Off Air... with Jane and Fi - You do continence, I'll do Eric Clapton (with Lucy Worsley)

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Once we get our headphones plugged in, Off Air is a-go. On this final on-the-day instalment of the pod for the year, Jane gives you an audio guide of London, and Fi makes a Sherlock-inspired word cloud. Don't worry, you can still get your Off Air fix over Christmas. We have lots of podcast content coming your way between now and the New Year, so keep your eyes on the feed! Today's guest is the historian, author and presenter Lucy Worsley - she tells us about her new series 'Killing Sherlock', which is out now. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] We're up for an award! You can vote for us here, if you'd like: https://podbiblemag.com/pod-bible-listener-polls-2023-vote-now/ Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfi Assistant Producer: Megan McElroy Times Radio Producer: Kate Lee Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

VoiceOver describes what's happening on your iPhone screen. VoiceOver on. Settings. So you can navigate it just by listening. Books. Contacts. Calendar. Double tap to open. Breakfast with Anna from 10 to 11. And get on with your day. Accessibility. There's more to iPhone. Are we recording?

Because you should record this. I literally didn't put the headphone into the right jack. And Megan had to go outside and look for another set of headphones. An executive told her to scrabble around on the floor and see if she could find the lost chip. And I just hadn't pulled it in, Jane. I've not turned it on and off again. Welcome to Off Air. This is the last one before Christmas. Can you tell? Wherever you are, wherever you are in

the world, we're on the banks of the River Thames. Sometimes I just need to turn around and just have a gawk at the view so we've got the walkie talkie we've got monument monument is there's a tube station called monument but we can see the monument from where we are now and it's just a big pole with a fiery furnace golden fiery furnace on top isn't it it is and it illustrates the place where the fire of London started. That's right. And we can see it from here. So it's right in the heart of what used to be Pudding Lane in the old city of London.

It's a very evocative part of London down here. It is. Have you ever been mudlarking on the Thames? No, but I follow a couple of people on Instagram who fiddle around, sift through the mud and they just uncover some wonderful bits of pottery, glass bottles. It's incredible. Yeah, it's fabulous.

My kids quite often went with their primary school because we're not that far away from the river in East London and I rather wondered because of all the stuff they came back with and I mean quite often it was a petrified packet of JPS and a lighter but sometimes it was more historical stuff. I did wonder whether or not, you know, the teachers or the mudlarking people that they were with had been kind and kind of, you know, maybe... Oh, please, Fee. Maybe planted some bits of clay pipes.

I don't think you need to. And stuff. But that's the thing. and stuff but that's the thing it you know the the the banks of the river give up so much treasure every week that you really don't need to be spreading it around do you know why i started uh the podcast on this note is because our guest is a historian oh jane that's superb isn't wonderful it's lucy worsley who's probably our favorite historian and we've got yeah we like a lot of historians but we reserve a particular affection and respect for Lucy Worsley. And there's something about Christmas that you just think,

I want Lucy Worsley, and I'd like her to be talking about a leading crime writer, please. And last year, she focused on Agatha Christie. And this year, she's bringing us a three-part documentary on the BBC iPlayer about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And, well, as you'll hear in the conversation that we'll play out in a couple of minutes, neither of us were huge. Well, I don't know anything about Sherlock Holmes. And I couldn't back you up. But Lucy, fortunately...

If you were going to do a word cloud... I did know a lot. ...for Sherlock Holmes, I would just go, Deerstalker Hat, Watson, Baker Street, Waterfall, Moriarty, nothing else. Well, drugs. I did know about the drugs. Oh. Yeah.

Because one of the Sherlock Holmes stories starts with him taking cocaine. And Lucy makes very clear in the documentary that drugs are dangerous and you shouldn't do them. But back at that time, late 19th century uh cocaine was um widely widely used well it's it is in kaolin and morphine isn't it so it was you could buy it from your pharmacist up until about 1980 and they just thought it sharpened the senses yeah yeah i wonder whether people still think that i don't think so no no i really don't think so let's talk about continents which is something you do continents and then i'll do eric clapton yeah you know we have to say a huge thank you to all of you for downloading our podcast but it is brilliant email segues like that really uh that keep me coming to work. Off you go. Thank you.

