Tag Archives: Podcasts

Discovering the Small Web Movement

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What happens when the mines run out?
The Captain announces a new golden age of prosperity. They just fill up again.
What, just like that?
Yeah. Well, you don’t think that’s wrong, do you?
Wrong? It’s an economic miracle. Of course it’s wrong.
Oh. Oh then, of course, the lights change.
What lights?
You know, the lights. The ones on the sky at night. Little points of light.
Do you mean the stars?

Conversation between the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Kimus (David Warwick) in The Pirate Planet (part 2) by Douglas Adams, broadcast 7th October 1978.

Anyone perusing my blog’s back-catalogue recently may recall my post about The Queen’s Reading Room, a post which I named “Reading the Room” in a very weak pun on the topic name. That post now has an update at the bottom clarifying that since I wrote it another podcast has started up which actually is called “Reading the Room”. Of course, it’s such an obvious title that, in this age of mass podcast proliferation, it was bound to be used eventually (and indeed the Substack blog carrying it needs to have “pod” at the end of its subdomain because plain “readingtheroom” was already taken), but this one seems to be rising to prominence among intellectual circles. It almost certainly gets a leg-up due to the fact that both the hosts – Felice Basbøll and Ella Dorn – are columnists for a handful of newspapers and magazines, as likely are a lot of their listeners, so its popularity is not entirely grassroots. Apart from the very broad stroke that they both talk about books, this podcast is entirely unlike the Clarence House production: There are no interviews with the authors, tours of vintage libraries or commissions of research into national literacy statistics. This podcast consists of the two hosts talking among themselves for over an hour at a time about one or more books they’ve read, their choices and the outflowing discussions focusing heavily on philosophy and contemporary socio-political matters. This is not an approach that it would be practical (or constitutionally wise) for Her Majesty to take.

Alright, that’s enough unpaid advertising. The podcast is not the real reason I’m writing this article now. In addition to their newspaper editorials, Basbøll and Dorn both also have individual Substack blogs. Most of what they write there isn’t relevant to this article either, but there was one that particularly struck me as important – Dorn’s post from 27th February this year entitled “How to Take Down Big Tech”. The main thrust was that, for the preservation of online freedom and, more broadly, of enlightened society, it would be better if we avoided large social networks as a general principle in favour of smaller forums and individual websites. She referred to this as “The Small Web Movement”. I have supported the same goals for practically the whole of my online life and have often encountered posts, articles, comments and videos from other people concurring, but only here did I discover that it was an established ideology with a tangible identity.

My history with the World Wide Web is a fought one. For most of the noughties, my family – and most households in the area – had about the connection quality you would expect from rural broadband at that time. Then again, the web itself was still quite primitive. In 2009 out ISP jacked up the price prohibitively high. For the next few years we had no home broadband at all, and internet access was only achievable through a prepaid WiFi plug-in device, which had limited utility. I think it was in 2012 that, having established HubbNet, we finally got a decent connection again. No sooner had I rejoined the online world then I became aware that it was under threat. In the good old days it appeared that, subject only to the physical limitations of their hardware, anyone could have their own website, use any number of online services and upload any number of photographs or videos. It seemed to be, quite literally, a free-for-all. The story of the past decade or so has been the realisation that this utopia was unsustainable. For a long time all of these big sites were running at a loss, heavily subsidised by very wealthy investors who supported the development of these technologies in the hope that they would somehow become massively profitable in the near future. A lot of them still haven’t. As the money dried up and investors started insisting on a tangible return, and even moreso post-pandemic as the long era of ultra-low interest rates finally ended, companies had to make drastic changes to their products to increase revenue and slash costs. Restrictions were placed on space, ads became more aggressive and harder to skip. Pages disappeared behind paywalls and old pictures/videos/files were deleted. The crusade against free riders often became in practice a war on usability. The polite term, though not the common one, for this phenomenon is “Platform Decay”. If the freedom of the web wasn’t under threat from the companies themselves, it was threatened by politicians. Leaders and legislators across many countries, parties and decades have repeatedly sought to take control of the medium that most of them don’t understand in the slightest. This is alternately done in the name of copyright, security and safety. In the New Tens we were threatened with the spectres of SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, ACTA and Article 13. thankfully the most dangerous aspects of these were killed before they could reach the statute book. In the present decade we haven’t been so lucky: I am writing this in the wake of the coming-into-force of the Online Safety Act, a multipartisan disaster passed in 2023 against the objections of everyone with half a brain. Similar laws exist in some parts of the United States and are expected to proliferate across the European Union. However virtuous may have seemed the intentions these laws claimed, they all had the potential to destroy the internet as it has been known for the past thirty years. The deliberations over these laws tend to play out as battles between sovereign states and the major tech businesses, with the common end user having plenty of reason to distrust both. With states concentrating on the most prominent large platforms, and the platform owners themselves often pre-emptively shutting messages which could offend either the government or their advertisers, the need for a decentralised network of small independent backup sites becomes pressing.

