes of the podcast. He’d played trumpet with Lucky Millinder, and he’d produced most of the artists on King Records in the late forties and fifties, including Wynonie Harris, Bill Doggett, and James Brown. He’d produced Little Willie John’s version of “Fever”, and wrote “Drown in My Own Tears”, which had become a hit for Ray Charles.   Glover had also produced Hank Ballard’s original version of “The Twist”, and now he was assigned to write a Twist song for Joey Dee and the Starliters. His song, “Peppermint Twist”, became their first single on Roulette:   [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “Peppermint Twist”]   “Peppermint Twist” went to number one, and Chubby Checker’s version of “The Twist” went back to number one, becoming the only record ever to do so during the rock and roll era. In fact, Checker’s record, on its reentry, became so popular that as recently as 2018 Billboard listed it as the *all-time* number one record on the Hot One Hundred.   The Twist was a massive sensation, but it had moved first from working-class black adults, to working-class white teenagers, to young middle-class white adults, and now to middle-aged and elderly rich white people who thought it was the latest “in” thing. And so, of course, it stopped being the cool in thing with the teenagers, almost straight away. If you’re young and rebellious, you don’t want to be doing the same thing that your grandmother’s favourite film star from when she was a girl is doing.   But it took a while for that disinterest on the part of the teenagers to filter through to the media, and in the meantime there were thousands of Twist cash-in records. There was a version of “Waltzin’ Matilda” remade as “Twistin’ Matilda”, the Chipmunks recorded “The Alvin Twist”. The Dovells, a group on Cameo Parkway who had had a hit with “The Bristol Stomp”, recorded “Bristol Twistin’ Annie”, which managed to be a sequel not only to “The Twist”, but to their own “The Bristol Stomp” and to Hank Ballard’s earlier “Annie” recordings:   [Excerpt: The Dovells, “Bristol Twistin’ Annie”]   There were Twist records by Bill Haley, Neil Sedaka, Duane Eddy… almost all of these were terrible records, although we will, in a future episode, look at one actually good Twist single.   The Twist craze proper started in November 1961, and by December there were already two films out in the cinemas. Hey! Let’s Twist! starred Joey Dee and the Starliters in a film which portrayed the Peppermint Lounge as a family-run Italian restaurant rather than a Mafia-run bar, and featured Joe Pesci in a cameo that was his first film role. Twist Around the Clock starred Chubby Checker and took a whole week to make. As well as Checker, it featured Dion, and the Marcels, trying desperately to have another hit after “Blue Moon”:   [Excerpt: The Marcels, “Merry Twistmas”]   Twist Around The Clock was an easy film to make because Sam Kurtzman, who produced it, had produced several rock films in the fifties, including Rock Around the Clock. He got the writer of that film to retype his script over a weekend, so it talked about twisting instead of rocking, and starred Chubby Checker instead of Bill Haley. As Kurtzman had also made Bill Haley’s second film, Don’t Knock The Rock, so Checker’s second film became Don’t Knock the Twist.   Checker also appeared in a British film, It’s Trad, Dad!, which we talked about last week. That was a cheap trad jazz cash-in, but at the last minute they decided to rework it so it included Twist music as well as trad, so the director, Richard Lester, flew to the USA for a couple of days to film Checker and a couple of other artists miming to their records, which was then intercut with footage of British teenagers dancing, to make it look like they were dancing to Checker.   Of course, the Twist craze couldn’t last forever, but Chubby Checker managed a good few years of making dance-craze singles, and he married Catharina Lodders, who had been Miss World 1962, in 1964. Rather amazingly for a marriage between a rock star and a beauty queen, they remain married to this day, nearly sixty years later.   Checker’s last big hit came in 1965, by which point the British Invasion had taken over the American charts so comprehensively that Checker was recording “Do the Freddie”, a song about the dance that Freddie Garrity of Freddie and the Dreamers did on stage:   [Excerpt: Chubby Checker, “Do the Freddie”]   In recent decades, Checker has been very bitter about his status. He’s continued a career of sorts, even scoring a novelty hit in the late eighties with a hip-hop remake of “The Twist” with The Fat Boys, but for a long time his most successful records were unavailable. Cameo-Parkway was bought in the late sixties by Allen Klein, a music industry executive we’ll be hearing more of, more or less as a tax writeoff, and between 1975 and 2005 there was no legal way to get any of the recordings on that label, as they went out of print and weren’t issued on CD, so Checker didn’t get the royalties he could have been getting from thirty years of nostalgia compilation albums. Recent interviews show that Checker is convinced he is the victim of an attempt to erase him from rock and roll history, and believes he deserves equal prominence with Elvis and the Beatles. He believes his lack of recognition is down to racism, as he married a white woman, and has protested outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at his lack of induction. Whatever one’s view of the artistic merits of his work, it’s sad that someone so successful now feels so overlooked.   But the Twist fad, once it died, left three real legacies. One was a song we’ll be looking at in a few months, and the other two came from Joey Dee and the Starliters. The Young Rascals, a group who had a series of hits from 1965 to 1970, started out as the instrumentalists in the 1964 lineup of Joey Dee and the Starliters before breaking out to become their own band, and a trio called Ronnie and the Relatives made their first appearances at the Peppermint Lounge, singing backing vocals and dancing behind the Starliters. They later changed their name to The Ronettes, and we’ll be hearing more from them later.   The Twist was the last great fad of the pre-Beatles sixties. That it left so little of a cultural mark says a lot about the changes that were to come, and which would sweep away all memory of the previous few years…

