History of the Telephone: 150th anniversary special

25:34On the one hand, wow, you can send voices down the line. That's amazing. The other part is, so what do we do with this? This doesn't, for example, solve the problem of being able to send even more information even more quickly than telegraph lines. Because voices aren't actually that efficient as means of quick communication. I mean, all those dot, dot, dot, dash, dash, dash, dash, dash is a lot quicker, a lot more efficient than saying, Mr. Watson. Come here, I need you. That's their issue. They're like, oh, great. So now we have to listen to you yap on. Is this what we just want to get to the information?

26:16I don't know. WhatsApp voice messages, they're basically mini podcast now. I've got friends who leave five minute messages. It's like, come on, just send a text. This is such a male reaction to the opportunity to chat. I'm like, what are you talking about? How nice. OK, so they think inefficient. So it's not quite clear what this amazing technological novelty is for. In 1876, the Americans hold their centennial exhibition in Philadelphia. Bell's invention is on show there. It wins prizes. Judges go, this is the most amazing thing we've ever seen. But it's still kind of not clear what it's for.

26:53So Bell goes campaigning. And he offers his patent to the Western Union Telegraph Company, a very powerful company that have a monopoly on the telegraph. And he says to them, I will give you my technology for$100 ,000. and they say, no, there's no future in this, which is now studied in business schools as one of the worst decisions in business history. It's legendary. Wow, love that. So Bell had to go on his own, right? So he hasn't got the big money. He's got his father-in-law, Gardner Hubbard. Yes, so they set up a Bell telephone company, which did okay. I mean, it's changed its name at one point to, what was it now?

27:32Yes, AT &T. Yeah. Oh, OK. I've heard of them. They're still there. And Bell started doing actually what all successful 19th century inventors do. Spectacle. Showmanship. He goes and gives lectures, shows telephones off on stage, plays music down the telephone, playing the harp in New York. And the punters in Boston can listen to the harp being played. Cool. Or if it's in the UK, playing God Save the Queen. Queen, yeah.

28:08So making a spectacle out of it, making a show out of it. Because he's ready to sell it to them? He wants this to go into communities, homes, towns, businesses. He doesn't want it to be just like an engineering thing. Absolutely. But is he in that kind of position? Does he have a load of telephone sat around that he's ready to sell? Or is he hyping before he has production? Oh, he's Elon Musking. Yeah, I guess I'm wondering, yeah, like where is he in this? He's doing a bit of that. I mean, he's certainly hyping before he has production. And if somebody rolls up at the end of one of these lectures and said, OK, right, I'll buy one.

28:44Yeah. It would be, well, very well, sir, you may join the waiting list. Because after all, with all of these things, you don't just need to buy the apparatus. You don't just need to buy the telephone. there's a whole infrastructure, there's a whole network that goes along with getting the telephone to work, to be a thing. But they can build on the existing telegraph cabling system across the America, right? Yes, they have an advantage there. But in lots of places those cables are there so they would need to connect those cables to individual houses, individual businesses. And you don't have a telegraph in your room.

29:23You don't even have a telegraph by and large in your office unless you're a very large outfit. There are telegraph offices and you send your boy to the telegraph office with a message and then it's... We've all got a boy for that. Of course, of course. A one son of sorts, sure. And it's sent down a line. So it needs to be connected. Yeah. So there has to be a new infrastructure. So yes, there does need to be money behind all of this. And as part of Bell's promo tour, he goes on tour. In fact, in 1877, he puts a ring on it his bell ring, ding, ding, there we go. He marries Mabel. They go on honeymoon.

30:00And when she's told what the honeymoon is, he's like, a promotional tour of Britain, darling. And off they go to Britain. How would you feel if your partner married you and then immediately said, honeymoon actually is, we're off to an expo. You know, go and sell the products I make. I can't fathom either happening. So I'm a bit like, hang on. I'm the wrong person to ask because I'm a performer. I'm like, I get it. Listen, I'll book some gigs. Let's make this, let's get the show on the road. I mean we're hell so I don't think that I'm a good example if I'm Mabel I'm like are you kidding me what the hell and also like there's got to be an extra salt in the wind when you're if you're deaf how effective is the telephone at this point for you not very useful and it's now my honeymoon oh come on I'd be livid but they did get to meet the Queen or at least you get to meet lots of her sirs you get to meet important influential people and you have to meet the Queen I would be raging.