The main benefit of having an entire website of your own is that it gives you a greater degree of personal control, especially with regard to visual customisation. Twitter and similar sites give you a profile picture, a couple of sentences’ written biography and maybe a header image if you’re lucky. Long ago YouTube channels allowed you to change the button colours and set a background image, but those abilities were removed around the time they were bought out by Google. Variables, on social media profiles, tend to be restricted within a fairly narrow range. Website builders, by contrast, often allow dozens, maybe hundreds of templates, after which the client has further options for menus, logos, assorted other widgets, fonts and colour schemes. If you’re coding your own website from scratch you can have it look and work basically any way you want. For a physical analogy, imagine a street where each resident can have his own house with its own unique design and decoration, versus a barrack hall where each inmate can, at best, have a different selection of photographs on the backboard behind his pillow. The flipside of this, of course, is that increased proximity allows conversations to happen faster. Short, snappy replies can be given almost in real time, whereas with separate websites they would naturally tend to be longer and more spaced out. Most in and indeed out of the Small Web Movement would consider that a positive, perhaps even the positive, but there are others for whom this spontaneity and intimacy are extremely valuable. There are ways to approximate this, if need be – most website builders include the options for comment sections on posts and pages, as well as a “re-blog” feature. If inter-platform compatibility is an issue, you could always just include a hyperlink to the other person’s post in your own. If that’s too cumbersome… maybe email each other? In my personal experience, I’ve more often witnessed this problem occur the other way around, as Tweeters desperately crush a substantial paragraph of text into a long string of single-sentence posts, or even screenshot the block of text on another medium then upload that as an image. The latter solution has the advantage of speed but it must be monstrously inefficient in terms of accessibility, searchability and digital memory space.

The Movement’s favoured solution is the return to the dedicated online forum. Forums have been around since the earliest days of the World Wide Web, but their power and prominence has waned in latter years with the rise of the social media giants. Reddit, in particular, is designed as a sort of universal mega-forum which subsumes all the others. Forums are a halfway point between personal websites and major social networks, giving people with shared interests a common space without having to invite the whole world in, allowing customisation of design at group level but not individual. Examples of forums which still command some cultural weight are The Student Room, Digital Spy and the notorious Mumsnet. One might throw in the Army Rumour Service as well. There are also lots of smaller forums dedicated to specific hobbies, needs or franchises. Often a long-running film, book, or television series will have a quasi-official fan forum, e.g. Star Trek has Trek BBS, Doctor Who has Outpost Gallifrey and I think I’ve already mentioned Sodor Island Forums. In case I’ve not mentioned already, there are, of course, heraldry forums too.

Fairly it could be said that all of this still falls short of the intention of the Small Web Movement because they still involve using someone else’s platform. The real goal is to have each blogger hosting their own website independently. While I accept the principle of decentralisation, I think expecting everyone to keep individual servers running may be a little beyond feasibility given constraints on money, space, electricity supply and technical knowledge. Indeed, since it has been over a decade since I completed my Information Technology GCSE or had much direct involvement in HubbNet, some of the material I’ve come across from the Movement about Gopher and Gemini is stretching the limits of my own understanding a little, though I hope to get there reasonably soon. Perhaps a compromise could come about in the form of small local data centres, with hosting space rented out in a manner akin to garden allotments. More realistically, since the intention is to transition the masses away from social media accounts, builders such as this would be a relatively easy first step, from which those most determined (and whose sites are successful enough to justify it) can later move the whole way.

