Martin Deeson UNLOADED

In May 1994, Loaded's editor James Brown gave a twenty-something Martin Deeson two hundred quid and told him not to come back from the Cannes Film Festival until he'd met the stars. No press pass, no clue... and a plane ticket to the wrong place.

Something new on Unloaded: Story Time. Martin reads, in full, the feature that made his name - "Film Ninety Phwoar!", from the third issue of Loaded, July 1994. Martin wrote it in one sitting on black coffee and cigarettes, left the office convinced he'd be fired, and came back on Monday to be made staff writer. With a commentary from 2026 Martin who keeps interrupting 1994 Martin with the stories that never made the magazine.

In this episode:

• The ‘minion’ who booked the flights to Caen, a ferry port 800 miles from the festival
• A Barbie movie, pitched to Hollywood twenty-nine years before Barbie became the biggest film of 2023
• Walking into the William Morris party by pretending to be a bearded, Brooklyn-born studio boss
• Turning round, drunk, to find Terence Stamp next to him – and assuming he worked in the corner shop back in London

Watch on YouTube to see Derek Ridgers' original photographs from the feature.

Cast (in order of appearance):

• Elle Macpherson – on the cover of issue three
• James Brown – Loaded's founding editor, who sent him
• Hunter S. Thompson – the influence
• Michael Holden – "the minion" (and great writer) who booked the flights
• Derek Ridgers – youth culture, music and clubland photographer
• Clint Eastwood – president of the jury, glimpsed through a limo window
• Lloyd Kaufman – head of Troma Films, home of The Toxic Avenger and Surf Nazis Must Die
• Margot Hope – star of Femme Fontaine: Killer Babe for the C.I.A.
• Mike Medavoy – the TriStar boss with a party invitation
• Lennox Lewis – heavyweight champion of the world, alone on a balcony
• Simon Le Bon – on his yacht with Yasmin Le Bon and John Taylor
• Robert Altman – director of Short Cuts and The Player
• Dolph Lundgren – fresh from Johnny Mnemonic with Keanu Reeves and Ice-T
• Terence Stamp – promoting Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
• Kristin Bauer – later of True Blood, and the only one who took Martin seriously
• Bruce Willis – in town with Pulp Fiction
• Harvey Weinstein and John Waters – in the background of the photographs

Credits:

• Written and read by Martin Deeson
• "Film Ninety Phwoar" first published in Loaded, issue 3, July 1994. Reproduced with kind permission of Loaded – loadedworld.com
• Photography: Derek Ridgers https://www.derekridgers.com/    
• Original magazine layout and design Steve Read https://www.steve-read.com/ and Jon Link https://jonlink.com/
• Original music by Chad Hobson https://chadhobsonmusic.com/

Links & Mentions:

Unloaded Podcast:

• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/martin-deeson-unloaded/id1885169674
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MartinDeesonUnloaded
• X: https://x.com/martindeeson
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/martindeeson/
• Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@martindeeson
• Website: https://www.unloadedpodcast.com/

Mentioned:

• The Complete Loaded Magazine Archive – every issue from 1994 to 2010, available as a digital download: https://loadedworld.com/products/the-complete-loaded-archive-digital-download
• Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem – BBC Arena, on BBC iPlayer
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson
• The Toxic Avenger – Troma Entertainment (Lloyd Kaufman)
• Derek Ridgers – https://www.derekridgers.com/   
• Instagram: @derekridgers

She shouted "Oi oi, Dickie!" at Richard Branson from the top floor of a Notting Hill squat, and by Monday he had put money into Kiss FM's bid to go legal. Years later she went to Ibiza with Radio 1, wandered off to the loo after Pete Tong told her to "stay close"... and didn't do the next show.

Lisa I'Anson was there for three of the great revolutions in British music broadcasting: pirate Kiss FM going legal, the video boom at MTV Europe, and Matthew Bannister's mid-90s clear-out of Radio 1, where she became the first woman of colour to host a daytime show. She says she's too forgetful and "not that interesting" to write a book. Martin, born the same month and the same year, disagrees, and gets the stories out of her anyway.

