Oh What A Time... - #78 Recreation (Part 1)

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

Elis’ is off filming his stand-up Christmas special, so we’re delighted to welcome in his stead the star of Radio X, Pappy’s and the Beckenham fireworks display: Matthew Crosby! And we���ll be discussing Recreation; how the vikings spent their spare time, the smash hit Tudor game of Fives and the national obsession with modelling.Plus, it turns out Tom spent his childhood on a chair, up a tree. If you’ve got anything to say about this or anything else, please do drop us an email: [e-mail] you fancy a bunch of OWAT content you’ve never heard before, why not treat yourself and become an Oh What A Time: FULL TIMER?Up for grabs is:- two bonus episodes every month!- ad-free listening- episodes a week ahead of everyone else- And much moreSubscriptions are available via AnotherSlice and Wondery +. For all the links head to: ohwhatatime.comYou 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 xSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wandery Plus subscribers can listen to episodes of Oh What A Time early and ad free. Join Wandery Plus in the Wandery app or on Apple podcasts. Hello and welcome to Oh What A Time. It's a big week. It's a special week. Ellis James is off filming his stand-up special for S4C, the Welsh-speaking channel of note that will be out on Christmas Day. So we've got a special guest in. He is the star of Pappies, he's the star of XFM. But for me, he'll always be the star of the Beckingham Firework display. Welcome Matthew Crosby.

The fireworks are the star, Chris, as well you know. The fireworks are the star. I'm just there as a cheerleader, but it's great to be here. Thank you for joining us, Crosby. Let's just get into that straight away. It's so cool. Every year you get to MC, or local, fireworks display, which incidentally is not something I was aware that happened.

I've never seen an MC at a fireworks display before, but you get to do it. Yeah, I mean, MC is a strong term. Yeah, I was going to say, it's a term more associated with the UK garage scene than it is with fireworks displays. Even described myself as a master of ceremonies, I think that's still too strong. Basically, the jobs I do is a 20 minute, a 10 minute, a five minute call for the fireworks. I tell people to go and use all the street stalls and all that kind of stuff and get some food. I sort of keep spirits up. I also do this competition, which I do it every year, which is who can make the best noise

of a firework. So I go along and I interview all the kids and I get them to see who can make the best noise of the firework. Because for me, it's one of the funniest things because everybody thinks they can do it. And then when they've got a microphone and a massive amplification system, it sounds pathetic every time. I immediately want to do a competition now between Skull and I. Do you want to give it a go? Yeah, I'll judge it. I'm going to do mine. I'm going to do Catherine Wheel. The one that spins around. Can I tell you now, no one ever says which specific firework they're doing. They just do the generic. But I love the fact you've gone specific.

Okay, here we go. This is a small Catherine Wheel, normally attached to sort of like a stick, not too far away. They feel it's not so dangerous. Crane, I'm already going to say you'll have lost the crowd in Beckenham if you're giving it this much preamble, all right? No, I'm explaining this to you off mic, just so you as the judge understand. Now I take to the mic, the crowd are going mad, oh my god it's that guy from the History podcast. He's not going to do a Catherine reel is he? He is. And here we go. It turns out he's every bit as boring in real life as he is on the podcast.

Give me a rocket, aim it at him. Okay, you ready? This is it. This is the Catherine rail. We can't hear any of this because Zoom is cutting you out. Zoom is cutting out. That's interesting. Zoom is cutting out. So the listener will get a real idea of how good that was because you'll record recorded locally. But what we hear through Zoom is nothing at all. All we saw was you getting increasingly redder and redder in the face. And that was just like leaning into the microphone,

looking really angry. But I believe you put your heart and soul into it. I can't wait to hear when the episode comes out because I'm really excited to hear what that sounds like. Yeah. I haven't seen a face like that since Dirty Den got done on that webcam. that sounds like. Yeah. I haven't seen a face like that since Dirty Den got done on that webcam. My Zoom says Catherine Wheel detected. Those words have come up on the screen. Is that weird? Moves slightly away from the microphone. Yeah. Exactly. Go on then, Chris.

And now he's up to a tree. Okay. Let's see if I can beat Zoom. No. Nothing. Nothing there either. What has Zoom got against fireworks? What has Zoom got against having a great time? This is so weird.

