The Rest Is History - 357: Historical Love Island: The Sequel

Episode Date: August 6, 2023

“There’s a lot of severed heads at this villa!” The great TV sensation of the summer returns on The Rest Is History, as Tom and Dominic are once again joined by Tom’s daughter Katy, to navigate an incredibly competitive field of islanders, and crown the successors to last year’s winners, Empress Theodora and Stanley Baldwin. Can Catherine Howard remain more loyal to Sir William Hamilton than she was to Henry VIII? Will Charles II and another byzantine Empress, Zoe, win it all? Or can the frightful, bloodthirsty duo of Peter the Great and Poppaea Sabina claim the throne for themselves? Will Admiral Horatio Nelson or Labour grandee Tony Benn make it to the final? Listen and find out now! *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Are 20-somethings really this clinically brain-dead? How could people this stupid possibly get a job, hold a job, let alone be able to go to some resort? These mindless idiots have no knowledge of books, films, art, history, politics, or anything else that normal people would use in small talk on a date. They appear to be completely uneducated, completely uncultured, and massively immature. An extremely sad and pathetic commentary on the current generation.

Disgraceful. So that, Tom Holland, is a review entitled, Brainless Morons. Was this in the Daily Mail, Dominic? No, it's on IMDB. It's a review of Love Island. It actually reads very like some of the reviews that academics write about The Rest Is History.

It does, I was just thinking that. Anyway, so that's Love Island, the great television sensation of our times. And Tom, last year we did a Restless History special themed around Love Island. We did. And you enjoyed it so much you wanted to do it again. Well they do Love Island every summer. Right. So if they do Love Island every summer we should do historical Love Island every summer. Yes. So last year's winners were Stanley Baldwin, your great hero, 1930s Prime Minister and the Empress Theodora. And they made a lovely

couple. They did. And we should explain to listeners who are not mad. Wondering what the hell is happening here. Yeah, who are not brainless morons. We should explain to these listeners what's going on. And to do that, Tom, we have recruited an absolutely tip-top expert, the same expert who joined us last year, one of Britain's leading Love Island connoisseurs. And that is that is of course would you like to introduce her to the audience yes so this is my daughter katie um who actually introduced me to love island because uh katie and her sister eliza watch it a great deal and talk about it a great deal so that's what inspired last year's historical love island and katie welcome back to the show It is lovely to have you on. And I

wonder, for the benefit of those very few of our listeners who haven't watched Love Island, could you just explain what the rules are, what's going on? Of course. Hello, everyone. Can't believe you've let me come back on. But very, very happy to be here. Yes. So for anyone who hasn't watched Love Island, firstly do it. Secondly, the format is basically that you get four girls and four boys in a villa and the ultimate aim is to find love. And it lasts for about eight weeks. And as you go through the eight weeks, the aim of the game is to stay in a couple. So every single week there's a recoupling and all the islanders have to gather around the fire pit and make a speech about who they want to stay with. And throughout

the course of the series, the couples are given challenges to test their loyalty to their loved ones. So one of the big challenges is Catherine Moor, where the boys and the girls are split up and four new boys and four new girls are sent in and chaos ensues because most of the boys especially are quite unloyal and the aim of the game at the end is to win and you also get 50k but you also get fame in the UK after you finish so it's quite an interesting experiment in a way because you're seeing whether the people are there to actually find love or are they there to get the Instagram brand deals after they leave. So that's Love Island in a nutshell. Right. It's like the people who come on this podcast, Tom. Are they in it for the right things or are they just hoping to become influencers?

They're in it for the love of learning, Dominic. So what you have done for us, as you did last time, is you have come up with the archetypes, the kind of people that if you watch Love Island, you will see. So four boys, four girls. And what you're going to do is introduce each of these archetypes. And Dominic and I have come up with a figure from history who we think fits that particular archetype. So we will then describe them. And you, at the end of our descriptions of these various characters will decide which of them will pair off exciting i cannot wait for this okay so shall i start with my first male archetype do yeah yeah so the first one i've chosen is the

jester so this is a classic love island character he is always the center of the pranks and he loves all of the other boys in the villa and often shows way more interest in them than the actual girl he's coupled up with. So he'll often cry whenever someone is dumped, especially one of his boys from the island. He'll cry tears? Yeah, yeah. He'll be very upset. Cracking. But then he'll have slight problems showing the same level of emotion to his partner,

much to her distress. So yes, that's our first one. Okay, so I have chosen King Charles II, who is well known as the Merry Monarch. And a huge part of his merriness is his fondness for japes, for horse racing, for wearing long wigs, for hanging out with the orange sellers and actresses. So he's a tremendous lad. And this is very bad news for his wife, Catherine of Braganza, who comes from Portugal, princess, had been brought up in a convent, very, very pious. And so probably not a natural Love Island contestant. So she's Catholic. Charles II

is a Protestant, ruling a Protestant country. So there's a lot of hostility in Britain to Catherine of Braganza. Charles does stand by her in that sense. He doesn't kind of get rid of her, although there are all kinds of accusations leveled against her, this kind of thing. But basically, he is not going to stay at home and moon around the Queen Catherine of Braganza because he is out there having fun. So his backdrop, of course, is that his dad had his head chopped off. So he's got quite a lot of issues to work through.

I mean, it's quite a lot of trauma there. He got exiled because England got taken over by the Commonwealth, by Oliver Cromwell. Charles tried to come back, set himself up as a kind of a popular favorite, try and get people behind him, but they didn't really rally to him. He got defeated in battle. So then he had to escape across England. He hid in an oak tree, very famously. But the great thing that enabled him to escape was his ability to blend in and to mingle and to play. He's kind of a man of the people. So even though he's a King,

he has that kind of popular touch. And then when he comes back and he's King, it's been a very do a time under Cromwell. Cromwell's been, you know, banning pies and Christmas, hasn't he? Dominic has banning pies.

That's a bizarre claim. Tom didn't even ban Christmas. No, he didn't. he didn't do any of that so charles comes back from his exile um he is restored this is the restoration cromwell is dead cromwell is not a guy for debauchery charles basically is so he although um he uh he has no children by poor old catherine of braganza he has 12 children by seven mistresses so one of them is Nell Gwynn,

another is Lady Castlemaine, another is Louise de Quere, who was a Love Island contender in the previous year. Princess Diana was descended from two of his mistresses. The Queen, Camilla, she's descended from one of Charles II's mistresses as well. There's a lot going on there. He loves horse racing. His favorite horse was a horse called Old Roly, and that was the nickname that got given to Charles himself. He loves pranks. He is great friends with a whole succession of notorious rakes, of whom perhaps the most notorious is the Earl of Rochester, a young man, the son of a very devoted follower of Charles II, who had stayed with him throughout all the bad years when Charles was in exile.

