No One Saw It Coming

There’s one man you can thank - or curse - for your hand cramp after writing all your Christmas cards. Sir Henry Cole was a ‘dumpy’ Englishman who had too many jobs and not enough time to write back to his friends and family so he created the first Christmas card in 1843. It caused quite the stir, and not exactly in the way he expected. 

Author and all-things-Christmas expert Ace Collins tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole) how the Christmas holiday evolved in Victorian England and why the first Christmas card took the country - and the...

It started as a deadly toxin and became a billion-dollar beauty secret. So how exactly did a poison become the world’s most popular cosmetic fix? 

It’s all to do with one man who took a plunge and used it to treat eye spasms, and another who saw its potential in the pursuit of perfection. 

Author and former ophthalmologist Dr Eugene Helveston tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole) the story of Botox, tracing it back to deadly sausages in the 18th century to being injected into faces 300 years later. 

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Over a hundred years ago, some divers jumped into the Mediterranean to look for sponges. Instead, they found ancient treasures. Artefacts, statues, jewellery. And a corroded piece of bronze. Little did they know that lump of metal would be the most valuable of the lot. 

Ancient Greek cultural historian Dr Tatiana Bur from the Australian National University tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) the story of the Antikythera mechanism. From how it was salvaged from the ocean floor, to being called the world’s first computer and how it’s transformed our understanding of ancient civilisations and t...

She entered the royal palace as a concubine and became the first and only female emperor of China. She was power hungry, a total operator and if you asked her enemies, a blood thirsty murderer. And her secret weapon to legitimise her rule wasn't just an unwavering belief in herself, but in Buddha. 

Historian and author William Dalrymple (Empire, The Golden Road) tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole) the extraordinary story of Wu Zetian, how she rose to power and paved the way for China having the world's largest Buddhist population. 

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It was a colour once reserved for emperors and the elite. But a lab mishap soon changed purple forever. 

Cultural historian and author of the book The Secret Lives of Colour, Kassia St Clair tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) the story of how a London teenager’s failed experiment transformed how fabric dyes were made, how we dressed and how power was perceived.

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There’s that phrase a picture says a thousand words... but what does a picture of child labour say? 

Curator, educator, and photo-historian Beth Saunders (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) sits down with Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) to tell the story of photographer Lewis Hine and his photographs of children working in places like factories, coal mines and cotton mills in the early 1900s. His powerful photos had a lasting legacy but not in the way he expected. 

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It’s small enough to fit in your pocket and it’s saved countless lives.

The asthma puffer has had a long journey, stretching back thousands of years to various treatments including asthma cigarettes. 

But the asthma puffer as we know it today is all thanks to a young girl’s throwaway comment over breakfast in the 1950s. 

Dr Daniel Duke from Monash University tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) about how the asthma puffer came into existence and how he fits into its long history as well. 

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London, 1854. A mysterious and deadly illness is sweeping through Soho, and people are dropping like flies. The leading theory? “Bad air.” But one doctor isn’t convinced. John Snow begins to trace the outbreak — not through symptoms, but through streets. 

Journalist and author Sandra Hempel tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) the story of how a hand-drawn map, a pub, and a pump sparked the birth of epidemiology — and changed the way we fight disease forever.

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A Changi prisoner of war. A fridge full of urine. A handful of dead guinea pigs. And one of the most important medical breakthroughs of the 20th century.

Greg de Moore, Associate Professor of Psychiatry based at Sydney's Westmead Hospital, tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) about the story of Australian doctor John Cade and his pioneering work in bipolar treatment. 

From the horrors of a Changi prison camp to a backyard shed experiment with lithium, this is the story of how science, serendipity, and sheer human determination transformed modern psychiatry.

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One of the most important scientific discoveries of the last century was the first immortal human cell line, known as “HeLa”. It enabled significant medical breakthroughs, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping and even COVID-19 vaccines.

But for decades no one knew that the name 'HeLa' stood for Henrietta Lacks, an African American mother who died of an aggressive cervical cancer. It was thanks to Henrietta Lacks that science had been given these miracle cells, and yet, the samples had been taken from her without her knowledge and without her consent. 

