You're Dead to Me - Christmas with Charles Dickens (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Emily Bell and Mike Wozniak to find out what Christmas was like with Charles Dickens.We take a walk through the many Christmases of the renowned Victorian author. From elephants walking on ice to the family Christmas punch recipe, we take a closer look at the factors that may have influenced some of his most famous works and unpick what the phrase Dickensian has come to mean over the years.Written by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Researcher: Jessica White Project Management: Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Steve Hankey

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Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the BBC Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And in the immortal words of Noddy Holder, it's Christmas. So we're back briefly to give you a one off seasonal stocking filler dedicated to Mr. Christmas himself, not Noddy Holder. No, the famous Victorian author Charles Dickens. And today we're gonna be looking at how he celebrated Christmas throughout his life. So it's not a conventional biography, this is a Christmas biography. And joining me on this jolly jaunt through Christmas' past are two very special guests.

In History Corner, she's a lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Leeds, specialising in 19th century literature. She's the editor of the Dickensian, the oldest academic journal in Dickens' studies. It's Dr Emily Bell. Hi Emily, welcome to the podcast and your surname is actually quite Christmassy. Hello, I'm feeling appropriately festive and it's a pleasure to be here. And in Comedy Corner, he's a comedian, actor, podcaster and globally renowned moustache ambassador. You'll have seen him in Taskmaster, Man Down, Horrible Histories and The Moonstone. It's Mike Wozniak. Welcome Mike. Hello, Merry Christmas one and all. Lovely to have you back Mike. Are you feeling Christmassy? Are you feeling Dickensian?

I'm feeling very Christmassy. I think feeling Christmassy and feeling Dickensian, they're sort of a parcel of each other, aren't they? Everyone's sort of nobly strutting around town with their chins high up in the air, bellowing Merry Christmas, one and all, and all that kind of thing. So, what do you know?

We start, as ever, with the So What Do You Know? This is where I try and guess what our listener might know about today's subject, and it's Charles Dickens. You know about Charles Dickens, but in terms of Dickens and Christmas specifically, I'm guessing it is the novel, A Christmas Carol, that you're going to know. It features the miserly Scrooge who gets ghosted in triplicate into changing his ways. It's been adapted into countless theatre productions, TV dramas, radio broadcasts, graphic novels, ballets, operas, and not even counting the 30-plus films.

But what about the man himself, the big Chuck D? How did he experience Christmas in his lifetime? Let's find out. Right then. Charles John Huffam Dickens, good name, was born on the 7th of February, 1812, in which town, Mike? I think you know it quite well. He was born in Portsmouth.

I know that because I grew up in Portsmouth. He was. And that's a Portsmouth thing. That was us. That was. We did that. We made a Dickens. What did you do, Southampton? Emily, why Portsmouth? What's the family situation?

So Dickens has quite a big family, yeah, and it's a fairly poor family. They move around a lot. He's born in Portsmouth, but they go to London, they go to Chatham. His dad was John Dickens, who was a payroll clerk in the Royal Navy. His mum was Elizabeth Dickens. He had an older sister whose name was Fanny and six younger siblings. We get the older Dickens remembering back to his childhood and his remembrances are of toys, Emily. He's slightly terrified of his toys. Yeah, absolutely. So we do know a bit about Charles's childhood Christmases, mostly from autobiographical elements in his later stories and journalism. So yeah, we know that Dickens had toys,

and he does describe some of them as quite terrifying. One toy had lobster eyes that bore down onto him. Another one was a cardboard man whose legs could be pulled up right around his neck, making him, in Dickens' words, ghastly and not a creature to be alone with. Mike, have you ever been traumatised by your childhood toys? I was traumatised by my childhood wardrobe. The way the wood was cut, there was a very sort of ghoulish kind of Edvard Munchian type face in the door that sort of faced me every night

and it would sort of catch the moonlight off the window through the curtains and I didn't get a lot of sleep with a small child by any means. Charles Dickens' childhood was not full of deprivation. He had toys even if they were harrowing and scary and also in the immortal words of the song baby it was cold outside because we're talking here about a mini ice age. His first eight Christmases were white Christmases. It was the coldest decade since the 1690s. So the snow likely left an impression on him as lots of his Christmas stories later include that kind of extremely cold weather that we wish that we would get now, that

