You're Dead to Me - Causes of the British Civil Wars (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Greg Jenner is joined in 17th-century England by Dr Jonathan Healey and comedian Toussaint Douglass to learn about King Charles I and the causes of the British Civil Wars.This year marks the 400th anniversary of Charles I coming to the throne on 27 March, 1625. Less than two decades later, his antagonistic relationship with Parliament would ignite a civil war, one that would end with his capture, trial and execution, and the rule of Oliver Cromwell. The war is remembered as a fight between Cavaliers and Roundheads, but what did each side actually believe in, and what were the causes of this conflict? Tracing the breakdown of the relationship between the King and Parliament, this episode takes in clashes over taxation, religion and the limits of royal power, disastrous wars, unpopular advisers, and Charles’s attempts to rule without Parliament altogether. It also moves outside London, exploring popular uprisings against everything from the King’s taxes and contentious church reforms to the 17th-century cost-of-living crisis.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Matt Ryan Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we're getting political. We're traveling back to the 17th century to discover the causes of the British Civil Wars. You might call them English Civil War. We'll explain later.

And to help us separate the royalists from the radicals, we have two very special guests. In History Corner, he's associate professor in social history at Kellogg College University of Oxford, where his research focuses on the social history of early modern England. You might've read his incredible book, The Blazing World, A New History of Revolutionary England.

He's also the author of a forthcoming book, The Blood in Winter, all about the run up to the Civil War in 1642. It's Dr Jonathan Healy. Welcome, John. Hi, Greg. Lovely to be here. Thank you for coming in and in Comedy Corner. He's an award-winning stand-up comedian. You may have seen him on BBC Three's Stand Up for live comedy or loads of Dave shows like Outsiders, Hypothetical, Question Team or Late Night Mash. And you will remember him from our episode on Frederick Douglas.

It's Toussaint Douglas. Welcome back to the show Toussaint. Thanks so much for having me Greg. You also forgot to mention that just like John I also have a connection with Kellogg's. I had cornflakes this morning so I'm also very academic myself. Don't want to leave it to him mostly but just to say that I dip my toes in some milk so yeah don't worry. Toussaint, last time you proved yourself to be an American history aficionado. You knew quite a lot about Frederick Douglas.

Yeah, well, he was one of my heroes. So someone I, yeah, and also I did study kind of American history at uni a bit. So I had a little bit of a help there. This one, not so much. So when you told me about the British Civil War, I did think it was like a British version of like the Marvel kind of film, some of that, the Civil War film, so I'm not sure if it's going to be that or not, but that's

my starting point. So yeah, we'll probably be leaving a lot of the history to John, but I'll chip in every now and then, I'm sure. So what do you know? This is the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject and as you've probably heard of the British Civil Wars, or rather you've probably heard of the English Civil War.

That's not really a name we use that much anymore and also there aren't that many movies about it or pop culture about it. We've got King Charles popping up in To Kill a King, there was Black Hat out of the Cavalier years, probably you're thinking of Roundheads vs Cavaliers or Oliver Cromwell and his ugly wart or Charles I being beheaded, but how did a civil war actually start and just how long is a long parliament? Let's find out. The British Civil Wars or the War of the Three Kingdoms or the English Civil War or the I mean there's loads of names for it, but they started in 1642, they lasted about a decade, but today we're going to do the prequel.

So John, where do we start our story? Do we start with Charles? Well, we're going to look at the period 1625 to 1642, so that's from the start of Charles' reign to the moment when it all falls apart and the Civil War begins in England, but we're going to start with James I as well, because some of the things that we'll be thinking about will date back to the predecessor of Charles, his father. So James I was very short of money and that created an awful lot of problems and in particular it created a lot of problems in his relationship with Parliament because the assumption was at this time that for the King to take people's money they they had to give consent to it in parliament, which meant when the king wanted it to,

but the trouble is that when James called parliaments, they tended to want grievances to be addressed. So there's that, he's short of money. There's also a huge amount of kind of social stress in England at this period. There's been a long period of population growth. It means that people can't get on the housing ladder and food prices are very, very high. There's a series of period of population growth. It means that people can't get on the housing ladder and food prices are very, very high.