Last week we were lucky enough to interview playwright James Graham, best known for Quiz, This House, Labour of Love and of course Brexit: an uncivil war. We asked him about his early years as a Midlands-born, working class writer in London, his motivation for trying to find empathy in the most controversial public figures (eg Rupert Murdoch or Dominic Cummings) and a little musical he's developing with 'up-and-coming' artist Elton John. We also talked to him about systemic lack of representation and discrimination in theatre, what Government interventions need to happen right now to ensure the survival of theatre in the UK, and the role that the streamers should play in guaranteeing that future. We've included the full Q&A, in which James details his encounters with Cummings, why he works in the early morning, and  Resources:James Graham's appearance on Question Time: https://bbc.in/2YuBNGvInterview with Alistair Campbell at the Edinburgh TV film festival: https://bit.ly/2MVW6qY'The Stage' article on the future of theatre post-covid: https://bit.ly/2XXaLsdThe Fabian Society report on Arts Education (by Ben Cooper): https://bit.ly/2Y0llidThe play ‘Fallout' by writer Roy Williams: https://bit.ly/2Aw9BefThe play 'Nine Nights' by Natasha Gordon: https://bit.ly/30A29cJThis episode was recorded on Friday 5th June. To all our female listeners: we want you in our podcast, so if you're passionate about a topic just get in touch with us at podcast@youngfabians.org.uk. We want to hear from you. Enjoy! Follow us on social media to find out more: https://www.facebook.com/PodcastYFhttps://twitter.com/PodcastYfThe intro music is by ‘One in a Googolplex' and used under Creative Commons. Find out more about them here: https://oneinagoogolplex.bandcamp.com/

Ali Alavi discusses the history of Iran's relations with Palestinian organisation and the Palestinian cause, and their implication to Iranian-Israeli relations. Examining the nature of relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Palestine, the talk investigates the relationship between state and authorities in the Middle East. Analysing the connections of the Iranian revolutionary movements, both the Left and the Islamic camps’ perspectives are scrutinised. To provide a historical background to the post-revolutionary period, the genealogy of pro-Palestinian sentiments before 1979 are also traced. The lecture contextualises the events from the beginning of the Palestinian predicament to the post-Arab spring era. In demonstrating the pro-Palestinian stance of post-revolutionary Iran, the study focuses on the roots of the ideological outlook and the interest of the state. The study also investigates the connections between the Islamic Republic and the Palestinian Islamic Movements of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in depth. Despite a growing body of literature on the Iranian Revolution and its impacts on the region, Iran’s connection with Palestine has been overlooked. This talk fills the gap in academia and enables the audience to unpack the history of the two states. Ultimately the talk aims to answer the questions: what the roots of Iranian pro-Palestinian tendencies are. The talk is based on the book (Iran and Palestine, Past Present, Future) published in August 2019. It transforms the notion of solidarity into a concept of desire for justice. In order to complete the book, the author conducted valuable interviews with Palestinian high representatives in Iran and some Iranian prominent academics active in the sociology of the Palestinian cause. Seyed Ali Alavi is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. He holds a PhD in Politics from SOAS. Ali’s book “Iran and Palestine, Past, Present, Future” was published by Routledge in 2019. Ali also writes and comments about contemporary politics of the Middle East and Europe and he has appeared in a number of interviews by Euronews, Al-Jazeera English, RT, LBC Radio, Radio Four and other outlets.

