D (2:17)

hello everyone. A bit of an unusual episode today. I'm going to read aloud the prologue to my second book, which was to be called Nuclear Fear and was an exploration of our fear of the nuclear bomb and how it was expressed through the pop culture of the Cold war films, novels, TV, pop songs, etc. But it cannot find a publisher, so I am putting it aside, ditching it. I am not too sure what I'll do with it. Some people on my Patreon have said, self publish, crowdfund, etc. It does seem a shame to take all my knowledge of nuclear pop culture and just ditch it. So in a talk with my agent, I have decided to turn to writing fiction about nuclear war. But as I say, a lot of people on Patreon and elsewhere are saying, don't ditch the pop culture idea, don't ditch nuclear fear. So whilst I look into those things, I thought I would take the Prologue and read it aloud to you here and you can let me know. Is it any good? Obviously publishers don't think so, but what about you nuclear nerds? My real audience. So here it is, the prologue to what would have been nuclear fear. I should say. The Prologue begins with a look back at my childhood in the nuclear 1980s. So it starts off a bit like a memoir, I suppose, explaining how and why my nuclear obsession arose. And then in Part two of the Prologue, which I will record tomorrow, we take a quick look back over the history of Cold War pop culture. A quick skip through it. So here we are, part one of the prologue. My nuclear 1980s childhood. Mum and dad were stupidly young when I was born and not at all ready to be parents. She had the tartan scarves of the Bay City Rollers knotted round her wrists and he still wanted to be Mark Bolan and would pose on his bed with a white guitar he couldn't play. She was writing I Love Donny Osmond in her photo album and he was shaking Johnson's baby powder into his hair to give it some punky heft. They would drink Perno at the Cue Ball Club, then each go home to their suburban bedrooms. No jobs, no mortgage, but they knew the lyrics to every song. Crazy time to have a kid. So she told a lie and said she was on the pill. And that's how I came to be born. Just a few days after John Lennon was killed, when all the world, but especially my dad, cared about nothing except the star and his music and how good it used to be and how it was all f ed now, totally f ed. Another dead idol gone the same way as Mark Bolan. Who's next? Bad time to be born. At the dark end of 1980, the music had died. Thatcher was in. Pits were closing, shops were shuttered, kids were rioting, Hope was gone. As for my dad. He had to stop messing about with guitars and get a job. My birth certificate says he was a labourer, but he would have preferred rascal or heartbreaker. Certainly he never imagined having the word labourer attached to him and nor the word father, but here it was. 1980 meant he was a labourer. John Lennon was dead and an uninvited baby was spewing on his best leather jacket, and where was the girl who used to dance at the cue ball with him? Pregnancy had made her sick. Eczema roared over her skin and weeping maps of red and she had to be steeped in stinking brown oils and tarry liquids. She lost weight, her hair thinned, her eyelashes fell out and her eyebrows vanished. People stared at her in the street. Dad couldn't even lock himself away in his room and hold the guitar under his posters because there was no teenage bedroom anymore. That was gone along with everything else. My gran, to try and make these kids respectable now they had a baby, arranged a quick registry office wedding followed by a cold buffet at the New Orleans function suite, and their reward for compliance would be the first six months rent on a flat of their own. My granddad attended in his lunge hour. Dressed in his navy blue postman uniform, he tipped his hat to the new couple, shouldered his heavy bag and went back to work. Anyone could see this was a daft idea, a forced wedding, a sick wife, a kid he hadn't asked for, and all his idols dead and now his days lost to a steel works down by the train line waiting on the platform. When I was older, Mum would point across at the plant. The loading bay doors would be open and we'd hear shrieks and sirens and grinding noises and see sprays of flame. Daddy works in there, she'd say, pointing into its darkness. And I'd find it strange, my dad in there. So no, he wasn't relishing the fag end of 1980, especially not when the lease was signed and the door closed behind them on the new flats, a high ceilinged cold Victorian place behind the school, which came jammed with forbidding old furniture and gloomy mahogany and cloudy brass. Even when he moved his record player, his hundreds of albums and a massive framed poster of Mark Bolan into the new flat, that gloomy feeling just wouldn't shift. Neither would the dust, dust upon dust, dust from all of the 20th century and a bit of the 19th, dust which drifted during wars and jubilees and depressions and coronations and funerals, settling now on the forced together young family,

