Talk Podcasts

For more than a decade, conversations between the late David Rathband and his ghostwriter Tony Horne recorded during the writing of the best-selling Tango 190 have remained in a vault. Now for the first time Tony shares them with David's twin Darren - and you. Darren and Tony walk you through the story from its humble beginnings in Staffordshire to its tragic end in Northumberland. You will hear D...

It has now been more than three years since the United Kingdom formally left the European Union. Since then, the UK, and the world, has gone through a pandemic that has caused enormous economic and political upheaval. In this podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins take stock of the situation. What have been the advantages of Brexit so far? Being outside the EU’s procurement programme led to...

In this specially-extended Christmas edition of Twenty Minute Topic, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins look into Britain’s energy crisis. We’re all spending a lot more than we did this time last year on energy bills, and Marcus and Greg explain this situation was entirely avoidable. It came about because British governments of all colours have made the country increasingly dependant on foreign e...

WHAT ON EARTH is going on with British politics right now? Liz Truss lasted 44 days as Prime Minister, during which time her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, delivered a mini-Budget, which Ms Truss approved of…and then she sacked him for doing what she asked him to do! Confused? How about this – a governing party with a majority of about 80 seats was struggling to get the legislation Liz Truss wanted th...

For more than 70 years, the Queen was our country’s Head of State, and she was also Head of the Commonwealth, a body of nations that clearly meant a huge amount to her. In this podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins look back on the Queen’s reign, and assess what sort of a King Charles III will be. You don’t have to be a Royalist to have a deep respect for the life the Queen led. It was a li...

Going to university and getting a degree isn’t the golden ticket to getting on in life that it once was. Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins debate whether going to university is a good idea for young people in the modern era. In the 1960s, just 4% of young people went to university. By the end of the 1970s, that figure had risen to 14%. The university sector expanded hugely during the 1990s, and...

THE PLATINUM Jubilee has arrived, and we're in for a four-day weekend of fun, thanksgiving and reflection. In this podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins reflect on the Queen's reign, assess the role of the Crown in our unwritten constitution, and discuss what might happen when the Queen is no longer around. The podcast is available on the Talk Podcasts website, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stit...

Since the last edition of the podcast, Vladimir Putin has carried out actions in Ukraine that go against all forms of decency and civil behaviour. One month later, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins try to make sense of the situation. All decent people are disgusted and appalled with Putin’s deliberate targeting of innocent civilians, and he has no role to play in any lasting discussions on a pea...

The situation on the Russia – Ukraine border is becoming more serious by the day. There are now 130,000 Russian troops on the border, but what’s it really all about? In this new episode of Twenty Minute Topic, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins try to make sense of the situation. The history, politics and demography of Ukraine is complex and bloody. We’re being told by the mainstream media that R...

Tony Horne returns with episode three of The Dead Good Podcast, with a look back on the life of Meat Loaf, who has died at the age of 74. Meat Loaf was a larger-than-life character who had a rare ability to condense a range of different emotions into a single song. He was wild, he was unpredictable, and he pushed boundaries. Yet for all his on-stage antics, there was another side to him. In interv...

Tony Horne returns with further memories and reflections on his friend of more than 30 years, James Brokenshire MP. James served as Northern Ireland Secretary during Theresa May's years as Prime Minister, where he was widely respected by all sides. But for Tony, James was a long-time personal friend, who gave him his first break on student radio in Exeter. Tony also provides an interesting insight...

FOR THE last four years, Tony Horne, writer and broadcaster, has reflected on how tragic he finds the process when individuals pass away, from the speed with which their death is updated on Wikipedia to the paucity and inadequacy of the letters RIP being used on social media. Tony also felt that many people who paid tribute perhaps might actually be grieving if they were the right person to be pay...