snowy Christmas. And it was so icy during Dickens's early years that the River Thames froze in February of 1814 and London celebrated its final Thames Frost Fair that year. So what they would do is roll out tents and vendors onto the ice, do drinking, dancing, bowling, and there was even an elephant being led across the river just below Blackfriars Bridge. Did they try anything before the elephant? It's a bit of a gambit, isn't it? It's like, we know this is just frozen water, so let's get the heaviest thing we can find in the zoo. And was it just the success that was documented

or were there failures as well that didn't get written down? There might be a whole heap of elephant skeletons at the bottom of the Thames to this day. What else do we know about little Charlie's early years, Emily? They moved to Chatham in the early 1820s and they're still struggling with money. In 1823, things get worse and they move to Gower Street in London. And just before Christmas, Dickens' father, John, is arrested and sent to Marshallsea Debtors Prison. And this was a really traumatising part of young Charles's life because he was sent to work in Warren's Blacking Warehouse.

And Warren's Blacking was a shoe polish factory and he was earning six shillings a week. He had to stay with another family while his dad, his mum and his siblings were all living in Marshallsea debtors prison. I think I did know that his dad ended up in a debtors jail. I didn't realise his whole family did. It's quite a weight on the shoulders. This is in December, so this would be his first Christmas as an earning man, aged 12 or so. So pretty daunting. But I'm going to race through the next highlights of Charles' life. Charles does get a brief education.

He gets a job as a legal clerk, aged 15. He absolutely hates it. He then becomes a talented parliamentary stenographer. Copperfield style. Exactly that. And at this point, he decides he's going to be a writer. And his first bit of writing is called A Dinner at Poplar Walk. We all know it well.

Tumbleweed. And it's 1833. Is that a novel? What is that? A short story? What is that? It's sort of a straddling short story and sketch. Is that a sort of Boz era type sketch or something?

Well identified, Mike. So tell us about the Boz era then. All I understood was when he first started writing, he wrote sketches under this alias of Boz. I've never read a single one of them, I have to admit. I've never read a Boz. I'm Boz ignorant. The sketches are inspired by 18th century satirical writing and their kind of comic views into life. And they're not really what you think of Dickens in terms of the gritty social reform. He's trying out what it means to be a writer in the vein of the stuff that he loved to read as a kid. And there's a Christmas entry, isn't there?

1835, I think he has a little Christmas festivities article. It's about eating turkey and presents and Christmas pudding and storytelling and speeches. He also then gets married the following year to Catherine Hogarth. So 1836, Charles Dickens is newly wedded to Catherine Hogarth. She's now Catherine Dickens. And he's even cranked out his debut novel, which is, Mike, do you know? The Pickwick Papers. It is. The Pickwick Papers. It's a series of jolly travel adventures starring Samuel Pickwick,

a posh chap who presides over a little Pickwick club. It's a huge seller. It, I think, shifts 400,000 copies. But we also have a lovely letter from 1836 that gives us an insight into charles dickens's christmas day he writes to his friend thomas beard my dear beard we propose giving the turkey until four tomorrow in order that he may be well done i arrived home at one o'clock this morning dead drunk and was put to bed by my loving missus we're just going to chapman's sister's quadrille party a type of dance for which you may imagine i feel remarkably disposed so he's a party animal, Mike. But in 1837, Charles and Catherine have their first child, little Charlie Dickens.

The first of, do you know how many children they have? I'm not, I'm going to say five. I don't know. Double it. No, ten? Chucky D. His quiver was full and he didn't care who knew it. So, ten children. Does that mean the Christmases get progressively less rowdy? Not at all. Yeah, the Dickens family go hard.