C (9:14)

even

D (9:15)

with my jingling silver Cross pram and my Snoopy chair and Wendy House. Nothing would chase out the Victorian gloom, not even Dad's cool Chelsea boots sitting by the door and his leather jackets creaking in the wardrobe. Not even with Mum's purple bottles of Bristow's hairspray, chunky white earrings on the bathroom sink. All these puny modern things were just up against too much history. After all, people were living in this flat when Jack the Ripper was afoot. They were here when Queen Victoria died. They heard the bells toll at the end of the First World War and the sirens blare in the second. Each household dotted through history left something behind. A writing desk here, a dining table there, a dent in the oven door, a heavy speckled mirror, a tiny brass key on a glass shelf, for who knows what the weight of hefty history was against my young parents, and they had no pleasant history of their own to neutralize it. Because when the books would be written about the early 1980s, they would be full of strikes and broken glass and police horses and the threat of nuclear war. That little brass key on the shelf might well be the key which winds up history and sets it going again. Misery, war, unemployment, all coming round again and nothing changes but the music. The glitz of the 1980s took a while to kick in. Some say the decade didn't start until the Human League released Don't yout Want me in late 81, but for us in dreary Glasgow, it took even longer if the TV was showing the dashing neuromantics in their wet eyeliner and pirate gear, or Crystal Carrington and her fierce shoulder pads. Up here it was still the old days. Shops were shuttered, bomb sites still existed, overrun now with sturdy weeds. Life did not match the zesty 1980s we saw on Top of the Pops. Our school desks still had ink wells. Coal was delivered. The men at the bar had been in the war. You could buy candy apples from a sack at the top of the street. My aunt's shop sold fabric to women who made their own dresses, curtains and baby bonnets. And the rag and bone man would plod around the streets with his horse and cart, often the only reminder that we were supposedly in a go getting decade of neon spangle and shoulder pads came via the tv, which brought pop music and soap opera and twangy American accents into her cold Victorian rooms. Dad tried to clear away the flat's heavy furniture to make room for some of her own. A desk, a chest of drawers and a heavy whirring clock were tucked away. But even with the monstrous furniture pushed to the edges of the room or piled in the alcove and covered with a curtain, it still breathed down on us and made our modern little things look poxy and small. The record player, stacks of albums, my white Snoopy chair. These were no contest for the hefty Victoriana. In a final act of defiance, dad placed the TV in front of the window and asked it to let the airy modern world in. The record player and the TV would surely exorcise this old flat. And as a toddler, amidst the gloom in my lilac athletic bear T shirt, which had a teddy on it, lifting purple weights, I'd be drawn to the telly with him, like a haunted house full of cold spots and creeks. The living room, with its TV and record player, was the safe bit of the flat. I'd let my toddler fingers pick out the best albums. Mind the records, dad would say as I'd pull them out one by one. Look at Culture Club's Colour by Numbers, which showed Boy George with his powdery eyeshadow and pink lipstick. And what about Rod Stewart's Atlantic Crossing, with the singer in spangly boots seeming to stride across space and above the record player, that huge poster of Mark Bolan with his pink feather boa, a sight to make the Victorian shudder. Being pulled away from the records and the TV to be put to bed or