Sharon and Ozzy | Inside the Osbourne Machine - Mick Wall on Chaos, Control and Survival | 4

Rock journalist Mick Wall has spent decades in Ozzy and Sharon's orbit, and he's got stories to tell. He takes Matt and Alice behind-the-scenes, from drinking pints of wine with Ozzy, to the moment Sharon asked him to escort her husband to rehab. Mick - who was also the couple's biographer - shares his up close view on the Osbournes' marriage: a partnership that ran on extremes, and a relationship as volatile as it was unbreakable. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:02Matt Forde?

  From Audible Originals, I'm Matt Ford.

• 0:04Alice Levine?

  And I'm Alice Levine.

• 0:06Matt Forde?

  And this is British Scandal.

• 0:19Matt Forde?

  So Alice, we've made it through bats, breakups, breakdowns, reality telly, reality itself, and a relationship that somehow survived all of it. How are you feeling now that we've reached the end of the Sharon and Ozzy story?

• 0:32Alice Levine?

  Honestly, very confused, traumatised, in awe. One day in the life of Ozzy and I would frankly be dead. What surprised me most, though, was behind this Prince of Darkness branding was a man who was being held together and literally held up by the people around him.

• 0:49Matt Forde?

  Yes, which is why in today's episode, we have a very exciting guest. One of those people from Ozzy's inner circle. Not a fan, not a family member, but a friend.

• 0:59Alice Levine?

  What a family to be a fly on the wall of. Never a dull dinner party.

• 1:03Matt Forde?

  No, and he's got some incredible stories about the Osborne family. Today, we're speaking to the music journalist that has been described as the world's leading rock and metal writer. He knew Ozzy for over 40 years and wrote his official biography. He's seen Ozzy and Sharon up close, and he knows exactly how that relationship kept the whole machine running. We are talking to Mick Wall after this.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Guys, it's Hayley Bailey. Okay, I need to tell you about something. I just got YouTube Premium. It's got tons of awesome features like offline downloads, so I can download my favorite videos before I travel and watch them whenever I don't have Wi-Fi. Because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst. I get ad-free, I get background play, and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. So try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. That's a mouthful.

• 3:00Alice Levine?

  Hello, Mick. Thank you so much for joining us. Can you start things by telling us when you first met Ozzy Osbourne?

• 3:06Speaker 03

  The very first time was actually at a stag party. It was in, I think, 1980, something like that. And he'd just been fired from Black Sabbath. It was a stag party for Phil Liner, the singer of Thin Lizzy. I was a PR in those days. And I was Black Sabbath's PR. And Ozzy had been sacked. And he was being sort of wheeled around the room by his roadies to introduce him to people. I remember he held out his hand to me, and I went to say, "Oh, hi, Ozzy." And he just went, "I was fucking sacked. Nine hundred thousand dollars and told to fuck off." And I went, "Well, I'm Mick, and it's lovely to meet you." And then he went on to the next.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  And you could hear it again. "Nine hundred thousand dollars and told to fuck off." You know, it just went round and round. And everybody's like, "Ah, Ozzy, he's a guy. Isn't he the character he is?" But then, a couple of years later, I was back writing for magazines, and I was sent to interview him at a hotel in London. In those days, he used to have a little entourage of his friends from Birmingham. The sort of guys that they just wouldn't have got a job. Anywhere else other than working as Ozzy's sort of official mates. And they were all sat at this big table and he was absolutely paralytic drunk. He could hardly speak.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  But when he did speak, it was like a scene from The Exorcist, you know, it was just this awful soliloquy, put it that way. And after about half an hour, I thought, I'm not going to use any of this, this is terrible. So I left and I decided then I would never have anything else to do with him. And it was only really again, a couple of years after that, January nineteen eighty five, the Rockin Rio Festival in Brazil. There were millions of huge bands, there Ozzy, Rod Stewart, Queen. And a friend of mine had gone to work as Sharon Osbourne's personal assistant. Sharon was managing Ozzy by this point, in fact, they were a couple by this point.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  And when I found out she was working for Sharon and Ozzy, I remember saying, oh God, how awful, how do you deal with it? And she said, no, you're joking, they're lovely. And I'm like, lovely? She said, Ozzy's amazing, oh, you've got to come and meet him. And I said, no, I've done that, I'm not doing it again. In the end, she organised a lunch and it was fantastic. They were a double act and he was tremendously funny, so was she. And at that point, I I kind of got absorbed into the Osbourne universe.