Rachel says, this is about what Miriam Margulies said. It's got a lot of people talking. In fact, I heard our radio pal Ian Dale referencing us on his LBC show only the other night because he'd been listening to Miriam Margulies talking about her fear of becoming doubly incontinent. Were you listening for research purposes? I often listen to Ian in the bath of an evening,

wash myself down in the company of Spirited Speech Radio, made by another network, admittedly, but that's only after I've had my full dose of John Pienaar. OK, I'm just easily having a shower with Kate Ballsay, but crack on. This is from Rachel, who says, my late mother suffered from dementia towards the end of her life and was actually doubly incontinent for the last year or so this certainly wasn't

ideal either for her or for my sister and me who both cared for her at various points it marked the point at which we had to accept that she could no longer live independently and of course yes it was messy and inconvenient and and sometimes for mum, rather undignified. But we found it quite possible to cope with it, sometimes laugh about it, and continue to value mum's life despite it. It makes me sad and a bit scared when people confidently declare that they'll be ready to give up on life if this terrible thing happens to them you might find you very much still want to live and that it's not so terrible um rachel that's uh thank you for that contribution uh to what is let's be honest a slightly difficult subject and um of course your mum was very very fortunate indeed to have two offspring who were caring for her in that very very intimate and loving way and I imagine that made your mum's

experience a little easier to cope with um I mean it is one of those things that I suspect until you do have to do it yeah you might not have a particularly clear view on how you're going to feel in the moment but so much of it Jane just depends on what kind of a relationship you've had in the many many years preceding oh yeah uh frailty infirmity and undignified ablutions because it must be incredibly difficult if you've not had a particularly close relationship or any kind of a you know warm physical relationship to then be the person who is expected to leap over all of those those barriers and do something quite so personal i think we need to we need to honor the fact that some people are brilliant at this stage of life brilliant at dealing with a parent who may or may not have

parented them brilliantly because all of us are only adequate parents at best aren't we um and some people do rise to the occasion and they're able to cope with it. I've got to be honest, not sure I could. But then, of course, you've got to have awkward conversations with yourself and think, well, if it's my mother, let's say it is me and it's my mother, she once did it for me, so would I be able to... Should I? Should I do it for her?

It's a really difficult one and I'm not going to pretend I've got any answers, or so far, no personal experience, actually. So it's really challenging. I think we've had some really fantastic debates about old age, and particularly about assisted dying in the last couple of weeks, because of brilliant women like Esther Ranson, who has been very, you know, vociferous about the fact that she's joined Dignitas, she's livid that she can't stay in this country because our laws prevent a sister dying at

the moment. But also Diana Rigg released, well, Diana Rigg's daughter released some interviews, didn't she, that she had done with her mum talking about how she would have liked a more dignified end. And it's just fantastic to hear those chats. And I've gone on to have conversations with my kids and with my partner that i wouldn't have had before well i gotta hear someone talking about it haven't you well you have and um i'm not in any way comparing humans with pets but but i've certainly attended uh the um what do you call it when your pet is put down uh and and honestly it was lovely peaceful and dignified and i remember looking at the cat at that moment thinking i hope my end's as good as this and i suspect it won't be

so look we've got i'm really glad esther ranson's raised this most difficult of subjects good for her let's hope that conversation keeps going in 2024 right we've got time for only one email about eric clapton megan saying yes. One email of Jane's choice. Then we're into Lucy Worsley. And then we're out. So here we go. This is because of studio difficulties. Oh, it's a very, very busy time of year.

So this one comes from Barbara. And to be honest, if you're called Barbara, I'm always going to read out your email. A late addition to your growing list of ordinary people who've encountered those who are higher up the fame scale in the late 60s. I worked in a photographic shop in New Bond Street, far from my native home on the north coast of Northern Ireland, where having had a sheltered upbringing, I was rarely in contact with the rich and famous. My boss, the manager, always checked with Mr. Pond in the

Barclays Bank, which was on the opposite corner to our premises, to ensure that potential customers had adequate fun to cover their checks. And one day, a very scruffy young man entered the shop and showed his interest in a, I'm going to say this wrong, Hasselblad? I think it is a Hasselblad. Okay. One of our most expensive cameras, plus lenses, etc, etc.