Ali Alavi discusses the history of Iran's relations with Palestinian organisation and the Palestinian cause, and their implication to Iranian-Israeli relations. Examining the nature of relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Palestine, the talk investigates the relationship between state and authorities in the Middle East. Analysing the connections of the Iranian revolutionary movements, both the Left and the Islamic camps' perspectives are scrutinised. To provide a historical background to the post-revolutionary period, the genealogy of pro-Palestinian sentiments before 1979 are also traced. The lecture contextualises the events from the beginning of the Palestinian predicament to the post-Arab spring era. In demonstrating the pro-Palestinian stance of post-revolutionary Iran, the study focuses on the roots of the ideological outlook and the interest of the state. The study also investigates the connections between the Islamic Republic and the Palestinian Islamic Movements of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in depth. Despite a growing body of literature on the Iranian Revolution and its impacts on the region, Iran's connection with Palestine has been overlooked. This talk fills the gap in academia and enables the audience to unpack the history of the two states. Ultimately the talk aims to answer the questions: what the roots of Iranian pro-Palestinian tendencies are. The talk is based on the book (Iran and Palestine, Past Present, Future) published in August 2019. It transforms the notion of solidarity into a concept of desire for justice. In order to complete the book, the author conducted valuable interviews with Palestinian high representatives in Iran and some Iranian prominent academics active in the sociology of the Palestinian cause. Seyed Ali Alavi is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. He holds a PhD in Politics from SOAS. Ali's book “Iran and Palestine, Past, Present, Future” was published by Routledge in 2019. Ali also writes and comments about contemporary politics of the Middle East and Europe and he has appeared in a number of interviews by Euronews, Al-Jazeera English, RT, LBC Radio, Radio Four and other outlets.

Having a podcast with Moni Mohsin, face to face , was the much needed dose of laughter, humor, intellect, wisdom and experience. Honored and humbled to have her on 'dhaani' - A platform that wants to promote well-being, on the emotional, psychological, physiological, spiritual level - and laughter , humor and wit is an intrinsic feature of the human life. We spoke about privacy, laying safe boundaries, the need for solitude, social media and intrusiveness, and last but not the least Moni was generous to share her "Social Butterfly" snippets with us. Moni Mohsin was born in 1963 in Lahore, Pakistan. Since her father was from the landed gentry of Punjab and her mother from a business family in Lahore, she grew up between Lahore (where she attended a strict convent school run by Irish nuns) and Okara, where she ran wild with peasant children. Like her siblings before her, she left Pakistan at the age of sixteen to attend boarding school in England. Having completed her A'levels, she proceeded to Cambridge to read for a tripos in Archaeology and Anthroplogy. In 1986 she returned to a Pakistan gripped tight in the iron fist of General Zia-ul-Haq. She spent the next two years working for an environmental agency, where she produced Pakistan's first environmental news magazine, Natura. And then in 1988, when General Zia was assassinated and space for political discourse opened up once again, she moved to a new publishing venture, The Friday Times, Pakistan's first independent weekly. She spent seven years there, rising eventually to the position of Features Editor. She married in 1995 and moved back to England with her husband. Since then she has freelanced for a number of Pakistani magazines including The Friday Times, Libas and Zameen. She has also contributed short fiction to the creative writing issue of Wasafiri 2000 edited by Aamer Huussein and Bernadine Evaristo and an anthology on Lahore edited by Bapsi Sidhwa and published by Penguin India. She has also authored a travel book on Lahore published by the Guide Book Company and is currently in talks for the publication of her journalistic writings with Vanguard Books Pakistan and Penguin India. The Ceremony of Innocence is her first novel. She has two children and divides her time between Lahore and London. Moni Mohsin is a Pakistani born novelist and freelance journalist based in London. She has authored two novels, the award winning The End of Innocence (Penguin UK) and Duty Free (Vintage) which was adapted for Radio Four's Book at Bedtime. Her long running satirical column in the weekly newspaper, The Friday Times in Lahore, has been published by Vintage as The Diary of a Social Butterfly and its best selling follow up, The Return of the Butterfly, by Random House India. Her journalistic work has appeared in The Guardian, 1843, Prospect, The Literary Review, Vogue, The Times of India and Nikkei Asian Review. Last year her article ‘Austenistan' (published in 1843) was shortlisted for a Foreign Press Association award. She does book reviews, cultural features, political pieces, satirical columns and celebrity interviews and writes on topics ranging from domestic workers in the Middle East to Bollywood. Moni Mohsin Social Media Handles Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/MoniMohsinpage/ Instagram : @monimohsinofficial Do listen to this and please leave us with a comment, rating or review You can subscribe to our podcast on: Apple Podcast Stitcher Anchor Fm Google Spotify

