Today In History with The Retrospectors

TMZ posted leaked footage of Christian Bale’s infamous meltdown on the set of ‘Terminator Salvation’ on 2nd February, 2009. Triggered by the film's Director Of Photography, Shane Hurlbut, repeatedly walking past his eyeline, Bale launched into an expletive-laden tirade that lasted more than three minutes, during which he threatened to smash up the lights, and have Hurlbut fired from the set. In th...

Theophile Gautier’s account of ‘green jam’ cannabis consumption at the drug-addled dinner parties of the ‘Club des Hachichins’ - alongside literary figures Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac - was first published in Revue des Deux Mondes on 1st February, 1846. The Club, founded by psychiatrist Dr Jacques Joseph Moreau to establish the psychedelic effects of eating copious amounts of...

McDonald’s invested $50million to establish an outpost in the Soviet Union, and after 14 years of preparation, their first Russian restaurant opened in Moscow’s Pushkinskaya Square on 31st January, 1990. 30,000 residents lined up in the freezing cold to be amongst the first customers to get a taste of America - although the restaurant, at the time the world’s largest, was technically an offshoot o...

Stud-and-tube bricks, which paved the way for Lego to become one of the most successful companies in Denmark, were patented on 28th January, 1958. But this family business had already been in existence for 26 years, mostly making wooden toys. It later emerged, however, that the plastic self-locking bricks that brought them so much success had in fact already been invented - and patented - by Briti...

Modern art was controversially celebrated on 27th January, 1687, when Charles Perrault read his poem ‘The Century of Louis The Great’ at the Académie Française - railing against the prevailing wisdom that believed literature should follow the strict classical templates laid down by the likes of Homer and Aristotle. The subsequent debate between rival factions of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ intellectual...

Sometimes termed ‘The Diaper Run’ due to the large number of babies on-board, the S.S. Argentina set sail from Southampton to New York City on 26th January, 1946 - transporting 456 ‘War Brides’ and their 170 children from Britain to the USA. Each was permitted to bring 200lb of luggage, and faced an uncertain future on arrival in the States - some reuniting with their one true love; others finding...

Walking down the aisle to Wagner’s ‘Here Comes The Bride’ and departing to Mendelssohn’s ‘The Wedding March’ remains a popular choice at wedding ceremonies - a precedent established by the Princess Royal Victoria and Prince Frederick of Prussia, who married at St James’s Palace on 25th January, 1858. Unfortunately for Mendelssohn, he’d been dead eleven years by the time his tune became a viral hit...

Henry VIII is typically remembered as he was at the end of his life - weighing in at a colossal 28 stone, with ulcerated legs, failing eyesight and an explosive temper. But, prior to the jousting accident he suffered 24th January, 1536, history had recorded him as merry, affable and physically attractive. Jousting was his favourite sport, but after being knocked off his horse and falling unconscio...

Henri Littière and his adulterous wife Suzanne thought they’d come up with a novel way to combat her philandering - by commissioning a custom-made chastity belt. But on 21st January, 1934, Littière was sentenced to three months in prison for cruelty to his spouse. It’s a strange story, but not half as weird as how the myth of chastity belts gained traction in the first place - not from medieval da...

Ozzy Osbourne orally decapitated a bat live on stage in Des Moines, Iowa on 20th January, 1982; an act that quickly went down as one of the most outrageous moments in rock n roll history. Concertgoer Mark Neal, 17, said the bat was dead long before he threw it on stage. But this was not Osbourne’s first offence: he had previously shocked attendees at a CBS press launch by biting the head away from...

Research In Motion were once the world’s most popular maker of smartphones, but when they launched the BlackBerry 850 on 19th January, 1999, the device had no phone functionality: it was marketed as a two-way pager. However, the gadget’s ability to bounce emails from a desktop server to its users on the move, and its bespoke instant messaging service, BBM, ensured it soon became an essential tool...

‘The First Fleet’ - the eleven ships carrying around 1400 people from Britain, most of whom were convicted criminals - landed in New South Wales on 18th January, 1788. Australia had been home to indigenous people for at least 50,000 years - but was a barren and shocking destination for 'the poms', who’d endured an epic 252-day voyage to get there; a journey about which Robert Hughes wrote: “before...

The first night of Richard Sheridan’s classic comedy ‘The Rivals’ did not go according to plan. Critics thought it was too long, the Irish gentry in the audience were insulted, and an actor was pelted with rotten fruit. It closed after one performance on 17th January, 1775. But then… after eleven days of rewrites, recasting and edits (a process Sheridan called “prunings, trimmings and patchings”),...

Disney’s long-awaited feature ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ was rapturously received at Radio City, New York, inspiring three-hour queues for tickets. The reviews that America woke up to on 14th January 1938 were euphoric: a masterpiece had landed. “It is a classic as important cinematically as The Birth Of A Nation”, Frank Nugent wrote in The New York Times.  “You’ll not, most of the time, re...

Chariot racing was a dangerous and violent sport at the best of times, but on 13th January, 532, a hooligan-led protest at the Hippodrome of Constantinople - known as ‘the Nika rebellion’ - ultimately lead to over 30,000 deaths and the destruction of half the City.  Upon hearing his wife urge him that ‘royalty is a good burial shroud’, the Emperor Justinian reportedly decided to slaughter his own...

Dr James Bedford became the first dead body to be cryogenically frozen on 12th January, 1967 - a day still commemorated in the ‘suspended animation’ community as Bedford Day. But in this burgeoning (pseudo)science, there were plenty of preparations yet to be made. Which meant that the freezing team - lead not by scientists but enthusiasts - ran out of ice, and forgot to drain his blood.  In this e...

With a top prize of £5,000 and a celebrity backer in the form of Queen Elizabeth I, England embarked on its first ever national lottery draw at St Paul’s Cathedral on 11th January, 1569. The results continued to be announced, day and night, for four months; a particularly prolonged process due to the fact that the prizes had to be divided into twelve, as the organisers had only sold a twelfth as m...

The Sinclair C5, Sir Clive Sinclair’s disastrous entry into the EV market, launched at Alexandra Palace on 10th January, 1985.  Looking like a cross between a mobility scooter and a child’s pedal car, it had no on-board storage, was too heavy to climb uphill, and a top speed of 15km per hour. But Sinclair had contracted Hoover to produce the vehicle, expecting orders of 200,000 units per year. In...

It’s our last episode of 2021, and Olly is putting Arion and Rebecca to the test to see what they’ve learned from our first 168 episodes... How many copies of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ were in the original print run in 1811? What (horrifying) ingredients were in Jane Asher’s 1990 ‘Mary, Mary’ cake for children’s parties? Which four U.S. Presidents had been cheerleaders at College?  It’s a fight to t...

Before becoming the most valuable poem in American Literature, ‘A Visit From St. Nicholas’ was published anonymously in the Troy Sentinel on 23rd December, 1823 - its author remaining a secret for fourteen years. The work, commonly known as ‘The Night Before Christmas’, was eventually revealed to be written by philosopher and lecturer Clement Clark Moore - although, in recent years, the family of...

The first string of lights to be festooned upon a tree dazzled visitors to the New York home of Edward Johnson, Vice President of the Edison Electric Light Company, on 22nd December, 1882. Lit patriotic red, white and blue, the tree also revolved; wowing a reporter from The Detroit Post and Tribune. “At the rear of the beautiful parlors, was a large Christmas tree presenting a most picturesque and...

All I Want For Christmas Is You has made Mariah Carey a fortune - but it took an astonishing 25 years for the song to finally reach Number One on the Billboard Hot 100; a feat it achieved on 21st December, 2019, becoming America’s first festive-themed chart-topper since The Chipmunk Song in 1958.  When originally released in 1994, neither Carey nor her co-songwriter Walter Afanasieff expected grea...

Festive favourite 'It’s a Wonderful Life' originated as a short story transcribed into Christmas cards by its author Philip Van Doren Stern. But it received disappointing box office returns following its premiere on 20th December, 1946 - and was not considered ‘a classic’ for decades. In the 1970s someone at Paramount forgot to renew its copyright, so the film became free for any TV channel to bro...

The debut episode of the world’s longest-running animated sitcom - 'Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire' - aired in the U.S. on 17th December, 1989; attracting the Fox network’s highest ever Sunday night ratings. It was an instant sensation, with many contemporary critics remarking that the ‘dysfunctionality’ of The Simpsons was in-keeping with other 90s hits Roseanne and Married… With Children, whi...

The Hideaway Club, now part of London’s Chinatown, opened on 16th December, 1964. Ronnie and Reggie Kray didn’t turn up for the big night, even though they had booked a table. It was an opening gambit in a war of intimidation against the manager of the club, Huw Cargill McCowan - to whom the gangsters had proposed a protection racket; threatening him when he turned down their offer. In this episod...