So this is Samuel Pepys on Lord Rochester. The king dining yesterday at the Dutch ambassador's. After dinner, they drank and were pretty merry. And among the rest of the king's company, there was that worthy fellow, my Lord of Rochester. And Tom Killigrew, whose mirth and raillery offended the former so much that he did give Tom Killigrew a box on the ear in the king's presence, which do give much offense to the people here at court. So this is very poor form. I mean, even if you're an earl, you don't go up and kind of box people in front of the king. And so Rochester is banned from the court, but Charles II misses him so much that within a few weeks, he's got Rochester back. Then Rochester is spectacularly the court, but Charles II misses him so much that within a few weeks,

he's got Rochester back. Then Rochester is spectacularly rude about the king. He writes a poem about him. So this is Rochester on Charles II. Restless he rolls from whore to whore, a merry monarch, scandalous and poor. And so Charles II bans him again, but then forgives him and appoints him the ranger of Woodstock Park. So that's the kind of vibe that's going on with Charles II. There's all this kind of banter. It goes too far. Charles II gets rid of his friends, but then brings them back and makes them rangers of parks. So that's the vibe that's going down. I think he'd be a great contender. He's a good contender, Tom. He's a very good contender.

I should say, actually, you can dump a fellow Islander if they rub you up the wrong way sometimes. Okay. So if the Earl of Rochester was on the Island and going too far, pushing the pranks too far, Charles would probably get the Earl of Rochester off. And Charles would have to do a speech saying why he's dumping him. He'd say, that poem was too far, Earl of Rochester, you're off. But could he then take it back yes then he can he can come back in a shock twist all right let's have your next one katie

what's your next archetype has to be a woman this time okay or girl sorry a girl they're not calling women do they uh no no they call them a girl yeah very good dominic so the first girl i have is the minx brilliant so a very vivid character from Love Island. He comes off every year in some kind of form. So she'll come in straight away, couple up with someone, proclaim her love for them in five days. She'll then fall in love

equally as quickly as someone else when Castle of Amor comes. So this is when the girls are put into a separate house and new boys come in and they have to test their loyalty. And she'll leave the first boy brokenhearted as well as the girl she has stolen the guy from. So yeah,

there's not a lot of loyalty to the ladies. Okay. So I'm choosing the minx and I've chosen Catherine Howard, briefly Queen of England. So she is one of Henry VIII's queens, as you will know, Katie. Catherine Howard was born, we think, in about 1524. And she's kind of been in a Love Island environment before. This is why I think she's such a strong contender. So I had a very good year last year with Theodora and Stanley Baldwin. I was disappointed not to have a good year this time, which is why I've chosen Catherine Howard. Because what happened to Catherine Howard, she's one of the six children of Lord Edmund Howard and Joyce Culpepper. So the Howard thing is really important because she's part of one of the most powerful aristocratic clans in 16th century England, the Howart clan, later to the Duke of Norfolk. And she is brought up at Norfolk House,

which is in Lambeth, not a million miles from where you are, Tom. Yeah. And Norfolk House, which is the house of her father's stepmother, the Dowager Duchess, Agnes Howart. And this is basically run as a sort of 16th century Love Island arrangement so there are quite a few aristocratic girls who stay there in a kind of dorm Katie and they smuggle boys in at night the girls will steal sweetmeats from the kitchens wine gifts for the blokes so Catherine is absolutely into all this she loves it she likes dancing she likes dogs she

likes messing around and ugliness and that sort of carry on. Her first liaison is with her music teacher, who's a man called Henry Mannix. And later on at her trial, during her interrogation, I should say, she says, at the flattering and fair persuasions of Mannix, I suffered him at sundry times to handle and touch the secret parts of my body. So this is going on. Anyway, he gets booted out, I think. I think this is discovered. So that's the end of Henry Mannix. And then she starts carrying on with the Dowager Duchess's secretary, Frances Derham. And they call each other husband and wife. They're not husband and

wife. This is very touching. I read he entrusts her with wifely duties, such as looking after his money when he goes away on holiday. So this is quite sweet. But then she meets bloke number three. And now the story takes a darker turn because this is Henry VIII. Now Henry VIII is married to Anne of Cleves, who is not a natural Love Island contestant, it's fair to say at all, because she's German, for one thing. So she's not laugh a minute. She's basically got Angela Merkel's personality.

And the Howards push young Catherine Howard in front of Henry. They make sure she's sitting near him at parties and things. He thinks she's a brilliant person. He, by the way, at this point, is an elephant of a man and much older. Has his ulcer kicked in? His smelly ulcer?

His ulcer has kicked in on his leg. So he's got this stinking ulcer on his leg. But love conquers all, as you know. In the casa amor. So Catherine Howard looks past this. He's delighted by this. She's about 70 years his junior, but that's fine. He says she's the very

jewel of womanhood. So he boots out Anne of Cleves marries Catherine Howard gives her tons of presents jewels and all this kind of thing. But as you know

with the minks you know history never stops. No. They go off on a tour of the north but Catherine has eyes

for a new a new player who is a man called Thomas Culpepper one of Henry's mates one of his hunting friends Thomas Culpepper has a slightly unsavory past he's been accused of raping a park keeper's wife and then murdering somebody who tried to restrain him or something this wouldn't play well on with Love Island audience well it's very Charles II and Rochester actually Henry was very cross at first but then forgave him said listen he's a great laugh

you know boys will be boys boys will be boys. Boys will be boys. People sometimes overstep the mark. Bring him back. Catherine carries on with Thomas Culpepper during the tour. She smuggles him up to her rooms in Pontefract. Very unromantic place. No offense to people from Pontefract. Great cakes though.

Yeah. And a good castle. I think it's Pontefract Castle where, and also the Bishop's Palace in Lincoln, where Culpeper is sneaking up late at night. Anyway, bad news for Catherine Cady. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer leaves Henry, this surely is very Love Island behaviour, he leaves him an anonymous note on his pew in the chapel saying, your wife is cheating on you. Terrible scenes. Henry bursts into floods of tears. He's like a quivering blancmange of misery and regret. Catherine herself, she's arrested. She's in floods of tears. It's absolute scenes. She's taken to the palace at Sion. Henry is very unrelenting, I have to say,

because later on she's dragged onto a barge, again sobbing, taken to the Tower of London, 13th of February, 1542. She is led to the block. Beforehand, she'd been very cool. She'd actually been practicing, laying her head down, practicing for the execution. But when the moment comes, apparently it's terrible scenes. She's pale. She's terrified.

