The Mark Steel Lectures
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The Mark Steel Lectures
''The Mark Steel Lectures'' are a series of radio and television programmes. Written and delivered by Mark Steel, each scripted lecture presents arguments for the importance of a historical figure. History The lectures were originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4 over three series between 1999 and 2002. Many of the arguments were illustrated by miniature sketches. These sketches featured Mark Steel, Martin Hyder, Mel Hudson, Carla Mendonça, Femi Elufowoju Junior and Debbie Isitt. The first series was subtitled "A series of lectures about Englishmen who changed the course of history", with the remaining two changing this to "A series of lectures about people with a passion". The first series was produced by Phil Clark; the others by Lucy Armitage. The lecture on Ludwig van Beethoven (2003) was nominated for a Sony Radio Comedy Award. The programme transferred to television in 2003, with an Open University series on BBC Four, which was later repeated on BBC Two. This variously f ...
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Radio
Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmitter connected to an antenna which radiates the waves, and received by another antenna connected to a radio receiver. Radio is very widely used in modern technology, in radio communication, radar, radio navigation, remote control, remote sensing, and other applications. In radio communication, used in radio and television broadcasting, cell phones, two-way radios, wireless networking, and satellite communication, among numerous other uses, radio waves are used to carry information across space from a transmitter to a receiver, by modulating the radio signal (impressing an information signal on the radio wave by varying some aspect of the wave) in the transmitter. In radar, used to locate and track objects like aircraft, ships, sp ...
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Che Guevara
Ernesto Che Guevara (; 14 June 1928The date of birth recorded on [//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Ernesto_Guevara_Acta_de_Nacimiento.jpg his birth certificate] was 14 June 1928, although one tertiary source, (Julia Constenla, quoted by Jon Lee Anderson), asserts that he was actually born on 14 May of that year. Constenla alleges that she was told by Che's mother, Celia de la Serna, that she was already pregnant when she and Ernesto Guevara Lynch were married and that the date on the birth certificate of their son was forged to make it appear that he was born a month later than the actual date to avoid scandal. (#refAnderson1997, Anderson 1997, pp. 3, 769.) – 9 October 1967) was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous Counterculture of the 1960s, countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in Che Guevara in popular culture, popular culture. As a young medical student, Gueva ...
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Paul Merton
Paul James Martin (born 9 July 1957), known under the stage name Paul Merton, is an English writer, actor, comedian and radio and television presenter. Known for his improvisation skill, Merton's humour is rooted in deadpan, surreal and sometimes dark comedy. He has been ranked by critics, fellow comedians and viewers to be among Britain's greatest comedians. He is well known for his regular appearances as a team captain on the BBC panel game '' Have I Got News for You'', and as the former host of ''Room 101'', as well as for several appearances on the original British version of the improvisational comedy television show '' Whose Line Is It Anyway?'' Merton appears as a panellist regularly on Radio 4's '' Just a Minute'', first appearing in 1989, and became the only remaining regular panellist in 2009 following the death of Clement Freud. He has also appeared as one of the Comedy Store's Comedy Store Players. Early life Paul James Martin was born on 9 July 1957 in Par ...
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Bob Monkhouse
Robert Alan Monkhouse (1 June 1928 – 29 December 2003) was an English comedian, writer and actor. He was the host of television game shows including ''The Golden Shot'', '' Celebrity Squares'', '' Family Fortunes'' and '' ''Wipeout''''. Early life and career Monkhouse was born on 1 June 1928 at 168 Bromley Road, Beckenham, Kent, the son of chartered accountant Wilfred Adrian Monkhouse (1894–1957) and Dorothy Muriel Monkhouse (''née'' Hansard, 1895–1971). Monkhouse had an elder brother, John, who was born in 1922. Monkhouse's grandfather John Monkhouse (1862–1938) was a prosperous Methodist businessman who co-founded Monk and Glass, which made custard powder and jelly. In a 2015 documentary, it was revealed that Monkhouse and his older brother suffered from physical and verbal abuse by their mother. Bob Monkhouse was educated at Goring Hall School in Worthing, Sussex, and Dulwich College in south London, from which he was expelled for climbing the clock tower. While ...
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Mark Lamarr
Mark Lamarr (born Mark Jones, 7 January 1967) is an English comedian, writer, radio DJ, and television presenter. He was a team captain on '' Shooting Stars'' from 1995 to 1997, and hosted '' Never Mind the Buzzcocks'' from 1996 to 2005. Early life Lamarr was born in the Park South area of Swindon, Wiltshire. He has three elder sisters. His father is Irish. He passed five O-Levels at Park School (renamed Oakfield School) but dropped out of school at 17 and moved to Harrow, London, which was the centre of the early 1980s British rockabilly revival scene. After his poem ''Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Work'' was published in 1987, his act developed from poetry to stand-up comedy. He took to performing at London's Comedy Store in 1985, was spotted on the touring circuit for the launch of Channel 4's '' The Big Breakfast'' in 1992 and co-presented'' The Word''. Career Television Lamarr first came to the public's attention as a co-presenter of the early 1990s late night var ...
