Oh What A Time... - #182 The Grand Tour and are The Killers better than The Beatles? (Part 2)

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!For the eighteenth-century gentleman few things marked a rite of passage more than the grand tour - so this week we’re seeing what exploring Europe, the UK and North America was like in the 18th and 19th Centuries.Elsewhere, Elis has been dreaming about Chris’ fictional children being good at football. If you’ve got any dreams to share, you know what to do: [e-mail] from now on Part 1 is released on Monday and Part 2 on Wednesday - but if you want more Oh What A Time and both parts at once, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh, What a Time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else, ad free, plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets, and access to the Oh Watertime Group chat. Plus, if you become an Oh Watertime All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis, will riff on your name to postulate

where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash oh, water time. Hello and welcome to part two of the Grand Tour. Let's get on on the show. All right, let's talk Wordsworth, Revolution and the Birth of the Romantic Nation. Now, for most of the 18th century, the education of a wealthy young European wasn't complete until he had taken the Grand Tour, an extended journey, sometimes lasting years through France, Italy and Switzerland. And the aim, as Tom touched on, was to absorb classical civilization at its source. So the ruins of Rome, the galleries,

of Florence, the Salons of Paris. And it was the cultural finishing school, essentially, of the European elite. And it produced a shared cultural language to be cultured, was to know Italy. And to be cultured was to have walked the forum. And then came 1789, and the world changed, as we've touched on this show before. So on the 14th of July, 1790, a 20-year-old Cambridge student named William Wordsworth landed in France on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. the symbolic beginning of the French Revolution.

Wordsworth wasn't a particularly political young man at this point, but the timing felt electric. France was throwing off centuries of monarchy and aristocratic privilege, and Wordsworth felt himself walking through what he later called the blissful dawn of a new world. Yeah. The start of the French Revolution is very exciting. And everyone was like, this is amazing.

This is going to be great and very fast. It turns into an utter nightmare. Blissful dawn sort of really quite difficult lunchtime basically isn't it by brunch it's not quite so it's gone to shit by lunch he was travelling with a friend

from his college St John's Cambridge a Welshman named Robert Jones from near Ruthin have I pronounced that right Ruthin Ruthin where he Cvons is from So William Wordsworth and Robert Jones walked over 2,000 miles through France, Italy and Switzerland

before returning home in October. Bloody hell, 2,000 miles. It's a lot, isn't it? That is a lot. Before New Balance trainers. No, thank you. And before Google Translate. I mean, even like, can you imagine the maps they were working with?

Yeah, because that's definitely not the most efficient route either. Because now we've got Google Maps that will tell you exactly what route to do it quickest. I imagine they could have done it 1,000 miles. Yeah, that's true. to drive to towns and ask people where the local comedy club was in the pre-Google mapage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I cannot imagine doing that.

That's really died out, hasn't it, asking for directions? Yeah, yeah, I've not been asked for directions for a very long time. I think a tourist asked me if a train was, like if the Victoria Line went to Houston a couple of weeks ago, and that's the closest I've come, so I ask me for directions for a very long time. Quite a lot of pressure when that happens, isn't it? When you send them off in the direction, direction of the right tube and you're thinking, it's about 10% I'm thinking, I hope I've got that right.

I know I've lived here long enough, but there's a chance I've really sued that. I've ruined their day, if that's wrong. So 2,000 miles they walked, and then a year later in 1791, the two friends took a second walking tour, and this time around North Wales, which feels a bit safer. Then Wordsworth went back to France. I'm not sure about that, actually. And then after that they did their walking tour around North Wales,

Wordsworth went back to France for another dose of revolution. For a young romantic, this was the perfect education. Democratic France in one ear and then mountainous whales in the other. And he didn't at this stage see any contradiction between the two. He loved them both. He thought they were both very similar. But Wordsworth's love affair with the French Revolution didn't last because by 1793, the French Revolution has now collapsed into the terror,

a period in which the new revolutionary government turned on its own citizens. executing thousands by the guillotine, old enemies, new enemies, and a great many people in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were all sent to the scaffold. The blissful dawn had become something far, far darker. And again, if you haven't signed up to the O'Wat Time Patreon, you've got to check out our Citizens episode where we review the book,