30:54A true Irish woman, yes. Yeah, I'd be like, are you kidding me? Hey, I'm Welsh, I'm with you. And also the post office in England, and England and Wales I'm assuming, becomes the agent for Bell's telephone as well. Yes, which is also quite handy because by this point the telegraph network in the UK has been nationalised and it's the post office that runs it. So having an in at the post office is quite a lot of help when you're trying to set up a new kind of communication network.

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33:38Watch the free trial now at Britbox.com. There are technical problems, right? Buzzy interference, noisy. There's an issue of crossed wires, which is quite a literal thing. The wires get crossed. Yes, literally. If wires brush up against each other. So if two wires touch each other. Then the messages might get confused, go in different directions. Reception with early telephones really isn't that good. It's buzzy, it's crackly. There are problems of kind of being able to sort of discriminate noise from the background. There is the whole business of you talking to the operator and then the operator putting you through.

34:20There's also the party line, isn't there? Yes. So a shared phone line. Though, mind you, party lines lasted for quite a long time. I can remember as a child in the 1970s. Sorry, what is the party line? We're on a party line. You share the line with some of your neighbours. So if they're on the phone, you can't be on the phone. Can you hear what they're saying? Yeah. Bring it back. Bring it back. I was going to ask gently, Catherine, would you be interested in eavesdropping? And your reaction tells me perhaps. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't mind. Bring it back. Are you joking? Bring it back. That's fantastic.

34:57Does anyone ever get off the phone? I'd be like, bring my meals to me. Who needs podcasts? I'm just listening in to the neighbours. Marriott number nine is, I'm making another call. Wow, that's exciting. I think it features quite a lot in things like early Agatha Christie novels. I was going to say, it's a big thing in comedy movies in the 1930s, like scruple comedies, people being on the wrong line to each other. The nosy neighbour is spending all of their time on the phone, literally listening on to... Curious neighbour, please, man, let's be respectful. So it's called the party line because you're sharing it with other parties.

35:30But for you, it'd be a party line because it's a party. It's an all-day party. So Bell's patent gave him 17 years, but then that lapsed and then other businesses came in and started offering their own phone services. You suddenly got rival phone companies. You've got first mover advantage, but then obviously everyone else gets to sort of hop onto the system that's already there. And so you subscribe to a service and there's no such thing as bills. You pay however much it is for the service. A dream. I mean, something like Netflix. You give them your subscription. Do you subscribe to phone, Catherine?

36:05I'd love to subscribe to Party Phone. Sign me up in a beautiful wooden box. I'd love it. I'd love it. From 1878, this is a brand new invention, the switchboard. Why is this important? As more and more people get phones, as more and more people are on the network, then connecting people gets more difficult, more important, more complicated. So switchboards are a way of, to a degree, automating the business of taking somebody's end and plugging it into somebody else's socket. OK, you have been watching the Gay Hockey Show. I was going to say, this is very erotic. Oh, hey, phones and telephone girls.

36:52Yeah, sure. No less. Yeah, yeah. Operating offices, switchboards are entirely staffed by women. Before they started employing young women as telephone operators, they did try young men. After all, that was the history. Telegraph operators from the mid-1840s have typically been young men, and they were typically a pretty raucous crew. and that kind of telegraph culture didn't really seem to work in the telephone exchange. Shocking. But women are, you'll be astonished to know, docile, well-mannered, they don't misbehave, they don't gossip, they don't do anything. They don't gossip. I'm like, this is a track, what are you doing then?

37:39They just sit there and they're obedient. They do as they're told. They're trusted, which is quite a rare thing in the 19th century for women to be given this level of trust in a commercial operation, actually. Yes, I'm not being serious for once. This is an important new kind of employment for middle-class young women. Yeah, it's huge. This is an independent job, something that allows degrees of financial independence and feeds into that kind of late Victorian, wow, technology of the future. I mean it makes women like that part of that kind of technological culture. And they get a charming nickname.

38:20Do you know what the nickname is? Call Girls. I want a better name. You're not far off. That's slightly inappropriate probably. The Hello Girls. Hello Girls. Yeah. I love that. That's from the 1880s. They're the Hello Girls because they greet you and then they plug you in to whoever you want to talk to. And initially you'd just say, can you just put my friend Jim on? And they'd be like, sure. and then obviously after a while there's too many gyms and then they have to start asking you for actual details of the number. Do they start asking for a phone number or do they start asking for a house address?

38:52It's more a connection to a number, I suppose, isn't it? So at the very beginning, you would literally call up the operator and say, I'd like to talk to Mr Jones and since there'd be only one Mr Jones there, then that'd be relatively straightforward. As the phone proliferates, then you start getting people using addresses, connect me to 45 Edgeware Terrace or wherever. And then you would end up with something like a contemporary situation where you're asking for a specific number, connect me to London 123. And the spread of the phone is really interesting. It spreads very quickly in America. So you get a very quick uptake in the States.

39:32It's really sort of popular in the cities. By 1882, there's a telephone for every 200 people in Chicago, which is amazing. In London, it's every 3 ,000 people. And obviously it spreads much slower in the rural regions, much slower in the countryside. I think the UK or England gets sort of fairly early on, but Europe's quite slow to pick up the phone. But it's interesting is that you still get these shared party lines, but you also get businesses putting phones into their banks, into hotels. So people might use the phone. You might pop into a bank to use a phone. So they've become quite important, the phone, quite early on.

40:02And by 1902, there are 81 ,000 pay phones in the USA, which is a lot of pay phones. How many? 81 ,000 payphones. Wow. 1902. I mean, we're within a quarter of a century of the invention of the thing. They're everywhere. Now, I said the hello girls, which obviously is a charming thing. Do you know where the word hello comes from? No. No. So it's the official telephone greeting. Okay. And it's not the one that Alexander Graham Bell wanted. Okay. Do you know what he wanted? No. I said at the beginning of the show. Ahoy, hoy. Yeah. Are you joking? He wanted... What if you're in a bad mood? A hoi hoi.

40:44I'm very angry. A hoi hoi. No, what are you talking about? Yeah, he wanted a hoi hoi. And what was hello? His reaction when he heard he didn't get it. Hell. Oh. That's great. Thank you. That's really good. So where did hello come from? He wanted a hoi hoi. What a weird, rich boy. That's so like... Ewan, why do we say hello on the telephone? Because it's one of the most popular words on the planet, which is remarkable because it's quite a newish word. It's a newish word. I mean, like a hoi hoi. It's distinct. Hello. It's a word that hopefully is going to kind of cut through. It's Thomas Edison's idea, if I remember right.

41:24It's Edison who suggests that hello would certainly be better than a hoi hoi as a form of greeting when you're communicating. But they're both hailing words, aren't they? A hoi hoi is what you say to a sailor when you're hailing them. Yeah, it feels very both. And in America, hello was a hailing word. Hello! Yes. So they're communicating at a distance. Yeah, because it carries. If you were shouting across a field, hello would carry. Yeah. But in the UK, hello was a phrase of surprise. If I bumped into you on holiday, if the two of us were in the same cafe in Italy, we'd be like, hello, what are you doing here?

41:58So it was a word that existed already. Just sort of to mask your disappointment at seeing a local on your one bloody holiday. And he bo-heart gets everywhere. It took us eight days on the boat. Hello. Hello. I like it. So hello becomes the official word because of Edison. He says it's got good, nice, clear. It cuts through the noise on the interference and it becomes one of the most popular words on the planet. And the hello girls are so named. Can you imagine, though, if we did a hoi hoi instead? No. The Lionel Richie song. A hoi hoi. Is it me you're looking for? Just so many. I just can't bear to think of how many boat shoes we'd have to be wearing.

42:34I just think, oh, it's just, I'm very glad it's not. OK. Just think the hoi hoi girls doesn't quite check the same. The hoi hoi girls. I can imagine the Wonderbra advert from the 90s. Ahoy hoi boys. I mean, just so much we could do with it. Come on, I'm going to bring it, I'm bringing it back. I'm bringing it back. Ahoy hoi magazine. So we've talked about the Hello Girls and the fact that they were trusted with employment. This is a really important thing. There is a gender shift here as well. And you've also got this notion of managerial roles. There's a woman called Catherine Schmidt who introduces training methods to make sure that women have good diction in her area.

43:08So there's really interesting things happening there. There are social anxieties as well about Hello Girls working in these jobs. People are concerned about their safety, but also their function or their performance. Yes. They're young, single women. They're going to be routinely as part of their job in contact with men. Are men going to flirt with them? Are men going to be inappropriate? Are men going to try to chat them up? Yes, absolutely they will. Yes, there are limited hours, but they finish working relatively late, so concerns about unaccompanied young women walking home late at night, things like that.