I remain undecided on the necessity of registering your own domain rather than using a subdomain of the website builder. I have written before about my disappointment in having to go for “HomeworkDirect.UK” because the Uncle Ben’s rice brand snapped up “HomeworkDirect.Com” just before I could claim it. I always intended this blog to be at “RobinStanleyTaylor.Net”, but did not actually get around to registering the domain until 2017, with “RobinStanleyTaylor.Wordpress.Com” sufficing for the first two years. I cannot run a proper counterfactual to see how the blog would have fared without the change, but I know I was getting at least some regular engagement on the small number of posts I’d made up until that point. I suppose the main value of a domain is on an aesthetic level – it confers an air of formality and professionalism, whereas a “.someonelse.com” looks casual and amateur. A personalised domain also tends to be shorter (what with one of the levels being removed) which makes branding easier. On a practical level, and in keeping with the general thrust of this article, having your own domain allows you to totally replace the website you use without having to give up the URL you’ve already posted everywhere. I took advantage of this in 2022 when I moved Homework Direct to WordPress because Wix put its prices up. On the other hand, renting a domain is itself an expense as well as requiring identification whereas subdomain sites can still be free and anonymous. Of the sites I frequent (on which topic more later), I notice that The Norton View is still on a WordPress subdomain after operating more than fifteen years, as did Murrey and Blue under its original ownership. Of the many Substack blogs I’ve recently encountered, the vast majority have kept it at “.substack.com”, whereas it would be difficult to imagine them all doing the same on WordPress. Perhaps one is considered more prestigious than the other in some way.

As a case study into the importance of having a website and not just a channel, I point to the example of Chuck Sonnenburg, professionally known as SF-Debris. Chuck is a film and television critic of more than seventeen years’ standing, making him one of the seniormost figures in what is now a very large “reviewtainment” industry. He got his start talking about Star Trek: Voyager, then gradually branched out to the rest of the Star Trek franchise, then to other science fiction and fantasy franchises (e.g. Doctor Who and Red Dwarf) as well as whatever miscellaneous films and series his fans suggest for him. He claims to have surpassed the ten thousand video mark some years ago. His journey has rarely been easy. His review videos take the form typical of the genre – ten to fifteen minutes of footage from the episode he’s reviewing, occasionally playing the sound but mostly as a silent montage over which he reads his commentary. Purveyors of this type of content maintain that it falls under Fair Use, but that doesn’t stop IP owners – or indeed the automated systems of the video-hosting services) from blocking videos on the grounds of copyright infringement. Chuck has been around long enough to witness several such piracy purges. For his first few years he used YouTube as his primary platform – only natural as it was and is by far the largest – with a backup channel on Blip.TV. The backup channel was mainly used for long-form videos, as YouTube back then had quite restrictive limits on running time. In 2011, having had a few too many threats from YouTube, Chuck decided to take down hundreds of his own videos before the platform inevitable purged them, then set about making Blip his main platform instead. Rather than simply reupload his old videos in their original form, Chuck decided that a lot of them needed rerecording. He did this alongside still making new reviews, so it took years before all his missing episodes were available again. Almost immediately this effort was rendered worthless because BlipTV completely shut down as a platform. Chuck therefore had to reupload everything again with yet another host. He has joked about this himself, claiming not to remember how many platforms have dropped him over the years. At the time of writing he seems to be using DailyMotion for his “full motion” videos while, ironically, going back to YouTube for lesser versions where he essentially talks over a slideshow of still images instead of moving clips. This alternative format is less engaging to watch but safer from a copyright perspective, as well as almost certainly being easier to edit. Here the point of this [my, not Dorn’s] article comes into play – originally Chuck’s videos were displayed on his YouTube channel and that was likely to be the place where people watched and commented on them. Alongside this, however, he also had a standalone website at sfdebris.com which essentially ran like a blog with each post being titled after the episode or film he was reviewing and consisting of an embed of the corresponding video followed by a short (and snarky) written description. Originally this could have struck some as pointless, but the repeated purges vindicated his approach, for links to his website remain usable long after links to his video channels are killed. When the videos are taken down, the sites pages are left with error messages or even just empty spaces where the embeds used to be, but the page titles, the descriptions and the navigation menus are intact so that the site exists as something of an empty shell. As Chuck proceeds with reuploading on a new video host, the shell is gradually filled in again with the new videos being embedded exactly where the old ones had been. When the reupload process is eventually completed, visitors will find the site looking and working much as it did before. If they notice any difference at all, it will only be that the play button on the video is a different colour – just like the citizens of Zanak noticing the new lights in the sky when the mines are refilled. Nowadays Chuck has the DailyMotion videos unlisted to they cannot be viewed from the hosting site itself, only as embedded on his blog, so that none come to think of the former as his home. Chuck also has a dedicated forum set up to take on the role normally played by the comment section. Again, this helps to maintain long-term continuity, because comments left on the videos themselves would be lost to digital history upon blocks or takedowns. It also has the advantage that the conversations themselves are easier to write and read.

