The RHODcasts

Rhod Sharp and Tony Staveacre take a fond look back at the 57 year career of the beloved British comedian Tim Brooke-Taylor. Tony caddies for Tim on the golf course where they grew up, stopping along the way to remember Tim’s radio heroes.

What was the prevailing sound on the Titanic? Light music, and lots of it. In The Band Played On, Tony Staveacre and Rhod Sharp recreate the musical voyage of SS Titanic, with a pickup band from the Savage Club of Bristol performing numbers from the White Star line songbook.

In 2020, a summer of no Olympics and precious little else because of lockdown, the conductor KEITH LOCKHART tells RHOD SHARP how 80 members of the Boston Pops came together from home in a YouTube performance of John Williams' Olympic anthem Summon The Heroes. (recorded June 2020)

Starting at a party thrown by the Kennedy family at their compound on Martha’s Vineyard and ending with an autumn 2020 encounter in a Scranton, PA. coffee shop with two voters separated by generations and party affiliation, JIM NAUGHTIE weaves more stories of the changing American body politic while asserting unshakeable faith in human nature.

Rhod talks to his old friend JAMES (Jim) NAUGHTIE about Jim’s introduction to the country 50 years ago this year and other memories collected in his book On The Road. (Recorded November 2020)

In the first part of this audiobook, internationally renowned pianist Allan Schiller looks back on 1961 when at the age of 18 he was selected for the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire.

In this concluding part of his audiobook, the renowned Mozartian Allan Schiller looks back on his student days at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire during the height of the Cold War. The members of Schiller’s piano trio prepare for the day when they go on the road.

Rhod Sharp and Tony Staveacre present a never-heard interview with a giant of music, Astor Piazzolla. Piazzolla inspired generations of musicians with his classically-trained approach to a form once heard only in the brothels of Buenos Aires. He called it New Tango. Such was the initial hostility to it in Argentina that he was forever grateful he had grown up learning to box on the mean streets of New York, alongside his schoolmate Jake LaMotta, The Bronx Bull. Here, in Tony’s carefully preserved recording from 1989, is Piazzolla in his own words, richly illustrated with his thrilling music. Afterwards he said this was his best-ever performance on record. Sadly, it would also be the last time that this brilliant sextet were heard together in public. We are privileged to hear it now. (August 2023)

It was 50 years ago to the day when four of the very few people in the world who can actually say “I was there” talked to RHOD SHARP about The Beatles’ rooftop concert on January 30, 1969. In a conversation broadcast on BBC 5 Live’s Up All Night in 2019, Let It Be director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Apple Corps’ Kevin Harrington and Ken Mansfield and Metropolitan police constable Ken Wharfe provide a fresh take on the events depicted anew in Peter Jackson’s extended documentary.

Robert Moore of Britain’s ITV News stepped out one January morning a year ago into quite possibly the biggest scoop of his career. By luck and judgement he and his crew would be there in the Capitol reporting on the first time in US history that the building had been breached by a hostile force: a force of self-described American patriots.

At least 5000 Black soldiers fought on the colonists’ side in the American war of of independence, despite a tempting offer to join the British forces. When a new school is dedicated to one of them, ALGY WARD tells Rhod Sharp the story of Marblehead’s Joseph Brown.

Rhod Sharp gets into the rich yachting history of Marblehead Massachusetts with the yacht designer and builder CHRIS HOOD.

An extraordinary gamble in early 2020 made RICK BOYD rich. But since we spoke back in March of 2021, it’s been a torrid spring for Bitcoin investors. Would you be OK with it? Is he? And whatever happened after HEATHER CAIRNS realized some of the torrent of wealth that came her way when Google went public? It’s all about risk, after all.

It all began with… a Chinese dinner? Or did it begin when HEATHER CAIRNS would invigilate the tests taken by two “child prodigy” graduate students in the engineering faculty at Stanford. Anyway, one thing led to another. Heather eventually returned to her home town on Boston’s North Shore where people still call her The Google Lady.

One hot day in June, Rhod joins BETTE HUNT, the emeritus historian of Marblehead, Mass. for a walk through the town’s almost 400 year old graveyard. Old Burial Hill connects the living with the dead in some strange ways as they discourse on Thornton Wilder’s famous play, George Washington’s favorite general, the Marblehead woman convicted at the Salem witch trials and the fairly undiscussed existence of a “negro” burial site in this quintessentially Yankee town.

The BBC’s New York correspondent sees the USA that so excited him as a youth sapped of vitality, politically divided against itself but in an old saying, always headed to hell and never getting there. When America Stopped Being great merges Bryant’s reporting experiences with a historian’s perspective in a way which, as the Washington Post said, gives foreign laments a fresh arc.

He tried to hawk them from his wheelbarrow and even built a backyard museum for them without success. After his death some of his paintings were used as building material by his cash-strapped son. And yet as his huge output of historically significant work became better known in the 1950s, “a pretty big shadow” was cast over the art of JOJ Frost. What prevented people who owned his paintings from coming forward? Rhod hears from one of the mother and daughter team who have done more than anyone to try to bring the rest of Frost’s surviving “canvases” to light.

Rhod Sharp discovers the pilot of a never-to-be-made podcast series. This cornucopia of offbeat stories from the first week of July 2008 may be of special interest to fans of Rhod’s appearances on BBC 5 Live’s Up All Night.

The outrageous success story of RICK BOYD. Since being furloughed by the pandemic from his job managing a small resort in southern Florida, he has done so well trading Bitcoin that he says neither he nor his wife he will ever have to work again.

The American ultra-right is back in the shadows, or at least keeping its powder dry. Seeing a massive show of state force with 25,000 National Guard packing Washington DC, and high alerts in state capitals, the far right is picking its fights. Nor will it have the country’s Chief Executive and his enablers minding its back. RHOD SHARP looks to the Wednesday’s Inauguration of President Biden and beyond with The Nation magazine’s National Correspondent JOHN NICHOLS.