The History of Fandom, 1700-1900 (Radio Edit)

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Corin Throsby and Stuart Goldsmith to look at early cultural fandom in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although many consider Beatlemania to be the start of what is now considered fan culture, Greg and his guests consider some much earlier and often hilarious examples of the birth of fandom. This episode was recorded live at the 2022 Hay Festival. This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed. Research by Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Written by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Project Management: Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Abi Paterson

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Jenner?

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• 1:38Greg Jenner?

  Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we're coming to you live from the Hay Literary Festival in Wales, which means I get to say hello, audience.

• 2:02Greg Jenner?

  You're lost, aren't you? You're looking for the toilets. They're over there. Fine. Thank you so much for coming. We're hoping that by the end of this, we all have acquired more fans, and that is very much what we're talking about today. Fandom is the crucial word, because with today, we are jumping back three centuries to learn all about the history of cultural fandom. That's books, theatre, music, but not sport, because it's the Hay Festival and Frankie, yeah, we're not doing sport here. Joining me and our lovely audience in this extremely glamorous tent are two very special guests. In history corner, she's a writer, broadcaster and academic who teaches at the University of Cambridge, that's one of the best ones. She's an expert in romantic literature and early celebrity culture. She's a BBC New Generation thinker, and this is her fifth stint on the show.

• 2:46Greg Jenner?

  She's already tackled Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Gothic vampire literature and Mary Wollstonecraft. We're officially super fans. It's the marvellous Dr Corinne Throsby. Welcome back, Corinne.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  Thank you so much. The restraining order's in the mail, Greg.

• 3:08Greg Jenner?

  And in comedy corner, he is the sensational stand-up and podcast host. I am a full-on fanboy of his podcast, The Comedian's Comedian, one of my absolute faves. He's been on Conan O'Brien's TV show.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:19Greg Jenner?

  I mean, that was a phenomenal thing. He's gone viral recently on TikTok.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  Yes, horrifyingly so.

• 3:26Greg Jenner?

  And you'll remember him from our episodes on Blackbeard the Pirate, Jack Shepherd, and Ancient Medicine. It's the marvellous Stu Goldsmith. Welcome back, Stu.

• 3:41Greg Jenner?

  Now, Stu, a word of warning here. Normally, I am just the mild-mannered tame host, but not today. Oh, no. Today, you're in my house. This is my subject. You are surrounded not only by a lovely raucous phalanx of highbrow book lovers at the Hay Festival, but you're also surrounded by two historians who work on this. This is also something I've worked on. I've written a book about it. So are you prepared for the onslaught?

• 4:06Speaker 04

  Yes, I am, but only because I know how nervous you are that it's a live show.

• 4:12Greg Jenner?

  Yes, dammit. All right.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Look, you're doing great. Isn't he doing great?

• 4:19Greg Jenner?

  So, what do you know?

• 4:25Greg Jenner?

  Well, we begin, as ever, with the so what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, plural, knows about our subject, fandom. And I think you know what fandom is. You may know about fan communities. You definitely would have heard of Beatlemania. You may know about the modern ones, the Mixers, the Monsters, the Whovians and Hooligans. And perhaps you're a fan. Perhaps we're all fans in this room. But the question is, is this intense and all-pervasive phenomenon a modern thing? And we all know it's not, because that's how this show works, with this very, it's a very rigid format. No, we are going to find out more about it, and we're going to find out, how did you buy your merch before the invention of eBay? Dr Corinne, what do we mean when we say fandom? What is a fan?

• 5:09Speaker 03

  A fan is someone who has an emotional connection to either a person or a cultural product. And right from the beginning, it's had a bit of a bad rap. You know, we sort of think of that cliche of the screaming teenage girl. And it's since the kind of 17th, 18th century been associated with women and young people, and therefore has been made fun of. You know, as an academic, I can't really say that I'm a fan of something, because that implies that I don't have a critical distance from it, and that I can't judge it intellectually because of that emotional response.

• 5:50Speaker 03

  But hopefully, a lot of the things that we talk about today will show that fandom is a really creative way of engaging with cultural products.

• 6:00Greg Jenner?

  And Stu, the word fan, where do you think it comes from, etymologically speaking?

• 6:05Speaker 04

  Oh, what?

• 6:09Speaker 04

  It's fanatic. It's obviously a fanatic. Yeah, I'm just looking at the audience going, well, it's obviously fanatic, Stu. This is Hay, raise your game. Yes, it's, surely it's short for fanatic, right? Isn't it like the word lunatic comes from the moon? It's like, so is there an equivalent, but with fans?