She's shaking. They have to help her up the steps. And then the blade comes down at the end of her story. And do you want to know what the top historian david loads says about catherine how sympathetically he describes her and her story in his history of the tudors he says she was a stupid and oversexed adolescent a wanton slut who behaved like a whore when did he write that it's about 90 i don't know 1990s or something wow i think his historiography is very different in those days. And her ghost haunts Hampton Court, isn't it?

I believe so, yeah. You can hear her screams echoing down the corridors. The story is that just after she was outed, after she was discovered, her dancing masters arrived to teach her regular dancing lesson and the doors were closed. And the guard said something like, the days of dancing are over. And they were for Catherine Howard, Katie. Oh gosh. So you can put that right today

if you find the right partner for her. Well, yeah, I guess there's the beheading thing to link her and Charles maybe. Yeah, they've both got beheading histories, haven't they, in various ways. Although maybe she wouldn't know she's being beheaded when she's in Love Island. I don't know if they know the whole life journey.

Well, I mean, she'd be dead if she did. Oh, I see. They don't know what's going to happen to them or what has happened to them. I guess her ghost could come. That's a bit niche, isn't it? A bit niche. I mean, she's sitting there without her head

round the fire pit. That would be very odd for people. I think we should actually have the next contestant because we're running out of time already. Okay, so I'm going to go back to the men. So this one is the devoted one. This character will most likely pair up with someone like the minx. I don't want to predict, but he will be hurt by her.

But he's so blinded by love that he is willing to be humiliated over and over again. Okay. So I have nominated Sir William Hamilton, who lived in the 18th century. He served as an MP, and then he became the British ambassador to Naples, to the kingdom of the two Sicilies, as it was called. And to begin with, there would be nothing at all about him that would suggest that he would in any way make a good Love Island contestant. He's an absolute model of sobriety. So he's married to his wife, Catherine, whom he absolutely adores. He's very, very

interested in Greek and Roman pottery. So he's hanging out in Naples and of course Pompeii and Herculaneum are nearby. And this is when the excavations there are starting and he becomes a great collector of antiquities. He's very, very interested in volcanoes and earthquakes. He climbs Mount Vesuvius over 70 times. He takes guests up there. One time he takes his friend, the fourth Earl of Bristol, up there and the fourth Earl of Bristol burns his arm on a burning piece of lava. So that's probably the most exciting thing that has happened to him in the course of his life. And also he's a great patron of music. And so he

entertains the 14-year-old Mozart in his ambassadorial residence. But as I say, there's nothing there, I think, really that would interest the contestants of Love Island. But then in 1782, his beloved wife Catherine Catherine, dies and Sir William is devastated. I must forever feel the loss of the most amiable, the most gentle and virtuous companion that ever man was blessed with. I mean, very, very touching. And he's very upset. So he goes back home to England to kind of recuperate emotionally.

And he stays with his nephew. And his nephew has a very young mistress who'd been born Amy Lyon and she'd worked variously as a housemaid, a dancer, an actress and a courtesan and it is as a courtesan that she is staying with Sir William's nephew and she has taken on the name Emma Hart. This is her kind of stage name. When Sir William meets with Emma, she is 18 years old, and he's an elderly widower, and he's a little bit smitten with her. He goes back to Naples, and he's very, very lonely. After having lived 22 years en famille, it is most terrible to live chiefly alone, he writes to his nephew. The nephew by now is getting a bit bored of Emma Hart. He wants to dump

her and move on to someone else. So he is very much a Love Island contestant. I mean, he'd be an absolute player. And so he decides, I know, I can see that my uncle, he's quite keen on this young girl. I will fob her off onto him. And so he packs Emma hart off to naples and so william's a bit nonplussed that he's been sent his his nephew's ex-mistress but he's very chivalrous and so he puts her up and indeed her mother who's come with her that's a bit that's a weird detail yeah so that probably doesn't happen in love island people The contestants don't bring their mothers with them, do they? They actually do in the last week, but to kind of see if they approve of their partner. So he puts Emma and her mother up in a palazzo and then he falls increasingly in love. And within five years, he's not only head over heels in love with her, but he's decided he's going to marry her. So they go back to London. They get married there. Emma is now Emma, Lady Hamilton.

They go back to Naples. Emma Hamilton becomes a great star. So she becomes a huge friend of the Queen of Naples, who is the sister of Marie Antoinette, daughter of Maria Theresa, the Empress of Austria. So this would be very, very Love Island. She does what are called attitudes, which involves her dressing up in kind of wispy classical style swimsuits and doing poses next to the fire pit. So this would be tremendous. But she's not a contestant, he is. No, she becomes very fond of Sir William, who she describes as the best husband and friend. And they seem to be ticking along. But then in 1798, the most famous man in Britain who has just beaten the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, he sails into town.

And this is Horatio Nelson. And Emma starts having a fling with him. Everyone's terribly embarrassed on behalf of Sir William, but he puts up with it. He doesn't mind. I think partly because he's so devoted to Emma, and partly because he thinks as British ambassador, it's his duty to allow the hero of the hour, Lord Nelson, to relax any way he wants. If Nelson wants to relax with his wife, then it's his patriotic duty to facilitate that. So 1800, they all return back to England over land, and it's a ménage à trois, and it causes a kind of international scandal. And they arrive in London, and the three of them together take rooms in a hotel. And Nelson is married as well. He hasn't told Lady Nelson that he's back, and he's shacked up with Lady Hamilton and her husband. So Lady Nelson suddenly turns up. They're having dinner. Lady Nelson turns up. Then Nelson's father turns up. They all have dinner. And Lady Nelson observes that Emma is looking a bit larger than she might otherwise be and realizes that Lady Hamilton is pregnant. And Nelson refuses to apologize.

Basically, there's a massive kind of scandal. It's all over the press. There are cartoons, journalists kind of door-stopping them. They're being papped everywhere they go. It's cartoonists are scribbling. And poor Sir William is a butt of public mockery. He's the most famous cookhold in England. But he still doesn't mind.