There's a series of riots in 1607. This sounds familiar. Yeah. And there's a lot of religious issues which have hung over from the Reformation. So Toussaint, King Charles I comes to the throne 1625. Do you think he learns from daddy's mistakes? I'm gonna go with no.

I'm gonna go with he didn't have the greatest dad modelling in what he should be doing, so I'm thinking he's more of the same, Greg? I think that's a pretty good guess. John, things just get worse for young Charles, don't they? The issue of tax didn't go away and completely poisoned Charles' relationship with Parliament because he basically sort of says, well, you know, there's a war, I really should be able tax didn't go away and completely poisoned Charles's relationship with Parliament because he basically sort of says, well, you know, there's a war, I really should be able to just take your money. But Parliament says, well, actually, we have to vote it to you.

And before we do that, we want you to address these grievances that we have. One of the grievances is Charles has married Princess Henrietta Maria of France, who of course was a Catholic. This was a provocative move at the time where religious tensions were high. There's also a weird thing called, Toussaint, tell me if you've heard of this before, tonnage and poundage. This is Radio 4 right? I'm gonna say no. Tonnage and poundage, as funny as it sounds, is a tax on imports and exports. And traditionally, parliament had always granted it to the monarch at the start of their reign for life. But under Charles I, parliament says, you can have it for a year, and then we're going to kind of have another look and see if everything kind of tracks and everything's okay.

And then it expired. So Charles was faced with a bit of a problem, which is that he suddenly lost this source of income. And he approached that problem in the most direct way you probably could, which is that he just collects it anyway. They've had a recent controversy over something called the petition of rights whereby parliament basically says non-parliamentary taxation is illegal. Charles eventually gives his assent but fudges it and eventually end up also fighting about religion. There's this group within the English church which wants much more kind of high church ceremonial. They are very much in

the ascendancy, Charles likes them very very much. MPs within Parliament got very angry about that because they saw it as a return to Catholicism and they started to challenge Charles in Parliament. What does high church involve? What would that be in like church? There's more sort of ceremony, there's a lot less focus on private prayer, listening to sermons. One of the biggest things is that the communion table, which in the English church at this period was traditionally in the middle, so it's kind of accessible to everyone, gets railed off and put at the East End. What you're saying there is that one of the key

reasons that caused Britain to plunge into civil war was a disagreement over interior design. that caused Britain to plunge into civil war was a disagreement over interior design. Is that what we're saying here? We've got the third parliament of 1628 called where again he's trying to raise money because there's a subsidy bill, John isn't there, and forced loans, there's martial law, the petition of rights, there's tonnage and poundage again. The subcommittee are in charge of the tonnage and poundage thing and they just suddenly decide to be a subcommittee about Catholicism. Oh, now we're getting into the nitty gritty. Subcommittee, here we go, alright.

Subcommittee, that's what you want. And Charles is annoyed at this and he demands an adjournment? Yeah, he basically adjourns parliament as a kind of prelude to dissolving it. But when he sends his messenger to the House of Commons, they basically bar the door so he can't get in. And they hold the speaker down in his chair for like an hour. And while they do that, MPs pass a series of resolutions basically saying that if you support all this kind of stuff, you are a traitor.

Very disorderly scenes, great fun. I love the idea of just the messenger just outside the door like, I can hear you. I know you're in there. Just open the door. This isn't cool guys. And the King responds by imprisoning nine MPs. That's not good news, right? John, you can't imprison MPs. Can you? I mean he can and he does. He basically decides that he wants to rule without parliament. So from now on he will try to rule England without calling another parliament for as long as

he can. Toussaint, do you want to guess how long this personal rule no parliament is? This guy doesn't sound like a long and stable ruler, so I'm going less than five years. Sensible guess, it's 11 years. 11, he managed to pull it off for 11 years, really. Is he raising cash just in his own way then? Yeah, so I mean, what he then tried to do was he tried to find new and creative ways of raising money.

And in order to do this, the new ways are basically the old ways. And one of his civil servants, a guy called Sir John Burra, had been ferreting away in the 17th century equivalent of the National Archives, which was in the Tower of London. And he'd found all these kind of crazy medieval ways of raising money and everything from a tax on beer, for example, or a tax on death, or a tax on lawyers, which I think would have been quite popular. Something he does do, he turns to ship money. What is ship money?

