You're Dead to Me - Medieval Christmas (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Greg Jenner and his guests Miles Jupp and Dr Eleanor Janega go back to the medieval Christmas for this one-off festive special. They look at the history and traditions that have thankfully continued through the ages, like gift-giving and stuffed wild boars (although numbers on stuffed wild boar we're told are down from previous years) and some that have mysteriously fallen off the radar completely, like masked carol singers and jellied eels.For the full-length version of this episode, please look further back in the feed.Research: Lloyd Roberts Script: Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Project Management: Siefe Miyo Edit Producer: Cornelius Mendez

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. All day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.

Hello, Greg here. Just popping in to say that this is a radio edit of the episode, which means it's a bit shorter and some of the naughty stuff has been removed, so it's a bit more appropriate for family listening. If you want to hear the full length versions, scroll down to the original episode further back in our feed. Thanks very much. Enjoy the show. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a BBC Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC Kids show Horrible Histories. We are back for a one-off festive special on the merriest of subject matters,

medieval Christmas. And to help us digest this feast of facts about the yuletides of yesteryear, I am joined by two very special guests. In History Corner, she lectures on medieval history at London School of Economics at the University of London and is an expert on late medieval sexuality, apocalyptic thought and propaganda. And you may have read her fun new illustrated book, The Middle Ages, A Graphic History. It's Dr. Eleanor Janager. Hello, Eleanor. How are you? Hi, Greg. I'm great. And in Comedy Corner, he's an actor, comedian, author and I think shoo-in for future national treasure. You'll have heard him on tons of radio, including as the host of the News Quiz,

and his list of screen credits is longer than The Hundred Years' War. Plus, he was in a Christmas movie, The Man Who Invented Christmas, so he knows about being jolly in the holly. It's Christmas cracker Miles Jupp. Welcome, Miles. Hello, thank you. Thank you for having me. As far as I'm aware, your dad was a vicar, maybe, or at least involved in faith in a pretty professional way. Is that fair? Yes, he profits from religion. He's not megabucks. He's retired now, but he's the United Reformed Church minister. It's quite a chilled out congregationalism, I suppose.

What's a Christmas like in the Jupp household? When I was little, I suppose, that would be a working day for Dad. It would be a sort of a busy day. I went to a choir school between the ages of 9 and 13, and it was in Windsor Castle. I was not a chorister but I was a cross-bearer and there was this thing that sounds sort of bonkers now but it was called the Christmas stay-on and the choristers would stay at school until Christmas day itself to sing services in St George's Chapel and so when I was maybe 13 I did the stay-on to be like an acolyte

and a cross-bearer. That felt very Christmassy. I think Christmas has felt less Christmassy ever since then. Eleanor, you've got Czech heritage. What is a Czech Christmas like? The traditional Czech Christmas, for example, is carp. So you get a carp and you keep it in your bathtub for a couple of days to kind of get the muddy taste out and it's swimming around and you eat it. And the thing about that is carp is rank. Sorry to all of my Czech brethren, but that's not something that my family was super huge on. But my family absolutely adores food, so we were often eating goose for Christmas.

Ooh. Is there a stage between the carp swimming in the bath and you eating it? Or do you scoop it out like a bear? Yeah, you've got to scoop it, and then there's some whacking. Oh, yeah. Okay.

So, what do you know? a bear yeah you kind of you got to scoop it and then there's some whacking oh yeah okay so what do you know that leads us on to the first segment of the podcast it's called the so what do you know this is where i have a guess of what our listeners might know about today's subject and we're talking about yuletide noel proper crimbo it's the national holiday in the uk and in many places around the world but what about its medieval heritage i think probably you're imagining grand feasting halls Papa Crimbo. It's the national holiday in the UK and in many places around the world. But what about its medieval heritage? I think probably you're imagining grand feasting halls decked with boughs of holly. Fa la la la la la la la. And I think maybe in your head it's a roast pig with an apple in its mouth. But what actually happened? And what's the best way to serve a