In this episode:

• How a Notting Hill squat, a shout of "Oi oi, Dickie!" and Richard Branson helped Kiss FM go from pirate to legal
• Three unpaid years on pirate Kiss alongside Norman Jay, Trevor Nelson, Gilles Peterson and Danny Rampling
• Manifesting her MTV Europe job from under a blimp at Notting Hill Carnival, clinging to Diana Ross ("please be my mum") and the day her flatmate hung up on Naomi Campbell
• Why she couldn't understand a single word James Brown said
• Saying no to Radio 1 three times, becoming its first Black daytime presenter, and the "two birds, one stone" moment she only saw in hindsight
• Fighting for one free play a week, and how long it took to get The Prodigy's Firestarter on air
• The 1998 Radio 1 Ibiza weekend: Pete Tong's "stay close", the wild rumours, and why she says she was never actually sacked
• Celebrity Big Brother 2005 with Bez, Brigitte Nielsen and Jackie Stallone, five weeks after losing her mum - and how her mother-in-law Erin Pizzey took on Germaine Greer
• Self-sabotage, getting sober in LA, and why 61 feels like the new 40
• Her open pitch to Strictly Come Dancing

Three things you'll take away:

• How a community of DJs, sound systems and the style press (The Face, i-D) pushed Kiss FM from pirate to legal, and forced Radio 1 to catch up.
• What being "the first" really looked like inside the BBC in the 1990s, seen with hindsight.
• Why Lisa thinks 61 is the new 40, and why she's ready to have another go at life.

Original music by Chad Hobson.

#LisaIAnson #KissFM #Radio1

Links & Mentions:

UNLOADED:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4f8zXJ9K7LcFFG1YjYoo1O

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/martin-deeson-unloaded/id1885169674

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MartinDeesonUnloaded

X: https://x.com/martindeeson

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/martindeeson/

Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@martindeeson

Website: https://www.unloadedpodcast.com/

All links - linktr.ee/martindeesonunloaded

Lisa I’Anson:

• Lisa I'Anson on Instagram - @lisaianson
• Lisa's piece on her MTV years for Sir! magazine
• Kiss FM (Kiss 100), MTV Europe, BBC Radio 1
• The MOBO Awards, founded by the late Kanya King CBE
• Celebrity Big Brother series 3 (January 2005)
• Ibiza Uncovered, which Lisa narrated
• Erin Pizzey, founder of the first women's refuge

Peter Greenaway, the director of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, decided there was nothing after death when he was 13. Seventy-one years later, sitting in front of the Swiss Alps, he talks sex, death, ageing, his daughter's verdict on him and the films he will never get to make.

Recorded at the St. Moritz Art Film Festival (SMAFF), where Greenaway was Guest of Honour, this special edition of Martin Deeson Unloaded sits down with one of British cinema's great provocateurs at 84.

Trained as a painter, Greenaway broke through with The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), then made the run of films that defined arthouse cinema for a generation: A Zed & Two Noughts, The Belly of an Architect with Brian Dennehy, Drowning by Numbers with Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson, and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, with Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren and Tim Roth, Jean Paul Gaultier costumes and a Michael Nyman score. Later came Prospero's Books with John Gielgud and The Pillow Book with Ewan McGregor.

Martin saw The Cook, the Thief exactly once, at the Renoir cinema in Bloomsbury in 1989, and has never shaken it off. Thirty-seven years later he gets to ask the man who made it what he was up to.

In this episode:

• Why he stopped believing in any afterlife at 13, and why he still isn't afraid of dying
• Sex and death: omnipresent in all of us, "even if you're a nun or a sex maniac"
• The Cook, the Thief as a portrait of Evil with a capital E, and whether the Thatcherite greed it satirised has won
• The sequel nobody knew existed: what happens to Helen Mirren's murderess after the final shot?
• Why every Greenaway film is designed to remind you that you're watching a Greenaway film
• The Greenaway Alphabet, Saskia Boddeke's film in which he is interviewed, and categorised, by his teenage daughter Pip
• Why he feels "equivocal" about AI, and why The Cook, the Thief belongs on a big screen, not a phone
• His new film, shot in Lucca with Dustin Hoffman and Helen Hunt
• Howard Marks, and the Palma restaurant that looked exactly like The Cook, the Thief
• The unmade films of Peter Greenaway, and what he'd do if he lived to 300

