On today's This Is Our Everest, Edward and Ian watch Bangers and Mash, a 5-minute long children's cartoon. However, this does nothing to stop them having a frankly bizarre discussion about parenting techniques, Chas and Dave and ape taxonomy for nearly eight times that long. Ian is not at all convinced by the punishments meted out to the titular characters and isn't shy about saying so. Meanwhile, Edward encourages you to beat your children, a view not shared by this podcast as a whole. If you w...
Nov 10, 2020•38 min
On today's This Is Our Everest, Edward and Ian watch Emu's Broadcasting Corporation from November 1978. With our heroes already showing distinct signs of battle fatigue, only Emu could possibly bolster their spirits. Or so you'd think. They discuss the utter believability of Emu as a sentient being, tear Michael Parkinson a new one and ponder life as it was in 2007. Ian's long-repressed fear of Billy Dainty is brought screaming back to the surface, while Ed suggests a classification and categori...
Nov 09, 2020•36 min
The fourth episode of This Is Our Everest sees Edward and Ian revisit an episode of television's longest-running sports quiz, A Question of Sport. Both of our heroes choose their ideal line-up of Question of Sport guests and will probably regret it at some point in the future. There's also ruminations on David Coleman, the advisability (or otherwise) of professional cricketers publicly espousing dog fighting and a realistic assessment of the uncling credentials of both of the team captains. Ther...
Nov 08, 2020•33 min
We reach the penultimate episode of Strength in Depth this morning, and this is the story of the shonky ownership that so many non-league football clubs have endured as speculators - and occasionally criminals - have circled with no intentions of doing anything but helping themselves. From Chester to Clapton, it's been an uphill battle just to keep some clubs in existence, and supporters have even found that allowing a club to die and rebirthing it has been the best option. Yet from this have co...
Nov 07, 2020•38 min
On today's This Is Our Everest, Edward and Ian revisit Yorkshire in December 1980 and the music magazine programme Calendar Goes Pop. No-one is particularly pleased about this, particularly Tom Robinson. Up for discussion are the relentlessness of Richard Madeley, the value of historical perspectives in popular music shows and the current whereabouts of The Yorkshire Ripper. There's also live Googling (always a crowd favourite), a test of sphincter control and Ian chooses what gig he'd most like...
Nov 07, 2020•43 min
Episode 2 of This Is Our Everest sees Edward and Ian bravely tackle the potentially poignant but probably not that funny Les & Dustin's Laughter Show from December 1985. Both of our heroes remain particularly mindful of the sad, premature demise of Dustin Gee which took place just days after its original transmission. However, there's only so far anyone can hold back under such sustained provocation. What's the best way to make cow pats look realistic on television? Is Roy Walker in Combat 1...
Nov 06, 2020•38 min
A second pandemic lockdown has begun, with the prospect of plenty more days sat forlornly in front of the television ahead. Then again, it could have been worse: it could have happened in the pre-digital age. As it is, the fact it is happening now can't save Edward and Ian from their own stupidity. This Is Our Everest sees our heroes shut inside watching whatever analogue TV had to offer, to see what they can learn. Why? BECAUSE IT'S THERE. The first episode sees them visit Whittaker's World of ...
Nov 05, 2020•36 min
With the Football League facing an unprecedented crisis during the mid-1980s, the decision to allow automatic promotion and relegation changed the face of non-league football forever. In this week's edition of Strength in Depth, our history of non-league football, we look at the years immediately following this and the obstacles that clubs continued to face in order to get a place in the League. There’s a bunch of different ways in which you can subscribe to the 200% podcast. You can do so throu...
Oct 31, 2020•38 min
Since the very beginning of the game of football, promotion and relegation have been a big part of how we perceive the status of our football clubs. This, on the whole, has usually been dealt with meritocratically, but at one critical juncture the most important fixture of the season was played out at the Football League's AGM rather than on the pitch. This is the story of re-election into the Football League. There’s a bunch of different ways in which you can subscribe to the 200% podcast. You ...
Oct 24, 2020•35 min
After a two week diversion into the FA Cup and the FA Amateur Cup, this week's episode of Strength In Depth takes us back to 1946. There was an attendance boom waiting for football following the end of the Second World War, but the amateur game took up most of the non-league game's attention as crowds grew and grew. The professional non-league game was going to change, especially in the north of England. This week's podcast tells the story of the creation of the Northern Premier League, the FA T...