• 6:28Greg Jenner?

  Just really love air conditioning. Really.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  You're not that far off, Stu. So the word fan actually didn't appear until the late 19th century, and it was in America to refer to baseball fans. But the idea of a fan had been around for a lot longer. Like, in 1812, Thomas More described the circle of people around Byron as a circle of stargazers. But the word, we think, is probably a shortening of fanatic, meaning someone with very intense religious fervour.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  Aha, gotcha. So what you're saying is I was right. I love being right on this show.

• 7:09Greg Jenner?

  So, Stu, how far back do you think we can go to find evidence of fandom as a construct?

• 7:14Speaker 04

  I enjoy the circus, right? I'm a fan of circus tricks and stuff. Saw a fantastic circus recently with my family. And I know that you can, there are hieroglyphs of people juggling. There's like a recognisable three-ball cascade, like a three-ball juggle in Egyptian hieroglyphs. So probably back then, if there were people doing tricks for money, then there were people going back and seeing them every day? So I'm going to go 5,000 years. That's my only gambit.

• 7:40Greg Jenner?

  That's a bold gambit.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Stu, yeah. I mean, it's, it's difficult to know when fans began.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  You were letting me down enough.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  No, no. It's possible. I mean, there's a thing that just because there is an evidence for it, doesn't mean that it didn't happen. But.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  Now you're speaking my language. Wild conjecture.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  But there is a sense that there probably was some kind of fan culture, possibly, in the ancient world. Like, certainly charioteers and gladiators were big stars in their day, we think, and that there's some evidence that maybe there were kind of riots when people's favourite, you know, charioteer didn't win or, but it's, it's difficult to know.

• 8:26Greg Jenner?

  Certainly, there seems to be some fan activity. But we're not really focusing on the ancient world today, because, I mean, Corinne, you're a specialist on the sort of 18th, 19th century, and that feels like where we're going to focus today.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Fandom as we know it couldn't exist without mass media. And in 1702, you get the first daily newspaper. And with that came the sense of a public sphere. And then through the 18th and 19th century, there was huge developments in printing technology. And so suddenly, there was this vast quantity of printed material. And in this time, we really see people start to long for a connection, that in this mass audience, people are searching for some connection to the author that they're reading. And that's really when we see fan communities start to form.

• 9:15Greg Jenner?

  And I think we should probably talk about, well, actually, we never usually do this, but we broke our own rule on this show. We, normally, we just dump our comedian in and they sort of have to swim. But this time around, we sent you some homework.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  Yes. Well, you asked me some questions, and I can't remember any of my answers.

• 9:29Greg Jenner?

  Excellent. That's what we like to hear. Yeah, we asked you, what do you think of when you think of fandom? One of the things you mentioned was fan mail.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:38Greg Jenner?

  And, I mean, have you ever written a fan letter?

• 9:39Speaker 04

  I did have a fan encounter when I was about 16.

• 9:42Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Speaker 04

  At the Edinburgh Festival, because obviously I'm obsessed with comedy, so a lot of my comedy heroes I'm fans of. I met Harry Hill in the, in the Pleasance Courtyard in Edinburgh, and I was all 16 and green as grass, and I kind of excitedly met him. And I said, can I have your autograph? And I still have it somewhere. He wrote me an autograph that said, dear Stu, glad to finally meet you, Harry Hill. I was like, oh, what a gent. What a gent. What a wonderful little secret joke that I've just blown wide open. But apologies if anyone listening had also received that joke. But what a lovely thing.

• 10:13Greg Jenner?

  That's adorable.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  Isn't it?

• 10:14Greg Jenner?

  Oh, good for Harry. Today, we're looking at the 18th and 19th centuries, and we've already done an episode on a, on a major celebrity with Lord Byron. He got loads of fan letters.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 10:24Greg Jenner?

  So the question is, was he the first?