• 5:50Matt Forde?

  So you saw him sort of on stage and off stage, you know, we we think of that Ozzy Osbourne persona. Was he identical off stage or had he slightly created and curated that image?

• 6:02Speaker 03

  No, that's exactly what he was like, right back to when I first knew him. He was bumbling, he was funny, he didn't have any filters, he was very happy, he was always himself. Ozzy just was Ozzy, he was exactly the same wherever you met him, whenever you met him. The only thing I'd say got different was as the years went by and he tried again and again to give up the booze and the drugs. Um, eventually he kind of smoothed out into the one kind of guy. But the drugs and the booze meant, you know, you'd meet fifty different Aussies.

• 6:46Alice Levine?

  You were hired to write his biography. Can you just tell us a bit about that?

• 6:50Speaker 03

  I was the fourth person they'd hired. They'd hired three before me, all of which didn't end well. And then I came into the picture and I kept turning up to interview him. They had a house in Berkeley Square at the time. I remember once I turned up and it was like, oh, Ozzy's not well, he's in bed. But he says, go on up, you know. So I go up and there he is in bed with Sharon and they both got flu. And I was in there for about half an hour just chatting to them. We didn't do any work. We just had a laugh and then I left. This went on for, I think, maybe three or four times. Different bizarre things would happen and we never got any work done.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  And then finally it was, well, look, to make up for it, Ozzy is going to cook you Sunday lunch. This is the summer of eighty five and I turned up at the house and he was in the kitchen peeling the potatoes. He's got his pini on, he's got all the stuff on the stove cooking away, he's got the joint in the oven. And Sharon and the kids, kids were very young. He said, right, Ozzy, I'm going, we're taking the kids to the park. We're back in an hour and that's when dinner will be ready, right? And he's like, yep, yep, yep, yep. So I'm standing there in the kitchen with Ozzy, in his pini, sweating as he's making all this food. As you can hear the steps going to the front gate, he kind of freezes, like a freeze frame.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  And I'm like, Ozzy, you okay? And he's like, shh, shh, shh. And you hear the gate go, you hear them get in the car, you hear the car drive off. And as the car drives off, he goes, thank fuck, would you like a drink? And I said, sure, I'll have a drink. And he goes, wine? I went, wine would be lovely. And he grabbed the bottle, he got two pint glasses and it just went gungun, gungun, gungun, gungun into one. And then gungun, gungun, gungun into the other. It wouldn't fill the two pint glasses. So he got the other bottle, thumbed that and then gungun, gungun, gungun. We've now got two pints of wine. He gives me one, he goes, cheers. And he literally downs it in one. I'm having a little sip and I'm just thinking,

• 9:00Speaker 03

  what's going to happen when Sharon gets back? You know, it's going to be, this will look bad, you know. So he finishes his pint and he goes, Fancy another, and all the time he's boiling the potatoes, he's grilling cheese onto the mash, he's getting it all together. By the time she comes back, I'm still on my first pint of wine, and he must be on to his fourth, maybe his fifth. And I'm shitting it, thinking she's gonna walk in here and think that fucking Mick Ward's got him drinking again. And she walked in, took one look, and went, okay, I'll set the table. Finally, we've all got food and gravy and everything on our plates.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  And I'm looking at Ozzy, and he's looking, and I can tell his eyes have gone. And he's looking at me, and his head starts to descend slowly, slowly, sl- and then whoosh, straight into the plate. Mashed potato in his head, gravy bubbling where he's breathing. And they're sort of passing the peas over his head, you know. And I looked at Sharon, I said, um, is Ozzy all right? And she goes, fuck him! And I went, absolutely, absolutely. So anyway, he starts to recover, and she goes, right, I'm taking you upstairs. And she literally carries him. I later found out this was a regular occurrence, she was often carrying him.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  She came back and she said, this interview is never gonna fucking happen. Let's you and me go into the drawing room, and you ask me everything you wanna know, and I'll tell you, and you just say it was Ozzy. And it's an official book, it's their book, so I'm cool. I said, okay. And we did, that's what we did. We spent two or three hours. It was a fan book, so it was like forty thousand words. It wasn't one of these, you know, deep dive biographies that I did years later. And that's how we did the book. It was Sharon telling me the stories that made up that book, uh, while Ozzy was snoring off another drunken Sunday lunch, which he had cooked in fancy.