Oct 17, 2020•33 min
This morning we reach the halfway point of Strength in Depth, our history of non-league football. The FA Cup is, of course, the oldest football tournament in the world, but whilst no non-league club has won the competition in almost 120 years, it retains a very close link with the non-league game. This week, we have the story of non-league clubs in the FA Cup, from before there were any leagues at all to the present day. There’s a bunch of different ways in which you can subscribe to the 200% po...
Oct 10, 2020•43 min
A little later than usual, it's time for this week's edition of this week's episode of Strength in Depth, our weekly podcast history of non-league football. Last week's podcast took us up to the start of the second world war, but this week we're going right the way back to 1893 for the history of the FA Amateur Cup. At the time, it's arguable that the true dividing line in English football wasn't between 'league' and 'non-league', but was between amateur and professional. This distinction proved...
Oct 03, 2020•40 min
It's Saturday morning, so it's time for the third episode of our latest podcast series, Strength In Depth: A History of Non-League Football. This week, it's the story of the non-league game between the two world wars, a period during which the Football League swelled to more than twice its previous size, the amateurs running the FA and the PFA contrived to get the Home Nations to expel themselves from the first three World Cups, and the amateur and professional games continued to battle for publ...
Sep 26, 2020•36 min
The formation of the Football League in 1888 proved to be an immediate success, and this success meant that there would be competition throughout its early years. This week on Strength In Depth, we look at the first quarter century of the non-league game. The Southern League was formed as a rival professional league to the Football League, the growth of rugby league threatened the development of the association game across the country, and the amateurs threatened to cleave the game into two. Thi...
Sep 19, 2020•34 min
It's the start of a new season, so it's time for the start of a new podcast series. And this one is, in many respects, the most ambitious project that I've yet taken on. Welcome to Strength In Depth - A History of Non-League Football. This is the third series of these podcasts that I've written - Winning At Dominoes, a series of standalone documentaries from football history, and An Echo of Glory, a history of football in England & Wales, are still available for those who want them - but th...
Sep 12, 2020•34 min
In this week's season finale, Edward and Ian play International Super Star Soccer Deluxe, the plucky cousin of the Winning Eleven Series of games that have long since cornered the market along with their FIFA counterparts. Much resolution is reached, too, with the definitive call on all coin tosses, Global Hypercolour kit designs and (after admittedly some initial shots are fired) signs of a rapprochement in the Sega-Nintendo console wars. Is Turkey in Africa? Would a robot that just barks out f...
Jun 05, 2020•1 hr 4 min
This week, Edward and Ian forgo the usual rigmarole of playing old video games and instead have been playing brand new ones. Ian has been gawping in wonderment at all that FIFA 20 has to offer, leading him to curate an increasingly impressive selection of balls, ponder the vissisitudes of inflation and contemplate the idea of FIFA 21 being entirely played behind closed doors due to an outbreak of a disease that none of the computerised participants could even reasonably contract. Meanwhile, Edwa...
May 29, 2020•1 hr 17 min
This week, Edward and Ian have been playing Striker on the Mega Drive, one of a number of Striker games that were available during a period of the early-to-mid-1990s now known to historians as The Striker Era. It's an all-encompassing arcade-style football game which seems to have pleased them both and brought memories of halcyon days of video gaming flooding back. Gaming histories and peccadillos are laid bare all over the place, and our heroes give due consideration to whether or not being goo...
May 22, 2020•1 hr 3 min
So, we've come to the end of the line. The last episode in this series. Thanks for listening to this series, we'll be continuing to put Scorchio out every Friday, and I'll make a decision on what to do next at some point in the future. This week brings us to 2010, and the last decade of football in England & Wales. We've got Wales and Euro 2016, the decline and revival of the England national team, the growth of women's football, Manchester City, Liverpool, and the sudden ending of the footb...
May 17, 2020•48 min
This week on Scorchio, Edward and Ian give their thumbs a rest and their brain holes a workout, each coming up with some football video games that they would like to see made. Chiefly because they would like to play them. What happened next was potentially psychologically revealing or potentially the genesis of the next generation of football games. Or both. Time will tell. There's plenty of meat on these tasty bones, though, with talk of kicking cans, a vengeful Peter Shilton, mailing forms in ...
