Bloomin' Legends with Johnny Vaughan & Gavin Woods

It's the Bloomin' Legends Halloween special, and Johnny Vaughan and Gavin "The Woodman" Woods have five wartime ghost stories across land, sea and air. Although Johnny would like it on record that Gav has a frustrating habit of explaining ruining the spookyness of them.

🏹 The Angels of Mons – August 1914, the retreat from Mons, and the phantom Agincourt bowmen said to have held the German advance long enough for the BEF to get out. Why Johnny thinks it should be the most famous story of the entire war

🪖 The Corridor of Lost Souls – a historian camping at Verdun digs a tin out of the mud, finds a 1916 diary, hears a French voice in the fog, and sees a soldier in a 1916 helmet. Then the diary page had moved

✈️ The bomber that landed itself – November 1944, Belgium. A B-17 comes down, bounces to a halt and sits there with its engines growling. When they finally open the hatch: no crew, half-eaten candy bars, code books still aboard and a full set of untouched parachutes

💀 The dead pilot still flying – 1942, over China. Two American pilots intercept a P-40 with no canopy, no landing gear, part of a wing missing and the pilot slumped forward in the cockpit. It never fired, never manoeuvred, and crashed into a rice field. Nobody knows who he was

🚢 The destroyer that came back – the USS Stewart, scuttled in 1942, spotted months later cruising the Pacific under Japanese colours

🐠 Plus: the three methods of pet burial – Navy, Army and RAF. You have to be fairly senior to qualify for the RAF one

If you love war stories, ghost stories, military history, Halloween and unbelievable true tales, this episode of Bloomin' Legends is for you.

Got a legend you want us to cover?

📩 Send it to: [email protected]

📲 Follow us on TikTok & Instagram: @BloominLegends

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bloominlegends

Listen to all episodes on Global Player, download the app, or visit www.globalplayer.com

Bloomin' Legends is a Global production

Produced by Ben Fairclough

New episodes are released every Wednesday & Sunday. Subscribe to never miss an episode!

They didn't stop public hangings because people found them distasteful. They stopped them because the crowds kept rioting.

Johnny and Gav on Britain's strangest spectator sport, and the few years when you could have taken in an execution and a football match on the same day.

The Extra Legendary Bit is where Johnny Vaughan and Gavin "The Woodman" Woods dive into your messages and uncover the gloriously unhinged tales sent in by the Bloomin' Legends nation.

⚖️ The correction, and the pedantry it unleashed – Johnny owns the Thackeray error, explains how Peter Ackroyd's biography of London tripped him up, and discovers that being slightly wrong is the most engaging thing you can possibly do

🪢 Why executions went indoors – not public taste, but public order. The crowds rioted, every single time

⚽ Hanging and football, the same era – the last public execution in London was 1868. The Cambridge rules of football arrived in 1863. For a brief window you could genuinely have gone to a hanging and then on to watch Notts County

💨 Roland the Farter – James nominates a genuine 12th century court entertainer who performed an annual jump, whistle and fart for Henry II, and was rewarded with a manor in Suffolk. His heirs inherited both the estate and the obligation to keep doing it

👮 Where "copper" really comes from – a serving Met sergeant writes in to correct the record: it predates Peel and the Met entirely, and comes from the copper band around the Bow Street Runners' truncheons

If you love funny true stories, listener tales, dark British history, odd facts and comedy podcasts, this bonus episode of Bloomin' Legends is for you.

Got a story that can top this week's madness?

📩 Send it to: [email protected]

📲 Follow us on TikTok & Instagram: @BloominLegends

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bloominlegends

Listen to all episodes on Global Player, download the app, or visit www.globalplayer.com

Bloomin' Legends is a Global production

Produced by Ben Fairclough

New episodes are released every Wednesday & Sunday. Subscribe to never miss an episode!

The most powerful man in the known world walked up to him and asked if there was anything he could do for him. He was lying in the sun at the time. His answer was: "You could stand out of my light."