Just to be confusing, he named his first child Charles. Charlie was born on Twelfth Night, so they always had a big party around that time. We know a lot about the Dickens family Christmas through his daughter Mary, who was called Mamie. Mamie wrote a personal memoir called My Father As I Recall Him, with the help of her aunt Georgina Hogarth. Christmas was always a time in which our home was looked forward to with eagerness and delight. And to my father, it was a time dearer than any other part of the year, I think. She also tells us that he would desert work for a week, and he would perform magic tricks, do musical and theatrical performances with his kids and his family and friends,

spend weeks learning dances for Christmas and take the kids to a toy shop in Hoban on Christmas Eve. And as well as filling their home at Gad's Hill with guests, they kept a cottage in the village reserved for the use of the bachelor members of the holiday. It's like a sort of Airbnb, but for bachelors. It's great. It's, you know, sort of get all the single lads, put them in the cottage in the village, and then they can come over, away from the kids. But, I mean, Mike, in terms of your Christmases,

you're a dad, children running around, song and dance, theatre, magic tricks. Are you the life and soul of the party? The kids are crucial, right? That's the whole point in our household. It's not a massive family. There'll be mine and my sister's children, there's four children, a couple of dogs. That's plenty. We don't invite any bachelors to our Christmas. That's why I draw the line. That's too high risk. All that booze swelling around, all that gravy. It's a mess. Yeah. But we do have from 1847, not a Christmas story,

But we do have from 1847, not a Christmas story, but we do have a Dickens punch recipe for Christmas party. Mike, you are a renowned voiceover artist. Would you like to give us your finest Nigella voice for this Christmas recipe for punch? Peel into a very common basin, which may be broken in case of accident without damage to the owner's piece or pocket, the rinds of three lemons cut very thin. Add a double handful of lump sugar, a good measure, a pint of good old rum, and a large wine glass of good old brandy. If it not be a large claret glass, say two. Set this on fire. Let it burn three or four minutes at least, stirring it from time to time. Then extinguish it. Squeeze in the juice of the three lemons and add a quart of boiling water stir the whole well cover it up for five minutes and stir again lovely beautifully done mike i mean i'm a teetotaler but i feel like i want to drink

this there's another one another punch called negus that shows up a lot in dickens's novels it was very very boozy and the victorians would give it to kids. So at Christmas parties, Dickens' kids are almost certainly drinking quite boozy punch. Dickens then has another big hit. It's a novel by the name of Oliver Twist in 1838. Then you get Nicholas Nickleby, followed by The Old Curiosity Shop in 1840. So it's going quite well. Then he has his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge. Not going so well at that point.

No one has read. And then he's off to America, 1842. And does he have a nice time stateside, Emily? So the 1840s is when he's really starting to get famous. And in a letter to a friend, he writes, I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go and see nothing that I want to see. If I turn into the street, I'm followed by a multitude.

So he's properly, properly famous in the States. Catherine is pregnant with their fifth child by this point. He needs a big hit to pay the bills. And so in 1843, he scribbles a little novella and it is called, Mike? Is this Christmas Carol time, is it? It is a Christmas Carol. And Emily, after a bumpy old childhood, he's not just scared of falling back into poverty himself. He has a social conscience. Absolutely. Dickens is very interested in the poor and the kind of plight of the poor. He visited Cornish tin mines earlier in that year where he saw children labouring in terrible conditions.

A parliamentary report of the Children's Employment Commission had revealed many of the horrifying realities of industrialisation. Dickens actually considered writing a pamphlet in response to that and thank God he didn't. He decided that fiction could be more powerful dickens's difficult upbringing and his mixed class background meant he engaged with social issues in a very personally informed way so this social commentary was rare and impactful and again thank god it was in fiction and not in a pamphlet no the muppets christmas pamphlet doesn't really have the same ring to it does it i love a A Christmas Carol, Mike,

because I think it does two things extremely well. It's quite spooky. It's also really funny. And that's very hard to pull off. Well, simply, he's always funny, isn't he, Dickens? They're genuinely terrifying ghosts, aren't they? The way the first one is described, the ghost of Christmas past,

it shifts in its shape, doesn't it? And it's all quite freaky, really. Christmas present looks avuncular and is dressed in green. He's very cheerful about it, but he keeps throwing Scrooge's own words back at him. So he sort of abounds with cheerfulness and yet suddenly will turn... This laser-directed savagery that he turns on Scrooge. It's great. Yeah, it's fearsome stuff. And it comes at this sort of very interesting time.

We did a previous episode about the Victorian Christmas, and indeed we get crackers, Christmas trees, stockings, cards, they all arrive at this point. And so A Christmas Carol is both reflecting this sudden upsurge in interest in Christmas, and it's driving that interest. A Christmas Carol is a huge catalyst for getting people more into Christmas and getting into that charity element as well. So it's a really powerful book. Is it a big success commercially, Emily?

