Formerly Known as The Rights of Fans
Walking around Dungeness nuclear power station, I was astonished to discover hundreds of people still working at a site that stopped generating electricity years ago. What followed was a fascinating investigation into the extraordinary costs, decades of dismantling and radioactive waste management. Nuclear power produces enormous amounts of electricity, but what happens when the lights finally go out?
Dungeness is a place where the peculiar becomes perfectly normal, including old railway carriages transformed into extraordinary homes. Staying in one of these beautifully converted relics has got me thinking about their remarkable history, the poverty of their original occupants and how yesterday’s makeshift accommodation has become today’s expensive architectural statement. A fascinating story of survival, reinvention and gentrification.
There can be few places as bleak or fascinating as Dungeness, where abandoned railway carriages once provided shelter for families with little money. Their history echoes the desperate poverty of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Today, these humble refuges have become luxurious holiday homes, an extraordinary transformation from places of necessity into playgrounds for the comfortably affluent.
A drunken aristocrat, a Leicestershire market town and an extraordinary quantity of red paint. In 1837, the notorious Mad Marquis and his companions embarked on a spectacular evening of vandalism that may have given us one of Britain's best-loved expressions. But how much of the story is historical fact, and how much has become colourful folklore over the years?
Today, reading someone the Riot Act usually means a stern telling-off from a parent, teacher or furious football manager. But the original expression carried a rather more terrifying threat. Under an eighteenth-century British law, an official could order a crowd to disperse, and anyone refusing to obey could face the gallows. It was no idle warning either.
In 1977, The Clash discovered that signing to CBS Records meant surrendering the very freedom they thought they'd secured. When the label released Remote Control without their permission, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones responded with three minutes of magnificent fury. Complete Control was punk rock revenge at its finest, with one delicious irony: CBS had to release and sell it.
London, 1977. At just 21, Belinda Strong is making clothes for punk royalty and fighting for garment workers' rights. But when her father's illness threatens everything, a lucrative fashion contract offers salvation. What happens when the price of success is surrendering the very principles she lives by?
Thirty years of poisonous put-downs, family humiliation and Christmas dinners from hell. Trudy Palmer has endured her mother-in-law, nicknamed Napalm, long enough. But this Christmas, an unexpected guest witnesses the carnage, and the festive celebrations take a spectacular turn.
The Clash attacked the establishment with Remote Control, only to discover their own record company was controlling them. Their furious response, Complete Control, exposed the music industry's hypocrisy. The ultimate punk irony? CBS happily released the song condemning itself.
From nineteenth-century British soldiers stranded in India to everyday British conversation, the expression ‘going doolally’ has a fascinating history. Discover how boredom, illness and military slang gave us one of our most wonderfully peculiar descriptions of eccentric behaviour.
Trevor was the undisputed pub philosopher, holding court with his cronies and declaring himself an expert on everything. But when he unexpectedly falls for Petunia, a mixed-race barmaid, his deeply ingrained prejudices threaten to expose the man behind the bluster.
A prestigious antiques fair at the Royal Albert Hall, a successful dealer and her reluctant husband, and an eccentric heiress with an extraordinary talent for getting under people's skin. As a disappointing weekend unfolds, an increasingly exasperated Stuart discovers that dealing with difficult customers requires considerably more patience than he possesses.