Unloaded Podcast:

• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/martin-deeson-unloaded/id1885169674
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MartinDeesonUnloaded
• X: https://x.com/martindeeson
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/martindeeson/
• Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@martindeeson
• Website: https://www.unloadedpodcast.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

• The Greenaway Alphabet (dir. Saskia Boddeke, 2017)
• St. Moritz Art Film Festival (SMAFF) - https://smaff.org/
• The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989); The Draughtsman's Contract (1982); Drowning by Numbers (1988); A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)

Original music by Chad Hobson

Murray Lachlan Young walked off the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury to find himself on the front page of the Daily Telegraph as the poet who had signed a million pound record deal. It made him the most talked-about poet in Britain, and very nearly broke him. Includes three poems performed in full: Simply Everyone's Taking Cocaine (with a brand-new verse), Don the sheepdog, and Everything's Under Control.

In the 1990s Murray Lachlan Young went from Sunday nights at Ronnie Scott's to EMI, Glastonbury and every chat show going, on the strength of a Noël Coward voice and a poem called Simply Everyone's Taking Cocaine that caught the decade in a single, ahem, line.

In this episode he tells Martin Deeson how the 90s music machine really worked, how he had already written a university dissertation on stardom before he found it, and what happened when he did. He performs three poems in full, including Simply Everyone's Taking Cocaine with a brand-new verse, and the conversation runs from Howard Marks, Orbital and Mary Berry to CERN, Mark Rylance's Globe, the Dalai Lama and a sheepdog who drove a tractor up the M74.

Murray Lachlan Young is the author of the collected poems How Freaking Zeitgeist Are You?, a long-standing poet on BBC 6 Music, co-writer of the film of Under Milk Wood and of Rehab: The Musical, and one half of Hartnoll & Young with Orbital's Paul Hartnoll.

Three things you will get from this episode:

• How the 90s fame machine actually worked, from a man who studied stardom at university and then watched a record deal turn him from a working artist into a media story overnight.

• A sharp take on why the 90s felt so different: the recession that cleared out the people who owned the 80s, and a country that for once wanted its people to succeed.

• What is left when the ego crashes: stage presence, losing it, and why surrender is the moment you get back in the game.

In this episode:

• Martin's memory of pulling Murray's demo tape off the pile in the Loaded magazine office one Saturday Sunday nights at Ronnie Scott's, on the same bill as a pre-Bush Gavin Rossdale.

• Walking off Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage to a Telegraph front page, and the truth about the million pound deal.

• The 90s as a big “why not”: the Spice Girls, Oasis as the Beatles, Brett Anderson as Bowie, Jamie Oliver as a famous chef.

• Simply Everyone's Taking Cocaine performed in full, with a new verse featuring Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz.

• Born in Washington DC, and the US draft letters that followed him home.

• School with Paul Hartnoll of Orbital, and their lockdown album The Virus Diaries: I Need a Haircut, Garden Centre, Bedtime.

• Why lockdown gave Britain its last truly shared experience.

• Japan's cleverest bear, and Don, the Lanarkshire sheepdog who drove a tractor onto the M74.

• The Dalai Lama getting booed at Glastonbury.

• Playing the exorcist in John Whiting's The Devils at the Edinburgh Festival, and the strangers who knelt for his blessing.

• Being booed at the Globe, and what happens when the energy goes.

• Everything's Under Control performed in full: the poem that came second in the competition.

Unloaded Podcast:
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/martin-deeson-unloaded/id1885169674
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MartinDeesonUnloaded
X: https://x.com/martindeeson
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/martindeeson/
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@martindeeson
Website: https://www.unloadedpodcast.com/

Murray Lachlan Young and mentions:
Murray Lachlan Young – https://www.murraylachlanyoung.co.uk/
How Freaking Zeitgeist Are You? – Murray's collected poems
The Virus Diaries – Hartnoll & Young (Paul Hartnoll of Orbital and Murray Lachlan Young), 2021

Rehab: The Musical and Under Milk Wood (dir. Kevin Allen, with Rhys Ifans and Charlotte Church)

Also on Martin Deeson Unloaded: the Keith Allen episode – https://youtu.be/QFjwbhA0ID8

She was 16, naked and sprayed gold in the Spandau Ballet video. A decade later she was pushing the trolley in Common People.