Yeah, it's an absolutely enormous success. And you've got to bear in mind as well, he wrote it in six weeks to have it published in time for Christmas. Oh, don't tell me that. Yeah, Dickens' productivity is terrifying. It's published on the 19th of December and it's sold out by Christmas Eve and that's 6,000 copies. Dickens spent his own money making it a beautiful book as well. It had colour illustrations by John Leach. It was red brown cloth embossed with gold, green endpapers, title page decorated in red and green. But Dickens only got £230 when he expected £1,000 from it because

he didn't realise how much he was paying for the production. But it was hugely successful. And by the end of 1844, so a year later, there have been 13 editions. And Dickens would later perform it on stage 127 times. And having found his Christmas golden goose, he realises, hang on a minute, I'm the Christmas novelist guy. But obviously, listeners to this podcast will probably not know any other Dickens Christmas stories, but there are some. So we'll start in 1844 with The Chimes. What's it about, Emily? So it follows Trotty Vec, which is another great Dickensian name, I think. Trotty Vec.

Trotty Vec, an elderly porter who follows the bells of a church as he thinks they're speaking to him. He discovers the spirits of the bells and their goblin attendants who reprimand him for losing faith in man's destiny to improve. He's told that actually he fell from the tower during his climb and he's now dead. But at the end of the book, Trotty finds himself awakening at home as if from a dream as the bells ring in the new year. So it's very, it's a wonderful life in that way. So still time, another last chance, basically. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's a Christmas car in that way. So still time, another last chance, basically. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's a Christmas carol with goblins.

I do remember reading one that had goblins. It was about a grave digger, I seem to remember. They do a similar thing to him with Scrooge and they tell him he's a terrible bloke and they take him into a cavern and sort of rough him up a bit. So Mike's absolutely right. There's an earlier Christmas story. Oh!

Yeah, from the Pickwick Papers called The Goblins Who Stole the Sexton. So he likes the goblins and he's been thinking about these Christmas stories for a while. It's all reassuring that I haven't just completely invented some goblins. So we've had the chimes and now we move on to the next story for the following year, 1845. It's called The Cricket on the Hearth and it stars another brilliantly named character called John Peerybingle who lives with his young wife Dot, their baby boy and their nanny Tilly Slowboy. What happens in The Cricket in the Hearth, Emily? So it features a cricket who chirps on the hearth and acts as a kind of guardian angel to the family. One day a mysterious elderly stranger comes to visit the Peerybingles and their life intersects with Caleb Plummer, a poor toy maker employed by the miserly Mr Tackleton.

I'm not going to spoil all the details, but scandal, intrigue and obviously a miserly heart melted by appropriate festive cheer. It sounds like a Christmas carol with added Pinocchio elements. Yeah, why not? Yeah. It's not a sequel, it's just, yeah, same thing with a bit of jazzle. Exactly. Give the people what they want. Let's move on then from The Cricket on the Hearth, which is quite successful and is quite a big theatrical success, isn't it, Emily?

Yeah. So although we don't really read it today, it quickly went through two editions and had huge theatrical success with 17 different theatres in London during the Christmas period of 1845 putting it on. Dickens sometimes found plays of his work difficult to watch, once being so embarrassed by a production of Oliver Twist that he lay down on the floor of his box in the middle of the first act and stayed there until the end of the play. But he also had a very nifty marketing trick for this one where he gave his friend, the playwright Albert Smith,

the cricket on the hearth in advance so that the theatrical version could open on the same day that it was published oh nice brand synergy so this is basically dickens in his sort of spice girl era where he's getting christmas number one year after year he's making hay isn't he is he's racking up the christmas hits and then you get his next christmas book in 1846 called the battle of life mike what's the plot of The Battle of Life? It doesn't even sound very Dickensian either, does it? It doesn't really. It sounds like a sort of Powell and Pressburger movie, doesn't it? Or a very, very, very dodgy soap opera that lasted for six episodes.