• 10:26Speaker 03

  He wasn't the first. Someone who Byron was a mega fan of, Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was a writer and philosopher. He also received thousands of fan letters after the publication of his novel Julie or The New Eloise in 1761. And yeah, he was inundated with mail from people who, when they read this sentimental novel, felt their emotions stirred and felt like they knew him through his work. And so they address him as ami Jean Jacques, you know, my friend Jean Jacques. We really see this happening again with Byron. People felt like they knew him and therefore wanted to make that connection, to let him

• 11:11Speaker 03

  know how much they loved his work.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  And if he was the first guy that was happening to, that must have been so weird from his perspective, because he wouldn't have had anyone else with whom to go, they're getting a bit close. Do you know what I mean? You just did one other person to go, yeah, I know, right? They're all nuts.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  I mean, it's weird because we fan mail is just something that we accept as being a normal thing that someone might do. And loads of the letter writers say, this is completely mad that I am writing to an absolute stranger, but I feel compelled to tell you how much your work is meant to me.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  Wow, that shows admirable kind of self-analysis on their part that they weren't all writing, going, I bet no one else is writing to you. I'm the only, I'm your biggest fan.

• 11:55Greg Jenner?

  Jean Chet Rousseau is getting people going, I love you, you're my friend. It's Byron getting, let's meet down by the bins.

• 12:04Speaker 04

  I'm learning so much about Byron. Bin's guy.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's sort of long been this sexist assumption that female fans are groupies. Byron's fans were called menads, who are the menads, who are the female followers of Dionysus, who used to do kind of ecstatic dances at orgies and things like that. There is, you know, I can't deny that in a lot of these letters that I've looked at, there is an erotic element.

• 12:32Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  But so often fans are sort of seen as this mass, a kind of hysterical mass. And actually, these are individuals who are feeling this individual connection. And so each letter is different. They're often kind of outpourings of their own life, so often saying, you know, I've read your thing and it just reminded me so much of this thing in my life, which is totally different from the thing that is written about in this book, but I felt this connection. Occasionally, it's about wanting to have sex with the person that you're writing to. But more often than not.

• 13:04Greg Jenner?

  Harry Hill, yes.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  But more often than not, it's a self-exploration. It's like, you know, lots of letter writers in the 19th century literally describe it as a type of therapy and say that they've felt so much better having poured their heart out in this way.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  I totally know how they feel. I had a wee next to Kermod earlier on. I'm just, I'm walking on air.

• 13:32Greg Jenner?

  And then we also got, I mean, we've got Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who's a renowned poet, and she has primarily women writing to her. What were her female fans saying to her?

• 13:42Speaker 03

  There's a reason why young people particularly write fan mail. I think that it's a way of exploring your own identity and emulating someone who you can follow. And Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a perfect example of that because she herself was a massive fan. She called herself a hero worshiper and she was a huge fan of Wordsworth. And in fact, she said that if she would happily grasp a thistle if Wordsworth's feet had trampled it. And she adored him. The scholar Eric Eisner has made a case that her fandom allowed her to believe in herself as an author through emulation of him.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  And I think that, you know, women in this time didn't have a lot of creative outlet in the same way as men did. And fan letters were one way of expressing themselves and through fandom kind of seeing, hey, that could possibly be me and imagining themselves in that position.

• 14:42Greg Jenner?

  Pilgrimages, going to a place to sort of enjoy the physical experience of being somewhere special related to your fan fave. And this is a big, big deal. Yeah, Shakespeare gets it. Walter Scott.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  Walter Scott, yeah.

• 14:54Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, I mean, it's sort of quite a big deal. And the other one, I suppose, is the Bronte parsonage. That's in Yorkshire, of course, it's Howarth. And the Brontes are a huge brand after they die. And there's an American collector called Charles Hale, who buys the wood and the glass from Charlotte's bedroom. Do you know what he does with it, Stu? He brings it back to America.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  Wood and glass.

• 15:16Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Does he build? I don't know. I was gonna say, does he build a kite? That doesn't make any sense at all, does it?

• 15:26Speaker 04

  From the window, does he rebuild the window, looking at a different, does he put the window in his house?

• 15:31Greg Jenner?

  That's not bad.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  So he can look out through the window through which they looked.

• 15:34Greg Jenner?

  Hey, I mean, you're not far off at all. He does exactly that, but smaller. He makes picture frames so he can look at his photographs through the same glass that Charlotte looked through.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  Ah, I'd prefer a kite.

• 15:46Greg Jenner?

  If a glass kite came down in your head, you're in serious trouble.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  Was this the Bronte?

• 15:53Greg Jenner?

  And then the other one we probably should mention is David Garrick and his, his big Shakespeare Jubilee pageant. You know it well, Stu.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  Oh, sure. Yeah, combined to my two favourite things.

• 16:06Greg Jenner?

  Which are?