Sadie Frost has been at the centre of British popular culture since 1983. She was in the two music videos that define the 80s and the 90s, she flew to Hollywood eight months after giving birth to audition for Francis Ford Coppola, and she spent a decade as the most photographed woman in north London.

She is now a documentary director making a film about Quadrophenia with Pete Townshend.

She talks to Martin Deeson about Gary Kemp, Kate Moss, Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder, Jude Law, Jarvis Cocker, Ray Winstone and Phil Daniels, and about growing up in Primrose Hill long before anybody called it a set.

• Why she was more nervous filming Common People than she was on set with Coppola, and the reason she couldn't work out how to push a supermarket trolley
• The truth about the Primrose Hill set, from someone who was actually born there, went to the local primary school, and watched the tabloids invent a narrative around a group of twentysomethings
• What happens after the crazy days. She gets up at quarter to five, goes to bed at nine, teaches yoga for free at the local community centre, and says something genuinely surprising about whether she ever enjoyed the partying in the first place

Also: the borrowed dress and the stuffed bra that got her the part in Bram Stoker's Dracula, being told at 23 that she was too old to act, the muntjac deer she put in her car, and why she is still waiting to hear back from Sting.

Chapters:

• 00:00 Trailer
• 01:07 Crazy Days
• 02:16 A sick child and a psychedelic father
• 09:01 Spandau Ballet, Gold, and meeting Gary Kemp
• 12:46 The call from Francis Ford Coppola
• 16:07 Common People and the Pulp video
• 19:10 The Primrose Hill set
• 23:12 Meeting Kate Moss
• 24:38 Getting sober, and never really liking the party
• 28:23 Yoga
• 33:00 Becoming a director: Quant and Twiggy
• 35:47 Quadrophenia, Pete Townshend and Sting
• 40:15 The deer in the car
• 41:11 Raising three sons
• 45:47 Rescue

Links & Mentions:

Unloaded Podcast:

• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/martin-deeson-unloaded/id1885169674

• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MartinDeesonUnloaded
• X: https://x.com/martindeeson
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/martindeeson/
• Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@martindeeson
• Website: https://www.unloadedpodcast.com/

Sadie frost:

• Sadie Frost on Instagram - instagram.com/sadiefrost

• RESCUE (documentary, exec produced by Sadie) - rescuefilm.com

The Word was the gateway drug to the 1990s, and everyone remembers Oliver Reed. Katie Puckrik was the one standing next to him, and this is the full behind-the-scenes story.

Katie Puckrik arrived in London in 1984 expecting the future and found powdered milk, orange squash and restaurants advertising the fact that they had ice. Within seven years she had danced with Michael Clark, toured the world with the Pet Shop Boys, and beaten five thousand applicants to become one of the faces of The Word, the Channel 4 show Martin Deeson calls the gateway drug to the 1990s.

She takes us inside the most notorious night in the show's history: Oliver Reed, a dressing room rigged with hidden cameras and stocked with booze, and Katie sent out to narrate it live while it happened. Her account of how he turned it around is not the one you have heard.

She also tells the story of the note Liza Minnelli sent backstage at Radio City Music Hall, the day she sat down in the middle of Take That and found they were considerably less gay than advertised, and the moment she reveals to Martin that she is the person who coined the word ladette.

Plus: she now fronts an Iggy Pop tribute band alongside the drummer from Blondie and the bassist from the Sex Pistols, and Iggy himself sent word back that he thought it was good.

Three things you will get from this episode

• A first-hand account of the Oliver Reed night on The Word, from the presenter who was told to narrate it, and a reading of him that nobody else offers.
• The story behind one of the defining words of 90s British culture, told by the person who coined it.
• A working method for a life spent saying yes: how to walk into a room, distil yourself down, and get hired.