Why is Zoom cutting out the sound of fireworks? What is it? What is that? Why does Zoom hate fantastic audio? Okay. I'll try, I'll do a different... No, we didn't get into that. I got a second.

I got like a tenth of a second of that before Zoom interrupted you. Genuinely, before we get into this, can we try and work out why Zoom is not willing to record the sound of mouth fireworks? I think because any noise that's too loud, it cuts out automatically. If anybody's like, I think it's probably so that if you're too close to your microphone in a meeting, you can't just boss the meeting by sticking the microphone in your gob. That's what it is. So welcome to Oh What A Time, a history podcast. As we always say, it tries to work out if

life in the past was dreadful. That's essentially it. We always like to discuss about whether times would have been better in the past. Something that clopped into my mind earlier is whether life would have been so much harder in the pre-fish finger age. The reason for that is me as a lazy parent, the ability to quickly make a fish finger supper. I'm thinking at a time where you had to hunt and gather three times a day for your kids. You're a tired parent. The idea of not being able to do a quick supper for your kids. Well, also I'd throw into the pre-fish finger age, I'd throw into the pre-air fryer age. The combination of frozen fish fingers and air fryer is the biggest game changer of the

21st century. The pre-air fryer age was only like two years ago, but it might as well be light years away. You haven't got an air fryer, have you? No, I don't have one. I haven't got one. And I'm constantly being told I should get one. I'm sure I will at some point. And now I've noticed that they're starting to put the air fryer timings on foods. So even the foods are telling you, you really should be using an air fryer. It'll be like, oh, you're making an oven pizza, are you? Well, that

could be 40 minutes from frozen, or it could be eight seconds in an air fryer. What are you? Well that could be 40 minutes from frozen or it could be eight seconds in an air fryer. What are you doing? If you're a 1950s housewife, put this in the oven for 40 minutes. If you're Marty McFly, give it 30 seconds. Exactly. I should get with it. I should get with the programme. This is what it must have felt like when the steam train was first introduced. And then we're going, well you could walk to Stockport but it'll take you 15 days. No I'm still walking. God gave me two strong legs and I'm not gonna, it is an affront

to God to get on that black machine of death. You need to get an air-fryer, Crosby. The amount of time it frees up as a pair, it frees up time for me to now routinely forget for them to do their homework, frees up time for them to watch yet more Pepper Pig. All these very important things, these childhood experiences. 15 episodes of Bluey before they go to bed, wired. Yeah, exactly. So, before we crack into today's subject, which should be a really fun one, today we're talking about hobbies and recreation from the past. I think let's do a little bit of

correspondence and then we'll crack into that subject. This is sort of quite a sweet email, actually. This is not the sort of thing we normally read out. But you know what? Let's give a little shout out to this person because I thought well done to this person. The title is GCSEs. Hello, Ellis, Tom and Chris. My name is Sibi and I'm a sixth former from Suffolk. I've just done my GCSEs in May and June this year and let me tell you, it was hell. I can agree with that. Quite a stressful time, GCSEs, wasn't it? Yeah, hated exams. Yeah, I was so bad at it. I just couldn't revise. But stay in school. Exactly. But do you know what? I've had the one day time machine and I went back, I'd love to tell my 16 year old self, once you get past the age of 21, no one ever asks you for

your GCSE results. Oh no, Chris, it's my icebreaker at any party. That's the first thing I ask anybody. Yeah, first thing I do. First thing I do is say, hi, nice to meet you, I'm Matthew. By the way, what did you get for your GCSEs? Talk us through the subjects. I don't really want to know. And then you drop in the fact you got straight A's. Oh, I absolutely didn't. And you leave and go to the next party. You try to do about 11 parties a night, don't you? Yeah. and you leave and go to the next party. You try to do about 11 parties a night, don't you? Yeah. Go around London bragging, basically. So, Sibi says, it was relentless hours of revision,

six exams a week. Sibi, you were a far better student than I was. Well done. I wanted to contact the show as a way of thanks for getting me through, not because of any of the facts actually helping me in my history exam. Bit hurtful. But instead, I listened to it nonstop during my GCSE period to have a laugh and to help calm my nerves, which I definitely did. I listened to my pod mainly before my history exams because I was absolutely bricking it, but I'd worked my ass off and ended up, here's the good thing, getting top grades. There you go. Well done, Siby. Nice one. You've got to ask yourself coincidence. I've gone on to study history at A level and I love it. Siby, that's awesome. I still listen