• 11:11Alice Levine?

  Mick, you really can't understand Ozzy without understanding Sharon. When did you first realise she wasn't just part of the story, but in fact shaping it?

• 11:22Speaker 03

  From the very first time I met her. Rock and heavy metal managers, particularly in those days, many, many characters did that gig. But she absolutely outshone them all. She was clearly very intelligent. What I didn't know at the time was she had a vast showbiz background. Her father was Don Arden. He managed Little Richard, Gene Vincent, and then in the 70s, Black Sabbath, the Electric Light Orchestra, many others. She had been a bit of a wild child. Her brother David used to describe Sharon to me as Don in a skirt. And Don was known as the Mr Big of the music business. All those stories about people being hung outside windows

• 12:05Speaker 03

  literally go back to things that Don Arden did in the 60s. So she was a fierce, fierce competitor. And Ozzy at that time was very much a joke. He'd been fired from Black Sabbath because they thought he was a joke. The business thought he was a joke, and he behaved like a joke. He was just drunk and out of his head all the time. He was always pissing himself. It was embarrassing. But she took him and she moulded him. She always saw completely what was going on in music, where the edge was. And she always positioned Ozzy there. So in the mid 80s, when it was all big hair and shoulder pads,

• 12:47Speaker 03

  he had big blonde hair, big silvert jackets with enormous shoulder pads. He used to say to me, "I look like a fucking fat Joan Collins." And because he had no thoughts of his own about where he should go or what he should do, it was all left to her.

• 13:05Matt Forde?

  And you think she was especially perceptive about understanding where the industry was always going to go next.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, we would have lunch and she would grill me about where I'd been lately, what I was doing, who's selling records and tickets.

• 13:21Matt Forde?

  So commercially astute.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  One hundred percent. I mean, from Sharon's point of view, there is no other way to be. You can either be artistic and amazing and no one's heard of you and you're poor. Or you can be, as you put it, commercially astute and have huge mansions in England, America. And she's remained that way to this day. I mean, her absolutely unerring sense of where things were going and what would get the eyeballs and what would get people buying tickets.

• 13:49Alice Levine?

  She obviously had another job as well, right, which was to protect him so that he could do what he did best, which was to be this charismatic performer.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  She definitely understood how to handle Ozzy. I mean, Ozzy has a creative force. You know, his third album, Bark at the Moon, another huge hit in America. This is the days of vinyl. And on the back of the sleeve, it actually says, "Written, produced and arranged by Ozzy Osbourne." And I was sitting with him one day and he goes, "Look at that. I couldn't produce a fucking fart."

• 14:23Speaker 03

  He goes, "That's all Sharon. That is all Sharon." And it's true. I mean, Ozzy was the first one to tell you he couldn't write a tune, he couldn't play an instrument. And his lyrics were nearly all written for him by Bob Daisley, who'd started out as his bass player. In Black Sabbath, it was the bassist, Giza Butler, that wrote all the lyrics. So Ozzy had no pretense as to, "I'm a great songwriter. This is my music." He was able to come up with melodies and a line here or there, but everybody else would fill in the blanks. She got that, so she surrounded him with incredibly talented people. The best producers, the best musicians. And from that comes this huge career.

• 15:09Matt Forde?

  And was there anyone else in the music industry at that time like Sharon Osbourne?