It came to a sizeable amount. Mr Wagner, a small portly gentleman, indicated to me that he'd like me to keep the unkempt guy talking whilst he ascertained the health of his bank account. No flies on this fellow. No. Mr Wagner is the manager. I was happy to do so,

so I began what I thought was an engaging conversation. What do you do for a living? I'm a musician. What instrument? Guitar. Oh, by yourself or in a group? Used to play with a group called Cream, but solo now. Oh, I think I've heard of them.

Such a shame, says Barbara, that my musical knowledge didn't stretch to having heard of Eric Clapton. But despite the arm-waving of the young male members of staff behind Eric's back, I remained ignorant of the talents until he left. The happy ending is that Mr Clapton called back the following day for his goods and invited me for coffee. Apparently it was very refreshing to find such ignorance. Happy Christmas to you both.

Barbara, we kind of want to know if you went for the coffee, darling. Yes, I mean, that's left us hanging there slightly, hasn't it? But that's a lovely one. Happy Christmas to you too. I think it's wonderfully refreshing when people don't know who I am. Do you feel the same way, Viv? I do. As I float through life, I often catch them doing a double take. And they think, ooh,

is it Sandy Toksvig? And I say yes. I wish I'd have money. Catherine says, before Christmas, I told the extended family no more presents unless you're below voting age.

After the immediate bar humbug feeling, I went on to feel relief. And most of them replied, oh good. Yeah, but not all of them. As it happens, Christmas is cancelled on my house anyway due to COVID.

Not sure if it's karma or what. I think that is karma. That is karma. A quick shout out to Anonymous who says they're feeling the rage. I'm feeling it too. Hope things improve for you. To the woman who emailed to say somebody really irritating at work keeps asking what she's doing on Christmas Day because she's divorced and won't be with her children.

Tell your colleague at work to bog off and stick her snout somewhere else. You do your own thing and have a lovely, lovely Christmas. Right, our guest is TV historian Lucy Worsley. Now, she was on our television screens last Christmas with a series of documentaries about the life and times of Agatha Christie. She's also written a best-selling book

about the wonderful crime writer, of course. This year, she's made a series for the BBC called Killing Sherlock. It is about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, but interestingly, a man who grew to absolutely intensely dislike his most famous creation. I started by asking Lucy if it's unusual for an artist to be so tortured by their own creation in the way that Conan Doyle appeared to be. Well, I think that he was an extreme case, but I don't think it's all that uncommon. If you think about Agatha Christie, she got a bit fed up with Poirot I think Ian Fleming had some of the same feelings about James Bond and sometimes the creator has a different idea about what they want to achieve

with their life than the public does it's quite curious tension there well Conan Doyle was somebody who wanted to be a different sort of writer wasn wasn't he? He wanted to be important and slightly impenetrable, and he ended up being wildly successful and very accessible, and appeared to intensely dislike it. That certainly isn't that unusual, is it? Have you ever read any of Arthur Conan Doyle's historical fiction? No. Because you've advised us not to. My advice would be, really don't go there. I mean, he tried so hard. He did so much research. He put so much creativity into this arcane 13th century dialogue

that he loved to conjure up. And I think in his mind, he was Hilary Mantel. You know, he wanted to be taken very seriously by the literary establishment. And he felt kind of shamed that people knew him for something that's uh i i don't want to call it trashy because that does it down something that's so mainstream and addictive and it actually took him quite a long time to get a um a publication deal because i think he was looking in the wrong place he when he first wanted to publish Sherlock Holmes, he sent it to the Cornhill magazine.

It was kind of like sending your work to the New Yorker today, you know, start at the top. And they didn't want it, and then others didn't want it, and then others didn't want it. And then finally the publisher who took it said, yes, this is just what we're looking for, Mr Doyle. It's cheap fiction. And you can imagine that was a blow to his heart.