Well, ship money is a well established or was a well established way of raising ships for the Navy. And basically what happened was that coastal communities were told you need to provide a ship for the Royal Navy and that would protect the country. What Charles did was he kind of rolled it out to inland counties on the fairly sensible premise that basically they get protected as well. And it was very, very controversial because he was essentially doing a new tax and he was doing it without parliament. But it seems to work. He raises quite a lot of money through it. You can see the tensions rising here, Tucson, I think, because the king is just doing what

he wants. So we've already mentioned tension between the high church Anglicans and the ones who are almost a bit Catholic and the Puritans. What is Arminianism? Is it this high church thing you mentioned? It comes to a Dutch theologian called Arminius and he argued for essentially a form of faith where you're not completely predestined to heaven or hell. You have a certain amount of free will. And that then kind of ties into this English idea of ceremonialism. You know, again, interior design, putting the altar, putting the holy table at the, at the East end. And it's connected by this sort of clumsy guy from Reading, who is sort of a bit like a kind of short version of Rickage of Ace who just alienates everyone called William Lord and he became the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was very very controversial because you

know the Calvinists and the Puritans didn't like it very much. So William Lord, it's Lord L-A-U-D and there's a there's a vicar called Peter Titli who sounds fun. Not because of his name, well I mean maybe a bit because of his name. It's a bit because of his name, is it? Come on, let's do it. John, why is Peter Titley fun? Well because he liked to bow and do all this kind of stuff so much that he would fall over and drop the prayer book and all this kind of stuff. And this was all in the name of decorum of course.

Was he also drunk as well though? Because I feel like just bowing isn't enough to make you fall over. Unless he was really top heavy on his head, I've got quite a big head sometimes, but I feel like I've been hitting the communion wine a little bit, surely. But we also then get the cost of living crisis again, John. Why is this crisis happening? It's not inflation, is it? Root cause, it is inflation. There's a big growth in population, that means that there's more mouths to feed. There's also a series of really bad harvests from about 1628 onwards that led to food riots. There's

a sense in the 1630s that the social order is really kind of fraying. There's a lot of anger out there. Now earlier Toussaint you mentioned Marvel and I can ring my Marvel bell because we have Captain Carter show up who is a lady who she sort of rallies the brave lads of Maldon in Essex. Do you know what she does Toussaint? To rally them? Yeah they go on a heist they go to steal some stuff. Oh right okay what do they steal? Well they're going after the grain they carted it off Captain Carter carted it off. Not the sexiest heist I'll be honest. No. Stealing sacks of grain a bit more ambitious go for the

gold do you know what I mean you get all the grain you want and then some with gold. Well, you just just stealing grain. You can only have grain. Grain only gets you grain. You can't eat gold, Doosan. Come on, think of it. They're hungry. This is a political act. John, Captain Carter, or Anne Carter as she is, she was executed for this heist. Was she rare being a woman involved in protests? Yes, I mean, women were very much involved in protests, particularly about food, because that was seen as kind of in the women's domain. And so you would often see women leading food riots. There's also people like Lady Eleanor Davis, who's a really interesting character.

She was an aristocratic lady and she began making prophecies early in the 17th century. And then in the 1630s she found herself angry about William Lord and at one point she went into Lichfield Cathedral and she poured a vat of boiling tar over the communion table because she thought it was in the wrong place, for which she was sent to Bedlam, which was a mental asylum, and eventually the tower, although she was released eventually. So yeah, women are very much involved in protest. Religion is one thing that women often end up protesting about.