• 15:13Speaker 03

  No, she set the tone and, and a lot of people tried to emulate her. I've met all of the big and great rock metal managers, including Don Arden, whose memoir I ghosted, including Peter Grant, the notorious Led Zeppelin manager. And none of them, none of them had the full package like Sharon because she was very witty and very funny and she could see through you in a second. So she knew who was faking, she knew where the bullshit was, but she didn't call it. She didn't deliberately make a scene, but she caught everything. Here's the other thing I think is great about her, she pivots.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  She has no problem whatsoever, and I've seen her do it, tell people to fuck off and die in many different ways, and two weeks later hire them to do a job. She didn't hold things as a personal grudge. There were some, but they were epic and went through the decades. But in terms of business, it was all business. If it was bad on a Monday and good on a Tuesday, that was all fine by her. She had no problem.

• 16:24Alice Levine?

  That's so interesting. So I'm wondering then if history has been a bit unfair to her role. Does she get enough credit? Because you've listed some men there heralded as, you know, manager greats, some legends. But she feels erased from that picture.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, the thing is, people are terrified. I've seen grown men reduced to trembling wrecks because when she put the knife in, it went all the way and then you got a few twists. Even those guys were very male, you know, once they'd kind of beaten you over the head, they never let you forget it. Sharon was more of an assassin or is, you know, go in, do what needs to be done and then bum bum bum, hands clean, a fresh page, all good.

• 17:13Matt Forde?

  When you look at Ozzy and Sharon together as a partnership, it feels extraordinary that it lasted. What do you think kept that relationship functioning when so many others collapsed?

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it nearly didn't, you know. I mean, my friend that worked for Sharon for so many years told me that when they were first together, it was a very physical relationship. You know, she'd walk into the office and find them fucking. And it'd be like, oh, oh, sorry, sorry. Or she'd walk in and find them literally hitting each other with bottles. I mean, they would fight, there'd be blood, things would be smashed. And the next thing, they're having wild sex. And then there were those times Ozzy, in his crazy days, put it that way, too much coke, too much everything. She told me, he brought a fucking groupie back and put her in the bed because he'd forgotten I was there, you know. So they, they had their ups and their downs.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  I mean, the famous occasion, of course, is when he tried to kill her in 1989. She said to me, it was like his eyes went out. Even when Ozzy's been completely out of his brain, I'd never seen that before. He was arrested, he was arraigned on bail. Part of the bail was that he should go into rehab. And she rang me and said, will you go in with him? And I said, okay, why? And she said, well, for company, he's terrified. No one understands what his life is like. You go in there and keep him company and also while you're at it, get his story. Because she knew that story would be gold.

• 18:50Alice Levine?

  That's such a good example of that blurred line. So was their relationship closer to a marriage or a business? If Sharon is saying, go get the story, go follow this, not just purely out of concern?

• 19:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  It was all things, all times. I've got a better story which will illustrate this very nicely. In Los Angeles, a few years after this, early nineties, Sharon's in London. Which means, you know, the cats away, the mice will play. And Ozzy rang me. What are you doing? I'm bored. So I went over to his place. I remember he brought out this bong and he had a plastic bin liner full of grass. And he goes, do you want to try it? It's my new bong. Shall we try it? And I'm like, yeah, you know. Anyway, cut to five in the morning. Because by now, our old friend cocaine has also made an appearance.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  And Brandy and whatever, whatever. And we are just laughing and laughing. I mean, he was a very, very funny man. But this point, everything is a blur. I, you know, I'm now in the dead zone. I don't know what's going on. And he's rabbiting away to me and I'm just sort of nodding, you know. And then suddenly he goes, do you know what? You're absolutely right. I'm gonna call her right now. I said, what are you, what, what? What am I right about? He said, what you said about Sharon. I went, what? What did I say about Sharon? No, he goes, no, you're right. And he picks up the phone. I'm going, don't fucking call Sharon. Don't call Sharon. He rings her. Sharon?