to this pod every weekend. When my mum overhears me playing it, she asks me, is it those silly men again? Cheers to Siby's mum there to which I reply, yes, it is. Well, there you go. I thought I'd read that. It's sort of a bit different to what you normally read out, but well done. Likes the podcast, nailed our exams, now studying history at A levels. That's awesome. So Siby, do you know what? If you have a subject you'd like us to cover in sort of celebration of your exam results, do send it in. We will try our very best, if it's decent, to cover it. If it's a rubbish suggestion, we'll pretend the email never came and we'll just move on as a group. Were you a good student then, Skull? What were you like? No, I absolutely sleptwalked through my entire education to my final year at uni where I

really worked hard. Really? Okay. If it was just my final year at uni, I got a first, but everything else was like hanging on by a thread. Yep. And it was only, I tried in my whole education, one year I actually tried. How about you?

I liked doing a highlighted revision timetable. I was a fan of that. That was good. Spent a highlighted revision timetable. I was a fan of that. That was good. Spent a lot of time doing that. Yeah, the trip to Ryman at the start of term when it's just like, I've got a perfect vision of the kind of student I'm going to be. And all of these pens and pencils and bits of paper are going to, they're going to play a key role in making me become that.

And then of course, day three, it's just a disaster. Just the dreams are dashed. Next thing you know, it's Sunday night, Antiques Roadshow on, you still haven't done your homework, the panic is setting in, on comes London's burning, it's too late, you've left it too late. The theme tunes you heard on a Sunday night that made you feel physically sick, Ballykiss Angel in Our Household, if you heard the theme tune of Ballykiss Angel and you hadn't done a lick of homework, you were screwed.

You were toast, my friend. As good as the episode of Ballykis Angel might be that you're about to sit down. I mean, awesome as well. That's how desperate I was to not do my homework. I was watching Ballykis Angel in my teens. I didn't even have a TV cross me, so I didn't even have that excuse. You had no warning signals. But I tell you what I did have, and I've forgotten about this until I went back to my mum's about a fortnight ago, and I was walking around the garden with my son and I looked up a tree and there was a kitchen chair up a tree which I had taken up there when I was about 12 and

it was my little lookout point and I'd sit there and I'd watch people walking up and down our street and it's still there and the tree has grown around the kitchen chair. It's stuck up there. The crane's nest. The crane's nest. I love it. That's fantastic. I mean, most people when they're a peeping Tom like to do it as innocuously as possible. Literally a peeping Tom in my case.

Yeah, exactly. Whereas you, peeping Tom, you made a real feature out of it. Just to be clear, it wasn't sort of creepy looks. I was just sort of like waving at neighbours from a kitchen chair. You were the local oddball. That's what I think. Can I just say as well, Tom, the looker doesn't get to decide whether or not the looker is creepy. Sorry, that's not how it works.

But I would say if the looker is making clear that they are there and also crucially fully clothed then it's alright. I think you're, oh the bar is so low in which case, I'm here and I'm clothed, therefore it's totally fine. I don't know if in a court of law this is going to stand up. Can I just say, Your Honour, I was wearing a full trench coat. Which at certain points was buttoned up. Why did you take a chair up the tree? Because surely you just sit on a branch, like when you think about the image of people climbing trees, they're not bringing a kitchen chair up. A branch is famously not

as comfortable as a chair. And you can tell that because when you go to any kitchen or restaurant, they have seats and not branches for you to sit on. That's your giveaway. No one has been sat down on a chair in a restaurant and gone, oh do you know what would improve this if this was a branch? Well, Crane, by the same token then, no one has ever gone into a restaurant and gone, oh yeah, would you like to be seated up a tree or on the ground? That's a very good point. The answer is always on the ground.

No, you know, it's smoking, non-smoking, outdoors, indoors, up a tree, on the ground. Oh my God. Well, I've ordered the pheasant, so I'll go up there. Is where it would want to be. Up in the clouds. Stick me up there please. Well there you go Sibby, thank you for getting in contact. Great email, great exam results.