AFTER nearly twenty years, British and American military involvement in Afghanistan is finally at an end. But why was our military ever sent there in the first place? Military intervention began on the pretext that the Taliban government in Afghanistan harboured the terrorists responsible for the attacks of 11 September 2001, but the facts do not back this up. Of the attackers, 15 were citizens of...

THE WORD ‘woke’ seems to be everywhere nowadays. How did we get from a situation where unpleasant racial slurs were rightly made socially unacceptable, to what we have today, where a small minority of the population is constantly on the lookout for new things to be offended by? With every year that passes, the sphere of opinions it’s considered socially acceptable to hold becomes narrower and narr...

In this edition, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins focus on Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Serious mistakes have undoubtedly been made during his handling of the pandemic so far, but on the other hand, the speed and efficiency vaccine rollout has been an enormous success, and, with a few hiccups along the way, Mr Johnson has delivered the Brexit the British people entrusted him to deliver at the...

IT HAS now been two months since Lord Dyson’s damning report into the behaviour of Martin Bashir and the way in which he and the BBC obtained the exclusive interview with Princess Diana in 1995. Dyson’s comments about Bashir’s ethics and the behaviour of future Director General Tony Hall portray both men in a poor light, but within days, the story died down and everything at the BBC appears to be...

THE GOVERNMENT has confirmed that a new royal yacht costing £200 million will be built and commissioned. In this podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins discuss the merits of the project. They are both strongly in favour of it, arguing that the Blair government’s decision to scrap its predecessor, Royal Yacht Britannia in 1997 was a serious mistake that even Mr Blair himself went on to regret...

Following the death of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh at the age of 99, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins reflect on his extraordinary life of duty and service in this special ‘double dose’ edition of Twenty Minute Topic. He was born in 1921 in Corfu, but the family was forced to flee Greece following a military coup. His education at Gordonstoun school proved to be character-forming, and...

AS THE dust settles following the broadcast of Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle earlier in the week, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins discuss the fall-out. Are they victims, or self-centred narcissists? It appears as though Meghan married into the Royal Family believing they would adapt to ‘Project Meghan’, and, as someone who is used to getting her own way, she did...

GREG Lance-Watkins recently celebrated his 75th birthday, and a few days afterwards he had his first Covid jab. The aim of this podcast is to put your mind at rest if you’re nervous or feeling anxious about having the vaccine. In conversation with Marcus Stead, Greg details the process from beginning to end, and having been there and done that, he explains that it’s well-organised, painless, and t...

THE ROLLOUT of the Covid vaccine has been an enormous success story. The United Kingdom now leads the world in terms of the speed and efficiency in which the population is being vaccinated. Boris Johnson’s Government decided not to join the EU vaccine procurement programme last year, and the decision was widely vilified at the time, yet the events of the last few days have shown that the decision...

ONE WEEK into 2021, and ‘Project Fear’ has been utterly discredited: World War III has not broken out, Western civilization has not come to an end, there has been no Emergency Budget, the FTSE has not collapsed, the pound has not collapsed, and there are no queues of lorries on the motorways of Kent. In this podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins assess the Brexit deal announced on Christmas...

CHRISTMAS is nearly here, and it’s going to be very different for all of us this year. Much of the country is already living under severe restrictions, and from Boxing Day, 24 million people in England alone will be in Tier Four. In this podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins discuss how worried we should be about the new variants of Covid, and how best to strike a balance between enjoying t...

THE COVID-19 vaccine has arrived, and the logistically-complex process of rolling it out to the British population will get underway in a matter of days. In this podcast, Marcus Stead and Greg Lance-Watkins discuss whether all of us should have the vaccine, the measures that have been taken to ensure it’s safe, and the level of immunity it will give us. They also discuss the dangers of conspiracy...

THE RECENT report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) into antisemitism in the Labour Party delivered a damning verdict on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. In this special podcast, Marcus Stead talks to Graham Perry, a Labour supporter and an antisemitism awareness trainer about the findings of the EHRC’s report and the events that followed it, including Jeremy Corbyn’s statement which l...