Presenter Emily Strasser is the granddaughter of another scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, and her telling of the story is both personal and coloured with just enough soundscaping to add life without turning into hacky historical dramatising. Leo Szilard is not one of the most famous of the bomb’s inventors, but he was the scientist who, sat at traffic lights on Southampton Row in Holborn, first realised that an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction could unleash an untold amount of energy. Seventy-five years on from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we’re still living in the age ushered in by the invention of the atom bomb. The parallels between McVeigh's toxic, home-brewed terrorism and the American far-right today were thunderingly ominous even before the storming of the Capitol building in early January now, they're immediate and frightening, and host Leah Sottile draws them out neatly. Two Minutes Past Nine retells the story, but this is not just a history podcast. He killed 168 people and injured 680 more. On 19 April 1995, 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh drove a truck loaded with two tons of homemade explosives into downtown Oklahoma City, and detonated it outside the Alfred P Murrah federal building. Sport / History / Culture / Britain Now / General ChatĪFP // Getty Images Two Minutes Past Nine
And it's got some of the internet's finest podcasting talent on its books. It's not perfect, but it's about as perfect as a gigantic, publicly owned corporation of nearly a century's standing can expect to be in 2020. Dead Ringers continues unabated, and will surely outlast us all. Venerable old institutions have been given fresh impetus, and another lease on life. It's given new voices the space and freedom to do their thing. In the podcast age, it's gone from strength to strength. (For the sake of argument, we're willing to let BBC3 sitcom Coming Of Age slide.)
The BBC does literally everything, and it generally does it really well. If it's not being hammered by the right for being full of wet lefty student types, it's taking a booting from the left for giving time to climate-denying, Brexit-loving right-wingers.īut! Come on. Much loved and much moaned about, talking about it is the national pastime.
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