Well done. Yeah, brilliant stuff. If you want to get in touch with the show, here's how. Alright you horrible lot. Here's how you can stay in touch with the show you can email us at hello at owhatatime.com and you can follow us on instagram and twitter at owhatatimepod now clear off all right so this week on the show we're talking about recreation and I'll be talking about the historic game of fives. I'll be talking about models and modeling.

And I today am going to be talking to you lovely boys about the recreational activities enjoyed by the Vikings. Wow. Which, spoiler alert, were occasionally a bit brutal. I don't know if you're a bit surprised by that. It wasn't the most cuddly bunch of games. That doesn't surprise me. Every time the Vikings have come up on this podcast, it's been pretty bleak. Absolutely. However, there's some loveliness to it as well. It's an interesting bunch of things they're into. So, just for some context, I think it's worth saying,

most people have heard of the Viking sagas. I think that's a fair point. The Viking sagas being tales of legendary deeds by kings and warriors. People of that time and place used to love to share. They're essentially a part of Icelandic and wider Norse culture. They detail aspects of history, folklore, culture, exploration, social structures everywhere from Greenland in the West all the way to Sweden in the East. And they've got mentions of places like Orkney and Shetland in it. But what is particularly interesting about the sagas and why they relate to this is they describe all sorts of activities that medieval Icelanders got up to and what we would now recognise as leisure. Okay. I never really thought that about

the sagas. I always thought it was just these over the top stories that basically, you know, were just ridiculous of monsters and all this sort of stuff. But actually, they are also a document of the sort of things that people got up to at the time. Is that what you would have assumed of them? So are they a work of fiction or not? Yes, they are. But they also tell you a lot about the real things that people were doing at that time, which is never what I thought the sagas were. I thought they were just these overblown stories of heroism and all this sort of stuff. I filed it alongside the Greek odysseys.

Exactly. That's where I was with it. But it's not. They're also a document of the sort of stuff they got into. So I'm going to take you through some of these hobbies and we'll see which you fancy, which you really would not be into. First of all, one of the popular games was a hockey game called, this is quite hard to pronounce, Scoffolink, which was played on ice, had a really, really hard wooden ball and is described as being unbelievably rough. Okay, so that's one of the basic games used to play, which when you think about, must have been brutal, if you think about how brutal ice hockey is now, and then you chuck in the fact that they're not wearing any pads, the ball is wooden, and they're Vikings. Crucially, they're Vikings. I've got a fear of, for me, any ice space game with a blade on the foot

as well. It's a thing. You're playing a game where people are playing rough and also they're on their feet, a sharpened blade. Thoughts on that? Let's get going with this very basic game to begin with. What are your thoughts on that? I'm assuming when they're playing this game, they're not allowed to have those penguins that guide you along around the ice. I mean, if they were doing it, they had real penguins. But I find anything on the ice, I find very, very scary. Because when you're a kid and you go ice skating for the first time, the first thing they say is, if you fall, bring your arms in.

Because if you put your arms out, someone will skate off your fingers and slice your fingers off. And it's just the man. And I appreciate that, obviously, if your fingers get sliced off and they're on ice, at least they're on ice. But, you know, it's a perfect place to lose them, isn't it? To be reattached. Exactly. But it just seems, yeah. Why would you, why would, why should any sport have boots with knives on them? Are you post-Penguin in terms of your skating? Because I am still, I've only been three or four times, but I'm still a Penguin user. What?

That is for children. You're not allowed the Penguins. You're not allowed. The visuals of you using a Penguin are unacceptable. You can't be using the Penguin. Well, I can't stay up otherwise. It's a better visual than me face down on the ice, isn't it?

Well, at least you tried. I'm dumb and dumber with the railing. You're not really ice skating, you're just edging along very, very slowly, hanging onto the side. Is that what you're doing? Very slowly. While my lower back seizes up, that's basically what it is. It becomes tighter and tighter and tighter. And I wish I was at home, sat in a chair in a tree, relaxing. Do you know what I mean? Yes. Do you know what you're just saying there, hockey, ice skating is dangerous, like the blade?

