No One Saw It Coming

It was the most glamorous job girls could get during WW1... until it turned fatal. 

In an emotional episode of No One Saw It Coming, author Kate Moore tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) the harrowing true story of the Radium Girls, a group of dial painters who had no idea the job they loved was slowly killing them. When the world turned their back on the Radium Girls, they fought a David and Goliath battle against the company that sentenced them to death - and won. 

Their heroic fight changed labour laws forever, and their legacy continues to resonate in the field of science today. 

Binge all the episodes of No One Saw It Coming now on the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Today trade unions are an integral part of the political landscape, at least in countries like Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada. But this hasn’t always been the case… 

In the 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution, there was a real fear that the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution might be replicated in England and as a result trade unions or ‘friendly societies’ were viewed with suspicion. 

In the 1830’s this came to a head in the small town of Tolpuddle in Dorset, where six poor farm labourers met under a tree to form the ‘Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers’, to protest wage cuts. They were arrested, tried and sentenced to transportation to Australia on the basis of a legal technicality. 

The cause of George Loveless and the Tolpuddle Martyrs became a symbol of the struggle for workers’ rights and contributed to the growth of trade unions and the labour movement in Britain and around the world. 

Tom De Wit is the Curator of the Tolpuddle Martyrs Museum and he joins Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole, Mastermind) from Tolpuddle to share this incredible story.

Binge all the episodes of No One Saw It Coming now on the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts.

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If you thought reality TV began in the ‘90s or early 2000s with MTV’s The Real World or Big Brother, think again… 

According to Pulitzer-Prize winning critic and New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum, the genre actually pre-dates television altogether, beginning with audience participation shows on radio in the 1940’s. But she tells host Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole, Mastermind) that it’s really thanks to a guy named Allen Funt that we have shows like Survivor, The Kardashians, and MasterChef today. 

His weird obsession with making secret recordings of people eventually turned into a hit TV show called Candid Camera and laid the foundations for a phenomenon that would not only change television, but would affect us as a society, to the point where a reality TV star now sits in the Oval Office (yes, Donald Trump). 

Binge all the episodes of No One Saw It Coming now on the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Emily’s book on the history of reality TV: Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV. 

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What does a volcano in Iceland have to do with the religious and political struggles going on across the world today? Well it turns out, a LOT… 

Back in 536AD, the skies turned dark and the world cooled. It was all thanks to a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland, that no one even knew had happened. It led to a mysterious plague, which swept through the Roman and Persian Empires. In the great Byzantine city of Constantinople, it was said that 10,000 people were dying every day. 

Between plague and war, the world’s two ‘superpowers’ were too distracted to notice that something major was happening on the Arabian peninsula. The Prophet Mohammed had united the tribes and, when he died, his followers started pushing north. Instead of encountering resistance, they were able to take huge swathes of the Roman Empire and completely destroy the Persian Empire.

Richard Fidler, host of ABC Conversations and the author of The Book of Roads and Kingdoms, tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) the incredible true story of how the language of Arabic and religion of Islam spread across the world, thanks (in part) to a natural disaster and climate change.

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What if the reason being on a treadmill feels like such a punishment is actually by design!?

Back in the 1800’s the British Empire started installing ‘tread-mills’ in prisons as a way to both punish criminals and make them more productive. In fact, it was so soul-crushing that the poet Oscar Wilde wrote about its horrors from prison and is thought to have died as a result of the hours he spent on it.

Writer Dan Koeppel, known also for running across Australia’s Nullarbor Plain and writing an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, tells host Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) the strange saga of how the treadmill went from a Victorian torture device to a piece of fitness equipment found in gyms and homes across the world. Really, it’s a story about capitalism - the rise in the need for equipment to offset our unhealthy lifestyles, marketed as an aspirational wellness tool.

Binge all the episodes of No One Saw It Coming now on the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Dan’s great article for The New York Times’ Wirecutter HERE. 

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You can probably picture that iconic moment, when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. But what if his ‘one small step for man’ was actually thanks to a group of unlikely women? 

In the 1960’s when President JFK accelerated the space race, NASA needed someone to design a spacesuit capable of putting man on the moon. When the big defense contractors failed to meet the challenge, NASA had no choice but to work with the only company up to the job: Playtex - manufacturers of women’s girdles and bras. 

The UK’s best selling historian under 40 Kassia St Clair tells host Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) the incredible true story of the unsung heroes of the space race: the seamstresses who painstakingly sewed the Apollo 11 spacesuits. 

Binge all the episodes of No One Saw It Coming now on the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts.

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What if Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo weren’t really the best artists of the Renaissance, they were just the subject of some really good PR? 

In this episode of No One Saw it Coming, TikToker and Art Historian Mary McGillivray tells host Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) the story of a salty Italian gossip writer called Giorgio Vasari, whose writing still influences the way we think about art, and she asks us to question everything we think we know about what makes historic art and artists 'good'. 

This episode will make you question if the Renaissance, a period when art, literature and philosophy flourished, and the so-called cultural and intellectual rebirth in Europe, was just the product of some really good marketing. 

Binge all the episodes of No One Saw It Coming now on the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Try to stop famine, or save your own life? This was the impossible choice facing the Russian scientists behind the world's first seed bank during World War 2, when the Soviet city of Leningrad came under siege by the Nazis. Food was so scarce at the time that throughout the city people were forced to eat wallpaper, boiled leather, even their own pets, to stay alive. 

But this set of Russian botanists, with their vaults full of seeds and hidden garden of plants, refused to eat them even as they starved to death. Their sacrifice ultimately saved species of plants and crops that plant breeders have since relied on to feed the world.

In this episode of No One Saw it Coming, podcast host Marc Fennell speaks to award-winning writer and games critic Simon Parkin about the decision that botanist Nikolai Vavilov and his team made, that would go on to change millions of lives and the food we eat today.

If you’ve binged all the episodes of No One Saw It Coming, listen to Marc’s other award-winning history podcast Stuff The British Stole, on the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts.

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You probably know the names of famous freestyle swimmers - whether it’s Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky, Ian Thorpe or Dawn Fraser. But do you know where the ‘freestyle’ swimming stroke actually comes from? It turns out it all started at a swimming carnival at Sydney’s Bronte Beach back in 1901…

In this episode of No One Saw It Coming, Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) goes on a journey to discover the incredible story of Alick Wickham, a young Solomon Islander who had no idea of the impact he would make on the swimming world. Along the way he meets sports historian Gary Osmond and a relative of Alick Wickham, journalist Dorothy Wickham.

This is a story of success against the odds, during the era of Australia’s racist White Australia policy, and of the importance of remembering and acknowledging the true Pacific roots of the world’s most popular swimming style. 

You can learn more about the Roviana Lagoon Festival HERE. 

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Bob Hawke, Bill Clinton, Malcolm Turnbull – all were recipients of the Rhodes Scholarship, one of the oldest and most prestigious academic scholarships in the world. It was started posthumously by a man named Cecil Rhodes; a man whose legacy has recently been the subject of heated debates and a protest movement to decolonise education known as #RhodesMustFall. 

The reckoning with Cecil Rhodes has largely focused on his actions as an imperialist and colonialist; a man who claimed large swathes of Africa in the name of the British Empire. But it turns out he had deeper and darker designs to ensure global white supremacy.  

Dr Jonny Steinberg, Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Yale University grew up in South Africa and witnessed the legacy of Cecil Rhodes first-hand. He explains to Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) that Rhodes’ initial plans for the Rhodes Scholarship involved a secret society, and a plan for world domination. 

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