Simon Sharma's analysis of the French Revolution, which is brilliant. So you see, today you go on TripAdvisor and say, good weather but I saw five people beheaded this afternoon. Two stars or whatever and you go maybe now's not the time. Yeah. Should we give it a month? Do you think as a tourist during the terror you'd feel a bit protected and, you know, outside of it? Or do you be terrified that you could get sucked in?

Well, actually, when Claire and I are honeymoon, we were there during the riot. in Paris for the refuse collection. Remember that? Oh, yeah. Basically, all the... Which was very similar to the French terror of the French Revolution. Well, you joke, obviously it's not the same,

but the bin men had gone on strike. The streets were piled full of refuse and people going around setting them on fire, so they were burning everywhere. And it kicked off on the street outside, so much so that we were in a restaurant on the first night of our honeymoon, And they locked everyone in.

They had to lock the gates outside. They bolted all the doors. And nobody was allowed to leave for like two hours. They gave us a free pudding, it wasn't all bad. Paris can be quite heavy, though. I was there on New Year's Eve one night. And there was just loads of fighting under the Eiffel Tower. Yeah.

And I remember thinking, hmm. If I won't fight in, I'll just go to Swansea. It's an easy place to walk by the fight, though, isn't it? Meet me underneath the Eiffel Tower. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You cannot claim that you couldn't find it. Exactly. A great landmark for having a scrap.

So for Wordsworth, and for many of his generation, they found the terror of the French Revolution, a profound betrayal. This revolution had promised freedom and had become a machine of fear. And then came, after that, the wars. So for idealists, they were absolutely broken because from 1792 onwards,

Europe was at war almost continuously. So he had revolutionary France fighting its neighbours, Napoleon's rise to power, and the entire continent became a battlefield, which didn't end until Waterloo in 1815, by which point Wordsworth was middle age. And breaking news listener, we're going to have Dan Snow on the podcast in a few weeks.

And I know he is passionate about the Battle of Waterloo, and he's a big reason why I actually went to the scene of the Battle of Waterloo. So I'm hoping we can ask him about that because his stories to do with the Battle of Waterloo are absolutely incredible, a little teaser for you there. For a generation of British travellers, though, this meant one thing that Europe being a war, I mean. The grand tour was no longer possible. You couldn't go tour Italy.

When there were French armies marching through it, you couldn't sketch Roman ruins when there's like roads lined with soldiers. So the British did the only thing they could, which was to look inward. And so when the continent's off limits, perhaps the wonders of Europe could be found closer to home. And so a new kind of tourism began to take shape. one that turned away from classical antiquity and became something... And towards Barry Island. Much more local. Well, you joked on. In place of the Alps, you've got Barry Island.

You've got the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District, the Pennines, the Peak District, the uplands of Wales, the rugged coasts of Devon and Cornwall. Sound good? As an aside, Scotland is one of the most beautiful countries on Earth. Yeah, impossibly beautiful. It is incredible Scotland. And I don't think the Scots go on about it enough.

Up in towards the locks as well, the highlands. Oh my, I've got, well, Izzy's got a lot of family in the highlands. So we've spent time up there. It is unbelievable. No. Every time you turn to the corner, you think it's like another incredible panoramic view. So you sound like, as someone was not from Scotland, you sound like you take the piss. You're like, God, that's like, bloody out again.

Wow! All the time. Amazing. My sister lives in the Lake District. Every time I drive up there, I always go, bloody hell. Look at this. The problem is, again, I drew through the lake just on tour last autumn. And I did the whole, if I lived here, I'd always be climbing in the lakes.