in the bath was like being yanked away from colour and warms and put back into the gloom again. I just wanted to creep back to the light of the tv. But if Dad's records were all about lipsticks and shiny boots and feather boas, the stuff on the TV could sometimes be scary. Sometimes it showed the same men who were on Dad's records. And yes, sometimes it even showed my cartoons. But as I got to the age of three and was able to understand more, I'd slide down off the plastic Snoopy chair to play in front of the TV with my big yellow teapot. And the screen would sometimes start to frighten me. The Falklands War has started. I cry that they'll take my daddy to fight, but he just laughs. Elsewhere there are riots, bombs in Belfast, a place called Beirut. Rabies can make you go mad. I see Britain under a crosshair and I am underneath it too. The bomb might drop, they say if they start fighting, we will be caught in the middle, my grandsons. I look at a map dad shows me America there and the Russians over there. And in the middle, Britain, I imagine they will fire bombs at each other across the papery space of the map and they will collide in midair and crash down onto us. Caught in the middle and kneeling on the carpet with my big yellow teapot, I feel the first snarl of injustice. Why don't the adults fix things? Even when the news was off, fear still sprang from the TV because Dad had bought a VCR and no one bothered to shoo me out of the room when he and Mum watched horror films rented from the shop. Like the Evil Dead, where I saw a woman running through a dark forest. So far, so fairy tale, nothing unusual there. But then the trees spring to life, branches clutch at her, vines wrap around her in some kind of arboreal rape. Then came Cudjoe, where an adorable St. Bernard dog is bitten by a bat and develops rabies and is soon mauling everyone in town, including a mother and son who encounter him at deserted garage with her cars broken down on a stifling hot day. These films probably inflicted psychological risk on the rapt toddler, but it was An American Werewolf in London which put me in physical danger. Dad rented it from Video World and I was fascinated, particularly by the infamous scene in the London Underground where a businessman on an empty platform hears a low growl from the tunnel and the werewolf emerges from the darkness and hunts him through the twisting tiled corridors of Tottenham Court Road station. Beware the moon, the film warned, and I was hooked. Indeed, I was so obsessed with it that one day I went missing so that I could find the werewolf. I hated that dad had been obliged to take the tape with its gruesome cover back to Video World, and so I slipped out of my aunt's shop, Fabtex, one Saturday as my mum worked a weekend shift and I made my way into the shopping arcade, past Presto and Greg's and Superdrug and other shops which don't exist anymore, and out the other end onto Main street, where the video shop stood. I pushed open Video World's heavy glass door and toddled over to the American Werewolf in London film poster. I sat down on the sticky carpet and I just gawped, staring up at the midnight blue poster which showed the werewolf's face and profile caught in a howl. And to me, looking not fierce but in agony, this was a sad wolf, a big dog, really, just like Cujo with the rabies. I wanted to stretch out toddler hands to pat and soothe, but at the same time I was repulsed. Meanwhile, up in Fabtex, the police had been called and I was quickly scooped up and returned to the safety of the fabric shop and put back behind the counter with the tubes of buttons and the racks of ribbon and lace. Even now it surprises me that I did such a thing because I was a good girl. I wasn't a scamp, a tear away, a troublesome child. I simply had to see that Werewolf.