• 20:30Speaker 03

  And I, I'm only hearing his end of the conversation. He goes, I'm sitting here with Mick Wall. I'm going, no. Sitting here with Mick, and he agrees with me that, you know, I love you, my darling, but you shouldn't be my manager. You're no good to me as my manager. And then he's like, uh huh, uh huh, uh huh. Oh, all right. Okay, okay, bye. I went, what did she say? He said, she says I'm divorcing you. I said, for fuck's sake, ring her back. Say that, none of that was Mick's idea. It was just a joke. Just ring her back. He goes, no, it's too late. I can tell she's on the warpath. But I saw her a couple of weeks later and of course she just laughed the whole thing off.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  But when he said, you can't manage me anymore, she was like, okay, well then we're getting a divorce. I think this is common actually for many, many, many marriages. Where the wife has much more control than the man would like to admit perhaps. But she was always ready to press the nuclear button when ready. And she did it that time and of course it brought him to heel. And as we now know, they didn't get divorced and she did carry on managing him. And he was bloody lucky to have her.

• 22:21Speaker 04

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• 22:58Matt Forde?

  Were you surprised when you heard they were going to let the cameras into their life on the TV show The Osbournes?

• 23:03Speaker 03

  Well, not really, because by that point, it was very much in Sharon we trust. You know, she'd never been wrong. From the early 80s, when she got this amazing guitar virtuoso, Randy Rose, to come in and write the music for Ozzy, to getting Motley Crue to open for them, which meant they sell most of the tickets, Metallica, so on. She was always positioning Ozzy in the place he needed to be.

• 23:30Alice Levine?

  Another trailblazing move from Sharon. So what do you think it was about that show that cemented them in cultural history? Was it just that they were chaotic or was there something more to it?

• 23:42Speaker 03

  I think the same reason why everybody that got close to them like I did. I've never met anybody like them. They really were just like that. And it was just incredible that this context, the format had never existed before to film a whole day in the life of the Osbournes, let alone weeks and months. The vast majority of people were going, fucking hell, have you seen this? Have you seen him throwing dog shit over the garden wall? You know, Sharon told me at the time, she said, Ozzy's over at this point, he's finished. This is our parting shot, so we're going to let it all hang out. We're just going to let all the crazy stuff be seen. They were going to get a hundred and seventy five thousand dollars.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  And they thought, and they were like laughing going, a hundred and seventy five thousand dollars for old rope. But it took off in a way that I don't think any other reality show has taken off. I mean, even something like The Kardashians is niche compared to what the Osbournes were doing. They were getting such a huge audience share in America. It was beyond the terrestrial channels. It was a true television phenomenon.

• 24:53Matt Forde?

  Obviously Ozzy's health in time declined. Um, when did you find out he had Parkinson's? It must have been very hard for you to to witness him fade in the way that he did.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  I think, again, this is maybe Sharon being able to engineer reality into a useful, commercial proposition because I did an interview with Ozzy for Mojo back in two thousand and five. So that's literally over twenty years ago. And he talked very freely at the time about his recent diagnosis for Parkinson's disease, which he said ran in his family. His aunt had had it, various other people had had it. And of course, if he'd spent time in his company, uh, his hands always shook very badly.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Uh, that stutter, that kind of speech impediment, which, which got steadily worse and worse and worse. That had kind of been there all along, except i- i- originally it was more like a just Aussie. You know, just, oh, oh, I don't know, I don't know, fuck off. And then, you know, over the years, it turned into something much, much more noticeable. It was slow. I mean, when he told me about the parkies, I wasn't remotely shocked because the man, yeah, he used to walk all hunched up, he used to, his hands used to shake terribly. He used to shuffle when he walked, and this was when he was still, you know, relatively young man in his early forties. So I wasn't, uh, that shocked.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  The bit that surprised me was that twenty years later, it would be this headline news. But I guess by then it had progressed much, much further down the line than, than when he first spoke to me about it.

• 26:46Alice Levine?

  How did Sharon cope?

• 26:47Speaker 03

  The same way she always copes, which is magnificently. I mean, of course, you know, she had a lot of help. There'd be nannies, personal assistants, and if you worked for Sharon, you virtually lived in the house. There would have been lots of people that weren't photographed or filmed. And they would have been on hand, so she would have had a great deal of help. Nevertheless, the personal investment, the personal coping, no amount of help. Carers can help you with that. And because Sharon had always babied Ozzy, this was now the next step along the road.