Chapters:

• 1:10 Intro
• 2:49 How to interview someone: part diplomat, part prostitute
• 3:38 An army childhood: Moscow at the height of the Cold War
• 5:13 Scoliosis, a metal rod in the spine, and the end of ballet
• 6:02 Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery, The Fall and London's mid-80s avant garde
• 7:21 Moving to Britain to become a pop star
• 8:13 Kensington Market, Hyper Hyper and finding a scene before social media
• 10:40 Dancing on the Pet Shop Boys Performance tour
• 13:07 Radio City Music Hall, and the note Liza Minnelli sent her
• 14:51 Britain in 1984: powdered milk, orange squash and "we have ice"
• 18:55 Beating 5,000 applicants to a job on The Word
• 20:00 Piers Morgan digs for dirt at the Groucho
• 21:25 Famous overnight, and the girl on the till at Marks & Spencer
• 23:54 The audition day, and Take That
• 24:28 Celebrating the biggest job on television with a 50p Harrods scrunchie
• 25:44 Oliver Reed, the hidden cameras and "Wild Thing" with the Lemonheads
• 30:45 Terry Christian, Mark Lamarr and men who cannot stop talking
• 34:03 The BFI, Loaded, and the 90s being taken seriously 30 years on
• 37:12 Pyjama Party, The Girlie Show and inventing the word ladette
• 40:08 "She seems so intelligent": being told off for having fun
• 41:22 Yacht rock, and pitching it to Radio 2
• 43:32 On being a savourer
• 44:45 Lust for Life: singing Iggy with Kevin Armstrong, Glen Matlock and Clem Burke
• 48:25 What Iggy Pop actually said about it
• 49:34 Shame, vulnerability and girl testosterone

Links & Mentions:

Katie Puckrik live, September 2026

THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10 SMELLS.
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/circleandstar/2307137

ZIGGYFEST 2026.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ziggyfest-2026-tickets-1995646334909

Katie Puckrik online:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katiepuckrik/
• X: https://x.com/KatiePuckrik
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/katiepuckriksmells

Martin Deeson Unloaded:

• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/martin-deeson-unloaded/id1885169674
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MartinDeesonUnloaded
• X: https://x.com/martindeeson
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/martindeeson/
• Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@martindeeson
• Website: https://www.unloadedpodcast.com/

She killed Dirty Den and buried him under the Queen Vic. Then she ran Torchwood, got turned into a Cyberman, and lost a soap award to a small dog in a bow tie.

Tracy-Ann Oberman has been in more of the things you love than almost anyone alive. EastEnders, Doctor Who, Toast of London, Friday Night Dinner, After Life, It’s a Sin, The Witcher, The Sandman, Ridley Road, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the new Harlan Coben series on Netflix.

She joins Martin Deeson, who has known her since they were teenagers, for a very funny and occasionally jaw-dropping hour on fame, tabloids, antisemitism, Matt Berry, and why the best thing that ever happened to her career was being told she did not look right for the part.

In this episode:

• Why the head of her drama school told her to change her name, and what she said back
• Reading the Toast of London pilot script and immediately ringing her agent to turn it down
• Matt Berry, Mrs Purchase, Clem Fandango, and why the dads at the school gates suddenly wanted to talk to her
• Auntie Val, Friday Night Dinner, Auntie Val Core trending on TikTok, and the dog cage she refused to come out of
• Ten days from audition to Albert Square, and the Selfridges spree with an unlimited budget
• What Leslie Grantham said to her in the EastEnders chemistry test, and what she said back
• Being told she was the Katharine Hepburn to his Spencer Tracy of Walford
• Killing Dirty Den, burying him under the Queen Vic, and then acting opposite him while he was under it
• Turning up to work on the Monday after a six-page tabloid expose of her co-star
• The small dog in a bow tie that beat her to a Soap Award, and why she thinks about it more than a BAFTA
• Russell T Davies, Dr Who, Yvonne Hartman, Torchwood, the Daleks, the Cybermen, and getting cybered
• It’s a Sin, and the friend whose family burned the bed sheets and buried the cutlery
• Ridley Road, Cable Street, and her great uncle put through a plate glass window by Mosley’s Blackshirts
• Becoming the first female Shylock in The Merchant of Venice 1936
• Noel Coward’s Present Laughter reimagined with a female lead at Studio 54, opening at Bath Theatre Royal