This one has to be done if not for anything, the meta aspect of things. Podcast - "iPod" and "Broadcast"... Or is it? Ben Hammersley original accidentally coined the term podcasting in an article as he explains on the BBC program Radio Four in 4.   So where do we get the portmanteau of iPod and Broadcasting from a made up word? It is a backronym - another portmanteau - and the meaning is under some dispute.   A little history. In 2000 Dave Winer drafted the Real Simple Syndication (RSS) standard to .92 and added the "enclosure" element that passes along a path to a media file. This ultimately led to different podcasts but most credit Adam Curry of putting together all of the elements needed - RSS, scripting, and actual audio content for his show Daily Source Code. He is commonly referred to as the "Podfather" - another portmanteau. Adam Curry also created RSS-to-iPod in 2003 which enabled transfer of MP3 files from Userland Radio - a blogging platform - to iTunes. Then in June 2005 iTunes 4.9 included podcast subscription support bringing them mainstream. But the name and the meaning. What is that? The common accepted definition is iPod + broadcasting.   However, there is another option given by Tee Morris and Evo Terra in their 2005 book, Podcasting for Dummies. This is Personal-On-Demand Narrowcasting. Evo added "because I don't even own an iPod, yet am quite obviously a podcaster, I see no reason for the association to continue to be made."   The controversy seems especially fitting for podcasting as they are all about creativity and can be anything to anyone, so why not the word itself? Whatever you think Podcasting means, I think it is here to stay and I hope you continue to enjoy this one.   Resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast https://create.blubrry.com/manual/about-podcasting/history-of-podcasting-new/technical-history-of-podcasting/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p038m811 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/feb/12/broadcasting.digitalmedia https://books.google.com/books?id=6YOV4I-hslYC&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=Ben+Hammersley+evo+terra&source=bl&ots=dWMGw5cxNQ&sig=ACfU3U1FQmfqTQvVLHCMZz2O_Rw9c0Jr-Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiPoI6P4NrjAhVlUt8KHYw8BIgQ6AEwDnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=Ben%20Hammersley%20evo%20terra&f=false

The BBC’s Radio Four is known among the British as the nation’s cerebral option. This well deserved reputation comes from decades of delivering consistently high quality content. What follows is an excellent example of this high standard. Since 2013, historian Peter Hennessy has picked four of his country’s highest profile politicians for in-depth interviews that explore their formative influences, experiences and impressions of people they had known. The final interview of the Seventh Series’ of Reflections with Peter Hennessy featured South African-raised anti-apartheid icon Lord Peter Hain. Aired last month, the interview provides unique insights into Hain, whose family were ejected from their homeland because of their political activism. Although best known for leading the sports boycott against white South Africa, Hain also became British MP for 24 years, served in the cabinets of two Prime Ministers and was knighted after his retirement in 2015. The peerage opened the door for Hain’s participation in the House of Lords, where his contribution to his former homeland has been immense through exposing the Guptas, Bell Pottinger and multinational companies which participated in the pillage of State Capture.   Here, with kind permission of the BBC, are the two Peters – Hennessy and Hain……

In this week’s books podcast Sam is joined by the physicist Jim Al-Khalili (host of Radio Four’s The Life Scientific) to talk about his first novel, a science-fiction thriller called Sunfall. In it, Jim uses real science to conjure up a plausible but fantastical near-future crisis in which the earth’s magnetic field falters and dies. What would that mean? (Nothing good, is the answer.) He helps us sort our neutralinos from our neutrinos, tells us about the real existential threats we face, and explains why he’s drawn to so-called “hard sf”. Spectator Books is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes of Spectator Books here (https://audioboom.com/dashboard/4905582) .

In this week’s books podcast Sam is joined by the physicist Jim Al-Khalili (host of Radio Four’s The Life Scientific) to talk about his first novel, a science-fiction thriller called Sunfall. In it, Jim uses real science to conjure up a plausible but fantastical near-future crisis in which the earth’s magnetic field falters and dies. What would that mean? (Nothing good, is the answer.) He helps us sort our neutralinos from our neutrinos, tells us about the real existential threats we face, and explains why he’s drawn to so-called “hard sf”. Presented by Sam Leith.