No, I wouldn't. I would be on my phone. But I'd be on my phone in a really, really beautiful landscape. Well, you should see the Lee Bridge roundabout in Clapton, which is where I live, it is stunning, Alice. If you like a build-up of all lanes of traffic, barely move. moving and road works, then oh, and you come to the right place. So people turned inwards in Britain, and in place of Roman temples came medieval ruins. So people went to see the abbeys broken open by Henry VIII.

They looked at Norman castles and ancient stones. And in place of classical mythology came something far older and closer to home. Celtic legends, the tales of Robin Hood, the stories of Rob Roy McGregor. And this wasn't just travel, essentially. It was the beginning of a movement. And that movement was Romanticism, the cultural and artistic movement that came to define the early 19th century. And it was many things at once. But out of its heart, it was a reaction to what happened in France, really.

So where the Enlightenment had prized reason, logic and order, romanticism prized emotion and intuition, the wild and the untamed, the local and the folk, nature and its rorous forms, mountains, storms and ruins. And this was the world, Wordsworth, came to and helped to show. shape. In 1810, Wordsworth published his guide to the lakes, a study in effective tourist prospectus of the Lake District. He wasn't the first. Thomas West had published a similar guide in 1778, but Wordsworth was different. It was a romantic manifesto disguised as a travel book. He described his ambition as, it is the author's principal wish to furnish a guide or companion for the minds of persons of taste and feeling for landscape. And it's interesting to note the wording, like minds of taste and feeling. This wasn't a guide of.

of where to go. It was a guide of how you should be feeling about this place. And Wordsworth was also in true romantic fashion, not above regional bias. He had seen North Wales, the Y Valley and the Avon Gorge, and concluded that none of them quite matched his beloved Cumberland. Even the weather, he insisted, was better in the lakes. A quote, such clouds cleaving to their stations or lifting up suddenly, their glittering heads from behind rocky barriers make me think of the blank sky of Egypt and of the Curilian vacancy of Italy as an unanimated and even a sad spectacle. In other words, who needs the Italian sun when you have the dramatic Cumbrian cloud? He could write, couldn't he?

To be fair to him. What's the language he uses there about the minds? What's the word he... He said, it is the author's principal wish to furnish a guide or companion for the minds of persons of taste and feeling for landscape. So what I find interesting about that is it clearly it's sort of aspirational. It's sort of pushing this idea of aspirational. holiday making, doesn't it?

Which exists today where people want to be doing the right thing. So on 18 to 30. Exactly, yeah. But that is the tone of people selling holiday destinations now. It's the right place for mindfulness for getting in touch with, you know,

you being, yeah, serving you later. Josh Peeve, the comedian, he does great videos on Instagram. He's got a really funny one about someone who's gone to a really beautiful, very cultured city, but just been the pub for three days. Lying about all the museums they haven't been to and it's very, very funny.

That is, every stagdo in Europe have ever been on. Including nine. When we went to Bruges. We were all going to go to the Bell Tower and the medieval Beltaire. We're all too far. We're all too young, Elle. One day we'll make it to the medieval Bell Tower. We were all in our 40s.

So there is one kind of surprising concept. of all this looking inward, which is that before Romanticism, the idea of the nation wasn't as central to political thought as we now assume. So when the American Declaration of Independence was drafted in 1776, the word nation barely appears. The document is overwhelmingly concerned with liberty, not nationality. The only real use of nation comes when Georgia Third is dismissed as totally unworthy to be the head of a civilized nation. But by the mid-19th century, the picture has completely changed. And romanticism, with its emphasis on folks, traditions, native landscape, ancestral myths and local identity had created basically an entirely

new way of thinking about belonging. To be a romantic was increasingly to be a nationalist. And not in the aggressive sense we sometimes think about today, but in more of a kind of cultural sense that you are defined by your land, your stories, your songs, like three lines. And so almost... And Mr. Bright's say. And so by accident, a cultural movement that began with poets walking through. France and Wales ended up producing what are effectively the building blocks of the modern nation state. Interesting, isn't it?

