Episodios

  • Metal Detectors: What goes 'beep beep' all over the land and is typically British? The gentle army of treasure seekers hoping to find an Anglo-Saxon hoard!

    Metal Detectors: What goes 'beep beep' all over the land and is typically British? The gentle army of treasure seekers hoping to find an Anglo-Saxon hoard!
    Dec 5 2025
    In which Suzanne unearths the story of a major British hobby and its relationship with landscape and the romance of the past. Why are the British obsessed with metal detecting? What is their Arthurian code of practice? What are portable antiquities? Who are the night hawkers? What does all this reveal about British attitudes to liberty, in stark contrast to France? Includes helpful pointers about buying the best metal detector, and Alexander Graham Bell as an unexpected star of the show!

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    1 h y 3 m
  • French Politicians and Clairvoyants: The French worship Reason and critical thinking, don't they? So why do Presidents (and mayors), who serve the French Republic, love the occult so much?

    French Politicians and Clairvoyants: The French worship Reason and critical thinking, don't they? So why do Presidents (and mayors), who serve the French Republic, love the occult so much?
    Nov 28 2025

    Muriel tackles an awkward truth: the French may love rigour and rationality – France is the nation of Descartes, after all – but they are also susceptible to the allure of psychics, the alignment of the stars, and angels calling on the phone from beyond. How has this survived the advent of the Enlightenment and the Revolution? And what does it mean in terms of our relationship to super-forecasting and superstition, Suzanne wonders.


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    53 m
  • The British Tax Year: Silent legacy of the past; wrinkle in time; further proof of British eccentricity!

    The British Tax Year: Silent legacy of the past; wrinkle in time; further proof of British eccentricity!
    Nov 21 2025
    In which Suzanne investigates profound differences between our two cultures by asking why the British tax year is not, like in France, aligned onto the calendar year. The answers, which astonish Muriel, are deeply rooted in Britain's relationship to the Continent. It's a story of mathematics and astrology, Popes, bishops and archbishops, Catholicism and the Reformation, and, of course, Acts of Parliament, which opens a vertiginous crack in time. Elizabeth I, John Dee and Isaac Newton all guest star.

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    57 m
  • Greatest Play Ever! Britain vs France, part 2. The Bald Prima Donna - Zany Avant-Garde on the Paris Left Bank

    Greatest Play Ever! Britain vs France, part 2. The Bald Prima Donna - Zany Avant-Garde on the Paris Left Bank
    Nov 14 2025
    In the second half of our theatrical diptych, Muriel tells Suzanne about the 'atomic bomb' of the French theatre, an experimental Absurdist masterpiece by Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco that became a classic of the French stage. It has neither plot nor psychology – only a lot of uneasy comic momentum, poking fun at the bourgeoisie. But how has it lasted so long? And why is it about British people?

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    52 m
  • Greatest Play Ever! Britain vs France, part 1. The Mousetrap - Agatha Christie's Not So Cosy West End Whodunnit

    Greatest Play Ever! Britain vs France, part 1. The Mousetrap - Agatha Christie's Not So Cosy West End Whodunnit
    Nov 7 2025
    Suzanne and Muriel consider the brilliance, longevity and significance of Agatha Christie's murder mystery play The Mousetrap, which has been running since 1952. Set in a country house isolated by bad weather, the play is a model of distinctly British sweet-and-sour eruption of violence in a cosy setting, and replete with red herrings and eccentric characters. The police inspector arrives on skis! It also taps into wider postwar unease: Christie evokes a newly unstable world, a shifting class structure and an air of paranoid watchfulness. But can Muriel and Suzanne guess the culprit? Can you?

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    53 m
  • The Paris Catacombs: palace of death, gigantic memento mori and a way of solving the problem of excess bones

    The Paris Catacombs: palace of death, gigantic memento mori and a way of solving the problem of excess bones
    Oct 31 2025
    It's Halloween and Muriel encourages Suzanne to think about the Gallic bones displayed and staged in the Paris Catacombs in a neo-classical early-19th-century mise-en-scène at once macabre and meditative. We also discover a contemporary underground scene of fun-loving secret explorers and hear about the time Suzanne dug up a medieval monk in Hampshire.

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    1 h y 2 m
  • The Real Making of Britain and France: A myth-busting, panoramic trip through time and space with our guest, the historian Graham Robb!

    The Real Making of Britain and France: A myth-busting, panoramic trip through time and space with our guest, the historian Graham Robb!
    Oct 24 2025
    Following on from his book The Discovery of France, Graham Robb has produced another fascinating work of exploration, The Discovery of Britain. Graham's observations are rooted in extensive travel all over both countries on a Victorian invention, the bicycle, reconnecting with old pathways, landscapes and forgotten people. He shares with Suzanne and Muriel what he discovered about nomads and tribes, hedgerows and standing stones, Ptlolemaic maps and the corporal punishment of saints with nettles. How did France gradually colonise itself into a centralised nation? How many beacons were needed to communicate from Cornwall to Sunderland? And what can you learn at ground level about two countries where so much of the past is visible in front of you?

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    58 m
  • Rhyming Slang: A distinctly British and creative code that's definitely not 'brown bread'

    Rhyming Slang: A distinctly British and creative code that's definitely not 'brown bread'
    Oct 17 2025
    Would you Adam and Eve it? Suzanne tutors her 'old China' Muriel in a coded language that is full of wit, inventions and surprises. Rooted in old street cant and secret words identified in the 1850s, rhyming slang expresses the earthiness and supple playfulness inherent in the ways in which the British use their language. Does a French equivalent exist? And what's rhyming slang for Garlic & Pearls?

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    58 m