Episodes

William Alnutt tipped arsenic into the family sugar bowl on 20th October, 1847 – and five days later, the 12 year-old’s sweet-toothed grandfather, Samuel Nelme, was dead. It was the second time the deeply troubled Alnutt had attempted to murder his grandfather, following a failed plot to shoot him with a pistol in their garden. His […]

Ten thousand spectators gathered by the side of the Thames on 19th October, 2003 to watch street magician/illusionist David Blaine come back down to Earth, having spent 44 days suspended in a perspex box in a stunt called ‘Above The Below’. It was an accomplishment almost sabotaged by the British tabloid media and general public,

When Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross failed to reach their celebrity guest, 78 year-old ‘Fawlty Towers’ star Andrew Sachs, they instead left him a series of answerphone messages, joking about sexual encounters with Sachs’s granddaughter, Georgina Baillie. The segment aired on Brand’s Radio 2 show on 18th October, 2008, and became the third most-complained about

Future President Abraham Lincoln had yet to grow his iconic facial fuzz when he received a letter from Grace Bedell – an 11 year-old resident of Westfield, New York – dated 15th October, 1860.  “I have yet got four brothers… and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them

Accused of planning the assassination of her cousin Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots stood trial for treason on 14th October, 1586. Mary’s coded letters, delivered to her co-conspirators in beer barrels, had been intercepted by Sir Francis Walsingham, who had deciphered and copied them and built a case against the former Scottish monarch. In

The first ever U.S. officer to be convicted of treason, Army Lieutenant Martin J. Monti Jr., defected from the Air Service to the Nazis on 13th October, 1944. After a stint in radio propaganda, he joined the Waffen-SS, was recaptured by the Americans, and then claimed to be a prisoner of War. His family petitioned

The world’s most famous adult magazine went ‘SFW’ on 12th October, 2015 – when Scott Flanders, then Playboy’s chief executive, announced that future editions would no longer contain full nudity. The change lasted for only one year. ‘Reading it for the articles’ had, at one time, been a plausible option – the magazine had published

Virgin Cola, Sir Richard Branson’s ultimately flawed contender in the Cola Wars, was certainly taken seriously by the competition. On 11th October 1994, a pokerfaced Coca-Cola spokesperson told The Independent: “Consumers consistently demonstrate, when given a free choice, that they prefer our product. ”Despite an extensive publicity campaign – including a stunt in Times Square,

Hairdressers descended upon Oxford Street on October 8th, 1906 to witness Karl Nessler’s first public demonstration of his pioneering new ‘perm’ – a style which didn’t have its heyday until some eighty years later. Creating a long-lasting curl had been a goal for many stylists over the decades, but Nessler had hit upon a winning

Ron Popeil, inventor of The Pocket Fisherman, the Amazing Smokeless Ashtray, and the Inside-The-Shell Egg Scrambler, was (satirically) awarded an Ignoble Award for Consumer Engineering on 7th November, 1993. But the ‘Infomercial King’ had spun an enviable career from his talent for selling; from humble beginnings shilling vegetable choppers on the shop floor of Woolworth’s