He still puts up with it. And Nelson ends up dumping his wife. He goes off to sea, fights the French again. Emma gives birth to their daughter, who they call Horatia, after Horatia, making absolutely clear to everyone who the father is. And Nelson buys a house in Merton. And the three of them go and live there. They go on holiday together. They go on holiday to Wales. They have a beach holiday in Ramsgate. And then in 1803, Sir William collapses and he dies in Emma's arms and he leaves her all his money. Oh, Sir William.

Leaves her 800 pounds. Katie, are you crying? Yeah. He has stuck with her through all this kind of stress. He's put up with the public humiliation of being laughed at, of having cartoons done about him. So I think he is an absolutely model Love Island contestant. Okay. Katie, what's the next contestant, please?

Okay. So we're going to go back to the girls. The next one is the resilient one. Okay, brilliant. So quite similar. So she will get rejected over and over again, but she always keeps her head held high. Regally high, would you say?

Imperially high? Definitely, definitely. Regally high. The public are impressed. Brilliant. They keep her until the final, despite her palpable lack of success in the boy arena. Splendid, splendid.

So I have a perfect candidate. She is the Empress Zoe of the Eastern Roman Empire, or the, splendid. So I have a perfect candidate. She is the Empress Zoe of the Eastern Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire, as people often call it. So Katie, she was born in the year 978 or thereabouts. She's one of the three daughters of the Emperor Constantine VIII. The Byzantine historian Michael Sellus says of her, she was regal in her ways, a woman of great beauty, most imposing in her manner and commanding respect, a woman of passionate interests prepared with equal enthusiasm for both alternatives, death or life. She was open-handed, the sort of woman who could exhaust a sea teeming with gold dust in one day. Her eyes were large, set apart with imposing eyebrows. Her nose was inclined to

be aquiline and her whole body was radiant with the whiteness of her skin. That may be an issue with all the fake tan. I don't know whether that's a problem. But he also adds, she confused the trifles of the harem with important matters of state, which I think is quite love island. So she has a bit of bad luck, which has a lot of bad luck in her life. She first appears in the history books when her uncle, who's the Emperor Basil II, decides he's going to marry her off to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III. She's all excited. Everyone says she's a top beauty, really pumped for it. She sets sail from Constantinople. She arrives in Bari to marry Otto III, and she's told he's actually dead. He's died of fever. So miserably, she has to sail back again to Constantinople. And this is a bit of a

blow for her, Katie, because she spends the next 27 years effectively locked up in the palace, stuck in her apartments. So that's very boring. But then her time comes at last. Her father, Constantine, dies of old age. And she is basically the next person standing, but she needs to marry to become empress. And her father has already arranged a marriage for her with an old man who's the governor of Constantinople, who's called Romanus Argyris, who becomes Romanus III. Now, he's this sort of wizened old bloke. She has no interest in him at all. She becomes infatuated with a young courtier called Michael the Paphlagonian, and she starts an affair with Michael.

Romanus, he's a bit of a William Hamilton type, because he allows Michael to become his personal kind of attendant. But she and her husband fall out, so she basically gets Michael to murder him. The emperor is drowned in his bath. That's very extreme Love Island behavior. And Michael becomes the emperor. But, but, Katie, how does he reward her? He banishes her to the women's apartments again, where she'd been for 27 years.

No. I was only going out with you because, you know, for the Instagram clicks or whatever. Yeah. So was it fake grafting, Dominic? It was fake grafting, as I believe they call it on the island. But he, fate turns against him or the audience turn against him. He's epileptic and this gets worse and worse. He gets dropsy, edema.

He swells up like a balloon with water and his legs become gangrenous. His legs become gangrenous and he dies. She's still hanging around though. She reemerges from the palace. She says, I need another emperor. She adopts his nephew, who's also called Michael, right? So this is Michael V. At this point his nephew, who's also called Michael. Right. So this is Michael V.

At this point, Katie, he also turns on her. Oh, no. He tries to banish her to a monastery on the Prince's Island in the Sea of Marmara. But the audience by now, they admire her resilience. Yeah. She's become a bit of a favorite. Yeah. So the audience, I mean, they literally riot.

People tearing through the streets. Michael goes and hides in a church. I don't know how much churchgoing takes place on Love Island, but he's not the contestant, she is. He's dragged out of the church and he's blinded by her chief sort of captain of the guard, who's a man from the north called Harold Hardrada. So he gouges Michael's eyes out. That's the end of Michael.

She needs another husband now. She's had a lot of bad luck she needs another husband the bad news is she's now 64 the good news is that Byzantine historian Michael Sellers says every part of her was firm and in good condition so she'd still look good in a swimsuit exactly exactly

so she's still Katie don't be ageist we're not ageist on the rest of history no no it's just the description from the historian different times that's journalist for you

yeah it's journalist exactly so she now marries somebody called Constantine Monomachus he is about her age thank God and he's a former

ladies man he's very loose he's very urbane I imagine him as Charles Dance crazy name crazy guy so she marries him but there's bad news constantine monomachus brings with him his mistress no maria sclerina who lives with them in the palace who's a raven haired beauty and um for

poor old um zoe i think this is a little bit humiliating and so she dies in 1050 she's lived to a ripe old age so she's lived to mid-70s but she's never really i mean she's never been not she's been knocked down again and again but she's always dragged herself back up and she's very much a crowd favorite they will riot and gouge out your eyes if you cross zoe and the thing is dominic that byzantine empresses have a track record in Love Island, don't they? Well, Theodora won.

Yeah. I would imagine that Zoe is very conscious of that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That one of her predecessors had won Love Island. I think as well that business about being firm and in good condition is a real... When I saw that, I thought, you know... Yeah.

She's a contender. She's a definite contender. The viewing audience would be impressed by that backstory. Anyway, I don't want to prejudge what you're going to decide, Katie. I don't want to put pressure on you. She's my favourite. You know who I think would be good for her would be Sir William. Are the public ready for two quite elderly winners, Tom?

I think they are. I think they are. Well, time will tell. Yeah. Because we have to take a break, don't we? So what sort of adverts do they have in Love Island, Katie? eBay is the sponsor this year. Oh, crikey. We're not in that league, Tom.

No. Sadly, we're more flights to Las Vegas, aren't we? Which is very Love Island in its own way. All right. We'll take a break now and we'll return for more contestants. See you in a second. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. See you in a second. access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are on Love Island. What was that review entitled? Brainless Morons. Woohoo! No, I think the four contenders we've had, well, maybe three of them, are clearly very smart. I don't think Catherine Howard is quite as smart as she might have been, but the other three.