In this episode, Johnny Vaughan and Gavin "The Woodman" Woods tackle their first ever philosopher: Diogenes of Sinope, also known as Diogenes the Dog.

🏺 Life in a jar – the banker's son who was exiled for defacing his own city's currency, arrived in Athens with one servant, and gave up absolutely everything when the servant ran away

🐕 Why they called him a dog – he fawned on those who gave him things, barked at those who didn't, and would bite a scoundrel. He also farted in response to rival philosophers' speeches

🔥 "Behold, Plato's man" – Plato defined a human as a "featherless biped," so Diogenes plucked a chicken and marched it into the Academy. Plato's followers had to amend the definition

🪔 The lamp in broad daylight – walking the marketplace with a lit lamp, telling anyone who asked that he was looking for a human being

🏴‍☠️ Captured by pirates and sold as a slave – asked at auction what he could do, he replied "Governing men. Sell me to someone who needs a master." He ended up effectively running his new owner's household

👑 The Alexander encounter – the exchange at Corinth in 336 BC that's still quoted 2,300 years later, and Alexander's reply: "If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes."

💀 Three competing accounts of his death – holding his breath, eating a raw octopus, or a dog bite. Plus the dog carved in marble that was placed on his grave

Also: why Diogenes asked statues for money, what Plato meant by calling him "Socrates gone mad," and Johnny's theory that every bulldog he's ever owned has had the same philosophy sorted.

If you love ancient history, eccentric characters, Ancient Greece, big ideas made funny and unbelievable true stories, this episode of Bloomin' Legends is for you.

Got a legend you want us to cover?

📩 Send it to: [email protected]

📲 Follow us on TikTok & Instagram: @BloominLegends

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bloominlegends

Listen to all episodes on Global Player, download the app, or visit www.globalplayer.com

Bloomin' Legends is a Global production

Produced by Ben Fairclough

New episodes are released every Wednesday & Sunday. Subscribe to never miss an episode!

Episode Bio:

Today we learn about a stray dog in Athens who turned up to every single protest, and was so unbothered by tear gas that it eventually killed him.

The Extra Legendary Bit is where Johnny Vaughan and Gavin "The Woodman" Woods dive into your messages and uncover the gloriously unhinged tales sent in by the Bloomin' Legends nation.

🐕 Loukanikos, the riot dog of Athens – George writes in to ask whether you can be a bloomin' legend if you aren't even human. Loukanikos settles it: a stray who attended Greek protests for years, cared for by left-wing groups, commemorated in murals, and whose name doubles as slang for a Molotov cocktail

🦁 Dogs that were bred to hunt lions – Johnny and Gav on the mastiff problem: the owners who insist their donkey-sized dog is "great with kids," the ones with clipped ears, and why anything bred to chase a lion probably shouldn't be on the Tube

💥 What if rioters had their own dogs? – the thought experiment nobody asked for. Riot dogs. Rioters with water cannons. And Riot Dogs as a three-piece band, complete with spray-painted logo

👟 The dog poo landmine – Vincent's boss spent an entire conversation with his foot pressed down on a fresh one, too frightened to lift it in case the smell gave him away

🎤 I Will Survive, Vic Reeves style – K nominates their dad for a club-singer rendition in an Irish bar in Spain that split the room clean in half and earned them free drinks all night

🦉 The owl-drawn carriage – one listener writes in from aboard his Mark II Luxor, powered by twelve owls, six a side, for stability during low-level flight

If you love funny true stories, listener tales, legendary animals, dog chat and comedy podcasts, this bonus episode of Bloomin' Legends is for you.

Got a story that can top this week's madness?

📩 Send it to: [email protected]

📲 Follow us on TikTok & Instagram: @BloominLegends

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bloominlegends

Listen to all episodes on Global Player, download the app, or visit www.globalplayer.com

Bloomin' Legends is a Global production

Produced by Ben Fairclough

New episodes are released every Wednesday & Sunday. Subscribe to never miss an episode!