If you’re as much a pessimist as I am you’ve probably already anticipated that if a critical mass of content creators adopted this strategy then the platform owners would cotton on and start forbidding embeds, or at least restricting them in some (probably financial) way to force viewers to use the host sites directly. In this scenario I would hope that creators already using said strategy would be able to vote with their feet by switching to hosts more obliging (unless of course they were to all do it at once). In the interim a simple direct link on the blog page would probably suffice for the same purpose, even if it was less elegant in looks.

Dorn’s article expressed a wish to see people exchanging URLs for websites instead of handles for profiles, so at this point I ought to share some of my own recommendations. Per her advice, I have created a link directory on this website, which can be accessed under the “About” heading in the main menu.

FURTHER READING

Canada, Carney and Commonwealth

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Sixty-two days after Trudeau announced his intention to step down, the leadership contest for the Liberal Party of Canada concluded last night. The winner, to the surprise of almost nobody, was former bank governor Mark Carney. He garnered 85.9% of the vote, albeit on only a 37% turnout, which really shows how uninspiring the other candidates must have been.

Carney’s Wikipedia page is already describing him as “Prime Minister Designate”, though the exact date at which the Governor General will formally appoint him to that office has not yet been decided. Canada tends to do governmental transitions at a rather slower pace than Britain does, with the time between leadership elections (or indeed general elections) and ministerial appointments often being measured in weeks rather than hours, but most indications are that this one will take place unusually quickly.

That the leadership election should eschew two experienced cabinet veterans in favour of someone who isn’t even an MP is a little surprising. In the Canadian constitution, as in the British, it is not illegal for a non-Parliamentarian to be appointed to a ministerial office, but it is considered improper and, above all, politically impractical. The nearest British precedent for Carney’s situation, and even then it is a very poor one, would be the much-discussed case of Sir Alec Douglas-Home disclaiming his peerages to jump back to the Commons in 1963. A more thorough comparison of these two situations may be worth a separate article.

Accession to the premiership will, of course, give Carney the right to constitutionally advise the King of Canada, including advising him to speak on Canadian matters.

For the moment, Charles continues in a state of political limbo. Following a long-established royal tradition, he must express himself in a cryptic, plausibly-deniable way, often through subtle sartorial cues.

Today is Commonwealth Day, which includes a service at Westminster Abbey and the publication of a message by His Majesty. As the position of Head of the Commonwealth has no formal powers at all, it is not subject to “advice” from the secretariat in the way that ministers advise their monarchs, and thus this is a rare opportunity for Charles to speak his own mind. Of course, the message is meant to broadly encompass all fifty-six-and-counting members of the organisation, so is still a poor venue for a determined diatribe about any particular one of them, so any comment about the defence of Canadian sovereignty must again be inferred rather than stated outright.

Sir Keir Starmer has been similarly cautious, Tweeting about “further deepening the UK-Canada relationship together” but not saying anything specific about what that would entail. It was also announced two days ago that the Department of National Defence had commissioned a fleet of new destroyers based on a British design, but this is likely unrelated to the state of relations with the White House.

Returning to more familiar territory, I notice that where the Commonwealth Day message has been quoted in photographic form, the coat of arms in the letterhead is now the new Timothy Noad illustration with the Tudor crown. Said illustration has also now replaced the earlier versions on the royal website as well. As I noted to Sodacan, the change was done at some point in the morning of Wednesday 5th March.