Okay, so you're back on, Tom. Katie, what's your next archetype? The next one is the power-hungry one. So this lady has applied for Love Island every single year, hoping to get her big break and become the new Molly May, who is one of the most commercially successful contestants of UK Love Island ever so commercially she's had lots of kind of brand endorsements yeah she's worth I think five million now so she will cause arguments with the other girls and pick them on purpose to get as much airtime as possible the public sees straight through it but they are conflicted she's very likable, but she also brings the drama.

Okay, so Dominic has already chosen one Roman empress in the form of Zoe. I'm choosing another one. And this is the wife of the Emperor Nero, his great beloved, Poppaea Sabina. And she was the most fashionable woman in Rome. Incredible beauty, unbelievably stylish, had kind of amber hair. Nero would send to Denmark for amber and then he would decorate his palace with it as a tribute to her. She actually had her own brands of cosmetics, which were, people wanted to look like her. She would bathe in asses milk to protect her complexion. Her mules, when she went out on trips carrying her luggage,

they would all be shod with gold. So she is absolutely the cutting edge of fashion and she'd be an amazing, amazing influencer. Every sponsor would want her, I think, advertising their products. But she is a bit of a baggage. I mean, she is a bit of a piece of work. And I think that that may be because she had quite a tough upbringing. She was the daughter of a guy called Titus Olius. And so originally she was called Olia, but then he gets caught up in a kind of court scandal and gets ruined. And so she then takes the name of her mother, who was also called Poppaea Sabina. But then Poppaea Sabina gets forced to commit suicide by the Empress Messalina, who's a love rival. So

Papaya Sabina absolutely has a sense of how high the stakes can be on Love Island, that you really have to play it hard. So Papaya, both her parents have been ruined. One of them has been disgraced. The other one has been forced to commit suicide. And so she's looking for a partner who can help her get a leg up in this competitive world of influencing in, uh, Julia, Claudia and Rome. So she marries the head of, of the Praetorian guard. So you'd think he'd be a banker, uh, but then he gets removed. So that's no good. So she dumps him. Um, and she moves on to a guy who was the best friend of Nero, a man called Otho, who again is very, very stylish, wears a cutting edge toupee, depilates his legs.

So he's kind of literally very, very smooth. And then a bit like with Nelson and Hamilton and Emma, they all get involved in a main achertoire. And the gossip columnists are obsessed by this. So there are lots of different interpretations in the press about what's going on. So maybe Otho had boasted to Nero too much about how sexy his wife was and Nero's kind of moved in. Or maybe they're having a threesome and then Nero decides that he wants Papaya for himself or whatever, who knows what's going on. But basically

Nero decides that he's going to marry Papaya for himself. And so he sends Otho off to govern Portugal. But there is a problem that Nero is already married to his stepsister, Octavia. And so Poppaea is saying, I'm not just going to be your mistress. I want to be the empress. I want to marry you. So poor Octavia, Nero is now obsessed with Poppaea Sabina. And so he accuses her of committing adultery, which is absolutely shameless because Nero has been committing adultery left, right and center. Octavia gets sent off to a remote island off Italy and then Papaya Sabina demands that she be executed. So Nero is so smitten by this point that he sends a guard to go and chop her head off

and brings Octavia's head back. They're from revolts, don't they? They do. Yes, they do. As you say, Papaya Sabina is quite unlikable and Octavia, people in Rome feel very sympathetic about her, but that doesn't stop Papaya because she knows that the key is to get off with the emperor. So Octavia ends up dead. Her head is brought back to Papaya and Papaya keeps it as a kind of souvenir. So she's quite tough.

Yeah. She's very good at the brands. I think she'd be an absolute player on Love Island. Yeah. I don't think you'd want to come up against her. Nothing will stop her from getting the donkey milk brand deals after she leaves. Exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. And she ends up dead because Nero ends up kicking her to death. So it all turns out badly yeah I can see her and Emperor Zoe her and Emperor Zoe having some serious clashes they'd have some real beef

wouldn't they they would and I think I'd probably back Papaya but you what Zoe's never beaten Tom well we'll see I mean she doesn't get

a head cut off or kicked to death or any of these things by Nero by her own husband that never happened to Zoe Zoe made sure her husband died first.

Yeah, but Pepea has a glamorous ending. That's much more Love Island. She's a loser, though. She's a loser. Also, Pepea, I guess, could say, look what I did to Octavia. You'll be next if you cross me. Yeah, but Zoe wasn't next. She never was.

Anyway, this is all part of the excitement of it. But we need some more contestants. So who's next, Katie? Okay, I'll go to a boy. So the next one I'm going to do is the other jester yeah this guy will be a duo with charles ii and he is much loved by the public and deeply in love with his lady but repeatedly stung by her will go on to become a very much loved presenter of shows on channel four like nick knowles or somebody like that yeah isn't

he a presenter of uh things on channel four anyway listen my choice is uh somebody who would definitely get on well with charles ii it's um russian czar peter the great so peter the great was born in 1672 katie um the key thing you need to know about him is he's six foot eight he's a massive bloke he's incredibly imposing he's a real roister dodoister. He loves his dwarves, doesn't he? He loves dwarves. We'll get onto the dwarves. He expands the frontiers of Russia enormously, beats the Swedes, who were previously their big rivals in the Baltic. He builds a Russian navy. He leads a kind of cultural revolution. He's a man of the early enlightenment. He wants to transform Russia into this great sort of modern powerhouse, but he's a man who knows how to party, loves pranks, loves partying.