Three things you will take away:

• What it actually costs to join a soap at the height of the tabloid era
• How a jobbing actor turns a part she nearly refused into a cult classic
• Why she calls herself an accidental activist, and what she thinks that obliges her to do

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/martin-deeson-unloaded/id1885169674
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MartinDeesonUnloaded
X: https://x.com/martindeeson
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/martindeeson/
Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@martindeeson
Website: https://www.unloadedpodcast.com/

Tracy-Ann Oberman on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tracyanno/

Present Laughter tickets - Theatre Royal Bath, then touring to Cambridge, Cheltenham, Malvern, Liverpool, York and Chichester: https://linktr.ee/PresentLaughterTour

In 1997 a young A&R man at London Records opened the post and found demos from two unsigned bands called Coldplay and Muse. He listened, shrugged, and decided Britain did not need another Radiohead.

Episode Summary:

John Niven spent the 1990s inside the record industry at London Records and Independiente, and then turned all of it into Kill Your Friends, the novel that caught the decade's greed, cocaine and moral collapse better than anything else written about it.

In this episode he tells Martin Deeson about the demos he waved away, the American visitors his label laughed out of the building who turned out to be setting up Yahoo, the five broke years it took to become a novelist, the memoir he wrote about his brother's suicide, and why Oasis stitched themselves into the soul of the British people in a way Blur never could.

John Niven is the author of eleven novels including Kill Your Friends, The Second Coming, Straight White Male and The Fathers, and the memoir O Brother. His first stage play, The Battle, is about the 1995 Blur and Oasis chart war.

Three things you will get from this episode:

• The best explanation you will hear of why Oasis became bigger than Blur, from the man who has written a play about that summer.

• What it actually felt like inside a major record label at the peak of the money, from a man who was paid a fortune to be there and freely admits he was terrible at the job.

• A working writer's account of how you get there: the discipline, the poverty, the seventeen rejections, and why the first draft of Kill Your Friends had to be thrown away.

In this episode:

• The Loaded job John Niven applied for and did not get, and the letter James Brown almost certainly binned
• Cocaine on the desk: why the music industry and the magazine industry behaved identically, and why only one of them was making real money
• Kingsley Amis on the moment lunch becomes dinner

• The truth about turning down Coldplay and Muse, and the photocopy of a photocopy line that ended up in Kill Your Friends
• Take That, East 17, Boyzone, Westlife, and underestimating the public's appetite for the same thing again
• The American visitors to London Records in 1994 who described streaming, wireless listening and the death of the CD, and got laughed out of the office

• The £50,000 investment London Records turned down, the second Menswear album they made instead, and the Yahoo fortune that got away
• Giving up the company car at 30 to write a novel, and being turned down by seventeen publishers
• Music from the Big Pink, drug dealers, private jets, and why that particular life curve rarely ends well
• Why the first draft of Kill Your Friends was unreadable until Steven Stelfox took over the telling
• Paul Schrader writing Taxi Driver on bourbon and cocaine, Bruce Robinson typing with his nose, and why John Niven could not write with a hangover

• Straight White Male, Irvine Welsh, and inhabiting men you would not want to be in a room with
• The Fathers, Dan and Jada, and the two versions of John Niven's own life
• O Brother, his brother's suicide, and the median peak age for male suicide

• Why books, films and music can be a lifeline for men in middle age, and what happens to the men who never had them

• The Battle: John Niven's play about the summer of 1995, Country House and Roll With It
• From Damon Albarn saying it should have been shared with Oasis at the Brits in February, to Noel Gallagher's AIDS remark by July
• Why the 90s revival has arrived exactly on schedule, thirty years on, just as the 60s did for the 90s
• 80,000 people at Wembley knowing every word, the magnetism of Liam Gallagher, and the Lennon and McCartney comparison

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/martin-deeson-unloaded/id1885169674Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MartinDeesonUnloadedX: https://x.com/martindeesonInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/martindeeson/Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@martindeesonWebsite: https://www.unloadedpodcast.com/

She narrated Eurotrash, starred in The Fast Show, and has spent thirty years sitting at the next table to everyone - Nigella, Graham Norton, Cilla Black, Salman Rushdie.

