The Runners Up Club

In a cautionary tale for all of today’s artisanal food-makers, a small bakery sees its innovative new cookie concept copied by a much larger rival. Losing market share is bad enough but being transformed in the public imagination from original to knockoff may sting even more.

In the 1920’s, Harold Lloyd’s silent film stardom outshone Charlie Chaplin's. Today, we remember The Little Tramp while The Glasses Character is a cinephile’s trivia question answer.

In the world of playing card design, there’s the classic Bicycle deck and then there’s everything else. Is it any wonder a fox-hunting dandy didn’t emerge as the nation’s most popular? Probably not.

Pre-Revolutionary Russia was the sort of place where more than one “holy man” had a legitimate claim to the title The Mad Monk. Rasputin won.

In an early standards war played out across the fields of Industrial England, an engineering genius loses out to a more widely adopted, though possibly inferior, system.

Few artists create a style so distinct that it is recognizable to an untrained eye. Johannes Vermeer is one. Meet the now-obscure artist who Vermeer displaced from the pantheon of Dutch Masters.

Jesse Owens’ greatest rival might have claimed a share of the sprinter’s four gold medals and a place beside him in history exposing the idiocy of Hitler’s Aryan racism… but for a common muscle pull.

A short intro to The Runners Up Club podcast, a series about second- and third-bests, from near misses to no chancers. It's an idiosyncratic series produced by, one hopes, people who are not idiots.