So in 1698, he launches what he calls his Grand Embassy. He travels, often incognito, around Western Europe with a load of attendants to try and observe what's going on so that he can modernize Russia. He arrives in England. He's in England for about four months. I don't know whether he would bring these people to the island. It's very unclear because obviously he's never been on Love Island before. He traveled with four chamberlains, two clocksmiths, three interpreters, a cook, a priest, six trumpeters, 70 soldiers, all as tall as him, four dwarves and a monkey. So he pitches up in England. He stays at the diarist John

Evelyn's house in Deptford. And Tom, we discussed this before in The Rest is History. When he moves out, Christopher Wren is sent round to sort of tally up the damage. They have caused £300 worth of damage, including £3 for wheelbarrows broken by the Tsar in races and parties and such. All the floors are covered with ink. All the curtains and the bedclothes have been torn to pieces. All the chairs have been smashed. 300 window panes have been broken. The garden has been torn up. And this is just in the course of their kind of roistering. He had a mistress, an actress called Letitia Cross. When he left England, he said, here's 500 pounds, which is the equivalent of

more than a million pounds today. She was absolutely gutted by this. She said, I'm worth a lot more than this. And he said, frankly, I think I'm being very generous. I think you're overpaid given the nature of your services. He goes back to Russia. Anyway, as Tom said, he's massively into dwarves. He stages a wedding for his favorite dwarf in 1710. He orders that all dwarves in Russia be brought to St. Petersburg. He forces them to drink goblets of vodka and dance until they fall over. He regularly convenes what he calls the all-drunken synod of prostitutes, dwarves, and other characters. And he tells each person at this party, this all-drunken synod, your name is going to be Archdeacon Thrust the Prick,

or you're going to be called Archdeacon F-Off, or any of these kind of things. So that's all great fun. He's a great lad. He's a great roisterer. Now, the obvious issue is what about his love life? He's deeply in love with this lady, but repeatedly stung by her. So he's married twice.

His first wife is called Eudokia. They had an arranged marriage, but they fell out. And Peter exiled her to a convent in Susdal. And he thought, she'll go and she'll be an icon and that'll be lovely. But no, she starts an affair with an officer called Stepan Glebov. And I think it's a sign of what a lovely fellow Peter is, how much he's hurt by this, that he's so upset that he has Stepan Glebov impaled on a stake. Because that would be an incredible adornment to Love Island. And the stake, we read, was artfully inserted to miss all the vital organs so that Stepan

would live longer. And then Peter is so hurt that he gets his soldiers to force Eudokia to watch Stepan's death agonies. How long did it last? Oh, probably hours and hours and hours, maybe days. So that's that. He also has a bit of bad luck. He has a Scottish mistress called Mary Hamilton, but it turns out that she's been stealing

from his second wife, the Empress Catherine. So again, Peter is very, very hurt and he has her beheaded. But then in a sign of his son foi, his call and composure, which I think would strongly advantage him on the island, he goes up and he picks up her head and he shows it to the crowd and he gives them a lesson on anatomy, pointing to the head. So it says, he pointed out the sliced vertebrae, open windpipe and dripping arteries before kissing the bloody lips and dropping the head. So again, that's a bit gruesome. Yeah. A lot of listeners will say Peter the Great sounds like a terrible man. So to make them feel better and to curry favour with that element of

our audience, I will say the good news is he died of hideous bladder problems. So at the end of his life, surgeons managed to extract two litres of blocked urine from his gangrenous bladder, and he dies of a gangrenous bladder a year later. So he's quite a character. In fact, Tom, we're going to return to Peter the Great next year on the rest is history, a little series on Peter the Great and the Great Northern War. What kind of Channel 4 series do you think he'd end up presenting? Don't they do things like naked bodies? Naked bodies, I was going to say.

Yeah. He would do that with naked severed heads or whatever, wouldn't he? There's a lot of severed heads in this villa. That would be the bonding point. That's history. That's history, Katie. Yeah. Severed heads and impaled bodies

and impaled bodies that can be their icebreaker at the beginning of the season I'm not going to prejudge anything again I don't want to influence you Katie but I think he'd get on

brilliantly with Zoe ooh why do you think he'd get on with Zoe they're both the emperor and empress we can't get into discussion now we've got

she had people's eyes gouged out Dominic stop stop it we've got to get on alright Tom it's on it's your go okay this is my last girl the last girl is the out of place one so she works in a crazy job like a landmine disposal and agrees to go on love island because she thinks it would be a great platform for the social cause she believes in and that it will push her out of her comfort zone. And in a nice twist of fate, she actually ends up falling in love. So I have chosen Mary Fisher, who was a housemaid,

lived in Yorkshire in the 17th century. She was born in 1628. But then in 1651, she is serving at table and she hears this guy called George Fox preach a sermon. And George Fox is a founder of a group called Quakers. And Quakers, the spirit of the Lord descends on them, and they start shaking and trembling and roaring and crying and foaming at the mouth. And this is why they get called Quakers. And Mary Fisher decides that this is great. She's going to sign up to it. Quakers believe in absolute human equality.

They believe in gender equality. They believe in giving away all their earthly possessions. And this really appeals to Mary. So she becomes a Quaker. And I think that you might think that going around the world preaching about the spirit of the Lord might not be entirely Love Island behavior, except for the fact that Quakers are quite prone to making public statements by taking all their clothes off and walking around naked. That might be something that the viewers of

Love Island would enjoy in Mary's case. She has quite a tough life because she is absolutely committed to spreading the good news of Quakerism. So she goes to Cambridge where she protests against the students who are all being trained to become vicars. Quakers don't really approve of vicars. And because of this, she gets taken to the market cross and flogged. And she is the first female Quaker to be publicly whipped for her Quaker ministry. Then she goes off to America. She goes to Barbados, where she manages to convert the governor

to become a Quaker. And then she goes to Boston. And here she has a terrible time because the Bostonians don't approve of her at all. The moment she lands, she gets arrested imprisoned stripped her body is intimately examined by a perv for signs of witchcraft by a perv is that tom yes that's a technical well the person meant to be examining her is meant to be a woman but it turns out to be a guy who's dressed up as a woman's clothes so that he can go and have a grope no really so i think that counts as a perv freaky don't you think that's definitely a perv. Freaky. Don't you think? That's definitely a perv. Definitely. And all her books and everything get seized by the Bostonian hangman and burned. So it's all very sad.

And she gets put in prison and she's only saved from starvation by a friendly innkeeper. Because there's obviously something about her that appeals to this innkeeper. So I think that that bodes well for her prospects on Love Island. So anyway, she spends five weeks in prison and then she gets deported and they've only managed to get one convert. So that's very sad, but she's nothing daunted. So her next stunt is she goes off with five Quaker pals and they go off to convert the Ottoman Sultan. There are various issues there. Firstly, he doesn't speak English and Mary doesn't speak Turkish. And secondly, she's a Quaker and he's a Muslim. And also she's a housemaid and he's a Sultan. So all in all, the odds on them meeting up and getting on, I'd say are fairly low, but actually she does get to

meet him and he's very polite and listens to her. And Mary says of him that he was very noble unto me. And someone writes about her performance here. She departed through that great army, that's the army of the Sultan, to Constantinople without a guard, whitherto she came without the least hurt or scoff to the commendation and praise of the discipline of that army, the glory of the great Turk and his great renown. So she's obviously got something. This impecunious, slightly mad housemaid has turned up and the Sultan himself has listened to her. She comes back. She meets with a sailor from Poole, marries him, he dies. And then she marries a guy called John Cross and they are together for the

rest of their lives. And they emigrate to South Carolina where she dies in 1698. And she is buried there with her beloved husband, John Cross, in the Quaker burial ground. And you can see her grave to this day. Oh, Tom. Sweet story. Very sweet. Katie, we've got one more. So the final person is the accidental heartbreaker.