I don't want to be a writer of cheap fiction. I want to be something better than that. But, you know, I sort of wish for his own sake he could own that. He would have been a happier man, I think. Can you just put into a kind of historical context the background and the time into which he placed Sherlock Holmes? What was going on around him? And what did what did the what do you think the public wanted from a detective hero? Well, to, to sort of pull back the lens to the bigger picture, people sometimes wonder, why did Britain get this tradition of detective fiction? You know, we can say we have the greatest detective fiction, the greatest fictional detectives in the world. And it's all to do with the industrial revolution,

I think. We industrialised quite early. And bear with me on this. If you were living in 18th century Britain before the industrial revolution, it's much more likely that you would have been living in a village. You would have known all of your neighbours and your greatest fear might have been dying or disease or maybe in a famine, maybe in a war, something like that. But by the 19th century it's much more likely that British people would have been living in a town, you wouldn't have known who your neighbours were and in some ways your life would have been much safer, There was a police force, you had plumbed in drains, things like that. And I think that sort of opened up a space in people's mind for the luxury, because it is a luxury, of worrying about being murdered by the dodgy bloke who's moved in next door, and you don't really know who he is. So you can imagine

that when you're living close to the dangers of nature, you don't want to be reading about violent death for fun. Yet by the 19th century, people get this, you know, if it goes with anxiety and paranoia and neurosis and all the other things that we enjoy about modern life. And I can imagine that for Arthur Conan Doyle's readers going to work, reading The Strand magazine, which has ended up as Sherlock Holmes' home, travelling on the trains, going into this bustling metropolis of London. They were very, you know, it made them feel better to think that there was someone like Sherlock Holmes looking out for them. I mean, he solves the problems of little people. He solves the problems of respectable people, people on the up, aspirational people. He does do kings and queens and aristocrats, but, you know, he's really on your side.

Now, Conan Doyle was a medical doctor. So why did he want to be a writer? Was there some desperate need to prove himself in some way? What was his family background? Oh, there are so many dark secrets in his family background. There are so many dark secrets in his family background. And you could really see in his career, he was so energetic. He had such an enormous need, as you say, to prove himself, that I'm sure that he wanted to put all of that behind him and be the respectable gentleman, which he appeared to be in the eyes of the world after his success came to him so he grew up in a family that was sort of clinging on to gentility with their fingernails

in Edinburgh he had an Irish background and his own father couldn't work his own father couldn't work because he was addicted to alcohol and for many years of Caelan Dore's life when he was this big grand man in London he none of his grand friends knew that his father was in this asylum where he ended up and there are the most extraordinary and moving documents that survive which are his uh Arthur Conan Doyle's uh drawings because he had been an illustrator a very talented illustrator and he went on finding some sort of comfort in in drawing and creativity while he was in the asylum and he would draw fairies and goblins and otherworldly creatures and you can see that

tapping into the world of the imagination was something that Cahdador was quite familiar with but as you say Jane he wanted to be a medical doctor he went to medical school because I'm sure that seemed like a shortcut out of this precarious situation into being you know a solid member of the middle classes but it didn't go that well for him perhaps because he was spending all of his spare time writing that's clearly something that he felt compelled to do but he also saw writing as a means to respectability rather than a means to what he actually got, which was huge commercial success. London is actually a character in Sherlock Holmes stories. But what I honestly had no idea about was how little Conan Doyle actually knew about the city when he started writing these stories.