peacock? These are the questions we need to find out. So let's crack on. Dr. Eleanor, we're talking about Western Europe. We're not going to talk about the Greek Orthodox Christmas, which is different. But in terms of time, our Christmas is very specifically Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, Medieval Christmas. It's a whole slow burn period, isn't it? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So it begins really on Christmas itself and then lasts 12 days. So you start out on the 25th of December and then you're going up to Epiphany or Twelfth Night, which is on the 6th of January. So Jesus is theoretically born on Christmas Day and then people slowly gather at the manger. So by the time you get to the 6th of January, the three kings have shown up to give him presents. But it goes even past that, all the way

through January. And it leads up to what is called Candlemas. And that's on the 2nd of February, which marks the end of Christmas time. Wow. Miles, could you go to February 2nd? Can you commit to that kind of engagement with Christmas spirit? No, to me, I have to say that seems slightly long. You know, when you start thinking, when is the first bin collection after Christmas? That to me seems to be like the end of Christmas, I suppose. The big bin day. And Caldamus is very important in the Catholic liturgical calendar. What happens is that each parishioner marches into the church to attend mass, and they join a big procession holding a candle as an offering to the church. They'll be blessed

by the priests. And these are seen as almost a talisman against bad luck. So they protect against thunderstorms, they ward off demons, they ward off sickness. You would bring those specifically in if people are dying. In one way, we think of Epiphany as being the last of the 12 days of Christmas, but people keep all of their sort of Christmas decorations, their bits and bobs up through candlemas, which I tried last year because everything was so extraordinarily bleak during COVID. So I kept my tree up till candlemas. And then, yeah, I couldn't get council to take it in the end, had to ring up and pay to get it taken away. Ah, see this, Miles with his binde, he knew. This is the thing, binde is the sacred end of

the calendar. Miles, according to Wikipedia, Miles with his Binday. He knew. This is the thing. Binday is the sacred end of the calendar. Miles, according to Wikipedia, you studied divinity at university. That's correct. Which means that you are the closest thing we have to a pope on this podcast. So I'm going to ask you, according to Pope Benedict XVI, when was Jesus Christ born? I'm imagining he was fairly orthodox, round about zero something and day of the year maybe not the 25th of December or you maybe wouldn't be asking it

or is it like mastermind when it's a really long question with a simple answer it could be the 19th the official answer is we don't know the Pope's position is

we're not sure when they're having discussions in the Vatican they go well someone's got to call this one surely that's when the Pope goes all right I, I'll decide. Otherwise, we'll never get to bed. Let's call it the 25th of December. This was a conversation that happened a lot in the Middle Ages, the dating of the events in Christ's life. And it's Julius Sextus Africanus, who's an early church father, who declares that Christ had to be conceived on March 25th, which is the anniversary of God creating the earth. And therefore, scroll forward nine months, December 25th.

It's as good a date as any. That then gets us into a secondary issue, which is the year. Most scholars would tell you Jesus Christ was born in the year 4 or 6 BC. So four years before Christ or six years before Christ. Because of Herod. Herod was dead by Zerah. There is some truth to the fact that why Christmas happens in midwinter is that, well, people like to have festivals in midwinter. It's a bit dark. People would like to have some

form of party to stave that off. The Romans have their big holiday of Saturnalia. There is also the generalized Germanic idea of Yule, which is a, you know, quote-unquote pagan tradition or Callens. All of these are about feasting. They're about drinking. They're about hanging out with your friends, just having a very, very nice time in what would otherwise be physically a dark part of the year. What the church is really good at and adept at is taking on these ideas,

subsuming them into Christianity, and then kind of selling them back to people. Let's stop talking timekeeping. Let's start talking tinsel, or at least the medieval equivalent. Miles, what do you think is decking the halls? Stuff that's still green in December, your non-deciduous stuff. And you're putting that up all around to give you a sort of sense of protectiveness and it's celebrating the things that are currently alive, I guess. If we put stuff that's only just been clipped from a tree, it's less flammable, I suppose. I mean, am I being too sort of practical about it?