So this is a man who's very joyous and charismatic, forms strong friendships with the girls, and then is fought over by them once they realise what a nice guy he is. Okay. Tom tugged at the heartstrings in the last one, and I've gone with an unexpected heartstring tugger, and a person who a lot of people will be surprised to hear me nominate in this category. So this is the former conscience of the Labour Party and of the Labour left, Tony Benn, the former Viscount Stansgate. Stung on his penis by a wasp. He was stung on the 6th of September, 2000, Tom. I had a bath this morning and I must report it, a wasp stung my private parts. It's been stinging all day. I could feel this thing flying around in

my pants and I tried to swat it and I probably did succeed and it responded by stinging me. Because that would be great on Love Island, wouldn't it? People would love watching that. That would go on Love Island best bits, which are the bits that don't make the main show. So Tony Benn is a very implausible candidate on Love Island because he's a man of enormous political piety and seriousness. So his father was a liberal and then Labour MP. His mother was a feminist suffragist theologian. He was in the RAF in the Second World War, though he never really saw action, but he was in the RAF in Africa, I think. He is motivated, as I'm sure Tom would agree, by this extraordinary kind of nonconformist

religious passion. Although he's not really a religious person, but he pours all that in. But quite Mary Fisher. Yeah, very much so, Tom. He would love Mary Fisher. He pours it all into politics. When he succeeds to the peerage at the beginning of the 1960s, he fights this long battle to disclaim his peerage because he doesn't want it.

So he was Viscount Stansgate, but he wants to stay in the House of Commons. He's the Minister of Technology under Labour in the 1960s. And then he has this kind of conversion experience where he goes way over to the left and he becomes Labour's Secretary of State for Industry in the 70s, where he loves nationalizing things. He dreams of a future in which hundreds of companies have been nationalized, in which men in donkey jackets are planning the future of the economy. In the 1980s, he becomes the absolute tribune of the plebs, touring the land, giving these incredibly articulate, rousing, inspirational speeches,

not just against thatorism, but against what he sees as the heretics in his own party. But the reason I've chosen him is because he is also incredibly uxorious. He has this very sort of admirable and touching love story with his wife, Caroline. So they met over tea at Worcester College, Oxford in 1949. She's American, and she's also very left-wing. And he was smitten straight away. He proposed to her nine days later after they'd first met at a park bench in the city of Oxford, she accepted. Many years later, he bought that bench from Oxford City Council and he installed it in the garden of their house in Holland Park. And critics in the mid-1970s claimed that he was secretly having orgies at a rented house. And it was a story so utterly unbelievable and outlandish that it didn't even remotely catch on because he was the last person in Britain that would ever have done something like that.

50 years after they had first met, she wore the same dress that she had worn that night. She kept it and she would come times, get it out and wear it on their wedding anniversaries and things like that. But the thing that's actually most touching about them is Tony Benn was an inveterate diarist. This is why he will, long after his political achievements, which were, I think it's fair to say, debatable, long after they were forgotten, he'll be remembered as this great diarist. And if you read his diaries from the year of her death and the year or so after she died, she died on the 22nd of November, 2000. And his diary entry afterwards said how heartbreaking he was. She was the finest person I ever met.

And then you read the next year's volumes. He's often saying, it was the anniversary of Caroline's death this week. I must say I'm finding it very painful. Not only do I miss her terribly, but I am riddled with guilt. The things that I should have done with her that I didn't. The next day, at six minutes past 10, the exact moment she died, we all went into the front room where I'd lit a candle and we stood in front of the picture of her and we hugged each other and took photographs a month later i was

listening to cassettes in the car and he's obviously thinking about his wife says i began crying and i sobbed and sobbed all the way to stansgate it was freezing cold there i sat in the bedroom and sobbed just comes back to you all of a sudden i wondered where caroline was has she disappeared into thin air what does death mean is it a complete and absolute end and he writes these kind of entries again and again but there is one nice love island touch to this which is about three years after his wife's death he meets somebody on whom i think it's fair to say he develops an absolute crush very implausible person and this is the first winner of strictly come dancing natasha koplinski so natasha koplinsky comes around to his house to interview him. She's a BBC breakfast presenter at the time. And he says in his diary, she did the interview. She's

very professional, exceptionally beautiful. Two days later, there was a knock at the door and there was Natasha Kaplinsky. You'd come around with a box of chocolates, which was really sweet of her. They keep up this relationship. June, 2004. I watched Strictly Come Dancing and Natasha won. She was doing a Foxtrot, I think. Oh, she was terribly good. And I sent her a little message. Later that month, Natasha came top again. Oh, she was so good. I voted several times in support of her. Then I rang her and said how fabulous she was. A month later, Natasha rang. She said she'd love to have lunch. I said, I've kept a month open for you. She said, only a month, Tony, which was very cheeky.

Anyway, next Wednesday is settled. It goes on and on. They have the lunch. Natasha arrived at 4.45. She's beautiful and very friendly. I really enjoyed the evening. So that was a sort of sweet romantic friendship. I think it's fair to say that he developed in very advanced age. And I think those two things, the love story with his wife and then the late life platonic romance with Natasha Koplinsky, make him a compelling dark horse candidate for this year's Love Island.

Yeah. So they never got together? Him and Natasha Koplinsky? Yeah. Well, who knows? Not that I'm aware of. I mean, Natasha Koplinsky, if she's listening will be able to yeah well there is a dance challenge so it sounds like Tony Benn would be completely undone by that maybe yeah

unless Natasha Kowalski has given him dance lessons Tony Benn was a great crier as well so if you were to have a miners choir or something who started singing he would burst into floods of tears and I wonder whether that would also endear him to the audience katie oh definitely it was a challenge a love island challenge about nationalizing businesses or fighting the imf he'd win i mean he'd be all over that he would be absolutely all over that they haven't done that yet but never say never yeah i don't think prepare would be as good no no our opinions on international capitalism tom probably not as robust as certainly no probably not so katie there you have your eight contenders. Now you have to decide which of them are going to pair up with which. What do you think, having heard them?

