Come fly away with us and Alain de Botton (sorry but he's coming too), and take a trip on Venga Airways - but we're not leaving the ground: you're trapped with us in the departure lounge, for ever. Are airports the most cursed spaces in the modern world? Liminal spaces between nations and cultures, a surveilled, high-security purgatory, with access to Oliver Bonas. Why the hell are Gen Z *choosing* to hang out there, for fun? And are personalised gifts like our Cursed Objects Toblerone the last gasp of late-period consumer capitalism?

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

It's a source of strength, life, sickness, disgust, delight and deep nausea. It's fraught with climate controversy and tensions over rights, care, state power, social democracy, misogyny and outrageous colonial history.  Where did we learn that strong kids drink milk? Why is the Laughing Cow not laughing anymore? Why have neo-Nazis adopted it as a weird signifier of their racism? And what does the rise and rise of oat milk - with its cringe hipster tweevertising - tell us about late capitalism?

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Here is Jude Rogers on band t-shirts: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/oct/13/band-tshirts

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Smoking is almost too on-the-nose a subject for Cursed Objects. But vapes - candy-coloured, daftly-named, targeted at children, making wads of $$$ for the same tobacco companies - vapes are perfect. How are these cursed little dummies - cheap plastic disposable tat, destined for landfill - marketed? Why did fags disappear from the movies? How has Big Tobacco adapted to bans on its lobbying, advertising and product placement?

In 1974, 45% of British adults smoked. People smoked not just in restaurants and pubs, but on the tube, and in hospitals. Those numbers have fallen to 13% today - a huge social change - but what else has changed, since smoking ceased to be an integral part of the fabric of everyday life?

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

The desire to feel like you are 'part of history' can turn even the most ardent republican into a flag-waving monarchist shill. So why are we all so desperate to tell subsequent generations that we were 'there' and how does this urge corrode politics? Just in time for the King's Coronation, from our Patreon to main feed, we explore the period of national mourning we recorded in September 2022 following the Queen's death. 9 months have passed, but many of the themes explored in this episode are timeless..

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

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A plain ham sandwich, a bottle of still water and a pack of ready salted crisps – it's a meal (deal) fit for a King, and a Cursed Objects x Lecker collab! This week, legends in their own lunchtimes Kasia, Dan and special guest Lucy Dearlove delve into claggy sandwiches, terrible sushi and supermarket psychology and ask: what the hell is going on in Britain that our most well-known high street chemist changed the way we eat lunch?

What do your meal deal choices say about you, and what’s the most cursed meal deal of all? How have the intertwined histories of British capitalism, office work and food led us to this point - where a ham and cheese sandwich, Coke Zero Vanilla and Itsu seaweed thins is a normal lunch combination?

If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon, for regular bonus episodes (and a Cursed Objects sticker pack!): patreon.com/cursedobjects.

You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK.

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Could we BE any more cursed? This week, Dan and Kasia talk about the strange, mutant afterlife of Friends, the world's least cool situation comedy. On the agenda, such questions as: has some kind of Friends merchandise atom bomb been detonated in recent years? What does the show tell us about the politics and culture of the 1990s - and why is that decade so 'long'? Why are tweens in Britain in 2023 wearing Central Perk t-shirts and 'We Were On A Break' socks? What kind of comfort is it that we find in lightweight sitcoms - "playing in the safe memory of history"? And why did 9/11 not occur in the Friends version of New York?

FULL EPISODE HERE >> ONLY £4 A MONTH TO LISTEN AND SUPPORT YR FAV CULTURAL HISTORIANS AND GET A *FREE* CURSED OBJECTS STICKER PACK https://www.patreon.com/posts/73409944

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Kasia and Dan explore the crisis in British swearing through Robert Peston’s very cursed book ‘WTF’. What does it say about our society that a leading political pundit sells his books through expletives? And with groans of despair viscerally being felt across the UK whenever someone calls Matt Hancock a ‘cockwomble’, what has become of swearing as a once transgressive art form? It’s a wild ride into Westminster’s ‘chumocracy’, the publishing industry’s sweary self-help books that atomise your depression and captisalise on a 'punk' ethos, and the most groan-worthy recesses of Internet forums.

If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon, for regular bonus episodes: patreon.com/cursedobjects. And very soon: CURSED OBJECTS STICKERS.

You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK.

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford