What links zebras to the Second World War? What connects partying to mental illness in Victorian Britain? What ties the bed to the expansion of the British Empire? What’s the history of hair? Toilets? Oranges? Zombies? Paperclips?
Well, they are all topics that have been explored by Professor James Daybell and Dr Sam Willis in their Histories of the Unexpected podcast series, which has rapidly gained a national following since its launch in September.
Backed by Dan Snow’s History Hit Network, the series of over 30 - 40 minute shows, recorded as a conversation between the two friends and colleagues, were among the top 15 most downloaded podcasts on iTunes at launch, and have regularly been inside the top 40 since.
“People may think there’s nothing unexpected about the past, or about history,” says James, Professor of Early Modern English History, and Director of the Arts Institute at the University. “But this series adopts a new approach to exploring our past arguing that, in fact, everything has a history – it is just about unpicking it. It’s cultural history meets comparative history, a fusion of object biography let us say, with a form of history that requires you to make connections temporally and geographically.”
It was Sam, an Honorary Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, and an award-winning BBC TV presenter, who first came up with the idea of a history podcast, and in conversation with James, the concept of a series of alternative histories began to take shape. Very quickly they had brainstormed a list of 150 potential topics that covered everything from objects and animals to themes and phrases.
Sam says: “To give an example of how these topics arise, we were talking about the Olympics and we began to consider where the phrase ‘blood, sweat and tears’ had come from. What does it represent? So we’ve focused a podcast on each one of those three.”
“We pick four topics and then we go off to research them on our own,” adds James, “We don’t tell each other what we’re doing so when it comes to recording the programme, there is a genuine sense of mystery about what is going to happen. We introduce the topic via a freewheeling conversation around how you might think about an unexpected history. Usually we have prepared two or three case studies, but the rest is improvisation and seeing where the story goes.”
Having experimented with various locations, the duo now record their podcasts in a soundproof studio using professional equipment used by Sam in his previous television work – including programmes such as Operation Grand Canyon, Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History, Castles and The Silk Road. It’s an intensive process in which they shut themselves away from family to do four or five episodes back-to-back, each in a single take.
“One of the most memorable podcasts was on the history of the box,” recalls James. “I’d had a student come up to me with this velvet covered box that had been found on a skip, and inside there were 500 letters dating back to World War II, which transformed it into an archive.”
“I then showed James a picture that I had found of someone lying in a box, holding a rope attached to a bell” adds Sam. ”It was a safety coffin, something that came into existence during the 18th century, and it’s fair to say that the conversation took a left-field turn at that point.”