• 27:27Matt Forde?

  If Ozzy and Sharon hadn't found each other, what do you think would have happened to them?

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Well, Ozzy used to say to me, and we're going back a few years now. But he told me that his original plan after Sabah sacked him and gave him ninety thousand dollars and told me to fuck off. He said his idea was he was going to go back to Birmingham. And with his first wife, Thelma, they were gonna open a wine bar.

• 27:55Alice Levine?

  Serving it in pints.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  Well, well, hey.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  See, that's a good idea.

• 28:03Alice Levine?

  Come on, that's a USP.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  Can you imagine going to Ozzy's Wine Bar?

• 28:08Alice Levine?

  I wonder, and this is going to be a tricky question, I'm sure, but what do you think Ozzy's legacy is?

• 28:13Speaker 03

  In terms of music, it will be all about Black Sabbath. And it will be all about the first two Ozzy's solo albums, because they're still regarded as the untouchable classics. But there'll clearly be another demographic which doesn't own any of that music, but simply loves Ozzy. He's going to mean different things to different people. He's kind of transcended reality now, and he'll certainly not be forgotten anytime soon.

• 28:47Matt Forde?

  Huge thanks to Mick Wall for illuminating us there about the incredible life of Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne. Now, because I've done, if I may say so, a superb job with the voices and accents in this series, the producers have said that I deserve to do two in a row.

• 29:01Alice Levine?

  So did someone mess up the scheduling?

• 29:03Matt Forde?

  How dare you suggest that that's the reason?

• 29:06Alice Levine?

  Fine, I won't dwell on it anymore. What do you have for me?

• 29:09Matt Forde?

  Okay, who provides the juiciest sibling rivalry gossip in Britain?

• 29:15Alice Levine?

  Ooh, the Miliband's?

• 29:17Matt Forde?

  I would love to do a series on the Miliband's. I'm not sure it would have wider commercial merit. Think richer.

• 29:26Alice Levine?

  Topical, the Beckhams?

• 29:28Matt Forde?

  Okay, more royal.

• 29:30Alice Levine?

  Ant and Dec?

• 29:32Matt Forde?

  Surely they are related?

• 29:33Alice Levine?

  Surely?

• 29:34Matt Forde?

  That would be a big twist. No, it is Harry and Wills.

• 29:38Alice Levine?

  Oh, actual royalty, okay, not TV royalty, got you.

• 29:41Matt Forde?

  We are telling the story of two princes and one impossible family.

• 29:45Alice Levine?

  That sounds like a viral YouTube clip.

• 29:47Matt Forde?

  It does. It also sounds like a series that's going to see us stand trial for treason. So let's see what happens. From Audible Originals and Samistat Audio, this is the fourth and final episode in our series, Sharon and Ozzy. British Scandal was hosted by me, Matt Ford.

• 30:03Alice Levine?

  And me, Alice Levine.

• 30:05Matt Forde?

  For Samistat, our series producer was Chica Ayers. Our assistant producer was Louise Mason. Our senior producers were Joe Sykes and Dashillic Sina. Our engineer was Jai Williams. Executive producers for Audible were Theodora Leludis and Destel Doyle.

• 30:28Speaker 04

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• 31:11Speaker 04

  and the things that come back to haunt us. For the best bingeable series like Ghost Story, listen to the Audible True Crime Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can get all episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 31:28Speaker 05

  By 1779, Benedict Arnold had sacrificed more for the revolution than almost any other man in America. One of George Washington's most effective commanders, he had nearly lost a leg in the Second Battle of Saratoga. But in return, Arnold believed he had been humiliated by Congress and cheated of his glory by lesser men. So he decided to make them pay. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of the podcast American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US history: presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, Benedict Arnold turns his back on his comrades in the Continental Army and secretly defects to the British. With the help of his wife, he plots to hand over the most important colonial fortress to the enemy

• 32:13Speaker 05

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