Do you know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking there's room for a new political party. It's going to be called English Common Sense. And Chris Scull is going to write the manifesto. And it's going to be all of his favourite things about England. So Mr Brightside will become the national anthem. I mean, imagine that at the Olympics. Every country in the world would be.

cheering a song because they want to hear it at the gold metal ceremony. If I were to write the Union Manifesto for English Common Sense, I feel like it should be no more than five bullet points. Yeah, agreed. Pray silence please for the English national. Then that riff kicks in. Yeah. All these athletes who have devoted years of their lives

to get into the very top of their chosen sport. and they're all standing on the podium as Mr. Bryce. When I am elected Prime Minister for the English Common Sense Party and I stand at the lectern and say, what are we if we're not our culture and the fact that Mr. Brightside has been in the top 100 for seven years or whatever it is, 20 years. And then everyone cheers.

Well, Chris, you haven't got my vote. I mean that, yeah, you haven't got my vote. Now, in 1967, Canada celebrated 100 years since, Confederation. It's such a young country, in that regard. I never knew that. And the creation of the country is an independent entity. First as a self, obviously, there were native Canadians living there before, but

Canada, as we know it today, is a very, very young country. So first as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire and subsequently as a wholly independent country. So to mark the occasion, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the CBC, Commission the P&N is Glenn Gould to make a personal documentary focused on the idea of the North. Now, as a self-confessed Arctic buff, Gould jumped at the chance. So he created a polyphonic layer documentary for radio,

which had much in common with the emerging looping techniques of contemporary electronic composers, people like Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Okay. But for decades, right, the North had been part and parcel of Canada's quite complex and often contradictory sense of itself. So to outsiders, to everyone else, Canada is the north. Yeah. Because it's got large swathes of its territory that are in the Arctic Circle.

But most Canadians live close to the American border. Interesting. So as Gould pointed out, the north was to them. And if you look at a map, like the major sort of Canadian cities that Montreal and Vancouver and Toronto are very near the American border. So to them, the north was the object of romantic fascination rather than somewhere of which they had direct experience because it's so remote up in the north of Canada.

So after all, simply getting to the north involved going on a particularly Canadian version of the Grand Tour. Now, a French friend of mine, has emigrated to Canada, but he hasn't moved to one of the big cities, which is what most people do. He's actually gone to the very north of Canada out in the sticks. And he's hundreds of miles from everywhere, from everywhere else. It's incredible.

So, but it's a very different... Is he in a community? He is, but a very small one. You know, it's a completely different kind of lifestyle. Have you seen The Revenant? No, I haven't actually. Has he seen The Revenant? Because I might have affected a decision.

Yeah. When is he... So it's obviously Leonardo DiCaprio. I'm pretty sure he's in Northern Canada, around about, I want to say, 1800. And obviously, it's such a brilliant film for making you understand. that level of wilderness,

isolation. And, you know, if you get attacked by a bear, you know, spoiler alert, what do you do? Like, it's just terrifying. If something goes wrong, there is no one there to help you. Yeah, yeah. Whereas I live in South London,

I can at least call in ambulance. It's a place that looks so cold that if I was attacked by a bear, I think I'd be briefly grateful for the warmth. As it was piling down on me. Certainly mixed up. emotions. Now, in a Canadian mind, the North signalled independence and resilience and this kind of solitude which seemed to be an alternative to city living, which was the commonest

experience of Canadians, within Halifax in the east or Vancouver in the west. So as Gould put it, the north, the idea of the north, was a foil for other ideas and values that seemed to me depressingly urban-oriented and spiritually limited thereby. So Gould is fascinated by the idea of northernness. So as most direct experiences were from northern Ontario. although this, you know, it's hardly the north in an Arctic sense. So he, but he still considered the region a respite from city living and city thinking. As someone who grew up in sort of relatively rural commandanthire, I love city living and city thinking.