They're definitely part of the political nation in this period. Wow. I mean, chucking molten tar onto a sort of sacred table in a holy building, that's quite bold. Toussaint, I mean, have you ever gone that bold with a protest? No. It's always boiling tar, isn't it? It's never kind of lukewarm tar. It always has to be bubbling, doesn't it? The tar. I feel like tar in itself is enough, but for some reason,

people who use tar, it's always got to be 100 degrees boiling point. It's a bit curious, that, to be honest. We've spoken a lot about England so far, and I think it's really important, in case listeners don't know, that Charles I of England was King of Scotland as well. So these English reforms, these William Lord reforms, was he also pushing them north of the border up into Scotland as well? Yes, and Charles saw himself as having what he called an imperial crown. So it was his duty to impose his ideas, his religion, on Ireland and on Scotland. In Scotland, initially, it ran into a lot of difficulty. In 1637, Charles tried to impose Lordianism on Scotland. And in 1638, the Scots en masse

signed this thing called the Scottish National Covenant, where they basically said that they would protect their church, their kirk. It led to a plan by Charles to invade Scotland and it all went terribly badly wrong. So Charles does the obvious thing here. He calls another parliament. And having had the short parliament for, he now goes on a parliamentary bender. It's called the long parliament.

He can't get enough. Toussaint, how long is the long parliament? I'm going to go with two years. That's a very sensible guess. It's 20 years. 20 years? What? This guy is so random. I wouldn't know where... If I was a parliamentarian, I just wouldn't know where I stand with him. Do you know what I mean? I just want clarity from Charles. I feel like he's like, are you into me? Are you not? Like, you keep calling me up and then you keep breaking up with me. Like, come on, like what's our relationship status here? 20 years. Wow. In fairness, he was dead for half of that. So, you know, I mean, John, it's a technicality,

right? The parliament is never dissolved because the king is executed. But you know that we're jumping ahead, but that's why it's called the long parliament. Is that fair? Yeah, but also he can't dissolve it because he needs money. They also then passed an act called the Triennial Act, which is terribly important, which says parliament must sit every three years. And if it doesn't, if the king doesn't call it, then leading kind of lawyers and politicians can call it anyway. And that is a massive constitutional revolution because previously Parliament had always been called by the King, that was the only way it could be called, and now they're saying Parliament

is permanent and it can be called even if the King doesn't. Good on Parliament. Yeah, they found their self-worth after all that being messed about and actually, you know, good, I'm glad. Yeah, so we now have a parliamentarian sort of step forward, you know, because often people will assume that Cromwell will be kind of important at this phase, but Cromwell isn't really in the picture yet. The person who steps forward to be sort of leader of parliament a bit is called John Pym, is that right?

Yeah, I mean, Cromwell is basically a backbench MP from Cambridge. He's virtually, you know, with very, very little significance at all. Pym is this kind of long-standing, incredibly politically savvy guy. He's incredibly clever, he's incredibly sophisticated and has this kind of group of MPs and peers who support him and want to reform the state. Pym starts to unpick Charles' policies. He goes after ship money, which was that inland coastal thing. He goes after the Star Chamber, which is how Charles had crushed the media. He goes after the High Commission. He goes after crucifixes and images in the churches. So King Charles was under huge pressure from Pym and from Parliament in general, and he

was now relying on a new adviser called Thomas Wentworth, the Earl of Stratford, who was out in Ireland. And he tried to recall Wentworth back to London, Parliament found out about it, they intercepted him, they accused him of treason and they forced the King to sign the death warrant and Stratford was executed. Yeah, so after the execution of Stratford, I mean literally the day of the execution of Stratford, Charles met with his negotiators from Scotland and they said he's surprisingly cheery for someone who's just had his lead advisor beheaded. And the reason was that Charles in the summer of 1641 had decided to go to Scotland and try and win power there. And to do that, he engaged in plotting to try and have his enemies arrested and possibly killed. Meanwhile, in

Ireland, which of course had been subject to British colonial rule for decades now, was suddenly kind of bubbling up into rebellion. And one of the kind of immediate issues was that Stratford had created this army of Irish Catholics, and then he'd been beheaded and the army was left with nothing to do. So essentially, it just kind of sat Catholics, and then he'd been beheaded and the army was left with nothing to do. So essentially it just kind of sat there. And then these people became, these disbanded soldiers became very, very angry and that kind of fed into a rebellion. And in October 1641, it all kind of explodes with this plot to take Dublin Castle, which is betrayed, and then a huge uprising in Ulster, which quickly gets out of hand. And there are reports of massacres,

really quite nasty bloodshed. And some of them are true, but also they're massively exaggerated by the English press. And that then creates a really kind of tense situation going into the end of 1641. And this is one of the reasons we don't call it the English Civil War because Ireland is a huge part of it, Scotland's a huge part of it. Unfortunately Wales just gets sucked into England, sorry Wales. So we get the grand remonstrance, do you know what that is Toussaint? It sounds a bit like a dance that the couples on Strictly would do like week nine, you know, like kind of like Blackpool week, you know, because it's quite technical and it's a lot of hip action to it, you know what I mean? Like the Grand Remonstrance. It just sounds really nice to say as well,