Emily, what's The Battle of Life? Yeah, it's interesting you say it's not very Dickensian because this is the only one with no supernatural elements in it. So the protagonist is Dr. Jedler and he finds life a joke and thinks human cares and issues are trivial. But he does have a change of heart because of his two daughters who hide their love for their mutual friend Alfred so that the other can have him. In terms of the theatrical side, Albert Smith again opens a dramatisation on publication day. And the plays in this case were actually more successful than the book. The Battle of Life doesn't have the supernatural elements. We really associate Dickens with those kind of ghostly moral lessons. Is this a new technique he's pioneered? Is he borrowing someone else's tradition? So Christmas ghost stories are probably a very old tradition. And interest rose in response to industrialization the rise of science new technologies early photography might capture accidental ghostly images of blurry double

exposures so there's a nice meeting of kind of modern issues and old forms in an era of mesmerism which dickens was really interested in spiritualism ghost hunting and some scholars have even suggested that leaking gas lamps as kind of part of the Victorian city meant people were hallucinating more due to carbon monoxide poisoning. Mike, where do we stand on the carbon monoxide poisoning good for literature debate? Sounds like it was more than worth it, I'd say. Poison those Victorians so we get some great ideas and some absolutely great novels. Thanks everybody. Dickens does not write a Christmas book in 1847.

He's too busy. 1848's. It's another Christmas book. This one is called The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain. It's a bit more spooky again. I'm going to say it, Mike. It sure does sound a lot like Christmas Carol.

Well, if it ain't broke, right? Emily, what's the plot? So it's a bit different. It's about an unhappy chemistry professor called Redlaw who's haunted by his own ghostly double. The ghost says he can take away Redlaw's painful memories and he accepts. But instead of feeling happy, he feels sad and angry, but doesn't know why. So we have the nice moral lesson that pain serves a purpose as it allows us to forgive and grow as people. And Redlaw understands this and becomes a happier, kinder and more humble person.

So in 1849, we get David Copperfield. This was meant to be an autobiography, but he chickens out, makes it a fictional book. And then in 1850, you get Household Words. He's kind of launching a magazine. And it's got a Christmas edition every year. The 1851 edition has a lovely piece called What Christmas Is to a Bunch of People, which I love as a title. It's so un-Victorian. But it's actually a really lovely piece. And it's about how different people experience Christmas in the family. And I thought maybe, Mike, you'd like to give us your finest Dickensian performance of The Father. The father of the family rubs his hands with a genial smile

when Christmas comes. And yet he now and then raises one finger to the calculating organ of his cranium with rather a thoughtful air, suggestive of certain bills and taxes which his resolved shall not weigh upon his mind. Why should they? He will get through his Christmas bills somehow or other, as he has done before. What if he does see half a dozen more grey hairs displaying themselves, as though to remind him that another year has passed, and a certain line or two in his face does look a trifle deeper than when he had last observed it?

Meanwhile he stands, thrumming a pleased but impatient tattoo with his fingers upon the banisters, and inhaling every now and then a savoury whiff of sweet herbs rising up from the kitchen. Ah, beautifully done. Thank you so much, Mike. He's a happy little chap, isn't he? But the little sense there of the grey hairs coming, the wrinkles deepening, the bills, the worries.

I get this guy. I get where he's coming from. He's going to put all that into tomorrow's box. Tomorrow's me can sort that out. He's going to have a good time. He's got some chestnuts to eat. But then in 1851, we get a different essay the following year, and it's called What Christmas Is As We Grow Older. And it's much more profoundly moving and sad. I suppose, Emily, the question always with Dickens is, is this coming from his personal life? Yeah, so Dickens did experience a lot of trauma in his life. We talked about his childhood. At this moment of writing,

he's recently lost his baby daughter, Dora, his father, John, and his beloved older sister, Fanny, and her son, Henry, who was possibly the inspiration for Tiny Tim. And all of that happens within three years. Yeah, it's definitely a tough time for him. You can see the sadness infused into his writing here. And in the 1850s, Dickens is back to writing novels. Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit. And in 1857, the Christmas bubble properly bursts because our 45-year-old Charlie meets an 18-year-old actress called Ellen Ternan and things get disappointingly predictable.

Yeah, it's not a great look and it's a problem for his reputation as this kind of moral figure as well. He ruthlessly separates from Catherine in 1858. She has to move out of the house. She doesn't see most of her children again until after Dickens dies. Wow. And this is kind of spurred by having a bracelet sent to her that was meant for Ellen.

