Episodes

The Winter Olympics kicked off in Calgary on 13th February, 1988 – but the stand-out stars of the event did not qualify for a medal. Rather, the four-man Jamaican Bobsled team – who would later become (unreliably) immortalised in the Disney comedy ‘Cool Runnings’ – became a testament to the intersection of determination, investment, and […]

Lady Jane Grey – Queen of England for just nine days – was executed at the Tower of London on 12th February, 1554. Edward VI, who had died aged 15, named the teenager as his successor in his will, even though Henry VIII’s daughters Mary and Elizabeth had a more direct connection to the throne.

Before ‘The X Factor’ and ‘The Voice’, there was ‘Pop Idol’, the ITV behemoth that spawned Simon Fuller’s global mega-hit ‘American Idol’.  Season One climaxed on 9th February, 2002, when Gareth Gates – a 17-year-old former head chorister – and Will Young – a politely-spoken 23-year-old alumnus of Wellington College – slugged it out for

The first film to feature Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Tramp’ character was filmed on 7th February, 1914: the Keystone comedy short, ‘Kid Auto Races at Venice’.  Remarkably, Chaplin had created the character only three days earlier, on instruction by studio boss Max Sennett to inject more gags into another film, ‘Mabel’s Strange Predicament’. In the costume cupboard,

Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1917 – yet, on 6th February, 1928, a mentally troubled Polish factory worker claiming to be her was welcomed to New York by Romanov associates. Anna Anderson’s claim to be the Tsar’s daughter climaxed in a 32-year legal saga, the longest in German history.

On this day in 1909 Leo Baekeland announced his invention of Bakelite to the American Chemical Society. Having already earned a fortune selling his photographic patent to Kodak, the Belgian-born chemist had opened his own lab in Yonkers, experimenting with formaldehyde and phenol. The resulting material, which he called Bakelite, could be used in everything

Long before Bill Murray turned up, Gobbler’s Knob, Punxsutawney hosted its first ever Groundhog Day on 2nd February, 1887 – as a day for huntsmen to eat the local rodent. Over time, the delightful, yet absurd, theory emerged that a groundhog sighting its shadow could predict six more weeks of winter, or herald an early

Rerun: 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

These Are My Children premiered on NBC on 31st January, 1949; the world’s first televised soap opera. It lasted only four weeks on air, was broadcast live, and had a tiny budget, but influenced the production of the genre for decades.  As dramas primarily created by and for women, soap operas typically attracted sniffy reviews

Revolutionary leader Oliver Cromwell was executed on 30th January, 1661 – despite having been dead for more than two years. His body was exhumed from its tomb in Westminster Abbey on the instruction of King Charles II, who sought retribution for those involved in the trial and execution of his father, Charles I. Along with