I think you're being wonderfully practical. But the word decking itself, decking obviously, you know, sort of thing you get at B&Q to uh hang out in the summer for your it's christmas why not get down to wicks yeah yeah i mean you're absolutely right it's basically it's holly and ivy and mistletoe possibly it's a spiritual thing too it's a symbol of eternal life which is of course a reference to christ again you do see some references for example there'll be a whole allegory about holly will they say, the red berries symbolize the blood of Jesus Christ. You know, the white berries of mistletoe, they symbolize the purity of the Virgin Mary. There's also some sort of pre-Christian connections specifically to mistletoe in old norse sagas how it connects necessarily to how we snog under mistletoe really unclear but i can tell you that it was in those halls it was

decking right right up there the whole time yes they had decked the halls but we weren't sure yes if they're snogging yet miles do you partake of a uh cheeky chocolate every morning with your advent calendar i do but our house is full of chocolate advent calendars because I have five children. But things like big tubs of sweets that you get, it's irresistible really, and yet it's only Christmas when you get a good fistful of them. While everyone else is opening presents, you think, I think I'll go and steal all the Malteser teasers. I don't want to describe it as every man for himself, but essentially.

We've got Advent calendars and they start on December the 1st. And that's not how it worked in the medieval world. They had Advent, of course, and any Christian listening now will know about Advent as a movable feast. Literally, what is the Advent period? So Advent, one calculates by saying it's got to be four Sundays before Christmas. We kind of associate Advent with Christmas itself. You know, it's this chocolate time, it's office parties. Exactly the opposite for medieval people. They're saying that this should be a time of fasting, real restraint. So you've got Advent,

which is like the Lent of Christmas, if you will. And then you get to Christmas, and then Christmas is when it's party time. How that actually pans out in terms of medieval people's lives really depends, though. If everybody did what the church says, then there would be no children born in the medieval period in September before the 25th. And that's just not the case now, is it? But you are meant to think of Advent as a preparatory time for Christmas, and you need to earn it through a spiritual process of contemplation. Is that how your Advent is, Miles? No, I think of Christmas as being sort of quite frantic. But also as a parent, it's quite sort of panicky. You look at the date and you think,

we haven't done anything yet, or we haven't, you know, get to the Christmas evening. We ought to put decorations decorations up shouldn't we or or whatever it is buy some presents from a local petrol station yeah yes exactly by the time it gets to Christmas day itself you're kind of sort of shattered by the experience that's why I mark Big Bin Day on the calendar in the kitchen because you think this is what it's all leading for this is what it will finally remember what this is all about 12 days of Christmas starts on Christmas runs up to the 6th of January. But we also have these other very important feast days in December, don't we? We've got the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on the 8th.

There's the Feast of St. Nicholas. One cannot stress enough how incredibly important the Feast of the Immaculate Conception is. Everyone sends to hear Immaculate Conception and they think that that's when, you know, God knocked Mary up. No, it's about Mary herself being born without original sin, which allows her to give birth to Jesus. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who the dogs are named after, he says that you need to be using Advent to think about the three comings of Christ. So Christ being born at Bethlehem, Christ in our hearts daily, and then also when Christ is going to come at the end of the world, which is, you know, like Miles' bin day, when he comes in to kind of clean everything up. So there's a lot of religious stuff that you're supposed to be doing and contemplating at the time.

And, you know, we still see a lot of hallmarks of this. So, you know, me as a Czech person, St. Nicholas Day is like a really, really big deal for us. of this. So you know me as a Czech person, St. Nicholas Day is like a really, really big deal for us. And so a Mikuláš, as we say, and you get stockings and you get presents in your shoe. And this is connected to St. Nicholas of Smyrna, who's considered a patron saint of children. So one of the things that he did while he was alive is there was a famine and somebody killed and was salting down three boys to eat like ham. And St. Nicholas busted in and was like, absolutely not. And he blessed them and brings them all back to life, uncures them.

And that, my friends, is how you become the patron saint of children. He cures them by uncuring them. There's a certain swagger to all of the saints in your telling of them. Not on my watch, dude. I mean, 24th of December is also sometimes known as the Feast of Adam and Eve. So you can have Adam and Eve Eve, I suppose, which would be the 23rd. But also another thing is the Yule log. Do you know what the Yule log was? Is it to do with creating heat? You choose your best log and burn it?