• 16:07Speaker 04

  Walking around and not knowing what I'm talking about.

• 16:10Greg Jenner?

  1769, in the Bard's hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, we have BardCon 69, that's what I'm calling it.

• 16:17Speaker 04

  No way!

• 16:19Greg Jenner?

  So a long time ago.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. Did they do cosplay?

• 16:23Speaker 03

  They did, Stu.

• 16:24Speaker 04

  Yes! A little like Darth Vader and stuff like that, great.

• 16:28Greg Jenner?

  Darth Vader, the famed Shakespeare character.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, people dressed up as Shakespeare's characters. They were gonna have a parade, but it literally got rained out.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  As someone who grew up near there, yeah, totally.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  People bought like souvenirs made out of the wood from the mulberry tree that Shakespeare had planted out the front of his house. Yeah, the only thing that didn't happen was any performance of an actual Shakespeare play. And.

• 16:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, because they're not there for the content, they're there for the fandom, right?

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Exactly. This is what defenders of the Jubilee have said. You know, this is the same at conventions today. Everyone knows the original text. It's about creating new experiences and new material around it. But it got a lot of criticism at the time as being a kind of, it just, all about the consumption of Shakespeare rather than a real appreciation of his work. And in fact, a poet at the time said, they know Shakespeare's name and have heard of his fame, though his merit, their shallow conception escapes. And there's sort of this sense with so many fans, again, that they have this true intellectual connection and they're kind of above other fans, you know?

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Other fans are just doing, doing this frenzied consumerism, whereas that one guy in the Chewbacca costume feels that he alone has that real.

• 17:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it's, but it comes from both ends, doesn't it? So is that what you're saying? The elite kind of look at it and go, oh, I can't believe you're dressing up as Shakespeare, how pathetic. I'm a true fan. And the person who's dressed as Falstaff is like, well, come on, mate, I'm living it.

• 18:06Greg Jenner?

  You know, we've often talked about fandom, we're talking about the emotional intimacy here, we're talking about what it means to people. But as a historian of celebrity, I'm gonna say, yes, but celebrity culture is about money, it's about cash, it's about commercialism, it's about, you know, it's this industry. And we see it rising in the 1700s and 1800s. Celebs have their own micro economies, they are trendsetters, their fans are eager to copy them, there's cash to be made in that kind of marketplace.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  The mulberry tree was a big merch producer. I mean, that thing got chopped down decades before the Jubilee. And at the Jubilee, they were selling mulberry tree toothpicks, mulberry tree walking sticks.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Produced so much merch. There's a long history of marketing stuff that has been associated. And there was also a whole world of prints, like when print culture became a thing, we then see what is pretty much the early pin-up, which were these print shops that would sell, you know, David Garrick was great at sort of utilizing the print to kind of spread his fame and his image.

• 19:10Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, engravings, prints, I mean, they're best sellers. Also ceramic statue, little statues of your favourite celeb, you could own those, pin badges and all sorts.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  Byron neckties were very big.

• 19:20Greg Jenner?

  Byron neckties.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  These days, the conversation about what merch to have as a comic is largely informed by weight and how much room it's gonna take up in your house if you don't sell it all. My friend brewed his own beer to advertise his comic character that he was doing. And then he kept it at home and anytime anyone would come around, he'd go, hey, do you want one of my beers? And then he gradually drank his way through like 400 beers and sold none of them. So, yeah, so tea towels are a good item.

• 19:49Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 19:49Speaker 04

  For comics at the Edinburgh Festival, knocking out a tea, not just a generic tea, not just like three for a pound, red and white check tea towel, but if you can put something on it, then yeah, pin badges and stuff like that, they're really good.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  And actually, in the 19th century, one of the biggest sort of celebrity merch crazers was, there was a whole thing called cartomania. It was with the advent of photography, you could now have these little images of stars and politicians and all sorts of people. And people started collecting them. And there were like hundreds of millions of these were sold in the 1860s. You know, you could sort of get your little album and stick them, they were like the Panini football cards of their day.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  A lot of the kind of the merch transaction, I find, is to do with meeting the people afterwards. Like often, if it's like, you know, people at Edinburgh, you might like sell a rubber duck or that you've signed or something, you know, brilliant Paul Curry used to do that. People really, they'd like it signed, that's nice, but what they want is just a couple of seconds of just you and me, hey, look, you get me, right?

• 20:47Greg Jenner?