43:43Love that the solution then, as it is now, is like, maybe the women should stay home rather than the men not being awful. Yes. Yes, great. A tale as old as time. Yes, isn't it just? There's also some fun stuff about them growing their hair or combing their hair over their ears or something. Concerns about, you know, women, their hair's too long. They can't hear properly. Stuff like that. Wow. I'd love to be surprised that men didn't know anything about women's bodies, but that also remains constant. Actually, there are plenty of concerns that were raised by this new technology arriving into people's homes and into towns and cities and buildings.

44:19So, Catherine, I've got a mini quiz for you here. These are seven things the Victorians feared might happen to society because of the telephone. Six are true. One I've made up. Can you guess which one I've made up? Let's go. Did people fear that women might commit adultery from home with the new technology of the phone? Men maybe would not stand up when phoning a woman. Were people fearing that there might be phone calls happening between people wearing their pyjamas? There might be fears of lower class people phoning up posh people and harassing them on the phone. There might be fears that businessmen would hog the phone lines and women couldn't use the phone because it was so busy.

44:55There could be fears that telephones would invade domestic privacy. And of course, casual telephone speech, little idle chit-chat, would destroy face-to-face manners and etiquette. So which of these complaints, worries, concerns was not a Victorian anxiety about the phone? They all seem like pretty Victorian anxieties. Perhaps I'm inclined towards pajama? Is that maybe? What's your thinking behind that? The pajamas are the sitting down one. They just seem even more parody of themselves. But they all seem like they'd be worried about it. I'm going to go sitting down. OK. Well, I'm afraid you are wrong.

45:32They were worried. They thought, but if men are sitting down on the phone, that's wildly inappropriate. They should stand to speak to a woman. Oh, for goodness. And the pyjamas thing too. What if they weren't wearing trousers on the phone? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that track. No, the one that was a lie, I said businessmen would hog the phone lines and women wouldn't be able to get on the phone. Exact opposite problem. Their fear was that women would gossip on the phones and men couldn't do business, Catherine. Well, if the resource is finite, that's a reasonable concern, I think. But OK, fair enough.

46:01That's the made up one. Good for you. I mean, you and actually the operators, they had the power to just end a call, right? They could say, sorry, someone needs a line. Yes. They could indeed. Oh, like our dads in the 90s. That's enough. Now I need the telephone. I mean, they're always there. Yes, I mean, there are a limited number of lines. if you're banging on for too long, then yes, the operator might well say, sorry, your time's up. Somebody else needs to talk to the Prime Minister now. Can they hear you? Yes. They can hear every conversation? I believe so. The operators would be able to hear what was happening, right?

46:35Yes, pretty much. Yeah. They can break in. Yeah. When you're using a pay phone, for example, you pay for a certain amount of time. Your two minutes is up. Do you want to put more money in? So they would interject into your conversation. Just going back to those anxieties, Catherine, just very quickly, I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? We once again have a lot of anxieties about the phone, about etiquette, about how it's changing young people, et cetera, et cetera. It's interesting how new technologies scare us. Oh, yeah, we always have panic, don't we? And the panic is always that we will reveal our true selves to be ourselves.

47:12It's always like, what if we behave like we probably will? and you're like, well, I don't know that it's a symptom more other than a cough. Like, which one is it? But also they could be speaking privately without being policed by society, right? Like they might actually have the opportunity to relax or to be intimate without being observed. And in France, the great fear is that women are having literally oral sex on the phone. That is the big number one concern, is that women will cheat on their husbands on the phone. As if that just started in France. That's a peak French concern. I love that.

47:43By the Edwardian era, by the early 1900s, Is the novelty of the phone wearing off or is it an exponential uptake? I wouldn't say it's quite an exponential uptake, but it becomes more and more normal to have a phone. Well, I mean, if you're a middle class, upper middle class household, predominantly initially in London, then in other large cities, then gradually the phone networks kind of spread out. I mean, you'd have telephone exchanges in towns. Yeah. So it's then the case that more and more of the country are getting hooked up through telephone networks. And I mean, by the 1920s, 40 % of American houses had a telephone, which is remarkable in the 1920s.