Bioethics exper...

He soared into the sky in a balloon to prove a scientific theory and landed in the world of espionage. 

This is a story about a man with a fabulous moustache who called himself Professor, who was accused of being the devil in the American Civil War and ended up becoming a spy in a big balloon, triggering the creation of the US Air Force. Yes, really. 

Matt Bevan from ABC's If You’re Listening tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) about the early days of aerial espionage, and how he stumbled down a rabb...

It’s one of the greatest museum heists in Australian history - a theft whose repercussions are still being felt today. And yet, no one really knows about it.

Journalist and author Walter Marsh sits down with Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) and shares the story of a mysterious British gentleman who duped Australian museums and stole thousands of butterflies right under their noses. 

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Yes, Adolf Hitler - the guy who was apparently so 'pure' that he never even drank coffee - was secretly a drug addict. 

Norman Ohler, author of the bestselling book Blitzed, tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole) how a strange celebrity wellness doctor named Theodor Morell became Hitler's personal physician and used Hitler as a guinea pig for his experimental drugs. By the end of WW2, the Nazi leader was on opioids, cocaine, perhaps even methamphetamine. 

After listening to this wild tale, you'll never see the Second World War in quite the same way. 

This is the story of a gadget lover from Australia who wanted to pirate music and instead created one of the greatest life saving devices in the history of air travel. 

Janice Witham, journalist and author, tells Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole) about the creation of the black box. It’s now ubiquitous in aviation but at the time, its creator David Warren fought against scepticism and bureaucracy to realise his vision. 

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28 June 1969 was a regular Saturday night at the Stonewall Inn. Until it wasn’t. 

“The bar lights blinked on and off. I'd never seen that happen before so I asked my friend what's going on, and my friend said, oh, just another raid. Well, it turned out not to be just the kind of raid that they were used to.”

While Mark Segal had spent many nights at the unlicensed gay bar, none were like the one that started the Stonewall Riots. The veteran activist and journalist, one of the last living eyewitnesses to the Stonewa...

If you had a premature baby in America in the 1900s, chances were they would not survive. That is, until Martin Couney came along...

In a bizarre attraction in Coney Island, 'Dr Couney' took the children that medicine deemed 'not worth saving' and displayed them to the public in rows of cutting-edge incubators. Over the years, he saved thousands of babies' lives. But the strangest thing was, Martin Couney wasn't a real doctor... 

Journalist Claire Prentice tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole) the incredible true story she unearthed while covering a presidential election, and t...

It's the event that's seen as the trigger for World War One, but it didn't happen quite the way the history books let on... 

Australian author Paul Ham tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) what really happened on the 28th of June 1914, when the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo. 

Far from a meticulously planned and executed assassination, the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand might not have happened at all, were it not for one fateful wrong turn that put him right in th...

It's the trial everyone in Darwin is talking about. In February 2022, a helicopter on a crocodile egg collection mission crashed in remote Arnhem Land, killing the egg collector and paralysing the pilot.

Now, Croc Wrangler Matt Wright is on trial: not for the crash, but for what allegedly he did after. Charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice, prosecutors say he tried to interfere with the investigation, fearing he'd be blamed for the crash. Matt Wright has pled not guilty and denies all the allegations.

The Case Of is your eyes and ears...

When you picture someone wearing high heels, what do you imagine? I'm guessing it's not horseriding archers on a Persian battlefield... 

But it turns out the high heel was indeed invented for men, as a brutally effective tool of war. And it was only because of colonialism, and later capitalism, that this iconic footwear made it to Europe and became embedded in women's fashion. 

Shoe historian Elizabeth Semmelhack tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) how high heels have been at the centre of power struggles - both male and female - for centuries. It...

It was the most glamorous job girls could get during WW1... until it turned fatal. 

In an emotional episode of No One Saw It Coming, author Kate Moore tells Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) the harrowing true story of the Radium Girls, a group of dial painters who had no idea the job they loved was slowly killing them. When the world turned their back on the Radium Girls, they fought a David and Goliath battle against the company that sentenced them to death - and won. 