Mercenary. Shipwreck survivor. Pirate. Beheaded three men in single combat on the same afternoon. Enslaved and shipped to Constantinople as a gift. Killed his own master with a threshing bat and escaped on horseback across the Russian Steppes.

All of that happened before he arrived at Jamestown, aged 27.

In this episode, Johnny Vaughan and Gavin "The Woodman" Woods take on Captain John Smith, a man with a CV so absurd that historians spent centuries assuming he'd invented most of it, only for modern research to keep confirming he really was where he said he was.

⚔️ The triple beheading – challenged to single combat by a bored Ottoman officer at the Siege of Alba Iulia, with the loser's head as the prize. Smith won. Then the man's friend stepped up. Then a third. He was knighted for it and granted a coat of arms showing three severed heads

⛓️ Sold into slavery – shipped to Constantinople as a gift for a Turkish noblewoman, sent on to her brother in Crimea to have his manners softened, and put to work threshing grain

🐎 The escape – one beating too many, so he killed his master, put on the dead man's clothes and rode across the Russian Steppes to freedom

⚖️ Nearly hanged on the way to America – accused of mutiny, clamped in irons, and marked for execution at the Canary Islands. The ship never stopped there. When the sealed orders were finally opened, he'd been named one of the colony's governors all along

🌽 "He that will not work shall not eat" – his brutal single year running Jamestown, during which colony deaths dropped sharply compared with the years either side

🐟 The stingray – speared one for food, got stung in the wrist, swelled so badly his men started digging his grave. He recovered by nightfall and ate the ray for dinner. The spot is still called Stingray Point

🗺️ He named New England – his Chesapeake map was so accurate settlers used it for 50 years, and the Mayflower expedition took his maps and books with them. They didn't take him. He was too expensive

Plus: why he was never invited back, what happened to Jamestown the moment he left, and why Johnny and Gav put him straight in at number one on the Bloomin' Legendary Leaderboard.

If you love adventure history, pirates, explorers, unbelievable true stories and larger-than-life characters, this episode of Bloomin' Legends is for you.

Got a legend you want us to cover?

📩 Send it to: [email protected]

📲 Follow us on TikTok & Instagram: @BloominLegends

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bloominlegends

Listen to all episodes on Global Player, download the app, or visit www.globalplayer.com

Bloomin' Legends is a Global production

Produced by Ben Fairclough

New episodes are released every Wednesday & Sunday. Subscribe to never miss an episode!

Welcome back to Bloomin' Legends!

The Extra Legendary Bit is the bonus episode where Johnny Vaughan and Gavin "The Woodman" Woods leave the history books behind and dive into the gloriously unhinged stories sent in by you, the listeners.

This week it's a masterclass in bullshido — "people who sweep the leg of truth in the dojo of deceit" — plus two dads who deserve legendary status.

What You'll Hear in This Episode:

🚜 The Weather-Activated Weapon – Tom Baxter's late dad, Robert "Bob" Baxter, lost patience with dog walkers cutting through the family's hedgerow. His solution: a slurry spreader full of pig muck, the entire household's supply of bog roll, and a second pass for luck. It worked. It also returned, violently, every time it rained.

🌳 The Tree Fellas – Listener Mike Thomas on rugby's Billy Twelvetrees, the nickname "36", and the family tree surgery business the surname was made for.

💎 The Black Diamonds – Tom in Shrewsbury's dad Phil and his mates blagged their way past Liverpool pub queues for months as a band that didn't exist — armed with a towel, a Scouse accent and exactly one rehearsed note.

👮 "Can't catch me now, coppers" – How the same man spent months drinking underage in a police social club as "Brian", and how his 18th birthday blew his cover.

Got a story that can top this week's madness? 📩 Send it to [email protected] and we'll decide if it's Bloomin' Legendary or just brilliantly bonkers. 📲 Follow us on TikTok & Instagram: @BloominLegends 🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bloominlegends

Listen to all episodes on Global Player, download from your app store or visit www.globalplayer.com

This is a Global Original Podcast, produced by Ben Fairclough.

