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Broken Oars Podcast returns with its celebrated Summer Shorts series.

 

After the fever dream that was Thomas Hardy as social climber; the weirdness that was A.E Housman inventing England; and an exploration of how a Geordie called Brian invented the guitar hero (true ... ), on our summer shorts programme we dive back to the early Victorian period ...

 

Why? That was you, wasn't it, three? It's always three ... Because a theme is emerging, an exploration of something that might loosely be called the condition of England. This is a term that hasn't been in fashion since before the First World War, but it's helpful in understanding why Britain is the way it is in the third decade of the twenty-first century if we also understand that many of the things we struggle with today were things we struggled with then ...

 

Step forward, Charlie boy! Pour a glass of something nice, put your feet up, load an air-rifle in case the lady-next-door's determination to keep hens has led to a sudden increase in furry visitors (as it has in at least one of our cases) and we'll get into why imaginative leaps forward rarely come from elites; how the British national character has always been defined by a tension between the drive to be modern and the urge to look back and why it was originally the Conservative Party who were seen as the party of the meddlesome big state - and how that perception has flipped around in the last 150 years.

 

And yes, I know that this might sound as dull as ditchwater, but it's me - you know it won't be. Think of Broken Oars Summer Shorts Series as being like In Our Time but without Melvyn Bragg's hair, portentiousness and bevvy of researchers doing the heavy lifting and far more quips, asides and insight.

 

We'll look at why free markets didn't work then and don't work now - and how they've never been free in any era. We'll explore how and why Britain hasn't changed in 200 years; investigate why everyone's working class regardless of whether they know how to make their own pasta or not; explore what literature was considered to be back then; and see how Charles Dickens, through luck as much as acumen, tapped into a new audience; and in doing so, how his belief in the fundamental kindliness of human nature, embraced by this audience, helped to balance the undoubted issues and iniquities of the age and prompt some of them to be addressed.Sounds good? Of course it does! And it isn't all doom and gloom. After all, if we hadn't been in such a terrible place back then, people wouldn't have left and as a result we wouldn't have got to talk to Drew and Berge and Macca - because they'd still be making shoes in a Leceistershire workshop somewhere for tuppence h'penny a decade.

 

And in the end, it really is true that kindness is all. We're told to be kind to ourselves nowadays - and being kind to others wouldn't hurt either.

 

Back soon with more rowing?

 

You bet!

 

Get some!

 

Yes, I know he's not a poet, three. There'll be more poetry along soon too.

 

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