Oh, that's the plot of Love Actually. Hang on a minute. Love Actually is a Christmas, it's a Christmas Dickens story. What? We can love his literature, but he's an absolute monster to her. In the 1860s, we get A Tale of Two Cities.

One of his Christmas stories rejigged. We get another new magazine called All the Year Round. Then we get his masterpiece, Great Expectations. And Christmas 1867, he's off to America again. And what's this one for, Emily?

So he's going and he's reading parts of his works. On Christmas Eve of that year, he reads from the Pickwick Papers and A Christmas Carol in Boston. On Christmas Day, he's travelling to New York and he speaks at Steinway Hall on Boxing Day. And again, he's overworking himself. He starts to get ill. He's suffering from overwork.

So he's away from home, away from his family, away from Ellen and working hard that Christmas. Okay, so 1869, in the immortal words of George Michael, is his last Christmas. And he sends a very moving and beautifully scripted Christmas letter to his tour manager, George Dolby. And you know what it says, Mike? I've no idea. I've no idea. not just i don't know love again tour again yeah it's it's it's a very beautiful and moving message and it says emily where is that turkey it has not arrived all capitals 11 exclamation marks every word on a different line where is that turkey dolby had promised to send a huge christmas turkey but it

was damaged by fire breaking out on the train and never arrived along with a lot of people's christmas presents and hampers and gifts on that train it's a classic christmas nightmare isn't it as we've sort of alluded to really dickens is in poor health even in 67 and and sadly he passes away he's just sort of run out of energy and dies pretty young, really. That is the end of our conversation, which means it's time for the nuance window. The nuance window! This is where Emily gets to talk for two whole uninterrupted minutes

while Mike and I go and sit back and mull it over. Nicely done. So, Emily, you have two minutes. Let's have a nuance window, please. I want to essentially rant about how we know what we know about Dickens and why we think what we think about him. So you probably have a specific, usually beardy Dickens-y image in your mind, whether you've read his work or not. Dickens' daughter Katie wrote in a letter to the playwright George Bernard Shaw, if you could make the public understand that my father was not a joyous,

jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch, you would greatly oblige me. We have the sort of vision of Dickens as the man who invented Christmas and also as a kind of literary institution that we foist on unimpressed school children. And yet prior to the 1970s or thereabouts, Dickens wasn't generally considered worthy of academic study in the first place. He was always popularly read, but not always the big canonical writer that he is today. The myth-making process around Dickens goes right back to Dickens crafting his own image

very deliberately. A lot of what we've discussed about how Dickens felt about his own Christmases comes from fiction and journalism he wrote and accounts by his children like Mamie and friends like George Dolby who are all trying to protect or promote a particular image of him too. That's the beginning of the Dickens industry, a whole myth-making process that sought to promote him as a social reformer with a strong moral character, especially in light of the treatment of his wife. And we can see how successful this has been today by focusing on the word Dickensian, which we've all used quite a lot in this episode. But what does it mean? I've seen it in the news just this week, and it can mean bad working conditions, a Dickensian Christmas, Dickensian characters in court cases. All the associations we have with the word

Dickensian are elements of Dickens's character and writing that he and others around him sought to promote and it leaves out other elements of his life both good and bad. Dickensian Christmases do not involve unhappy marriages generally for example. So take details about Dickens's life and where that information comes from with a grain of salt and every time you see the word Dickensian, you'll notice it's got a kind of different cultural baggage attached to it, depending on the context. But it's still impressive to me that he's one of the few authors to become adjectives. Yeah, beautifully done. Thank you so much.

But all that's left for me is to say a huge festive thank you to our guests in History Corner, our Dickensian Christmas connoisseur, Dr Emily Bell from the University of Leeds. Thank you, Emily. Thank you. And pod bless us, everyone, for a podcast joke. Love it. Love it.

And in Comedy Corner, our maestro of merriment, Mr Mike Wozniak. Thank you, Mike. Thank you. Thanks for having me and happy Christmas. And to you, lovely listener, join us next time as we ignite the brandy on another historical pudding of the past. But for now, I'm off to go and see where my turkey is.

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