It's not far off, actually. We're not entirely sure if this is medieval, Eleanor. I mean, this is definitely later, and it's possibly medieval, isn't it? We certainly know that it's early modern. And who's to say what's medieval and early modern? It's vibes. It's vibes, everybody. But the Yule log, the idea is you go find your biggest possible log, and you bring it into your big grand fireplace. And it needs to be a log that is so large that it's going to be able to burn through all 12 days of Christmas. And it's considered bad luck to let the Yule log go out. And oftentimes what they will do is they'll keep a little bit of last year's Yule log and then they'll use it to light the new

Yule log. And so it's kind of like your Christmas tree from last year being your kindling, right? This is a big grand thing. And yeah, it's representative of the fact that everything's going to be warm and cozy and you're going to have a nice time during this cold part of the year. I was going to ask that about the practicalities of that. A log that is big enough to burn for 12 days would be gargantuan, wouldn't it? I mean, wood burns so quickly. This is the province, obviously, of the nobility. So you've got to be the sort of person who can command someone to go get a big old log, bring it in, and then you've got to be the sort of person who can command someone to go get a big old log bring it in and then you've got to have a fireplace that's going to you know accommodate that but

don't tell them that we keep we keep changing the logs when they're asleep and that sort of thing just just don't keep telling them it's the same log that is your job nobody speak of this but we're changing the logs it's like when your child's hamster dies and you you swap it out for another one and go same hamster darling it's the hamster. This hamster's been burning for ages. Yeah. And that brings me on to the nativity. Do we associate it with Francis of Assisi? Yeah.

So we think that St. Francis of Assisi in about 1223 is the one who came up with the idea of doing a live nativity scene. But nativity scenes are different in the medieval period, once again, because of how Christmas is different. So they would start out with having baby Jesus and Mary and Joseph in the stable, and then they would grow over time until eventually the magi show up on Epiphany. Basically, what that's connected to and why St. Francis came up with it, it was about emphasizing the poverty of Jesus. So underlining the fact that he was born in the stable, he's just like a normal poor person.

And instead of thinking about him as always, you know, a king, always a prince, always quite ennobled like the rest of the church. Because St. Francis was a CC, apostolic poverty, that was his thing. But also, Eleanor, we need to talk about what most people were doing in terms of entertainment. And that brings us on to mumming plays and Christmas plays, miracle plays. These are pretty full on, aren't they? Oh, absolutely. So there are mummers plays, which are kind of like a medieval pantomime. And that involves putting on masks and you go out into the streets and people's homes in order to do plays. They're pretty popular. And the reason we know that they're popular is there's a couple attempts to ban them.

So people would put on disguises and come into your house. Then the people in the house would have to guess who it was. And then if you don't guess who it is, then you have to give them booze and food. If you do guess who it is, then everyone just goes, Hey, haha, got you got you woo mumming uh and then they kind of like run off to the next house and they try it again we've got carolers who who basically break into your house and say hey who am i yeah give me booze that's that's fairly invasive yes that's a sort of protection racket sort of ring to it i have to say but then there's also what we call in English the miracle plays. And these are a little bit

more state. And it kind of starts off with priests and monks going on tours to do stage plays in the vernacular to let people know what generalized religious stories are. Eventually, the church is like, you are not actors. You are a priest. Please stop doing this. Because the priests are just so into it. And they're putting on these absolutely huge, elaborate productions. And they're like, guys, you're supposed to be doing mass. Knock this off. What kind of jumps up in that place are civic guilds who will do Christmas plays. So, you know, the pepperers or the mercers or whoever will say, haha, here is our Christmas production of various plays. What they are meant to do is put forward the idea of

misrule. So things being a bit topsy-turvy and the traditional hierarchies being suspended. It's kind of linked a little bit to plays about Adam and Eve at the time, because it's like, okay, well, Adam and Eve famously, you know, lived in a time before social norms, very naked. And, you know, I think that you will be unsurprised to learn that eventually the church was like, could you stop with the naked? This is getting a bit much,

but the spoiler alert, they did not stop. And with the sort of mumming and things, there's a community aspect to that, isn't there? The point of it is it's not a thing necessarily done by professional actors, that it is a thing done by the community or whatever. And if a whole load of priests want to put on a show i mean crikey why stop them i've never seen drag race but i imagine that's what

it's like we've also got king henry ii's favorite christmas entertainment he had a favourite jester. He was known as Roland the Farter. And his act was that he did one jump, one whistle and one fart every Christmas. And for that, he was rewarded with a very nice house in Suffolk. It's nice work if you can get it. Yeah. You know, like 20 years ago, people would say, you know, you don't make any money playing computer games to children, whatever. Now people do exactly that to do it. It's the sort of time. I don't think you're going to make a living out of farting, young man. Guess what? Good news, mum and dad.