I live here forever. And he thought it would be somewhere to sort of sort of my thoughts out and get some writing done. So a retreat, you know, in all but names. So the first time Gould went to the north was in June, 1965, a few months before his 33rd birthday and a year after he amazingly quit the concert hall, which was a real sensation at the time. So we travelled by train from Winnipeg to Churchill on the Hudson Bay Coast, then and still the furthest north you could get to by passenger rail, although Churchill lies sort of a bit south of the Arctic Circle. So the journey covered more than a thousand miles and it took several

days. Even today the trip takes at least 48 hours and often more. So you go north to disconnect, if you're that kind of person. I'm not. I absolutely love my phone. I want to be connected to everything for the rest of my life. You go north to disconnect, to sit or to stand

and to stare at the window, at the landscape and at wildlife, at polar bears, at beluga whales, for example, or at the northern nights. I'll Google them, which are a so common site in the night sky. The internet doesn't really work.

No thanks. Mobile phone signal is no existent. No thanks. There's no road either. No thanks. The only alternative to the train is the plane. And then, so then you live, life at a pace dictated by nature. No thanks. Also as scenes. So Gould's idea of the North

emphasised solitude. No thanks. Freedom from the pressures of an urban lifestyle. I love it. No thanks. A contrast with earlier presentations of this same landscape. So in the 19th century tourists had seen it as basically one great part for hunting, particularly for moose. So on indigenous residents of the North did survival, now tourists did for sport. So when there was a clash of a It was those with imperial power behind them who won out. So something similar had happened in Montreal in the early 19th century when snowshoeing,

which was previously a practicality for moving around in the Canadian winter, was turned into a leisure activity and then a competitive sport with a variety of categories from long-distance races to hurdling. So the Montreal Snusho Club was founded in 1840 in Inichdysol members.

They're basically like tennis rackets from your feet, aren't they? Yeah, yeah. And initially so members tramp out into the country side on weekend excursions by the 1850s. They were conducting torchlit nighttime walks at Mount Royal. Always, and there was always this sort of sense of getting back to nature. So as one observer note at the time, their route is across the mountain. Fier snow shower looks with contempt upon the beaten road.

The more impediments in the shape of hedges, ditches and fences, the better. That's like, to bring cycling into it, it's like the difference between road bikes and mountain bikes. I do not understand mountain bikers at all. Why do you want to make it so hard for yourself? on a road for God's sake. Anyway, now it was it was not enough to just don a pair of snow shoes and walk across the snow

as you might do, you know, if you were a tourist in Quebec City. You had to look the part, okay? So these folks, they gave, you know, the classic middle-aged men in Liker a real run for their money. So serious snowshoes at a uniform a particular hat, the tassel toque,

which may bring to mind a sort of, you know, like a revolutionary cap of liberty. They're just to wear like a waistband and a kind of trapper outfit. And if you didn't have that on, were you really a snow-shoer? So you had to look the path. At the serious point about the north is of any for tourism. They're all too often the perception negates reality.

I think this is true for tourists all over the world, isn't it? We're excited about getting somewhere. You've led to believe it's paradise, and then you get there, and it's not quite as you demand it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're always given the idea of an empty landscape, somewhere intended not to live or to be from, but to escape to, somewhere to read,

to rediscover yourself. Don't want to do that. I like myself as I am. You can look yourself up on Wikipedia on your phone, can you? You know, you discover yourself, all the information's there. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then I'll know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And this is the great contradiction of this version of the Grand Tour, because the railway in which Google travelled, which opened in 1929, had been built by often immigrant workers, laboring in very dangerous and extremely difficult conditions. So a notorious section of the line, which is only a mile long, once it had 50 graves along the track,

each marking the death of a worker. So, you know, preaching simplicity It was much more complicated than that But fortunately, Gould's documentary leaves us with more than romantic idealism, more than just the perception of the north from the outside. He, in it, he considers the tensions between those perceptions and the realities of life up there,

up in the far north of Canada, and how the aspired for solitude of the sort of, you know, urban city dweller turns into isolation and loneliness, for example. Yet for Goulden, self-solitude was exactly what he saw in the north. So there was no getting away from that either. He loved the idea. Famously, he said that for every hour you spend in the company of other human beings,

you need X number of hours alone. Isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness. Wow. Did you see a TV show called, I think it was called Win the Wilderness? No. You clearly have to be cut out to live this sort of life, to live out in the wilderness. Not anyone can do it. But the idea of the show one, there's this old couple who built this incredible house in Alaska.

