StoryCo

Summary Dr. Jess Venner on Pompeii, the ordinary people history forgot, and why resilience is a better story than disaster. Jess Venner grew up in Hainault on the end of the Central Line, at a school in special measures, having never heard of classics. She is now a research fellow at Oxford, and her book The Lost Voices of Pompeii reconstructs the final day of seven ordinary Pompeiians: a pub land...

Summary Emma Dabiri on hair, history, and why the Black/white binary is a design choice, not a fact of life. Episode Overview Emma Dabiri wrote a book about hair. Except it wasn't about hair.  Don't Touch My Hair  used braiding as a trapdoor into 6,000 years of African philosophy, pre-colonial constructions of time, and the question of who gets to name things, and what happens to the things that g...

Summary Mike Figgis on  Leaving Las Vegas ,  Timecode , and why the best creative work comes from stripping everything back. Episode Overview Mike Figgis shot  Leaving Las Vegas  in three weeks on Super 16 with a skeleton crew and no permits on the Las Vegas Strip. Nicolas Cage won the Oscar. The film cost almost nothing. That was the point. Figgis has been making this argument for 50 years, from...

Rowan Pelling on the Erotic Review, the death of the tease, and why desire needs saving from pornography. Episode Overview Rowan Pelling founded the Erotic Review on a single bet: that the sexiest organ is the brain. The young are having less sex than any previous generation on record. Pornography is free, instant, and infinite. The tease has disappeared. The accidental workplace romance, the fumb...

Summary Julia Shaw on false memory, green crime, and why AI is both the problem and the solution. Episode Overview Julia Shaw once implanted a false memory of a violent crime in a volunteer's mind using three conversations and a few leading questions. The volunteer described it in vivid detail three weeks later. That was her PhD. Now she says we have built the same machine and put it in everyo...

Summary  Richard Welsh on COPA90, Decent Partners, and why AI is a translation tool, not a threat. Episode Overview  Richard Welsh beat David Beckham's team to a YouTube channel with no rights and no leverage, just a deep understanding of how networks actually work. What followed was 20 years of arriving early to every platform shift: Bebo, MySpace, YouTube Originals, Web3, and now AI. Welsh h...

Summary A cold email, a chest-infection phone call, a buyout, and 951 sold-out shows since 2021. The CEO of Defected Records on what holds the centre. Episode Overview Wez Saunders cold-emailed Simon Dunmore in 2013. Two days after a meeting in which Dunmore said he could sell a pen, Wez was home with a chest infection when Dunmore called. He took the club promotions job. Four years later he ran D...

Ryan Hopkins filmed his first TEDx talk from a toilet cubicle, ran a hundred episodes of Toilet Break Wellbeing on LinkedIn and turned the script into an Amazon No. 1 business book. Three years before any of that he was a former rugby player with a broken leg, an eating disorder, and a Halifax bank clerk who found himself unable to speak across the counter. In an hour with James Kirkham, Ryan draw...

Joe Fattorini sat in a bath of red wine in the Atacama Desert, filmed himself talking to camera and uploaded the clip to YouTube. Years later the producer Mel Jappy found it, four-by-three and badly cropped, and built The Wine Show around him. In an hour with James Kirkham, Joe and Mel walk through how a show ostensibly about wine ended up in 110 countries and in front of hundreds of millions of v...

Kathleen Saxton was repossessed out of her family home at 11. By 40 she was running C-suite headhunting at The Lighthouse Company. She trained as a psychotherapist along the way and now argues boards have governance for cash, finance and risk, and none at all for behaviour. In an hour with James Kirkham she walks through the memoir she wrote on domestic abuse and the lawyer she hired to defend it;...

Will Storr has spent thirty years working out what a story actually is. He sits down with James for the longest, most personal version he has given of how that obsession started — and what it has cost him to get good at it. It starts with six words. A tiger. A hunter. A tiger. Will calls this an ancient Bengali story, and inside ninety seconds it has done more to explain how stories work than most...

"I had an early midlife crisis. I ended up at a work event rearranging the downstairs of a restaurant." Alex Wade is a lawyer, a writer, and a surfer ; in that order of discovery, maybe the reverse order of importance. Fleet Street defamation lawyer. Night lawyer at the Mirror. Head of legal affairs for Richard Desmond. White-collar boxer. Journalist at The Times and The Guardian. Author. Mont Bla...

"Is there a formula for fame?" "Definitely." "Can you tell me?" "No." PR legend Mark Borkowski has spent four decades bending media to his will: from circus stunts to celebrity crisis management, Alcopop scandals to political warfare. Mark opens with the greatest dilemma of his career , chasing the Holy Grail or pitching Bisto gravy granules, before unravelling how spectacle, nerve, and story have...

Andrew Lownie spent thirty years as one of Britain's leading literary agents — establishment, discreet, well-connected. Then he started digging into the royal family, and he kept going. His new biography of the former Prince Andrew, Entitled , was called "among the most lurid ever published about a senior royal." Simon & Schuster's US imprint dropped it weeks before publicati...

Charlie Webster was in a coma on life support for two weeks. She had malaria and multiple organ failure. Doctors gave her 24 hours. She survived, and the story of what came before and after is unlike anything you have heard. Charlie tells James Kirkham how a TV executive told her the boxing world was not ready for women. Two years later she became the first woman in the world to host a heavyweight...

A five-year-old in the back of a car repeats a phrase he heard at school without understanding what it means. His father explodes with a fury he has never shown before. The incident is never mentioned again — until John Yorke is 22 years old and finally asks. What his father tells him on that Christmas Day walk reshapes everything John later writes about the power of story, and why that power carr...

Story has never mattered more. We're drowning in noise, falsehoods, and feeds that never end and say nothing. Right in the middle of that chaos, truth is at a premium — and the people who can tell it are the ones who cut through. StoryCo is the podcast about the business of storytelling, across every discipline, every industry, every culture there is. Hosted by James Kirkham — entrepreneur, brand...