The Zeitgeist Tapes

Happy Christmas! For this year's Christmas special, Emma and Steve look at the Bill Murray vehicle Scrooged. Loosely based on Charles Dicken's classic A Christmas Carol, this is a tale of how rampant greed ruinds lives and redemption through giving - at Christmas.

In this special episode, journalist Emma Burnell has made a short documentary about political podcasts. In it she explores who is making them, who is listening to them and why they are taking off. 

Interviewees include Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, Nick Robinson, Rt Hon Jacqui Smith, Iain Dale, Matt Chorley, Helen Lewis and Stephen Bush.

This month, Steve and Emma talk about Mike Leigh's Peterloo. In cinemas now, this tells the tale of the massacre in the early 19th century of democracy and poverty campaigners at a rally in Manchester. 

With a stunning cast, this epic is historically accurate - but is it entertaining?

This month Emma and Steve are joined by Clangers Expert and writer for Dr Who Magazine Tim Worthington to discuss the politics of The Doctor. Is the Doctor basically a centrist Dad even now she's a woman?

This month, Emma and Steve are joined by Dr Sarah Lonsdale, Author of The Journalist in British Fiction and Film. We talk about 1983's Ploughman's Lunch - a drama about journalists covering the 1982 Argentine War, the Tory Party conference and generally climbing the greasy pole of the establishment. Written by Ian McEwan and directed by Richard Eyre, this early Channel 4 film is as watchable as its characters are unlikeable.

This month, Emma and Steve discuss 2016 film Denial. Based on the true story of a court case between Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt and holocaust denier David Irving. The film speaks to the Labour Party's current crisis, but equally to the importance not just of remembering, but of not forgetting, which as Emma says are two different things.

Seminal dance movie of the 80s, few think of Dirty Dancing as a political film, but it absolutely is. From having women's reproductive rights at it's heart to its critique of middle-class liberalism, politics are at the heart of this classic film. And it makes its point much better by not hammering them home, but dancing around them.

This month, Emma and Steve discuss the recent Russell T Davis penned, real life drama A Very English Scandal. The true story of the leader of the Liberals who tried to have his ex-lover killed.

With barnstoming performances from both Hugh Grant and Ben Wishaw, this drama exposes just how far the establishment will go to protect their own.

In this episode, Professor Steve Fielding and journalist Emma Burnell discuss the novel Heartland by Anthony Cartwright. Set around the 2002 world cup at a time and place of heightened racial and political tensions it tells the story of three contests playing out in the fictions Cinderheath neighbourhood of Dudley.

In this episode, Emma and Steve discuss The Crown - the Netflix series about the life and times of Queen Elizabeth the Second. Gloriously shot, but somewhat overstretched, this drama centres on the least interesting person in the monarchy, but does so in a way that shows the conflicts of duty and regality.