  But we should talk just a little bit about sort of the darker side of fame and fandom. So when we emailed you, Stu, one of the words you mentioned was stalking.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 20:56Greg Jenner?

  That brings us to the psychological term parasocial intimacy. I don't know if any, is some nodding going on in the room?

• 21:01Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, that's the clingy fan who thinks they've got more of a relationship with you than they have.

• 21:05Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, it doesn't have to be that intense, but yeah, it's the idea that it's a sort of one-way relationship.

• 21:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 21:09Greg Jenner?

  Fan knows a lot about the famous person, the famous person doesn't know anything of the fan.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:13Greg Jenner?

  So that does sometimes go a little bit too far. One case study is Frances Maria Kelly, which she was an actress, very famous in the 1816. And her fan goes a bit far.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, she was at a performance, I mean, she'd been receiving letters from a fan who felt that they should get married. And she performed a lot of her roles in britches, so in men's clothing. He really did not approve of this and let her know and kind of felt like they were in this relationship, which she was oblivious to. And then in a performance, he bought a ticket, came in, stood up and shot her.

• 21:52Greg Jenner?

  Shot at her.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Shot at her. And luckily, no one was hurt and he was sort of wrestled to the ground. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's not a great way of getting someone to accept a marriage proposal. But yeah, and it's, it's a sort of, he was declared mentally ill. And there is a thing, you know, we know with figures like John Lennon, and it's, it's a sort of common fan story that fans can become violent. But it's by far and away, I mean, most fans, peace-loving.

• 22:20Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, yeah, that is extremely rare, but we thought we'd give you one case study just to say that, you know, it can happen.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  I mean, I too can't honestly say I like britches on a woman.

• 22:30Speaker 04

  I'm just gonna put it out there. What was her name?

• 22:33Greg Jenner?

  Frances Maria Kelly. But let's move away from that because we don't want to dwell on the negatives because fan, as we say, fan culture gets a lot of a bad rep and that's not fair. So let's, let's talk about the positives. Let's talk about collaborative fan communities, Corin.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a huge part of fandom and, you know, the fan club has been around for quite a while. Dickens is a really great example. When Charles Dickens was writing The Pickwick Papers, he was doing it in installments. And in this novel, there is a kind of jovial gentleman's club. And fans became really inspired by this and started creating their own clubs. Pickwick clubs became this huge thing and they were established all over the world. And Louisa May Alcott formed a women's pickwick club in Massachusetts in America. And for anyone who's read Little Women, the March sisters form a pickwick club and give themselves all names from the novel.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  So there was this lovely kind of meta-fandom because then loads of women started pickwick clubs because they were fans of Little Women and not actually the original. So it was sort of this lovely chain of fandom.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  That's beautiful.

• 23:42Greg Jenner?

  Yes, lovely.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  I love how inception that is. Should we start a Little Women club now?

• 23:48Greg Jenner?

  The nuance window.

• 23:54Greg Jenner?

  Well, we've had a lovely old chat, but I think it's time for the classic end of the show, which is the nuance window. I'm gonna get my stopwatch up and without much further ado, Dr. Corin, the nuance window, please.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  It's easy to think that creating your social profile is a peculiarity of the internet age, but commonplace books, which are really one of my favourite forms of fan activity, were the social media of their day. They were bound blank notebooks kept since the 15th century, initially mostly by male scholars who would copy down favourite passages of what they were reading. And so in that way, they were a kind of tool, like a record for reading. And in this time, books were so expensive that this was a way of cheaply having the literature that you were reading. And in the late 1700s, the books started to become popular with the ever-growing number of female readers.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  And at this time, there was a real shift in the way commonplace books worked. They started to be shared between people. So you would be able to show off the stuff that you were reading, you know, and show that you were kind of had the latest, you were reading like whatever the latest popular work was. And they were a way of constructing your social identity, really. This was a time when what you liked became kind of who you were. It's like, this is me, this is my commonplace book, this is what I'm reading. And they started to be signed by your social circle. If a visitor came to the house or a friend came over, then they might write in your commonplace book. And then everyone who then came would see who had written.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  So it was also, much like social media, an advertisement of your social circle. It was what you're reading and who you were friends with. The interesting thing I find about these books is that although they were widely shared like this, there was this weird pretence that they were private. Lots of them had locks on them, like they were a private diary. So it was like you were getting access to the person's innermost thoughts. This was a private space that you, that you were able to access. And so it was really this kind of way of building your social identity. And like all good fan culture, commonplace books were eventually commercialised.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  They were replaced with Victorian pre-printed albums where like the poetry was all kind of pre-printed in the back and then you cut it out a bit like a scrapbook. But commonplace books, for me, were really in their kind of heyday, an example of fan culture at its very best. This is a creative, social form of self-expression that offered a sense of connection in an increasingly mediated world.