In the Wild West, you didn’t need receipts. You just needed a good story — and Calamity Jane had hundreds of them.

She said she was a crack shot. An army scout. A battlefield hero. Wild Bill Hickok’s lover. Possibly his wife. Possibly the mother of his child. She claimed she rescued a wounded captain, swam a mile-wide river with a horse, then rode 90 miles at full speed to deliver dispatches.

The problem? A huge amount of it was probably complete nonsense. Like a certain current US President...

Johnny Vaughan and Gavin "The Woodman" Woods take on Calamity Jane, the hard-drinking, chaos-magnet frontier woman who became so good at myth-making that the fake version of her life eventually became more famous than the real one. By the time dime novels, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and Jane’s own autobiography were finished, she had basically written herself into history.

What you'll hear in this episode:

🤠 Why was she REALLY called Calamity Jane? – Jane claimed it came from heroic battlefield exploits. Another explanation is much funnier: she was simply a walking disaster

🔫 The Wild West’s greatest self-promoter? – scouting, gunfighting, rescues, military campaigns… Jane’s life story gets more spectacular every time she tells it

🐎 The mile-wide river story – one horse, one freezing river, 90 miles at top speed and a tale that sounds increasingly heroic the longer you think about it

♠️ Wild Bill Hickok: husband, lover… or bloke she knew for a month? – Jane claimed romance, marriage and even a child. Historians remain unconvinced

📚 How the myth swallowed the woman – dime novels transformed Jane into an unbeatable gunslinger before she started selling her own version of the story

🎪 Fake it ’til you make it: Wild West edition – after years of telling the legend, Jane joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and literally got paid to perform it

💰 The fundraiser from hell – Jane reportedly raised money for her daughter’s education, got hammered, then left town with the cash

🎩 Plus: Deadwood chaos, gunslingers, horse stamina, bizarre frontier deaths, lorry kids and whether Calamity Jane was legendary enough for the leaderboard

If you love history podcasts, Wild West stories, American history, unbelievable true stories, historical scams and people who were spectacularly loose with the truth, this episode of Bloomin' Legends is for you.

Did Calamity Jane make the Bloomin' Legendary leaderboard — or was the biggest legend of all simply the one she invented herself?

Listen to find out, and tell us whether she deserves a place.

Got a legend you want us to cover?

📩 Send it to: [email protected]

📲 Follow us on TikTok & Instagram: @BloominLegends

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bloominlegends

Listen to all episodes on Global Player, download the app, or visit www.globalplayer.com

Bloomin' Legends is a Global production

Produced by Ben Fairclough

New episodes are released every Wednesday & Sunday. Subscribe to never miss an episode!

#bloominlegends #history #comedy

A pub near Waterloo. One enormous queue down the middle of the room. Two bartenders standing idle at either end. And one man, several pints in, who decides he's had enough.

The Extra Legendary Bit is where Johnny Vaughan and Gavin "The Woodman" Woods leave the history books behind and hand the show over to you, and this week it's a masterclass in British pride, British moaning, and taking a stand over absolutely nothing.

What you'll hear in this episode:

🍺 The queue that shouldn't exist – Lucy's mate Freddy reorganises an entire pub by shouting "this isn't the post office", and briefly becomes chief executive of queue prevention

👕 Millwall v West Ham – Doug watched a mouthy away fan get his shirt torn clean off his chest, no punches thrown, and reckons the culprit did the nation a service

🏖️ The great towel revolution – Johnny's proudest day: confiscating every reserved sunbed towel in a Tenerife hotel and putting the lot in lost property

🌊 Damn fool Englishmen – Mark's teenage cliff dive in Malta for a crowd that had already wandered off, plus Johnny's near-death plunge into the freezing Atlantic off Cape Town purely so the locals would be impressed

⚽ Who should actually run Britain? – the benevolent dictator debate continues: Prince William, Gareth Southgate, Eddie Howe, and why Number 10 should be replaced with a dugout

Got a story that can top this week's madness?