During the abbey service itself, I distinctly noticed Their Majesties sitting behind ornate wooden faldstools with what looked like the old-style royal arms of Canada on them. This is not in itself the cryptic clue that it might seem – they were donated by the Canada Club in 1949.

The most surprising recent development in the past few days has been the launch of another royal podcast. Whereas Camilla has been patronising The Queen’s Reading Room (of which a podcast is but one part) for some years, Charles has only just announced The King’s Music Room (probably named that way for congruence with his wife’s project), but it has already generated a lot more headlines. The format is very different from the Reading Room, being very explicitly the product of a partnership with Apple and only available to their subscribers, among which I am not.

Reading the Room

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The Queen’s Reading Room today celebrated its second annual festival at Hampton Court Palace.

Rather than focus on the festival event specifically, of which I could not find much footage, I wanted to use the opportunity to write more broadly about the reading room as a concept.

At the start of 2021 Camilla, then Duchess of Cornwall, launched the reading room under her title as an online book club. In 2023, her husband having acceded to the throne, she reconstituted it as a charity and updated the name to reflect her change in status.1

I had been intrigued by the royal couple’s literary interests since the pandemic forced so much of public interaction into the virtual space, and the bookshelf backdrop became an important element of one’s self-presentation. Conferences held from her study at Birkhall show her with at least three books by J. K. Rowling and six by Philippa Gregory2 — the latter suggesting an unorthodox approach to family history. Charles’s shelf was also the subject of some news articles.

The website contains numerous video interviews with authors, celebrity readings and, of course, a weekly podcast.

The most intriguing part of the enterprise, naturally, is in the particular choice of books: There is a page dedicated to Her Majesty’s own picks, which are named in batches of four every season (i.e. sixteen per year). As of June 2024 there have been fourteen literary seasons, resulting in a list of fifty-six books so far. I have listed them here oldest to newest.

Pride & Prejudice Austen, Jane 1813
Frankenstein Shelley, Mary 1818
A Christmas Carol Dickens, Charles 1843
The Queen’s Necklace Dumas, Alexandre 1849
A Tale of Two Cities Dickens, Charles 1859
The Woman in White Collins, Wilkie 1859
Black Beauty Sewell, Anna 1877
Dracula Stoker, Bram 1897
A Book of Food Shand, P. Morton 1927
Rebecca Maurier, Daphne du 1938
I Capture the Castle Smith, Dodie 1948
My Family and Other Animals Durrell, Gerald 1956
Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris Gallico, Paul 1958
The Far Pavilions Kaye, M. M. 1978
War Horse Morpurgo, Michael 1982
Love in the Time of Cholera Márquez, Gabriel García 1988
The Remains of the Day Ishiguro, Kazuo 1989
The Light Years Howard, Elizabeth Jane 1990
A Suitable Boy Seth, Vikram 1993
Charlotte Gray Faulks, Sebastian 1998
The Poisonwood Bible Kingsolver, Barbara 1998
Atonement McEwan, Ian 2001
The Secret Life of Bees Kidd, Sue Monk 2001
The Kite Runner Hasseini Khaled 2003
Suite Française Némirovsky, Irène 2004
The Various Haunts of Men Hill, Susan 2004
Labyrinth Mosse, Kate 2005
The Island Hislop, Victoria 2005
Half of a Yellow Sun Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 2006
Restless Boyd, William 2006
The Book Thief Zusak, Marcus 2006
The Lords’ Day Dobbs, Michael 2007
The Year of Eating Dangerously Parker Bowles, Tom 2007
My Brilliant Friend Ferrante, Elena 2012
The Architect’s Apprentice Shafak, Elif 2013
The Red Notebook Laurain, Antoine 2015
A Gentleman in Moscow Towles, Amor 2016
Magpie Murders Horowitz, Anthony 2016
The Little Library Cookbook Young, Kate 2017
Where the Crawdads Sing Owens, Delia 2018
City of Girls Gilbert, Elizabeth 2019
Girl O’Brien, Edna 2019
Girl, Woman, Other Evaristo, Bernadine 2019
Lady in Waiting Glenconner, Anne, Baroness 2019
The Secret Commonwealth Pullman, Philip 2019
A Half Baked Idea Potts, Olivia 2020
Dark Tides Gregory, Philippa 2020
Hamnet O’Farrell, Maggie 2020
Miss Benson’s Beetle Joyce, Rachel 2020
The Mirror & the Light Mantel, Hilary 2020
Great Circle Shipstead, Maggie 2021
Left You Dead James, Peter 2021
The Fair Botanists Sheridan, Sara 2021
The Paper Palace Heller, Miranda Cowley 2021
Lessons in Chemistry Garmus, Bonnie 2022
The Whalebone Theatre Quinn, Joanna 2022