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Sylvia Pankhurst
Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (5 May 1882 – 27 September 1960) was a campaigning English feminist and socialist. Committed to organising working-class women in London's East End, and unwilling in 1914 to enter into a wartime political truce with the government, she broke with the suffragette leadership of her mother and sister, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. She was inspired by the Russian Revolution and consulted with Lenin, but defied Moscow in endorsing a syndicalist programme of workers' control and by criticising the emerging Soviet dictatorship. Pankhurst was vocal in her support for Irish independence; for anti-colonial struggle throughout the British Empire; and for anti-fascist solidarity in Europe. Following the Italian invasion in 1935, she was devoted to the cause of Ethiopia where, after the Second World War, she spent her remaining years as a guest of the restored emperor Haile Selassie. The international circulation of her pan-Africanist weekly ''The New Time ...
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Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (; ; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel '' Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary's mother died less than a fortnight after giving birth to her. She was raised by her father, who provided her with a rich if informal education, encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political theories. When she was four, her father married a neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom Mary came to have a troubled relationship. In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with her stepsister, Claire C ...
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Emma Kennedy
Emma Kennedy (born Elizabeth Emma Williams on 28 May 1967) is an English actress, lawyer, comedian, and travel writer, comedian, television presenter and author. Early life and education The daughter of teachers,"Focus: Comedy Chameleon"
''The Stage'', n.d.
she was educated at , and . At Oxford in 1987, she worked with (among others) and

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Martha Freud
Martha Bernays ( , ; 26 July 1861 – 2 November 1951) was the wife of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Bernays was the second daughter of Emmeline and Berman Bernays. Her paternal grandfather Isaac Bernays was a Chief Rabbi of Hamburg. Background Martha Bernays was raised in an observant Orthodox Jewish family, the daughter of Berman Bernays (1826–1879) and Emmeline Philipp (1830–1910). Her grandfather, Isaac Bernays, was the chief rabbi of Hamburg and a distant relative of the German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine and whom Heine frequently mentioned in letters. Isaac's son, Michael Bernays (1834–1897), Martha's uncle, converted to Christianity at an early age and was professor of German at the University of Munich. Although the Bernays and Freud families were well-acquainted - her elder brother Eli married Freud's younger sister, for example - the latter were more liberal Jews, and Freud in particular had no time for ritual observances. Martha told a cousin that "no ...
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Linda Smith (comedian)
Linda Helen Smith (29 January 1958 – 27 February 2006) was an English comedian and comedy writer. She appeared regularly on Radio 4 panel games, and was voted "Wittiest Living Person" by listeners in 2002. From 2004 to 2006 she was head of the British Humanist Association. Life and career Smith was born in Erith, Kent in 1958 and was educated at Erith College of Technology (now Bexley College) and at the University of Sheffield where she graduated in English and Drama. She joined a professional theatre company before turning to comedy. In 1987, she won the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year, then known as the New London Comic Award, and performed on the Edinburgh Fringe before breaking into radio comedy. Many of her early stand-up appearances were benefit concerts staged in solidarity with the British miners during the Miners' Strike in the 1980s. She was a lifelong socialist. Her first appearances on national radio were on Radio 5's ''The Treatment'' in 1997. She was subse ...
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Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle (; 25 January 1627 – 31 December 1691) was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, alchemist and inventor. Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry, and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method. He is best known for Boyle's law, which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system. Among his works, '' The Sceptical Chymist'' is seen as a cornerstone book in the field of chemistry. He was a devout and pious Anglican and is noted for his writings in theology. Biography Early years Boyle was born at Lismore Castle, in County Waterford, Ireland, the seventh son and fourteenth child of The 1st Earl of Cork ('the Great Earl of Cork') and Catherine Fenton. Lord Cork, then known simply as Richard Boyle, had arrived in Dublin from England i ...
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Ainsley Harriott
Ainsley Denzil Dubriel Harriott (born 28 February 1957) is an English chef and television presenter. He is known for his BBC cooking game shows '' Can't Cook, Won't Cook'' and '' Ready Steady Cook''. Early life Harriott was born in Paddington, London, to Peppy (née Strudwick) and pianist and singer, Chester Leroy Harriott (1933–2013).Van Wilmer"Chester Harriott obituary" ''The Guardian'', 15 July 2013. Retrieved 20 January 2017. He has Jamaican heritage. Harriott attended Wandsworth Comprehensive School then trained at Westminster Kingsway College (formerly Westminster Technical College), and obtained an apprenticeship at Verrey's restaurant in London's West End, later working as a commis chef. Career Harriott's talents lie in comedy and singing as well as cooking. He formed the Calypso Twins with school friend Paul Boross, releasing a hit record in the early 1990s, "World Party". The Calypso Twins were regular performers at the Comedy Store and Jongleurs; they al ...
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