I mean, a lot of people have been fooled into believing he's part of the very fabric of the capital, but it's nonsense. Yes, it's so funny. When he first started working on Sherlock Holmes, he was living in Portsmouth. He was a struggling doctor in Southsea, actually. And he came up with this character. He decided that he was going to live in London and not having that much personal knowledge of London, he had to make it up. He used things like maps to help him plan Sherlock Holmes's movements around the character, around the capital. But he was so, so gifted at conjuring up a world that so many people, even to this day, believe that Sherlock Holmes' home, 221B Baker Street, is a real place. I mean, you can go to it today because it's been made into a kind of museum. It's completely unreal. Sherlock Holmes doesn't exist. His house doesn't exist. And yet,

thousands of people go there hoping to meet him. People write letters. they to this day they write piles of letters from all over the world addressed to Mr Sherlock Holmes 221B Baker Street please help me with my with my problem and I think this might explain a little bit why Arthur Conan Doyle got so fed up with Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes was stealing all the limelight here nobody wanted to talk to Arthur Conan Doyle they only wanted to talk to Mr Sherlock Holmes I have lived in London for I think 35 years now I know Jane's been in London for an equal amount of time uh I can pretty much guarantee that neither of us have visited uh Baker Street I've seen the queues outside what's inside the place have you you been round it? What's in there? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. There's my family has a has a Ukrainian refugee. And do you know where she wanted to go on her first ever trip to London?

She wanted to go to Baker Street. She was she was one of those people. And if you go in today, they have cleverly recreated Sherlock Holmes's and Watson's and watson's domestic setup as is described in the book uh so it's got this sort of um classic sherlockian gloomy late victorian feeling and you can see his violin and his pipe and photographs of his famous clients and his letters and all that sort of thing and it's it complete, it's magical thinking. And yet, and yet, I am such a Sherlock Holmes fan. I can see I'm like you too. I'm such a Sherlock Holmes fan that I believe in my heart on some level he does exist. He's very real to me. Conan Doyle would be fuming, wouldn't he, about that?

Yes, Conan Doyle would be absolutely fuming to know that i like sherlock combs more than i like him and it's like it's this this sort of battle between conan doyle and his character was eventually won by sherlock combs i mean really today in the world many more people would know the name of sherlock combs than they would after conan doyle voiceover describes what's happening on your iphone screen voiceover on of Sherlock Holmes and they would offer Conan Doyle. Voice over describes what's happening on your iPhone screen. Voice over on settings. So you can navigate it just by listening.

Books, contacts, calendar, double tap to open. Breakfast with Anna from 10 to 11. And get on with your day. Accessibility. There's more to 11. And get on with your day. Accessibility. There's more to iPhone. You're listening to Lucy Worsley on the podcast. I asked her to explain the significance of the Deerstalker hat worn by Sherlock Holmes. The hat is one of these things that Conan Doyle geeks will get obsessed about. Because in the text, it's not there. Actually, I'm not 100% sure about that.

I think it's not a big feature. It's not part of the sort of main way in which the character is presented. But the Strand magazine started to illustrate the stories. They used illustrations and the hat became a big part of that. So quite soon you can see that people loved the character so much that they picked it up and they ran with it. This started in the illustrations. Later on it began to happen in stage plays and in films.

And the phrase, elementary, dear Watson, that's not part of the words on the page in the stories. That's something that becomes made famous through stage and screen adaptations of the stories. So Arthur Conan Doyle was kind of left behind in all of this. How much did Conan Doyle get right about the detective techniques of that period of time? Was he ahead of his time? Was he imagining stuff? What was your assessment of that? assessment of that? Well, as somebody who had a medical training, Arthur Conan Doyle was up to date with and very interested in scientific development. Curiously, one of the reasons that

Sherlock Holmes takes cocaine, which was this fabulous new wonder drug, was that it had been pioneered in, this is a bit wincy, in eye surgery. You can inject around the eye and do things to the eye that were previously impossible. That's how cocaine sort of entered the marketplace. And Arthur Cote d'Azur had gone to Vienna to study eye surgery in particular. So you can see him incorporating his medical knowledge into his character. But sometimes when Sherlock Holmes uses cutting edge techniques, he gets it a bit wrong. And that's because, you know, the weapons in James Bond, we know that that's not really what MI5 used, right? Yet we want to think that they use them. And there was a bit of that going on with Arthur Conan Doyle as well. He would describe techniques that had some basis in reality, but weren't quite available in the world yet. So there was a super gun, there was a

super gun that he describes in the story, The Empty House. And for our show, I went to the Royal Armouries in Leeds and said, look, could guns do this in 1983? And they said, no, they couldn't. And in order to get the performance that Arthur Conan Doyle had described, we had to use a really modern gun, a really large modern gun that they had recently captured from some drug dealers, actually. I did have a guilt-making amount of pleasure firing that gun. But that's typical. That's typical. Koda Doyle to describe something that sounds really cool, but doesn't quite work. Lucy, we want to make the most of having you on the programme and in the podcast.