The selection skews modern. While there are some obvious classics in there (e.g. Dickens and Austen) the majority of entries are from the present century. In this long list the only one which I personally recall reading in full is The Book Thief, about eleven years ago. Fittingly enough, that story is itself about the importance of literacy for intellectual development and freedom, in the context of living through World War II under the German regime that encouraged book-burning.

There are many others from which I have at least read extracts (or listened to them in audiobooks) or which I know by reputation.

The one which sticks out to me the most, given the regal patronage of the Reading Room is The Lords’ Day (2007) by Michael Dobbs. This is a political thriller about the Palace of Westminster being captured by terrorists on the day of the State Opening of Parliament, with fictionalised versions of Elizabeth II and her then-Prince of Wales among the characters. Dobbs (himself ennobled in 2010) earlier wrote the famous House of Cards/To Play the King/The Final Cut trilogy whose second instalment also features a fictionalised version of Charles — ascending to the throne thirty years earlier than in real life and then swiftly being forced to abdicate after a losing a constitutional battle against an evil prime minister. Also featured is Lady in Waiting (2019) by the Lady Glenconner (which I bought at a charity shop last year but haven’t gotten around to reading yet), a memoir which goes into great detail about her time with the Princess Margaret.

The historical novels also often touch on potentially-sensitive topics: e.g. Dumas’s The Queen’s Necklace and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities both centre on the French Revolution while Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow deals with the Russian one. Seth and Kaye both write about British India, Kingsolver about the Belgian Congo. It would be hard to find a set of popular historical books set in Britain (whether fictional or factual) without encountering at least one about the royal family themselves. In this case Her Majesty chose Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, the last in a trilogy about the career of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. There are quite a lot more books about Word War II as well.

The King also gets a look-in. Before his accession to the throne, the Prince Charles shared five of his favourite books: The Battle of the Atlantic by Jonathan Dimbleby, Along the Enchanted Way by William Blacker, Lustrum by Robert Harris, Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn and Napoleon by Adam Zamoyski. That second book is likely particularly important to Charles, given his attempts to live that life himself.

There is a further section dealing specifically with children’s books, figureheaded by the Princess of Wales.3 On World Book Day 2022 Catherine similarly made five personal recommendations, and there are dozens more recommended by other friends of the charity. The proportion of these which I have personally read is higher than in the adult section but there are fewer interesting points I have to make about them.

It is also worth noting that while quite a few of the entries end up being about the royal family, there are so far as I can tell none of the books by them e.g. A Vision of Britain, The Old Man of Lochnagar, Crowned in a Far Country or Budgie the Little Helicopter. The Queen did, however, recommend one book by her non-royal son.

I daresay that Her Majesty is at times being a little, well, courageous in associating herself with some of these books. The monarchy strives to be above politics, yet literature is fundamentally about ideas and politics are never far away. A reading room project which took a wide berth from any possible controversy would probably end to watered-down to be worth doing, so Camilla has taken the riskier but more rewarding path. This was exemplified by her Clarence House speech in 2023 for the relaunch of the project, at which she told writers collectively to “remain true to your calling, unimpeded by those who may wish to curb the freedom of your expression or impose limits on your imagination” in what was widely perceived as an intervention in an ongoing controversy over the proposed Bowdlerisation of some classic Roald Dahl books. The edits ultimately did not go ahead.

FURTHER READING

UPDATE (June 2025)

I originally meant the title of this post to be a weak pun on the project’s actual name, but lately I have discovered that there actually is a newly-launched podcast called Reading the Room.

UPDATE (October 2025)

The Queen has, reportedly, gotten herself included in The Hawk is Dead, an upcoming crime novel by Peter James.