They'd lived there their entire life. They'd literally moved there, I think it was in the 70s and built it by hand. He built this incredible house over the time. It had just been them. And now, as they were getting to the end of their life, they wanted to hand it on. And the competition was four or five sets of couples who wanted a life moving away from the city, living completely out on the mountain size. sufficient. Where were they? This is in Alaska. Oh, in Alaska.

And they basically had to prove that they were capable over a series of tasks for a number of weeks and then the winning couple got the house. And indeed, they live there now. But it's so tough. It's like, you really, it's not for everyone. Even these people that turned

up with this idea of themselves being outdoorsy, so much of that crumpled. Oh, I can imagine. Yeah. Wow. Because it's just sort of like, I don't know, it just takes a type person, doesn't it really? I actually can completely get that if you do have that mindset and you

do have the strength that it must be an incredible way of living your life, but I just couldn't know what obviously. There is a shop on the end of our street that is open from 7 in the morning until 11 p.m. And the amount of times I'm in there

at 10.58 a.m. buying milk for the morning, etc. or bread or whatever for kids' breakfasts. I think if I lived in Alaska. Yeah. If you fuck up the big shop. Yeah.

That's been an absolute nightmare. Yeah. I didn't get any frozen kids pizzas. Yeah. Oh, God. If I remember rightly, I think basically they have to do a big shop once every six months, which is flown into a local airport. Six months.

And anyone who lives, something like that. Imagine getting that wrong. Hundreds of miles in the area, then travel to that airport to get their stuff. But you just basically have to get it right to sustain. because they will not be another flight in for next. Oh my God. That's pressure. Also, even if you do a weekly big shop in Tesco or Azda, whatever, on a Wednesday night, by Tuesday night, you've run out of all the good stuff.

I know. In the last month, if you're doing one shop, I mean six months. Really chocolate, Dad, is there fuck? I just imagining Izzy on the tarmacs turning to you and going, Ellis, please tell me you remember the fairy liquid. You've got no washing up liquid for the next half for you. year. Imagine, to Ellis's point, imagine your meals in the last weeks before your next big shock.

It's just cans of survival food, isn't it? Okay. Does anyone want anchovies and shower gel for dinner? Well, there you go. That's fascinating. I thought that was really interesting stuff there. It's amazing how much these things impact the stories of nations and our lives now, really. And how remote parts of the world still are.

Yeah, absolutely. It's very easy to forget that way, especially if you live in a big city. Yeah. Well, do we announce it now? Yeah, let's tell them. As a patron special in a couple of months, Ellis is going to be exploring the snowy cats of Alaska, aren't you? Your phone. On Google Street View.

So sign up now to see that. Wonderful. Thank you very much again to Dr. Darrell-Lieworthy, our fantastic historian who does so much wonderful research for us. And is a brilliant part of the show. I can't thank him enough. And he's also, he's just a great historian and historical writer. So if you need someone to do that kind of work, get in touch with us

and we'll pass your details on to him because he's a brilliant freelancer. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you so much for joining us. Don't forget there is Tomorrow's World over on our patron if you want to hear that episode. It is a video episode so you will be able to see Tom in my definition. Absolutely. Someone wrote on our Patreon wall

Tom is glowing. There you go. I've only ever heard that said of pregnant women. And it genuinely meant the world. So thank you to that person. We will see you guys very soon. Bye, bye, bye. Goodbye.

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