• 26:38Greg Jenner?

  Beautifully done.

• 26:48Greg Jenner?

  Stu, any thoughts on that? Any, any comeback on the commonplace book?

• 26:51Speaker 04

  I'd never heard of them before. So it's like a journal and a scrapbook of ideas that you then leave lying around the house going, don't look at my commonplace book. You'll, you'll find out about all the cool stuff I like.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  Exactly. And it was, they were sort of everywhere in the 19th century. Everyone had them and it would be really cool if you could get someone famous to sign your commonplace book. So Byron wrote in a lot of commonplace books and he kept one himself.

• 27:15Greg Jenner?

  Leave me alone, yeah.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 27:17Speaker 04

  I don't know you.

• 27:19Greg Jenner?

  Okay. And listener, if you are fangirling over Stu or fanboying over Stu, want more 18th century stars, then check out our episode on Bad Boy Jack Sheppard.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 27:28Greg Jenner?

  I love him, he's my favourite. If you're crazed for Corin, scurry over to our episode about Lord Byron or the other things we've talked about. But there's a big old back catalogue available on BBC Sounds. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, make sure to subscribe to You're Dead To Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. But it's time now for me to say a huge thank you. In history corner, we had the incomparable Dr. Corin Throsby from the University of Cambridge. Thank you, Corin.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  I'm off to, I'm off to look for thistles that might have been trampled by Stephen Fry.

• 28:06Greg Jenner?

  And in comedy corner, we had the inventor of the glass kite, the man himself, the stupendous Stu Goldsmith. Thank you, Stu.

• 28:21Speaker 04

  It's an, it's an absolutely workable idea. I'll get back to you.

• 28:25Greg Jenner?

  Patent pending, yeah, absolutely. And we also had the wonderful audience here. Hey, so give yourself a round of applause. Thank you so much.

• 28:38Greg Jenner?

  And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we pen another chapter of historical fanfic on a totally different topic. But for now, I'm off to go and fill my aftershave bottle with Harry Kane sweat. Bye.

• 29:05Greg Jenner?

  Zandi, happy anniversary.

• 29:06Speaker 05

  Oh, what are you talking about? Have I missed something?

• 29:09Greg Jenner?

  Yes, Zandi, you have. We are over a year into making What's Up Docs. You didn't even get me a card.

• 29:15Speaker 05

  Is it really over a year?

• 29:16Greg Jenner?

  It is. Think of all the episodes we've done. How to look after our feet, our shoulders, our hips, our teeth.

• 29:21Speaker 05

  We've explored snoring, cholesterol, the immune system, endometriosis.

• 29:25Greg Jenner?

  All with the help of expert guests. I think it's fair to say we have plundered the world of health and wellbeing, equipping ourselves.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  And our listeners.

• 29:33Greg Jenner?

  With the best information out there on how to look after our minds, our bodies, our souls even.

• 29:39Speaker 05

  And we're not stopping, are we, Chris?

• 29:41Greg Jenner?

  We must certainly not, Zandi. We have a lot of new topics coming up, from tinnitus to acne, crying, male fertility. We are holding steadfast in our mission to sort facts from fiction, debunking wellness myths along the way. And you can find all of our previous episodes of What's Up Docs in the feed on BBC Sounds.

• 29:59Speaker 05

  And don't forget to subscribe on BBC Sounds and turn on the notifications so you don't miss any of these upcoming episodes.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  How do you build a career you're proud of? It's easy to get caught up in the impact you hope to have or the legacy you want to leave behind, but how much of that is actually within your control? Something that I believe is that legacy is totally out of your control. Like legacy is something that other people determine, but what is in your control is, is contribution and your actions around that. I really grew up, you know, into my twenties, maybe even thirties, thinking that, that like if I didn't do something that meaningful and important, then like I hadn't done something worthwhile. Find out how to build a career you're proud of in this episode of my podcast, Work Life, featuring actress and director Bryce Dallas Howard. And don't worry, we'll get into the nepo baby conversation.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  I'm Molly Graham and you can find Work Life, a podcast from TED, wherever you listen.