FOOTNOTES

1 It went straight from “The Duchess of Cornwall’s Reading Room” to “The Queen’s Reading Room” without being called “The Queen Consort’s Reading Room” in between, perhaps the earliest hint at the eventual abandonment of this honorific crutch at the coronation.

2 I can’t get a perfect view even in 1080p, but I think I recognised The Lady of the Rivers, The Red Queen, The Kingmaker’s Daughter and Three Sisters, Three Queens. What Camilla chose for the above list, however, was Dark Tides, one of the non-royal Fairmile series.

3 Catherine’s URL slug has been updated for the new reign but Charles’s has not, giving the impression that they are husband and wife instead of father and daughter-in-law.

Heraldic Headache

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Five and a half months since the announcement of their appointments, the installation of the Duchess of Cornwall, the Baroness Amos and Sir Tony Blair in the Order of the Garter finally took place today. Suspended for two years due to the pandemic, the ceremony was revived with the knights, ladies, heralds and soldiers marching through the grounds of Windsor Castle in all their finery.

Getting photographs of this event has proven annoyingly difficult. The Royal Household itself has not made a proper film of it, nor have the major news networks covered it in much detail, so I have had to piece it together from commercial photographers (whose shots I would not risk directly embedding here), crowd-members short films and attendees’ Tweets. The end result is less than satsifactory.

Most importantly, I have yet to see any photographs from inside the chapel since the new members were installed, so remain none the wiser as to the appearance of their armorial banners – my main reason for waiting so expectantly all this time! Sir David Amess and Sir Lindsay Hoyle remain similarly elusive.

While we’re here, it’s worth mentioning yet another podcast I have discovered: the Commonwealth Poetry Podcast by Gyles & Aphra Brandreth, whose first episode features the Duchess of Cornwall and Dame Joanna Lumley as its guest stars.

EXTERNAL LINKS

UPDATE (12th August)

By searching “Garter” on the Parliamentary Archives website, I have found this photographic album of the procession from 1996. Hopefully there will be more of its kind in the same place.

That Harrison & Graham Sound

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Exactly when I first saw Peep Show has slipped from memory. I recall watching New Year’s Eve when it was reasonably new, and also remember parts of Mugging from slightly earlier. I binged the whole of the first seven series on 4oD at some point before the end of 2012, and then watched the final two series as they came out.

My experience with Podcast Secrets of the Pharaohs is even more retroactive – it ended two months ago, and I only came across it last week. Blasting through the lot was made more difficult by the podcast episodes being three or four times the length of their televised counterparts, but also easier by being audio-only, so they could be played as the background to something else.

In some ways it is remarkable that a program which ended over six years ago continues to amass a dedicated following, and that so many lines from it have permeated popular discourse.

Tom & Rob’s commentary is at least as good as that by McNeil and Wang for Voyager, the main differences being that they come from one generation lower and they were not insiders when the series they are reviewing was on air. The lower-concept setting also allows that hosts to compare the events of Peep Show to their own lives. As an aside, it always strikes me as a little strange when the hosts of these kinds of review-tainment programs, whose demeanour is otherwise hintless as to age, start going on about their partners or even children. Of course, neither of them ever had to eat a partly-cremated dog, nor wrestle a burglar to the ground while hosting a dinner party, so there are limits to their personal experience. What struck me most was when they wanted to give advice to the characters, comparing the events of the episodes against merely what their own lives had been, but a surprisingly certain and definite idea of how everyone’s life at various stages is and should be.

In addition to episodic analysis, the podcast also features interviews of nearly all the significant cast members, going into great detail about their experiences with the series and their views on the characters they played.

EXTERNAL LINKS

  • Andrxxw – a YouTuber who also reviewed Peep Show in its entirety, albeit in much briefer form.
  • The Peep Show Reviews Blog – a similar review series in textual format, though it was abandoned after just four series.

In Those Circles

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Five years ago I discovered a project called the Culture Concept Circle. It is run by Carolyn McDowall, an “independent cultural and social historian”. The YouTube channel comprises a long series of short documentaries about the history of art and design, a lot of them focusing on British architecture. The videos are not as polished as those you’d see on television – they are mostly just zooming or panning along stock still images (often low resolution) with a voiceover lecture – but this should not diminish their appeal for anyone already interested in the subject matter. If anything, they highlight how much of a modern TV documentary is essentially padding. The People Profiles are somewhere in between, as are History Matters and Extra History.