I've just been awarded a stipend. I get grace and favour accommodation for one fart at Christmas. What did you say it was? The hop and a... One jump, one whistle, one fart. One church, one voice. Like the sort of early triple jump. Yes, exactly. The Jonathan Edwards of his day.

And we should also talk about caroling. In medieval times, caroling is a bit more raucous, really, Eleanor, isn't it? Yeah, basically, the entire story of Medieval Christmas is the church being like, can you tone it down a notch? And everyone's saying no. Caroling has almost nothing to do with singing from a medieval perspective, and it's more about dancing. So, you know, you'll see lots of little illustrations of people kind of like joining hands and having a little dance around, you know, maybe they've got a little deer head on. It's more like you go again, door to door, doing some dancing, maybe knock in the window, demand booze and dance back out again you know there's a lot a lot more petty crime involved in the medieval christmas traditions an idea of drunken intimidation i think is a christmas tradition carried into city centers to

this to this day isn't it we need to move on from the boozing to the feasting we're going to talk about food back in the medieval period what What is the kind of classic meal? So, I mean, from a perspective of what we really know a ton about, which is rich people stuff generally, one of the big centerpieces is the boar's head, often trotted out in really noble households. Rich people are extraordinarily into hunting, and in particular, they like to kill boars because it's really difficult. It's not just about eating the boar. It's also about this big form of display. So what you do is you take the boar's head. You then remove all of the skin.

You cook the boar's head, and then you kind of stuff it full of fruits, spices. And then you take the skin, boil it up, and put it back on over the top. Then you take some charcoal, you really rough it up, and you make it look like the boar is still alive. So you want to put like little hairs on there. It's like the equivalent of ladies doing their eyebrows now, right? You get some charcoal on. False lashes, yeah. Put some little sprigs of rosemary for tusks. That's very cute.

And then there's a big procession while it's brought out. Another huge one is peacock. And again, it's the same sort of thing. So you skin the bird with the feathers intact, right? Then you roast the peacock and then you reattach the skin over the top of it, stuffing it with, you know, whatever you can get your hands on that's nice and spicy. You know, maybe some apples, some currants, some raisins, as much cinnamon and ginger as you've got in town. And then you bring it out in a big display to put this full peacock on the table.

The defining thing of the peacock is the feathers. So if you take those away, you're just left with, well, what's this? This is just some sort of bird meat, isn't it? If you didn't have the feathers, you'd be like, well, what the hell are we eating here? Pe peacock twizzlers would be very disappointing wouldn't they the other main christmasy food i think would be a particularly soggy pie the reason that the pies are soggy is that the pie-ness is not what's important what they do is they take the dough

and make it into really interesting shapes so you may make a little duck or you make a little fish um so like say you can't afford a peacock maybe you can make a little peacock out of dough, right? So here the crust is just for show. And what it does is it contains just a feeling that you're going to then eat as sort of a stew. It's like the precursor to a mince pie that we have now. So there's a lot of meat, there's fruit, it's going to be really highly spiced. But you know, you might have then the meat in there be fish or eels. There's lot more fish and eel oh no oh yeah lovely bit of smoked eel served with the cold vodka i'm outnumbered by eel absolutely cracking breakfast yeah goodness me in terms of kings we've got in 1213 king john who's obviously notorious for magna carta but his

guests ate 400 head of pork 3 000 fowl 15 000, 15,000 herring, 10,000 eels, that's 10,000 too many, 100 pounds of almonds, 2 pounds of spices and 66 pounds of pepper. 66 pounds, that's imported from India. Are these career statistics or is this like one Christmas? One period, this is one big shop. They've gone down to the big shop and they've got in, have you got eels? Yeah, we've got eels. How many? I need 10,000.

I'll have to look out back. The other thing we do need to talk about, and this is one of my favourite things. Have you ever heard of boy bishops, Miles? Yeah. Were they sort of just pre-Britpop? No, I've not heard of the boy bishops. For the liturgy on St. Nicholas's Day, you choose a boy bishop. And the boy bishops are usually chosen from the choir boys.