Grand Remonstrance. It's just a really nice name to say. But it's not, John, it's much more serious than that and the music isn't nearly as jolly. Well, so it's basically a big document with 204 clauses. It's huge, which basically says what was wrong with Charles's rule, what we've done about it, and how we're good, and what we still need to do about it. And essentially the kind of implication is that because Charles's government was so bad,

we as parliament need to take control over that government. We need to have control over the appointment of government officers. So people like the Lord Treasurer, all those kinds of things. And that's the implication. It's hugely, hugely controversial. MPs sit up until 2am in the morning, debating it. Eventually it passes by a whisker because there's lots and lots of opposition to Pym in parliament by this point. And the really important thing I think about the Grand Remonstrance is it's a moment where it's clear that in parliament itself, in the House of Commons in particular, MPs are divided. There are royalists and there are parliamentarians and it's a split down the middle. That hadn't been the case in 1640. It had

been much more unified in opposition. So now we're getting closer to a situation where the political nation is divided and that can then lead to civil war. There's also a petition presented to Parliament which is 24 yards long. So it's about 20 metres long, it's got 15,000 signatures on it. It's against Catholic peers and bishops. And I love the idea of just unrolling this petition slowly in front of Parliament. It's so passive aggressive. We're getting daily clashes in parliament by this point. We've got riots, we've got protests, we've got people being shot, proper violence breaking out in Westminster and a fed up King Charles basically comes up with a plan. He's going to arrest Pym. He's going to accuse him of treason, he's presumably going to execute him and

why doesn't it work? Well, so the first thing that Charles did was he accused them publicly in the House of Lords on the 3rd of January, and he accused five MPs and one peer. And then at some point, he decides that the next day he will gather about sort of 500 armed cavaliers, march down to Westminster from Whitehall, and he will pull them out himself. He will have the five MPs arrested. And so that's what he did. But by the time he got there, they'd run away. The 4th of January, when this happened, was an utterly shocking moment for the country because Charles had basically taken an armed gang down to Parliament and threatened to arrest him. Now he hadn't done it. He hadn't massacred them. But they thought he was within a whisker of basically having loads of MPs shot. It was a hugely, hugely shocking moment for

the political nation. 1642, this is the year of the Civil War and in May of 42, we get the country... how does the country raise itself to war when it's the king that they're angry at? Well I think, I mean by this point it's much more split down the middle. I mean a lot of people are angry at the king but there's a lot of people who are still loyal. And basically what happens is that both sides say we need to defend ourselves from the other side. So Parliament raises the militia and does so without the assent of the king, which they've never done before. Whereas Charles used something called the commissions of array, which was sort

of medieval way of getting people to come out to slay and kill people who were attacking the king. And parliament had put together another document, which sounds a bit less like a ballroom dance, I reckon. The 19 propositions, which basically is another attempt to say, look, things have got bad. The way that we solve this is we get control of the government. We take it away from the king. We get control of the militia. And of course, there's no way that Charles would agree to this. And that's why he went to Nottingham and raised his standard on the 22nd of August. Why did he choose Nottingham to declare war? Is it because it already looks like a bit of a

battlefield or is it just like... No, I'm joking. I really like Nottingham. I've got a long history with Nottingham. I went to uni there, it's really good. Some fond memories, I got my first mugging was in Radford so I thought a lot of I really like Nottingham. I mean it's a fair point, why not? Is it just because it's in the middle of the country? Is that just a good, sensible... Yeah, and it was a great base for raising troops in the Midlands, and also possibly going over towards Wales where Charles knew that he had a lot of support. So on the fateful day 22nd of August 1642, having come to power in 1625, Charles I raised the royal standard at Nottingham and then apparently the wind blew it down, which was never a good sign, and thus declared the British Civil War, the English Civil War, whatever you want to call it, but he declared war.

