The Great Political Films: Do The Right Thing
Our political films season has reached the late 1980s with Do The Right Thing (1989), Spike Lee’s searing take on racial tension on a Brooklyn block on a boiling hot summer’s day. How does a fight ove...
26 Dec 202450min
The Great Political Films: Kagemusha
Today’s great political film is Akira Kurosawa’s epic of war and deception Kagemusha (1980). Set in late sixteenth-century Japan it tells the story of a thief tasked with impersonating a warlord. Can ...
22 Dec 202453min
The Great Political Films: Jeanne Dielman
Today’s great political film is Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), voted the greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. A classic of feminis...
19 Dec 202453min
The Great Political Films: The Candidate w/Chris Smith
Today’s episode is a conversation between David and the former politician Chris Smith (long-time MP and Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in Tony Blair’s first government) about The Cand...
15 Dec 202457min
The Great Political Films: Z
We resume our series on the great political films with Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969), the quintessential late 60s movie about assassination, conspiracy, street politics and police brutality. How could a fil...
12 Dec 202459min
The History of Bad Ideas: Televised Leadership Debates
To finish this series of bad ideas, David tries to persuade Gary Gerstle of the futility of televised leadership debates. From Nixon vs Kennedy to Harris vs Trump, do the voters really learn anything ...
8 Dec 202458min
The History of Bad Ideas: Party Members Choosing Leaders
For our penultimate bad idea in this series, David talks to Robert Saunders about what’s gone wrong with British politics since party members got to decide who leads the party – and in some cases who ...
5 Dec 202455min
The History of Bad Ideas: Steady State Theory
Today’s bad idea is a theory of the universe: David talks to astrophysicist Chris Lintott about Steady State Theory, the rival cosmological model to the Big Bang, which held its own for a while in the...
1 Dec 202459min