Their heroic fight changed labour laws fo...

Today trade unions are an integral part of the political landscape, at least in countries like Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada. But this hasn’t always been the case… 

In the 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution, there was a real fear that the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution might be replicated in England and as a result trade unions or ‘friendly societies’ were viewed with suspicion. 

In the 1830’s this came to a head in the small town of Tolpuddle in Dorset, where six poor farm labourers met under a tree to form...

If you thought reality TV began in the ‘90s or early 2000s with MTV’s The Real World or Big Brother, think again… 

According to Pulitzer-Prize winning critic and New Yorker staff writer Emily Nussbaum, the genre actually pre-dates television altogether, beginning with audience participation shows on radio in the 1940’s. But she tells host Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole, Mastermind) that it’s really thanks to a guy named Allen Funt that we have shows like Survivor, The Kardashians, and MasterChef today. 

His weird obsession with making secret recordings of people eventually turned into a hit TV show...

What does a volcano in Iceland have to do with the religious and political struggles going on across the world today? Well it turns out, a LOT… 

Back in 536AD, the skies turned dark and the world cooled. It was all thanks to a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland, that no one even knew had happened. It led to a mysterious plague, which swept through the Roman and Persian Empires. In the great Byzantine city of Constantinople, it was said that 10,000 people were dying every day. 

Between plague and war, the world’s two ‘superpowers’ were too di...

What if the reason being on a treadmill feels like such a punishment is actually by design!?

Back in the 1800’s the British Empire started installing ‘tread-mills’ in prisons as a way to both punish criminals and make them more productive. In fact, it was so soul-crushing that the poet Oscar Wilde wrote about its horrors from prison and is thought to have died as a result of the hours he spent on it.

Writer Dan Koeppel, known also for running across Australia’s Nullarbor Plain and writing an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generatio...

You can probably picture that iconic moment, when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. But what if his ‘one small step for man’ was actually thanks to a group of unlikely women? 

In the 1960’s when President JFK accelerated the space race, NASA needed someone to design a spacesuit capable of putting man on the moon. When the big defense contractors failed to meet the challenge, NASA had no choice but to work with the only company up to the job: Playtex - manufacturers of women’s girdles and bras. 

The UK’s best selling hist...

What if Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo weren’t really the best artists of the Renaissance, they were just the subject of some really good PR? 

In this episode of No One Saw it Coming, TikToker and Art Historian Mary McGillivray tells host Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) the story of a salty Italian gossip writer called Giorgio Vasari, whose writing still influences the way we think about art, and she asks us to question everything we think we know about what makes historic art and artists 'good'. 

This episode will make you quest...

Try to stop famine, or save your own life? This was the impossible choice facing the Russian scientists behind the world's first seed bank during World War 2, when the Soviet city of Leningrad came under siege by the Nazis. Food was so scarce at the time that throughout the city people were forced to eat wallpaper, boiled leather, even their own pets, to stay alive. 

But this set of Russian botanists, with their vaults full of seeds and hidden garden of plants, refused to eat them even as they starved to death. Their sacrifice ultimately saved species o...

You probably know the names of famous freestyle swimmers - whether it’s Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky, Ian Thorpe or Dawn Fraser. But do you know where the ‘freestyle’ swimming stroke actually comes from? It turns out it all started at a swimming carnival at Sydney’s Bronte Beach back in 1901…

In this episode of No One Saw It Coming, Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) goes on a journey to discover the incredible story of Alick Wickham, a young Solomon Islander who had no idea of the impact he would make on the swimming world. Along the wa...

Bob Hawke, Bill Clinton, Malcolm Turnbull – all were recipients of the Rhodes Scholarship, one of the oldest and most prestigious academic scholarships in the world. It was started posthumously by a man named Cecil Rhodes; a man whose legacy has recently been the subject of heated debates and a protest movement to decolonise education known as #RhodesMustFall. 

The reckoning with Cecil Rhodes has largely focused on his actions as an imperialist and colonialist; a man who claimed large swathes of Africa in the name of the British Empire. But it turns out he had deeper and darker des...