📩 Send it to [email protected] and we'll decide if it's Bloomin' Legendary or just brilliantly bonkers

📲 Follow us on TikTok & Instagram: @BloominLegends

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bloominlegends

Listen to all episodes on Global Player, download the app, or visit www.globalplayer.com

Bloomin' Legends is a Global production Produced by Ben Fairclough

New episodes are released every Wednesday & Sunday. Subscribe to never miss an episode!

In 1815, there were over 200 crimes in Britain that could get you hanged. Wrecking a fish pond. Stealing from a rabbit warren. Damaging a road.

The man who started dismantling that list is the same man who invented the modern police force, and got so thoroughly attacked for it that his officers were nicknamed the Blue Devils. Johnny Vaughan and Gavin "The Woodman" Woods take on Sir Robert Peel: cotton money, a bought Irish seat at 21, and a career built on doing the one thing politicians are never supposed to do, changing his mind.

What you'll hear in this episode:

🎩 895 men, top hats and a wooden rattle – how the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 put Britain's first full-time force on the streets, deliberately dressed to look nothing like soldiers

🐇 200 ways to hang – the genuinely unhinged list of capital crimes Peel inherited, from maiming cattle to returning from exile

🍊 "Orange Peel" – the man who spent two decades blocking Catholic emancipation… then pushed it through Parliament himself in 1829

⛏️ The Tory who took on the factories – banning women and children from the mines in 1842, while his own family got rich on cotton

🌾 The U-turn that ended him – why repealing the Corn Laws in 1846 split his own party and cost him everything

🏇 Constitution Hill, 1850 – the horse, the fall, and Johnny's theory about what really happened

⚽ Plus: which football manager would make the best benevolent dictator of Britain?

If you love history podcasts, British history, true crime origins, politics and unbelievable true stories, this episode of Bloomin' Legends is for you.

Did Peel make the Bloomin' Legendary leaderboard? Listen to find out, and tell us if we got the shuffle wrong.

Got a legend you want us to cover?

📩 Send it to: [email protected] 📲 Follow us on TikTok & Instagram: @BloominLegends

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bloominlegends Listen to all episodes on Global Player, download the app, or visit www.globalplayer.com

Bloomin' Legends is a Global production Produced by Ben Fairclough

New episodes are released every Wednesday & Sunday. Subscribe to never miss an episode!

40,000 eggs. 75,000lb of fresh meat. One Atlantic crossing.

After our Titanic episode, listener Bazil sent in the stat Johnny and Gav have been craving, and it sends The Extra Legendary Bit straight down a rabbit hole of floating farmyards, sub-zero labyrinths and the great mystery of "long egg".

What you'll hear in this episode:

🥚 40,000 eggs, one crossing – the jaw-dropping shopping list behind a single Titanic voyage

❄️ The hidden sub-zero labyrinth – the steam-driven cooling plant, brine-filled pipes and separate meat, dairy and produce rooms that kept an egg tasting fresh on day seven 🐄 When ships carried the farm – why mid-19th century steamships packed live cows, sheep and poultry into deck pens and slaughtered them mid-voyage

🍳 The mystery of "long egg" – Johnny's former-caterer knowledge gets fully unleashed, plus a heated debate about where veal really came from

👁️ Cullen's all-seeing eye – the South African farmer who left his glass eye on a fence post to watch his workers… then spied on them through binoculars from over a ridge

If you love history, the Titanic and comedy, this episode of Bloomin' Legends is for you.

Got a story that can top this week's madness?

📩 Send it to [email protected] and we'll decide if it's Bloomin' Legendary or just brilliantly bonkers

📲 Follow us on TikTok & Instagram: @BloominLegends

🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bloominlegends

Listen to all episodes on Global Player, download the app, or visit www.globalplayer.com

Bloomin' Legends is a Global production Produced by Ben Fairclough

New episodes are released every Wednesday & Sunday. Subscribe to never miss an episode!