48:29You know, this is really, really kind of widespread. The UK is slightly further behind, but the lines were nationalised in the UK in 1912, so just before the First World War. And is that an important decision? Yes, I mean, it's as with the nationalisation of the Telegraph, a generation or so earlier, a recognition to a large extent that this was an asset that couldn't really be trusted to private enterprise. Right. That this mattered sufficiently to be a matter of governmental control, governmental oversight. Remember. 1912. Wait, so who's in government who's doing all this nationalisation? Well, I definitely know this off the top of my head.

49:12It's just right there. It's Asquith with the Liberal government. But it's a really important question. And funny how you reacted. I did exactly the same. My brain immediately went, why are we letting all the tech billionaires run everything? But, you know, that's where we are now. Anyway, I mean, we've done a huge amount of history there, Catherine. Only 25 years, really, we crammed it in, but actually a huge story. Is there anything particularly that surprised you or stood out? I guess that it, from invention to the ubiquity of its use is such a short period of time that there aren't any major hiccups.

49:44It seems like that it kind of seems to go quite smoothly. It's function. There isn't, it doesn't seem like it became impossible at a certain distance. It seemed to just grow exponentially. I think the other thing I find shocking is, yeah, I guess the presumption of nationalisation is still like, oh, gosh. But I think it's also, I had never really thought of it as a part of the feminist movement or of like, you know, empowering women. But I guess it makes total sense that it was a space through which they acquired employment. Yeah. And good employment. They unionised quite quickly. They got higher wages quite quickly.

50:15It's one of those rare jobs in history where like everyone went, we do need this. We'll have to pay these women, unfortunately. Wow. Am I getting excited for 1912? Yeah, exactly. Wow. Nostalgia, phone nostalgia. Imagine that. The Nuance Window.

50:37Well, it's been a fascinating chat, but it is time now for The Nuance Window. This is the part of the show where Catherine and I quietly eavesdrop on the party line for two minutes while Professor Yuan tells us something we need to know about the history of the early telephone. My stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Professor Morris. We've been talking about the telephone invented in 1876. I want to tell you about another invention that took place almost at the same time as the telephone. It's revealing and it's important because it tells us a lot, I think, about what the telephone meant to the Victorians.

51:13Almost as soon as the telephone was invented, people started talking about this other new invention that hadn't quite been invented yet, but was going to be invented really honest gov any second now. This was the Telectroscope. The Telectroscope essentially was going to be telephone with vision. So you get wonderful cartoons in punch of, you know, Matron Pater sitting in their Victorian parlour, talking to their kids, playing tennis somewhere far out in the colonies. And it's always on the cusp of being invented. Throughout the 80s, throughout the 90s, it's always just about to be invented. And obviously it never is.

51:55But what I think is fascinating about that is what it shows us about the telephone and what the telephone meant. It's the future. I mean, that's what all of those sorts of technologies meant to the Victorians. because they were starting to think about the future and understand the future basically the way that we do. It's that destination we're going to get to with big tech, with technology, things like the telephone. And a telescope was the next big thing on their horizon. That was going to be the technological future. Amazing. Thank you so much. Two minutes on the spot. I mean, fantastic. They basically invented Zoom.

52:31All I could think about as you were talking was The Simpsons. where in the future they always had televisions that you could see each other on and that was like 100 years later in the 90s of us being like, get real. But like, yeah, that's so interesting. Never happened. Yeah, it's very steampunk, isn't it? There's a real aesthetic to that. I mean, again, I mean, you're imagining the people in the past thought about the future the way we do. Yeah. And they didn't really. No. I mean, not before the 19th century. How do we know that? What do you mean? Well, because what does Isaac Newton think the future is going to hold?

53:03Isaac Newton thinks the future is going to hold Armageddon. Yeah. That's it. I mean, in between Newton and Armageddon, things are going to pretty much be... You get stories where people are going to the moon, say, in the 17th century. They go to the moon in chariots... Yeah. Pulled by geese. Drawn by geese or swans or whatever. Yeah, but I... Nobody thinks you can do that. Yeah. These are utopian tales. Yeah. The moon is utopian. The Victorians invent the future that we think of as a future, as a concept. It's really interesting. We'll do an episode on it one day because it's really good stuff.

53:32Okay. Because my brain is immediately going, well, no, the people who wrote things down imagine the future. As you were telling me, they imagined it, but loads of people didn't get to. No, that's fair. It's fair. We'll do it one day. Interesting, yes. Sorry. It's all right. So what do you know now?

