Standard Issue Podcast

Making babies for a chance to win cold, hard cash sounds like something out of a dystopian nightmare, but was something wealthy lawyer and high-level prankster/prick Charles Vance Millar planned for lols in Toronto, in the decade after his death in 1926. When our Hannah heard about Caroline Lea’s fictional retelling of the shockingly real-life Great Stork Derby in her latest novel Prize Women, she had to talk to her. They chat about Vance Millar, the women who got caught up in his dubious legacy and why the number of children women have is topical again.Award-winning and best-selling author, and long-distance runner, Dr Rachel Hewitt was interested in the erasure of women from the history of sporting pursuits in the great outdoors, when a series of family bereavements made her question loss in the wider sense. She joins Jen to chat about In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors, her new book, which examines grief, the things women lose - or rather are taken from them - just by virtue of their sex, and the women who blazed a trail in early outdoor sports. 

Working-class poet and writer Natasha Carthew is Cornish. She grew up in a small village called Downderry, where the rockpools, beautiful beaches and hedgerows were as constant as the low wages, high property prices, lack of nearby resources and services, and the high rates of alcoholism, drug misuse, mental health crises and suicide. How’s that for a picture perfect postcard?Rural poverty often gets lost amid the stats on urban poverty, so in her first non-fiction, Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature and Resilience, amid recollections of her youth, Natasha investigates the state of poverty in rural places in general, and Cornwall in particular. In this Chops, Natasha chats to our Mick about the generational trauma of rural poverty, the othering of poor kids, and how careless tourists add to the problem. But it’s not all doom and gloom: Natasha is a huge champion of working-class voices and so they also talk about the power of resilience and writing, and the return of the excellent ClassFest in 2024.

Good morning listeners! And in case we don't see you, good afternoon, good evening and goodnight. Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank is the star of this month’s Flicking, but maybe we’re all the subjects of Yosra’s pick: Peter Weir’s terrifyingly prescient 1998 drama/sci-fi/dystopia/horror, The Truman Show. How do Hannah and Mick feel about that? Find out.