Ken introduces you to four of his all-time favorite radio performers.  These are the voices that inspired him and made him laugh.   Vin Scully, Dan Ingram, The Real Don Steele, and Gary Burbank.

It's International Women's Day and DJ Lippy and Sobering Maid are back in episode four with news and discussions on sexism in the music industry and the unpaid labour of women. Read more about the Mary Quaile club here: https://maryquaileclub.wordpress.com

Tara is an Irish actress and writer. She came to international attention for her satirical videos, Racist B&B, which earned her the title Satirist of the Year 2013 at the Swift Satire Festival, and Armagayddon – co-written with Kevin McGahern. She has written two satirical books – You’re Grand: the Irishwoman’s Secret Guide to Life and Giving Out Yards: the Art of Complaint, Irish Style (Hachette Books Ireland) and a book of essays, Rage In for Headstuff and Mercier Press was a 2018 best seller. Tara has worked extensively in Ireland and the UK as an actress in theatre, radio and TV. TV includes roles in Irish Pictorial Weekly, Line of Duty, Moone Boy, Doctors, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, The Omid Djalili Show, The Impressions Show with Culshaw & Stephenson, Hide & Seek(directed by Dearbhla Walsh) and she was part of the recurring cast on Thank God You’re Here UK. She played DI Tina Mahon opposite David Threlfall in season five of Baldi for Radio Four. Her own piece Fete Worse Than Death was recorded for the Radio Four Funny Bones series. Favourite theatre roles include Miss Fitt in Beckett’s All That Fall for Out of Joint Theatre Co. (drected by Max Stafford Clark), most of the female voices in Stewart Lee’s EdFringe production of Talk Radio, and Suzy Bernstein in I Do Not Like Thee Dr. Fell for the Abbey Theatre. She was a founder-member of comedy singing trio The Nualas and was a core member of Dublin Comedy Improv for over 15 years. In her past life as a stand-up, she performed at festivals including Edinburgh Fringe, Kilkenny Cat Laughs and Melbourne International Comedy Festival. You might have seen her on panel shows, including The Panel (Channel 10, Australia and the RTÉ version with Dara Ó Briain) and she’s a regular radio contributor. She is one of Ireland’s top voice artists, with numerous commercial and animation credits. She is a columnist for Irish Tatler, a contributor to the Irish Times, and wrote a weekly Rage-In for Headstuff. Her YouTube channel is [here](https://www.youtube.com/user/Flynnercom/videos). You can find her on Instagram at [@taraflynnirl](https://www.instagram.com/taraflynnirl/)

Listen to the writer and storyteller, Dr Sunny Singh, speaking to delegates at the 'Race in Britain: Inequality, Identity, Belonging' conference for 10 minutes on 1-2 November 2018, at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park. Sunny spoke during a session on 'The Role of the Past on Race and Identity Today'. The Principal of Cumberland Lodge, Ed Newell, posed the question: 'What, if any, is the ongoing relevance of Britain's colonial history for issues of race, identity and citizenship today?' The roundtable conference was held in partnership with race equality think tank, the Runnymede Trust, which marks its 50th anniversary this year. Find out more about the event at: https://www.cumberlandlodge.ac.uk/whats-on/race-britain-inequality-identity-belonging. Sunny is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning writer of fiction and creative non-fiction, and an academic based at London Metropolitan University. Her short stories have been published by prestigious international literary journals including The Drawbridge, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and World Literature Today. Her creative nonfiction has been published across the world in key journals and anthologies. She also writes for newspapers and magazines, in Spanish and English, across the globe. Sunny also comments on aspects of politics and culture on radio and television, and has appeared on BBC World, BBC News, Radio Four, ITV News and Sky News. Sunny’s research interests include but are not limited to gender, sexuality, armed conflict, and postcoloniality(-ies). She is particularly interested in research projects exploring representations of the above in literature and cinema.