53:51It's time for the So What Do You Know Now. This is our quickfire quiz for Catherine to see how much she has remembered today. You have been jotting down notes. Yes. Will they help me? I've got 10 questions for you. Okay. We've covered a lot of history, so let's see how you go. So, question one. What form of electrical long-distance communication predated the telephone? The telegraph. Very good. Question two. Which inventor submitted his patent caveat on the same day as Alexander Graham Bell? Gray. It was Elisha Gray. Well done. Question three. What did Bell say to his assistant, Thomas Watson, in the very first telephone call?

54:23Mr Watson, I want you. Come here, I want you. Come here, I want you. I need you. I must have you. Come on, Watson. It's our time. Question four. What did Belle propose should be the standard telephone greeting? Hoi hoi. Yes. Crazy. Bring it back. Question five. How did Belle spend his honeymoon with his wife, Mabel? Making her promo his new product in the UK. Yep, absolutely. With a surprise twist of getting to meet the Queen. Yes. What a drag. A honeymoon for all to enjoy. Question six. What invention allowed telephone users to talk to each other rather than just the central office? As in, do you mean like the switchboard?

55:02The switchboard is correct, absolutely, well done. Question seven, what nickname was given to the women who operated the telephone exchanges in America after the 1880s? Hello, girls. Hello, boys. Question eight, name one common technical problem that beset early telephone users. Crossed wires, it's a real thing. Yeah, real thing. And noise interference and surveillance, people listening in. Yes, of course. The party line. That still befalls them if they're on a bus with me, let me tell you that. Question nine, can you name two examples of the social anxieties that critics had about the telephone and its use.

55:32They were very worried about poor people calling rich people to moan about the state of affairs, which they should have been wary of. And they were also concerned about men sitting down or possibly wearing a pyjamas while they speak to women on the telephone. Good serious concerns, I think. Yes, real things. This for a perfect 10 out of 10. I haven't referred to my notes yet, by the way. I'm very proud of myself. In what year was the telephone system nationalised in Britain? Oh, 1912. Oh, she's done it. Amazing. so casual I told you I'm good at short term retention regurgitation and then immediately forgetting it because I went to a very very intense school do I know any of it now?

56:10no trauma learning yeah amazing Catherine well done and thank you so much Professor Johan that was a lovely history lesson there I think we all learned plenty about the telephone and listener if you want more from Catherine of course she's done many episodes with us including a fan favourite Gráinne O'Malley Irish Pirate Queen and of course the history of general elections, which was very interesting too. For more electrical history from Professor Yuan, there's our episode on vital electricity with Olga Koch that was surprisingly violent. It's quite a lot of sort of electricity torture and people being shocked horribly.

56:41If you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds in the UK to hear new episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else. And if you're outside the UK, you can listen at bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We had the incredible Professor Yuan Morris from the University of Aberystwyth. Thank you, Yuan. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. It has. We've had a lot of fun. And in Comedy Corner, we had the brilliant Catherine Bohart. Thank you, Catherine. Thank you for having me.

57:09Am I allowed to plug my futuristic special that's on the internet? Yeah, go for it. How exciting. I just put my most recent show on YouTube and it's called Again With Feelings. And if you like a nosy hello girl, then I'm very much that and I'm gabbing some gossip. Perfect. There we go. Go watch it. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we search through the phone book for another neglected historical topic. But for now, I'm off to go and make Ahoy Hoy, the official greeting for podcast. Come on! Never. Bye!

57:41You're Dead to Me is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4. This episode was researched by Rosalind Sklar and Catherine Russell. It was written by Rosalind Sklar, Dr. Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow, Dr. Emmy Ngoose and me. The audio producer was Steve Hanke and our production coordinator was Jill Huggett. It was produced by Dr. Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow, me and senior producer Dr. Emmy Nagus, and our executive editor was Philip Sellers.

58:07Hello, I'm Nick Robinson. You might be tired of switching on the news, hearing those pre-rehearsed soundbites, the lines to take from those who shape our lives. When politics is as fragmented, as unpredictable, as fraught as it is now, it can be hard to cut through the noise. That is precisely my aim on political thinking, my podcast from BBC Radio 4. I have extended conversations with those who shape our political thinking. I try to get to the heart of what makes these people tick. What lies behind what you're seeing or hearing on the news? That's Political Thinking with me, Nick Robinson. You can listen on BBC Sounds.

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