Before selfies, before CT scans, before social media filters and front-facing cameras… there was the X-Ray. Discovered by accident in a 19th-century lab, it went on to become a craze. Displayed as a sideshow attraction, people would x-ray their hands, their bags, their feet, even cuddling their loved one! 

Suzie Sheehy is an Accelerator Physicist by day and on the side, she writes books like The Matter of Everything: Twelve Experiments that Changed our World. She explains to Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) how the invention of the x-ray revolutionised medicine, changed the way we thin...

Have you ever tried absinthe - that fluorescent green spirit that people used to set on fire in the 90’s?  It’s had a pretty bad reputation over the years. In fact, it was illegal in a lot of countries for almost a century! 

But back in France during the period known as the Belle Époque, it was the drink associated with great artists and writers like Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh and Edgar Degas. Happy Hour was even known as ‘the Green Hour’. 

So what happened? Well according to food and beverage writer Evan...

These days chemotherapy or ‘chemo’ is a common treatment for cancer. But did you know that part of the reason it exists today is because of a terrible accident that happened in Italy during World War 2?

The Bari bombing was known as the ‘Little Pearl Harbour’ and it saw hundreds of American and British soldiers killed by mustard gas that was being secretly transported to Europe inside an American ship. Despite Winston Churchill’s attempts to cover up what happened, one doctor was determined to find the truth.

Journalist Jennet Conant dives deep into the historical...

After the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, the United States was on edge. So when it seemed like spies for the Nazis and Mussolini were operating along the harbour in New York, the government decided that something had to be done. So they turned to an unlikely wartime ally: the Italian Mafia. 

As Podcast host Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) discovers, the clandestine coalition did help change the outcome of World War 2, but labour and crime historian Matt Black questions who really wins when the US government forms secret deals with mobsters and murderers. 

...

The fall of the Berlin Wall on the 9th of November, 1989, is one of the most famous events of modern history. Not only did it lead to the reunification of East and West Germany, it contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the formation of the global political and economic landscape that we know today. 

But did you know that this momentous event started with a small slip up during a routine press conference? 

Dr Katrin Schreiter is a Senior Lecturer in German and History at Kings Co...

In schools, universities and colleges around the world, a story gets told about a man named Phineas Gage. He was an American railroad foreman, until one day when an iron rod shot through his head and nearly killed him. After that, he was never the same. In fact, he was something of a monster, a man with limited inhibitions or impulse control, a social outcast.

It’s a story that has shaped neuroscience and our understanding of the brain. But what if it’s only partially true? 

Sam Kean spent years collecting mercury from broken therm...

‘Would you like fries with that?’ It’s the question you’re likely to be asked at McDonalds, Burger King, KFC or Chick-fil-A, no matter where in the world you visit. But what if the only reason French fries are so popular throughout the West today is because of a Queen who lost her head during the French Revolution? 

Dr Lauren Samuelsson is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Wollongong where she investigates the history of food, drink, popular culture and gender. She reveals how the history of the humble potato is really a history of empire; a...

Submarine warfare was considered ‘ungentlemanly’ in terms of the rules of engagement of war until relatively recently… or so we thought! Dr James Hunter hunts shipwrecks for a living, as part of his job as Curator of Naval Heritage and Archaeology at the Australian National Maritime Museum. This job has allowed him to research a question that could change how we view some historic battles. Were submarines invented and used as a secret weapon by the Confederates during the American Civil War? 

Podcast host Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) follows his curiosity to unearth the odd facts...

These days people line up for hours to see Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. But at one stage there were so few people wanting to see this Renaissance painting that she was remarkably easy to steal from the Louvre Museum in Paris. In fact, for a while following the theft, no one even noticed she was gone... 

Tiktoker and Art Historian Mary McGillivray tells podcast host Marc Fennell (Stuff The British Stole, Mastermind) the story of art history’s most sensational crime and its patriotic perpetrator. It turns out he might have been motivated by something even more p...

The bit players, the unexpected twists, the turning point you missed. Join Walkley award-winner Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) as he uncovers the incredible moments that changed the course of history.