Instinctively, I'm going to pair up Peter the Great with Poppea Sabina, because I think she would be attracted to his name. She would see some opportunity in that. And he's also got a bit of a cruel edge like Nero, so I think they would get on. I would pair up Catherineatherine howard with sir william hamilton oh because i think she would see some opportunity to have some fun while also having a stable partner in the villa i like it yeah very good i pair up with charles ii because i think the producers will want that to happen because they'll enjoy her being humiliated over and over by him. Oh no.

Poor Zoe. Poor Zoe. I feel a bit cruel doing that because she is my favorite actually, but it makes good TV, so it's going to be done. And then of course I pair up Mary Fisher with Tony Benn because I think Papaya Sabina will be attracted to Tony Benn and might try and ruffle some feathers. That sentence has never been said in the history of human experience. Until now.

You could have a million monkeys on typewriters writing for a million years and you'd never get that line. No. Right. Okay. So Peter the Great and Papaya Sabina, Catherine Howard and Sir William Hamilton, Emperor Zoe and Charles II, Tony Benn and Mary Fisher. Those are the four Love Island couples. And now Katie, am I right? The rule is that two people who are called bombshells get introduced. Yes, exactly. And there's a chance to see if people are going to dump the people that they're with and move on to someone else. So we're going to introduce a man and a woman. And both of these

are friends of the show, people who have already appeared in episodes who will be familiar to lots of listeners. And the man that I have chosen is Admiral Horatio Nelson. Ooh. There's a history there. He's walking in. One eye, one arm, a victor of many battles, man from Norfolk. Burning with zeal for king and country. King and country.

Yeah, king and country keeps him warm. And of course, Sir William Hamilton. Well, I mean, is he going to glare at Nelson? They get on, I think. They get on, yeah. They get on. So do you think basically any of the ladies, sorry, the girls, do you think that they might go for Nelson?

I think they'll all go for him, but he'll be attracted to Catherine because he always wants what Sir William Hamilton has. Yeah. History's repeating. Would Catherine go for him? Yeah, 1,000%. Of course she would. Sir William Hamilton, sadly, would be dumped.

Oh, he's been dumped again. But I think he'd go very graciously. Or do you think that they would live in a ménage à trois? He'd still tag along. Yeah, he might be brought back, actually. He'd stand outside the bedroom. Yeah, exactly. Looking sad with his vases.

Oh, no. Yeah, you can imagine the memes being made about him, I think. Oh, okay. So Catherine Howard and Nelson. So William has been dumped. So that is explosive action. But Dominic, who is the girl who's coming in? Top blood drinking, Christ marrying saint, Catherine of Siena.

So Katie, your dad had been pestering to do an episode on Catherine of Siena for about, well, ever since the beginning of The Rest is History. She initially was very interested in fashion, wasn't she, Tom? Yeah. Loved fashion. And then had this sort of, again, a sort of conversion experience, actually, a bit like Tony Benn moving to the left after the 1970 general election. She casts off earthly things.

She stops eating. Jesus visits her in her bedroom. They get married. She pledges herself to eternal virginity. She pledges herself to eternal virginity, which is an issue on Love, I agree. Loads of saints and stuff piled into her bedroom to preserve the wedding. I mean, these are dead people, like St. Paul and stuff. She married Jesus, using as a ring his blooded foreskin.

And then she carried out miracles, didn't she, Tom? Yeah. Stuff with bread and wine, healing people. She drank, what did she drink? Pus from the- She drank pus from a breast, a cancerous breast. I mean, that would be unusual. I mean, that's not the kind of thing I imagine that you get on Love Island.

Anyway, so do you think that she might anyone yes any of the lads would I think she'd be brought in halfway through yeah in Casa Amor for Tony Ben to test his love with Mary Fisher but it will fail because he's exorius and so she will then be booted off Catherine Sienna didn't last long. Okay. Crikey. Yeah. Okay. Right. So the final couples therefore are Peter the Great and Poppea Sabina, Catherine Howard and Horatio Nelson, Empress Zoe and Charles II, Mary Fisher and Tony Benn. You eliminate them, Katie. So two couples go to the final. Yeah. So which are the two finalists, please? I think probably Poppea Sabina and Peter the Great because they'd have killed off most of the other stillborns. And I think probably Papyrus of Iron and Peter the Great because that would have killed off most of the other still ones

and I think probably Tony Benn and Mary Fisher Crikey what a showdown oh yeah what a showdown what a showdown I mean this will say

so much about the British people won't it about the British electorate so they go for blood stained murderous head severing

dwarf tossing yeah and loads of articles will be written about it. What does it mean for Britain? Yeah. What does the vote mean? The cultural zeitgeist. Guardian will be going bonkers for Tony Benn, Tom.

They'll be writing one of their letter-writing campaigns. So, Katie, you have to decide not who you want to win, but who you think the British public would vote for. So, Peter the Great and Papaya Sabina, Tony Benn and Mary Fisher, given those two couples, who do you think the Love Island voters would go for? I think given the political climate

that we're in at the moment, it has to be Tony Benn and Mary Fisher. Oh my word. Oh, what a turn up. Stunning. Tom, can you see Theo in the chat, in our producer just, what a turn up. Stunning. Tom, can you see Theo in the chat? Our producer just writing, yes, yes. In capitals.

The people's choice. The people's winner. Amazing scenes. And then you can imagine the Guardian writing about that as well. Perfect. Oh, the Guardian would be all over it. Yeah. Maybe the Guardian would sponsor Love Island.

Yeah. Crikey. And people sometimes say that the Guardian would sponsor Love Island. Yeah. Exactly. And people sometimes say that the rest is history is not woke enough, Tom. I mean, what a rebuke. That's amazing. Yeah. What a rebuke to them. Yes.

Katie, that was brilliant. Thank you so much. Thank you. And I think everyone who's listened will agree that that was a rollercoaster. Yeah. Wow. Who saw that coming? With a stunning denouement.

Right. And on that bombshell. Absolute bombshell. That succeeding Stanley Baldwin and the Empress Theodora are top Quaker Mary Fisher and top nationaliser of British Leyland, Sony Benn. Woo-hoo! We say thank you very much to Katie, who, as always, an expert guide to a world that,

as that review on IMDb said, a world of brainless morons and extremely sad and pathetic commentary on the current generation. Let's hope they're not saying that about this podcast. And we will see you all next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.