It was so popular last year that we decided to do it again! Join us this holiday season as we introduce you to twelve of our favourite podcasts in the 12 Days of Podmas.
There seems to be an increasing breed – you may well know the sort: those ‘nostalgia porn’ addicts who share memes on Facebook, bemoaning there’s no any longer lead in petrol or paint, reminiscing about how they all grew up with building sites as playgrounds, or proudly proclaiming they never had any central heating as kids and woke up to ice on the insides of their windows in winter – who have a thing when it comes to millennials.
They like to proclaim that young ‘uns today are just too soft, pampered, and don’t seem to know they’re born. Although most of this is all just bluster and hot air, for Generation X it does feel as though there is at least some small measure of truth present in some of this otherwise angry rhetoric, even if only begrudgingly acknowledged. After all, today’s youths just don’t seem to have the same level of pop culture-based trauma inflicted upon them, be it in the form of adverts, TV shows and movies, Public Information Films, or – sometimes – even the most apparently innocuous of things.
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Yes, if you just happened to be going through your formative years in the ‘70s or ‘80s, then childhood could be a veritable minefield. From the threat of a supposedly pending nuclear holocaust (accompanied by the sonorous and doom-laden tones of Patrick Allen in the Protect and Survive campaign), to the horror of the grinning, leering mask of Mr. Noseybonk, and the Saturday teatime terrors inflicted weekly by Doctor Who sending the nation’s nippers scurrying behind the soft furnishings, growing up as a ‘Gen X’ kid guaranteed a rather lucrative trade for future cohorts of therapists.
All this counselling fuel has been recounted, taken down and committed to print in the series of Scarred For Life books (so far, two volumes have been published, with a third one in the works at present). Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence have taken readers on a guided tour through what are some of those darker and possibly forgotten – or even repressed – remembrances of things past, which turned us into the quite damaged individuals which some of us grew up to become. A look at the pre-release trailer for the Scarred For Life books gives a glimpse at some of the stuff we had to deal with, and demonstrates even board games and snack foods were out to traumatise us.
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Having taken Scarred For Life on the road with a series of live shows, Brotherstone and Lawrence have recently launched a podcast version of their tomes. Joined by Absolute Radio DJ Andy Bush, each week they play host to a guest hailing “from the world of TV, literature, film or pop culture”, and ask them to share a trio of things which had left them scarred for life as a youngster. Amongst those who’ve shared tales of their own personal psychological damage to date are Jamie Anderson, Andy Nyman, Charlie Higson, and – from the black comedy troupe The League of Gentlemen – Jeremy Dyson and Reece Shearsmith.
Like it says on the tin, Scarred For Life is “a Deep Dive into the Dark, Dystopian Pop culture of the 1970s, 80s and beyond”, and in the sharing of our juvenescent wounds, reminds us of the healing power of laughter. So, in the immortal, comforting words of Nick Ross: Don’t have nightmares.
Scarred For Life is available from wherever you get your podcasts.