Matthew Sweet is a journalist and broadcaster. He presents Night Waves and Freethinking on BBC Radio 3, and is the summer presenter of The Film Programme on Radio Four. He is the author of The West End Front, Inventing the Victorians and SheppertonBabylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema, which he adapted as a film for BBC Four. He has edited and introduced the work of Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Thackeray, George Eliot and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. His TV programmes include Silent Britain, A Brief History of Fun, The Age of Excess, Truly, Madly, Cheaply and The Rules of Film Noir. Matthew’s latest book isOperation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Martine McCutcheon, real life east ender, became famous as a TV Eastender in the 90s playing Tiffany, on off love interest for hi-maintenance Grant Mitchell, until she was squished by Frank Butcher outside the Queen Vic on Christmas Eve. She reinvented herself as a pop star - having a Perfect Moment in 1999 with the chart topping song of that name - and then another perfect moment co-starring with Hugh Grant in the Richard Curtis romcom, Love Actually. Off screen life, however, was complicated and after an award winning but stormy run in My Fair Lady in the West End, things went Pete Tong. Illness, bankruptcy, time to regroup - but now, fighting fit, she's back with a new album. When Benjamin Mee's dad died, he persuaded his mum to buy a zoo so that the whole family could live together. Of course it wasn't as easy as that - there were plenty of challenges along the way. But his story was made into a film starring Matt Damon in 2013. With the thank you slot, when we offer you the opportunity to thank someone for a good deed done by left unthanked, we're especially delighted on the rare occasion when a thanker is reunited with a thankee. But, people of Britain, today we reunite two of them live in the studio. Rabia Dignam and Sir Harold Walker, who met in a crowded and extremely tense Baghdad airport during the Iraqi Invasion of 1990. There's not much Gabe Cook doesn't know about cider. He's made cider for big name companies and small breweries. He's done the PR for the UK cider industry. And now he is his own man - a ciderologist and Britain's first 'pommelier'. The adorable and thoroughly cherished Roy Hudd was on Saturday Live a while ago with tales of his six decades in showbiz. He started as a redcoat, has appeared in everything from panto to Broadchurch, presented the News Huddlines here on Radio Four for a quarter of a century, and is today a custodian of anecdotes to the platinum standard of Ned Sherrin. Heritage on legs, people, and we thought we'd be unforgivably remiss if we didn't get him to surrender his Inheritance Tracks. Cally Beaton has done alright. She worked her way up to senior Vice President at the media company Viacom International. Then inexplicably at the age of 45 she decided to get into stand-up comedy. Her show Super Cally Fragile Lipstick will be in Edinburgh from August 5th And as you know we always want to hear from you - the listener. This week's Call Out is asking 'what unusual job do you do and how did you get into it'? In fact do you have such an unusual job most people wouldn't even know it exists? We have heard of people who are professional mourners. One person even told us they had a job as a professional 'cuddler'. We want to hear from you. Get in touch and don't forget to leave a number in case JP Devlin wants to call you back EMAIL: saturdaylive@bbc.co.uk TEXT: 84844 TWEET: #bbcsaturdaylive Presenters: Aasmah Mir & the Rev. Richard Coles Producer: Maire Devine.

In a week which saw the testimonial game for Jon Mackenzie's over 200 appearances for Corpus Christi College, we're here to celebrate the podcast's one year anniversary. Much like Jon's testimonial, we expect this episode to be full of silky skills, crunching slide tackles and, as requested by Will Geeson, for things to end with a gentlemanly shaking of hands and a rousing rendition of God Save the Queen before each heading home for a comfortable evening in the company of Radio Four. Before that though, we're going to be talking about our ideal podcast guests. For the sake of brevity and listener sanity, we have each pledged to not mention our actual ideal podcast guests. So if you have come here for discussions of Peter Mandleson, Martin Luther or Martin McGuinness you might as well leave now. After this Miles-Davis-esque creative, free-flowing harmony of thought, we return to the rigidity of Organised Fun. Paddy has organised fun this week so expect it to be unbelievable. All this and more beside in this week's episode of A Team of John O'Sheas...

A new Radio Four spoof from Mackenzie & McGuire On Radio Hoohah today: In My Mind delves into the thoughts of Leonora Velvety Constable-Wheeler, and her passion for Pugs, Shakespeare and taking her clothes off when she totally doesn’t realise. Popular soap opera The Burgers has a few surprises in store this week when Mrs White slips on some conditioner in the hairdressers, and What’s New has an exclusive look into Dorothy Ahlwhala’s latest novel “Raspberry Ripple, Iron Hoof”, the latest theatre and music releases, as well as handling the political hot potato – Globalisation. Contains lots of bad language. And swearing. A French and Saunders for the Facebook generation” Allthefestivals.com Listen free for a limited time only! Written, Directed and Performed by Octavia Mackenzie and Ashley McGuire. Edited By: Joe Siddons Running Time : 45 mins #sketchcomedy #audiosketch #comedians #femalecomedians #femalesketchcomedy

In the middle of September last year, Steve Hewlett, the presenter of Radio Four's The Media Show was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer. He thought it might be of interest to PM listeners to detail his treatment on air. Sadly Steve has died. Here is our tribute to Steve Hewlett, a collection of moments from the times he generously spent talking to us about his illness.