The thing I was thinking recently, I don't know what's happened to my algorithm, but I get a lot of ice hockey fights from the NHL. Do you? I've obviously watched a few, and now I'm getting more and more of them sent up to me. And it is, you know, hockey is dangerous enough. I've obviously watched a few and now I'm getting more and more of them sent up to me. And it is, you know, hockey is dangerous enough. Nauvindja is fighting into it. It's insane to me.

But again, how are they allowed, what are the rules there? Because it seems that a fight breaks out and then it just is allowed to continue. They're allowed to. Right. Do you know what? Is there a rule around it? I have the answer. I know they get in trouble afterwards, but why is there not a teacher running out, or

not a teacher? You watch sports, you know it's not. It's a flashback of secondary school. I take it back, you can use the penguin after that. Why is there not a referee running over and going, you need to stop fighting, this is a professional sport and there's kids in the stadium. If you've seen it, the referees let the fight happen and then they suspend the both of them. But the reason they let fights continue is, one, entertainment value, they think it's

quite good for hockey, people are interested in that, it's exciting. Two, they use fights to maintain order. Really? It lets the pressure out of the game. Instead of barging each other in increasingly bad fouls, they'll just let them have a fight and things cool down afterwards. We do that on O-What A Time though sometimes, don't we? We just sort of break into a scuffle. We take it out in the edit.

Yeah. You operate a purge system, don't you? There's five minutes every episode when there are no rules and then you go back to the harmony. I've got a guess as to why they let it play out is because it has a marketing value and it plays into the idea of what's wanted. It's Chris's algorithm. Yeah, it's my algorithm. Yeah.

That's exactly what it is. Now this ice hockey game wasn't even anywhere near the most violent game they used to play. There were loads of these violent games, it's worth saying. The most popular being Canatí Ligga, which translates to ball game. This was essentially, this is awful this, a medieval take on Irish hurling, but far more physical and dangerous. Now, you may have seen hurling before. It's a very rough, violent game, and this is far beyond that. It's a game that even modern reenactors who have reenacted this at historical events will warn people that you will probably get injured even in the reenactment. It is that dangerous. The aim of the game was to carry a ball to

an opposing goal using a stick or your hand, which sounds quite simple. However, and there was a big however, players were allowed to be as violent as they liked in any manner, using their body, using weapons, there were literally no limits. In fact, several of the sagas describe how the most powerful men were only allowed to play against people of the same size for fear of doing serious damage against other people. So the sport is, you take the ball to the under and the pitch, but you're allowed to hit anyone with any weapon, in any manner, and the game will never get stopped. That's how the game works.

The only way to make that fair is if you have a randomly allocated weaponry system like in the movie Battle Royale. Yeah, or marry a car. Yeah, absolutely. But otherwise, it's just whoever can bring the biggest weapon. Yes. If you're showing up with a broadsword, the guy who's brought a pocket knife may as well not play, right? Yeah. I'm the guy who's forgotten his weapons altogether.

He just turned up in his work stuff. He realised he's got his kid's school bag instead of his bag. Trying to hit someone with a jam sandwich. But you know, before a game started, I remember remember back like when I used to play power league, like five a side football, sometimes you'd be in the warmup and you'd look over and you'd see the other team and you'd think, oh, this lot are quite good. Like if you're doing this Viking hockey game and you look over to your opponents and they've brought like a broadsword or one of those massive pikes, like you can see they've got better weapons than you have.

Surely you just go, do you know what actually, it's a bit cold. I'm gonna give you the three points. I'm happy to concede at this point. Before you give me three points through my sternum. Exactly. I like games personally where there's no limit to how respectful you can be.

That's my sort of vibe. There's a game called, This Is My Cupcake that I play with my three-year-old where you have to try and win cupcakes and when someone has a cupcake that you're about to win, you have to say the phrase, please could I have your cupcake? And then they say, yes, of course you can have my cupcake. And that's the sort of vibe that I like. I love that. Yeah. Very GMT. I like playing that with a Viking. Vikings famously never said, please can I have your, they just took it. No, exactly. Well, and you think that's the worst of it. You think the fact that you

could inflict any damage is the worst of it. I think the worst is how long it was played for. It was played without stop from dawn until dusk. Wow. So that is how long one match was. So are they using violence quite sparingly then? No, very much not. Because you'd think given the rules, it'd be over in 10 minutes. This is it.