A (19:45)

ACAST Powers the World's Best Podcasts Here's a show that we recommend

F (19:53)

what if you laughed all through your commute? Or if you heard the funniest story while at the gym? Well, now you can I'm Jameela Jamil, and guests on my new podcast Wrong Turns share their most mortifying and hilarious disaster stories. I'm talking people like Mae Martin, Bob the Drag Queen, Catherine Ryan, Jake Johnson, Margaret Cho, Simon Pegg, Penn Badgley, and so many more. So listen wherever you get your podcast Wrong Terms where dignity Goes to die

A (20:23)

ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com.

D (20:35)

But Threads was the film which affected me most. It was broadcast on BBC2 on a quiet Sunday evening in September, not the usual venue for a film which would stun and horrify millions. I was only three when I saw it, and writing this at the age of 44, I'm still troubled and frightened and nervous because of what I saw on TV that night. In my adult life, I have been diagnosed at various times with depression, anxiety, and panic disorder. I have sometimes been confined to the house, unable to board a train or a bus because the sliding shut of the doors makes me want to scare, scream. And I've often been unnaturally afraid of the broad white sky. And I can trace it all back to seeing that film in 1984. In fact, I can trace the film's influence even deeper. I lost a ton of weight in 2009 as I started having panic attacks on public transportation, so was forced, not being a car driver, to walk three hours each day to get to work. The Secret of my Spectacular Weight loss Threads I later began Internet dating as a method of curing a particularly stubborn depression. I figured that being forced to get out there, as they say, and have a shower and put on some lipstick might help dislodge the block of stone in my chest. So the secret to my sudden social life and endless string of dates? Threads I met my husband this way. Therefore I am married because of Threads. I was able to give up my call center job and devote myself to writing about nuclear war because of this same husband. So my career, my marriage, my panic, my story, my anxious and Prickly personality. It's all because of Threads. True, my dad should never have let me watch it, but thank God he did. Threads is a drama documentary imagining nuclear war in miserable 1980s Britain. It focuses on the fates of two ordinary families from Sheffield and doesn't concern itself with the military or the politicians in Moscow and Washington. The film is about ordinary people. It is about you. And it is merciless and brutal and one of the best things the BBC has ever done. My dog snoring there. It was also the first film to show us nuclear winter on screen, which made Threads even more frightening than it would otherwise have been, because nuclear winter means there's no hope. The first half of the film is agonizingly tense as the nuclear war inches closer and our Sheffield families are tangled in the minutiae of life. Renting a flat, preparing for a new baby, getting homework done, tending the allotment, tossing peas in the colander and ruining their hearing with that personal stereo turned up so loud. And as life in a slightly grubby Sheffield plods on, there are hints of the Holocaust drawing closer. A TV behind the bar talks of troop movements. A protest march demands that we ban the bomb. Bundles of blankets are delivered to the local primary school and fighter jets fly low over the dales. This is the preparation for nuclear war. In one of the most ominous scenes, a figure watches from his bedroom window as fire engines quietly depart the station and leave the city in the dead of night. And like a child, I always want to cry after them. Don't leave us. Because the departure of the fire engines implies the civilians are being left to their fate. The tension is almost unbearable and I've always found it a strange relief when, at 8:30 on a Thursday morning, as mothers are pushing their buggies at the Moor shopping precinct, the siren starts to wail. The remainder of the film after the bomb drops is horror upon horror. The director Mick Jackson explained there are no words for properly describing a nuclear war, and he instead sought a visual vocabulary. And so the film presents us with a succession of hideous and unforgettable images of nuclear attack. And this is what seized my three year old attention. Pictures I could never have grasped the geopolitics behind this imagined war, or concepts such as nuclear deterrence. I could certainly stare in horror at terrible images. When I interviewed Mick Jackson, he specifically mentioned the camera lingering on, a flaming hand poking out from the rubble, fingertips alight. There is also the unforgettable image of the traffic warden whose startling picture graced the COVID of the radio times, and the weak thread was broadcast, but the one which stayed with me was the scene of an ordinary doorstep with its milk bottles melting in the heat of the bomb. Ask any Threads fanatic. Everyone remembers the milk bottles. Threads takes the basic rules of storytelling and ignores them. Some characters simply vanish and the bomb drops. There are no conclusions, no resolutions, certainly no happy ending. Infamously, the film concludes with a dead newborn being handed to its exhausted mother, who, when she looks down into the shawl to see what she has delivered, opens her mouth to scream. The film ends on her intake of breath as she gathers herself to howl. And no, Threads won't even grant us the satisfaction of a typical Hollywood scream. The film ends with death and silence. The director remembers that after the credits had rolled, he was waiting by the phone for the deluge of congratulatory calls from BBC loveies. But his phone didn't ring. He fretted that maybe his film had been a flop, but he later realised the silence was because everyone who watched Threads that night was sitting in stunned silence. And ever since that Autumn evening in 1984, I've been frightened of nuclear war. And I've been expecting it.

E (28:18)

Leadership used to mean having all the answers, but today's best leaders embody a more human approach. I'm Jack Myers. And I'm Tim Spengler. Tim and I have spent our careers inside media marketing and culture and we partnered with the ACAST Creator Network to start Lead Human to answer one simple question. What does it really look like to lead in this AI dominated world? The biggest tip for being a creator? It's a job.

B (28:42)

What I learned from Michael Jackson Here's a man who understands precision.

E (28:47)

It's about answering the questions that are hard, not about answering a bunch of teed up questions that are fake. What we're looking for are real stories and practical advice that you can use with your teams right away. Subscribe to Lead Human with Jack Meyers and Tim Spengler wherever you get your podcasts. It's tax season and at LifeLock, we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it. Guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com special offer for the threats you can't control, terms apply

A (29:35)

ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.

B (29:42)

Hi, I'm Henrik and I make a podcast called Fall Asleep with Henrik. It's for people who can't sleep. And it's just me. I talk for about an hour. I improvise. No script, no music, no advice, nothing you really need to do. You don't even have to listen, to be honest. Just put it on and let yourself drift. Fall Asleep with Henrik is available wherever you get your podcasts.

A (30:13)

ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast. Com.