So can we also talk about your fantastic biography of Agatha Christie? Please don't give away the ending. I haven't got right to the final page yet. Please don't give away the ending. I haven't got right to the final page yet. I didn't realise quite what a pioneering figure she was until reading your book. And you say in the introduction that she shattered the 20th century's rules for women. Females of her generation and social class were supposed to be slender, earn nothing, blindly adore their numerous children and constantly give themselves to others. The only one of these Agatha completely fulfilled is the last. And she was an extraordinary character, actually, wasn't she? In a way, she is more interesting than any of her detectives that she created. I think she is fascinating.

And you said there that you weren't aware of the ways in which she was innovative. And I think that she would have been pleased by that. Because my reading is that she was very aware of the fact that she was, she had been a working single parent, she was divorced, she'd had mental health problems, she was interested in money and achievement and success. I think she was very aware that she felt all of those things, but that the world wasn't ready for her to feel them. So she adopted this persona, this sort of stealthy persona, where she basically pretended that she was Miss Marple. And a lot of people think, oh, I know all about Agatha Christie. She's that little old lady in the tweed suit, likes gardening, likes cream teas, probably lives in the village. She must be

just like, you know, Miss Marple, all sorts of fluffy. But the thing about Miss Marple is that she has depths, there's steel within. And I feel the same about Agatha Christie. She's such a, oh, I'll stop now because I'm ranting. I'll let you ask another question. I think you can tell I'm very passionate about her. Yeah, no, I mean, you know, feel free to rant. I mean, there are so many things that you discover about her in the book. But one of the things I just hadn't realised, Lucy, was her obsession with the house. So, so many of her detective books are set in a, you know, a big English country mansion. But actually in her own life, that's what she loved to have. And it was a huge part of her achievement wasn't it to actually buy the places live in the places that she then set the books in well there's a close relationship between

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and then what Agatha Christie does next in the next generation because uh Sherlock Holmes he doesn't really have a home. He lives in rooms with Mrs. Hudson. He has no friends. He's really uninterested in having a sort of domestic setup. And by the time you get to the 1920s, I think that after World War I, society had changed so much that it was ready for a female author of detective fiction. I kind of see it like the men had been in charge of World War I. That had gone really well, hadn't it?

No, it had not. So it's time to give the ladies a term. When Agatha got her first publishing deal, she had expected that she should publish under a male pseudonym. But the publisher who knew the market, I think, thought, hang on, some women have now got the vote, some women have entered the workplace during the war, some women have delayed marriage, it's time for women to have their own names on the covers of the books, which was both brilliant, and it turned out awful for her. So she kind of stepped forward with other female writers,

actually, at the 1920s, like Marjorie Allingham and A.O. Marsh. And it was definitely time for female perspective on the world. And what part of the world did she and her peers know best? It was the home. It was the domestic. And she took the darkness and the violence that in Sherlock Holmes happens out there in the world, And she brought it into the family. And that's what's really nasty about it.

In an Agatha Christie story, the murderer is always one of us. It's always somebody who's in the circle, somebody you trust, somebody who's your friend or your housemaid or your spouse even. And one way that this is kind of classically revealed is in the denouement of the story. When Agatha Christie wrote her first detective story, there was kind of the solution was given by Poirot in the witness box in a courtroom. was given by Poirot in the witness box in a courtroom and her publisher actually said hang on the the law doesn't work like this Mrs Christie witnesses aren't allowed to harangue the judge in this way so she thought okay okay how will I do it instead and she wrote her first drawing room denouement she got all the characters into the drawing room of the house and Poirot came in and

he said I can now reveal you know it unfolded in that classic way and yes it was the right person at the right point in history and you also correctly identified that Agatha Christie you know her own area of expertise was domestic as well she really loved houses she loved buying houses she loved she loved furnishing houses she loved acting as as the the matriarch can we talk a little bit about the bbc adaptation of christy which is now an annual tradition i think isn't it is murder is easy um is that good i haven't oh it's the book murder is easy Good. Yes, it's a classic one. It doesn't have Miss Marple in it. It's a lovely, lovely, lovely village mystery.