With his own Radio Four series and a raft of Mock The Week appearances under his belt, Nathan Caton remains astonishingly down to earth and level-headed. We explore panel-show tactics, discuss using comedy to heal people close to you, and learn how he was dropped by a leading agent out of the blue. He's happy, well-balanced and kind - will Stu manage to crack the bastard? Get ad-free new episodes, bonus content from interviews and much more by joining the Insiders Club at www.comedianscomedian.com/insidersGet tickets for Stu Goldsmith's stand-up tour at www.comedianscomedian.com/tour@comcompod | www.comedianscomedian.comAnd don't forget to join the Comcom Facebook group, which you can do here. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

As Britain declares war on Austria-Hungary, Folkestone tries to rally flagging tourism whilst waving local troops off to the front. Written by: Katie Hims & Sean Moffatt Consultant Historian: Professor Maggie Andrews Music by: Matthew Strachan Sound: Martha Littlehailes Directed and produced by: Lucy Collingwood Editor: Jessica Dromgoole Home Front is a ground-breaking Radio Four radio drama - its biggest ever - set in Britain during 1914-18, playing a central role in the BBC's comprehensive offering to mark the centenaries of the First World War. An enthralling fiction, set against a backdrop of fact. Each episode is set a hundred years to the day before broadcast, and follows one character's day. Together they create a mosaic of experience from a wide cross-section of British society, and a playful treasure hunt, with historical truths hidden in each story. Season One is set in Folkestone, a fashionable Edwardian seaside resort that quickly became one of the hubs of the military machine, and close enough to France to hear the fighting. Future seasons will be set in Newcastle and Devon, telling the major stories of wartime Britain.

An epic drama series set in Great War Britain exactly a hundred years before it was first broadcast. In the first weekly omnibus edition of Season 1, Folkestone comes to terms with being at the hub of Britain's war effort. Written by Katie Hims Consultant Historian: Professor Maggie Andrews Music: Matthew Strachan Sound: Martha Littlehailes Directed by Jessica Dromgoole Home Front is a ground-breaking Radio Four radio drama - its biggest ever - set in Britain during 1914-18, playing a central role in the BBC's comprehensive offering to mark the centenaries of World War One. An enthralling fiction, set against a backdrop of fact. Each episode is set a hundred years to the day before broadcast, and follows one character's day. Together they create a mosaic of experience from a wide cross-section of British society, and a playful treasure hunt, with historical truths hidden in each story. Season One is set in Folkestone, a fashionable Edwardian seaside resort that quickly became one of the hubs of the military machine, and close enough to France to hear the fighting. Future seasons will be set in Newcastle and Devon, telling the major stories of wartime Britain.

"Blossom is an account of Scotland at the grassroots through the stories of people I've had the good fortune to know – the most stubborn, talented and resilient people on the planet. They've had to be. Some have transformed their parts of Scotland. Some have tried and failed. But all have something in common – they know what it takes for Scotland to blossom. We should know too."The ScotIndyBook series features audio book versions, full books or selected pieces, fiction and non-fiction, of some of the books being written about the independence referendum, or using it as a theme.All the books in this series have been given by the kind permissions of their authors.This time it is part of Blossom, by Lesley Riddoch (who was also on the other podcast just before christmas).I'm sure you know who Lesley is but in case you aren't sure...An honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, president of the student union in 1981, founded and directed a feminist magazine known as Harpies and Quines, contributing editor of the Sunday Herald and assistant editor of The Scotsman. She was editor of a special one-off edition of The Scotsman known as The Scotswoman produced by the paper's female staff.Writing columns for The Sunday Post, The Scotsman, and occasionally The Guardian, shortlisted for the Orwell prize. From 1989 to 1994 she presented the BBC Radio Scotland programme Speaking Out and was one of the presenters of Radio Four programme You and Yours. In 1993 Riddoch won a Cosmopolitan woman award for Communication and in 1994 for the best talk show award. Her programme Speaking Out took the Silver Quill Law Society award that same year. Between 1999 and 2005 she had her own daily radio programme the Lesley Riddoch Programme on Radio Scotland.8392802340_fea0d5a957_zRiddoch presented TV programmes of which include The Midnight Hour on BBC2, and The People's Parliament and Powerhouse on Channel 4, runs her own independent radio, podcast and TV production company known as Feisty Ltd.Riddoch was involved in the buyout of the Isle of Eigg by the local community. She assisted in putting together the buyout plan and later became a trustee of the Isle of Eigg Trust. The trust bought the island in 1997.In 2008, Riddoch served as a member of the Scottish Prisons Commission. In 2009, she acted as Chair in Task Force, set up by the Scottish Government, to transfer the island of Rùm into community ownership from Scottish Natural Heritage.So there you have it. And she's donated part of her book, so here it is...Hope you enjoy...

