Cursed Objects

Welcome to a new series of Cursed Objects! For the first episode back, very special guest historian Charlotte Lydia Riley brings in a souvenir mug commemorating the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 – where the very normal exhibits included a working coalmine, a model of the Prince of Wales sculpted out of butter, and… actual human beings brought back from the colonies to the metropole. Charlotte explains how groups like the Union of African Students pushed back, and the imperial undertones of Winnie the Pooh and Adrian Mole.  We discuss Charlotte’s brilliant new book Imperial Island, about empire in the 20th century, and whether reading deep into everyday pop culture is the best way to escape the official narrative of empire. What did you learn about the British Empire at school??

Imperial Island is out now - go and get it immediately, you won't regret it: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442125/imperial-island-by-riley-charlotte-lydia/9781847926432 

Charlotte can be found here: https://twitter.com/lottelydia

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

For the next Patreon-only Cursed Summer Session, Dan and Kasia get stuck into a decades-old British institution, with a TV review of Antiques Roadshow - comparing the huge gulf between the show in 1990 and 2023. Is it the most suffocating, reactionary show on TV? Twee middle-class commodity fetishism?

Or is there more to it than that - couldn't this also be a democratic goldmine, a forum for grassroots, participatory material history for the masses? What kind of objects need to appear on Antiques Roadshow to make it something more than Tory heritage industry fluff? 

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Sit up straight, hippies! Kasia and Dan have some questions for you, and it's high time you answered. Where did all this magic mushroom merch come from? What makes tye-die and flares swing in and out of fashion? What is the thread between psychedelia in 1960s pop culture and medieval dance manias? What does Camden market have to do with all this? Are drugs still winning the war on drugs? And most infuriatingly of all, how is there so much cowardice, hypocrisy and bullshit in British discourse around drug policies that we are now behind even the United States?

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Pukka! We’re dancing in the moonlight with the king of the English culinary world, Jamie Oliver. How did someone so cringe achieve such dizzying levels of fame and power? How did he end up being an unofficial advisor to Tonty Blair? Special guests Jonathan Nunn and Biz take us through Jamie’s Naked Chef years, the Downing Street years and the Jerk Rice years, via the extremely cursed Cookin’: Music To Cook By compilation CD. From New Labour and school dinners to the notorious Lamb Curry Song (complete with dodgy Jamaican accent), it’s a wild ride with the world’s most milquetoast indie soundtrack.

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Jonathan Nunn is a writer and co-founder of online food magazine Vittles. He edited the brilliant London Feeds Itself. 

Biz is Director of Resonance FM, and has written for the New Statesman, New York Times, The Nation, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

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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