Épisodes

  • #61 They just pretended to shoot - Ep 1 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

    #61 They just pretended to shoot - Ep 1 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16
    May 7 2025
    1 July 1916. Had British Corps commanders understood machine gun warfare they would not have sent British infantrymen across No Man’s Land unprotected from the German machine gun crews. In fact we explain why the British army need never have been in the position it was in on the Somme, scrabbling about at the bottom of hills, peering up at German fortifications in all the strategic locations. We look at its refusal to take trench warfare seriously even though it had been around for 60 years. (R)

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    40 min
  • #109 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 - 2 May 1937: the king, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

    #109 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 - 2 May 1937: the king, his wife, their Führer, the lobster
    Apr 30 2025
    We complete our exploration of the dark shadows in the background of Cecil Beaton’s sunny photograph. The laws of the time made it perfectly possible to prevent Edward VIII from marrying Wallis Simpson. Then there wouldn’t have been any point in abdicating. But nobody even tried. Did the yet-to-be-crowned king himself manufacture the crisis? Or had Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, by never revealing the private letters he had from Wallis Simpson, carried off a very British palace coup? (R)

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    33 min
  • #108 'I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler' - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

    #108 'I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler' - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster
    Apr 23 2025
    As the newly appointed king, but not yet crowned, Edward VIII secretly told the Nazis he admired, that he was going ‘to concentrate the business of government in himself…. Who is king here? Baldwin or I?’ Did Prime Minister Baldwin get rid of the King because he was too pro-Nazi, as Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop, maintained? Or was there another reason? (R)

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    26 min
  • #07 That Dress - Ep 1 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster'

    #07 That Dress - Ep 1 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster'
    Apr 16 2025
    2 May 1937. Cecil Beaton photographs for American Vogue the twice-divorced American heiress soon to marry the ex-King Edward VIII. Wallis Simpson wears a Schiaparelli ‘waltz dress’ with a Salvador Dali red lobster down her skirt. The setting is a French chateau belonging to the American businessman who a few months later will mastermind the Windsors’ honeymoon tour of Germany. But what – other than Wallis Simpson - connects all these people? (R)

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    24 min
  • #111 A live donkey or a dead lion? - Ep 4 Amundsen vs Scott - a very British failure

    #111 A live donkey or a dead lion? - Ep 4 Amundsen vs Scott - a very British failure
    Apr 9 2025
    Amundsen reached the South Pole a month before Scott, but his story never captured the imagination of the English. They wanted heroic tales of desperate survival in appalling conditions - even if those conditions were of their own making. Scott went on to be glorified in the First World War by men like Haig who used young men as German cannon fodder because he believed British spirit was stronger than the polar cold, or German bullets.

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    39 min
  • #110 ‘the worst has happened’ - Ep 3 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

    #110 ‘the worst has happened’ - Ep 3 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure
    Apr 1 2025
    When Scott took a fifth man with him to the South Pole he signed each man’s death warrants. Not for the first time, Scott’s endless calculations for four men – pages and pages of scribbled notes on weights and distances and food and cooking fuel to carry – proved to be a waste of time. His surgeon had already warned him he’d calculated too little food per day for manhauling a sled. What’s more they only had four pairs of skis. They’d have to take it in turns to walk.

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    38 min
  • #109 The Worst Journey in the World - Ep 2 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

    #109 The Worst Journey in the World - Ep 2 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure
    Mar 26 2025
    Over a year before he and two of his men starved to death, just two days’ march from a depot with food and fuel, Scott confided to young biologist Apsley Cherry-Garrard. ‘This is the end of the pole.’ He wasn’t questioning his planning or his leadership. He was blaming what he saw as the failure of their ‘transport,’ their dogs and ponies. Now they would have to rely on the British Naval tradition of man-hauling sledges into blizzards of the Arctic winter. Scott doubted it was possible.

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    36 min
  • #108 Lop Ears and Jackass Ep 1 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

    #108 Lop Ears and Jackass Ep 1 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure
    Mar 18 2025
    The race is on between Captain Robert Scott of the Royal Navy and Norwegian Roald Amundsen. As Scott’s wife, Kathleen Bruce, requires, and as Edwardian culture expects, Scott will test the manliness and endurance of himself and his team. Amundsen will test the efficacy of Norwegian Telemark skiing combined with Inuit survival techniques. We know which team we would prefer to be on.

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    40 min