Radio Four's Station Manager, Denis Nowlan, was in Dublin of Friday night at the invitation of AIRPI. He gave a highly informative overview of Radio Four with a view to letting Irish independent radio producers know what is required to get commissioned for documentaries. His full talk will soon be available on airpi.ie to members, but for now, we are posting his wrap up gag about one of the many moaning letters that Radio Four receives. Thanks Denis.

One cold November night four individuals in their mid-late twenties got together for an evening chat. These were not any random four people however these were four friends that have known each other for years and at least once a week over those years they would get together to check in with each other, all the while of course pursing a shared dream. So it stands to reason that these four would be sensitive to each others needs and supportive shoulders for each other to lean on. Generally speaking that might be a correct assumption but in this case we are talking about the cast of Comical Radio who have made a career out of lovingly shitting on each other and pulling no punches. Danny is Fat, Chris is a goofy Italian, Kasten is a drug addicted psychotic antisocial basement dweller and Myka is a paranoid neurotic hypochondriac with anxiety problems. We get it! But Maybe it's deeper than that, maybe just maybe these are the four most maladjusted unsupportive unsympathetic people to ever pull off a consistently listened to show with any kind of longevity. Perhaps it's an entire show of Artie Langs and the audience is just tuning in with baited breath each week to see who will break down the fastest or the hardest. It is possible that that question was answered today when Myka left mid-show during the commercial break to goto the hospital because she was uncontrollably shaking. Was it psychosomatic? Is she really dieing? Will the Comical Crew have sympathy if she does or are they all truly assholes? Perhaps the better question is how many boyfriend points will Chris accumulate for wearing the proper suit to the funeral! I guess you will just have to stay tuned to find out more.One cold November night four individuals in their mid-late twenties got together for an evening chat. These were not any random four people however these were four friends that have known each other for years and at least once a week over those years they would get together to check in with each other, all the while of course pursing a shared dream. So it stands to reason that these four would be sensitive to each others needs and supportive shoulders for each other to lean on. Generally speaking that might be a correct assumption but in this case we are talking about the cast of Comical Radio who have made a career out of lovingly shitting on each other and pulling no punches. Danny is Fat, Chris is a goofy Italian, Kasten is a drug addicted psychotic anti social basement dweller and Myka is a paranoid neurotic hypochondriac with anxiety problems. We get it! But Maybe it's deeper than that, maybe just maybe these are the four most mal adjusted unsupportive unsympathetic people to ever pull off a consistently listened to show with any kind of longevity. Perhaps it's an entire show of Artie Langs and the audience is just tuning in with baited breath each week to see who will break down the fastest or the hardest. It is possible that that question was answered today when Myka left mid-show during the commercial break to go to the hospital because she was uncontrollably shaking. Was it psychosomatic? Is she really dieing? Will the Comical Crew have sympathy if she does or are they all truly assholes? Perhaps the better question is how many boyfriend points will Chris accumulate for wearing the proper suit to the funeral! I guess you will just have to stay tuned to find out more.

Here's a little intermediate audio treat. Farmers Weekly launched a discussion forum thread about

The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is Paul Merton. He'll be talking to Sue Lawley about his enduring but secret ambition to be a comedian and the feeling he's had throughout his life that he would always make it somehow. He'll be describing his painful beginnings at London's Comedy Store, and his graduation from there to radio and television, where he now has his own series on Channel 4, as well as appearing on Radio Four's Just A Minute and I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue and being part of the regular team of BBC2's Have I Got News For You?[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Spreading by Kronos Quartet Book: Buster Keaton Biography by Rudi Blesh Luxury: Bed