May 15, 2020•1 hr 2 min
It's time for the penultimate episode of An Echo of Glory, our series of the history of football in England & Wales. This week's episode takes us into the 21st century, to corporate wrestling at Manchester United and the formation of FC United of Manchester, Roman Abramovich pouring money into Chelsea, Setanta Sports, England's celebrity team and rum goings-on at Chester, Notts County and Portsmouth. There’s a bunch of different ways in which you can subscribe to the 200% podcast. You can do...
May 10, 2020•46 min
This week, Edward and Ian continue to be cockteases of the worst possible kind, playing a football game programmed by Sensible Software that isn't Sensible Soccer, while you all sit around on tenterhooks. Vinegar strokes or no, World Championship Soccer II on the Sega Mega Drive is an interesting curiosity, part fun-filled arcade romp and part calamatously shonky and infuriating missed opportunity. A slap in the face for anyone who ever thought that World Cup football might be good and pure. Can...
May 08, 2020•1 hr
In the aftermath of Euro 96, the Premier League bubble continued to grow as football clubs rushed towards the stock markets. But the new-found wealth within football wasn't being shared equally, and smaller clubs were being left behind as the biggest grew and grew. With supporters becoming more political, though, there were those who started to look towards a different way of running a football club. There’s a bunch of different ways in which you can subscribe to the 200% podcast. You can do so ...
May 03, 2020•45 min
This week on Scorchio! Edward and Ian have been playing Jon Ritman's seminal Match Day series, perhaps the first football simulation game to prove that they don't all have to be just garbage, absolute garbage. As they thrill at its pioneering advances in game physics, rakish multiplayer functionality and a version of the Match of the Day theme tune seemingly played down a tin can telephone by the murderer who is currently upstairs in your house, there's also consideration of any or all of the fo...
May 01, 2020•1 hr 4 min
This week's episode of An Echo of Glory takes us from the period following the Hillsborough disaster to Euro 96. A lot happened in those six years - a World Cup semi-final for England, the collapse of two Football League clubs and one former Football League club, the formation of the Premier League, the fading of Liverpool and the arrival of their successors as the team to beat in English football. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Apr 26, 2020•51 min
This week on Scorchio!, Edward and Ian venture behind enemy lines in the console wars to assess the lasting cultural impact of the SNES game Super Soccer. Both of our heroes have a variety of fruity and completely groundless thoughts and feelings about the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Perhaps it was karma from these which saw one of our panel receive the kind of hiding from the CPU normally reserved for characters in lazily-written 1990s sitcoms during play testing? There's analysis of I...
Apr 24, 2020•1 hr 5 min
The FIFA World Cup is such a beloved global carnival of soccer funtimes that there's simply bound to be a series of downright mercenary, dismal and shonky video games devoted to it. Or so you might think. And you'd be right. This week Edward and Ian look at the first three officially licenced World Cup video games and quickly find themselves dissolving into a world of acrimony, crushing disappointment and swivel-eyed frustration. How can you keep the ball when you can't see your player? Is the p...
Apr 17, 2020•1 hr 1 min
This week's episode of An Echo of Glory has been brought forward from Sunday to this morning, to align with a tragic anniversary. On April 15th 1989, 96 football supporters travelled to a match and did not return. What followed made heroes of some, whilst others - bodies charged with ensuring the safety of others and organisations that couldn't be trusted to tell the truth - disgraced themselves, systematically, over the course of years. This is the story of the Hillsborough disaster. Hosted on ...
Apr 15, 2020•56 min
In May 1985, football in England suffered an existential trauma that some felt it may have been impossible to recover from. This week, we tell the story of how the game reacted to the twin disasters of Bradford and Heysel, as the national team continued to morph into the team that we know and understand today. It's a story of near-bankruptcy, falling attendances, innovation, and the first shoots of the football of the 1990s. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Apr 12, 2020•43 min
This week on Scorchio, Edward and Ian have been battering their B buttons as they got back to grips with FIFA Soccer 95. In many ways it is the first modern FIFA game, in that it came out a year after the previous one and a year before the next one and if you didn't get them all your peers would shun you. FIFA revolutionised the genre 25 years ago, so now two bitter old men pass judgement on whether or not it still holds up today. Can Scotland win the World Cup? Are All-Stars teams cheating? And...
Apr 10, 2020•1 hr 1 min