But Maria McErlane didn’t come on to drop celebrity names; she came on to talk about how to actually live, and somehow we ended up discussing the two bottles of morphine in her fridge.

Episode Summary:

Martin Deeson sits down with Maria McErlane - Fast Show star, the unmistakable voice of Eurotrash, actress, journalist, Agony Aunt, and Graham Norton’s comedy partner on Radio 2, Virgin Radio and their hit podcast Wanging On.

What starts as a tour through 90s comedy turns into one of the most quietly profound conversations of the series - on fame, mortality, ageing without bitterness, and finding the joy anyway.

Three things you’ll take from it: how to develop a thick skin in an age that’s lost the knack; why “death is not a life ended, it’s a life completed” might be the most useful thing you hear all year; and how the people who treat fame as a licence to be horrible (yes, that story) always end up the loneliest in the room.

In this episode:

• How Maria landed The Fast Show - replacing Caroline Aherne, recruited by Mark Williams
• “I’m Not Pissed,” “Suits you sir,” and the secret-alcoholic sketch
• The voice of Eurotrash - 16 seasons of Jean-Paul Gaultier, Antoine de Caunes and refusing to be cruel about Lolo Ferrari
• Why the women of 90s comedy were genuinely frightened of Loaded and James Brown’s mob
• Being a woman on the 90s circuit alongside Jenny Eclair, Jo Brand and Hattie Hayridge
• Her book Bumps in the Road - and why it’s a book of philosophy disguised as a showbiz memoir
• John Diamond, Nigella Lawson, and the vodka injected straight into the stomach
• The Salman Rushdie moleskine-pad story - “fuck off, I’ve got cancer”
• “Death is not a life ended, it’s a life completed” - and where the phrase came from
• The two bottles of 25-year-old morphine still in her fridge
• Meeting Graham Norton on Carnal Knowledge, and how he got famous overnight
• The three types of fame - and why Cilla Black made her call her “Miss Black”
• The Maureen Lipman “I’m sure you are” takedown
• Martin’s day from hell with Vinnie Jones, GQ and a helicopter to the dogs
• Howard Marks, the nicest man at Glastonbury
• John Cleese’s stem cells, ageing, and doing it all with grace

Rowland Rivron was there at the birth of alternative comedy, sharing stages and dressing rooms with Rik Mayall, French & Saunders, Alexei Sayle and The Comic Strip.

In this episode he reveals what Soho was really like during the wild 1980s and 1990s, from The Young Ones to the Groucho Club and beyond.

Episode Summary / Bullet Points

In this episode of Martin Deeson Unloaded, Martin sits down with comedian, actor, writer, musician and broadcaster Rowland Rivron.

Long before alternative comedy became mainstream, Rowland was part of the scene that transformed British entertainment.

From living with Rik Mayall while The Young Ones was being written to performing alongside French & Saunders, Alexei Sayle and The Comic Strip, he found himself at the centre of one of the most influential cultural movements of modern Britain.

The conversation also explores the legendary excesses of Soho, the Groucho Club, television in the Channel 4 golden era, life on the road with Jools Holland, and the infamous Loaded magazine Christmas stunt that left children convinced Father Christmas had been killed.

Topics include:

• Rik Mayall and the creation of The Young Ones
• The Comic Strip and the birth of alternative comedy
• Working alongside French & Saunders
• Alexei Sayle and the early comedy circuit
• Jonathan Ross and Channel 4’s golden era
• Jools Holland and life as a touring musician
• The infamous Loaded magazine drunken Santa stunt
• Wild nights at the Groucho Club
• What Soho was really like in the 1980s and 1990s
• Why comedy, music and television were changing Britain

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