And it's so it's so curious, isn't it, that what people want to do at Christmas, which is supposed to be pleasant, cosy family time is read about violent death. Well, all the best, everybody. It is a bit odd that, isn't it? Can we just own that that is absolutely true and deeply peculiar? It's peculiar as long... It's only peculiar if you don't accept

that families can and do do dark things to each other. I mean, the image of family life, the image of Christmas is all, you know, robins and snow and getting on together. But everybody knows the reality is a bit different. And there can be dark secrets and brutal things done and nasty things said. And Agatha Christie was all too aware of that. That's the secret of her power.

It works in the surface and what's underneath are very different. You were a 50 last week uh now i only know that because you said so yourself um was it something was it something that um you were in any way bothered by um i mean it didn't look as though you were bothered by it but people unfortunately do take notice particularly when a woman gets to 50 and I say this as someone who's 59 Lucy and still more or less alive alive ish after a fashion all the feelings all the feelings I went through I went through the the gamut I it did make me think I'm very lucky to be in a place in my life where turning 50 is something I've got time to think about I got this far I should be sort of more pleasant about and pleasantly pleasantly surprised and happy about that I suppose but I knew it was going to I I knew that

other people were going to notice this so I'm going to own it I'm going to own it and I've had a lovely time not having a party but having lots of little little lovely things uh done and in fact back tonight, I'm going to the pub with my dad and we're going to have fish and chips. It still continues. I'm having sort of royal progress through my 50th birthday month. Well, many happy returns from us. Final question. Using the immense bank of historical knowledge that you have, Lucy. I don't like this question it's already going wrong for me this is a simple one uh which uh era of christmas would you most like to plonk yourself in if you could pick any time from history oh i think i will probably say um victorian

christmas when it gets more recognisable. Dickens has a lot to do with this. That's when you feel that peak Christmas was happening. Christmas had been celebrated before that, but it had many more religious overtones and less kind of jolly, feasting, goodwill-to-all-men overtones. What about the pagans, though?

Because they had a big thing at this time of year, didn't they? And we don't want to forget them. No, and the idea that the winter solstice is worth celebrating is... You're right, it's there in the background. That's the sort of deep history at this time of year. And the idea of bringing trees and greenery and things like that into the house is very ancient. It represents life in the midst of the darkness. Yes. Lucy Worsley has been our guest on the podcast today.

We'd like to wish you all a really, really, really happy and safe and vaguely sane Christmas. If you get to a place beyond yourself, pop yourself down to the laptop. Pop yourself, well, you know what I mean. Pop yourself down to a laptop. That's right, Bea. And send us an email. We'll regroup in the new year. Thank you for listening and goodbye. Well done for getting to the end of another episode

of Off Air with Jane Garvey and Fee Glover. Our Times Radio producer is Rosie Cutler and the podcast executive producer is Henry Tribe. And don't forget, there is even more of us every afternoon on Times Radio. Radio producer is Rosie Cutler and the podcast executive producer is Henry Tribe. And don't forget, there is even more of us every afternoon on Times Radio. It's Monday to Thursday, three till five. You can pop us on when you're pottering around the house or heading out in the car on the school run or running a bank. Thank you for joining us.

And we hope you can join us again on Off Air very soon. Don't be so silly. Running a bank? I know, ladies. A lady listener. I'm sorry. very soon. Don't be so silly. Money, good bank. I know ladies don't just by listening. Books. Contacts. Calendar. Double tap to open. Breakfast with Anna from 10 to 11. And get on with your day.

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