How are you going to maintain it? Yes. Because I don't know if you've ever been in like a fight, like even at school, I was in fights, none of them lasted more than about 40 seconds. And not because I was an amazing fighter. Not because I was like stood there like Bruce Lee having dispatched everybody at the end. It's just because that's as long as it takes for one person to go actually, you know, no thanks, no more of this, thank you very much. If someone is literally fighting you with a weapon, I mean,

how long did a battle take? It's the same thing, isn't it? They'd be over pretty quickly, depending on the number of people who were there. I assume there must have been some understanding you didn't just run someone through with your sword. I imagine it wasn't just, I'm just going to stab the centre back in the heart. It'd be hard to get a game week to week if you're just murdering your opponents in the league. Completely. But it's dawn till dusk, constant violence, and that was one of the most popular sports at the time. Another popular sport was swimming, but because this was a Vikings, swimming wasn't as we do it today.

People loved watching it, competing in it. According to some texts, it was considered, this is remarkable, actually this sentence makes me think that maybe running someone through the sword is something they did. In races, it was considered quite fair to try and drown your opponent, which would really spice up the Olympics if they brought that in. Can I say something? I think the Vikings are bad people. I think, you know, as I consider myself to be progressive, I hate to make a sweeping generalisation about an entire group of people, but I think they're bad eggs. Yeah. So you'd race someone and you were able to try and drown them as a way of people, but I think they're bad eggs. Yeah. Yeah.

So you race someone and you're able to try and drown them as a way of winning the race. Some heroes in the sagas, this is apparently one of the ways they used to race, are even said to have competed in swimming competitions whilst wearing their armour. That was the other thing they used to do, used to do swimming competitions in full armour. So drowning themselves. Drowning themselves. How does that even work? Also the thing I'm thinking is, we're all parents.

Imagine your kids going, I'm off to play, what are you going to play? Or that game where you might get murdered. You're not playing it. Like generation to generation, how is this allowed? The parents had a different mindset then to us, didn't they? I just like the idea of someone going, sorry, where are your parents? So these two Vikings smashing each other to bits with clubs. I'm sorry, sorry, is there a responsible adult around here anywhere?

Have you done your homework? This is disgraceful. Ballycus Angel starts in 10 minutes and neither of you have finished it. Yesterday I told my six-year-old he wasn't ready for Harry Potter 3. Things really have changed since those times. So in answer to your question, how they swam in their armour, Chris, apparently it was like basically you keep your legs below you and more of a breast stroke. People have tested this to see how they did it. And that's what the conclusion has been drawn. The only way to do it is to swim breaststroke and keep your legs kicking below you.

So you almost like stood upright in the water is the only way you can basically do it. Take a lot of energy then. Does not sound fun. But not all medieval Icelandic games were violent or physical. It's worth saying this you might quite like. They also played a lot of board games

or tavel games as they were known. Tavel meant table. So table games, also they played. Many of these games were like chess or draughts, essentially strategy board games designed to sort of pit your mind against the person you were playing. The most popular form of tafel game mentioned many times in the sagas was henefl tafel. Once again, a very hard thing to pronounce and I'm sure I've got it wrong, henefl tafel. The Orkney Saga, for instance, has a character

who boasts his greatest skill in a list of 10 is his skill at this game. Imagine asking someone what they're good at and they list 10 things. What a nobbed. One of those things wasn't pithy lists. Brevity. Yeah, I'm not good at top threes. Neville Tafel was played by two people with two sets of pieces, one red, the other white. The most important piece was the king piece, which had to be protected by the rest while engaging in battle to capture the opponent's king piece. So this is quite like chess, but there was a catch. The king piece could not perform captures, it could only be captured.

So that's how it's different to chess, if that makes sense. So the King just had to be protected at all times. So the player's strategy came down to manoeuvring his or her pawns or knights into a position to capture the other pieces, ultimately to affect Checkmate. But your actual King could do nothing. Which reminded me of... Have I told you about my worst experience, my paintball experience? Have I told you about this, Chris? No. This is such a revelatory podcast. In this game, the king is not allowed to attack anyone. I once went paintballing when I was about 15. And in one of the rounds, they told me I was El Presidente. So El Presidente was

the president. And I thought this was an exciting thing. Can I ask who they were? The people who were running the... The small South American nation. Yes. The militia that had taken over. Yeah, this was in Colombia, I can explain. The drug lords. So I was El Presidente, which I thought was quite exciting, until they took my gun off me and then I had to stand in a helicopter and everyone else had to protect me, but I had no way of returning fire.