I’ve also recently discovered English Heritage podcasts. They cover an eclectic range of subjects from royal romances to Darwin’s gardens. The one that particularly caught me was How the railways shaped the nation. This is less because of its actual content than because it is narrated by collections curator Dr Matt Thompson, whose voice sounds remarkably similar to that of Ted Robbins.

Yet More Podcasts

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Some months ago I discovered a weekly podcast entitled The Benji & Nick Show. It mainly reviews old Doctor Who, but also branches out into lots of other old television. The hosts are Nicholas Briggs (voice of the Daleks) and Benji Clifford (of 5WF fame, later sound designer for Big Finish). They speak in a candid but reasoned manner about a wide range of media. Sadly, they announced some weeks ago that their series will come to an end in September.

Still going is The Delta Flyers, which started last spring but which I only discovered a week ago. It is an episode-by-episode commentary on Star Trek: Voyager by two of its principal cast – Robert Duncan McNeil (Lieutenant Tom Paris) and Garrett Wang (Ensign Harry Kim). Their discussions include personal recollections from the time as well as insights from their later careers. There’s even a bit of poetry thrown in. Currently they have just finished the third season, which means with one episode per week they should finish exactly two years from now.

More Podcasts

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For the whole of January I wondered when the third episode of the House of Lords podcast was going to arrive. On 10th February it finally did so. The Lord Patel, Chair of the Science & Technology Committee, was interviewed about healthy ageing. The Lord Cashman, former MEP and actor, recalled his role in founding Stonewall. I hope that new episodes will be produced more frequently in future so that momentum is not lost among potential listeners.

The Heraldry Society recently started a podcast of its own, the first episode being an interview of Quentin Peacock about Digital Heraldry. Peacock spoke about the time and difficulty of creating high-quality vector graphics. Notice was also taken of the growth of online heraldist communities in recent years.

Back on Wikipedia, I have spent the last week constructing another armorial page – that for Anglican Bishops of the Diocese of Chester. The bulk of the necessary information was found on the website of the now-defunct Cheshire Heraldry Society. The vast majority of the escutcheons (no crests or mottoes listed) were simple enough to recreate in a short time, so that it only took a few days to illustrate and upload the whole lot. Creating the list page itself was also quite easy, given that I am well used to the template by now. It is too early to say if the page will survive. At present no other editor appears to have noticed it at all. If it is accepted then I may go on to produce armorials for the more senior bishoprics of Canterbury and York, though so far I have not found the relevant information so conveniently assembled.

UPDATE (15th February)

Searching around I uncovered this presentation by Dr Adrian Ailes for the National Archives, recorded a decade ago.

The Podcast in the Tower

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Princes in the Tower Podcast Series

Shortly after mentioning them in a post about someone else, I came across a podcast by History Extra concerning the mystery of the “Princes in the Tower”, meaning Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury in the Tower of London awaiting what should have been the former’s coronation. As well as the boys themselves, the podcast also investigates the historical reputation of their supposed killer Richard III, formerly Duke of Gloucester.

As the boys simply disappeared without trace in the summer of 1483, nobody can be sure exactly what happened to them. Bones were discovered in 1674 that might have been them, but there were discrepancies between historical accounts and some of the bones were not even human. Our present sovereign has not allowed DNA testing to determine their exact identity. The reason for her reticence is itself unknown, the most plausible explanation being that she fears setting a precedent for historians to tamper with her own remains in centuries to come. Perhaps “the Princess in the Tunnel” will still be an obsession for the nuttier tabloids?

Richard III himself is also hotly contested. Having been painted by the Tudors (and then Shakespeare as a deformed, leering hunchback, he has benefited from later attempts to rehabilitate his reputation, at least relative to the standards of the time. As said in the podcast, the Ricardian phenomenon is at least as intriguing as the life of Richard himself, or indeed his royal nephews.

EXTERNAL LINKS

UPDATE (February 2021)

Today I found a podcast series about Richard III by Matt Lewis.