Miles, you almost made it in. Not that one. He's an acolyte. Put him down. They kind of then preside over the cathedral from at the end of services on St. John the Evangelist's Day on the 27th to Mass on the Feast of the Evangelist's Day on the 27th to Mass on the Feast of the Holy Innocents on the 28th. So the Feast of the Holy Innocents, that celebrates all the children who died. So sometimes they deliver a sermon, and then at the same time, the roles are reversed. So then the clergy scoot off to the choir. Boy bishops, though, that's a real sweet job. It's not just giving a sermon and wearing a hat. You also get gifts, you get money. Is it sort of enforced as well? I mean,

can you opt out of it or you just suddenly one day you're made to be... Your childhood is basically stolen because you've been appointed unexpectedly a bishop. Or can Steve come out and play football? Steve can't play football actually, he's a bishop. He's actually got to go to a diocesan lunch. Oh, right. Okay, fair enough. The idea is that there's a Christian message behind all of this. It's called the exaltation of the humble. So the idea is that, you know, at the end of the world, in God's eyes, we're all equal. So the mighty can fall in importance, the innocent are raised above. And it's also about, again, the undoing of the slaughter of the firstborn by Herod when

Jesus was born. Eventually, the practice is brought to an end by Henry VIII, one of our least fun kings. And this is probably because of the break from Rome and Catholicism. But I love the idea of a small boy suddenly being given a really serious job and saying, right, go on, get on with it. It feels like the plot of a Hallmark Christmas movie. Could you stay behind after class, please, Jenna? I've had an email. You're now the transport minister. The Nuance Window!

Time now for The Nuance Window. This is where Miles and I have a little bit of eggnog, a bit of mulled wine. We have a sit down, we have a listen, and Eleanor gets two minutes to tell us anything we need to know about the medieval Christmas and how we should think about it. So without much further ado, Dr. Eleanor, can we have the nuance window, please? We've kind of given specifics about what ideally a Christmas is supposed to look like, you know, on the part of the church, on the part of royal people. And we have to also take this with a grain of salt at all times.

We know more about rich people, right? Because rich people are the ones that stuff gets written about. Rich people are the ones who are literate. So a lot of the time, what we're talking about when we talk about traditions and festivals like this is a very, very small segment of the population who get to enjoy Christmas in this particular way. In the medieval period, and indeed into the early modern period, 80% of all Europeans are actually peasants. And they're not getting a boar's head. That's not how it works for them. You know, they might have a pie. They're definitely getting drunk and they're reveling and, you know, they are being mummers and things like that, but they are not going to be part of the Yule log sort of style of life.

But another thing that I think that people should really take from medieval Christmas, and which I'm really passionate about myself, is this idea of thinking about Christmas as a long period of time. Because I think that what we tend to do is we conflict Advent with Christmas, which again, it is not. And by the time we hit Christmas, you get to Boxing Day and everyone is like, okay, throw it all out, put the tree on the street, start over, we're done here. And that leads to a lot of disappointment on Christmas Day itself. Start thinking about Christmas as at least the 12 days, my friends. Just let it flow.

Let it happen to you. And thinking of it that way also means that it opens you up to a lot more chilled out celebrations. It doesn't put so much pressure on Christmas Day to be quote unquote perfect. And it means that you can get together with friends over a long period of time and have a really, really great time. And I think the minute you start thinking about things in that medieval way, Christmas as a long, relaxed period, then that just brings the stress level down. And I think that we could all agree, not just Miles, that we could use a little bit of that around Christmas. Beautiful. Thank you. Some excellent advice. Let's all enjoy Christmas forever. Eternal Christmas.

I'm afraid that's all we have time for today. So all that's left is to thank our brilliant guests in History Corner, the wonderful Dr. Eleanor Janega from LSE, and in Comedy Corner, the excellent Miles Jupp. And to you, lovely listener, make sure to join us next time as we take a sleigh ride into a different region of global history with two different little helpers. But for now, I'm off to go and bake 10,000 undercooked eel pies and then throw them in the bin. Bye!

Hello, it's Chris Van Tulleken here. My brother Zand. That's me. I'm here too. And I are back. Now, in series two of our Radio 4 podcast, A Thorough Examination, we are on a mission to find out whether or not people can change. It's called Can I Change?

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