You were the king. So El Presidente. So it was basically, it turned out I was the president of a fallen government. The nation was in turmoil. It was mid civil war and they had to protect El Presidente, who was me, who had no gun, and just had to run around and get shot out for 15 minutes. Horrendous. The helicopter is just some sort of wooden construct made out of pallets. An X helicopter that no longer flew.

Right. Wow. Because it flew out of there. I was going to say, yeah, if you're in a helicopter, come on. Back into the sea of power. Exactly. But of course, there was one other major area of recreation and entertainment for the Vikings and that was the sagas themselves. The stories from which we take all this information. So although the sagas were eventually written down, their original purpose was as an orally transmitted tale. Basically a portrait of the past and its people, a kind of historical

soap opera is how you kind of see it. Like a sort of really violent and its people, a kind of historical soap opera is how you kind of see it, like a sort of really violent Hollyoaks. They were basically full of everyday drama as well as great feats of kingship. There are sort of disputes between farmers, there's scoundrels turned heroes, there's morals and ethics that ordinary people of the island could follow as they wished. And in terms of entertainment, they would be performed by someone with the skill to perform them, often in like a great hall or a place of feasting, drinking and merriment, which really mattered then because often Viking communities were living in small, scattered,

rural ways, quite detached from one another. But people would come together to hear the reading of these tales or the telling of these tales at feasts, which I do actually like. I really do like that. The idea of community and cohesion through storytelling and people coming together to listen to these stories must have been amazing. I mean, that's very much what, that's where Ellis is right now, isn't he? He's off somewhere speaking in his native tongue about his travails to a small local community.

He's going back to his homeland to regale them of tales of the big city, of his podcasting ways. Although he can't be a part of this episode, in many ways he is. He's embodying the spirit of the episode. Exactly. Exactly. Icelanders heard these stories so often, and I really like this as well, that they were able to repeat them from generation to generation and also tell them in their own homes or in ad hoc gatherings, almost like a miniature version of what had happened in the more formal setting. And this habit continued in Iceland all the way through to the 19th century, even

as literacy rates soared. When I read this final thing, it made me think, this is something I'd love to do with my family at Christmas, genuinely. So in the long dark winter months, even in the 19th century, families would gather and they'd read aloud from books to one another just as they had a thousand years prior. So even then, your family would sit together and you would tell stories. You would take turns telling stories and reading stories to one another around the half, which is kind of in the same way that they had all these many years ago. I kind of love that. I love the idea of sort of sitting around at Christmas with a fire on and reading to your kids. I'll never do it, but the idea of reading Dickens to my kids or whatever.

What's the terrible book you really like that you're always banging on about at Christmas time? It's like a fox and a horse and a little boy. The mole, the horse, the fox and whatever it is. Yeah, yeah. It's very sweet. I could picture you saying, okay, kids, sit down, everyone getting, you know, turning through the pages. I'm scared, said the horse. I think it's very sweet. Well, mole said, being scared is actually the bravest thing you can be. Cross me, it's all right to be vulnerable, it's all right to fear. I tell you what, that sounds boring, but a hell of a lot better than getting drowned.

Sign me up. Are you saying, sat around the fire, reading a Christmas carol to your family is not something you'd enjoy? I think that would be amazing, wouldn't it? Isn't that a lovely thing to do? By candlelight, yeah. It does feel very festive. Yeah, absolutely. I'm pretty going to watch Gavin and Stacey instead. Yeah. Is there any reruns of Morkham and Wise on? A final little footnote here. The other thing they used to read when it wasn't books, they would read the newspapers to one another, which doesn't sound quite as sort of romantic.

Blicking through the FT, the footsies down. Meanwhile on the NASDAQ, the kids are just bored out their minds. Oh God. Please don't read about Putin in the nukes. That's the last thing I need is ruining Christmas. ["Jingle Bells"] That's the end of part one.

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