Sentimental Garbage

Costume dramas are the most dominant way that ordinary people engage with history, so why are we so frequently snobby about them? Dr Emma Southon gives a historian's perspective about the usefulness of costume drama, as well as the pure pleasure of just looking at nice fabrics. We talk Shakespeare in Love, Marie Antoinette, The Lion in Winter, I Claudius, Vanity Fair and even make a pretty good ca...

Jen Cownie is back on to celebrate our 100th episode with a boozy tarot round up of all the things that need Sentimental Garbage tarot readings: when will men embrace pyjamas? Why does it feel so good to cry in public? And when will prosecco liberate herself from its Basic Bitch prison? Jen Cownie is the co-author of Wild Card: Let The Tarot Tell Your Story, and it's available from all good book s...

Punk rock prom queens assemble, today we're talking about the criminally over-looked and under-loved Josie & The Pussycats. Why was this movies so misunderstood, and why do so many critics refuse to believe that women can do sarcasm? We talk about the amazing soundtrack (RIP Adam Schlesinger), the even more amazing fashion (RIP transfer tattoos) and Alan Cumming (RIP my boner) Andrea Cleary is...

Do influencers make fame feel less special? Influencers distort our ideas of where wealth and fame should come from, and often provoke our hate-follows in the process. We discuss the power of influence and its humble beginnings in the blogging world, the metamorphosis into big business and a curated lifestyle, the exhaustion of the influencer life, and why influencers are so often destroyed by the...

Journalist Grace Medford joins us to talk about the endlessly entertaining dress-up box that was the noughties Charlie's Angels reboot. We discuss the giddy fun of this movie, the power of the Diaz/Barrymore/Liu trio, why a "woke" version was never required and a surprise TED talk on the Pussycat Dolls. Grace Medford is a journalist and the author of the substack oneofthosefaces.substack.com. Host...

Before Self Esteem was selling out venues as a solo artist, she was Rebecca Taylor of Slow Club, a band who helped bring British twee to its apex in the 2010s. We talk about glockenspiels made out of Shloer, making cakes for the audience, the backlash against twee, the obsession with babytalk and the way bad men could use tweeness to hide in plain sight. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for...

Usually on the podcast I speak to people about the culture they love that has been unfairly dismissed, but I’m also interested in talking to the artists who created that work. This week we're starting an "indie twee" investigation. This is the movement that brought us tote bags, and ukuleles, and arguably, adult colouring books; it brought us the Juno soundtrack, and Zooey Deschanel, and dressing...

Sarah Griffin is back to worship at the altar of Maeve Binchy and to deliver a new taxonomy about men and the wind. Evacuated from Blitz-battered London, shy and genteel Elizabeth White is sent to stay with the boisterous O'Connors in Kilgarret, Ireland. It is the beginning of an unshakeable bond between Elizabeth and Aisling O'Connor, a friendship which will endure through twenty turbulent years...

We're joined by journalist and long-time Swiftie Marisa Bate to talk about why the most decorated artist of her generation is also one of the most polarising. We cover All Too Well, the Squad era, Taylor's obscene productivity, her endless fascination with love and her talent for imagery and storytelling that continue to captivate us. Marisa's list of Taylor songs here: https://open.spotify.com/pl...

Guardian host and producer Leah Green is in the garbage vault this week with 2000's dance classic Save the Last Dance, a movie that has since become famous for having... sort of shitty dances? We talk about music video culture, Step Up, and the ensemble cast of Save the Last Dance that made it a covertly revolutionary movie. We also discuss whether "problematic" discourse has finally run its cours...

We're limping towards the finish line of an uneven first season, talking about what we would have done differently, whether Carrie can even be called the main character of this show anymore, and pitch our new TV show, Steve & The City. The three AJLT eps will be spread across April, and then the normal Sentimental Garbage season will resume in May. Like you, we’ve been so distressed and heartb...

It's part two of our And Just Like That recap, and we're talking about Charlotte's horrible dinner party, the terrible music choices, our blind adoration of Seema, That Jackie and the emotional burden of the mealy mouthed teacher. The three AJLT eps will be spread across April, and then the normal Sentimental Garbage season will resume in May. Like you, we’ve been so distressed and heartbroken to...

Dolly Alderton is back, and we're finally getting balls deep into And Just Like That. This is the first of THREE Sentimental in the City episodes covering the reboot, and while the show was famously uneven and a bit cringe in places, we still had a great time. In this episode we cover the first three episodes, discussing Big's death, Susan Sharon and Carrie's feud, the wasted potential of Gloria a...

Nora Ephron is a writer and filmmaker whose fame was huge in her lifetime and has only snow-balled since her death in 2012. Now that her name is on t-shirts, her novel is an established classic, and she's even the subject of fictional renderings ('sup, Good Girls Revolt), is there more to the Ephron legacy than meets the eye? Caroline and Ella pick through her personal life, victories, failings, a...

How did a Bukowski-style piece published in 1997 by Elizabeth Gilbert in GQ magazine turn into the quintessential sleepover movie of the early noughties? Author Hannah Woods brings the 2000 movie Coyote Ugly to the garbage truck, and we discuss this baffling film that is nonetheless still stylistically perfect and so much fun to watch. What happened to Piper Perabo? Why does John Goodman get hit b...

Whether it's a baked potato in a M&S cafe, a Jane Norman shopping bag, or a limited-range of celebrity dresses at Topshop, there's nothing that gets our hearts racing or our wallets twitching like the high street. Fashion writer Lauren Bravo joins Caroline to talk about the nostalgia of the high street, the evolution of Christmas gift giving, the unique personalities of each shop (Warehouse is...

There is a very clear narrative on Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron's final feature film, and it's this: the Julia Child portions of the movie are heavenly, and the Julie Powell side of the movie is both infuriating and a drag. American Girl In Paris correspondent Fiona Zublin returns to the podcast to defend Amy Adams' performance but ends up bashing it just like everyone else. Still, for a movie t...

Young women's use of the word 'like' has been parodied for decades, but where did it come from, why do we use it, and why is it, like, so goddamn useful? Linguist and host of Sounds Like A Cult podcast Amanda Montell discusses the versatility of one of the most despised words in the English language, primarily because it's associated with teenage girls. We talked about female voices, how we percei...

When Titanic first came out, it made history for the epic scale of James Cameron's filmmaking. But like the ship itself, its reputation started to capsize. The more the movie was embraced by young women and girls, the more it was ridiculed as garbage. Caroline and author Janina Matthewson discuss the legacy of the movie, Rose as a protagonist, the camp factor of Billy Zane, what Christopher Nolan...

The Guardian once compared Maroon 5 to 'rats scavenging through pizza boxes', but to a generation of millennial women, they were as close to sex-positive as indie music was willing to get. Caroline and Cosmopolitan editor Catriona Innes talk about the rise and fall of Adam Levine, the mystery and allure of 'Jane', the fan fiction this album has inspired, how the way we thought and felt about sex w...

According to best-selling author Séamas O'Reilly's family, this is not just the superior Grease film, but a classic movie on a par with Jaws and Scarface. We discuss Michelle Pfeiffer's breathtaking star turn as Stephanie Zinone, the idea of Grease as a genre of film, our hatred of squares, and a lot else. Séamas O'Reilly is the author of Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? and the features editor of The Fenc...

Author, witch and host of Your Magic Michelle Tea talks about one of the most guilt-ridden feminine practices of all: magic and witchcraft. Caroline and Michelle talk about tarot, astrology, belief, having an altar, Catholic childhoods and devotion. Michelle is the author of many books, including Modern Tarot, Against Memoir, Black Wave, How to Grow Up and more. She has a weekly podcast about magi...

"I AM big... it's the pictures that got small." Drag Race UK star Joe Black joins us to talk about the camp Billy Wilder classic that took the best of gothic literature and the best of old Hollywood to make one of the best movies of all time. We talk about the blurred lines between fact and fiction, the craziness of the monkey funeral, the fear of age within the entertainment system, the unique fa...

Mona Lisa Smile was a 2003 movie about women's education in the 1950s, and it was also the first Julia Roberts drama to spectacularly fail. We talk a lot about the negative reception to the film – in some cases, the negative reception from the cast itself. We discuss movies about education, and why no one ever seems to have quite the same high standards of filmmaking when it comes to making movies...

Coin Operated Boy Tom McInnes is back and we're here to cry about Amanda Palmer. Amanda Palmer is a singer, songwriter and performance artist who first rose to fame in the early 2000s with her band, The Dresden Dolls. After singles like Coin Operated Boy and Girl Anachronism, The Dresden Dolls became a staple of indie music and were known for their cabaret-inspired aesthetic and wild live shows. A...