The question I want to ask you, Toussaint, which side would you have sided with? Would you have gone king or parliament? Oh, that is a good question. I think before this I would have gone parliament because I'm a man of the people and also I'm just, I'm not a king. So, but to be honest, I'm not going to lie, parliament, they do seem a bit like Jobsworth's,

like a little bit like, you know what I mean? Like 2 a.m. grand remonstrance thing the 19 prop you know if I got that in my entry I'd be like mate do one please just chill out so I think I might go Charles you know I think I'm gonna I think I'm gonna I'm think I'm royalist yeah it just sounds a little bit more fun. Just a little bit, yeah. Okay, so you're a cavalier. Pop on your hat. Yeah, cavalier, yeah. Yeah, feather in the cap and off you go.

So there we go, so that's the end of the story. We're not gonna cover the actual wars itself. We're stopping here. But there we go, Toussaint has committed himself to the king's cause. The nuance window! ["The New Ones' Theme"] Okay, time now for the nuance window. This is where Toussaint and I sit quietly and read

seditious pamphlets for two minutes while Dr John tries not to topple over in the pulpits while gesticulating wildly about the British Civil Wars. You have two minutes, take it away Dr Healy. So, I mean, it's very easy when you're thinking about the British Civil Wars to think that it's basically all Charles I's fault and lots of historians think that's the case. I'm not saying he's a success by any stretch of the imagination. He toys with militarism, he toys with authoritarianism, he marches to parliament with an armed gang. He basically does mess things up quite significantly. There's nothing which says that he has to impose his prayer book on Scotland.

Nonetheless, I think one of the things that's really important to have in mind is the fact that there are these really kind of deep level problems in the country at the time. We talked a bit about inflation and all this kind of stuff, and that makes it much harder to run a government. We talked a little bit about social pressures, and again, that makes it much harder to rule the country.

But also, these kind of issues with parliament are based on really kind of longstanding ideological differences. There are people who believe the king can kind of do what he wants, and there are people who believe that the king is much more restricted. It's very, very hard to rule the country which thinks intelligently about these issues

and comes to different conclusions. And it's the same with religion. The country, it's complex the way it thinks about religion. There are Catholics, there are Puritans, there are Protestants in the middle. And it's very, very, very hard to run one country like that, let alone three. And remember that Scotland is more Protestant,

more Puritan than England, and Ireland is mostly Catholic. So it's very, very hard for Charles. So again, I think with the Civil War, it's really, really important not to just pin this on one hopeless guy. And I'm not saying he's not hopeless, but it's important to think of other things that are going on. He's dealt a very, very difficult hand. Oh boo hoo, so hard for the king. I mean, he was a king in the 17th century who thought he was chosen by God, so let's not go too heavy on the feel sorry for a bit. You know, I mean Now you've got sides. Yeah So you were fine for the king a minute ago what happens?

We've lost you Well, thank you so much to saw and and listen if you want more to saw it do check out our episode on the American Abolitionist Frederick Douglass who was an extraordinary man for more Stuart history We've got the episode on King James of course but also Nell Gwynn the 17th century actress and remember if you've enjoyed the podcast please leave a review, share the show with your friends, subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC sound so you never miss an episode but I've just got to say a big thank you to our guests in History Corner. We have the amazing Professor Jonathan Healy from the University of Oxford. Thank you John.

Thanks Greg. And in Comedy Corner we have the truly talented Toussaint Douglass. Thank you, John. Thanks, Greg. And in Comedy Corner, we have the truly talented Toussaint Douglas. Thank you, Toussaint. Thanks so much for having me again. So much fun. Thank you. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we untangle the complicated origins of another historical happening.

But for now, I'm off to go and petition my local council with a 24 yard long petition about potholes. They're gonna feel my petty Roth. Bye! Hello, Russell Kane here. I used to love British history, be proud of it. Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians, obviously, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor. That has become much more challenging, for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius.

The show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius. Do not catch up on BBC Sounds by searching Evil Genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed. But if like me you quite enjoy it, have a little search. Listen to Evil Genius with me, Russell Kane. Go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed.